Tag Archives: mongolia

This Brilliant Memoir Will Challenge What You Think You Know About Loss and Pregnancy

by LandonOlmstead Posted on March 18, 2017

Mother Jones

For most of her life, Ariel Levy’s disregard for rules and expectations has mostly paid off. As a child, she preferred adventurous make-believe to playing house. As a young adult, she was determined to write at New York magazine when she was a lowly editorial assistant and became an accomplished magazine writer for such publications as the New York Times, Vogue, and the New Yorker. She fell in love and got the girl, even though the girl was in a relationship with someone else when they met. Eventually, they married. She’s boarded airplanes to places like South Africa in search of characters and returned with stories about gender and athleticism and ways that ignorance and stereotypes can cripple.

But life isn’t simple, and as she moved from her 20s into her late 30s, the rules began to feel a little less negotiable—an experience she records in her riveting new memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply.

“Every morning I wake up, and for a few seconds I’m disoriented, confused as to why I feel grief seeping into my body, and then I remember what has become of my life,” Levy writes in the preface. “I am thunderstruck by feeling at odd times, and then I find myself gripping the kitchen counter, a subway pole, a friend’s body, so I won’t fall over.” Over the course of only a few months when she was 38 years old, Levy lost her spouse and her house to divorce, and her son to a miscarriage. In 2013, Levy wrote about her miscarriage in a powerful New Yorker personal essay called “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” It’s impossible to read that essay—and the book—without experiencing some of her anguish, as if you’ve stepped outside of your body and into hers. It’s the sort of writing that is vulnerable and vivid, and makes the reader feel brave and desperate in quick succession. “All of my conjuring had led to ruin and death,” she writes in her memoir. “Now I was a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone…The wide-open blue forever had spoken: You control nothing.”

Mother Jones caught up with Levy to talk about writing through grief, the politics of miscarriage, and what it means to be an animal woman.

Mother Jones: Let’s talk about “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” How did you decide to write about that experience in the first place?

Ariel Levy: It wasn’t really a decision. It just sort of came out of my fingers, you know? There were fewer choices involved than in anything I’ve ever written before—it just kind of happened. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever had a piece like that before in my life where there was not a lot of effort; there were not a lot of choices; there was not a lot of moving things around. It just came out of my fingers. I just said what I had to say, basically. It’s not usually like that. Usually it’s a lot of work. Usually it’s a pain in the drain. It just happened.

MJ: So it just felt like something you needed to write about?

AL: Yeah. I guess I needed to, because it wasn’t a conscious choice. The book is a different matter—the book is a conscious choice, and the book was work. It did involve making lots and lots of decisions, and doing lots and lots of revisions. “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” was not like that. I felt like I had said exactly what I meant to say. It’s not usually like that for me. Normally, it’s kind of what I want to say, you know, it’s sort of what I want to say, but it’s never quite everything I hoped. With that piece, I didn’t have any hope. I was like, “Yeah, I mean every word of that.” Unfortunately, it only happened once in 20 years. I’m not going to get too used to it. The book was, in many ways, a pleasurable process. It was a normal writing experience that involved decision-making and revision, and some struggle, like anything. Much, much easier than my first book, which was like a total uphill slog.

MJ: I’m sort of surprised to hear you say that—the writing comes across as such raw emotion.

AL: Well, the fact of the matter is, I was doing that anyway. That process of looking at what has happened and what I had done in various ways was difficult, but writing about it wasn’t painful. Feeling suffering is painful, obviously, but writing about suffering, I did not find unpleasant. Usually I don’t write about myself; I write about other people. When you’re reporting, you’re trying to put together the truth based on what lots of different people tell you. Maybe you’re there for some of it because you’re reporting scenes, but at the end of the day, you’re trying to piece together reality from various sources. It’s not like I know the ultimate truth, but I know what was true to me. I found the exercise of trying to express that as precisely as possible sort of thrilling.

MJ: So how did you decide to write the story of your miscarriage as a book?

AL: I don’t know. If this was someone else’s story, I would have wanted to tell it. I would have thought, “Well first of all, that’s a good story, and second of all, it involves lots of stuff that I’m interested in.” Why is it disqualified just because it’s my story, and I know every single thing about it? That shouldn’t be a mark against it. Maybe that should be a mark for it, is what I ultimately decided. Obviously personal life is complicated, but I decided to do it anyway.

MJ: I’m glad you did.

AL: Thanks, I’m glad I did too.

MJ: So does that mean you’re feeling good about the book coming out?

AL: I feel partly good about it, let’s say.

MJ: How did the people in your life react to the idea of your memoir?

