Deborah Clark Vance's Blog, page 2

What’s So Great About Reading and Writing?

I’d like to thank and warmly welcome the new readers and writers who recently signed up through Authors XP. Please indulge me while I introduce myself and my blog.

When we set the publication date of Feb 2021 for my debut novel “Sylvie Denied”, we thought Covid would’ve been out of crisis mode and that book stores, book clubs and libraries would be holding live in-person events. Instead, 2021 has been the second worst year for book publishing  — the prize for worst goes to 2020 when Covid upturned us all.

So, as I was approving a book cover, working on final edits and all the many other details, I also started this blog where I express my reactions to the things going on around me. Like many of you, my movement had become more confined than what I’m used to, but that didn’t make my world much smaller, especially when everyone with access to technology found that we could meet virtually. In fact, being on Zoom calls opened up my world in unexpected ways. And between those meetings and social media, I’ve met many new people, have had some wonderful interactions and even made friends with folks I’ve yet to see in the flesh. And now I receive regular emails from new-to-me authors and am impressed by how they keep on producing novels and sharing teaser content about their upcoming books.

As for me, writing “Sylvie Denied” was challenging conceptually, artistically and physically., and although I’ve dipped my toe into writing a next novel, I’m concentrating on writing shorter pieces, some of which I’ll post on my blog.

The reason I don’t want to bury myself immediately in a long form is this: I write to have conversations. And I also love to tell stories, which are the best conversation-starters. In “Sylvie Denied” my characters engage in conversations and some whom Sylvie doesn’t agree with even make valid points now and then. As in real life, can we always tell who to trust? You’ll find many stories throughout my blog posts, including the ongoing saga of the swan love triangle.

The conversations I’ve proposed in “Sylvie Denied” are about family, motherhood, women’s collective reality, materialism, classism, spirituality, race, mental illness and convention. Such ideas in the abstract can seem meaningless without seeing how they’re embodied. And just like flesh-and-blood people, my characters’ lives contain layers of stories. stories. Reviews posted on Amazon by readers also show that issues facing women of previous generations have yet to be resolved by younger women today.

The blog is interactive so I do hope you’ll comment. I look forward to speaking with you!

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

Special Sale for One Day Only! Tuesday Aug. 17, 2021

“Sylvie Denied” eBook will be on sale for 24 hours on Tuesday, Aug. 17th for 99 cents. You can find it at these sites:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Deborah-Clark-Vance/e/B08MWP4DVK?ref_=dbs_p_pbk_r00_abau_000000

Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sylvie-denied-deborah-clark-vance/1137946633?ean=2940163025039

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/sylvie-denied

Mark your calendars!

Where Does Your Mind Go When You Work on an Assembly Line?

I belong to a civic-minded group that decided to volunteer at a food pantry as a team-building exercise. Twelve of us showed up for an afternoon of assembling emergency boxes of food and were was assigned to the assembly line doing what I later realized were the difficult jobs.  Other individuals who also signed up for that shift apparently knew the ropes and, arriving ahead of us, had grabbed the easier jobs. This alone wouldn’t be remarkable except they were all at least half our average age.

We could choose to either standing at various stations on the assembly line or open boxes of dried goods and position them for the line-worker who placed them in boxes that rolled by. The low-pressure jobs were to open up flattened cardboard boxes and set them on the belt at the front of the line and close up the full boxes at the end of the line and put them — weighing no more than two grocery bags-full — on a nearby pallet. Those volunteers hobnobbed with the supervisors who chit-chatted in the corner or moved pallets around with a forklift. But we line-workers each had a box of food packages on our right and another on our left: mine were cheesy tuna and bags of cornflakes. The guy ahead of me packed cans of tuna and packages of spaghetti noodles. Others packed cans of beans, peaches, tomatoes, soup and a few other items. Our only time for “team-building” was during our one water break – water was only allowed near the coatrack. As if that weren’t enough, the supervisors played at high volume such entertainment as Wham singing “Wake me up it’s time to go-go.”

While toiling away, I recalled my workout instructors’ recommendations to use both sides of the body equally, so I made a point of twisting and stretching left and right, plus some steps and squats. Though healthier, this slowed me enough that boxes began piling up, like in the “I Love Lucy” episode where Lucy worked so slowly in a chocolate factory that chocolates passed too quickly for her to box so she ate them to catch up. Thinking of eating packets of cheesy tuna made me feel for the recipients, though I knew they’d be happy to have something to eat.

