Journey to Hopiland – Alone in Kindergarten
Posted on September 8, 2012 2 Comments
This is the first story in the series I began two weeks ago with the poetic story of my birth. This is a story I have told to children in schools. Your children may enjoy this story too.
The fun days of summer were coming to an end but Denise was not sad. Sure, she would miss the afternoon concerts at Lake Superior with Mama and wouldn’t be able to spend the night with Mama’s friend, Mary. Denise did enjoy spending time alone with a grown lady eating Chinese food, and sleeping in her big bed. But, beginning kindergarten was even more exciting and special. She was away from her sisters, Sherri and Lisa’s arguments and baby Boo-Boo’s crying. But, she was home in the afternoon to watch the Howdy Doody Show and Popeye.
When they first moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota from Mobile, Alabama, Denise wanted to play in the school’s large playground with swings, slides, and merry-go-round. But, Mama told her the playground was just for school children. Now, she was able to play there. Every morning Mama walked her to the school, came back at noon, and they walked back home.
One mornng, Mama left Denise at the entrance of the school as she went to “get her hair done.” As Denise walked through the long, dark hall, she saw older boys and girls but not any of her classmates. When she opened her classroom door and didn’t see any one, not even Sister Marie Therese, she thought, Mama must have brought me to school early. She hung up her coat and looked around the large, open classroom. Each corner of the room was a special area, one for reading books, one for coloring books, one for arts and crafts, and one for games. The middle of the room was filled with round tables and chairs and against the back wall sat a piano.
Denise headed straight to the reading area. Even though, she couldn’t read many words, Denise loved books. As long as she could remember, Mama read books to Denise and her sisters. She taught Denise the alphabet so she was ready to learn to read when she began kindergarten. Sitting on a pillow, Denise lost herself in the colorful worlds of the picture books. She stretched out on the floor and slowly looked through all of the books she had wanted to read but not been able to before. After awhile she realized she was tired of reading and looked around the room. Still no one had come in the classroom. This is strange, Denise thought and wondered where everyone was.
Coloring books called out to her as she looked around the room for something new to do. She found a jungle coloring book filled with pages of animals and plants. The page she chose to color was a picture of a lion, elephant, trees, and flowers. She colored as carefully as she could. All of the colors stayed within the lines. When she finished coloring she felt very proud of her work and wanted to show it off but still no one was in the classroom. Denise couldn’t tell time, but she felt she had been alone a long time. So, she got up and walked to the window to see if her teacher and classmates were outside. Many children were playing outside but none of them were her classmates.
Now what can I do, Denise thought. She looked around the room until her eyes settled on the old upright piano sitting in the back of the room. When Sister Marie Therese was there she didn’t let any children touch the piano. But, since Denise was all alone, she decided no one would mind if she played. The piano stool was too tall for her to get on, so she pushed a chair next to it, stood on the chair, and slid onto the stool. Denise had never played a piano and was excited. Loudly, with both hands she hit the keys, then stopped immediately and looked around the room. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw her loud banging hadn’t brought in anyone. Then she began to play one key at a time starting at the lowest keys and traveling to the highest. She experimented with keys, playing more than one at a time, playing fast, then very slowly but always softly. She didn’t want to get in trouble if her teacher came in. Time passed as she played on the piano. Then she stopped, looked around and said aloud, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
Usually when she said that Sister Marie Therese would take her and other students to the bathroom. But Sister wasn’t in the classroom. Denise was all alone. Students weren’t allowed in the hall without a teacher or hall pass. But, she couldn’t wait any longer. Denise slid off of the piano stool and cracked open the door, looked up and down the hallway, and saw it was empty. Quickly she ran to the bathroom. Just as she was preparing to run back to the classroom a nun appeared, it seemed, from thin air and grabbed her hand. Denise looked up and saw the stern, unsmiling face of the principal.
“What are you doing in the hall alone?”
“I had to go to the bathroom.”
“Your teacher let you go alone?”
“No.”
“Where is your teacher?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who is your teacher?”
“Sister Marie Therese.”
“Oh,” said the principal as she placed her hand over her mouth as if she was surprised. Just then the outside door opened, Mama entered, and walked toward them.
“Mrs. Alexander, I am so sorry,” the principal said. “Sister Marie Therese was not here today. We thought the secretary called everyone last night.”
Denise’s mother smiled, paused a moment, and then said, “We were out late last night, so we missed her call.” She looked at her daughter, “You stayed in the classroom all this time by yourself?”
“Uh huh and I had fun all by myself,” Denise said as she took her mother’s hand and led her into the classroom. “See what I colored.” Proudly Denise showed her mother the page she had colored.
The Rewards of Positive Persistance – A Folktale for Returning to School
Posted on September 1, 2012 Leave a Comment
Today, for the listening pleasure of young and old, is the story of a young man who used changing circumstances and confidence in himself to achieve his goal.
