Hello, friends! How are you? I’m good, mostly. A little harried, between a blissful weekend with my best friend last weekend and then a planned weekend retreat to write until my fingers fall off this coming one. So, all the things I usually do on the weekend had to get squeezed into the weekdays around wage work. But most of us know that dance, right?
I try to remember it’s a good problem, to have a job and a house and busy kids and creative projects to juggle. I mean, I wouldn’t give up any of them even if I could, so thinking of it as an overflow of blessings helps…mostly.
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Is there someone who is older than you, who makes growing older inspiring to you? Who is your aging idol and why?
The Baba Yaga. I dream of spending my crone years living deep in the forest in a house on chicken legs, riding around in a mortar and pestle, helping and smiting as I see fit.
Fairly recently it occurred to me for the first time that my parents met and adopted my oldest brother, Paul, before the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled on the historic, cross-racial marriage case Loving v. Virginia. This means that when their home country still had yet to validate the right of consenting adults to make a family across racial lines, my White parents fell in love with an African boy with a mega-watt smile and declared him their very own.
Before the adoption was even finalized they had to arrange for Paul to receive the first-ever individual passport held by a minor child in the history of post-colonial Tanzania. All Tanzanian children had traveled under their parents’ passports until then, but my parents weren’t Tanzanian. So, to take Paul to Pendle Hill, a Quaker study and contemplation center outside of Philadelphia for a school year, they had to ask the Tanzanian government to do something it had never even considered before.
It was like they ran out to the very edge of the known world and pitched the family flag there. At every turn, the world demanded, “What?! Who do you think you are?” And every time they responded, “Nothing and no one you have ever witnessed before.”
Whatever complications ensued after that point, nearly 60 years later the sheer audacity and vivid imagination that fueled the birth of our unprecedented family still take my breath away.
What also never occurred to me until fairly recently was how their determination to stake our familial claim at the edge of what was known and acceptable established a template for the entirety of my life— never entirely on the outside, and never at the center. One foot perennially out the door, and the other trying to keep it propped open so as not to close off access to resources, possibility, connection, and belonging.
Living on this threshold, neither fully here nor there, is a precarious place to be in a binary world that wants us to always choose a side. The insistence on a both/and existence prompts hostility from each theoretical camp— “Whose side are you on?”, “Are you in or out?”— and demands constant internal negotiation over what you are allowed, what feels true, and what you have to sacrifice to hold faith with yourself and the people you love.
We are all simply making it up as we go along, but I imagine if you choose a path with precedent life is somewhat easier, no matter what side of any line you’re on. A way has been cleared, a direction marked in bold on the map of the world. But if you persist in staking claim to the edge of the known, to the right to do what your integrity demands, regardless if anyone has ever done it before, if you have permission or support or any idea of how it will work or turn out, that is a particularly challenging road.
Given what often feels like the precarity of this threshold place where my life is perched, encountering examples of others successfully riding the edge of the known and acceptable is powerful for me. I don’t imagine I will be able to replicate their success necessarily, given differences in identity and history, but there’s always some takeaway that’s applicable. In the following example, it’s the reminder that creating something out of nothing? That can take a long time.
Case in point: earlier this month, the Washington Post published a deep-dive profile on one of the unsung heroes of our federal workforce— Christopher Mark, an engineer and statistician for the Bureau of Mines, which currently operates under the umbrella of the Department of Labor. You wouldn’t necessarily think of a worker in the federal government, or someone so deeply entrenched in the world of coal mining, as being someone who exists on the edge of the known, but that’s exactly who Christopher Mark is.
Mark didn’t grow up in a community of coal miners. His father, Robert Mark, was a famous civil engineering professor at Princeton University, in fact. But Christopher eschewed both the elitism of the Ivy League and the safety of academia. Instead, he set out to be a labor organizer in factories and warehouses and, eventually, coal mines.
By the time Mark made his way to West Virginia, the largest coal mining state in the U.S., however, his youthful romanticism was failing. He also realized that the men he worked with in the mine every day weren’t looking for a savior or some outside notion of “empowerment.” What they needed was someone who cared if they lived or died working the job. So, that’s who Mark became.
Like his father, Mark had a mind for engineering. What he had that his father lacked, though, was a temperament for living at the edge of the known. He saw that the most common reason miners died was due to roof collapse and that the mining industry had determined the problem was the cost of doing business. Instead, Mark decided to find a solution.
No one hired him to find it. No one even really understood what he wanted to do or imagined it could be done. But that meant no one stopped him, either, and that was all Mark needed— the unimpeded space to create something that didn’t yet exist.
Over the next 50+ years, Mark embarked on technical research that had never been conceived of before. First, he went back to school at Penn State and studied with a well-known professor of rock mechanics. His PhD thesis focused on establishing a safe, standard design for pillars in what is called “longwall mining.” He then took his research and knack for problem-solving into the federal workforce with a singular, personal mission: to keep miners safe.
