From: Barbara Henszey
Date: July 13, 2010 8:55:22 PM EDT
To: Kenneth Zimmerman
Subject: Eleanor Roosevelt Center
Kenny,
The Eleanor Roosevelt Center in Hyde Park celebrates all the remarkable elements of ER’s legacy, but its overall visibility is weak.
Kenny, I know you are a good friend of Kelly Cutrone. It struck me the other day that she and Eleanor Roosevelt might have been great friends. Kelly’s book is full of poignant inspiration and activist wisdom, the hallmarks of ER’s journey. Do you think Kelly might have an interest in contributing to the Center? I would appreciate any input—from brainstorming to assistance in planning an event. Perhaps when Kelly is at her weekend home, we could meet for an hour at Eleanor’s Val-Kill home in Hyde Park.
If Kelly is not able to help at this time, I would love to give her and her daughter, Ava (and you and Arlene) a tour through the grounds. It’s a most magical place.
Best,
Barbara
Reading this, I felt as though I’d been hit on the head with a coconut. I mean, Eleanor Roosevelt and Kelly Cutrone? Whaaaaaaaaat?! I was simultaneously curious and elated that anyone would think Eleanor and I would have been friends, even though I knew almost nothing about her or what she accomplished in her life (but it certainly sounded fancy). I accepted the invitation partly because I was flattered, and partly because this woman Barbara seemed like she was stabbing around in the dark and needed some help. Maybe I could at least get her some free publicity for the estate.
Ava and I decided to visit Val-Kill the day before I was scheduled to fly to Toronto for a retreat with the Indian-born guru Sri Devi Amritanandamayi Ma, commonly called Amma, for whom I’d been consulting on media and branding. (To be honest, I don’t really think Amma needs my help with anything, but she knows I love to work more than meditate, so she’s been nice enough to throw me a bone.) This should have been my first clue that this would be no ordinary weekend in the country. The morning started off simply enough. When we awoke at my country house, my daughter and I walked down to the lake for a swim. It was one of those perfect Norman Rockwell scenes when you see the promise of life blooming in vibrant relief all around you.
I remember looking at Ava as she skipped up the path ahead of me after our swim, sun streaming through her hair. There won’t be many more summers when she’s going to walk like a little girl, I thought, and when she’s going to want to go for a swim with me. Right before my eyes, there she was, growing up. I felt like an old sage in the forest, aware as I took in all her beauty and her youth that these days, and my days, were more than limited. My days as the mother of a young girl and then a teenager, and my days as a woman on this planet. I would be dead soon; there was no avoiding this thing called death. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not planning on dying in five years or anything—and if I do, I guess I’ll seem really psychic!—but as I gazed at my daughter through a prism of different perspectives, both short and long, I felt my awareness of everything heighten. If cherish and psychically imprinted had sex, they would be the parents of this feeling. Before I knew it, tears were streaming down my face.
This seems like a good time to set something straight. I know I called my first book If You Have to Cry, Go Outside, but what I meant was, it’s not professional to let your emotions get the best of you in the workplace. I actually believe that if you’re crying from gratitude, you can do it anywhere (though it’s still better to not do it at the office). That day, watching Ava, I knew I was in a state of grace. I’ve never taken acid, but everything around me seemed tinged; I felt with every pore of my body the sheer amount of beauty, tenderness, and abundance in every breath and every interaction on this earth. The thing about states of grace is that they tend to announce themselves suddenly, with the backing of an angelic choir or maybe in a thunderbolt. It’s usually pretty clear that something special’s happening. Most of the time these moments are triggered by really simple things, as mine was, and maybe the moment itself is the entire teaching. The Divine could’ve just been reminding me to cherish having a child like Ava, for whom I’d manifested a country house as a single mother, so that she and I could have a more intimate relationship with nature.