Just click on the link below and enjoy.
The Story of My Birth – The Ballad of Mama Queen
Posted on August 25, 2012 3 Comments
Beginning a new career path as a school nurse at a small elementary school in the heart of the Hopi Nation causes me to reflect on this journey that has led me here. My childhood dreams have changed through time. I began reflecting on my life when I was in fourth grade with my first diary. Unfortunately, I lost my early diaries during my gypsy life in my twenties. However, I have written many stories and poems about this life and maintained journals intermittently. So, in order to understand how I have arrived at this point, I will reflect through my writings.
The story of my birth is the beginning. I wrote this poem when I was living in Evanston, Il, working as the secretary for the Linguistics Department at Northwestern University. One of the professors had written a dictionary of slang. I used it to find expressions for a child born out of wedlock and making love. Some of the phrases, as you will see, lent themselves easily to poetry.
The Ballad of Mama Queen and Her Darling Daughter
Mama Queen looked for action. 
A handsome photographer
came to her satisfaction.
Children enjoying their sport,
ran a restaurant for support.
Separated, but married, Mama Queen
he could not court.
Oh, but they did Adam-and-Eve-it,
in that act of darkness, an accident.
Mama was bright, beautiful, young and free.
Daddy, a struggling, father of three.
His wife called, “Daddy, you I got to see.”
Yes, with his family he had to be.
Oh, Mama are you left alone?
you know Daddy’s gone home.
You did Adam-and-Eve-it,
in that act of darkness, an accident.
Oh, Mama love that man so
but he’s packed his bags, he had to go. 
Mama got hulled between wind and water
floating with a darling daughter.
Born-out-of-wedlock girl
were you misbegotten
hasty pudding
come by chance
love-child?
Now, you’ve got a yard child.
She’s an off-girl
making music in a
mad-man’s world.
An accident
one incident
heaven sent
love’s fragrant.
****************************************************************************
You can hear this poem and the song refrain by purchasing my CD at
http://storytellingtheater.com/storytellingtheater.com/SHOP_BOOKINGS.html
The Couple Who Returned from the Land of the Dead
Posted on August 18, 2012 Leave a Comment
Today, an oral story. This African folktale speaks of love, death, and resurrection. Click onto link below. Enjoy.
A Spider Story for Gardeners
Posted on August 11, 2012 7 Comments
When I was eight years old my sisters and I spent a semester living with Mother, our paternal grandmother. She was a large, round woman who ruled with an iron hand. Her large wooden house had a wide, screened back porch that ran the full length of the house. A well was on the back porch and we pulled up water from it in the early morning chill to wash up for school. One day I was sweeping the porch and saw the largest spider I had ever seen crawling slowly across the floor. When I tried to crush the spider with the broom, its back exploded into dozens of tiny spiders scurrying across the wood. Mother came and stood at the kitchen door with her hands on her wide hips.
“What are you doing?”
I hung my head, feeling badly about the baby spiders. “I tried to kill a spider. But I didn’t know it had babies.”
Mother shook her head as she watched the last few baby spiders run away and looked at me sternly. “Child, don’t be trying to kill no spiders. Spiders are good luck. They mean you’ll always have money. And they eat up all the bothersome insects, flies and roaches. So, just leave them spiders alone.”
I followed her advice. I became a storyteller and learned of Spider Woman’s significance in storytelling. So for my fiftieth birthday I had my storytelling staff carved with a spider on top. After a few years my husband began to use my method of catching spiders with a paper cup and index card to carry them outside. When I became a Buddhist I learned that all sentient beings, even grasshoppers and flies, could have been my mother in a previous life. We do our best to carry the many insects we find in our house back outdoors.
But in July, I was confronted with a dilemma when I discovered squash bugs devouring my young winter squash leaves. I had no choice but to destroy them after they killed two of my plants. I felt badly and chanted “Om Mani Padme Hum” as I crushed them into the sand. I try to justify my murders with the thought that my prayers will allow them to be reborn as humans sooner than if they were allowed to destroy all of my squash plants.
To my sorrow this has been a daily battle. I did find a natural garden site, Planetnatural, http://www.planetnatural.com and ordered neem oil and a high powered hose attachment to control their population, and not harm the feeding bees. But, every afternoon when I go out to check on my plants, I find from one to dozens of squash bugs. Just when I learned what their babies look like, and how they can consume a full squash, they have appeared and added to my challenge.
But, I am managing to see some squash begin to grow and hopefully will have a few to harvest. Now, I have the added challenge of trying to save my corn. Yesterday I checked on my first ripe cob and saw it is being eaten up by black beetle like bugs and worms! So, I’ll try the high powered hose on them and cayenne pepper which I heard discussed on the radio during a Hopi agricultural conference. For next year’s garden, I’m going to find plants that are bug repellents, mint was mentioned against squash bugs, and research other ways of preventing pests. (Any and all suggestions are welcome!)