I also thought of Leroy whom I’d met four years ago at a community garden coordinator training. Leroy’s plan was to train gang members to grow food, theorizing that when the electric grid crashed – of which he was certain – gangs would plunder everyone else’s food unless they learned to grow their own.

During the 2020 sequestering, when folks didn’t visit grocery stores, many went to garden centers which enjoyed record sales, especially of vegetable seeds, plants and supplies for growing them. 2021 is continuing the trend. Besides people learning to grow food in containers in small spaces, urban farming is increasingly popular among those who want to shrink the carbon footprint by buying food grown locally. But most importantly, teaching more people to grow fresh food will be better for their health than having to rely on processed food.

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

Should Musicians Quit Talking and Let the Music Unite?

The sun was low in the sky but still quite warm on an early summer evening. We found a spot beneath a small crabapple tree and set up our new folding chairs – the kind you carry in a bag you can sling over your shoulders. When we arrived, a guitarist and a cellist were performing original songs. The guitarist sang his composition about peanut allergies that I’m still puzzling over. During their performance, four people settled down next to and slightly behind us, passing around boxes of pizza among themselves. At times their noise prevented me from hearing the song lyrics, though I know one was about traffic on a bridge.

To get to the venue in a part of town we’d never been to, we obeyed the GPS that took us through a blue-collar area of modest homes with pro-Trump and f*** Biden signs in the yards. The band was set up on the front steps of a nineteenth century Catholic church, now repurposed for other things including concerts.

My four rowdy neighbors turned out to be additional band members led by a pianist who sang her own excessively wordy compositions mentioned blue and purple turtles and butterflies. In fact she was excessively wordy in general. We learned that she’s thirty-seven years old, has a condition that causes much pain and occasional memory loss and wanted to share this because it’s an illness that people are afraid to talk about. She’s married to one of the band members and sang several passionate love songs about previous boyfriends, one of whom was her first love when she was twenty. After another number, she let us know she’d just swallowed a bug that made it hard for her to speak, but it might’ve been dog hair that floats around their house and is probably carried on her clothes.

The audience were most likely locals who’d walked over to see a free concert. A serious-looking guy was setting up chairs for the audience — never more than twenty-five people including occasional bystanders — and taking them down as people left. Everyone applauded especially after the riffs. A man standing in the street expressed approval bodily and vociferously.

After about two hours, the pianist brought up political subjects, none of which was in her lyrics, and within a few minutes, an audience member said, “Get back to the music, we don’t need to hear this!” She said it was her concert and could say what she liked, which riled up another man who’d previously been loudly praising her music. Others in the audience yelled at those who’d told her to shut up. She advised her opposition that they needed to be respectful and they retorted that they’d come to hear music, not her political views. Then an audience member started singing “Amazing Grace”, everyone joined in and things quieted down but the mood was gone. Anyway, we’d stayed longer than planned and decided to take off. We had some trouble folding up the chairs to fit them back into their bags, something I’d successfully done before.  A man sitting behind us advised that we never try putting them back into their bags.

Clearly, the pianist should’ve known something Aristotle said 2500 years ago — you can’t persuade an audience unless you know something about their mindset so you can tackle their emotional roadblocks and persuade based on what they believe to be true. From the signs still firmly planted in yards eight months after the presidential election, she could’ve deduced the local mindset and stuck with the music which everyone enjoyed.

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

How Covid Sequestering Helped Acquaint Me with Our Insistent Outdoor Pets

Maybe during Covid I became a little too insular. Actually, I might’ve become a little too much a part of the world of nature and forgotten some social skills. But I do remember how to get dressed properly, keep myself clean and not spill. The thing is, we’re literally next door to a woods and many of my new friends who are animals don’t mind such tidiness details. We used to have dogs who died within a couple years of each other. In their old age, they needed constant attention, like eye-drops in the middle of the night so we really couldn’t travel out of town during their final months since we couldn’t find a dog-sitter who’d agree to do all the work. A few months after the dogs had passed, we decided to have outdoor pets from then on and began feeding the birds. We enjoy watching them and learning their habits, so I guess with the entertainment factor, you there’s some reciprocity.