Largely left to his own devices at the Bureau of Mines, he applied statistics to existing data that had been collected and then left unanalyzed for decades. He created formulas for assessing the stability of pillars regardless of mine location, and classifying the masses of rock supporting them. He wrote software for the industry to use that protected profits and miner’s lives. He also uncovered the ways that industry leaders were scrimping on existing safety measures— metal roof bolts— to save costs, which meant unnecessary deaths were still occurring. So, he pushed for regulation (of an industry that had been operating for decades completely unregulated), requiring the technology be used properly.
Because of his work at the Bureau, which began in 1976, 2016 was the first year in recorded history that zero underground coal miners in the United States were killed by falling roofs.
So, about the Baba Yaga. (Thank you, Sari, for the questions, which I stole from the Oldster Magazine questionnaire.) It’s true that I harbor an admiration for her, despite her being a fairy tale character. When you live at the edge of the known you get used to looking for personal inspiration in the imaginal realm, lacking any realistic template for yourself.
What I find so admirable (or maybe the correct word is enviable) about this Slavic folklore witch is how she exists far beyond the boundaries of everything safe and comfortable and acceptable, ruling unapologetically with a Trickster heart and an iron will. In contrast, though straddling the edge of the known may be innovative, it can also feel, as a woman particularly, like an endless exercise in translation and justification.
No, this is what I meant.
Yes, I have the right to be here.
No, I don’t want to come in.
Yes, I will pay what it costs.
Living at the edge, for anyone outside of the white, cishet, male standard, can also be dangerous. How many women who’ve lived on the edge of a village, at the boundary of the known, the safe, the comfortable, got labeled witches? How many of those were targeted, abused, or killed?
How are homeless people treated where you live? The mentally ill? The disabled or openly queer or trans?
I look around at the edge-dwellers and think maybe the Baba Yaga has the right of it. Maybe it’s better and safer to abandon the edges and just fly away entirely.
My edge-dwelling is kind of stealth, I know. My life involves many of the trappings of a standard, American existence. I own a home and a car, work a full-time job with benefits, and have healthy kids. Over the last dozen years, however, it’s become increasingly clear that I have no instinct for the role-playing necessary to live entirely on the inside of the systems I participate in (or have tried to). I’ve proven myself to be a traitor to Whiteness, with its requirement to remain unconscious and entitled. To patriarchal nuclear family structures, which depend on women’s willingness to volunteer endless unacknowledged labor and be docile and happy just to be chosen. Even the demands of heterosexuality and compulsory monogamy have relegated me to the sidelines. And now, unpartnered and with my kids nearly grown, all the usual tethers are loosening.
Baba Yaga, here I come.
Dreaming of her, I’ve watched hours of a BBC show called Escape to the Country on YouTube. After investigating many of the counties in the U.K. watching the series, I’ve settled mostly on watching those episodes centered on the counties of Yorkshire. North Yorkshire was the county home of the Brontë sisters, but the more important touchstone for me is The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The main character, Mary Lennox, one of the greatest literary companions of my childhood, was reborn on the edge of the Yorkshire moors.
Could I someday leave wage employment and immigrate permanently, finding my own magical witch cottage on the edge of the Yorkshire moors? Be reborn like Mary Lennox and in full control of my fate like the Baba Yaga? My parents found their hearts’ home overseas and would likely still be there if the world hadn’t conspired to force them back to the United States all those years ago, so it’s not an entirely unprecedented choice. The marks on the map of the world exist.
Realistically, I’ll likely have to submit to my fate at the edge of the known, given my obligations to family and community (and that the U.K. doesn’t want me). But I could take a page from the snowbird playbook so common in the northern U.S., except my version would be spending part of every year in my witch cottage, deep inside my solitary self, then returning here the rest of the year to connect and work for the world I want. A world I could maybe feel comfortable and safe inside of.
Is this a dream that makes sense? Maybe not. But increasingly, I’m realizing that’s never been what matters in my world. My people have never made sense. That’s what I love about them.
What does any of this have to do with the practice of integrity? Nothing and everything, perhaps. Living at the edge of the known isn’t the only way to practice integrity, that’s for sure. It’s just mine. But if it’s yours, maybe Christopher Mark will offer an example for how to do it— working inside of existing structures to expand what they can do and protecting life in the process. Or maybe I will, rambling around in my witch cottage, writing and thinking and asking questions. Or maybe we’ll figure it out together and keep each other company. I’d like that.
XO,
Asha
sounds like perfect weekend sandwich to me!! xo
Wow, Asha, how did we both manage to publish newsletters in the same afternoon examining the challenges of living a more curious, stranger life than the more obvious paths, specifically even around an adoption story? :o