Episode Thirty-Three: The Interview-Mickla Littlefoot

Mickla's experience as a Marine on a base in the Middle East was life-changing. In this longer episode hear how a solitary moment under a star-kissed sky in the desert opened her eyes-and became her miracle.

Transcript

But then I have to sit with myself and say why are you reacting that way to somebody else's lived experience? That's their experience and I think for me one of the ways in which I'm choosing to go forward is like I'm okay with your lived experience don't try to take mine away as a female woman in the world I will fight you for it. This actually is a work in progress for me because like I said you know I often I think the term would be like self-deprecating and I downplay my achievements because part of it is I don't think it's anything extraordinary and that is something I'm working on to see that it doesn't have to be extraordinary to be noteworthy and so when I describe myself to people whether it's on social media or like when you go on to like the dating profiles or whatever I say you know I'm an adventurer I love a good adventurer you call me tomorrow and be like there's this you can get this ticket to go to Paris for 48 hours you want to go I'd be like sure let me call in sick real quick. I think I'm also you know I'm a foodie I love food you know I love to cook I like to say I have empathy for people but I'm not necessarily the one who's at the soup kitchen I'm a family-oriented person I never thought of myself as that but my mother mentioned it one time but I understand that it's also a very common thing and I think that's a very cultural thing when a Guyanese person talks about their family they don't just mean their mom and dad and siblings they mean their cousins and their aunties and their great aunties and great grandparents like that's our family so it doesn't have to be you know my favorite aunt's kid is in the hospital it could be my great aunt's grandchild is in the hospital who I don't know but I'm close by I'll go be a representative for the family see if they can help me in the future. In terms of personal identity I identify myself as a mixed race or biracial woman the reason I do that part of it is representation matters so you know I cried when Kamala won because she's mixed like I am black and Indian growing up that's how that's what I was taught that your mom's Indian your dad's black or back then they said colored but those two are not colored so I'm a black girl and I'm a black girl and I'm a black girl and I'm a black girl and I'm a black girl and we call people like me dougler so I'm a dougler girl from Guyana so that's always kind of like my first identity but if you ask a Guyanese person they would say I'm not Guyanese because I spent my formative years in the United States so in terms of where my culture lies it's definitely very Indo-Guyanese leaning but my identity as a woman has definitely been a very conservative woman especially not one who's lived his whole life in Guyana they have very as patriarchal as the United States is that's more patriarchal and as much as you know you see a lot of women in Guyana who are definitely working definitely have their own when it comes down to it there's this expectation that the woman be lesser than the man she could be the minister you know her husband may not be really slowed down he could just be visiting the doctors at a hospital but he's not in charge of anything he's in charge of his patients and maybe the floor he works on but she's definitely of the higher position career-wise there's this expectation that he should be her head always part of me would say that I want my husband my future husband to take the lead in things but taking the lead does not mean that I must subjugate or subsume myself to you it's okay if you want to make the decisions but understand that we have a conversation and then you make the final decision I just know that if the decision is the wrong decision then you also hold the whole responsibility for it and I will attempt not to be like I told you so so it's one of my great aunts or uncles came to the states back in the I want to say 60s might be 60s and the first ones that came did so illegally as by any definition they overstayed a visa and then were able to get one of those visa lottery things and then once you had the visa lottery they sponsored their siblings and their parents their parents were then able to sponsor they were able to sponsor the single children then once the parents came over they were able to sponsor the married children and their families my mother actually ended up marrying a Guyanese guy who had also came kind of that with that chain migration his sister sponsored him so when she got married to him she was then able to sponsor me my brother so it's just a chain migration but I don't know about her ex-husband his family but in my family are the original people from Guyana that came to the states they overstayed a visa that's why when the whole thing about immigration I was like you don't know what people's stories are you don't know and furthermore there are people who are here who came as immigrants and the only reason they weren't technically illegal is because they hadn't changed the laws yet people are always looking for opportunity they wanted to move to the states be able to support their family check the education as they like to say that's how we ended up in the states little backstory is when my mom was in university she had gotten pregnant gotten married had me the lady who was taking care of me wasn't taking care of me her younger sister by one year went and got me from the city took me back to the village they lived in when she got married my auntie cheryl when she got married she took me to live with her and her husband he was you know he was fine with it he was he didn't mind so he was a pastor so that's how i ended up growing up in a pentecostal super you know christian household