Before I start crowing about the birds, I need to report how this winter a chipmunk and two birds invaded our house – our veritable nest! – and wrought some havoc until we managed to convince them to leave. The birds outdoors still fly at the windows when the food has run out, and the chipmunk seems interested in coming back in and chewing more of the baseboard. Because of their bullying behavior, we try to dissuade squirrels by using suet that contains hot peppers, but when I cook fish, I’ll toss the skin into the woods for the raccoons and am always happy when a possum stops by or a fox makes an appearance. Deer are less visible when the leaves are out, and always (rudely) help themselves to whatever they feel like eating from my garden.

As for the birds, we’ve gotten to know about twenty different species, some of them rare sightings like the snowy owl that stopped by for a few minutes, the pileated woodpecker that made some appearances, the western tanager that must have blown in from Colorado, and a bohemian waxwing whose presence seemed to quell all the wrangling.

It’s a little sad to learn birds’ negative traits, like how one hummingbird will claim ownership over and police a feeder and chase the others away (though they try to sneak back when the boss isn’t looking). But the boss gets his comeuppance when there’s a wasp at the feeder that wants to duke it out and the two chase each other around until they forget what they were doing and both disappear.

Nesting time is the calm before the storm – when the hatchlings emerge, the parents are practically frantic. Entomologist and author Doug Tallamy says that both chickadee  parents take turns feeding their chicks, and deliver one caterpillar to the nest every three minutes. Calculating 14-hour days for two-and-a-half weeks equals somewhere in the range of 350 to 570 caterpillars every day, meaning they need six- to nine-thousand bugs to feed one clutch of chickadees. I imagine that sparrows go to the same amount of trouble so it galls me when the young birds that can fly will face their parents with beaks open and wings rapidly fluttering expecting to be fed. If we ever tried that sort of stunt, my mother would have called us “lazy louts.” One sad example of this is when a cowbird had laid an egg in a house finch nest and a gigantic infant cowbird that looks like it could swallow up mama finch whole sat there with beak open and wings trembling, insatiably begging for food.

When the parents. move on and show some tough love and the broods have only learned to eat from our patio, it gets nuts. The young sparrows even gang up on the young woodpecker who hasn’t learned that the power of his head that’s like a pneumatic drill is enough to dissuade any contender.

Oddly, the insect world seems less moody and more logical, more down to earth, as it were. As an organic gardener and indigenous plant collector forever, I’ve formed a relationship with pollinators and even have registered my garden with a county ecological organization as a pollinator garden. Once when my husband visited me in the garden, he noticed a bumblebee hovering above my shoulder as if watching my every move. And yesterday I rescued a butterfly from the local pool – I thought it was surely dead, but after a few minutes it stood up, dried off and flew away. But if insects come inside and think I won’t mind them flying around, they’ve got another think coming.

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

Must the Tree Grow as the Twig is Bent?

Storytelling groups are springing up all over the city. One of them recently called for stories about the best and worst neighbors. It got me thinking about a next-door neighbor whom I’ll call Olga,

Olga became very involved in community life. She joined the bridge club and said to one of the founding members, “Pregnant again? Don’t you know when to quit?”

She volunteered to coach her daughter’s Little League team and was famous for inspiring the 3rd graders with encouragements like “C’mon, honey. Hustle that fat ass!” This engendered complaints, but Olga defended herself by pointing out that her team was in first place. Still, she wasn’t invited back.

But she really enjoyed entertaining children. So for her home decorations on Halloween, she created the most elaborate display in the neighborhood with a battery-operated guillotine chopping off a doll’s head, accompanied by a looped recording of horrid screams. Parents had to quickly backtrack to protect the tender sensibilities of their young ones.

Olga was constantly baking and liked to take her unusual dessert concoctions – some kind of soggy fruity pastry — to new neighbors. I thought of her as Martha Stewart on steroids for her indefatigable desire to show off her skills.

She was hospitality itself, and held a baby shower for a pregnant new neighbor. As all were assembled to watch the neighbor open gifts, Olga asked the mother-to-be, Sally, “What are you going to name him or her?”

Sally said, “We know it’s a boy and we’re naming him Arthur.”

Olga became irate. “You can’t name him Arthur. My son’s name is Arthur.”

 “My husband’s name is Arthur,” Sally replied, “And so are his father and grandfather.”

