Sometimes we want freedom of choice. Sometimes we want freedom from choice. It seems to be that as the Wheel of Fortune spins we want what is on the other side coming down. Sometimes we get dizzy from all the spinning as it all slides out of our conscious control.
I am aware of anniversaries. To a codependent person, anniversaries are dangerous shadowed time, when the past encroaches upon the future, propelling us out of the now and into thoughts and patterns that seem more real than reality. I am thinking of April Fool's Day 2003, when I left my first husband.
I am also remembering another leave-taking, or a day just before it happened. My sister, who had been an integral part of my separation, taking me me into her home while I prepared for my divorce, was moving away from New England and beginning the precarious journey to the West Coast to join her husband in Oregon. She had stayed behind for our family's annual reunion at our aunt's house in Vermont that was nestled beside a beautiful man-made pond. There were kayaks and paddle-boats and other small watercraft bobbing in the water.
My niece and nephews had no qualms taking off onto the pond by themselves. I wanted to enjoy the gorgeous July day but I had no experience at all with kayaks. Having capsized the Sunfish with my ex-husband, I was leery of small boats and certain I would end up unintentionally in the drink. There was a two-person kayak. My sister took her youngest son out for a spin, then came back for me. She was the veteran adventurer of the family, battling with rubber bumpers to protect our drifting sailboat from crashing into other boats at the same time that I was dreamily scribbling poetic descriptions of the New York skyline into my travelogue. So of course I felt safe with her.
How lovely it was to see the sunlight sparkle on the water on that long summer day. We rowed together, speaking some but mostly secure in companionable silence, gazing at the tall water reeds, watching the childrens' good-natured rough-housing, drowsing in the heat. I knew she was going away, that she would no longer be just 20 minutes over country roads whenever I needed her. That day was tinged with sadness, especially when after a few revolutions she spun us back up to the dock and got out of the kayak.
She took off her lifejacket and tossed me the oar.
"Now you have the freedom of the water," she said. I sat there with a sinking feeling in my gut. How could I go out by myself? I've never done this before in my life, not by myself. But her confidence somehow outshone my confusion. I shoved back out onto the pond. I went out by myself for another hour. I enjoyed paddling at my own pace. I let myself be lulled by the meditative stillness of circling the known perimeter of the pond. I left my anxiety back on the land and lost myself in the tranquility of the water.
Now I have the freedom of the water. I am pondering what that freedom means. I am trying to find the tenuous tranquility that I knew on that gorgeous bittersweet day.
Freedom is not something encouraged in little girls or the women they grow up to be. At least not in our culture. How delighted and surprised I was when a friend showed me this video about the women of the Mosuo , an obscure matrilineal ethnic group in rural China that gives adolescent girls unprecedented freedom in choosing their own sexual and romantic partners. Unlike in traditional Chinese families, where girl children are considered a burden until they are married off, these girls are raised in tribe-like families of women and uncles with very little emphasis on fathers. To a Westerner's eye they seem to get the best of both worlds-song and dance and romance on a Saturday night and a place at a big family table. In a way they are living in a similar way to some single mothers I know who have social lives on an every-other-weekend basis, when the fathers take over the parental responsibilities and the women let themselves live semi-single lives.
Yet the children of the Mosuo do not lack anything with this absence of fathers. They are doted on by their uncles and raised by their mothers family. They don't sacrifice freedom for security in traditional marriages. Their confidence reminds me of my own college days when in addition to study we could experiment with ourselves and our identities. Far away from parental influence, we could exist in this limited time-span where the joys and responsibilities of personal choice could be taken for granted. From this place of confidence we could choose careers, choose life partners, choose to have or not have children.
Of course in the Mosuo culture it is all about the children. The Mosuo women are not Britney Spears-- they are hard-working economic providers. Our own culture does not have such a built-in-support system for mothers. In tight nuclear units we are supposed to somehow face all these pressures single-handed, as well as hold down an equal-paying job. Is it any wonder I opted out the joys and challenges of motherhood for myself? But for the unmarried woman, especially as she ages, what hope does she have of finding love and connection of a less temporary nature than choice-and-emotion-driven romance? If men are biologically driven to abandon the known for the new and shiny, is freedom for women just another word for nothing left to lose? Or is true love not found in the pair-bond but in the larger community?