When I use the high power hose, I have to put on my water resistant jump suit or I get thoroughly soaked. Brian, my husband, took photos of my work last week. I have interspersed them with some of the haikus I wrote this summer.
Wilting corn leaves rise
water reaches thirsty roots
now they laugh at sun
Squash blossoms bloom in
morning, gold star shaped flowers
close in heat’s hot hand
Bees slip in yellow
squash blossoms drink sweet nectar
I step carefully
Birds flock to garden
balance on leaves, eat pollen
breakfast with delight
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION – THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE BOMBING OF HIROSHIMA
Posted on August 4, 2012 Leave a Comment
During the Cuban Missile Crises, I was in fifth grade and lived on Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida. I remember we had to walk to school because the base was using our school buses to transport troops in case the President decided to take military action against the Russians. Anti-communism was at a peak and I worried constantly about the possibility of war. My worries grew so intense I became ill with a sickness the doctors never defined. I didn’t eat, had terrible headaches, and slept all of the time. I was admitted to the hospital and only began to eat when doctors threatened to feed me intravenously. Years later, when I read my diaries from that time, I saw that my entries on fearing war and communism stopped after I left the hospital.
Growing up in a military family, I learned early that nothing is permanent, not homes, not friends, not schools. I also began at an early age to question the necessity of war. I have not yet understood the justification for legalized murder in order to obtain power over others. I was a pacifist before I became a Buddhist and “Just War,” “War for Peace” are lies. As the Dalai Lama teaches harming the person who harms you just leads to more violence. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. led movements that proved non-violent actions can result in permanent social change.
Sixty-seven years ago on August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first weapon of mass destruction, an atomic bomb, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb’s explosion destroyed 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people. Three days later, another B-29 dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing about 40,000 people. Countless thousands of people died over the following years as a result of radiation poisoning and other injuries from the bombing.
Every year we observe this anniversary, not only to recall the deaths of innocent women, men, and children who were not soldiers, but also to urge those who call themselves leaders to recognize the need to end nuclear proliferation. When I was a freshman in college, I read the screenplay, Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras. That script provided many strong images of Hiroshima after the explosion. The image that struck me most was that flowers began to grow just 14 days after the bombing. Those images led to my poem, Hiroshima.
Please click on the following link to listen to the poem.
http://storytellingtheater.com/storytellingtheater.com/PERFORMANCE/Entries/2012/8/4_HiROSHIMA.html
This is a calendar of events being held in commemoration of the Hiroshima bombing. http://www.ananuclear.org/Calendar/tabid/157/Default.aspx
A Step Toward Peace
Posted on July 27, 2012 2 Comments
In a far distant future, a wind of compassion and power sweeps over the planet earth like a fire. Its force destroys every single man made weapon, from small pistols to the most powerful atomic bombs. Biological weapons too, are swept up in this wave of celestial annihilation. When the wind disappears, human beings confront each other unarmored. They realize that artificial state and national boundaries, walls and checkpoints are unnecessary. They acknowledge we are all simply human beings traversing but a blink – in universal time – on this planet earth. Human meets human to create a world of peace and harmony.
Yes, another one of my utopian stories, for I must have been born under that star – utopia. The star that bestows upon its seekers the belief that human beings can transcend the poisons of greed, jealousy, anger, and hatred to create a world of peace, abundance, justice, and equality. A first step in achieving my utopian dream is happening now, July 27th, 2012 at the United Nations as diplomats and representatives from 190 countries convene in the United Nations to ratify a global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). They have been working on this treaty for some time and today is the date it should be completed.
As these treaties go, probably much will be left to criticize. And I’m sure it will fall far short of the utopian vision of pacifists such as me. But it is a step in the right direction.
Of course, this treaty will not be able to impact the lucrative illegal business of international arms transfers, so well portrayed by Nicholas Cage in Lord of War. That movie led me to discover the Arms Control Association http://www.armscontrol.org/ which offers a free e-mail newsletter that keeps readers aware of efforts around the world to control one tool that can lead to mass murders – guns.
Here in the United States we mourn the murder and wounding of less than 100 people by one deranged individual. But, around the world – from Burma, to Sudan, to Syria, to Columbia thousands of innocent civilians are killed daily by weapons sold by companies and governments in the so-called “developed nations” to equally deranged individuals. Our efforts to be brokers of peace are hypocritical until we, as individuals and as a nation, acknowledge that our endorsement of unfettered gun marketing, directly contributes to every war, genocide, and injustice that occurs around the world.
Remember –
Profit and power
walk hand in hand
like a disease
plaguing the land.