“C’mon. There are plenty of other names.”

Sally dropped the subject and quietly disappeared. Her family moved away soon after Arthur was born

Olga invited me sailing. I’m a sailor but didn’t own a boat, and was happy for the chance to be on the Bay. She didn’t seem to be trying very hard to get us clear of the harbor and I soon understood why. She said, “Here, take the tiller, but hold back while some of those boats move out of the way.” So I let the sails luff and couldn’t help but notice that she was stripping.as she sang, “Wild women do and they don’t regret it,” an annoying song by Natalie Cole that I wasn’t familiar with but that was popular with the country music crowd. Relieved of her clothes, she jumped into the water. Neighboring boats had stopped to watch and were tooting their horns in support.

Later at the bridge group Olga kept prodding me to recount our sailing trip. Not wanting to help her amplify her self-image as a “wild woman,” I shared everything about that outing except the fact that she’d stripped naked in a harbor full of men. She kept sending evil glances my way.

She volunteered to serve on the Community Association board and signed up for the holiday parties committee. Since it was everyone’s least favorite committee because it required the most work, fellow board members were grateful that someone with energy was taking it on. The neighborhood always held a cookout toward the end of summer. Olga took up a collection from the neighbors in order to one of those inflatable bounce houses for the kids. Except she also ordered inflatable boxing gloves.

Olga wasn’t unattractive, but let’s just say she wasn’t in the best of shape and in no way as desirable as she imagined. Still, she was convinced that two of the HOA board members had a crush on her. She said she could tell by the way they always asked her to tone it down during the meetings, and to please wait her turn and quit interrupting. Before the annual party, she had publicly challenged one of these secret admirers – the one who was half her size – to a boxing match.

Though he didn’t live in the neighborhood, her father attended and cheered her on with “C’mon Olga – get his fat ass.” thus clarifying where she’d learned that phrase, among other things. She did pound the little guy. I guess she got his ass.

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

Do We All Actually Just Name Ourselves?

In the 1946 film, “A Matter of Life and Death,” two newly dead WWII British pilots are on a tour guided by the admitting angel. They’re looking down from a balcony on the top floor of a huge building into a room in the courtyard below where the death records are filed. Pilot #1 says to the angel,  “If anyone told me that clarks are working here just like on earth, …” The angel interrupts, “Everyone here is allowed to start where they like.” Pilot #2 says, “Heaven, isn’t it?” Turning to Pilot #1, the angel says, “You see? there are millions of people on earth who’d think it heaven to be a clark.” [note: that’s British for “clerk”]

And that’s the problem. There are millions of Clarks. I was born a Clark and am very familiar with this. In fact, once when I was at a meeting where everyone wore name tags, I turned to my right to see that I was sitting right next to Debbie Clark. I cringed because I don’t let people call me Debbie and wanted to correct her name-tag, but quickly realized this was her name. (I’ve managed to train people to call me Deb — most have complied.)

 Then there was the time freshman year — I’d only been in Boston for a week when I answered the phone and a man said, “Is this Debbie Clark?” I knew it wasn’t really for me because he said Debbie but I didn’t want to be a jerk and said yes. Then he started saying sexually graphic things he’d like to do to me, so I screamed and hung up. Turns out that a Deborah Clark lived just a few doors down the street.

Because Deb Clark seemed such a dull name, after freshman year of college I decided to change the spelling. In French, words with “ai” in them like “fait” and “plait” sound much like the short e in Deb, and also a final “e” is silent. So I spelled my name Daibe. But when I worked as a waitress and wore a nametag proclaiming “Daibe”, people looked at me saying “dah-eeb” or “daisy.” I didn’t realize they meant me. Later when I first got on Facebook as Deb and started finding old friends, they’d write, “Is this Daibe?”

I’m pleased with my alternate spelling for Clark. In Greek, the letter combo ch sounds like K. A familiar example for a word beginning with the “ch” as K is “Christmas.” And a final k sound could be “q” as in Iraq. And to avoid the confusion that “Chl” might cause, I added a letter “a” and spelled Clark as Chalarcq. Not many folks know or remember that spelling.