As I was pondering those questions while considering getting married for the second time, I became obsessed with a certain fictional matriarchal TV community found on "The L Word" . While certainly the drama was campy and the sex scenes over-the-top, there was something wonderfully rewarding about the sense of friendship and community the women shared with each other, love that transcended romance, but was more about lasting commitment to each other's growth. Before this fictional representation of fem-powered tribe there was "Sex In The City" , a fun 90's exploratory romp through the locker-room talk of gal pals whose glamourous surface hid an underbelly of existential angst: If the ultimate quest was to find the "One", as the notches on the belt and the candles on the birthday cake added up, these "girls" had a Sisyphean task ahead of them as the brass ring of married happiness got farther and farther away. Watching them became painful more than joyful--no wonder I rallied to the you-go-sister spirit of the L Word where they would faced real issues like breast cancer and military discrimination, where they fought for human rights not the perfect pair of shoes.
So now I find myself wanting to dig deeper, use my passion and my freedom not just to acquire an endless string of romantic partners or personal ego satisfaction but to support causes like The 99% Spring and dare to see community as something bigger than tribe, something more than a few voices raised in prayer or song in churches or yoga studios, something like the movements of Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi... nonviolent direct action creating community and expanding freedom to something more than just the individual pursuit of happiness or security through material acquisition. I missed the protests of the 60's and this is my chance to be part of something bigger. Having been given the gift of choice, I will advocate for the choices of others. Having decided against biological motherhood I will bring forth the nurturing warrior energy I found in the internal sacred space of the Red Tent Temple and give something back of my self that will transcend myself.
I have found the freedom of the water, looking out at the hard-working harbor, not as a tourist at the edge of a pleasure lake at the other side of the world. And I will not relinquish it any time soon.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
Solar Flare: Rebound in a Bottle
I remember my friend's sense of awe when I told him about the magical little black box called a Roku which would stream your Netflix queque live to your TV set, bringing instant gratification to your viewing experience. Now we can stream live from a cell phone, a computer, a blue ray player or a tablet but only a few years ago that seemed like a dragon's hoard of digital gold. Woah, he said, that's like Videocrack!
And indeed for the sad and searching souls, nothing can be so addictive as the illusionary social circle of a good television show. For me the most recently discovered (for time means nothing in the age of instant digital archives) addiction came in the form of the short-lived teen drama, My So-Called Life . Played with lip-quivering, luminous vulnerability by Claire Daines, this ground-breaking and short-lived show featured a creature as rare as a unicorn in all of televison, let along TV aimed at 90's teens: a bonafide introvert as protagonist. In the first episode, Angela, in an act of incredulous rebellion, dies her mouse-brown hair red with the help of her new friend, the Enkidu to her girlish Gilgamesh, the brash, alcoholic, trashy and irrepressibly likeable Rayanne.
Who among us absorbed, fantasy-prone scribbling dreamers hasn't had at least one aserbically outgoing friend who did not coax us out of our shell but dragged us kicking and screaming? Rayanne is both shadow and soulmate, swapping shoes and sharing gossip in that heads-together, enmeshed way of female friends who earnestly need each other, wanting to be each other and complete each other yet who bond through snide camaraderie yet never reveal the naked vulnerability underneath their fuck-it-all attitudes. Angela witnesses her self-destructive friend party her way into the hospital. She is there through the recovery process, goody-two-shoes gadfly, virgin firebrand to Rayanne's Mary Magdalene. And although this doesn't go in Sapphic direction of the delightful romance The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Girls In Love, when Rayanne beds Angela's broody-eyed boy obsession in a torrent of envy and misplaced identification, and Angela withdraws into the horror of being betrayed by her best friend. It is in this moment that we know their friendship is not without its introverted fire. Rayanne is Angela's sexual initiator when she blurts out, catching the direction of her friends furtive glances, "YOU WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH JORDAN CATALANO"....
Then Angela responds with the line that seared her forever into my heart: "Sex or a conversation" and I remembered my own worshipful adolescence, when those two things were equally improbable with a boy that had caught my eye, my heart, my poetic soul.
So in my moment of contemplation of conscious uncoupling from my long-term relationship when I needed a burst of inspiration of courage, of course I thought of my own beloved mutineer, my angry-young-Irishwoman, the Rayanne to my Angela who with solicitious friendliness at work penetrated the Neutral Zone between our cubicles and enlisted my opinion, my assistance, and, though she didn't know it, my eternal loyalty. She is brash, loud, sometimes needs a muzzle or a leash dropping names with aplomb at the local pub, where I naively assume she knows the people she engages in confrontational conversation. (It turns out she rarely actually does). And though our friendship has been fraught with its own codependent/addict power struggle, when I went to her house last night it was not for a restorative night on the town or a whisky-bolstered personal growth session into the wee hours it is with a bottle of cheap Intense Red hair dye from the Rite Aid down the street from the office where we both used to work.
