11/11/2016
Grey light is coming in through the window.
Two days after Trumpageddon we have Veteran's Day, a time to remember the sacrifices of the warriors, a time to pray for peace and safety for our loved ones who are shattered and frightened.
11/11
How many of us believe in synchronicities, numerology, the alchemical traces of the fingers of God caressing our everyday? 2;22 3:33 things lining up a glitch in the Matrix.
How many of us had a crisis of faith while our spiritual bypass derailed and our Divine Feminine failed to manifest in the 3rd dimension with the election of Hillary Clinton.
How many of us, mostly women, have been triggered into flashbacks of rape, assault, domestic abuse and horrifying reality of sexism and rape culture displayed in the alpha male bravado of Donald Trump.
How many of us, who defended Bernie against accusations of sexism by the Hillary camp, and refused to "vote our vaginas" were galvanized by our own secondary trauma by what we witnessed in the mansplaining, bull-baiting, woman-hating arena of the general election debates? Some of us who were reluctant supporters at best showed up in their sisterhood of travelling pantsuits and waited for the Demopublican Borg Queen who had seduced "rational" Republicans into voting from her watched woke women recall every creepy boss every grabby encounter every unsolicited dick pick and vowed to smash the patriarchy and shatter the glass ceiling at the voting booth?
I for one was grabbed by the pussy. My entire first three chakras were in fact psychically enflamed with indignation ever since this slugfest began.
The best man for the job was a woman, the most experienced, the most qualified woman was about to lose it to a blowhard and the old boy network. I had to watch the debates.I saw her tactics with Trump, the way she let him blunder her carefully set traps, the way she smirked like the cat who had just shat in Donald's shoes.
My rational, practical, businesslike, methodical side really loved her for it. Not in a Bernie way but I had to say she was grace under pressure, the way she shook him off her shoulders with disdain. Wanting the best for all my friends who would suffer from Trump and Pence's anti-gay and anti-woman policies, overturning Roe-V-Wade and ushering in the "Handmaid's Tale" return to woman-as-chattel or pussy-up-for-grabs, I conceded that she may be "establishment" she may be "inauthentic" but when the opposite was inexperienced and unstable I could deal with that. Get her in and hold her feet to the fire, go local Berniecrats.
I came late to Pantsuit Nation. But when I heard the heart-warming stories of multiple generations of women waiting for the opportunity to elect the first female president, when I read how she had sent inspiring notes to little girls about what they can become when I read about her listening sessions and her owning her mistakes and her work to learn about other nation's health care systems, when I watched the heart-breaking and strangely uplifting Michael Moore documentary "Trumpland" he put out at the eleventh hour for cheap money in a desperate attempt to reach out to the feel the pain of the economically devastated Trump supporters and tell the story of the human being beyond the demonized Hillbot, I started opening my heart to her and understanding her story. Michael Moores turn of heart came too late to inspire millennial fervor or prevent the Rust Belt Brexit he foresaw, the Electoral Blitzkrieg but it did make me understand what pressures had created her,, and the the human under that plastic Grandma smile.
She had to be better than any man to be believable, to be creditable, to succeed. She tried to transform her long-haired bespectacled legal dweeb authentic self into a Southern political wife. She made the cookies, and served the lemonade with poison on the side. She was the hero of my mother's generation, but she was so.... uncool. The adaptations she had made the dichotomous roles she had created did not compute. And thus she was "unlikeable", "inauthentic" despite the sleazy charm of her husband that had served him into making himself such an aw-shucks guy that we forgave him for his sexual peccadillos (not having a real narrative of sexual harassment),,,, We just wanted the Republican witch hunters off his back. After all, we rationalized, it was a '"political marriage" and between consenting adults.
The thing that made Obama stir the hearts of America and stand out starkly against Hillary Clinton's brittleness was his dignity, charm and inspiring rhetoric. He was the dream date to the political prom, looking so cool and dignified next to John McCain's angry old man who you thought might pop a vein in his heart on the podium. Gays are OK, and everybody gets health care. And how can you not get excited over "Yes We Can" or get that earworm out of your head? His symbol was Hope with a great American sunray. Of course we voted for Obama- all the cool kids were doing it. My friend said the best party of her life was the night he won the election, where an all black club opened its doors to whites and they celebrated together. It seemed like the battle was won, but the racist attacks on of "birtherism" continued as the resentments simmered underneath and the Republican obstructionism began.
He was adaptive too. He was the suave, funny black entertainer. He was a genteel Eddie Murphy leaving out the F-bombs relieving the pressure of racism with his clever diplomatic banter. We would never have elected an angry black man, so his cool made him a caramel-colored Kennedy. Hillary didn't have the same options. She had to transform from resentful scorned wife to cool steel Athena. A woman had to prove she was tough enough, had the stamina, a black man had to prove he was not angry. And they have both been equally rejected and embraced by the public for their personas.
Hillary's perceived lack of compassion which I believe comes from her social awkwardness and impossible task of defining a woman in power for an American audience, did not appeal to an audience of young voters looking for inspiration, though her tough acumen inspired my Mom's generation to vote for her. The same generation of working women who were still working into their retirement years, some of them lucky enough to have formed their own businesses, like my Mom, She found the passion in vocation that romance had left for dead. Having raised their kids and paid their dues, they were women with their own space, women with immaculate homes and empty beds. Or at least that is how I thought of it at the time. Voting for Hillary was voting for a woman who was good in her career but doomed in love. At the time my feminism was edging into third-wave sex positive feminism -- I already knew I was going to have a career, or at least a "job" had chosen a child-free life without domestic servitude thanks to modern birth control, but I wanted the possibility of romance too. Our moms didn't swear and had stopped dating. I don't know when I thought of her as the president of a society of spinsters, but I suppose my heart and my pussy had closed up at the thought of her winning.
The point is elections are not won with rationality. They are won by fueling the fires of compassion and inspiration or revolution They are won by the manipulation of hopes and fears. They are won through pain and collective trauma. That is what it is to live in a democracy. Bernie lit the flame, Hillary tried to squelch it, Trump threw gasoline and danced around the pyre, So I suppose some part of me, my gut, my pussy, my witchy pricking fingers of dread, knew she was doomed. But I refused to believe it was possible.
I tried to cover up my queasy revolting guts with a meditation flash mob on my phone. We were supposed to Elevate the Vote, holding all the candidates including the orange menace in sacred intentional space. I visualized. I prayed my hardest. My hands were burning. My arms were heavy as if I was holding up the world with 30,000 meditators in an astral football stadium. The snake in my gut kept twisting as the guests were arriving and the television grudge match between the Nasty Woman and Bad Hombre was about to begin.
So I wore my pantsuit and the necklace of my Sovereignty goddess and got the victory cupcakes ready and gathered in an estrogen den with my oh so tolerant husband who was happily awaiting Amazon rule certain in his diplomatic logic-loving heart that no one could vote for a maniac buffoon. Then the screen started changing to blood red as the electoral votes were counted and my stomach seized up and my head started spinning feminist rhetoric with my friend that I will call Dr. Porpoise.She deserves that Dr. she earned it even though she's not using it now.
I had met her early October, toasting the Goddess at the Halloween parade in Salem, but she was not a witch just a highly intuitive intellectual powerhouse who just struck up a conversation with a stranger in a blood red velvet gown. She said she was looking for her tribe. Shes a porpoise, she said, she dives deep and likes to play. The combination of ebullience and creative and intellectual power was exhilarating. I said, ah you mean like Anais Nin, a mermaid. I am not afraid of the depths but terrified of shadow places. A feminist scholar, who wrote a dissertation on trauma in the media, a study of domestic abuse and incest survivors and their reactions to movies about rape and stalking, how they use the stories to articulate and recover their own histories in a type of soul retrieval, herself an abuse survivor with PTSD who had been harassed out of her position as a harassment advisor for the courts and forced to take a medical early retirement. Her narrative written ten years ago was spot-on what was happening today, with Bannon, with Brock Turner, with nice guy rage and "righteous male victim discourse."
So there we were watching the narrative of trauma unfold. Thousands of raging women and people of color and gays and transgenders blacklashing against the backlash unprepared for anything but victory but still sick at heart with foreboding. As the hours ticked by and the numbers piled up on the screen I knew it was over when my husband slowly got up and started mechanically putting the dishes away, completely shut down, One of my friends went home, exhausted, The good Doctor and I were left paralysed, shaking, talking fast and frantic, spiralling into a PTSD tornado seeking refuge from our bodies in heady language. At last she had to go running home in a sheer panic. Back to the nest she seldom leaves.
At 130am we went to bed, my husband and I, stunned, shocked, unsleeping. He said we have to deal with the reality of a Trump presidency.He was calm, but deflated. The bullies were not supposed to win. It just was not logical except in an upside-down world. Bereft of logic and magic we just coexisted, inert, taking comfort in each others stillness where we could. He had to get up in 2 hours for work.
I woke up the next morning, broken, sobbing, shaking, I teetered on the edge of panic, fearing a relapse after nearly 2 years out of the hospital, then I had a moment of clarity.
I looked at myself in the mirror, red faced, ragged. I heard a calm voice say you are not crazy, this is secondary trauma.
