In New Mexico where I now live, cultural and historical inequities of access to education have been intensified by the pandemic. In the Santa Fe New Mexican, Anthony J. Wallace describes how COVID-19 has challenged the Navajo Nation with death and loss, upheaval and isolation. He writes about Native American youth and their interrupted dream “to graduate high school, find a way to go to college, get a degree, land a dream job.” Not only are indigenous learners in the Southwest engulfed in these challenges, but also those I know in Mongolia, South Africa, and Central Asia facing an uncertain future.

After schools were closed in Tajikistan and students in rural southwestern villages lost connection, I reached out to my long-time colleague Zebo Muradova, who teaches in Bokhtar in an after-school English ACCESS program supported by the U.S. Department of State. Though the non-profit American Space where the students had been meeting was closed indefinitely, the Director provided internet packages and loaned cell phones, so Zebo was able to connect with her fifteen English learners twice weekly on Google Meet.

That connection allowed Zebo and me to imagine a hybrid Digital Storytelling project for September/October 2020. In six hybrid workshops, five ACCESS girls wrote, recorded, and illustrated personal narratives of loss and loneliness amplified by the isolation of COVID-19. Munisa tells the story of the death of her youngest uncle: “That was the worst day in my life. I stopped eating. I cried all day. Even I got sick.” Mahina shares the story of her father’s abandonment and her mother’s second marriage and divorce. Marhabo writes of the challenges when COVID-19 canceled school and her ACCESS program: “I lost my hope and motivation….Most of my ACCESS friends experienced the sadness which came with feeling lonely.”

In the digital stories, the girls proceed to express hope and strength through their cell phone classes. Munisa finds resilience in focusing on her lessons. Mehrangez gains motivation, embracing change. Mahina says her lessons “helped me to be brave, overcome my challenges and feel connected with other students.” Sabohat shares, “I must not forget this. Never give up.” Each of the girls embodies a more resilient self, awakening to her own inner strength, her soul-force revealed in the act of making her story heard.

Gandhi says of satyagraha that one’s soul force must be “expressed in action in the service of social justice” (Sethia 2012 p. 47). In a Google Meet interview after the workshop, two of the five shared their future hopes and dreams. Mahina wants to “open a classroom in our school and teach what I have learned in this workshop.” Munisa hopes to “share my ideas with students . . . to improve my English knowledge by teaching students.”

Empowered by their identity as strong, resilient young women, the first five Tajik storytellers applied for and recently received an ACCESS Alumni Grant to share their learning by teaching girls and boys in their school.

In a small way, this hybrid digital storytelling workshop attests to the power of digital connection in a socially distanced world and to dreams that may be realized from sharing of authentic voices.

Watch the Stories

Read the Ahimsa Center Newsletter, Ahimsa & K-12 Education, pp. 9-10.

Moving here at the end of 2017 was “entering new territory”—not only high-altitude desert geography but metaphorically, as Gloria Steinem writes in Doing Sixty and Seventy (2006). She says that “fifty felt like leaving a much beloved and familiar country –hence both the defiance and the sadness—and sixty felt like arriving at the border of a new one.”  For me, grounded from international work as a traveling Specialist after the fracture and dealing with two years’ of infection and resulting surgeries, my residency in New Mexico has invited exploration not only of the Southwest but of my internal landscape—both journeys as interesting as Karnatica, Zavkahn and Govi-Altai had been two years before.  Steinem says this decade is “not so much controlling time, it’s losing track of time.” In my own flight from pain, engaging in blogging and the creative media-making of Digital Storytelling has been healing, most recently the ones created with lectio divina on Rumi’s poems, merging travel photos from New Mexico/India/ Portugal/Philippines to make one-minute devotions. Selected digital stories are uploaded under Jode’s Stories.

