The Puzzle
Our nation is raging, crumbling and burning. Tattered shreds of decency and ashes of logic impede the understanding we need in order to pull ourselves from the pits of our mindsets. Every one of us attempting to survive this mania of confusion wishes it were different. The puzzle will never make sense until polarized opinions are released from their blind bunkers and given not just an honest hearing, but a sincere listening; not only from others, but from within each of our stubborn centers of self.
There are valid reasons why so many cultural pockets of our nation tenaciously cling to security blankets of identity, explode from cannons of generational inequities, or mute the sounds of desperate cries for survival. We understand our local worlds through the filters of our limited experiences, both a gift and a curse. We internalize what we have been taught and defiantly defend tradition, because exclusion is painful.
Where can we go to untangled the riddles of power, nightmares of annihilation, and twisted normalcy in times of lunacy? Where is there room for everyone to see and be seen, to hear and be heard? How do we bring our rich national diversity into common contact with each other for the explicit promise of democratic law— of, by and for the people— all the people? It is time to engage the conversations in which solutions replace blame.
The Bigger Picture: Each of us is one among many; each perspective only a piece of the national portrait; each country its own continuum of historical conditions; each continent sculpted by forces of scientific formula; and each planet a unique speck in the whole universal scheme of things. Visiting the Bigger Picture is a mind-altering experience. It is also where we learn how everything and everyone are connected, what is needed from each of us and how we can contribute our gift of self toward the benefit of all.
Each of us holds a unique piece in the Bigger Picture puzzle. Those who discover how their piece fits, contribute clarity to our humanity; those who hold fast to their puzzle piece render our understanding incomplete and inaccurate. We can do better than we imagine and we can be crueler than we admit.
Your piece could make all the difference.
Betsy Roman stepped out from her storybook childhood in the Northeast, remarkably unprepared for the maze of mid twentieth-century mixed messages and upheavals. While training to become a medical illustrator, a profession on the brink of obsolescence, she met her future husband working in a hospital lab sketching autopsies in the morgue. Within a year of their marriage, her husband was drafted into the Army Medical Corps and sent to Vietnam, while Betsy managed an orthopedic office in San Francisco. Being an officer’s wife at the Presidio and protesting the war during the Summer of Love seemed like a perfectly normal dichotomy of the times. Upon the safe return of her husband, they were reassigned to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where Betsy assisted in physical therapy and sang the only female part in the play, The Fantastiks— inside the federal penitentiary. Travel into the unknown became a way of life.
After settling in Los Angeles, Betsy attended to the education of their two children, as well as tutoring at-risk teens, teaching adult literacy, and becoming a liberal religious educator with the Unitarian-Universalist Association. With all good fortune, the family survived earthquakes, fires, riots, and Hollywood. Her move to the Napa Valley also brought her back to the acute care hospital setting as a medical transcriptionist until it, too, was rendered obsolete.
As a faithful journal keeper, letter writer, and poet, Betsy began excising stories from a life of disruptions, infusing them with significance and stitching them with humor. She has written award-winning fiction for the Jessamyn West Creative Writing Contest in Napa. Her granddaughters continue to keep her happily disrupted, and growing vegetables keep her grounded.
Building a Better Story 