The Talking Skull
Posted on July 20, 2012 Leave a Comment
This week I tell an African story, which comes in different versions, however the message is always the same. It’s one I need to remember, and one that serves everyone well. Enjoy.
Just click on the link below to hear story.
The Becoming
Posted on July 13, 2012 3 Comments
I wrote my first poem when I was in third grade. My only book published is a slim poetry chapbook, “I Am That We May Be” published by Third World Press in the seventies. Poetry dances in and out of my life like a seasonal bird. Poetry requires space and time to see and receive the words that can create colorful imagery.
After years of having neither space nor time, a month ago, I began writing poetry daily. The movie Sylvia, in which Gwyneth Paltrow gave a touching and sympathetic portrayal of the poet Sylvia Plath was the catalyst. In my twenties I read Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, but it did not resonate with me. But, after watching the movie, I went on-line and searched for Plath’s poetry. The one or two I read, hit me like bolts of lightening and poetry continues to flow through me.
I begin with older poems, as the new ones need much work. Today’s poem is different from most of my poetry, and some may say it really isn’t a poem but more a statement. I want to share it because it reflects many thoughts I have seen in other people’s blogs or writings lately and because it speaks of my creative and spiritual base.
I wrote this during my twenties at some point as I traveled between Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles when I was experiencing the free life striving to make a living as a writer and performance artist. The title is a quote from a source I did not save and can not now find.
The Becoming which is in the Becoming of All When They Become
Beneath the spirit of the creative genius
sleeps the body of the despairing heart.
Between writers be the word.
Between bodies be touch taste feeling.
Between spirits all is light understanding bliss of sound.
Between creators is the Supreme Creator.
Some stars, sages say, cross each other’s path
but once in eternity. Some are a light’s year
light year apart in distance. Some stars
transit each other’s path periodically.
All energy expands and explodes in its own universe into the all embracing Universal.
Can we be more committed than to say before ALL, “We submit.”?
We submit solely to the One Supreme Creative Force
the All Embracing Light of Universal Love Consciousness.
All that is before us is work that we may be images of perfect creativity.
In the Beginning was no “sell” of Creation.
In the Beginning was the Word manifest in the Way of Light.
Know this
we are committed to becoming Pure Spirits
Balanced in the Hand of the Supreme Juggler.
Vote in this 21st Century Multicultural USA
Posted on July 6, 2012 Leave a Comment
My husband and I watched “Bowling for Columbine” on HBO this week. This Michael Moore documentary examines root causes of the Columbine High School tragedy on April 20, 1999. That day two students came to the school with guns and killed 12 students, one teacher, wounded many, and killed themselves. The school is located in Littleton, Colorado the home of Lockheed Martin, a leading missile arms manufacturer. Moore’s movie examined gun use in the USA, and the lack of adequate controls on gun sales. The movie also showed how media and politicians exaggerate and create a fear of violence even though actual acts of violence in this country have declined. One of the most heart wrenching parts of the film was a montage of interventions by the USA government in the overthrow of foreign governments which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people from Iran to El Salvador.
In my research I also found an article printed in Slate which presents a very interesting psychological analysis of the Columbine murderers which may be of interest to some readers. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2004/04/the_depressive_and_the_psychopath.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_3
I was working on my introduction for this week’s post and seeing Moore’s movie brought me back to my roots. For many years I lost faith in the American dream. However, being a pacifist, I was not in support of any ill fated violent revolution. However, I did not vote and felt that U.S. politics was a sham and a lie I did not want to participate in. My husband, Brian Payne, a child of Iowa, changed my mind and I began to vote. I recognized the legitimacy of his argument, if we don’t vote, we have no basis in which to complain. So I vote.
In 2005, I participated in the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act by presenting a storytelling performance. My research for that performance led me to appreciate what the ability to vote means, not only for black Americans, but for all Americans of different cultural and language backgrounds. The laws now being passed in states attempting to hinder individual’s rights to vote are a travesty and should be opposed by all who recognize that thousands, throughout this country’s history, sacrificed their lives to secure this right for all citizens.
Now, in this 21st Century, the USA is entering a new era. No longer is this a country in which white people can claim to be the majority. People of color are having more children and are becoming the majority in states in the Southwest. The USA is a multicultural nation, of diverse religions, colors, and national heritages. This is a fact. No amount of bigoted rhetoric can change this fact, no number of bigoted laws can stop the forward progress of citizens whose first language is not English.
So, I ask you to listen to my story, which is part a dream of a USA that I intend should manifest, even though some would call it a utopia. When we, this diverse population, recognize that we are the power. We must unite to overcome the force of monied interests and create a true democracy that practices equality and freedom of expression and opportunity to all regardless of race, cultural background, or religion.
Click link to hear the story of my dream of what a united multicultural USA can accomplish.