She grins at my absurdity, as her tastes run from sporty Amanda Bynes comedies like She's The Man to cop dramas with strong female leads, and she probably would not get My So-Called Life at all, her own tough love hard-knocks story would give no credence to Angela's cloistered, suburban world. But there she is, earnestly typing away to meet the midnight deadline of her criminal justice class, calling up cops for esoteric knowledge of search warrants to get the insider's edge over the other students. Cutthroat, determined, she's still got that Irish fire even with her head bent to the academic grinstone and not blurting blarney in some pub. But now its concentrated with lazer beam focus and I now know that passion was wasted in interoffice triangulated battles between of absent parents, overachiver, slacker and the poor bastard in the middle (me)--hard fought battles that seemed to evaporate after she left.
So she lends me a pre-stained dye towel and continues her homework sipping on a lite beer. I go into the bathroom, bottle in hand, not knowing what will emerge after the sitting and rinsing, a Dark Phoenix or Bozo the clown. We all know introverts are drawn to but terrified of any intensity and this Intense Red is my flag of warning and rebellion, my rebound out of self-inflicted emotional bondage into self-directed freedom. In the CSI scene I could see Dexter's Ophelia floating in the water as my vampire tears drained. But I was determined to honor transition and turn over my own leaf from green hope to crimson surrender. So I watched "the waters turn/from blue to red/as to the sky I offer it" as in the anthem of terror transformed into power "Rabbit Heart" by ginger-powered Florence and her mystical Machine.
But the thing about self-sacrifice is you never know if it is about suicide or salvation when the knife goes in. You only know it when you rise. And so I dried my hair and saw myself in the mirror with the strange alienation of all introverts when confronting their own outsides. I saw my mother, going bald at 40 liberated by her love of wigs and weaves, chosing her artifical crowning glory with the nonchalance of the elegant black women with impeccable suits and interchangeable hair extensions. I saw Bonnie Raitt, balm to heartbroken women everywhere and I remembered me and Rachel (a May West-like bodacious Rayanne from my timid college days) bonding over alcohol and country ballads. I saw my complexion get a little more dramatic, the lines around my eyes get a little deeper, a little older. I was sexy and sovereign. Like Angela, I knew I wasn't a little girl anymore.
I spent some time with my friend in casual, but heartfelt conversation, was admired as Ariel the crimson mermaid by her daughters, played trivia games on the big TV. I drove home in the insubstantial, magical snow and for the first time in a long time wanted to go home, not crash on her couch in order have to face the lonliness of an empty apartment. At home were the cats, the ocean, the sun in the morning to show my the glory of my new mane. I spent a weekend of kirtan on Saturday, and on Sunday played in the park with priestesses, avatars of Artemis and Peter Pan scrambling over rocks, honoring the ocean, sparkling incandescent waves rich with red algae. And to crown my weekend I went to a watering hole in Manchester-by-the-Sea to get my fix of folk music and share some poetry.
When I got there, I didn't know what to expect. I was shunning the bar scene, but Will and Janice are Gloucester music staples and when I got Janice's email I did a little dance of glee to catch a glimpse of the silver-haired flower child I whose music mesmerized me by the river's edge at the Essex Folk Festival in 2010. What I found was a three-fold interweave of women's voices--maiden, mother, crone--singing "Rhiannon" and sending shivers down my witchy spine. At the center was, you guessed it, my next Rayanne, a brash, irrepresible 56 year old grandmother of four and music scene veteran who invited me to sing harmony, who allowed me to pour conspiratorally through her sheet music and see her original songs, who lured me with that over-the-top interpersonal enthusiasm--those smiles, those bright eyes, those casual hand-touches--that we introverts tragically never really learn isn't personal at all.
"Are you on Facebook?", I asked, speaking of the introvert's senior prom, where the socially inept can share the floor with prom queens and kings in a one-sided epistolary waltz.