You have just witnessed the obliteration of your Sovereignty goddess and the loss of your high ideals of sisterhood and solidarity. You have just seen your mother, her blood vessels worn thin by the ingestion of 30 aspirin a week endure the gaslighting and belittling and years of emotional abuse, with an uncontrollable nose bleed pleading to your father to take her to the hospital while he barks quit whining, just bleed in the sink. The sight of her blood is a stab in your heart. You have just seen her rush you out of the house with some hasty story of teenagers vandalizing her car spraypainting "cunt" and "whore". Only after you return does she tell you it was her boyfriend who did it--she wanted you out of the house until she could get a restraining order. Before that you witnessed him yelling at her in an alcoholic rage and wished you could tear him limb from limb. You have a fierce warrior mother bear inside you, a harpy yowling for blood but that monster is housed inside your powerless form and it can only devour you from the inside out.
I realized I could not go to work. It was not an ordinary day. I could not stay there alone either, not and still feel safe in my skin. I called my girlfriend I had met in my Dialectical Behavioral Therapy class who had become a soul sister survivor and witness. We went for a walk in the woods with another friend, a genderpunk den mother priestess who tended to our flocks of beloved freaks. They painted while I curled up on a yoga mat hoping to sleep. I didn't sleep but I gave myself reiki. I talked a little, cried a little, watched them make badass feminist art out of their raw rage. Harpy pussycats with snatching claws and demonic dangling hag breasts. I knew if i tried to practice my art I would fly off into maniacal ranting. I kept breathing. Wanting to run but knowing if I was alone the panic would carry me off like a violent wind. They stayed with me. My friend drove me to see my therapist, who is a reiki master. I told her I had missed work, I had a PTSD relapse that almost became mania. I told her of my chills driving by the crisis center where I had once been admitted into the hospital. I told her I prevented the misogynistic bully in my head wielding the club of shame and stigma from forcing me to go to work as if it was an ordinary day. I called out, told my boss I had stomach cramps. I wish I didn't have to lie. But I'm not out about my disability. I've always been so high-functioning. Until the last few weeks of energetic assault and the seizure of my gut in a psychic chastity belt I had had an impeccable attendance record.
I asked my wise mentor, the therapist who takes Mass Health, who helps the downtrodden and refuses to pathologize her unique charges, who has "clairvoyant" on her profile in Psychology Today. Who uses mental health diagnoses as just one layer of information, combined with bodily cues, intuitive impressions and the sharing of her survivor narrative after being crushed by the machine of corporate America while going through a painful divorce.. I asked her what happened to the rise of the Sacred Feminine? What happened to the vision of the light workers?
She said we were mislead by our own hope for a savior. The Divine Feminine is here, but it was not manifest in Hillary Clinton. And this battle is not going to be won with a rout, or without the acknowledgment of pain on all sides.
Yes all. All abusers come from abusive homes. My own ex husband witnessed his father beating his mother. It continued until his brother until they got big enough to drive him physically out of the house. I was an empath. I saw his scars. I became embroiled in his pain. He wielded it like a club out of the desperation of his own trauma. No one is all black or all white. We have all had trauma. The trauma of rape culture. The trauma of corporate culture, poverty, police state, freeze fight or flee. Some of us get stuck in one of these at our detriment. Cower in a corner or come out swinging. But some of us fly off out of our bodies.We become writers, magicians, poets, musicians, transmuting our trauma through art and through performance. External manifestation of the story under our skins. Eckart Tolle or Leo Tolstoy, dark ego-destroying nights of the soul. Sylvia Platz equisate swan song. I know what that feels like, to be seized by that fire, the fire in the head. Warriors, Magicians, Lovers, Sovereigns. Out of the shadow shines our gold, or rises our demons
Yes to the loving left Trump was a hate shadow, but Hillary was a shadow too to some. All heroes are demons from the other side. To the downtrodden residents of the depressed manufacturing states who worshipped their outlaw hero Trump, Hillary Clinton did not win the debates. Her composure was read as contempt. She was a monster their hero was slaying with his plain words and refusal to relent the attack against the establishment. Hillary was not a woman, she was just the biggest boss in the great infotainment video game that Trump had to beat to win, after he had crushed the Republicans, They cheered on his gladiatorial victory, his rout of the corrupt "establishment". It was not about two people on stage arguing policy. It was about two archetypal monsters in a heated death match. He shouted the most, so in the eyes of his supporters, he won.It was about two shadows, two archetypes that had to fall like Bernie fell to wake us up out of this madness.
The truth is we don't really need heroes or monsters any more. We are not served by our cleverness, our derision. Sarcasm is the weapon of the ego. Its the work of the predator, who is another aspect of the Magician. The wound out of which the narcissist, the sociopath, the demagogue springs from. The Pandora's Box of Deporable Judgments that we all come out of with our survival minds. ,All of us need to awaken the true divine feminine and the true divine masculine within us. Open up to our wounds and discover our gifts. The shadow can be a teacher. All our demons come from our own stories.
We need new stories. We need to be the face of the future. The feminine rise into masculine power left the male behind trapped emotionally bereft and divided from themselves. We need to heal our men, work towards emotional and economic freedom and racial justice for all. Heal our abusers as well as our abused
Right now President Obama is talking to Presidential-Elect Trump. Can he charm the monster into something like a presentable leader? Can we all work together, to co-create an America that works for everyone, that has a place for everyone, that practices tolerance and rationality. It seems too surreal to be believed but it is happening now. Not quite the lion and the lamb, but damn close.
We can't be grabbed by our nads, our pussies, our rage our fear or our wallets any more. We have a world to save together.
We have to be minds and hearts, rational and passionate. We have to be bodies and souls, heal our wounds and find our center. We have to get real. Only then can the healing, the witnessing, the listening, the leading, the rebuilding, the reparations begin
.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Saturday, August 6, 2016
Word Lives Matter
"Our Lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our Future"
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
I'm checking my inbox and I am bombarded by imperatives. "Obama NEEDS you". "Trump MUST be Stopped"... I have to wonder who is benefiting from all this urgency. Of course they are asking donations. Of course in the past I have been caught up in the vast momentum of the Bernie Sanders movement. I have donate more online in 2016 than in all of my years on this planet. Stroking my super-ego with the intimate attention of a well-placed plead. I have "liked" Occupy which may have virtually been swallowed up by mainstream media but has been echoed through the protest poetry of 60's icons like Diane DiPrima who recognized it for the collective re-awakening of the revolutionary spirit in a corporate-dominated America.
Even my own language seems hyperbolic. Yet there is an intensity in the air that happens the moment those electronic sparks start flying. The moment those words are unleashed.
In this age of hyper-connectedness, I have to wonder are the foil hats correct? And if "they" are watching us, who are "they" and what do they hope to get out of it?
"Cloud Atlas" a stunning sleeper science fiction of multiple worlds, of reincarnation and the endurance of love, the ability of humanity to transcend savagery and institutions of slavery and corporate control. The same story told over and over again, the agonizing climb towards evolution and the failure of technology to make us better people. Yet an underlying message of hope and inter-connectedness not unlike our incestuous Nirvana here in cyberspace.
These interconnections don't shock me anymore.
Once the ambulance drove me away and I woke up in the hospital, I lost my fear of "going crazy." Jungian symbolic alchemy showed me that "the hospital" was a threshold monster. I had to go to the hospital to prove I was not crazy. It was the ultimate "carnival flip" that could tell me the true story I was too wedded to a the cognitive dissonance that was my daily reality at the job that was slowly killing me while trying to save the lives of patients dying from the poisons in their bodies caused by the imbalances of the American lifestyle and diet, and extreme poverty and genetic vulnerabilities , diseases with their own tragic agenda of racial profiling.
Now it seems that I am find out I am saner than ever. Way too sane for this side show spin game and the shit slinging, the idealization and demonization that has plagued these Borderline States of America, the closing of minds and hearts and self-denial and projection that are typical of any neurotic but now seem to be lionized as conviction and integrity and "authenticity"
I am tired of being gas-lighted, bullied, traumatized, insulted, and emotionally abused in the name of other people's addictions, on the left or on the right, to righteous indignation.
I really wanted to like Jill Stein but she just doesn't push the Bernie button which was about so much more than policy, so much more than the carrot-and-stick of hope and fear. It was about the largeness of the human spirit and the prevalence in all cultures of something like the Golden Rule. It was about his sticking to the issues and not resorting to name-calling or denigration. The dignity it takes to support someone you agree with in some ways and don't agree with in others is a dignity that seems to be a dying art, like setting a formal table or writing a thank you letter. But it is just those things that make a difference in the picture you present to the world.
Someone on a blog supporting Jill wrote that voting for Hillary after what happened at the DNC was like dating your rapist. This meme has been taken up and used to shame friends who favor an established politician, for their own reasons which are uniquely sacred to the individual, to back a likely winner rather than a long shot. Who opt for progress at inches rather than rapid regression. Who want voting reform and justice but know it will take time. Who have perhaps themselves been victims of abuse and whom the word rape itself is a huge trigger. When I tried to defuse the negativity with a story about the rise of feminism by a cultured celebrity that just happened to be President Obama, I got an angry response that he was "the worse president ever." When I explained it wasn't really political, it was about the radical idea that women could be strong leaders and men could be allowed to shed a tear. The response I received was "He's destroying society"
The idea of equality and evolution, of integration and harmony is "destroying" society? This seems unbelievable that this man and I were once in the same group singing Glory and Praise in a hippy dippy Catholic church in the 70's where they danced the Passion and drummed in Chistmas Eve. I didn't declare this culture war. Please don't shoot at me Mr. Marine.