This coming year, I’m focused on physical recovery to full mobility and returning to professional work through this just-launched website.  A book chapter Voices of Young Women Leaders: Swaraj and Satyagraha through Digital Storytelling is coming out early in 2020, and in March, I’m presenting In Their Own Voices:  The Immigrant Experience through Digital Storytelling at the international TESOL 2020 conference in Denver. In April, Ebrahim and I are traveling to Tajikistan with support from a Fulbright Alumni grant to work with Zebo and give voice to her ACCESS girls through DST,  On the local front, I’m waiting to hear about a grant to support Santa Fe’s Southside teens in sharing their voices of the City Different.

As we each navigate crossing over into a new decade and the challenge of this election year, I hope for health, well-being, and social justice, especially for those seeking asylum at our southern border.

I ask my surgeon when can I swim?  When can I get on a stationary bike to pedal? When can I start Pilates?  He looks at me with that small frown between his brows. I get quiet and wait. No swimming for six weeks, he says.   No bicycling.  No hiking. Importantly, no driving.  You can walk. 

I take this in.  OK,  I can walk.

Richard points out that all I said before I went into this third surgery is I want to walk.  I am going to walk.  I want to keep on walking.

And I do walk out of C.U. Medical Center hospital with a Leki walking stick for balance, without pain.

Boo gives me a post surgery gift, a square black screen on a rubberized watchband.  A Fitbit.  His and her matching Fitbits.  If I’m going to walk, I’m going to focus on walking.  Each day counts.  Steps.  

At the end of the first day back home in Santa Fe, having walked around the house with the support of my wheelie, the Fitbit strapped on my wrist marks 310 steps.  That doesn’t make sense.  I realize that if pushing my three-wheeled walker, the gadget doesn’t read the steps.  So I fold up the tricycle and put it in the garage next to my Harley.  I’ll donate it to the Senior Center in appreciation for the walker, wheelchair, shower stool and elevated potty seat they’ve lent me over the last three months.   I try the walking stick around the house but I discover I don’t need it.  I have full weight bearing.  No pain in the socket.  Surgical sutures burn a bit but they are clean.  Muscle soreness in the quad.  All expected.  I can walk.

The next morning, I say to Boo, let’s go to Frenchy’s Park down the street.  There’s a sidewalk route .33 miles long. It’s 38 degrees out.   I walk the first third of a mile with extension poles, needing to rest.  At the beginning, 769 steps the Fitbit calculates.  I’m exhausted. I can’t do more, I say, and Boo drives me back home

On Sunday, we go again in the morning..  I bring compression walking poles and circumnavigate the park two times.  I stop briefly just to say OK, I can do this.   1535 steps.  I don’t think I can do anymore, I say. And Boo drives me back home.

On Monday morning, I ask if Boo will drive me over before he goes to work at St. Bede’s.  I do two times around.  At the end of the second lap, my Fitbit tells me my heart rate is up to l03 beats per minute.  I haven’t seen a heart rate that high for two years.  I’m going for it, I say,  and start the third loop.  I get up to ll3 beats per minute.  2348 steps.   The little monitor with the footprints around the loop in a data circle like the loop I’m walking at the park sends me a wrist-message:  “Hey you!  256 more steps to go this hour!”    I hobble back to the car, 63 steps.

In the afternoon of that mile walk, my leg swells up like the Dakota Pipeline. I’m worried. I call Tena. She comes over, kneels down by the low supported guest bed and lightly massages the edema, brings the congestion down around my knee.  Lying under her caring hands, I show here my Fitbit. 4623 steps!

She looks at my like I’m a lunatic and says I’m less than a week out from surgery. I need to give time for my capillaries to adjust, time to recover.

But I’m so excited that I can walk!  I just want to walk!  To keep on walking! 

She says she’s going to take away my Fitbit.

I hide my gadget but I  heed her advice, take Tuesday off, I just walk around the house, from room to room, doing light housework, organizing my files, cooking dinner. (2136 steps.)