"Facebook!", she laughed, blasting into my face, "You might just as well walk naked down main street!" I laughed hard with her infectious braying, only crushed a little. You see I was already envisioning earning her friendship and trust through sharing You Tube videos of obscure folk covers and getting invites to private gigs with local legends. Entranced and rejected at once, I felt the hook, my truest eternal slow dance with Rayanne. I knew that I had found something wider, deeper sweeter and more piercing that anything I could have found going after a man with a belly full of liquid courage and vengeance in my heart. She admired my hair.. "Rebound in a bottle" I quipped, "best guilt-free remedy for a breakup. She said hey that's a great line for a song!"
I knew I would be back again in that local bar with those fearless, friendly honky tonk women. And maybe I would raise my timid Joni-Mitchell/Sandy Denny soprano in shared song and become the rocking Queens of Wands who had come before --Bonnie Raitt, Kate Bush, Tori Amos and lately Florence with or without her Machine.
I knew I would come back the next Sunday.
Wild horses couldn't drag me away.
And indeed for the sad and searching souls, nothing can be so addictive as the illusionary social circle of a good television show. For me the most recently discovered (for time means nothing in the age of instant digital archives) addiction came in the form of the short-lived teen drama, My So-Called Life . Played with lip-quivering, luminous vulnerability by Claire Daines, this ground-breaking and short-lived show featured a creature as rare as a unicorn in all of televison, let along TV aimed at 90's teens: a bonafide introvert as protagonist. In the first episode, Angela, in an act of incredulous rebellion, dies her mouse-brown hair red with the help of her new friend, the Enkidu to her girlish Gilgamesh, the brash, alcoholic, trashy and irrepressibly likeable Rayanne.
Who among us absorbed, fantasy-prone scribbling dreamers hasn't had at least one aserbically outgoing friend who did not coax us out of our shell but dragged us kicking and screaming? Rayanne is both shadow and soulmate, swapping shoes and sharing gossip in that heads-together, enmeshed way of female friends who earnestly need each other, wanting to be each other and complete each other yet who bond through snide camaraderie yet never reveal the naked vulnerability underneath their fuck-it-all attitudes. Angela witnesses her self-destructive friend party her way into the hospital. She is there through the recovery process, goody-two-shoes gadfly, virgin firebrand to Rayanne's Mary Magdalene. And although this doesn't go in Sapphic direction of the delightful romance The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Girls In Love, when Rayanne beds Angela's broody-eyed boy obsession in a torrent of envy and misplaced identification, and Angela withdraws into the horror of being betrayed by her best friend. It is in this moment that we know their friendship is not without its introverted fire. Rayanne is Angela's sexual initiator when she blurts out, catching the direction of her friends furtive glances, "YOU WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH JORDAN CATALANO"....
Then Angela responds with the line that seared her forever into my heart: "Sex or a conversation" and I remembered my own worshipful adolescence, when those two things were equally improbable with a boy that had caught my eye, my heart, my poetic soul.
So in my moment of contemplation of conscious uncoupling from my long-term relationship when I needed a burst of inspiration of courage, of course I thought of my own beloved mutineer, my angry-young-Irishwoman, the Rayanne to my Angela who with solicitious friendliness at work penetrated the Neutral Zone between our cubicles and enlisted my opinion, my assistance, and, though she didn't know it, my eternal loyalty. She is brash, loud, sometimes needs a muzzle or a leash dropping names with aplomb at the local pub, where I naively assume she knows the people she engages in confrontational conversation. (It turns out she rarely actually does). And though our friendship has been fraught with its own codependent/addict power struggle, when I went to her house last night it was not for a restorative night on the town or a whisky-bolstered personal growth session into the wee hours it is with a bottle of cheap Intense Red hair dye from the Rite Aid down the street from the office where we both used to work.
She grins at my absurdity, as her tastes run from sporty Amanda Bynes comedies like She's The Man to cop dramas with strong female leads, and she probably would not get My So-Called Life at all, her own tough love hard-knocks story would give no credence to Angela's cloistered, suburban world. But there she is, earnestly typing away to meet the midnight deadline of her criminal justice class, calling up cops for esoteric knowledge of search warrants to get the insider's edge over the other students. Cutthroat, determined, she's still got that Irish fire even with her head bent to the academic grinstone and not blurting blarney in some pub. But now its concentrated with lazer beam focus and I now know that passion was wasted in interoffice triangulated battles between of absent parents, overachiver, slacker and the poor bastard in the middle (me)--hard fought battles that seemed to evaporate after she left.