I'm done. Stop the abuse. Word Lives Matter
I have spent hours and dollars time and money in therapy trying to do the damage that mere words have done to me, the damage that holds shackles as strong as violence. I have witnessed my mother and been myself a victim of domestic violence. I have paid forward the karmic debt of my privilege as a happily married feminist by volunteering on the hotline for a local domestic violence agency that exists through donations and government grants that could be cut any time in the current regime we are under, It assists survivors of all types of power inequities that still persist-racism, sexism, homophobia, trans-phobia. I have spent the last six months talking to people who have been threatened, traumatized, controlled and tortured by emotional and physical violence. I have seen the scars and seen the remarkable and transformative healing that can take place when we receive and experience regard, affection, healthy touch and human connection. Dance, touch, pleasure and rest can heal trauma. I have seen evidence of this.
Sticks and stones, we are taught, may break our bones but words can never hurt us, It is cold comfort for the bullied. It is so contrary to what our beings, our energies, our psyches know. Tell this to the girls shamed online by strangers who took their own life. Tell that to the bullied and ostracized Muslim boys who are driven into the arms of jihad. Tell that to the poets who put their lives on the line to speak the truth to power in totalitarian regimes. No poet worth his salt would believe that.
We are told that words don't hurt, it is all in our heads, yet many of the trauma and abuse, the sexual shaming of woman the denigration of race, the demonization of our enemies, had their origin in words.
We are so thin-skinned that the words "Black Lives Matter" can make us cringe a little and feel singled out, maybe even under attack.
"Black Lives Matter" is supposed to make us feel uncomfortable. It is a poetic sucker punch of philosophical and existential potency. Of course, we the vanilla middle, the spiritual-not-religious, we the good whites, the Unitarians who march on Martin Luther King Day, the ones who are kind to are African-American coworkers (they wanted us to call them African-Americans where is this "Black" thing coming from?), the Hollywood liberals who voted for Obama living with the invisible superpower of privilege more kind of privilege than ever before--male privilege, white privilege, cis-privilege (oh now they have gone too far, they are making up words now this can't be serious) a new flavor of oppression comes out every week what obnoxious hashtag will trend next?
So our knee-jerk reaction is to say "Of Course, All Lives Matter" not realizing that that is not the point. Rather than accept their justified rage we want to white-wash our discomfort with platitudes. We want to take their words away.
No. I will not take anyone else's words away. That is not my right. I will support your right to protest, to seek justice, to be counted and exist with the same rights as anyone else. I will support your right to esteem yourself, even reject me and my values, as long as you respect other's rights to do the same. But I will not stand for hate speech which is a form of abuse.
I want to see more stories of cooperation and collaboration, stories of using words to bring light in the darkness and expose what gets lost in the shadows. I want to see politicians offering something besides a negative image of what they believe their opponent to be. I didn't come for a wrestling match. I don't believe any human being is infallible or entirely evil. We are all a part of each other holding the potential for so much collective strength and healing. But first we have to talk to each other and learn to speak each other's language.
We have come so far but there is so much farther to go.
Let's not go backwards. Let it start with civility, respect, finding "principled agreement" with those whose world views may be different and life experiences may have taught them different lessons. The trans-partisan movement is bringing the skills of dialogue and dialectic to political arenas. Healing the dysfunctional marriage between Democrats and Republics, co-opted by culture wars while the corporations laughed all the way to the bank to pull everyone's strings. I survived the schism of "you're mother is crazy you're father's an asshole." I have been in the middle of a barrage of verbal onslaught and I know the energetic pattern of that false dualism,
I am sitting in the back seat of America silently crying "Why can't you just get along?"
The words you use convey the energy of your intention. Is your energy anger, fear, joy or love? Ask yourself before you hurl that missile stand down the tactical nukes.
I promise you I will not negate your energy I will suggest safe outlets expression in dance, in protest, in music, poetry, and I will share your powerful narratives. Some well-meaning wholistic healers posted that they would have a "Day of Sage" and not a "Day of Rage"after the latest shootings of black people by police. I joined their prayers for peace. But it was not their right to take that away from those who were in shock and mourning. Counterprotest is counterproductive. Argue your case without denigrating someone's else's concerns. Kindness and consideration is not capitulation. Holding space for anger is not owning the burden or the blame.
I will not, even in the name of a cause that is just, use fighting words. We have overplayed the Nazi scenario over and over it is like a collective trauma of our age. It is our geopolitical PTSD.
If Word Lives Matter, than calling Trump supporters Nazi sympathizers spreads fear, anger and panic.Because to the nervous system, especially the highly-sensitive hyper-charged overstimulated nervous system, a perceived threat causes the same response as an actual threat. Thus a little old lady writing a check to support a man who wants to restore "law and order" because her reptilian brain fear response has been hyper-stimulated by a bullying conman becomes herself an object of terror. Thus my twenty-something nephew asking the question after Marriage Equality was passed "why is Facebook so gay and saying it is weird triggers the fear of a friend whose loved ones were denied the right to be with their partner when they were dying by harsh Republican laws. Thus my decision to let my loved one adjust to change and not hit the electronic "smite" key causes me to be branded with a Nazi flag. I am chastised not because I don't agree but because I don't agree with them enough, or in the right way.
But I refuse to give in to fear from the right or the left I refuse to live in a world where I am afraid of little old ladies and teenage boys. I reject the fear the "low vibration" flight, fight or freeze response.
I refuse to traumatize myself and alienate other people with this word. Change is not created at the same energetic level that created the problem. Elevate oneself, and one can have a ripple effect on the world,
Once the ancients believed that Bards, not just songsters but the wise advisers of Celtic kings, had the power to "satirize" an enemy and cause boils to break out on his face. The Druids never wrote anything down words were too powerful. Inspiration of poets was not just mere artistic fancy it was prophecy. True Thomas received the gift of faery, the-fire-in-the-head, and could not tell a lie. What a double-edge sword these word lives wield. Writers are famous for misanthropy and bad relationships.
Now we are finding that exposure to toxic messages and inflammatory rhetoric combined with the instantaneous power of communication can expose us to blatant attack. We feel barraged and want to volley back, defend our position with zealous idealism. But if we had respect for the weapons we would become martial artists, and learn the art of deflection and de-escalation. If we had respect for the magic we would craft our words carefully, diplomatically, fold them over and over into a fine edge like a Japanese sword. Not hack and slash and brutalize.
Word lives matter. So may we all chose our words with a little more cognizance that there is a living breathing suffering loving scared human behind that blustering arm-chair tyrant striking out at a rapidly changing word through the anonymity of a keyboard. May we chose our words well when we engage in the exchange and honor the words that someone we come into relationship with has for themselves and not impose our own on them for them.. May we burn with as much compassion as conviction. May we allow someone else a word in edgewise and not fear immediately that we may be confused or convinced. May we find a harmony in that uncomfortable place may we go inward and reflect on why we were triggered and what we learned about ourselves as a result of the trigger. May we own our responses and our responsibility long before we hit "send"
Because indeed sticks and stones break bones, but when words are hurled with the force of shame they can kill.
Word Lives Matter, because they have a strange immortality lingering in the stratosphere. We want our legacy to reflect the very best of us and not our invective.
Word lives matter poems curses blessings prayers
Word Lives Matter, because we matter, all our lives, all our words
Word Lives Matter, please treat them, please treat each other like they do
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
I'm checking my inbox and I am bombarded by imperatives. "Obama NEEDS you". "Trump MUST be Stopped"... I have to wonder who is benefiting from all this urgency. Of course they are asking donations. Of course in the past I have been caught up in the vast momentum of the Bernie Sanders movement. I have donate more online in 2016 than in all of my years on this planet. Stroking my super-ego with the intimate attention of a well-placed plead. I have "liked" Occupy which may have virtually been swallowed up by mainstream media but has been echoed through the protest poetry of 60's icons like Diane DiPrima who recognized it for the collective re-awakening of the revolutionary spirit in a corporate-dominated America.
Even my own language seems hyperbolic. Yet there is an intensity in the air that happens the moment those electronic sparks start flying. The moment those words are unleashed.
In this age of hyper-connectedness, I have to wonder are the foil hats correct? And if "they" are watching us, who are "they" and what do they hope to get out of it?
"Cloud Atlas" a stunning sleeper science fiction of multiple worlds, of reincarnation and the endurance of love, the ability of humanity to transcend savagery and institutions of slavery and corporate control. The same story told over and over again, the agonizing climb towards evolution and the failure of technology to make us better people. Yet an underlying message of hope and inter-connectedness not unlike our incestuous Nirvana here in cyberspace.
These interconnections don't shock me anymore.
Once the ambulance drove me away and I woke up in the hospital, I lost my fear of "going crazy." Jungian symbolic alchemy showed me that "the hospital" was a threshold monster. I had to go to the hospital to prove I was not crazy. It was the ultimate "carnival flip" that could tell me the true story I was too wedded to a the cognitive dissonance that was my daily reality at the job that was slowly killing me while trying to save the lives of patients dying from the poisons in their bodies caused by the imbalances of the American lifestyle and diet, and extreme poverty and genetic vulnerabilities , diseases with their own tragic agenda of racial profiling.
Now it seems that I am find out I am saner than ever. Way too sane for this side show spin game and the shit slinging, the idealization and demonization that has plagued these Borderline States of America, the closing of minds and hearts and self-denial and projection that are typical of any neurotic but now seem to be lionized as conviction and integrity and "authenticity"
I am tired of being gas-lighted, bullied, traumatized, insulted, and emotionally abused in the name of other people's addictions, on the left or on the right, to righteous indignation.
I really wanted to like Jill Stein but she just doesn't push the Bernie button which was about so much more than policy, so much more than the carrot-and-stick of hope and fear. It was about the largeness of the human spirit and the prevalence in all cultures of something like the Golden Rule. It was about his sticking to the issues and not resorting to name-calling or denigration. The dignity it takes to support someone you agree with in some ways and don't agree with in others is a dignity that seems to be a dying art, like setting a formal table or writing a thank you letter. But it is just those things that make a difference in the picture you present to the world.