AL: Really generously. My former spouse is the first person who read it before I turned it in. I was like, “Okay, if there’s anything you can’t live with, let me know and I’ll take it out.” She’s more important to me than any book. Characteristically generous, she was like, “You know what? I’m not going to censor you. This is your story—you tell it how you want to tell it.”

Which is incredible, but also not surprising if you know her. She was the only one I was concerned about. My parents, you know, that’s ancient history.

MJ: Miscarriage is sometimes regarded as this personal, private thing. When women come forward and speak about it, it becomes political. Do you see yourself normalizing the spectrum of pregnancy outcomes by writing about your experience?

AL: Certainly hearing from lots and lots of women who had lost babies, lost pregnancies, and also some women who’d lost children, made me feel good about writing about some of these issues. I feel that the dramatic experience of being a human female animal hasn’t really been a major subject for art and literature. Why shouldn’t it be? It affects half the population. Not that every woman is going to get pregnant or have a child or lose a child, but at some point in her life every woman will have some drama around menstruation, pregnancy, childbearing, childbirth, menopause, something to do with that animal fear.

MJ: Do you feel like there’s a stigma of blame around miscarriage?

AL: Well it’s also a biological experience, right? When you lose a pregnancy like that—especially if you are late term, as I was—you’re going through an enormous let down of all these hormones. If things go well, you’ve got a baby to take care of, so that serves as this counterbalance to this enormous physical, hormonal shitshow. If the baby dies, then you’re in a pretty dark place. Sure it’s cultural, but it’s not just cultural. It’s also physical. It’s pretty hard not to blame yourself and feel terrible in 800 ways when you’re going through that physical experience. Your body’s producing milk for a baby who’s not there. I don’t see a way that you’d avoid going to a pretty dark place in that condition.

MJ: The book is, in some ways, a meditation on womanhood and what it means to have the power to reproduce. Can you talk a little bit about what that has meant to you and then how it has evolved since your pregnancy?

AL: Before I had that experience, I wouldn’t have understood what it entailed. I think if someone said to me, “Oh, this person had a late-term miscarriage, this person went into premature labor,” I would’ve had no sense of what that meant. I think sometimes people will assume women will know what this is all about. I don’t even think it’s fair to ask women to know what it’s about if they haven’t experienced that. I certainly didn’t understand the emotional experience of pregnancy and birth. It just wouldn’t have resonated for me.

MJ: What advice would you give someone who is dealing with this kind of loss?

AL: Just to know that eventually, grief moves. It changes shape. If you’re fortunate, it moves from something you live in to something that lives in you. What I mean is, there’s always going to be something. I’m never going to be like, “Oh yeah, that was fine that that happened.” It’s always going to be a really painful reality for me. I’m always going to wish that my son had lived. Now, that’s something that lives in me. I don’t walk around in a tunnel of that experience. It’s just something that lives in my heart.

Original link – 

This Brilliant Memoir Will Challenge What You Think You Know About Loss and Pregnancy

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Brilliant Memoir Will Challenge What You Think You Know About Loss and Pregnancy

You Have to See These Photos of Mongolian Men Hunting With Eagles

by EmelyHarrell Posted on December 20, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The hunter climbs high into the mountains in search of his new bird, looking to sharp clefts in the splintered rock faces where golden eagles usually make their roost. He snatches a four-year-old eaglet—old enough to hunt and survive without its mother, but not too old to adjust to a new life among people—and takes her back to his home, where he feeds her yak, sheep, and horse meat by hand. The meal is the start of a lasting bond. For the next decade or more they will be inseparable partners, returning to the mountains to hunt each winter, when their prey—foxes and, at times, wolves—betray themselves with fresh tracks in the ice and snow.

Golden eagles are the hunters of choice for the burkitshi of western Mongolia. Palani Mohan

The eagle hunters, known as burkitshi, are members of Mongolia’s Kazakh minority, living in the remote valleys of the Altai Mountains in the country’s far west. Australian photographer Palani Mohan spent five years traveling there, documenting the nomadic lives of the 50 or 60 men who still hunt as their ancestors did 1,000 years ago. They will likely be the last generation of eagle hunters, says Orazkhan Shinshui in the introduction to Mohan’s book, Hunting with Eagles. Shinshui, who is in his mid-nineties, is considered the oldest and wisest of the burkitshi.

>A herder and his bird watch over sheep and yaks in the mountain pass below.

Mohan’s gorgeous photographs capture the howling isolation of the land—flat, treeless valleys dominated by swirling clouds and jutting, wind-swept peaks. And yet the fierce-eyed eagles seem to preside over the vast emptiness, enveloping the landscape with their enormous wingspan. The hunters, proud and rugged on the hunt, peer out from thick fox-fur coats, bearing the scars of the landscape upon their faces.