I didn’t know I was being prepared for a much larger teaching, one that would last for weeks. When Mira Alfassa, or The Mother—my longtime teacher and guru—was in her body, she sent certain students to other gurus to learn lessons they needed at certain times. Recently, I’ve felt that Amma is like one of The Mother’s sisters who came to get me for the weekend—a very long weekend that has lasted over two years. The Mother and her spiritual partner, Sri Aurobindo, were very focused on transforming the self from the inside out—changing mind, life, and body into channels of Divine consciousness—and Amma is also focused on this, but in a more outwardly collaborative way. (I believe she and The Mother are just differentiated aspects of the same Divine being—that the Universal Mother has many faces.) Amma’s currently one of the greatest living examples of the Divine feminine force in full effect. In addition to being a great humanitarian, she has toured the planet for more than thirty-five years hugging millions upon millions of people (over 30 million to date). In fact, she sometimes spends up to twenty hours sitting in one place without so much as a meal or a bathroom break, receiving anyone who wants to see her.
I would no sooner arrive on the grounds of Val-Kill than I’d realize I was in a sacred space. And by end of the weekend it would be fair to say that Eleanor Roosevelt, Amma, The Mother, and Wonder Woman—all great teachers—had had their way with me.
Part II: Dear Eleanor Roosevelt, I Think I Love You
Val-Kill looks like a proper estate. It is breathtaking and majestic, an American take on an impressionist painting. Of course, all of the grace I’d felt walking to the lake that morning was soon shattered when I showed up my normal fifteen minutes late and proceeded to plow my SUV into several orange cones in the parking lot, infuriating two female-ish (and that’s a compliment) park rangers. Luckily, Barbara was there to receive Ava and me, because otherwise we probably would’ve been turned away. (I should really give you a tip here about first impressions, but I’m not the one to speak to those.) Before our tour, we were ushered into a screening room to watch a documentary about Eleanor’s life.
This is when it all started to come together. As the film rolled, it hit me that Eleanor Roosevelt was a feminine force of superhigh consciousness and compassion, the counterpart to her husband’s famous political consciousness and ambitions. Although most other First Ladies in history have sat behind their husbands, Eleanor and Franklin were really something (in addition to being cousins). In fact, to me they were a great example of Shiva Shakti, or the tantric balance of masculine and feminine dimensions collaborating to create tremendous life energy and transcendental awareness. I began to firmly believe that Amma and The Mother sent me to Val-Kill for a reason. They wanted me to meet their sister Eleanor.
One of my first symbiotic touch points with Eleanor was the opening scene of the documentary, when she stated that every powerful woman needs a home in the country to retreat to, a beautiful cottage where she can hear the sound of a brook. I knew this all too well, as I too have a beautiful cottage where I can hear the sound of a very cold spring. (Once you make some money, I highly recommend that you also buy or at least rent a country home where you can shower off the city each weekend; I think I’d be in jail by now if I didn’t have one.) Actually, my home was just twelve miles from Eleanor’s! And we had way more in common than that; like many powerful women in her time and ours, her sexuality was called into question. To be honest, I don’t really know who she slept with, and I don’t care. After learning more about her life, God bless her if she had time to sleep with anyone!
Eleanor Roosevelt was a woman ahead of her time. The First Lady is at least expected to live at the White House, which Eleanor couldn’t be bothered with. She didn’t give a fuck about sleeping with her husba
nd; she had better things to do! It got to the point that it was actually news when she showed up. This was probably because, despite the fact that she bore President Roosevelt six children, her husband maintained a lover throughout their marriage—who also happened to be her best friend. But Eleanor was beyond all that. She and Franklin were actually a very modern couple by the time they hit the White House. I mean, they had a handful of kids, he was banging her best friend, and somehow they still found a way to work together for four terms! Even when they were no longer intimate, they remained close, with Eleanor functioning as Franklin’s social conscience and generally keeping him in check. While he ran the country, she lived at Val-Kill, holding frequent press conferences on the issues of the day and writing a daily syndicated newspaper column called “My Day,” which she used often to disagree with the president. She’d write the column every night at midnight from her room, no matter where she was.
In it, she revealed the consciousness of the true Universal Mother, full of clarity and compassion. Not only did she urge women to get out of the house and go to work; she fought for other groups too. The New Yorker penned a cartoon of the First Lady descending into coal mines to check on how the coal miners were doing. She’d call up her husband and say things like, “Franklin, it’s unconscionable you’re allowing lynching!” He’d say, “Why?” And she’d say, “Because, Franklin, it’s not nice!” At one point he said to her, “Lady, this is a free country. Say what you think . . . Anyway, the whole world knows I can’t control you.”1 To me, this sounds like an understatement, but a generous move by the president nonetheless.