Someone on a blog supporting Jill wrote that voting for Hillary after what happened at the DNC was like dating your rapist. This meme has been taken up and used to shame friends who favor an established politician, for their own reasons which are uniquely sacred to the individual, to back a likely winner rather than a long shot. Who opt for progress at inches rather than rapid regression. Who want voting reform and justice but know it will take time. Who have perhaps themselves been victims of abuse and whom the word rape itself is a huge trigger. When I tried to defuse the negativity with a story about the rise of feminism by a cultured celebrity that just happened to be President Obama, I got an angry response that he was "the worse president ever." When I explained it wasn't really political, it was about the radical idea that women could be strong leaders and men could be allowed to shed a tear. The response I received was "He's destroying society"
The idea of equality and evolution, of integration and harmony is "destroying" society? This seems unbelievable that this man and I were once in the same group singing Glory and Praise in a hippy dippy Catholic church in the 70's where they danced the Passion and drummed in Chistmas Eve. I didn't declare this culture war. Please don't shoot at me Mr. Marine.
I'm done. Stop the abuse. Word Lives Matter
I have spent hours and dollars time and money in therapy trying to do the damage that mere words have done to me, the damage that holds shackles as strong as violence. I have witnessed my mother and been myself a victim of domestic violence. I have paid forward the karmic debt of my privilege as a happily married feminist by volunteering on the hotline for a local domestic violence agency that exists through donations and government grants that could be cut any time in the current regime we are under, It assists survivors of all types of power inequities that still persist-racism, sexism, homophobia, trans-phobia. I have spent the last six months talking to people who have been threatened, traumatized, controlled and tortured by emotional and physical violence. I have seen the scars and seen the remarkable and transformative healing that can take place when we receive and experience regard, affection, healthy touch and human connection. Dance, touch, pleasure and rest can heal trauma. I have seen evidence of this.
Sticks and stones, we are taught, may break our bones but words can never hurt us, It is cold comfort for the bullied. It is so contrary to what our beings, our energies, our psyches know. Tell this to the girls shamed online by strangers who took their own life. Tell that to the bullied and ostracized Muslim boys who are driven into the arms of jihad. Tell that to the poets who put their lives on the line to speak the truth to power in totalitarian regimes. No poet worth his salt would believe that.
We are told that words don't hurt, it is all in our heads, yet many of the trauma and abuse, the sexual shaming of woman the denigration of race, the demonization of our enemies, had their origin in words.
We are so thin-skinned that the words "Black Lives Matter" can make us cringe a little and feel singled out, maybe even under attack.
"Black Lives Matter" is supposed to make us feel uncomfortable. It is a poetic sucker punch of philosophical and existential potency. Of course, we the vanilla middle, the spiritual-not-religious, we the good whites, the Unitarians who march on Martin Luther King Day, the ones who are kind to are African-American coworkers (they wanted us to call them African-Americans where is this "Black" thing coming from?), the Hollywood liberals who voted for Obama living with the invisible superpower of privilege more kind of privilege than ever before--male privilege, white privilege, cis-privilege (oh now they have gone too far, they are making up words now this can't be serious) a new flavor of oppression comes out every week what obnoxious hashtag will trend next?
So our knee-jerk reaction is to say "Of Course, All Lives Matter" not realizing that that is not the point. Rather than accept their justified rage we want to white-wash our discomfort with platitudes. We want to take their words away.
No. I will not take anyone else's words away. That is not my right. I will support your right to protest, to seek justice, to be counted and exist with the same rights as anyone else. I will support your right to esteem yourself, even reject me and my values, as long as you respect other's rights to do the same. But I will not stand for hate speech which is a form of abuse.
I want to see more stories of cooperation and collaboration, stories of using words to bring light in the darkness and expose what gets lost in the shadows. I want to see politicians offering something besides a negative image of what they believe their opponent to be. I didn't come for a wrestling match. I don't believe any human being is infallible or entirely evil. We are all a part of each other holding the potential for so much collective strength and healing. But first we have to talk to each other and learn to speak each other's language.
We have come so far but there is so much farther to go.
Let's not go backwards. Let it start with civility, respect, finding "principled agreement" with those whose world views may be different and life experiences may have taught them different lessons. The trans-partisan movement is bringing the skills of dialogue and dialectic to political arenas. Healing the dysfunctional marriage between Democrats and Republics, co-opted by culture wars while the corporations laughed all the way to the bank to pull everyone's strings. I survived the schism of "you're mother is crazy you're father's an asshole." I have been in the middle of a barrage of verbal onslaught and I know the energetic pattern of that false dualism,
I am sitting in the back seat of America silently crying "Why can't you just get along?"
The words you use convey the energy of your intention. Is your energy anger, fear, joy or love? Ask yourself before you hurl that missile stand down the tactical nukes.
I promise you I will not negate your energy I will suggest safe outlets expression in dance, in protest, in music, poetry, and I will share your powerful narratives. Some well-meaning wholistic healers posted that they would have a "Day of Sage" and not a "Day of Rage"after the latest shootings of black people by police. I joined their prayers for peace. But it was not their right to take that away from those who were in shock and mourning. Counterprotest is counterproductive. Argue your case without denigrating someone's else's concerns. Kindness and consideration is not capitulation. Holding space for anger is not owning the burden or the blame.
I will not, even in the name of a cause that is just, use fighting words. We have overplayed the Nazi scenario over and over it is like a collective trauma of our age. It is our geopolitical PTSD.
If Word Lives Matter, than calling Trump supporters Nazi sympathizers spreads fear, anger and panic.Because to the nervous system, especially the highly-sensitive hyper-charged overstimulated nervous system, a perceived threat causes the same response as an actual threat. Thus a little old lady writing a check to support a man who wants to restore "law and order" because her reptilian brain fear response has been hyper-stimulated by a bullying conman becomes herself an object of terror. Thus my twenty-something nephew asking the question after Marriage Equality was passed "why is Facebook so gay and saying it is weird triggers the fear of a friend whose loved ones were denied the right to be with their partner when they were dying by harsh Republican laws. Thus my decision to let my loved one adjust to change and not hit the electronic "smite" key causes me to be branded with a Nazi flag. I am chastised not because I don't agree but because I don't agree with them enough, or in the right way.
But I refuse to give in to fear from the right or the left I refuse to live in a world where I am afraid of little old ladies and teenage boys. I reject the fear the "low vibration" flight, fight or freeze response.
I refuse to traumatize myself and alienate other people with this word. Change is not created at the same energetic level that created the problem. Elevate oneself, and one can have a ripple effect on the world,
Once the ancients believed that Bards, not just songsters but the wise advisers of Celtic kings, had the power to "satirize" an enemy and cause boils to break out on his face. The Druids never wrote anything down words were too powerful. Inspiration of poets was not just mere artistic fancy it was prophecy. True Thomas received the gift of faery, the-fire-in-the-head, and could not tell a lie. What a double-edge sword these word lives wield. Writers are famous for misanthropy and bad relationships.
Now we are finding that exposure to toxic messages and inflammatory rhetoric combined with the instantaneous power of communication can expose us to blatant attack. We feel barraged and want to volley back, defend our position with zealous idealism. But if we had respect for the weapons we would become martial artists, and learn the art of deflection and de-escalation. If we had respect for the magic we would craft our words carefully, diplomatically, fold them over and over into a fine edge like a Japanese sword. Not hack and slash and brutalize.
Word lives matter. So may we all chose our words with a little more cognizance that there is a living breathing suffering loving scared human behind that blustering arm-chair tyrant striking out at a rapidly changing word through the anonymity of a keyboard. May we chose our words well when we engage in the exchange and honor the words that someone we come into relationship with has for themselves and not impose our own on them for them.. May we burn with as much compassion as conviction. May we allow someone else a word in edgewise and not fear immediately that we may be confused or convinced. May we find a harmony in that uncomfortable place may we go inward and reflect on why we were triggered and what we learned about ourselves as a result of the trigger. May we own our responses and our responsibility long before we hit "send"
Because indeed sticks and stones break bones, but when words are hurled with the force of shame they can kill.
Word Lives Matter, because they have a strange immortality lingering in the stratosphere. We want our legacy to reflect the very best of us and not our invective.
Word lives matter poems curses blessings prayers
Word Lives Matter, because we matter, all our lives, all our words
Word Lives Matter, please treat them, please treat each other like they do
Saturday, July 9, 2016
Dystopian Prophets and the Exegesis of the Elephant
"Hard times require furious dancing"
-Alice Walker
Where does art go?
It goes to the pain
This is something I am feeling quite acutely right now
Where does art go?
it goes to the story
But it is not my story to tell.
I am merely witness to the burning of the world
I have been tempered by the fire in my own head
I have been mediated and medicated by the meditative monastic repetition of my job at a local bank where we are a microcosm of community. We are so many races.
I saw a black coworker crying at her desk. I had just been online reading about the latest killing of an innocent black person.
I don't know her very well but I know she's proud, and fierce, a dancer an athlete, an out lesbian with funny stories about her daughter and her girlfriend.
I went to the vigil downtown for Orlando. I sat at a table at our local Pride passing out pamphlets for those seeking shelter from domestic violence.
I wanted to invite her to go with me. But I couldn't step over the Elephant in the Room. I still feel like a freak and a geek, among so many people younger than me. I still cringe a little when I mispronounce their names. So I mourned with others in my city of freaks and merchants and artists carried rainbow flags, candles, prayed and praised the value of tolerance.