On Wednesday, in my session with my psychiatrist, I tell Dr. Joe that I’m not doing enough, that I’ve become lazy, that I’ve lost my drive.   He suggests that at mid-sixty,  I’ve done everything I need to do.   Well, yes, he recommends, I do need to put in the effort of recovery, the rehab, but not overdo it.  He clarifies I’ve put in my time: three academic degrees, academic and story publications, dozens of grant projects and professional awards, a public school career, international contracts, and the last two years’ endurance through surgeries. I don’t have to “work at it” anymore, he says.  I get quiet. 

No one in my life has ever suggested that I’ve done enough.  Dr. Joe offers that what I could do now, at this time of my life, is focus on developing a balance through integration of intellect, creativity, insight, and love and compassion.

This is something to ponder.

After the session, I walk to DeVargas Mall (2019 steps) to get a Starbucks cappucino and write this blog. 

When Boo picks me up after his work and drives me home, he takes his gear and leaves for Chavez for his daily swim.  I take off my Fitbit to recharge the battery, then go outside in the surprisingly warm afternoon and sit outside in my walled garden on an old wicker chair, crunching my butt on a pile of leaves I don’t bother to sweep off.   I put up my feet in their multicolored knitted Tajik mucklucks on the Restore table.  I note the Mongolian tea chest at the far end of the garden, wrapped in plastic for the winter, and the drop cloth-covered tiled table.  The dried chili-ristras swing  from their hooks.  The abandoned barbecue, mid-garden the iron gate ajar, the empty hummingbird feeder, the dead blooms in the Oriental pots.  Beside me, the stick like dried stems of summer’s coleus poke up beneath Ann’s passport mask, and dried leaves cascade down the cement steps around the patio lanterns.   In my meditation on not doing, I see that I am in love with the transitioning backspace of my casita with its death and dying and its held hope for Spring.  In a few minutes, I’ll get up and walk, but just now I don’t feel like standing up to straighten or sweep, empty pots or move lanterns, or put anything away.  For the moment, I don’t want to change a thing in this November afternoon quiet of my recovery.

My surgery is scheduled in a week.  I look towards my operation with hope though I won’t know until after if the surgery will have been successful.  Not until Dr. Hogan slices open the same incision he stitched shut with the explant will he find if the six weeks of vancomycin has killed the infection.  

I hope for a different future from my recent past:  I hope to rove around the world under my own volition.

In Canyon de Chelly in Arizona this summer, we camped in the Monument in a charmed circle of massive cottonwoods, twelve druidic totems I embraced around midnight when I crawled out of the tent for a tinkle.  Each trunk a monument to longevity, dwarfing my own human decades.  They felt like rock, no sense of sap when I pressed my cheek against the petrified riffled bark.  

In the morning, the cacophony of birds woke us.  Boo climbed out to heat water in the JetBoy and made plunger coffee in the camping press.  Nothing like fresh brewed French Roast under the comforter and quilt inside one’s own screened in temporary home.  

We packed up and then hiked down the White House trail. Flawless turquoise skies above the undulating rocks and the massive curve of the red stonewalls, oranges, striations of white, yellow and pink, smell of dust and odor of dry.  A few skinny lizards; tupelo chirping from branches; pink trumpets of cactus in bloom. 

Tucked into the crevice of ledges the unmistakable ruins of the Anasazi. Six hundred feet below the rim on the canyon floor,  a green gemland of grass and blooming trees, the lovely ruins crumbling back into the land. 

Climbing out, the rise of sheer walls from the canyon floor, magnificence in their vertical striations, dripping with black like a bottleful of ink poured down the face.

