Who’s the Voice? What’s the Hope?

By Mary Reiman

You might think, why should I care? It won’t happen in my house…or on my street…or in my neighborhood. Perhaps you think no one you know has ever experienced relationship violence or sexual assault. 

Are you sure?  It’s not something we talk about in casual conversation. Not often talked about in serious conversations. Not a topic anyone really wants to discuss. 

During my career, I was invited to speak about the importance of books and libraries and reading aloud with children. Everyone remembered their favorite children’s book. Stories and storytelling conjure up pleasant childhood memories. Those make for comfortable conversations.

There aren’t requests to the Speaker’s Bureau for presentations about how someone survived sexual assault, domestic violence, or incest. It’s not a comfortable conversation for a luncheon meeting. 

And yet sexual assaults and domestic violence happen. And it could have happened to any of us. I often think back to my college days. I was 17 years old, off to a college where I knew no one. I will be the first to admit, I was naïve. Mom said I was sheltered, growing up on a farm, in the era before cell phones or social media or any health class discussions about sexual assault or domestic violence. I look back on moments that could have so easily spun out of control and I would not have known who to turn to for support, guidance, kindness and empathy. 

For 47 years there has been a 24/7 crisis line in Lincoln for those who are desperate to hear a voice who cares, who understands, who knows how to help. In January 2007, the Rape/Spouse Abuse Crisis Center officially changed its name to Voices of Hope.  

Yes, we need to be talking about it. We need to be aware of where to find resources and caring individuals who counsel and advocate and provide support for victims of abuse. Those who will meet a victim in the emergency room. Those who offer support groups in safe, confidential, supportive environments. Those who help fill out protection orders and maneuver through the criminal justice system. 

More than 2200 cases were reported to Voices of Hope last year and yet that is a fraction of the number of actual cases. It isn’t just in college. It is in the workplace. It is in homes. Sexual assault and domestic violence permeate our world. 

Today begins an awareness campaign: Who’s the Voice? What’s the Hope? 

In the next few months, you will learn more about the depth and breadth of Voices of Hope by hearing the voices of hospital staff, community members, representatives from organizations who partner with Voices of Hope, as well as staff and survivors. 

Who’s the Voice?  We are. All of us using our voices to raise awareness of the services of Voices of Hope in Lincoln and the surrounding communities. You never know who might need this information.

What’s the Hope?  Scott Young articulates it quite clearly at the end of the video. “Hope of building a safe and positive future.”

Please donate to Voices of Hope on Give to Lincoln Day to support the crisis intervention which offers hope to those in need.  You or those you love may never need these services.  Consider donating as a way of saying thank you to the Voices of Hope staff for always being available to empower those who DO need help, advice, and legal services.

Also, please ‘SHARE’ this post so your friends on Facebook also have the opportunity to learn more about Voices of Hope. 

May we never need the services of Voices of Hope...but may we always support those who do.

Let us be the voices. Let us be the hope.  

https://www.voicesofhopelincoln.org/whos-the-voice.html

Time to decide: Dog or wolf?

By JoAnne Young

I have been thinking a lot over the past two years about dusk, that time of day when the sun sets but the darkness has not yet fully descended. 

 

The French have a soul-gripping phrase for it: “Entre chien et loup,” the time between dog and wolf, when the two can’t be distinguished from each other. 

 

Are we looking into the distance at friend or foe? The known or the unknown? Hope or fear? 

 

It’s a time when the darkness gathers its forces, when our shadows move into our very beings. The hour of metamorphoses when we go into waiting for the sun to finish its rounds lighting  the rest of the world and then return to us, bringing back hope and luminance. 

 

I used to think of dusk as a poetic time, a time of settling calm, of transition or transformation. 

 

But when I recently set out to photograph dusk on several evenings, I found it was more chilling than calming, more discordant than poetic. More confounding than serene. 

 

It’s something like the turbulence of adolescence, that age between the innocence of childhood and the reckoning of the adult world. 