I came into work early. I saw her shoulders slumped, heard unmistakable crying. I thought of the images on my newsfeed last night, of all my white friends apologizing for their good days and July vacations. I asked are you ok? She said I'm fine.
I still felt that heavy plodding sensation in my gut. The Elephant was stepping on me, crushing me. That intuition and intimation that comes with the territory of being an empath. That implicit guilt that comes of being a white person in the world that black people live in today.
I sent her an IM ... it sucks what is happening in the world I just want you to know I care
I know that doesn't take away the pain.
It's like putting a band aid on a bullet hole. I have no illusion. But I sent it like I sent reiki to the homeless man I saw sleeping in the common in the pavilion.
There is a place where we go in art that is like a hidden drone camera into the soul stealing your humanity to capture a uniquely humane moment. It's our species most ancient and invasive technology.
The place that says not now, only weeks after Orlando....
The place that says I don't know you but you are fierce and I see you. Bleeding from a thousand small cuts a thousand micro-aggressions and gaslight invalidations because unlike me and most of my geeky witchy white privileged friends who innocently say "oh we're not racist" but benefit from this system you don't get to graduate from high school and leave the bullies behind.
The PTSD, the constant trauma, the energetic, physical and mental exhaustion of knowing the weight of hate is not something time can erase. The bullies are still there and they have guns, and laws, and the might of society behind them.
My husband and I are watching "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K Dick. It's a dystopian science fiction about an alternate history, an existential speculation of "what if." What if the Germans and Japanese won World War II and the United States was divided between the Nazi's and the Pacific Empire? A young woman in San Francisco has her world shattered one night when her sister is killed delivering a mysterious film depicting an alternate ending.... Suddenly she is fleeing for her life and everyone is after her. As we watch her world crumble we ask ourselves the questions who would we be in that America. Would we be resistance? Would we be cowards? Would we keep our heads down, go along to get along? The truth is we just don't know. The truth is that by the grace of circumstance, we've mostly been spared that knowledge.
I am reading the "Exegesis" of Philip K Dick, the visionary science fiction writer who envisioned such dire futures and also had a mysterious psychological and metaphysical awakening he spend thousands of hours and pages upon pages chronicling. His journals are rabbit holes of scientific and metaphysical exposition similar to the Red Book of Carl Jung only using the language of science fiction and fact rather than nascent spiritual and psychological terminology of the subconscious that Jung pioneered by writing himself sane, excavating his own dreams of blood and horror just before the world was plunged into World War.
Philip K Dick talks about future memory, about transmissions from mysterious beings, aliens, the Holy Spirit, Logos, the fire-in-the-head that kept him up all night recording his divine disordered downloads the madness genius watcher and observer and clairvoyant writer that he was.
Why was this series released now, in 2015? Are we skittering on the edge of fascism, of police state, of a class driven by fear and compliance, where the protesters are protested and the immediate media erased and re-written? Is this the right time for this message?
We've had robots used to quell riots why the hell have we not invented "phasers on stun"? Nonlethal stopping power we have this miracle nightmare technology why can't it serve humanity and not make us better killers?
I'm waking up to the reality that for those who don't come from white, suburban backgrounds, this dystopian future is already here. The jackboots are on the ground. But the good news is that most of the fighting back in my reality is digital. Armchair activists are flooding bloody images of the unjustly killed onto our Facebook walls, psychically staining our baby pictures and cat videos because the homeless bodies of poor nonwhite America littering the city park is not enough to make us put down our lattes and take notice. We are far too conditioned to keep our head down and keep walking. Just ask my friend Jason who after Occupy organized homeless people into squats only to see friends frozen to death in a Maine winter when the cops came to protect property already abandoned. The jackboots are on the ground for the criminally under-housed.
I am part of the problem. I am one of the "sensitives". One of them who would have been rounded up into a death camp, permanently institutionalized possibly burned at the stake in another age. One of those creepily aware clairvoyant writers diagnosed with psychosis at sixteen because I was self-aware enough to refuse to write my auto-biography with names and dates and boring details about my life but instead submitted an audio-tape analysis of my own novels and how each character was an aspect of my personality or those of people who were closest to me. I didn't know my creative departure would send me a one-way ticket to the school psychologist and I would be pathologized for the rest of my life with an alphabet soup of diagnoses.
My salvation is my own chronicle, my own Anais-esque diaries of exegesis and apology, my own neurotic rabbit holes of mythological, magickal erotic, transformational and romantic obsession. By the grace of reiki, a phenomenally supportive husband, wonderful communities, my spiritual tribemates online and in real time, and my entry into a double-income household homeowner minority I am doing well enough not to be medicated any more. I live in a lovely neighborhood and walk to work every day. I am not left alone long enough to chew off my own leg in the trap of obsessive self-analysis, like perhaps those genius neurotics were. But I have been watching and observing. Taking notes.
I was sold a bill of goods. I was driven to the edge of madness by the insanity of corporate America and escaped the medical straight-jacket when I quit my old job, but I was told that the price of this was I had to keep my head down, on the narrow track keep my blinders on, not let passion, disruption or rage take the reins of my fragile psyche. Told not to watch the news or pay attention to what might ignite the already faulty wiring of the fire in my head. I understand as many of us do that there is an energetic and emotional power to the magic mirror of media. I understand that we are emotionally overcharged, even those of us who don't believe in anything beyond the limits of the physical body, would scoff at the concept of a universal mind or cosmic consciousness.
Yet in this country another time young people saw kids killed in Vietnam on television in their living rooms and it mobilized them to carry signs and face down the police and stop a war. They said"The revolution will be televised"
"First you See Video. Then you Eat Video. Then you Be Video"
I wish I could remember what dystopian pulp short story that was from, back in the days before the hum of the modem launched the noosphere, when I was just girl with a hungry head reading Iassac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.
It used to be just a few freaks and geeks were exploring the trans-corporeal frontiers of cyberspace.
Now we are all living in our own reality show. We are turned off by the commercialism of mainstream TV that was the lifeline of our predecessors but tuned in to an endless incestuous soap opera of consensual reality.
We see black people bleeding
We see our friend’s newborn babies
We hear one person's cry for help, one person's whining about the IT department, and one person revealing deep secrets to strangers that they can't tell their family.
We change our names to tell the truth.
We say what we feel and inadvertently hurt people we love who don't want to know this side of us.
We see people using the power of the mass media to speak the truth to power. We have lost the illusion of an impartial press so we are pressing "SEND" or "SHARE" and pushing the electronic emotional current through the stratosphere of our collective consciousness.
These are the equivalent of the sign-carriers. Because getting up close to power gets you arrested, but unlike the 60's getting arrested these days may get you dead. Especially if you are poor and non-white.
And I have to say I'm sorry when I thought that I could thrust some peacenik flower in the gun barrel you face every day some affectation of affirmation as the panacea to all ills simply because it helped me get through my day. I have to say I was buying into an addiction a distraction that says if I don't see it is not happening and if I see it, it will hurt me and my job is to stay sane and keep buying things keep the clockwork turning generating the matrix of the ELEPHANT that is the WALL that we keep building around ourselves.
The infamous WALL. Laughing at the bloated cartoon of the racist. Just as offensive as a lawn jockey that was commonplace only a hundred years ago and now obscene.
That wall is the elephant looming up that thing that keeps us trapped in ego in fear that makes us dive down into rabbit holes of religion and video and consume positive fantasy to erase the bloody reality that someone has left on our electronic doorstep and offended our vision of MANIFESTING the perfect self-delusion of all inclusive world peace. That wall is the crushing shame in the gut when we think of all the things we have, the shadow side of gratitude the empty pit that says.... for my portion, who gets less of a place at the table? That makes me deflect my own shame at not doing not being not caring enough and say put down your Don Quixote armor old man just breathe, just twist your body into bliss take a walk take a drink take a break from your constant vigilance.
But the art. the art that is real always goes to the pain. Of "life as it is" while imaging "life as it should be."
So I apologize to my artist activist friends when I have said you have to think of yourself, you have to put down your sword and stop tilting these windmills these giants these Elephants that you have been working so desperately to reveal to your room. That have been crushing the black writers in the energetic neighborhood you live in, bloodying the stories you swim in, the words and the worlds you consume. For years now.
We were wrong and we were right me and my crazy new age tribe. We are energetically creating the matrix but we are all waking up and to be awake is a privilege and a terrible burden, it means we don't get to change the channel to eliminate "negativity"
We must learn to co-exist with the elephant to not let it crush us to live with this gift and curse every day to listen keep listening to listen to ourselves listening to each other listening to poets listening to prophets, listening live witnesses while reading our inner oracles written in our breathing bodies and souls.
I woke up this morning after a late night of terror reflection and the distortion and magnificence of art. I had to prepare myself for the business of the day. I looked at myself in the mirror.
I saw what was really there, the stranger that was my body to the fire in my head. Start where you are, that's what the Buddhists say, like Pema Chondron. For god's sake breathe. I saw the lines in my tired, worn, sad face. And I heard a voice.
My higher self? The voice said yes.... it is all there... but you knew this truth all of your holy books all of your prophets the light rises and the shadow with it.
We do not get a free pass. Magick always has a price and that price is life and that price is living with this exquisite awareness of ecstasy and terror dancing with that fire.