My body wanted to hike, the muscle memory engaged from half a century of trails but my hip demanded my patience.  Each plant of my extension pole invited the shoulder,  quads, the glutes to take the burden, cajoling the flexor, asking for another step.  I counted 100 and then another ten decades as in prayer. I wanted to give in: my groin asked for respite each step. But climbed the entire way back out in pain, though not in grief.  That came after. The inconsolable ache of my loss

Images from White Sands National Park and Keshava Temple in Karnataka illustrate a rumi poem to celebrate the gift of recovery.     Click here to view the digital poem   rove 2020

I contemplate the circular black standing Lasko fan’s whirring propeller jjjzjzjzjjjng as it vacillates toward my lavender louvre doors and back towards the open window where the Russian olives screen the clouds and periwinkle sky.  I’m half reclined in bed, bolstered by three fat pillows against the headboard, another between my thighs to keep my hip from rotating inward, yellow smiley hospital socks on my agitated feet while vancomycin drips from the plastic grenade of antibiotics at my side through the long slender catheter of my PICC line,  At my bedside table, my purple glitter journal, ripped at the right corner,  a Lamy fountain pen and a pack of blue-black cartridges, the small jar of cannabis-infused coconut oil, a glass of cold water form the fridge in a Goodwill glass marked with lemon slice icons.  On my iPhone, I upload my niece’s 75-minute flow posted on her website The Honest Blonde, I follow her guidance,  pressing my thumb and left finger to my nose, breathing with her in pranayama.  Mirroring her, I place my hand over my heart where the PICC’s distal tip enters my vena cava, and I imagine the antibiotic seeping in to the left chamber of oxygen rich blood and through my arteries, delivering the dose to my cells. I visualize this twice a day for the hour and a half I’m hooked up to my home intravenous treatment, a sort of Fantastic Voyage of chemicals attacking the purple pompom bacteria consuming my bone. Though I want to lift my arms, like Liv, above my head to sweep the energy towards the ceiling of this small room where I’ve spent the last months, I can’t compromise the deep needle in my brachial vein.

So I  lie back and watch with great tenderness her standing poses, dancer’s arms and legs elongated, as she flows on, this lithe young woman, muscular and flexible.  By the time she is through,  all soft angles and strength, my grenade is empty, a miniature deflated football.  At the end of her practice—at the end of my treatment—she lies in savasana on her yoga mat; I lie supine on the bed’s down duvet: both of us contemplating life from corpse poses.  In Medellin, Columbia, she is inhaling the elix’ir of tropical oxygen rich air.   I am inhaling the whirring air from the floor fan as tonight’s killing cocktail mixes in my veins.

When Ebrahim comes into the room with the two syringes–the saline and the heparin–to flush the line after the antibiotics and screw on the little sterile green cap that protects the port hanging from my upper arm, I reach for hope but feel submerged in despair.  Housebound and trapped:  nowhere to go but from kitchen to bathroom to bedroom rolling an old lady walker.

In this state, I turn to lectio divina:  not unlike yoga, a spiritual solace.  From The Illustrated Rumi, I transcribe a poem in my journal and sit quietly, allowing the words to seep into my veins as irrevocably as the drug.  In contemplation, a soft tingle slides across my skin; I recognize gratitude and my husband comes into focus,  He has cared for me since the accident through the first two surgeries.  Not only these past months but in our twenty-four years together, Ebrahim’s steadfastness and loyalty have never wavered. I record the Rumi poem and pull digital images from our 2017 travel to Portugal.

In one-minute bride,  images from Ereciera and a narrative poem by rumi are accompanied by the iconic wedding walk of Pachelbel Canon express gratitude for the gift of both human and divine love.

My weekly sessions with a psychiatrist are to find ways to bring as many resources as I can muster to fight this bacterial infection in my bone.  Supporting the post-surgical care, twice daily IV two-hour doses of pharmaceuticals and weekly labs, I want positive thinking, visualization, and prayer: whatever it takes. 

