May 08 2009
Friends in Japan
My friend Deb Lund, a well-known children’s author, is traveling on school visits throughout Japan these weeks, and her companion is her 6th grade son, Kaj. They are both keeping blogs of the journey–shared experiences through two generational eyes. It is beautiful to read these parallel and unique trains of thought and I invite you to check them out. Kaj is a voracious reader and has started his own blog to gather and share ideas for good books for the 12-year-old set. His blog is:http://portalreads.edublogs.org/ and his mother’s blog is: www.deblund.com/blog/. I can tell Kaj is having a great time–his blog is not being kept up to date! Imagine that, a boy living in the present moment of his big adventure! However, he did tackle a huge piece of observation and reflection–their visit to the Peace Museum in Hiroshima.
Both mother and son are profoundly impacted. Each writes of it from their own ways of carrying story.
As a person who grew up very close to World War II, who was conceived near the day the US dropped the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and sent 100,000+ people to their deaths in a few moments, I have carried this story in my life narrative. And sometimes I feel I carry it in my psychic DNA somehow–as my soul was called in at the moment when so many others were called out. That’s an exploration for another time… what strikes me now is the picture of Kaj staring at the rusted, twisted tricycle of a little Japanese boy who was killed by the bomb.
These are important lessons in the middle track of childhood. I remember the somber lessons from my own childhood. I was haunted by the big red book of LIFE’s History of World War II, and far more than I think my parents knew I would pour over pictures of this history that was still shaking us throughout the 1950s. My parents sponsored refugees from Germany and Poland and the tiny house of our Indiana childhood would swell with strangers whose stories we could barely know through the barriers of language and culture.
When the movie “Shindler’s List” came out, one of the responses I had was gratitude to have been shown the fullness of that horror in one sweeping story. I sat frozen in my theater chair, barely able to blink. But I was middle-aged and had studied this era. I had thought about these atrocities and come up with ways to accommodate my prenatal darkness in the peaceful privileges of my life. The teenage daughter of a friend, who was at the time much more removed and ignorant of WWII’s horrific details, was taken to the movie by her German language teacher. She came home, went to her bedroom and wept and wept. I remember her mother called me quite worried and asked, “What shall I do?”
I said, “I think she’s all right. Her heart breaking at the cruelty of the world. She needs that stamina and empathy. She needs to know she can hold this story and hold her own…”
That is also my prayer for Kaj–that he can know the story of Hiroshima and hold his own path. As a boy who just finished Lord of the Rings, he is already a student of good and evil. As a child heading into the 21st century, he is already living in the turning point. He needs to know–and to find ways to think about it–and then to go out for sushi and explore temples and let the light and the darkness make their rivers in him.
That is also my prayer for myself and all of us in this Storycatcher network–that we let the light and the darkness make rivers within us and learn to swim them both.
It seems to be an incredibly intense time at the moment. Is this temporary or permanent? We don’t know. I made two teaching/speaking trips to California in less than a week and participated in a conference here–moving around several thousand people at a time who are infused with excitation, exhaustion, anticipation, resignation– all the big words seem to be in play. People are having life crises, health crises, work crises (not to mention Mexico shutting down for 2 weeks and serving up a big reminder of not being in charge of much of anything anymore)…
It is three weeks until Ann’s and my new book on circle is due at the publisher’s–and it is being a struggle for me to be as regular as I usually like with this blog. If you don’t hear from me for awhile it means I’m editing chapters and weeding the garden without a moment to spare for extra writing. I’ll be back in June.
I’ll miss you–please take care, keep writing, and know we’ll be back in the story circle soon.
Blessings,
Christina
Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.
You store and share stories like a library, Christina. I’m off to share stories of a friend at a memorial service Saturday in Vancouver, another Story person, and I’ll be cloaked in the fabric we share. Thanks for helping me place it there.
I’m watching as I and those I love experience “…excitation, exhaustion, anticipation, resignation…” And my people “…are having life crises, health crises, work crises.” In this week’s “The Power of Your Story” class, words of yours from “Life’s Companion” on ‘Dreaming, Longing, Acting’ were the words that struck a chord with all of us in the room. Your words then and your words now remind us that the sharing of our stories will carry us through. Thank you.