 

And it’s a lot like what we have been living through the past two years, a time we couldn’t know what or who we could trust. Only worse. Because dusk has a definite beginning and end. The sun goes down, the light fades, the night descends and shows itself. This era of pandemic and politics seems a never-ending cycle.

 

As I am writing this, I am asking what I choose to see as I squint into the twilight of the early 2020s. More years of the darkness that seems to surround us now? Or is that light, just a few hours, days, months ahead?

 

At this moment, I don’t know. I’m hoping to discover a clear direction by the end of these paragraphs. 

 

Amy Leach, in “Things That Are,” writes that most plants will bend over backwards to cooperate with reality. They will bend and warp toward the light. 

 

Birds make long arduous flights to find the warmth, then make their way back again as the cold departs in their homeland. Or they stay put, and wait out periods of difficulty, knowing the spring and summer will return.

 

The daffodils and tulips and tree buds don’t sit in the ground, complaining about the lingering cold. They show up in all their brightness, in spite of the risks of a mid-April snow. 

 

Now that I think about it, I instinctively ditched the idea of taking photos of the dusk. I turned my camera toward an abundance of pelicans bobbing and flying at Pawnee Lake near Lincoln, despite the wind gusts and 40-degree temps. 

I have welcomed the goldfinches to the feeder outside my front window. 

 

I have planted pansies and watched the clematis I thought had fallen prey to the frozen and dry winter grow leaves of green. And I leave the hope open that any day now I can trust the weather enough to plant more grass and blooming plants. 

 

They have survived. They have decided on dog, friend, hope and the known. 

 

Rainer Maria Rilke says it this way: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going.”

 

I have to think, maybe I can see the light out there somewhere, too. 

March Madness: In Retrospect

By Marilyn Moore

Yes, I know, it’s no longer March…but some moments of March Madness linger, and I must write to bring them to some kind of order in my mind.  This is not a blog about basketball, though who among us was not just delighted with the madness of the men’s basketball team from St. Peter’s University making it to the Elite 8?  A twenty-first century David and Goliath story, if ever there were one.  Bird walk….I wonder, are there any David and Goliath stories where David is a woman?  I know…every single day, just ask any woman…a topic for another blog at another time….

Back to March.  The war in Ukraine, the invasion by Russian forces into the country of Ukraine, dominated the airwaves.  The absolute horror of it all.  Captured by brave reporters, broadcasters, and photo journalists, the images are searing.  I cannot forget the pregnant woman, carried on a gurney out of the hospital that had just been bombed, and the photo the next day of her and her just-born baby, followed by the news a couple of days later that both had died.  I still see, and hear, the video of the woman, preparing to leave her bombed out apartment, but stopping to play one last piece of classical music on the grand piano, covered with dust and debris, but still standing.  The masses of (mostly) women and children and elderly, standing in lines at border crossings, at train stations, leaving their homes and cities, hugging husbands and fathers who were staying behind to take up arms against the Russian soldiers.  The utter devastation of blocks and blocks and blocks of homes and shops and schools and churches and hospitals in Mariupol.  And now, in April, but killed in March, the civilians in Bucha, a massacre, a war crime.  

And I know, peeling back all the layers and seeing this war for what it is, that this is what war always looks like.  The weapons may have changed, but the death and destruction has not. This is what the Civil War, and WWI, and WWII, and the Vietnam War, and the wars in Syria and Afghanistan looked like.  We see it now, because it’s on our screens, almost 24/7.  Journalists who take life-threatening risks (and at least six have been killed), with technology that beams images and words to our screens large and small at all hours of the day and night, reveal to us the ugliness and pain and devastation that war always is.  

And peeling back the layers still further, I look for what may be an end to this…and I can’t see it.  The military and political leaders predict a war that lasts for a long time.  I remember my friend, asking, in the early days of this war, “Can Putin just do this?”  It appears he can…and the world really has no way to stop a bully with a high tolerance for pain and nuclear weapons in his arsenal.  The images of this conventional war are terrible beyond description…and those of a nuclear war a thousand times worse.  I admire the united efforts of the NATO countries, the EU countries, indeed, most of the countries of the world who have applied sanctions to the Russian economy, even at great cost to their own economies and to their leaders’ re-election chances, and to the united efforts to provide military support and humanitarian support to the nation and people of Ukraine.  I just don’t know if it’s enough….or if anything is enough, to stop the slaughter.