Dr. Joe asks me if I meditate.  I tell him about Gaia and the Insight Timer App I plug into at night trying to sleep.   We explore ways to meet my insomnia and the anxiety that washes over me when I wake in the night from dream sleep.  CBD oil, Melatonin, L-ethylene maybe. He asks if I’ve worked with contemplative meditation and introduces me in his soft spoken but direct way to Lectio Divina or “Divine Reading.”  Lectio Divina is a traditional Christian monastic practice of scriptual reading, mediation and prayer intended to promote communion with God and to increase the knowledge of God’s Word.

I imagine medieval monks with tonsure in rough, rope-belted robes and leather sandals bending over illuminated manuscripts in their monasteries. In this twenty-first century, I turn not to the Bible but to a beautiful hardbound text of Rumi’s poems: The Illuminated Rumi, a text Ann Raabe gave me years ago with the inscription, “May we celebrate together, forever, the divine & magical.”  Coleman Bark’s divinely witty translations are illustrated by Michael Green’s unapologetic cultural appropriations:  the dome of a Persian temple, ancient Japanese scrolls, Native American figures, Greek sculpture, Tibetan mandalas, Medieval art, Buddhist iconography.   

Rumi, born in Afghanistan in the thirteenth century, wrote Eastern-Islamic poetry, calling his spiritual teachings “the roots of the roots of the roots of the (Islamic) religion.”  Though some consider Rumi’s Persian-language holy scripture, Willian Kilpatrick in Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West notes that others believe Rumi’s followers’ rituals of music and dance are “un-Islamic.” In a similar vein, Bark’s “new age” texts have been criticized as divorcing Rumi’s mysticism from its historical background.

Divorcing myself from historical tradition, I bring the four steps of Lectio Divina–reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation—to the new age paragraphs of a non-Islamic poet in a secular exploration towards insight and meaning.   I begin with four contemporary questions from a contemplative website: 1) what does the text say?    2) What does the text say to me?   3) What do I want to say to the Divine about the text?  4) What difference will this text make in my life? 

I transcribe the poem in my journal and sit quietly and allow my mind to wander.  From the internet, I unabashedly download images—from Pixabay and Pexel with Creative Commons Licenses CC0 and one pirated .gif.   I explore the multiple layering of images on five simultaneous video tracks in my movie-making software.  With each technical adjustment, an intuitive understanding of the poem begins to emerge.  As I fuss with the timing and the overlays of sourced images, translated text,and found music, possible meanings are revealed. 

Click here to view the digital poem   eon 2020

By the time of my Sunday brunch–spanikopita, tabouli, spring asparagus and new potatoes; dolmas and olives–the trees were greener than floral white.  No matter. The sun was bright and the enamel pots on the deck overflowed with blooming pink petunias.  I concocted lemon/vanilla vodka/pink champagne cocktails and there was room at the table Boo built and on the tahkt for the intergenerational eight who showed up- four over sixty friends and four twenty-somethings.    The afternoon unfolded the way holidays do–shared food and conversation, ever-evolving friendships.

The next day, my actual birthday, Ebrahim and I drove the hour to Ojo Caliente where I  soaked up the minerals in eleven hot pools and turned 64 circles in the one cold pool, an essential memory from each year of my life. The early ones: Easter Sunday straw hats with grosgrain ribbon; after church egg hunts.  I was pulled back to my Ohio childhood.

In shush, a text about two sisters one Ohio summer are juxtaposed with nature photographs of Rock Creek Park in Washington D.C taken by my dear friend C.N.  

Last week I panicked. At Santa Fe Community College I tried to sign up for an undergraduate class on the History of New Mexico but it was already full. I met with the ESL Coordinator about teaching a course.  I called St John’s and had a meeting with the admissions officer about their Graduate Program in East Asian Studies.  Hobbling across those campuses in pain, still dependent on a cane, my body is saying wait awhile.  But my brain says shame.

