"Embracing the Positive"

I recently read a letter in The New Yorker referencing Erik Erikson, a “brilliant neo-Freudian thinker from the past century,” who, according to the letter writer, posits that as we get older we either embrace what was positive in our lives or wallow in feelings of failure. Can’t be more polarized than that, but as one who levitates between the two poles, I decided I better look into exactly what Erikson had to say to maybe find out how to embrace the positive.

Erikson sees this choice as a process, a series of stages, in which one develops a personality based on social experience and relationships. In each stage people experience a conflict that determines whether one meets that conflict with a quality that allows for growth or fails to meet that conflict or develop essential skills needed for a strong sense of self. Mastery of the skills needed to grow equips one with “ego strength” or “ego quality.”

That’s all well and good, but how do you deal with ego strength in a society that emphasizes competition and comparison that is exacerbated by unlimited access to information about everyone with whom you can possible compete or compare?

I’m almost 70 years old. I can easily “wallow” when I think about all the incredible things that other 70 year olds like Louise Erdrich and Bill Frisell have provided for me. I’ve also lived through many “stages” that are life affirming. So how do I refrain from the competition and comparison to focus on the positive? I decided to make a list, starting with my early adult life, of the experiences and relationships that have made an impression.

1.     I went to a crazy college—Antioch—where I learned all about love and politics and expanding the mind and met lots of crazy people.

2.     I got a co-op job at the Central Clearing House in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which I never left—New Mexico, that is.

3.     I invented a career as journalist for alternative newspapers like Seer’s Catalogue that floated around the Albuquerque underground.

4.     I found my dog Judge, my dearest companion, in an Oregon forest while doing shit work one summer for the Forest Service.

5.     I got to spend two summers as a fire lookout on Mount Taylor while acting as a spy for environmental groups fighting uranium exploration in the forest.

6.     I fell in love with Mark, my partner of 34 years, in the fire lookout.

7.     Mark and I built a house in Placitas from scratch.

8.     We traveled all over Mexico, having all sorts of adventures, from Yucatan to Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara and Mexico City, where Mark got his pocket picked and we had to go to the US Embassy to get enough money to pay for a hotel until we could get money wired from his parents for a bus ride home.

9.     I got to earn money hiking around the Sandia Mountains (again, the Forest Service).

10. I parleyed those hikes into classes—hiking and cross-country skiing—and guidebooks under my own imprint: Acequia Madre Press.

11. I gave birth to Jakob Matthews Schiller in 1981.

12.  I fought the Forest Service—Cibola Forest Plan—and the Forest Service won. I fought the developers—building Placitas fake adobe haciendas—and the developers won.

13. I gave birth to Max Matthews Schiller in 1988.

14. Mark and John Kennedy and I wrote the UnReal Estate news to parody the developers Real Estate News and nobody knew it was us.

15. Mark and I wanted out of Placitas so we traded houses with a woman who lived in Llano San Juan but she wanted us to exorcise our house in Placitas so we kicked her out.

16. Mark and I did get out of Placitas, but to El Valle, where we finished a house, restored a hay field, planted a garden, and started an orchard.

17. Mark and I became norteño activists and got to hang out with Ike DeVargas, Max Cordova, and Chellis Glendinning.

18. Mark and I went after Forest Guardians and Sam Hitt, those absolutist, urban environmentalists, in our radical rag newspaper, La Jicarita News.

19. We went backcountry skiing and backpacking all over northern New Mexico. We taught our kids to downhill ski. Climbed a few Colorado peaks as well.

20. We went to demonstrations where environmentalists were hung in effigy.

21. We went dancing with Tomás, the unofficial mayordomo of El Valle, and his girlfriend, in Las Vegas on Sunday afternoons.

22. We went to Spain—the Prado, the Alhambra, the Pyrenees— to visit Jakob who was there for his senior year.

23. I wrote a couple of children’s’ books.

24. We sent both kids off to college.

25. I hiked the Grand Canyon, backpacked in Big Bend, and skied to the yurts with the “girls,” who became my boon companions on many outdoor adventures.

26.  I published a couple of books with Sunstone Press: Culture Clash; Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities, and Stories From Life’s Other Side.

27. Jakob married Casey in 2010; 10 months later Mark died of pancreatic cancer.

28. David Correia, Eric Shultz and I pounded out La Jicarita online, extending coverage to police violence in Albuquerque and fascism at the Santa Fe Opera.

29. Jakob and Casey gave me two grandchildren, Lulu and Marcos.

30. I published two more books under Acequia Madre Press: Unf*#!ing Believable and ¡No Se Vende! Water as a Right of the Commons.

31. John Nichols wrote me a 60 page letter in response to Unf*#!ing Believable and we became fast friends.

32. Jakob and I taught the grandkids to downhill ski. I won’t be able to keep up with them in a few more years.

33. I volunteered at the Mexican border with shelters harboring Latin American refugees seeking asylum in the United States as Trump separated children from their parents and put them in cages.

34. After years of lambasting Forest Service policy I helped start the Rio de Las Trampas Forest Council to develop a forest restoration program on the Camino Real Ranger District.

35. I helped John publish what he says will be his last book, Goodbye Monique: Requiem for a Brief Marriage, about the death of his mother when he was just two years old.

36. I’m piddling around with my novel. I don’t know what to do with myself if I’m not writing something.

It turns out Fred Rogers was also heavily influenced by Erikson in developing his much beloved series for children. Supposedly his favorite quote was from “The Little Prince:” “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” He took that to mean that what is essential to life isn’t the “honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. . . . It’s the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff . . . What is essential about you that is invisible to the eye.”

As my life becomes more circumscribed and my body declines, I hope “what is essential” about me remains.

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