So she lends me a pre-stained dye towel and continues her homework sipping on a lite beer. I go into the bathroom, bottle in hand, not knowing what will emerge after the sitting and rinsing, a Dark Phoenix or Bozo the clown. We all know introverts are drawn to but terrified of any intensity and this Intense Red is my flag of warning and rebellion, my rebound out of self-inflicted emotional bondage into self-directed freedom. In the CSI scene I could see Dexter's Ophelia floating in the water as my vampire tears drained. But I was determined to honor transition and turn over my own leaf from green hope to crimson surrender. So I watched "the waters turn/from blue to red/as to the sky I offer it" as in the anthem of terror transformed into power "Rabbit Heart" by ginger-powered Florence and her mystical Machine.
But the thing about self-sacrifice is you never know if it is about suicide or salvation when the knife goes in. You only know it when you rise. And so I dried my hair and saw myself in the mirror with the strange alienation of all introverts when confronting their own outsides. I saw my mother, going bald at 40 liberated by her love of wigs and weaves, chosing her artifical crowning glory with the nonchalance of the elegant black women with impeccable suits and interchangeable hair extensions. I saw Bonnie Raitt, balm to heartbroken women everywhere and I remembered me and Rachel (a May West-like bodacious Rayanne from my timid college days) bonding over alcohol and country ballads. I saw my complexion get a little more dramatic, the lines around my eyes get a little deeper, a little older. I was sexy and sovereign. Like Angela, I knew I wasn't a little girl anymore.
I spent some time with my friend in casual, but heartfelt conversation, was admired as Ariel the crimson mermaid by her daughters, played trivia games on the big TV. I drove home in the insubstantial, magical snow and for the first time in a long time wanted to go home, not crash on her couch in order have to face the lonliness of an empty apartment. At home were the cats, the ocean, the sun in the morning to show my the glory of my new mane. I spent a weekend of kirtan on Saturday, and on Sunday played in the park with priestesses, avatars of Artemis and Peter Pan scrambling over rocks, honoring the ocean, sparkling incandescent waves rich with red algae. And to crown my weekend I went to a watering hole in Manchester-by-the-Sea to get my fix of folk music and share some poetry.
When I got there, I didn't know what to expect. I was shunning the bar scene, but Will and Janice are Gloucester music staples and when I got Janice's email I did a little dance of glee to catch a glimpse of the silver-haired flower child I whose music mesmerized me by the river's edge at the Essex Folk Festival in 2010. What I found was a three-fold interweave of women's voices--maiden, mother, crone--singing "Rhiannon" and sending shivers down my witchy spine. At the center was, you guessed it, my next Rayanne, a brash, irrepresible 56 year old grandmother of four and music scene veteran who invited me to sing harmony, who allowed me to pour conspiratorally through her sheet music and see her original songs, who lured me with that over-the-top interpersonal enthusiasm--those smiles, those bright eyes, those casual hand-touches--that we introverts tragically never really learn isn't personal at all.
"Are you on Facebook?", I asked, speaking of the introvert's senior prom, where the socially inept can share the floor with prom queens and kings in a one-sided epistolary waltz.
"Facebook!", she laughed, blasting into my face, "You might just as well walk naked down main street!" I laughed hard with her infectious braying, only crushed a little. You see I was already envisioning earning her friendship and trust through sharing You Tube videos of obscure folk covers and getting invites to private gigs with local legends. Entranced and rejected at once, I felt the hook, my truest eternal slow dance with Rayanne. I knew that I had found something wider, deeper sweeter and more piercing that anything I could have found going after a man with a belly full of liquid courage and vengeance in my heart. She admired my hair.. "Rebound in a bottle" I quipped, "best guilt-free remedy for a breakup. She said hey that's a great line for a song!"
I knew I would be back again in that local bar with those fearless, friendly honky tonk women. And maybe I would raise my timid Joni-Mitchell/Sandy Denny soprano in shared song and become the rocking Queens of Wands who had come before --Bonnie Raitt, Kate Bush, Tori Amos and lately Florence with or without her Machine.
I knew I would come back the next Sunday.
Wild horses couldn't drag me away.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Poem: Dungeon Warrior, Come Home
For Jay E.
In the coffee house
I conceal my shame behind greenery
like a recent exile from Eden
I hear the local kids playing magic cards
the place is crackling with youth
and numb electronica
and I remember one of your few refusals
you wouldn't go with me to the Celtic Festival
because it was likely to be haunted
by kids in cloaks playing Magic cards
I said it's July
they will have kilts not cloaks
and no one will be playing magic cards
but you would have none of it
so we hung out in front of the computer
in your Dad's basement
and I called your Dad's house
But you're not there now
you're out Occupying something somewhere
no longer under stucco stalactites
You burst out of the bum leg and the cobweb dungeon
you're out there sleeping rough in protest
kicked out of Worcester in solidarity- now Providence
what's next?
