On May 12, 2024, I shared my elation at regaining access to my Facebook account after discovering on April 12th that it had been hacked. My initial fears about the hacker’s nefarious actions were not unfounded. On Saturday morning, June 22nd, I was shocked to see the captioned notice of suspension of my Facebook account when I attempted to log in. It took a week to recover from the blow to my reputation.
Why? What had I done wrong? Your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards on fraud and deception, the notice reads. It’s nothing personal. They made this decision because Our technology found your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our rules. As a result, our technology took action.
Had AI only now detected the fraudulent activity? Was the hacker still using my account to perpetuate more fraud?
Rosaliene (right) and Celeste (fictitious name) with Bishop Guilly SJ – First Vows and Receipt of Religious Habit – Georgetown – Guyana Photo taken by Father Bernard Darke SJ for the Catholic Standard Newspapers
In Chapter Thirteen of my work in progress, I share my failure in living the religious vows as a celibate and childless woman in a patriarchal church. In retrospect, I have come to realize that the Guyana Mission, established during the British colonial period and headquartered in the United States, was not prepared for dealing with young women who challenged the lingering colonial mindset within the community.
The 1970s was a decade of great social-political-economic upheavals in our fledgling nation. The 1976 government takeover of all schools owned and run by the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations struck a decisive blow for the religious community accustomed to its autonomy. By abandoning my teaching post in Guyana’s hinterlands, I unwittingly became the first casualty for the religious community, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 16.
While the sisters struggled to adapt to the country’s new ways of thinking and being, three of the youngest professed local nuns, all trained in the United States, left the community. Of the seven of us, trained at the newly established novitiate in Guyana, only three stayed to make final or perpetual vows.
Nowadays, here in the USA, the patriarchal religious right would like to turn back time to the “Golden 1950s.” Make America Great(er) Again, they implore, bowing down before their Anointed One. A faithful disciple, now sharing the pulpit, believes that “childless cat ladies” shouldn’t have the same civic rights as women with children. What an upside-down world for women who are childless by choice or for biological reasons!
My Poetry Corner July 2024 features the poem “Nevertheless” from the debut poetry collection Tender Headed (USA, 2023) by Olatunde Osinaike, a poet, essayist, and software developer. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection, winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series.
Osinaike earned his BS in Engineering from Vanderbilt University (Tennessee) and his MS in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University (Maryland). Originally from the West Side of Chicago (Illinois), he currently lives with his wife in Atlanta, the capital of Georgia.
How did a data scientist for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton also become a poet? In an October 2023 interview for his alma mater, Vanderbilt University, Osinaike said: “I don’t think of the data science and the writing as different. You definitely use a lot of creativity in how you code. The best observations I ever got were in a technology forecasting class with Andy Van Schaack [associate professor of the practice of engineering management] my junior year at Vanderbilt. We talked about scenario analysis, convergent opinions. So, even if I’m looking at something under a microscope, I’m also thinking about the world around what I’m observing.”
Front Cover: Eye of the Storm: Facing Climate and Social Chaos with Calm and Courage by Terry Lepage Photo Credit: Open Door Communication (USA, 2023)
[D]ue to the baked-in heating of the planet, we are experiencing ever-increasing regional catastrophes across the globe from storms, fires, floods, droughts, crop failures, and heat waves. A barrage of local, regional, and specific collapses on an uncertain time frame against a background of more general decline seems to be in store, rather than one grand collapse…. This is the storm we face.
Fear is contagious, calm is contagious, and courage is contagious. Those of us who have some idea of what is unfolding can prepare ourselves mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to be (as we are able) centers of calm, compassion, and courage. We can be ready to coach others to hold onto their values in hard times. Because we will have pre-processed some of the loss that others will deny for a while longer, we will be able to support them when they finally face what comes.
Excerpt from Eye of the Storm: Facing Climate and Social Chaos with Calm and Courage by Terry Lepage, Open Door Communication, California, USA, 2023 (pp. 11 & 12).
Terry LePage creates spaces for connection, healing, insight, and inspiration. With a PhD in chemistry and a Master of Divinity, she combines heart and head with her clear and insightful writing, speaking, and facilitation. She has worked as a research chemist, transitional minister, and hospice chaplain. She currently lives in Southern California and facilitates Nonviolent Communication practice groups, grief circles, and social justice groups both locally and for the international Deep Adaptation Forum.
