Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty

Week 6: in which we realize the profound relationship between the sign in our windows and the sins of our fathers

Beautiful Magicians,

Thank you for your messages wondering where I was last Sunday and if I’m OK. It is heartening to be reminded that hundreds of you wake up on Sunday morning and read my Notes from the Field.

I am fine; my computer is not.

Last Saturday, she greeted me with a black screen. Better than the blue screen of death, but still. My computer guru collected her, stripped the software because he was pretty sure a glitch happened during an update. Then he reloaded the software and downloaded all my files from the cloud. She came back home on Wednesday and all was well, or so I thought, until I opened her the next day to be greeted by the black screen. Computer John once more to the rescue.

She’s functional at the moment, so I’m rushing to write this newsletter so you get it on Sunday morning Feb 8. May it be so! There will be conversations with Dell engineers next week, I’m sure.

In the meantime, I wondered what to write about today.

Plan A was to share some of the “signs in my window” that you sent after the newsletter “What sign is in your window” on Jan 26.

You sent signs with bold computer graphics and signs handwritten with a Sharpie. For my own sign, I went back and forth. One idea I had (and still love) was to draw the ASL sign for “help.” It’s a beautiful sign with your non dominant hand out flat in front of you with palm up. And your dominant hand making a fist with the thumb sticking up and placing that fist hand on the flat hand. Then, the person asking for help raises both hands a wee bit.

I couldn’t begin to count how many times a child beckoned me to come help with their schoolwork during the decade I taught young deaf children. I love that sign. I particularly liked it for my sign in the window because it can be seen as both a call for help and a reminder to help one another. Cathy Pratt, who makes all the artwork and graphics for The Witch Sequence was planning on taking a screenshot of me signing help. But a computer with a black screen kinda ended that idea.

While I was computerless my mind kept ruminating over what sign I would want in my window. The window of my home, my heart, my soul. And in the night, I had a big AHA.

I already have my perfect sign. I’ve had it for over a year. It’s right there at the bottom of every newsletter. I don’t remember when I started closing my Notes from the Fields (and most of my emails) with this:

Life is Fragile
Handle with Reverence

This is the perfect sign for me and my window.

So I thought I might share some of the signs I’ve received in today’s newsletter. And cap them off with Lady Gaga’s rendition of Mister Roger’s song Won't You Be My Neighbor. That felt good and holy. And healing.

But then, so much vile horror unfolded this past week, that I wondered if a newsletter that felt so hopeful and sweet wouldn’t be out of sync with your felt experience.

Plus, it’s Black History Month. BHM is always important, but now, with an unspeakably racist Thug in Chief (henceforth to be referred to in my letters as TIC or perhaps DIC for Dictator in Chief) posting unspeakably racist slop, honoring the humanity and brilliance of our Black and Brown sisters and brothers feels essential. Necessary. Life-giving.

So it was time for Plan B.

I thought I’d write a newsletter recommending a few of the books that opened my eyes to real American history and yes: Black history is American history. Immigrant history is American history. Indigenous history is American history. And we have been taught very little of it. My parents, who were products of Jim Crow, never read a single book about Black history. I had to start reading for myself.

I started, at my son’s recommendation, with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

• This book made me queasy. So much for the glorious founding fathers my parents praised endlessly at the dinner table.
• Zinn made me angry, but he also made me hungry. I won’t lay out the dozens of books I’ve read, but here are a few that cracked me open:

Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson

• By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns
• Named 100 best books of the 21st century
• Wilkerson does a masterful job of bringing her readers face to face with the racist underpinnings of the United States

Women, Race & Class, Angela Davis

• By the woman considered a civil rights icon
• A powerful and painful history of the reality of the experiences of Black women in America
• All the racism and misogyny happening today falls into place in this 1983 book

The Humanity Archive: Recovering the Soul of Black History from a Whitewashed American Myth, Jermaine Fowler

• If you want to know real American history and the countless Black heroes, scientists, soldiers, inventors, and artists who built this country, but were left out of the history books, this is for you.
• You can follow Jermaine Fowler on facebook. His commentaries are food.

All About Love, bell hooks

• A love song to the way we are intended to live
• When I read her definition of love, I was shocked to realize I have never been loved by a man, not husband, father, or boyfriend.
• But now, fortified with a vibrant definition of love, I see and smell and recognize love everywhere I look. Love is not in Washington, that’s for sure, but I see love, real love, in the thousands of people blowing whistles at ICE in the frozen streets of Minneapolis and protecting Black and Brown immigrants with their bodies.
• Want to know what love looks like: It looks like Alex Pretti, Renee Good, and the women who recorded their deaths and, terrified to speak, spoke anyway.
• It looks like US District Judge Fred Biery who ordered 5-year-old Liam Ramos and his father released from immigration detention, adding a picture of Laim in his blue bunny hat to the order.
• It looks like all the federal prosecutors in Minnesota who resigned rather than follow orders to not pursue the evidence needed to prosecute Good’s murderer.

So last night, I was debating which topic to share with you today: Plan A, signs in the window or Plan B, Black history.

And I realized, wait a minute. Plan A and Plan B are the same thing.

Learning a bit about Black history and fighting the blatant racism of the TIC and his minions is acknowledging the sins of our fathers and their ongoing crimes against humanity.

And the signs in the windows are our prayers, our dreams, our beliefs that countermand all that ugliness.

The signs heal the sins.

My sign is a prayer. My prayer. My prayer now and forever. The truth is life is fragile. And all the racist thuggery and bombast in the world only confirms the truth: Life is Fragile. Holy. Precious. And we must handle it with reverence.

The antidote to the racist lies and thuggery is Reverence.

Cathy is playing with what my sign might look like. Next Sunday, computer willing, I’ll post my sign and yours as well. Please continue to send them.

Until then, I will pray:

Life is Fragile, Handle with Reverence,

Janet

PS: If you’ve been reading me these past three years, you know that my legacy project is The Witch Sequence. Next month, we open the first of 3 Prequel events for the final gift of Dragon. If you were in ART 4,5, or 6, you should have received an invitation this week. I have not been able to recreate the outlook groups for ART 1-3. So if you feel Dragon calling, visit this initial version of a landing page for ART 7.

ART 7 Dragon

Be sure to read the prerequisites. And don't panic. There is time to complete ART 5 on Divination and ART 6 on Reverence in Feb and March. Lots of people are doing that right now. The links to order those intensives on demand are on the landing page.

If you have any questions, email me.
website: janetconner.com

blog (all newsletters): janetconner.com/blog

facebook: janet conner prayer artist

YouTube: Janet Conner