In our own country, the madness of March played out in the Senate hearings on the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.  These hearings are a relatively modern-day invention, not required by the Constitution.  But they have become a tradition, and now seem to be an opportunity for the Senators to generate media minutes for their own re-election campaigns, and for nominees to demonstrate grace under pressure.  This one, however, reached a new height, or depth, of absurdity.  A senator, asking a nominee for the Supreme Court, in a nation whose constitution specifically says that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion, about her religious faith, and the depth of that faith.  A senator, asking a nominee for the Supreme Court, about a book found in the library of a private school on whose board she serves, a book that dares to tackle the subject of racism, and bringing the book, in a larger size than any teacher ever needed to use to read to a group of students, to use as a prop at the hearing.  More than one senator implying that there is something umseemly and disqualifying about serving as a public defender…seeming to ignore the Constitutional guarantee that all persons are entitled to legal counsel if charged with a crime.  That public defender role is one that is essential in assuring the system of justice is indeed just…a requirement that some senators, even though they be graduates of schools of law, seemed to have forgotten.

Peeling back not many layers at all, it’s clear to me that we were watching racism and sexism in action…again.  The nominee, highly qualified by every standard, including the evaluations of conservative organizations, subjected to irrelevant questions and uninformed opinions.  Judge Jackson was harassed, shouted out, interrupted, and treated as the launchpad for some senators’ sound points.  Seldom do I agree with Ben Sasse, but I think he was accurate when he said the presence of television cameras lead to a display of jackassery behavior.  (Not sure that’s a dictionary approved word, but everyone who reads it knows exactly what he meant.) It was demeaning, insulting, belittling behavior; it was racist.  And I have to wonder, in the years to come, when those senators (47 of them) who voted against her nomination are asked what it was like to be in the US Senate when the first African American woman was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, what will they say?  

And then, of course, there was the slap heard ‘round the world, when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for Rock’s comment about Smith’s wife’s hair at the Oscar’s award ceremony.  I have nothing to add to the millions of words written about that, but the best words I read were those written by Leonard Pitts, columnist extraordinaire, and Marthaellen Florence, wise woman of Lincoln.  Lots of layers on that incident; Pitts and Florence pull them back well.

The hopefulness of March madness, if I look closely enough, comes from looking for the very core of strength within those layers.  President Zelensky is a sterling leader of his country under siege.  He brings together the best of encouraging his people, organizing the military and the very human resources of the Ukrainian people, advocacy for Ukraine in the global community, strong and clear language about what is at stake, and relentless persistence in pursuing what the country needs to survive.  His language is clear and compelling, and his is now a recognizable and face and voice around the world.  And the world responds, from the billions of dollars of military aid given to Ukraine from the US, to the literally countless donations large and small to organizations aiding the now more than four million Ukrainian refugees.  And it is my hope that those godawful images of war are such that as a human race we figure out a better way to live with one another, a better way to manage bullies.

The core strength of the Jackson hearings, of course, is Ketanji Brown Jackson herself.  We witnessed a demonstration of knowledge of the law, commitment to the Constitution, resolve, patience, determination, and grace under pressure that certainly is what “judicial temperament” looks like.  The sheer joy and admiration on her daughter’s face, seated just behind and to the left of her mom during the hearing, is an image that lives in my mind, also…and is one of strength for the moment and for the future.  Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson gave tribute to the sisterhood, her group of friends formed as first-year college students who remain her close friends today, for the role these women have played in her life…and by extension, the role that friends play in all our lives.  Strength, indeed, to and through the core.  