Understanding that we are only beginning to know the truths of our emotional bodies, that people in warfare reduced to base survival and traumatized do horrible things. That patriotism and duty are thin bandages we wrap across atrocity to keep ourselves sane. Everyone in a battle has some kind of lasting scars, just as those who have grown up in unjust regimes. Why don't they train all cops in trauma therapy and mindfulness, so they can bring those skills of humanity into the very real battleground they face every day. Why don't they honor the warrior not by worshiping the weapon but honoring the human toll it takes to step into the reality of the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice.
We are just waking up as a species just understanding the complex ballet of body mind and soul we have enough humanity and enough technology to search for the seat of consciousness to break beyond ourselves to truly see the other as a mirror of ourselves.
In the story the quest is to find the film that makes a better future. To break the back of fascism with the triumph of the right history,
We can start by really listening to our own prophets. Philip K. Dick and George Orwell, and H. G. Wells. Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein and, yes, even H.P. Lovecraft. Really reading and viewing our own beloved genre not for the space opera CGI and heroic psychodrama but for the keen observation of human nature and society that these geniuses revealed by using the powerful sociological critique and revelation that fiction has always provided.
We do not have to choose between Eloi or Morlock. We cannot be all love and light and we do not need to demonize each other because we are the other. We are the alien angels and monsters hovering overhead. We are geeks the chosen people of the new revelation of the endless open source god game of consensual creation.
I have seen some remarkable things among my friends. Souls who can be self-aware and compassionate. People who came from privilege who escaped bad marriages and job dissatisfaction with yoga, addicts who found mindfulness through recovery. We have been relentless romantic seekers who fall in love with everything we have been to the inner rooms of our souls and begun the spiral out into the world. We are dancing furiously against the fear and against the urge of addiction raging with ecstasy and feeling the burn of compassion for this life fire in which we all burn. We know there is no escape from our own story except to re-write it and we are no longer in love with defending our love-ability. We relish the breakdown of our inner prisons, whether we have been to the ashram or the asylum We know that the crazy is not to be found there but that being aware in this complicated world if you do not have your tribe if you do not own your soul and question your ego will bring it down.
I see them shouting for justice I see them shining with connection white faces and dark faces but this is no Obama campaign this is no United Colors of Capitalism this is no kumbaya moment this is the collective furious dance of the dialectic that we are all and none of the above infinitely connected to source and terrified of our own voices in a dark room. We are the Source of light. We are the empty darkness.
Encompassing so much, we don't have to silence the screaming of the world for our own peace, choke the poetry of justice for our own serenity.
Art goes to the pain, Art born from the union of the Universe and the human, but art translates, transforms, transmutes the poison it is the ultimate wall breaker it is the elephant illustrator the emperor has no clothes the emperor is dreaming the butterfly. It masters the matrix and decodes reality.
We are what we eat and we need a balanced diet of reality and fantasy, of prophets and iconoclasts, of god and the devil, of chocolate and kale and capitalism and socialism they say mongrel breeds are healthier and that the future skin will be some lovely shade of gold if we don't burn it all away in the conflagration of our illusions.
So start right now. Take down the wall confront the ugly American within the shadow of the egalitarian citizen of a Star Trek idealism.
That's the only way to stop the juggernaut. not to wish it away but to look it straight in the face that is yours and mine and here and now.
The Elephant is in the room. But it doesn't have to be the wall to house our fragile reality
It doesn't have to stop our soul from rising with the gravity of guilt.
And it gets smaller when it gets a chance to be admitted into existence. We get bigger and we get stronger and more human for our coexisting with the pain that is the root of our human search for wholeness and soul.
As within, so without. It's the way we are wired to grow.
-Alice Walker
Where does art go?
It goes to the pain
This is something I am feeling quite acutely right now
Where does art go?
it goes to the story
But it is not my story to tell.
I am merely witness to the burning of the world
I have been tempered by the fire in my own head
I have been mediated and medicated by the meditative monastic repetition of my job at a local bank where we are a microcosm of community. We are so many races.
I saw a black coworker crying at her desk. I had just been online reading about the latest killing of an innocent black person.
I don't know her very well but I know she's proud, and fierce, a dancer an athlete, an out lesbian with funny stories about her daughter and her girlfriend.
I went to the vigil downtown for Orlando. I sat at a table at our local Pride passing out pamphlets for those seeking shelter from domestic violence.
I wanted to invite her to go with me. But I couldn't step over the Elephant in the Room. I still feel like a freak and a geek, among so many people younger than me. I still cringe a little when I mispronounce their names. So I mourned with others in my city of freaks and merchants and artists carried rainbow flags, candles, prayed and praised the value of tolerance.
I came into work early. I saw her shoulders slumped, heard unmistakable crying. I thought of the images on my newsfeed last night, of all my white friends apologizing for their good days and July vacations. I asked are you ok? She said I'm fine.
I still felt that heavy plodding sensation in my gut. The Elephant was stepping on me, crushing me. That intuition and intimation that comes with the territory of being an empath. That implicit guilt that comes of being a white person in the world that black people live in today.
I sent her an IM ... it sucks what is happening in the world I just want you to know I care
I know that doesn't take away the pain.
It's like putting a band aid on a bullet hole. I have no illusion. But I sent it like I sent reiki to the homeless man I saw sleeping in the common in the pavilion.
There is a place where we go in art that is like a hidden drone camera into the soul stealing your humanity to capture a uniquely humane moment. It's our species most ancient and invasive technology.
The place that says not now, only weeks after Orlando....
The place that says I don't know you but you are fierce and I see you. Bleeding from a thousand small cuts a thousand micro-aggressions and gaslight invalidations because unlike me and most of my geeky witchy white privileged friends who innocently say "oh we're not racist" but benefit from this system you don't get to graduate from high school and leave the bullies behind.
The PTSD, the constant trauma, the energetic, physical and mental exhaustion of knowing the weight of hate is not something time can erase. The bullies are still there and they have guns, and laws, and the might of society behind them.
My husband and I are watching "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K Dick. It's a dystopian science fiction about an alternate history, an existential speculation of "what if." What if the Germans and Japanese won World War II and the United States was divided between the Nazi's and the Pacific Empire? A young woman in San Francisco has her world shattered one night when her sister is killed delivering a mysterious film depicting an alternate ending.... Suddenly she is fleeing for her life and everyone is after her. As we watch her world crumble we ask ourselves the questions who would we be in that America. Would we be resistance? Would we be cowards? Would we keep our heads down, go along to get along? The truth is we just don't know. The truth is that by the grace of circumstance, we've mostly been spared that knowledge.
I am reading the "Exegesis" of Philip K Dick, the visionary science fiction writer who envisioned such dire futures and also had a mysterious psychological and metaphysical awakening he spend thousands of hours and pages upon pages chronicling. His journals are rabbit holes of scientific and metaphysical exposition similar to the Red Book of Carl Jung only using the language of science fiction and fact rather than nascent spiritual and psychological terminology of the subconscious that Jung pioneered by writing himself sane, excavating his own dreams of blood and horror just before the world was plunged into World War.
Philip K Dick talks about future memory, about transmissions from mysterious beings, aliens, the Holy Spirit, Logos, the fire-in-the-head that kept him up all night recording his divine disordered downloads the madness genius watcher and observer and clairvoyant writer that he was.
Why was this series released now, in 2015? Are we skittering on the edge of fascism, of police state, of a class driven by fear and compliance, where the protesters are protested and the immediate media erased and re-written? Is this the right time for this message?
We've had robots used to quell riots why the hell have we not invented "phasers on stun"? Nonlethal stopping power we have this miracle nightmare technology why can't it serve humanity and not make us better killers?
I'm waking up to the reality that for those who don't come from white, suburban backgrounds, this dystopian future is already here. The jackboots are on the ground. But the good news is that most of the fighting back in my reality is digital. Armchair activists are flooding bloody images of the unjustly killed onto our Facebook walls, psychically staining our baby pictures and cat videos because the homeless bodies of poor nonwhite America littering the city park is not enough to make us put down our lattes and take notice. We are far too conditioned to keep our head down and keep walking. Just ask my friend Jason who after Occupy organized homeless people into squats only to see friends frozen to death in a Maine winter when the cops came to protect property already abandoned. The jackboots are on the ground for the criminally under-housed.
I am part of the problem. I am one of the "sensitives". One of them who would have been rounded up into a death camp, permanently institutionalized possibly burned at the stake in another age. One of those creepily aware clairvoyant writers diagnosed with psychosis at sixteen because I was self-aware enough to refuse to write my auto-biography with names and dates and boring details about my life but instead submitted an audio-tape analysis of my own novels and how each character was an aspect of my personality or those of people who were closest to me. I didn't know my creative departure would send me a one-way ticket to the school psychologist and I would be pathologized for the rest of my life with an alphabet soup of diagnoses.
My salvation is my own chronicle, my own Anais-esque diaries of exegesis and apology, my own neurotic rabbit holes of mythological, magickal erotic, transformational and romantic obsession. By the grace of reiki, a phenomenally supportive husband, wonderful communities, my spiritual tribemates online and in real time, and my entry into a double-income household homeowner minority I am doing well enough not to be medicated any more. I live in a lovely neighborhood and walk to work every day. I am not left alone long enough to chew off my own leg in the trap of obsessive self-analysis, like perhaps those genius neurotics were. But I have been watching and observing. Taking notes.
I was sold a bill of goods. I was driven to the edge of madness by the insanity of corporate America and escaped the medical straight-jacket when I quit my old job, but I was told that the price of this was I had to keep my head down, on the narrow track keep my blinders on, not let passion, disruption or rage take the reins of my fragile psyche. Told not to watch the news or pay attention to what might ignite the already faulty wiring of the fire in my head. I understand as many of us do that there is an energetic and emotional power to the magic mirror of media. I understand that we are emotionally overcharged, even those of us who don't believe in anything beyond the limits of the physical body, would scoff at the concept of a universal mind or cosmic consciousness.