Fragrant Red Rosebush – Spring 2024 – Los Angeles – Southern California
With an ongoing global climate crisis, due to humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, our weather swings from one extreme to the next. Heat domes. Prolonged drought. Rain bombs. Epic floods. We’re not the only ones impacted. So are the trees and plants. Unlike those of us who can find shelter, they must face the elements head-on. Some are resilient and adaptive. Others are not so fortunate.
I’ve observed that the rosebushes in our communal garden are more sensitive to these extremes than my succulent plants. Over the years, we have lost 50 percent of our rosebushes, leaving only eight survivors. The two most recent losses, of the white Hedgerow variety, occurred after the Winter 2022-2023 heavy rains. Grown in an area fully exposed to the elements, their roots sat for three months underwater.
The photo on the left below shows one of them. I haven’t asked the gardener to uproot it in the hope that there may still be some lingering life. The photo on the right is also a white Hedgerow rosebush that stands at the other end of the same exposed plot. After standing for three months in the Winter 2023-2024 floodwater, it’s not doing well. In spring, it’s usually filled with lots of sprawling leaf-laden branches and roses. During our “gray May,” it produced only one tiny rose. I fear that it will not survive another wet winter.
Dead White Rosebush – Winter 2022-2023White Rosebush – Spring 2024
About seven years ago, I undertook to clean up the garden plot of a former neighbor and friend, a food stylist, who had moved back to her home state when her husband Benny took ill with lung cancer. He died months later in January 2016. In March the following year, my best friend and poet also died of lung cancer. Taking care of this plot became part of my grieving process.
After clearing the dense overgrowth of cactus plants, I uncovered the stunted dead trunk and branches of what appeared to be a rosebush. The six-inch tall (15 cm) plant had been smothered by more aggressive plants. For two years I watered it without any sign of life. Then, wonders of wonders, a new branch appeared with tender baby leaves. My care and attention had paid off. The first and single stunning pink rose appeared a year later. Then in 2022, it thanked me with five roses (see photo on the left below). My Miracle Rosebush, as I call it, continued to produce up to six flowers each spring, but I’ve noticed a change in the color and shape, as shown in the photo on the right below. Resilience has its limits as we age.
Stunted Miracle Rosebush – Spring 2022Stunted Miracle Rosebush – Spring 2024
My former food stylist neighbor planted the captioned fragrant red rosebush. Then just a small potted plant used in one of her photo shoots, it has grown into the hardiest and most luxurious of our rosebushes that keeps on giving. It reminds me of our neighbor Benny who is no longer with us. Healing after loss can come in unexpected ways.
Three other rosebushes also brighten my days with their unique beauty and vibrancy, as pictured below. The two remaining rosebushes are not yet in bloom. Hopefully, with the “gray May” and early “June gloom” now behind us, they will awaken to the summer heat.
The photos below were taken by a neighbor and dear friend who, sad to say, has recently moved out-of-state. In the early spring, I also lost my young gardening enthusiast and companion who moved to another neighborhood, trading her garden space for a dog park and ocean-view. Our lives, like the weather and climate, are continually in motion. I adapt as best as I can and, like the rosebushes, bloom in due season.
Brazilian Poet Angélica Freitas Photo Credit: Dirk Skiba / Companhia das Letras, Brazil
In my Poetry Corner June 2024, featuring a Brazilian poet, I would like to call attention to a climate change disaster that struck the people of Porto Alegre, capital of Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul.
The contemporary poet and translator Angélica Freitas is no newcomer to my Poetry Corner. In May 2019, I featured her poem “the woman is a construction” from her poetry collection a uterus is the size of a fist / um útero é do tamanho de um punho (2012). This month’s featured poem “porto alegre, 2016” is from her third collection Songs of Torment /Canções de Atormentar (2020). In this collection, she takes a wider view of injustice, machismo, and her disillusion with the Brazilian dream that’s still out of reach for the majority.
Born in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, in 1973, Angélica Freitas began writing poetry at the age of nine, but her journey to finding herself as a poet took a long and circuitous route. Her discovery, at fifteen years, that she was gay made it difficult to fit in with her peers. Bullies found her and easy target. Then, her father’s sudden death when she was eighteen upended her dream to study in Glasgow, where she spent six months with a Scottish girlfriend.
With her mother’s insistence that she earn a university degree, she opted to pursue a career in journalism at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre. She remained in the capital after graduation, where she could be invisible. In 2000, an unexpected acceptance as a trainee with O Estado de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest newspapers, led her to the metropolis of São Paulo.