When I got married, taking husbands’ names wasn’t cool and I had qualms about it, but I took my husband’s last name. Not once, not twice, but 3 times, partly because of the complexities of children’s last names. The first two name changes were the most fun. The third wasn’t exactly fun but Vance is much less common than Clark. My husband complains about this because Clark Counties, Clark bars, Clark gasoline, Clark Streets abound. I remind him of that half-block long Vance Alley in Pittsburgh, but this didn’t appease him. Debora Imparato (Italian doesn’t use h’s) was uncommon because Debora is. As Deborah Levine, I met a number of namesakes. This was different because everyone wrongly assumed I was Jewish.

When marrying Mr. Vance I balked about another name change, but then thought, what the hell? – I did it for those two exes, and he’s the best husband ever. But it turns out there are more Deborah Vances than Vance place names.

The name issue lives on. When my daughter was 8 she asked, “Why did you give us these stupid names?” My mother confessed that after I was born, she hadn’t a clue what to name me and the nurse said, “Deborah is a popular name now.” No kidding!

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

How Should We Handle Casual Remarks About Ourselves?

There’s a reason I don’t look forward to the end of mask-wearing. It’s not that I’ll miss my Van Gogh masks printed with “Starry Night”, “Irises” or “Undergrowth with Two Figures.” It’s that I’m wearing a full set of braces. Top and bottom. With an ever more elaborate configuration of rubber-bands to keep it interesting. Call it vanity if you must. But really, it gets old when people stare at your teeth and you know they’d like to offer, “You should get Invisalign.” And no, Invisalign wasn’t an option.

It all began when I learned I could dislocate my jaw and put my whole fist in my mouth. And no one said, “Don’t do that or you’ll freeze that way” – not because my mom wouldn’t have, but she never saw me. Not sure what inspired me, but it made my big brother laugh so I offered this entertainment in exchange for him letting me tag along to play baseball with him and his friends.

Fast forward to when, in the California wilds, I got a pecan stubbornly lodged in a molar. That dentist – who must’ve suffered from mercury poisoning –  said, “It’s filling a cavity so we’ll just leave it there.” This didn’t surprise me because I’d had experience with a crazy dentist before. I even found a Facebook support group discussion about him, Dr. B. would drill indiscriminately until the patient screamed and writhed so much he’d stop. And he didn’t use Novocain. (Having experienced that hellish pain as a 5-year-old, then later having experienced unmedicated childbirth, when a doctor asks me to grade my pain level on a scale from 1 and 10, my level 10 is pretty extreme.) Anyway, to avoid the pain of a pecan stuck in a molar, I chewed just on the right side for months until I found a sane dentist. And since my bite was off, by then since chewing on just the right side for months, I couldn’t give a good answer about whether the new filling felt “right.” (Note: For the past year, my orthodontist has said my braces are coming off “soon.” On a scale of 1 to 10, I don’t know what he means by soon.)

The weird thing is that, according to my dentists, I’ve always had a perfect bite. Even when my teeth didn’t hit on one side. The next dentist, Dr. F. said he’d apprenticed with an older dentist who kept loose mercury rolling around inside a drawer from which he made his own amalgam with his bare hands. Dr. F affirmed he was looney. (If you’re not familiar with mercury poisoning: the Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland” had it from inhaling mercury vapors used in hat-making.)

Dr. F. referred me to a periodontist who counseled me to hold a pencil in front of my face, while looking in a mirror, and practice opening and closing my mouth in line with the pencil. He made a costly mold of my teeth that showed my bite was indeed perfect, even though I couldn’t bring my teeth together properly. He even gave a slide-show lecture about my case to several hundred nurses. I asked about royalties, but he just laughed so I assume he was pretty rational.

So, how did that Invisalign comment open up this history and what’s my conclusion? First, Invisalign has a great shtick, but none of us should be advertising for free on anyone’s behalf. And it’s best not to assume we know what’s going on with each other, especially based on appearances. So, as I go about maskless, please don’t mention my purple rubber-bands unless you want to hear the entire back story, including Dr. P. who committed suicide and Dr. R. with the unfortunate occupational liability of having bad breath.

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

Is It Possible for Animals to Violate Each Other’s Rights?

Probably everyone knows we communicate nonverbally, though maybe not everyone knows exactly what we’re communicating. Stories are plentiful about travelers getting into all sorts of trouble after making a gesture that’s interpreted in ways they never dreamed of. I recently found evidence that animal species are similarly challenged.