Thank you for this read. In finding a place to view life without being knocked off center by the continual barrage of hysteria I have been thinking of ocean currents instead of rivers. There are cold places and warm places in the ocean eventhough it is all part of the whole. We move through the currents as well as the rough and smooth and it is all part of life. Spring is always an intense transition time for me and those little weeds keep springing up regardless of my schedule. Such is all of life. I give thanks in a moment-by-moment way for the fact that I am awake and alive to the intensity and the transitions regardless that it isn’t necessarily comfortable. Journaling is an exercise in staying awake when I would rather pull the covers over my head or when I am swept away in the glee of the first tulips. Thanks again.
How very moving to read of the visit to Hiroshima and to see the pictures. The mixture of emotions I had as a boy of 15 when the bombs were dropped came flooding back over me, along with a thought I’d never had before: I wonder if we’d have dropped those bombs on Hamburg or Munich if we thought it would shorten the war…or was it easier to kill all those Japanese persons than it would have been if they’d been German?
I have been longer coming to read this blog. It’s stunning, Christina…seeing the next generation coming to terms with those realities and knowing they’ll survive them and be changed by them as we were and as you describe. I couldn’t speak for three hours after seeing Schindler’s List, and The Deer Hunter, about the Viet Nam war, had a similar effect.
We carry those realities, all of us, no matter where we live. It is the carrying of them that somehow, even without words, creates a presence in the world that (I pray) weaves a web of holding of all the generations to come.
Blessings on the last part of your book. I await it! May your gardens flourish even as your two beautiful souls listen and speak, listen and speak.
The year of my birth, 1938, was a heavy and dense time for the world. The Great Depression took it’s toll throughout the world and the threat of Nazi Germany cast a gloomy shadow across the landscape. I was too young to understand what was going on during the beginning of World War II, but I assure you, that darkness had a way of seeping into my unconscious mind.
It is not that I am a gloomy person, but I am a serious one, and I take world events seriously. Although I have many interests that I pursue, I have a great interest in the World War II era that I feed with books and films. I search for answers that can explain the hatred, cruelty, indifference and greed of that time. I have the greatest empathy for the victims of that war and for those who managed to survive and tell the tale. God only knows why I was born into my birth family in America instead of a Jewish family somewhere in Europe or a Japanese family living in Hiroshima.
As it was, my family was not highly affected by the war. We lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming at that time where the major industries were the railroad and the military post known today as Warren Air Force Base. My father was at home throughout the war with a job working as a car inspector on the Union Pacific Railroad while my mother stayed home to care for us children. There were only three of us: two boys and one girl (that’s me, the youngest.) Later on after the war, my younger brother and sister were born. All my uncles were farmers except for one miliary uncle who fought in Europe, survived and returned home after the war.
Our living situation, however, brought us a little closer to the war effort as we lived in military housing along with other railroad families mixed in with military families. Our small apartment was in a long barrack style cinder block building with six other identical apartments. Our source of heat was a coal burning stove that we fed with the coal stored in the shed right outside our door. This coal shed served an additional purpose for us kids when we sat on it’s roof on hot summer nights and told ghost stories. One I remember well: “Bloody Murder in The Coal Shed”. I don’t know who made that one up. There was no mail delivery then, so my brother and I walked to a military trailer camp nearby with a note from Mom to pick up the mail. And I remember my brothers and I loading our pockets full of ginger snaps and running through the fields up to the security fence around the air strip to watch the fighter planes land and take off. What a thrill that was!
Now, I don’t claim to have an infallible memory about those days. After all, I was only seven years old by the end of the war in Europe, but I remember bits and pieces very well. As an adult, I know that my parents sacrificed and struggled. My father carried two jobs: one full time and another part time, and he rode a bike to work or walked. As children, my brothers and I didn’t understand struggle. But as adults we have lived my parents example of courage and fortitude and have the knowledge that we can summon those strengths when we need to.
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