Jacksonville?
the tropics is hardly austere enough for a martyr
what's left? Occupy Disney
Mickie and Minne, agents of the evil empire, are in conspiracy
concealing vaults where Walts frozen corpse
dreams its Nazi cartoons?
Or are you picking off chiggers under Spanish moss
sprawled in some swamp
like a batshit folk hero in a Carl Hiassen novel
Where are you?
The internet is not enough
I need you here
solid Panda presence
I need to drink molten ice cream cocoa
down in the basement
surrounded by by 300 year old trees
a tame german shepherd
and the red liquid sky where cell phones don't work
Where are you?
I need the radio silence of another sad heart
under my swollen head
I need to be cradled by hands that still know how to
pick broken things off the ground
I am that thing with feathers after it smashes
against what is
Come back here and occupy my couch
foment revolution among the seagulls
I'm no longer the hurtling Phoenix
just your wounded bird
it hurts too much to burn
3/7/2012
In the coffee house
I conceal my shame behind greenery
like a recent exile from Eden
I hear the local kids playing magic cards
the place is crackling with youth
and numb electronica
and I remember one of your few refusals
you wouldn't go with me to the Celtic Festival
because it was likely to be haunted
by kids in cloaks playing Magic cards
I said it's July
they will have kilts not cloaks
and no one will be playing magic cards
but you would have none of it
so we hung out in front of the computer
in your Dad's basement
and I called your Dad's house
But you're not there now
you're out Occupying something somewhere
no longer under stucco stalactites
You burst out of the bum leg and the cobweb dungeon
you're out there sleeping rough in protest
kicked out of Worcester in solidarity- now Providence
what's next?
Jacksonville?
the tropics is hardly austere enough for a martyr
what's left? Occupy Disney
Mickie and Minne, agents of the evil empire, are in conspiracy
concealing vaults where Walts frozen corpse
dreams its Nazi cartoons?
Or are you picking off chiggers under Spanish moss
sprawled in some swamp
like a batshit folk hero in a Carl Hiassen novel
Where are you?
The internet is not enough
I need you here
solid Panda presence
I need to drink molten ice cream cocoa
down in the basement
surrounded by by 300 year old trees
a tame german shepherd
and the red liquid sky where cell phones don't work
Where are you?
I need the radio silence of another sad heart
under my swollen head
I need to be cradled by hands that still know how to
pick broken things off the ground
I am that thing with feathers after it smashes
against what is
Come back here and occupy my couch
foment revolution among the seagulls
I'm no longer the hurtling Phoenix
just your wounded bird
it hurts too much to burn
3/7/2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Surrender Value
There is perhaps an aspect of arrogance in starting a blog. I agonized for a long time what my topic would be... would it be based on something I have personal knowledge of, a passion for, or an experience I have had? Would it be a medium for poetry, prose, a kind of shout into the void like my previous online adventures on livejournal and the now-defunct but loved in memory diaryland? What to write about? What is it that drives me, what is the seed that is germinating that I share with the world? What is my higher purpose? I am blessed to have so many different sources of loving community-- The Red Tent Temple Movement, more recently the Earth Spirit Community and Rites of Spring, the Human Awareness Institute, and via HAI the Shalom Community, my spiritual path of 20 years ago that miraculously returned to me, Blue Star Wicca... it would seem like in the course of two years of personal growth that started with things as various as Weight Watchers and reading The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron I have found a treasure trove of communities so different but all centered around the idea of tribe, higher love, integrating male and female, Eros and Agape, sexuality and spiritual, nature and nurture.
So with so much in the mix where do I begin? With hobbies, like my eclectic and painstakingly collected music mix of over 65,000 tracks on Itunes? I briefly toyed with a music blog, but I could not take the stick pin of critical analysis and stab it into the butterfly of what music is for me. With new passions of which I have little skill but great enthusiasm, like tribal belly dancing lessons with Aepril Schaille ?
The old adage says "write what you know" and so I am doing just that. Perhaps what I want to address with this blog is how to integrate all of these light and dark aspects, how to heal myself and heal the world by shedding light on the cobwebbed corners of my soul.