March madness.  The month has passed for this year, but not the madness.  March will reappear in 2023, and basketball will be right there; perhaps there will be another St. Peter’s University to enthrall us with hope for the underdog.  All of that is good.  It is my prayer, though, that we shall not still be viewing the utter madness of war, unleashed by a bully on a neighboring country, and that the shameful hearing will be a part of our history, but no longer of our present.  My understanding of prayer is that usually prayers are answered because good and caring people get up and do the work...and I hope I have the strength and the courage to recognize the work that needs to be done, and to do it.  

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A simple blog about spring

 By Mary Kay Roth

Birdsong dazzles on these early mornings at Holmes Lake with the trill and tweet of a dawn choir calling out over an enchanted land newly baptized and rebirthed.  

The glories of April days are upon us, mystical days, when we watch the world around us move from iron-gray to fairyland green. Or parsley green.  Glade green. Emerald green. (I can never get the description of that color quite right.)

Pairs of red-tailed hawks court, robins twitter and bounce through the boughs, skeins of loud-mouthed geese punctuate a high blue sky. Resilient worms wiggle across our path.  Grasslands start to whisper their intentions.  

And the rhythms of earth throb with the pulse of spring.

Yes, I know, so many exquisite words, poems and songs have been written about this season – from the likes of Thoreau to Mary Oliver to Simon and Garfunkel. 

But that doesn’t matter to me on this luminous Sunday, walking around a lake I love on a morning that feels like a love song drunk on dew.

Because – it’s just this simple – I want to write a blog about spring. 

Despite the embarrassment of a shotgun-toting governor’s race. Despite all the lingering variants of the ongoing coronavirus.  Despite the shock of Ukraine.  

Spring still shows up, like a fizzy tonic that drizzles fresh, warm rain upon us, opens blossoms, thaws the land and greens the grasses.    

And the light, oh god, the light washing over us, “a light that only exists in spring,” says Emily Dickinson – as we track the arc of the sun creeping across the equator line, shifting toward the north. 

And the smell, oh god, the smell, equal parts grass and earthen breath, rain and dirt, a fragrant balm that no measure of scientific genius can reproduce.

Admittedly, we live in a collectively exhausted world, overextended, and stressed.  Life is messy with the inevitable dichotomy of good times and bad.  Who cares that while the planet spins around at more than 1,000 mph – it tilts.  

And yet – despite the weariness of our world – our plains and prairies and forests and parks are all shaking off winter’s frozen grip, business as usual.  “Come in, we’re open…” 

Some call this season a quiet awakening, but I find it rowdy and busting out all over. Woodpeckers are drumming to the beat of an orchestra playing sweet harmonies of cardinals, purple finches, song sparrows – and, just this morning, a meadowlark.  

Anytime soon we’ll hear the spring peepers who sing from every wet patch of ground in the woods – marvel at determined dandelions sprouting practically everywhere – witness the bare, leafless branches of maple trees beginning to cast their reddish glow. Soon every living tree in our town will burst into leaf. 

Spring is green and tender and shockingly alive. 

It is bike racers and marathoners in training.

It is muddy ground and flowing creeks and sandhill cranes dancing in the Platte.  Lawnmowers roaring out of hibernation while flannel-lined coats pile high in the back of the closet. 

It is saying goodbye to those little grayish wonders, the juncos – hello to robins and wrens and warblers.

Spring is balmy breezes – sunlight on our skin – cotton sheets and chimes and barbecue grills – the first crocus poking up – hands in the dirt dug deep down.

So, by god, I will write-sing-shout about spring, because I believe we lose something essential if we fail to celebrate the stunning fact that life is fiercely jump-starting all over again. 

Please join me today as I climb a tree, sow seeds, spring-clean the heck out of the cobwebs, curl bare toes deep into the beginnings of fresh grass – as I open my windows wide and holler to the heavens, “welcome back.”

Join me at dawn … as I turn my face skyward, on this most glorious of all spring mornings, feel the grace of the sun and offer a joyously noisy, deafening, riotous prayer of thanks. 

Because in this most sacred season of dreamers and imaginers – this season of those who still believe in silly wonder and those who still believe in hope – we have been given a precious gift. Despite the darkest of dark days, yes indeed, light and life do come around again.