I know no one’s taking a vote, but to me Eleanor needs to be at the top of the list of First Ladies throughout history, and in fact of Americans as a whole. I want to hear her mentioned alongside George Washington and Ben Franklin. Seriously, she needs to be on our money!
After her husband died, Eleanor began her work with the United Nations, which is where one of her greatest accomplishments took place—she coauthored the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed by the General Assembly of the United Nations at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris in 1948. As the declaration’s articles flashed on the screen that day, I knew I’d never read anything so fucking simple and beautiful and natural and true. It even said that requiring passports was a violation of our rights as humans—that we were all first and foremost citizens of the world. By this time, I knew Eleanor and I definitely would have been friends. Though I didn’t know much about the document itself, I do believe I was born with an inherent understanding of human rights in my DNA. I mean, passports have always struck me as a huge “Fuck You”; why should I need a document to travel freely on this earth I was born on? I’m a citizen of the world, thank you very much.*
Dear President Obama,
I’m writing you this letter because I think it’s absolutely deplorable that Eleanor Roosevelt is not on our money. In fact, why aren’t there any women on our money? I mean, with the exception of Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea—and nobody even uses silver dollars anyway. This seems like a mercy-fuck offering to the women’s movement at best. I suggest we bump off one of those troublemaker presidents like Thomas Jefferson, who impregnated his slaves, and get Eleanor on instead. Alternatively, we could transfer Jefferson to the silver dollar and give Eleanor the nickel and the two-dollar bill, both of which he currently occupies. Or here’s a better idea. Since every founding father came from a pioneering birthing mother, let’s issue a feminine counterpart to every coin or bill, with pictures of people like Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Betsy Ross, Margaret Sanger, Jane Addams, and Florence Nightingale. If women make over 70 percent of the buying choices in the average home, why aren’t we on the money, even from a purely capitalistic standpoint? I mean, Grover Cleveland is on the thousand-dollar bill! Who the fuck is he?
Sincerely,
Kelly Cutrone
PS: While we’re at it, I suggest we add two new people to Mount Rushmore: Eleanor Roosevelt and, with her, an indigenous person who made a difference in the history of our country, like Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull.
It all seemed so obvious. Of course we are all born into this world from a mother, and of course we all have a right to every particle on this planet. We should all be free and demand equal treatment under the law! Even gender and race are limiting.
I’ve always been in favor of the race of:
EVERYONE.
Would you like to join me?
(Let’s get our birth certificates changed immediately. If and when you have a baby and they ask you to name its race, make sure you say, “Everyone.”)
I was struck by how amazing it is that human beings still haven’t mastered these basic concepts, despite the fact that the Divine has been sending people like Eleanor Roosevelt to us for millennia, from Krishna, Jesus, and Buddha to Gandhi, Rumi, Amma, and The Mother. Think about it. We have been on this earth for tens of thousands of years, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was just written 62 years ago! What is going on here? The progress of humanity is too fucking slow, and that is an understatement. As humans, we are inclined to repetition, not progression. It’s easy to forget that 50 years ago, dark-skinned people still had to use separate bathrooms in some states in this country, and it was against the law for women to fly commercial planes.
I firmly believe that the United Nations needs a new PR team.
When the declaration was signed, the United Nations stated countries should “cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories.” It was intended to blanket our civil institutions almost like the choking poster. But that never happened. Despite the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been referred to as “the single most important reference point for discussions of how to order our future together on our increasingly conflict-ridden and interdependent planet,”2 most of us have no idea it even exists, let alone have taken the time to read it as adults. And we are definitely not talking to our children about this.
The more I thought about it, the more I was embarrassed that I’d never really read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or learned much about Eleanor Roosevelt either. Here I was, an American woman from an iconic place (near the Yellow Brick Road, the birthplace of the suffragist/suffragette movement, and the Underground Railroad!) with little or no knowledge of many of the women who have fought with both fierceness and compassion for my rights, your rights, and others’ rights throughout history. I hope I can inspire you to read about Eleanor and her work.
For posterity’s sake, and the future’s sake, on the next few pages we’ve included the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its entirety.
THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion
of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6. Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Normal Gets You Nowhere Page 6