Right now I am coming to realize that what inspires me, what breaks and expands my heart are the complex interweaving of human beings in relationships- whether they are traditional married couples, gays and lesbians, all of the many spectrums of polyamorous relationships-- and I have been a student and a spectator of relationships from when I was very young. So I want this blog to talk about relationships, from as many angles as I feel called to explore-- most especially for the time being the relationship I am forming with myself and my own needs in the long journey out of the shadow of codependency which has led to the downfall of my most recent long-term relationship.
As I was contemplating how to let go with love and good will I became pressed with the financial realities of uncoupling, how crippling it can feel when your long-term plans suddenly evaporate and you are left with sorting out the massive debt involved sometimes in the end of an assumed life partnership even when it does not end with marriage. I have been divorced before, and I know there is always a "price to pay to get away" and when the time comes I am not afraid to pay it just as in the high of new love energy I over-give and under-plan. Perhaps we need to re-think the future, and while I was lying in bed not sleeping struggling with these survival fears I heard a phrase that sounded like the voice of an angel whispering over the quiet waves:
Surrender Value
There is nothing mystical about this phrase- it refers to the amount you get back when you cash in an annuity, as I am planning to do. But I thought about the emotional cost that I have paid, and how I can pay that forward as much as I can have the maximum taxes withheld so this emergent need won't penalize me next year.
As I surrender this love, I know what I have given, what I have saved, I know what I wanted my future to look like and that what I have now is peace and serenity but not the happily-ever-after story I craved. I also know what I am willing to pay for it-- in order to find that peace and serenity I have given up holding onto anger, resentment, and hope. All forms of attachment
So here in the wee hours, feeling at the brink of emotional and financial Armageddon, I am blessed with this one little phrase I will hold as a mantra through my first lonely nights and my early-onset triggers.
Surrender Value
I will pay it
I will let go
So with so much in the mix where do I begin? With hobbies, like my eclectic and painstakingly collected music mix of over 65,000 tracks on Itunes? I briefly toyed with a music blog, but I could not take the stick pin of critical analysis and stab it into the butterfly of what music is for me. With new passions of which I have little skill but great enthusiasm, like tribal belly dancing lessons with Aepril Schaille ?
The old adage says "write what you know" and so I am doing just that. Perhaps what I want to address with this blog is how to integrate all of these light and dark aspects, how to heal myself and heal the world by shedding light on the cobwebbed corners of my soul.
Right now I am coming to realize that what inspires me, what breaks and expands my heart are the complex interweaving of human beings in relationships- whether they are traditional married couples, gays and lesbians, all of the many spectrums of polyamorous relationships-- and I have been a student and a spectator of relationships from when I was very young. So I want this blog to talk about relationships, from as many angles as I feel called to explore-- most especially for the time being the relationship I am forming with myself and my own needs in the long journey out of the shadow of codependency which has led to the downfall of my most recent long-term relationship.
As I was contemplating how to let go with love and good will I became pressed with the financial realities of uncoupling, how crippling it can feel when your long-term plans suddenly evaporate and you are left with sorting out the massive debt involved sometimes in the end of an assumed life partnership even when it does not end with marriage. I have been divorced before, and I know there is always a "price to pay to get away" and when the time comes I am not afraid to pay it just as in the high of new love energy I over-give and under-plan. Perhaps we need to re-think the future, and while I was lying in bed not sleeping struggling with these survival fears I heard a phrase that sounded like the voice of an angel whispering over the quiet waves:
Surrender Value
There is nothing mystical about this phrase- it refers to the amount you get back when you cash in an annuity, as I am planning to do. But I thought about the emotional cost that I have paid, and how I can pay that forward as much as I can have the maximum taxes withheld so this emergent need won't penalize me next year.
As I surrender this love, I know what I have given, what I have saved, I know what I wanted my future to look like and that what I have now is peace and serenity but not the happily-ever-after story I craved. I also know what I am willing to pay for it-- in order to find that peace and serenity I have given up holding onto anger, resentment, and hope. All forms of attachment
So here in the wee hours, feeling at the brink of emotional and financial Armageddon, I am blessed with this one little phrase I will hold as a mantra through my first lonely nights and my early-onset triggers.
Surrender Value
I will pay it
I will let go
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Tenuous Sunshine
How do we balance sun and shadow, individual growth and community responsibility, sustainable safe relationships with exploration and adventure? How can I be a poet in every day life, fall in love with sunrises and seagulls and bars of soap like Billy Collins in his gorgeous poem Aimless Love that I first heard in a small seaside Unitarian Universalist church when I was looking to find acceptance and welcoming for my ragged pagan soul inside white clapboard walls.