But other photographs examine the deep bond between hunter and eagle as it is fostered both on the frigid hunt and in the comparative warmth of the ger, or yurt—the bird calmly cradled in a hunter’s arm, or lying immobilized on the frozen ground, hooded and swaddled against the cold. “When you’ve lived with someone, like I’ve done many many times with these hunters, you really see the bond,” Mohan says. The hunters gushed with stories of loving their eagles more than their wives, talking about them as though they were children.

Though hunters have partnered with eagles for thousands of years in Central Asia, the young men who would have carried on their fathers’ way of life are choosing a more modern existence. They’re moving east to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, or working along the new roads connecting Russia with China. “They want all the things that any teenager in the world wants. They want money. They want to meet girls. They want to listen to music,” Mohan says. “The old guys like Orazkhan find this very problematic.”

The tradition of keeping eagles in the home has continued, but now it’s mostly for the tourists, Mohan says. “There are golden eagle festivals popping up left, right, and center every year. They’re quite hideous really; it’s completely traumatizing for the eagles.” He’s heard about eagles that have died of heart attacks, startled by the noise as busloads of iPad-bearing tourists descend upon isolated communities.

Any self-respecting hunter, Mohan says, would never bring his eagle to a festival. “You need to love the bird to be a true eagle hunter, and the bird needs to love you. That does not exist until you live with them out in the sticks.”

This eagle is swaddled in leather and carpet to keep it warm and relaxed, despite frigid temperatures.

Mohan, who was born in Madras, India, and is a vegetarian, says the isolation and brutally cold temperatures, which can plummet to -40 degrees Fahrenheit, made the hunting trips the most physically difficult excursions he’s undertaken for his work. The conditions took a toll on his equipment as well—he took to strapping batteries under his armpits and against his thighs to keep them warm and retain their power. “I felt that I was missing the majority of my pictures because I just couldn’t quite work the buttons and I was wearing too many warm clothes,” he says, although he got better at it over the years.

But Orazkhan, who has spent his life here, fears the winters have grown less harsh in recent years, causing many eagles to migrate elsewhere. “He talks about how the winters used to be much longer, the clouds used to be much darker and more fierce,” Mohan says. “The salt lakes that surround him used to stay frozen for many more months than they do now…It really is quite sobering when you’re sitting there in the middle of nowhere, talking to a 94-year-old man who has never heard of the term global warming, and he’s talking about something drastic happening there.”

After 10 to 15 years of partnership, the eagles are taken far from home, given a feast of meat, and left to rejoin the wild—although it can be challenging to keep the bird from circling straight back to its hunter. “Golden eagles are like no other bird,” Orazkhan says in the book. “They want to be with you. They love you. And they love to kill for you. When the time comes to let them go, it’s the hardest thing a man can ever do.”

Hunting with Eagles: In the Realm of the Mongolian Kazakhs is available through Merrell Publishers. In the meantime, enjoy a few more of Mohan’s photos below.

Credit: 

You Have to See These Photos of Mongolian Men Hunting With Eagles

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on You Have to See These Photos of Mongolian Men Hunting With Eagles

What These Historical Kings and Marauders Can Teach Our Leaders About Climate Change

by ReinaPalmerston Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

There are no two ways about it: Humankind is, for the first time in our recorded history, living through a massive global climate shift of our own making. Science paints today’s crisis as unprecedented in scope and consequence. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t historical cases of societies that have enjoyed the highs and endured the lows of natural climatic changes—from civilization-busting droughts to empire-building stretches of gorgeous sunshine.

Whether they’re commanding marauding armies or struggling with dramatic temperature shifts, today’s leaders have a variety of historical role models they can learn from:

Should Governor Jerry Brown—confronted by California’s 500-year drought—be mindful of the policy mistakes made by the last Ming Emperor?

Will President Obama learn lessons from Ponhea Yat, the last king of the sacred city of Angkor Wat, when planning how to safeguard America’s critical infrastructure against extreme weather?

Will Vladimir Putin channel his inner Genghis Khan as Russia seeks new territories in the melting Arctic? (He’s already got the horse-riding thing on lock down.)

Here are four historical figures whose triumphs and defeats were related, at least in part, to major changes in their climates.

A new study published this week argues that Genghis Khan, the massively successful Mongol overlord who stitched together the biggest contiguous land empire in world history, may have had a secret weapon: really nice weather.

The paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents evidence from tree ring data collected in present-day Mongolia. It shows that when Genghis Khan was building his empire, the usually frigid steppes of central Asia were at their mildest and wettest in more than 1,000 years. This potentially favored “the formation of Mongol political and military power,” the paper says.