when i moved to the states my mom is not i mean she's christian but she's not super religious or anything but my uncle came over like a couple of months later and made sure we found he found us a home church to go to so i spent all all that time shoot all the way into my 30s i would have i would have called myself a christian i don't anymore but i did spend you know my childhood in a very religious household you know you can't watch this movie because there's too much kissing and we don't do that funnily enough we could watch things like rambo and predator which are like rated r because of the killing and probably like indiana jones and things like that but we couldn't watch anything that had too much sex or kissing or anything like that so when i started divinity school one of my well my first quarter i took anglicanism in africa and it was this very expansive study of basically you know the arrival i mean i read the books that i had to read i mean i was it's my first quarter and i don't think i had any clue of what the reading requirements were going to be but there were like seven books for this class that was like 10 weeks long and so and it was just a very all of them were very deep examinations of the anglican church and how it moved into africa how it affected communities how it changed communities one of the things i thought was really fascinating was for many indigenous african communities they absorbed the christian church and anglicanism but they also retained some of their indigenous practices so i'm curious in guiana was that part of the pentecostal religion um no okay no um pentecostalism at least the way i experienced it um so let me not speak for the all of the pentecostal stuff again the way i experienced it was it's very um everything that is not it is somehow considered demonic like they even looked at catholics and anglicans as you know idol worshippers because you know they have the statues of the saints and they pray to the saints you're not supposed to pray to any other person you pray to god and that's it so anything else was demonic they would say that you know hinduism was also demonic because they have all the the deities the the statuary that they'd have of their gods funnily enough there was this one thing i remember about this one hindu woman come into like a revival service and she was dancing in the isles and i was like oh you know the whole thing of being filled with the holy spirit and in pentecostal people get filled with the holy spirit they dance they sing they clap they whatever so i'm a child thinking she's doing the same thing and they're like no it's devil worship and i'm like she's possessed by a devil and i was to this day i'm just like how do you know the difference how do you know the difference between her being possessed by a an evil devil's spirit as opposed to somebody who claims they're filled with the holy spirit because if you look if you step outside of it and you looked into you know you look into the the voodoo people of haiti when they do they they commune with their spirits it doesn't look any different from somebody who's super pentecostal and into that sort of stuff so it's like when i think back on all of those things i'm like how did you know she wasn't just with filled with the holy ghost so that's the biggest thing i remember everything else was demonic like you had to be a christian jesus christ was the only way to salvation and if you weren't a christian you were going to hell and it was a very fire and brimstone kind of preaching my my uncle was a billy graham graham devotee so to speak he was into billy graham and jimmy jimmy swagger those type of preachers you know the laying on of hands is very important people fall down and i don't begrudge people their beliefs i think my strongest thing with it is how a lot of those religions came in and tried to denigrate other people's beliefs you know they said like the native folks were savages and they were wild and it's like as when i was older and i was like how you how you so audacious to tell somebody else that the way they practice their faith is wild and uh it's idolatry or something well and non-legitimate right yes yeah and so that's super problematic i mean just native americans even from the beginning just walking in onto the soil and saying these are all savages it's like such a eurocentric thing but it's also to me it also smacks of a convenient excuse to then visit depredations and murder on another culture and to take what is theirs like the you know and a lot of the i see like a lot of the new world peoples they the land was to be shared by everyone and even if this tribe said that this is their boundaries it wasn't like they owned it this was the boundaries given to them by you know mother earth father sky or whoever their deity is to take care of and it's fascinating to me that the bible does talk about being stewards of the earth and the way many western christians practice christianity there's no stewardship there's take take take take take like you said that degradation of what's there ever since i was little i would always ask but why why does you know why do we believe that why do we do that why do we say that why why why why and it's like well go read your bible and pray and reading my bible and praying never really gave me the answer it's like i've read the bible from cover to cover you still haven't explained to me why this is the only way to salvation i'm like there's plenty of people who say they believe in god and they say but they believe that jesus is their savior but they don't act like it and then there's the the the my friend the hindu who goes and feeds people on the weekend because they believe that that's their duty as a human and then there's the you know my friend the muslim who gives alms every week because they believe that that is their duty and maybe they're doing it out of duty but people often don't do things you know they still they