Back in November 2020, I blogged about a swan drama involving Glenda leaving her long-time mate to be with the lonely widower swan Dexter who’d lost his mate and offspring to predators. (Please see “What Random Truth Does the Pandemic Year Challenge?”)

Steve and I disagreed about the bird-brained reasons for this mate-swap – he accused Glenda of low morals. I considered some “me too” reasons she decided that Dexter was a better choice as a mate, and felt vindicated when we saw Glenda sitting on eggs such as Dale had never fertilized.

Steve continued to feel sorry for Dale alone in his lake. But Dale was soon to find a new life purpose.

Before Glenda had eggs to sit on, Dexter had gotten busy chasing away the Canada geese to make it safe for the happy couple to raise their family. Many of the geese flew away, but a few moved over to Dale’s lake.

Then one day, loud honking grabbed our attention: we saw two ganders hectoring two females who were trying unsuccessfully to distance themselves. I was astonished when Dale interceded and faced the males, stretching up his neck and spreading his wings wide in a threatening stance. The ganders backed off and the females waddled into the water, joined by Dale who escorted them across the lake.

For several weeks, Dale, an apparent hero, could be seen escorting his two goose friends. Steve scorned Glenda for abandoning such a saintly mate.

Then one glorious spring day, there was Dale swimming with just one goose. The two were companionably stretching their necks down into the water looking for snacks, the way how Dexter and Glenda dine together. They continued for a little while until Dale suddenly maneuvered behind the goose and tried to mount her. She squawked in protest, took off and hasn’t come back.

While trying to find out how typical this was, I located such articles as, “The Truth About Swans” and “When Bird Mating Goes Wrong” and learned that though uncommon, it’s not unheard of.

I suggest Glenda left Dale because she just wasn’t into his kind of kink. Besides that, Dale may be a swan version of Harvey  Weinstein.

Of course, not all that familiar with bird culture, I don’t know for sure and must withhold judgment. As we all must when encountering cultures unfamiliar to us.

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

How Do You Know What You Think You Know?

“Minari” actress Youn Yuh-jung stunned me by saying in a radio interview, “Self-sacrifice is human nature.”  What a refreshing improvement over a typical US person-on-the-street opinion, “We’ll always have war because violence and selfishness are human nature.”

As a professional social scientist, I maintain that you can’t find any legitimate study that claims it shows that anything is “human nature.” Social scientific studies can tell you what people do and what they report about their thoughts and feelings, but cannot point to any specific nature among all humans.

When my first child was born, elders told me that if I picked her up when she cried I’d “spoil” her, a notion so absurd it’s amazing anyone would say it out loud. How can babies be born selfish and manipulative?

This train of thought led me to wonder about the dogma of original sin. I followed the trail to Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 CE) who wrote something in his Confessions XII:29 that became adopted as church doctrine at the Councils of Trent in the 16th century.

While sitting with his friend Alypius on a bench, Augustine was reading the Bible and meditating about his two “opposing natures.” It seems as he was trying to read scripture and focus on obedience to God, he kept thinking about his former mistresses who still “enthralled” him. He decided God was angry with him and tormenting him which upset him so much that he went to sit under a fig tree to cry and pray. As he was meditating, he heard nearby children playing a game and chanting, “Pick it up, read it! Pick it up, read it!” which Augustine took as a sign meant specifically for him. (Sidebar: let’s acknowledge that some people are heavily medicated for thinking that radio messages, for instance, are meant specifically for them.) Augustine went back to the bench and picked up the Bible where he’d left off and read a verse that he interpreted to mean that if he did something bad, it wasn’t he himself who did it but the “sin” that lived in him like a tumor. And the reason he and everyone else had this metaphorical tumor was something he’d heard about it being the fault of Adam thousands of years before.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

We’re all born with capacities to grow either way: selfish and self-absorbed or self-sacrificing. But human communities – that is, cultures— adopt stories and myths about who they are, that are often proposed and circulated by their leadership. So at birth we’re plunged into a sea of collective consciousness that tells us our shared values as well as tells us what’s real. We all pass along our shared mythology through the generations without wondering how and why they originated.

This “inherited knowledge” affects the worlds we construct in every way imaginable. Maybe we should try to see with our own eyes. And maybe then we’ll construct better worlds.

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.