Escape to Malibu: Part 16

My anger was sublimated into the work & study I was involved in. I loathed the beginning, (& logically, now the end) of the Reagan era. I was frustrated by my lack of ability to exercise my Christian conscience in the payment of my taxes. Through the peace activists I associated with I learned how to pacifistically resist. I wrote letters to Congress-people & the President about my views, as I had all along growing up, & never once received a response from the White House. I even sent mailgrams. Nothing.

I stopped paying Federal tax & instead donated money to worthwhile groups, non-profits such as Greenpeace & the National Wildlfe Foundation. Bernie & I spent more time locked in acrimony than in embrace. Increasingly I preferred the company of Cambridge friends & a few women in the church who had formed an informal weekly Mother's group for support, peer counseling, & affirmation. We read books with each oher. Eventually, all but one of us divorced, & our strength to make these changes was found largely within our nexus.

I had heated debates over women's issues with my senior minister, & found underneath his cheery facade was a large blind spot when it came to what we were about & why we were agitating for change. At the top of the list was economics; fair pay for fair labor. It is an issue I still grapple with today. The other main one was & remains the essential invisibility & hence devaluation of traditional women's work; tending the hearth & home as a labor of love. Perhaps many women would feel contentment in a traditional role if greater awareness & worth were acknowleged by society today. Truly, women's work is priceless.

Amidst this backdrop was an increasing awareness of & need to intervene in child & wife abuse cases. Children & I have always understood & respected each other, & too often I was sought out & confided in about beatings & altercations at home.

In Massachusetts we nurses are mandated to report these incidents to the police, which I dutifully did only to be told, "lady it's you that's causing all the trouble by reporting this!"

I spent some time with the juvenile officer & another PDer. Irish Catholic families grew up with ritualized abuse,didn't I know it? And he himself grew up in one & he turned out O.K., didn't he?

More insight, deeper tap roots.

When working with people became too much to bear, I retreated to well-loved places once haunted by Thoreau & Emeron, Louisa May Alcott & Nat Hawthorne. I lived near Sleepy Hollow Cemetery & would often feel a deep, inexplicable sense of peace treading along Author's Ridge in the sacred grounds. I understood the need Thoreau had felt to retreat from village life to his cabin by Walden Pond. I drew in the silent, natural places, the wildlife sanctuaries, the birdsong to lift up my spirit & breathed mossy air, the smell of leaves decaying, the rich earthy scent of softening ground as winter melted into spring & my first & final year at D School came to an end.

I was finely tuned to inner whisperings of the Oversoul as the transcendentalists referred to it, or Spirit as Christians call it or Holy Ghost as Latter-Day-Saints name the author of those inner promptings. Certain places where I went to sit seemed particularly clear. There would I get very strong & concise directions & guidance. The Comforter was with me in those whisperings. I was blessed with divine guidance.