How do we quiet the wild longings of the heart? Can a sea priestess don the mantle of a bride? For me I found my serenity at the edge of the sea, in the middle of a busy intersection. At 3 am the trucks are silent and I can hear the constant breath of the ocean lulling me, like the heartbeat of a mother or a lover or a living wide presence. I can watch from my window the dog-walkers and the seagulls and the pigeons. From this 2nd-floor vantage on the world, I am in that perfect balance between connectedness and remoteness.
Like Spalding Gray, in "Swimming to Cambodia," I am learning to know the sea.
The sea is a lovely lady when you play in Her,
but if you play With her, she's a bitch"
The bitch claimed his life, in the form of a river. Yet I still choose to walk in the footsteps of the artists, the writers, those who claim the edges of the world.
My ideal is the snowy egret who visits these waters, a unicorn bird whiter than it has any right to be against the brown mud of the waters of the Cut bridge, now only a few hundred feet from me. Watching the egrets, breathless as if visited by angels or aliens I saw the truth of grace in transition-- they do not land on water or land clumsy and heavy like a duck-- they simply flow from water to air, wings open, necks fluid, legs lifting effortless in slow motion.. there is no jarring moment of impact, as if they are held up by something more rarefied than gravity, they trust their bodies to the air, the water and the muddy embankment alike. I want to rise so gracefully between states, but it is that very longing that lifts me and keeps me hummingbird-frenzied wanting HERE to be THERE, THEN to be now.... The egrets, Buddha hunters who stand motionless waiting for prey even in the midst of storms that end weddings and send baseball players scurrying for cover... they have taught me what I need to know to dare to test my own edges.
That is why the ocean now is my dearest most constant companion. Perhaps I am a cat-- who falls in love with places and is indifferent to faces. Yet it is not because of lack of love it is that with love and a warm bed can come limitation of freedom, a loss of hunger and vitality.
Some of us need that to thrive, to live, to really see and hear the ocean and feel the sunshine that falls from heaven every day.
So I am here now, testing the waters, gathering sea-glass in storms. I am here serene and contained in the center of the maelstrom. I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
More Later
Blessed Be
http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Aimless_Love.html
How do we quiet the wild longings of the heart? Can a sea priestess don the mantle of a bride? For me I found my serenity at the edge of the sea, in the middle of a busy intersection. At 3 am the trucks are silent and I can hear the constant breath of the ocean lulling me, like the heartbeat of a mother or a lover or a living wide presence. I can watch from my window the dog-walkers and the seagulls and the pigeons. From this 2nd-floor vantage on the world, I am in that perfect balance between connectedness and remoteness.
Like Spalding Gray, in "Swimming to Cambodia," I am learning to know the sea.
The sea is a lovely lady when you play in Her,
but if you play With her, she's a bitch"
The bitch claimed his life, in the form of a river. Yet I still choose to walk in the footsteps of the artists, the writers, those who claim the edges of the world.
My ideal is the snowy egret who visits these waters, a unicorn bird whiter than it has any right to be against the brown mud of the waters of the Cut bridge, now only a few hundred feet from me. Watching the egrets, breathless as if visited by angels or aliens I saw the truth of grace in transition-- they do not land on water or land clumsy and heavy like a duck-- they simply flow from water to air, wings open, necks fluid, legs lifting effortless in slow motion.. there is no jarring moment of impact, as if they are held up by something more rarefied than gravity, they trust their bodies to the air, the water and the muddy embankment alike. I want to rise so gracefully between states, but it is that very longing that lifts me and keeps me hummingbird-frenzied wanting HERE to be THERE, THEN to be now.... The egrets, Buddha hunters who stand motionless waiting for prey even in the midst of storms that end weddings and send baseball players scurrying for cover... they have taught me what I need to know to dare to test my own edges.
That is why the ocean now is my dearest most constant companion. Perhaps I am a cat-- who falls in love with places and is indifferent to faces. Yet it is not because of lack of love it is that with love and a warm bed can come limitation of freedom, a loss of hunger and vitality.
Some of us need that to thrive, to live, to really see and hear the ocean and feel the sunshine that falls from heaven every day.
So I am here now, testing the waters, gathering sea-glass in storms. I am here serene and contained in the center of the maelstrom. I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
More Later
Blessed Be
http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Aimless_Love.html
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