know it's a duty and it's what makes them a good person so they do it but because they don't believe in your savior they're somehow damned and i'm like yeah i'm gonna be in the car with them because i i don't i don't believe that i mean i've always been of the mind that you know if there is this great god that has created the universe and our world and everything else that we can see it shows a distinct lack of imagination on god's part to really only be into one religion because humans are so diverse and i think you can really see the beauty and the expansiveness and the generosity of this greater being who supposedly created all of us you can see the dynamic nature of that force in every human being that's ever been created so why would that dynamic force limit itself put itself in a box and say there's only one way to reach me i mean to me that that's like completely absurd how did you decide to join the military i'm so curious i wanted to serve so originally i was going to i wanted to become a foreign service officer you know fascinated by being able to serve but also i get to travel and go to different countries i mean there was an ulterior motive but it was like okay i can two birds with one stone i can serve my country but then i can also you know maybe i'll get posted to you know spain or or paris you know france or somewhere fabulous understanding that i'd also get posted to you know the backwater someday i might end up in kazakhstan or something but you have to take with the you know the supposedly good with the bad everything has its um ups and downs at the time i didn't have my citizenship so in order for you to be a consular officer you have to be a citizen i talked to somebody and they were like my my options were what do i do now like i this is what i want to do but i can't do it until my citizenship comes through and it was in the making and a couple more years after after that so i said you know what in the meantime i wasn't working at the time i had uh i'd gotten laid off so i finished off i was finishing off my degree like you know what i'll join the military it'll give me kind of that cred of a military background to then go to the consular service but you know and also get a paycheck the marines in their uniforms look badass and and um when i i called all the different services because my brother had gone to the air force i was like i called his recruiter he never got back to me i wasn't even really aware of the marines that much it was i was going to school or leaving my campus one day and then i ran into this dude in his fabulous uniform and took his card and got in touch with him so i ended up in the marines in your email you made mention of this kind of transcendent experience that you had while you were in afghanistan iraq like yeah i'm sorry iraq first of all i'd love to hear about that experience but did that also shift your your understanding and belief in your place in the universe i think it did um and so how how how that happened so this base was a huge base like to get from one side of the base to the other you had to get on a vehicle like there was no walking it i think from where we lived to where the chow hall was like a mile mile long walk so some people were lucky to have vehicles in the middle of summer when it was 107 degrees and you had to go to the chow hall in the middle of the day some of us just just chose not to eat lunch because we wasn't trying to go on that walk but one of the beautiful things about being there it's like people think that you're always you're kind of always on on guard but not to the extent everybody's not on guard the same way if you're not on guard duty looking out you're you're not going to be at that same level of alertness so at night you know you're coming from chow evening child usually there's a group of people nobody ever really walked alone it was rare to see somebody walking like strolling alone it was like if they were walking alone they were walking at a brisk pace because they had to get back somewhere but if you saw like two or three or four people usually they're walking a lot slower because they're finished with probably work for the day they're heading back to do something maybe go to the gym or go back to their their birthing or whatever occasionally late at night you know if you can't sleep or even if you just don't want to be around people that was the beautiful thing you could just take a walk and you know it's always like don't go too far you know there's the third country national guard you don't know you know you're a girl things can happen and it doesn't necessarily mean it's one of the third country nationals that can be doing the thing you walked around with an m16 all the time so it's not like you were just walking along arm swinging no i had a m16 slung all the time there was a a magazine carrier on the butt stock of it so if i needed to i probably could take the magazine load it in and unload some rounds but you were you weren't supposed to put your magazine in unless directed to but you had it at all times so there was that aspect of always being basically armed and ready to respond in a fight and then you're walking in the moonlight looking at the different buildings in the distance and after a couple of times and then you'd see the sunsets oh my god the sunsets and sunrises were magnificent and you probably experienced some of it being in the desert area like those sunsets like if you've never experienced it before it was like wow this is you know the colors it you know and then depending on if there was a sandstorm or something you might get like a really red sunlight sunset going into purple so that was you know and it was just like when you were there like if you spent any time in iraq in a firm base and a firm base is one that's just more fortified so it's less likely to be attacked because they got guns on the on the walls ready for people if you spent any time in a firm base like that and