Yet in this country another time young people saw kids killed in Vietnam on television in their living rooms and it mobilized them to carry signs and face down the police and stop a war. They said"The revolution will be televised"
"First you See Video. Then you Eat Video. Then you Be Video"
I wish I could remember what dystopian pulp short story that was from, back in the days before the hum of the modem launched the noosphere, when I was just girl with a hungry head reading Iassac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.
It used to be just a few freaks and geeks were exploring the trans-corporeal frontiers of cyberspace.
Now we are all living in our own reality show. We are turned off by the commercialism of mainstream TV that was the lifeline of our predecessors but tuned in to an endless incestuous soap opera of consensual reality.
We see black people bleeding
We see our friend’s newborn babies
We hear one person's cry for help, one person's whining about the IT department, and one person revealing deep secrets to strangers that they can't tell their family.
We change our names to tell the truth.
We say what we feel and inadvertently hurt people we love who don't want to know this side of us.
We see people using the power of the mass media to speak the truth to power. We have lost the illusion of an impartial press so we are pressing "SEND" or "SHARE" and pushing the electronic emotional current through the stratosphere of our collective consciousness.
These are the equivalent of the sign-carriers. Because getting up close to power gets you arrested, but unlike the 60's getting arrested these days may get you dead. Especially if you are poor and non-white.
And I have to say I'm sorry when I thought that I could thrust some peacenik flower in the gun barrel you face every day some affectation of affirmation as the panacea to all ills simply because it helped me get through my day. I have to say I was buying into an addiction a distraction that says if I don't see it is not happening and if I see it, it will hurt me and my job is to stay sane and keep buying things keep the clockwork turning generating the matrix of the ELEPHANT that is the WALL that we keep building around ourselves.
The infamous WALL. Laughing at the bloated cartoon of the racist. Just as offensive as a lawn jockey that was commonplace only a hundred years ago and now obscene.
That wall is the elephant looming up that thing that keeps us trapped in ego in fear that makes us dive down into rabbit holes of religion and video and consume positive fantasy to erase the bloody reality that someone has left on our electronic doorstep and offended our vision of MANIFESTING the perfect self-delusion of all inclusive world peace. That wall is the crushing shame in the gut when we think of all the things we have, the shadow side of gratitude the empty pit that says.... for my portion, who gets less of a place at the table? That makes me deflect my own shame at not doing not being not caring enough and say put down your Don Quixote armor old man just breathe, just twist your body into bliss take a walk take a drink take a break from your constant vigilance.
But the art. the art that is real always goes to the pain. Of "life as it is" while imaging "life as it should be."
So I apologize to my artist activist friends when I have said you have to think of yourself, you have to put down your sword and stop tilting these windmills these giants these Elephants that you have been working so desperately to reveal to your room. That have been crushing the black writers in the energetic neighborhood you live in, bloodying the stories you swim in, the words and the worlds you consume. For years now.
We were wrong and we were right me and my crazy new age tribe. We are energetically creating the matrix but we are all waking up and to be awake is a privilege and a terrible burden, it means we don't get to change the channel to eliminate "negativity"
We must learn to co-exist with the elephant to not let it crush us to live with this gift and curse every day to listen keep listening to listen to ourselves listening to each other listening to poets listening to prophets, listening live witnesses while reading our inner oracles written in our breathing bodies and souls.
I woke up this morning after a late night of terror reflection and the distortion and magnificence of art. I had to prepare myself for the business of the day. I looked at myself in the mirror.
I saw what was really there, the stranger that was my body to the fire in my head. Start where you are, that's what the Buddhists say, like Pema Chondron. For god's sake breathe. I saw the lines in my tired, worn, sad face. And I heard a voice.
My higher self? The voice said yes.... it is all there... but you knew this truth all of your holy books all of your prophets the light rises and the shadow with it.
We do not get a free pass. Magick always has a price and that price is life and that price is living with this exquisite awareness of ecstasy and terror dancing with that fire.
Understanding that we are only beginning to know the truths of our emotional bodies, that people in warfare reduced to base survival and traumatized do horrible things. That patriotism and duty are thin bandages we wrap across atrocity to keep ourselves sane. Everyone in a battle has some kind of lasting scars, just as those who have grown up in unjust regimes. Why don't they train all cops in trauma therapy and mindfulness, so they can bring those skills of humanity into the very real battleground they face every day. Why don't they honor the warrior not by worshiping the weapon but honoring the human toll it takes to step into the reality of the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice.
We are just waking up as a species just understanding the complex ballet of body mind and soul we have enough humanity and enough technology to search for the seat of consciousness to break beyond ourselves to truly see the other as a mirror of ourselves.
In the story the quest is to find the film that makes a better future. To break the back of fascism with the triumph of the right history,
We can start by really listening to our own prophets. Philip K. Dick and George Orwell, and H. G. Wells. Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein and, yes, even H.P. Lovecraft. Really reading and viewing our own beloved genre not for the space opera CGI and heroic psychodrama but for the keen observation of human nature and society that these geniuses revealed by using the powerful sociological critique and revelation that fiction has always provided.
We do not have to choose between Eloi or Morlock. We cannot be all love and light and we do not need to demonize each other because we are the other. We are the alien angels and monsters hovering overhead. We are geeks the chosen people of the new revelation of the endless open source god game of consensual creation.
I have seen some remarkable things among my friends. Souls who can be self-aware and compassionate. People who came from privilege who escaped bad marriages and job dissatisfaction with yoga, addicts who found mindfulness through recovery. We have been relentless romantic seekers who fall in love with everything we have been to the inner rooms of our souls and begun the spiral out into the world. We are dancing furiously against the fear and against the urge of addiction raging with ecstasy and feeling the burn of compassion for this life fire in which we all burn. We know there is no escape from our own story except to re-write it and we are no longer in love with defending our love-ability. We relish the breakdown of our inner prisons, whether we have been to the ashram or the asylum We know that the crazy is not to be found there but that being aware in this complicated world if you do not have your tribe if you do not own your soul and question your ego will bring it down.
I see them shouting for justice I see them shining with connection white faces and dark faces but this is no Obama campaign this is no United Colors of Capitalism this is no kumbaya moment this is the collective furious dance of the dialectic that we are all and none of the above infinitely connected to source and terrified of our own voices in a dark room. We are the Source of light. We are the empty darkness.
Encompassing so much, we don't have to silence the screaming of the world for our own peace, choke the poetry of justice for our own serenity.
Art goes to the pain, Art born from the union of the Universe and the human, but art translates, transforms, transmutes the poison it is the ultimate wall breaker it is the elephant illustrator the emperor has no clothes the emperor is dreaming the butterfly. It masters the matrix and decodes reality.
We are what we eat and we need a balanced diet of reality and fantasy, of prophets and iconoclasts, of god and the devil, of chocolate and kale and capitalism and socialism they say mongrel breeds are healthier and that the future skin will be some lovely shade of gold if we don't burn it all away in the conflagration of our illusions.
So start right now. Take down the wall confront the ugly American within the shadow of the egalitarian citizen of a Star Trek idealism.
That's the only way to stop the juggernaut. not to wish it away but to look it straight in the face that is yours and mine and here and now.
The Elephant is in the room. But it doesn't have to be the wall to house our fragile reality
It doesn't have to stop our soul from rising with the gravity of guilt.
And it gets smaller when it gets a chance to be admitted into existence. We get bigger and we get stronger and more human for our coexisting with the pain that is the root of our human search for wholeness and soul.
As within, so without. It's the way we are wired to grow.
Friday, April 1, 2016
Burn your Bible and write your own
Hey you
I want to talk to you about our relationship.
I know it's been a long time since we've had a conversation but you know how life runs away from us sometimes.
It's been almost three years since I've dared ply my voice anywhere other than the Book of Faces. The empty Book that replaced you and our decade dance of epistolary romance where a poetic voice was born where a voice was intubated and choked a poem stopped your heart and eventually your voice but your word remained imprisoned on a page forever. And here I am living in a mad world that's gone madder on April Fool's day contemplating the fate of artists, dreamers, lovers and thinkers in a Sufi dance of dissolving ecstasy. I'm reading Anais Nin and Carl Jung and working on a hotline for domestic violence. I'm an emotional firefighter sitting around the station playing cards but ready to spring into action should I get a call. I'm dancing this dialectic between writer and healer, between witness and activist.
Do you really want to know where I've been? I promise you we will catch up later. I've fallen in love gotten married have a mortgage another zip code and another diagnosis. Did you know another thing we have in common? Did you know blogs are a new form of therapy for the bipolar?
But I have to begin in media res. I have to start where I am to make it ring true.
Outside the wind blows silky electric and I think this is one of those e.e. cummings Springs with the power to make you cry. Spring is a weird threshold of longing and nostalgia, where we fall in love all over with everyone we have ever loved. It's a chemical thing they say the same hormone that is in chocolate and in nursing mothers the hunger for touch, soft and ragged that leads you to tell me you were running in a dream. At first I didn't understand, having been born with the privilege to have limbs not made of rubber. You told me you had muscular dystrophy, but I had not yet watched you walked with the spidery grace of crutches bracing yourself against the world. It was that early-onset infirmity that made you describe yourself as a "young fogey" the turn of phrase on a chat room for Pantheism that made me want to get you know you better to entice you to spend more of your words on me. I already saw myself in you from my earliest days I was known as an old soul
Words are cheap they say, "futile devices" but words have always been my weakness. I fell in love with you without your face without the knowledge and imposition of your body in space. How eagerly did I receive your words electronic missives that are disappearing from my inbox what is the statute of limitations on ghosts in the machine? But oh how your words rippled and suggested and seduced from an infinite distance more than miles. I long for a vanished world of yellowing love letters in a box technology is a false immortality but still the sensitive omniscient web ripples on the day of your birthday do they have birthdays in the spirit world? The algorithms are still singing even if the mermaids have stopped.