Freitas confessed that she wasn’t a good reporter, but that the experience exposed her to the other realities of life. During a period of depression in 2005, she attended a poetry workshop conducted by Carlito Azevedo, a poet from Rio de Janeiro, that changed the course of her life. At 31 years old, she realized she was on the wrong path. During an interview for the Public Library of Paraná, she said:
“Okay, I want to write, but it’s not journalism, it’s poetry. You see, that was in my face the whole time. It was what I had been doing since I was little. So that’s it. Best to quit my job and dedicate myself to literature. I called my mother and said I was thinking about spending time in Pelotas. She supported me. Six months later, I resigned, handed over my apartment. Then I returned to Pelotas to organize and finish writing what became my first book, which was called Rilke shake.”
Front Cover: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit Photo Credit: Penguin Books (USA, 2009)
Who are you? Who are we? The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning. It also suggests that if this is who we are, then everyday life in most places is a disaster that disruptions sometimes give us a chance to change. They are a crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in, and what floods in can be enormously destructive—or creative. Hierarchies and institutions are inadequate to these circumstances; they are often what fails in such crises. Civil society is what succeeds, not only in an emotional demonstration of altruism and mutual aid but also in a practical mustering of creativity and resources to meet the challenges.
Excerpt from “Epilogue: The Doorway in the Ruins,” A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit, Penguin Books, New York, USA, 2009 (p. 305).
The disasters covered in this book include: Earthquake San Francisco/California/USA (1906), Explosion Halifax/Nova Scotia/Canada (1917), The Blitz/London/UK (1940), Earthquake Mexico City/Mexico (1985), Bombing World Trade Center/New York/USA (2001), and Hurricane Katrina New Orleans/USA (2005).
REBECCA SOLNIT, writer, historian, and activist, is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, hope and catastrophe. Her books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and recently launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).
During Mass on Entrance Day – Convent Chapel – January 14, 1971
In Chapter Twelve of my work in progress, I share my experience of adjusting to convent life. The captioned photo was taken during Mass on our Entrance Day. That’s me on the left carrying the chalice. Celeste (fictitious name) served within the religious community until her death in November 2021. The laywoman with glasses, seated in the pew on the right, is my invitee and senior high school geography teacher, another influential woman during my adolescent years.
As far as I know [Celeste used to keep me up to date with news], only two nuns who welcomed the two of us into the community that day are still alive today. I honor the memory of the Sisters in Christ who, by their exemplary life, shaped my formation into the purpose-driven woman I still am today.
Instead of featuring the life of a particular nun, I decided to focus on adjusting to convent life (Chapter 12) and on the three religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience (Chapter 13) that define the life of the religious woman.
MyPoetry Corner May 2024 features the poem “To Enter My Mother’s House” from the debut poetry collection Doe Songs by poet and artist Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2018). The collection won the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry.
Born in 1986 in the twin-island Caribbean nation of Trinidad & Tobago, Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus, where she later completed a Creative Writing Course in Poetry, taught by award-winning Trinidadian poet Jennifer Rahim (1963-2023).
Danielle was raised by her two grandmothers: Her maternal grandmother is of East Indian descent; her paternal grandmother is African and Chinese. One of her grandmothers was a secondary school English teacher who introduced her to reading and writing poetry at an early age. But it was not until joining Jennifer Rahim’s creative writing class that Danielle saw the power of poetry and committed to the craft.
“Poetry speaks not only of your brain and soul, but of your belly, your bones,” she said in a 2010 interview with Caribbean Literary Salon. “It is that bare truth and intensity that I love so much about poetry… the physicality of those simple words.”
The first indication that something was brewing came from a close friend in San Francisco. She called asking if I had just sent her an email inviting her to some special dinner event.
“No,” I told her, puzzled.
“I knew it!” she said. “I told [name of husband] not to click on the link.”
We chatted about this strange situation.
“A couple days ago, I received a dinner invitation on Facebook from a writing friend,” I told her. “It seemed odd; I didn’t click on the link.”
After ending our call, I accessed the said email account. I was surprised to see the warning: Your account may be compromised. We recommend that you change your password. I did so, immediately.
How had someone gained access to my email account without my knowledge? I prayed that no one on my contact list had fallen for the scam. Surely, they must know that I wouldn’t ask them for money.
Three Worlds One Vision 