you did not stop to take in the sunrise or sunset or just the twinkle into the stars i don't i question your humanity but after a while you start you do contemplate your place in the universe because the universe actually the it looks it seems closer i think maybe it's because of where you are in the world there's not that light pollution so it really does feel like you could reach up and touch the black velvet sky it really did feel like that and you would reach up and you can't touch it but it felt like that i just remember it was one like moonlit not moonlit it was one new moon but it was still so bright because the stars were so close you know from my time there the sunsets the sunrises the the the dark you know the when the moon was full to when there was no moon it was just like are we alone here in the universe and when you see that it's like these these are the stars we can see and this is our universe you know with the milky or our galaxy the milky way galaxy but the milky way galaxy is part of you know a super cluster which is then part of an you know another cluster in this whole big universe and i'm like we're not alone you know and i'm like we're not alone and whoever's out there isn't coming to greet us because we ain't ready it i i missed that that that sky and i got it i was i was so incredibly fortunate to then be on a ship in the middle of the pacific and indian ocean and experience that big full moon and sitting there like are we alone we're not alone it also influenced that so this big god of ours right there's only one way to pray to him he made the moon so it could look so pretty and then the stars and then he made us all smart that we're on this big vessel in the middle of the pacific but there's only one way to and you know it's like one of the it's like those thoughts you have kind of like those one-off you're like sometimes it right it doesn't sit right with you and you go back to observing the pretty sky and just let because it's one of those thoughts that if you sit with it too long it starts disturbing your spirit in a way so it's just like you know what i'm gonna go back to looking at the pretty moon or the pretty stars or what have you but once you've had it you can't let go of it and then as i went on and you know i got more into my studies and like i said it was one it's like it's building um kind of like a little part you know you take the little lego blocks and you put it together and you build something bigger so it's kind of like i feel like my journey from jesus freak because i back in my teenage early 20s i was a jesus freak i would have i would proudly have claimed it you know i was a holy roller you know but that was then now i'm more of a i don't know i don't know what in terms of faith and spirituality i'm not sure how or what to describe myself i think i'm still on my journey of really deciding what i am there but i just know that one we're not alone two that whatever the creator the creative spirit that brought us all into being i feel it leans very feminine because i feel like the creative spirit is definitely female leaning and i'm still on it's part of my journey i guess think about like maybe the nomadic tribes in the desert who wander underneath a big beautiful moon why would they ever want any other belief system than they would they have and the life they live who are we to go in there and tell them that their perception is wrong that ours is the best one i would hope to get to a place where i am more accepting of people's differences because i i don't think i'm fully there yet there's there's certain areas in the in in just human beings where i'm just like i don't know that seemed like a little crazy but then i have to sit with myself and say why are you reacting that way to somebody else's lived experience that's their experience and i think for me one of the ways in which i i'm choosing to go forward is like i'm okay with your lived experience don't try to take mine away as a female woman in the world female born woman identified that is my experience in the world i will fight you for it i will also fight for you to have your own existence you know as whatever you identify or however you describe yourself and i think you know that's what the creator wants of us it's a journey just don't believe it's a journey and it's something that i do have to sit with sometimes that your way is not the best way and it's but it's also it's not the only way because i'm a virgo and apparently virgos tend to be very my ways the best way and i'm like i'm not like that and you know my therapist had to let me know that i was wrong in my that i might want to rethink that that point of view i know but virgos get stuff done it's a true story virgos get stuff done i mean look at beyonce she's a virgo michael jackson was a virgo this has been episode 33 of bite-sized blessings the podcast all about the magic and spirit that surrounds us if only we open our eyes to it i need to thank my charming guest today mikle littlefoot for sharing her story with me as well as the creators of the music used chilled music frank schroeder rafael crux music l files kevin mcleod music hauled and jole lupes for complete attribution please see the bite-sized blessings website at bite-sized blessings. Com on the website you'll find links to authors music and change makers i think will lift and inspire you thank you for listening and usually at the end i make a request of you some way to be like the guest i've just interviewed but with this episode i'd like to leave with a quotation that mikle has said has changed her life the quotation is from the bhagavad gita chapter 2 verse 20 the soul is neither born nor does it ever die nor having once existed does it ever cease to be the soul is without birth eternal immortal and ageless it is not destroyed when the body is destroyed so i guess here's my one request live with this idea that the soul is eternal and you will never cease to be you