I can’t help myself. It seems I’m hard-wired to go back to school.  For fifty-five years, since I was seven years old, around the middle of August I get ready.  Each year of private school at Holy Family started with a new uniform, five pairs of navy blue knee socks and three crisp white blouses with Peter Pan collars.  Heading up Adeline Drive for ninth grade to a new school, August’s anxiety was all about getting it right.   I wore a medallion miniskirt and a butterscotch man’s shirt with the tail out, unbuttoned cuffs covering my knuckles.  At those big swinging green doors, the huge Vice Principal stood like a bouncer and yelled Tuck In That Shirt! I did as told, my outfit ruined, the big shirt bunched up inside a scrap of skirt.

When I moved to Denver the summer before my Senior Year, I planned for the first day at the new school, dressing up in my favorite maroon swingy mini with the giant pink and white blooms.   Students in the parking lot going into the building were all dressed down:  jeans and sneakers sweat pants and hoodies.  I was the only girl in the entire school wearing a dress.  And so I learned the codes: the humiliation of getting it wrong took me to studying how to fit in.

Packing for college in the ‘70s, I cultivated an eclectic bohemian style, shopped Salvation Army for vintage finds long before consignment stores even existed.   In graduate school, when I started teaching Writing as a GTA at 23–only a few years older than my freshman students–I stood tall at the front of the room in the uniform of hip::  dark fitted ribbed turtlenecks,  multi strings of hand-strung hishi beads, high-waisted flared jeans and Frye stacked-heel leather boots.

During my thirties, working internationally, teaching at the Universite de Cheikh Anta Diop, I designed African-inspired clothes made to order from  little tailor shops in the side streets of Dakar;  in Tokyo bought high-end designer fashion for corporate language training,; in Bucharest wore serious blazers and matching wool pants to teach at the Ministry of Finance.  I shopped in airports during  layovers: Frankfurt, London, Paris.

In my mid-forties, when I decided on public education., every early August for those fifteen years, I studied the fat fall fashion tomes of Vogue and Bazaar, pulling hangers  from the closet and piling pants, shirts and jackets on the bed, reimagining a look for that coming year’s high school teacher dress-code.

In the last seven years, traveling on grants, still following an academic calendar in Dushanbe, Bloemfontein, Delhi, Kolkata, Ulaanbaatar,, I curated capsule wardrobes for the climates and the jobs, using every inch of my one allowed personal check-in bag with outfits–and shoes and accessories–for the two- or four- or six-month contracts.

Now, I’m in retreat.  I hardly go out.   I live in t-shirts and pull-on yoga pants,  my greying hair pulled tight on top into a little-girl elastic.  From the bed, elevating and icing my emaciated leg,  I try to ignore the whispering coming from behind my closet doors.   She’s finally lost it!  She’s really let herself go…. 

Personal photos, travelogue shots, and images from Coimbra are combined in digital space to spoof this extended recess of recovery and the distraction of past years’ fashions.

As she lays her hands on the scar, she says in time the steel will become the same as the femur it was driven into.  I don’t know if she means symbolically or biologically, but I trust her, speak to my living bone, remembering its strength and loyalty before the accident.   Lucid dreaming under her healing hands brings imagery of a blade.  I remember Charlemagne’s jewel-studded Joyeuse in its glass case when I visited a special exhibit of ancient swords at my favorite Paris haunt, le musée de Cluny.

Three summers ago, taking advantage of Senior access to University of Colorado classes, I audited an advanced French literature class.  The professor was brilliant. We read 12th century le Chanson de Roland in the original.  What joy I experienced translating sentences far beyond my college French, checking my understanding side-by-side with my dog-eared, pen-annotated 1979 edition of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.  For bone, I reread the great narrative poem–themes of  pride and revenge, recklessness and loss, grief and redemption–as Roland battles against the Mohammedans to protect his liege.

Images from the 16th century Capela dos Ossos in Evora, Portugal, travel photos, my niece’s Instagram pics, and an x-ray image illustrate this digital story inspired by The Song of Roland’s imagery and rhyme.  The Portuguese inscription silently opening the piece translates as We bones that here are, for yours await