The researchers, led by Neil Pederson, a tree-ring scientist at Columbia University, discovered 15 consecutive years of above-average moisture in Mongolia. This was great, politically speaking, for nomad types: “The warm and consistently wet conditions of the early 13th century would have led to high grassland productivity and allowed for increases in domesticated livestock, including horses,” the authors write. If you’ve seen any cheesy historical reenactments of Khan, you’ll know horses were key to expansion, in the same way that icebreakers are becoming all-important in today’s race for shipping routes—and geopolitical influence—in the melting Arctic.

Genghis Khan and his hoard may have had successful romps across the warm climes of Central Asia, but the scientists say the weather was temporary, and their analysis reveals worrying trends for the future. Tree rings show that the early 21st century drought that afflicted Central Asia was the worst in Mongolia in over 1000 years, and made harsher by the higher temperatures consistent with manmade global warming. As temperatures here rise more than the global mean in coming decades, the authors say we could witness repeated instances of mass migration and livestock die-off: “If future warming overwhelms increased precipitation, episodic heat droughts and their social, economic, and political consequences will likely become more common in Mongolia and Inner Asia.”

For three centuries, China’s Ming Dynasty was a superpower that, among other things, invented the bristle-headed toothbrush. But from around 1630, the country was ravaged by a record-breaking drought that was caused by some of the weakest monsoons of the last 2,000 years, which in turn sparked mass civil unrest. Anthropologist Brian Fagan writes in his book, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850, that these events in China were “far more threatening than any contemporary disorders in Europe.” By the time of the fall of the Ming Dynasty in the mid-1600s, Fagan writes, the usually fertile Yangtze Valley had suffered from catastrophic epidemics, floods and famine that drove political discord and left the state vulnerable to attack.

Temperatures were at an all-time low. In China, “it was colder in the mid-seventeenth century than at any other time from 1370 to the present,” writes Emory University historian Tonio Andrade in his 2011 book, Lost Colony. “It was also drier. 1640 was the driest year for north China recorded during the last five centuries.”

The Forbidden City is perhaps the most famous Ming Dynasty structure, and Chongzhen’s final fortress. kallgan/Wikimedia Commons

As Andrade writes, even “the best government would be tried by such conditions.” And Chongzhen’s government was hardly the best. As crop yields collapsed, the response from the emperor’s already fragile regime exacerbated the crisis. Zero tax relief meant starving farmers “now abandoned their land and joined the outlaws,” writes Geoffery Parker in Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. The hermit-like emperor in Beijing walled himself off in the Forbidden City, the most famous Ming Dynasty symbol of power, distrustful of lawmakers and bureaucrats who were themselves absorbed in bitter factional disputes. (Sound familiar?) Instead of keeping law and order in the provinces, the emperor withdrew his troops to the capital, basically ceding his empire to the disaffected packs of bandits that were growing in number every day; and he shut down one-third of the “courier network” that he relied on for communications, leaving him blind to worsening developments.

â&#128;&#139;

Click to embiggen: Temperatures during the Ming Dynasty plummeted. Adapted from “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century,” by Geoffrey Parker.

Meanwhile, the Manchus were ravaging the north, driven by their own drought. It all became too much for Chongzhen. “Under the cumulative pressure of so many catastrophes in so many areas,” writes Parker, “the social fabric of Ming China began to unravel.” Forced to choose between abandoning the north for the southern capital, Nanjing, or standing his ground, “on the morning of 25 April 1644, abandoned by his officials, the last Ming emperor climbed part-way up the hill behind the forbidden city and hanged himself,” writes the University of North Texas’s Harold Miles Tanner in China: A History.

The Manchus eventually sacked Beijing and started the Qing dynasty.

According to author and environmental commentator Fred Pearce, the balmy days of the 10th and 11th century favored the creation of Viking settlements in Greenland under Erik the Red. His son, Leif Erikson was the gallant Viking king credited with the first European discovery of North America, at Newfoundland, in the late 10th century. But the period of great adventure and productivity Erikson initiated in Greenland was soon under threat from increasingly cold weather.

“The settlement on the southern tip of the Arctic island thrived for 400 years, but by the mid-fifteenth century, crops were failing and sea ice cut off any chance of food aid from Europe,” writes Pearce in his book, With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change. It was a failure of adaptation more than anything else, Pearce argues. The Vikings stubbornly continued to farm chickens and grains—warmer weather practices—instead of hunting seals and polar bears, and as a result, “creeping starvation had cut the average height of a Greenland Viking from a sturdy five feet nine inches to a stunted five feet.”

Continue Reading »

See original article here: 

What These Historical Kings and Marauders Can Teach Our Leaders About Climate Change

Posted in Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What These Historical Kings and Marauders Can Teach Our Leaders About Climate Change