I am trying to talk to the Jungian Alchemists who are in search of a new symbol about the Bernie Sanders bird, about Egyptian gods and internet memes and shamanic symbols weaving into American Politics, and maybe they wouldn't understand and that is why I am writing to you now, master mythmaker of these modern times. You and I began this conversation years ago, spelunkers diving into each other's Platonic caves, cartographers of each other's interior cities, articulate as Anais Nin and Henry Miller but graced with the ability to instantly interweave stories, to friend each other's friends and fall in love with each other's lovers, longings, stories and secrets, graced by the internet and by our own spectacular peculiarities of mind our own ravenous need for meaning and voracious appetite for myth.
They say that spring mix chemical is produced not only through intimate touch but by women talking to each other. That there is something in our brains that makes us bond when we tell our story, even to strangers.
Is that what makes us write, poetry, novels, blogs? At first writing was reserved for only the most holy occasions. The technology was held secret, in the hands of scribes and priests and oracles. Poets chewed the fat of slain bulls and wrapped themselves in their bloody hides and waited for the gift of the awen, the fire-in-the-head sent to them from the gods. Poetry, to the Celts, was a serious business, and the poet who was part shaman part war correspondent and part travelling entertainer and news provider was that quicksilver trickster whose value in society, measured by the number of colors allowed in his cloak, was lesser only than the king.
In the magic mirror online we are all storytellers, all with the power to bring the thunder from far away, to launch a thousand ships, to touch the lives of those we have never met or never even imagined. We are all the masters of our own mirror kingdoms, we are all echo chambers. We take this technological promiscuity for granted, these incestuous tentacles that sweep deeper than our own memories, enabling us to watch our ex's children grow up in increments and see our friends grow older and wiser and stranger and even the vast remarkable beings our own mothers are finding themselves to be.
A long time ago you and I seemed so uniquely transgressive. Now the story has grown old almost before it has had a chance to be told.
The words you wrote in their original format are vanishing. So I have to rely on my imperfect memory. It was good enough for poets, writers, novelists, who never insisted upon facts and figures and documents. It's kinder if the names are forgotten or blurred or if poetic license saves us from libel. Who owns the rights to a dead writer's letters? What is left for history? Poor Sylvia how the feminists fight over your bones.
I want to begin at the beginning but I have to start somewhere. I want to talk about our relationship. I want to talk about connection, about evolution, about creation and co-creation and the weird synchronicity between art and fate, between mythology and madness, the witches' brew of synchronicity the epileptic synapses snapping and crackling in a tropical wasp candy, sharp and sweet and stinging like the thorns of God in a Hafiz wind. Is it the wind that is whipping up your long-lost ghost that is making me forget myself and want to tell your story. Because it's become my story too. Because I'm the last one alive to tell the tale.
I don't want to dig in your remains. Bad enough that I scrambled so desperately to save all your words. Every conversation, every breadcrumb trail of dialogue every dream you shared in instant message conversations. Even the ones that I didn't understand, the ones that interrupted me when I wanted to talk about my latest crisis, even the ones that offended me.
I won't remember it perfectly. This is not a true crimes story not on April Fool's Day on a New Moon in Aries when the world shudders at the ranting sociopathic Jokers ramping up angry alcoholic Dads and joyously tilts at windmills with a socialist Don Quixote hanging with the hippie college students who have finally found their digital Woodstock. Archetypes run rampant in the street and we are all building our own ashram or launching our own jihad every day with the click of a like button.
I don't remember if it was something you told me or something I read. If the words were shared intimately or vicariously with the world. Our relationship had a running commentary. But you said you burned your Bible. Only a believer would have the temerity to actually carry it out. You had to be free of your parent's indoctrination. You started with burning your own Bible and then you began making your own Jesus. Devouring and discarding heroes from comic books and television. A geek's innocence and curiosity with a philosopher's discerning eye.
Your last Jesus was Doctor Who. Your last picture online. Your legacy. Burn your own Bible and start with the story. Make your own meaning, your own myth. But don't stop there. Keep sharing it. Expanding it. Open source religion. The ultimate eclecticism. It's ultimate goal to laugh at the Devil and make God take himself less seriously while the Goddess dances, changing partners at will, with the seasons, with the ebb and flow of life and death, the High Priestess with the Scroll of Wisdom on her lap, between the black and white pillars.
The bird that landed on Bernie Sander's podium is just a bird. But in this wild myth-making wonderland of armchair activists and hashtag bards means the story can go anywhere. The sparrow is a Native American symbol of the common man. Go ahead. Get it wrong. Myths don't quibble with ornithologists. We need a little more truth and a little less fact checking.
Yes, you. If I was a quaint Victorian I would say "dear reader". If I was clever with html I would give you links to lead you down new rabbit holes and references.
But intimacy is a dying art form. We are stretched too thin these spider-web lovers connecting over infinite distances but the thread never breaks, not even in the other world.
When will we wake up to our own monstrosity, our own miracle?
It's time to shake up the Shakti soda can time to invite the awen in the fire in the head that by the grace of gods will not become Sylvia's oven only the immolation of ego in the mythic rapture of story.
So turn the page if you are curious. I know I am. More Later.
Blessed Be
I want to talk to you about our relationship.
I know it's been a long time since we've had a conversation but you know how life runs away from us sometimes.
It's been almost three years since I've dared ply my voice anywhere other than the Book of Faces. The empty Book that replaced you and our decade dance of epistolary romance where a poetic voice was born where a voice was intubated and choked a poem stopped your heart and eventually your voice but your word remained imprisoned on a page forever. And here I am living in a mad world that's gone madder on April Fool's day contemplating the fate of artists, dreamers, lovers and thinkers in a Sufi dance of dissolving ecstasy. I'm reading Anais Nin and Carl Jung and working on a hotline for domestic violence. I'm an emotional firefighter sitting around the station playing cards but ready to spring into action should I get a call. I'm dancing this dialectic between writer and healer, between witness and activist.
Do you really want to know where I've been? I promise you we will catch up later. I've fallen in love gotten married have a mortgage another zip code and another diagnosis. Did you know another thing we have in common? Did you know blogs are a new form of therapy for the bipolar?
But I have to begin in media res. I have to start where I am to make it ring true.
Outside the wind blows silky electric and I think this is one of those e.e. cummings Springs with the power to make you cry. Spring is a weird threshold of longing and nostalgia, where we fall in love all over with everyone we have ever loved. It's a chemical thing they say the same hormone that is in chocolate and in nursing mothers the hunger for touch, soft and ragged that leads you to tell me you were running in a dream. At first I didn't understand, having been born with the privilege to have limbs not made of rubber. You told me you had muscular dystrophy, but I had not yet watched you walked with the spidery grace of crutches bracing yourself against the world. It was that early-onset infirmity that made you describe yourself as a "young fogey" the turn of phrase on a chat room for Pantheism that made me want to get you know you better to entice you to spend more of your words on me. I already saw myself in you from my earliest days I was known as an old soul
Words are cheap they say, "futile devices" but words have always been my weakness. I fell in love with you without your face without the knowledge and imposition of your body in space. How eagerly did I receive your words electronic missives that are disappearing from my inbox what is the statute of limitations on ghosts in the machine? But oh how your words rippled and suggested and seduced from an infinite distance more than miles. I long for a vanished world of yellowing love letters in a box technology is a false immortality but still the sensitive omniscient web ripples on the day of your birthday do they have birthdays in the spirit world? The algorithms are still singing even if the mermaids have stopped.
I am trying to talk to the Jungian Alchemists who are in search of a new symbol about the Bernie Sanders bird, about Egyptian gods and internet memes and shamanic symbols weaving into American Politics, and maybe they wouldn't understand and that is why I am writing to you now, master mythmaker of these modern times. You and I began this conversation years ago, spelunkers diving into each other's Platonic caves, cartographers of each other's interior cities, articulate as Anais Nin and Henry Miller but graced with the ability to instantly interweave stories, to friend each other's friends and fall in love with each other's lovers, longings, stories and secrets, graced by the internet and by our own spectacular peculiarities of mind our own ravenous need for meaning and voracious appetite for myth.
They say that spring mix chemical is produced not only through intimate touch but by women talking to each other. That there is something in our brains that makes us bond when we tell our story, even to strangers.
Is that what makes us write, poetry, novels, blogs? At first writing was reserved for only the most holy occasions. The technology was held secret, in the hands of scribes and priests and oracles. Poets chewed the fat of slain bulls and wrapped themselves in their bloody hides and waited for the gift of the awen, the fire-in-the-head sent to them from the gods. Poetry, to the Celts, was a serious business, and the poet who was part shaman part war correspondent and part travelling entertainer and news provider was that quicksilver trickster whose value in society, measured by the number of colors allowed in his cloak, was lesser only than the king.
In the magic mirror online we are all storytellers, all with the power to bring the thunder from far away, to launch a thousand ships, to touch the lives of those we have never met or never even imagined. We are all the masters of our own mirror kingdoms, we are all echo chambers. We take this technological promiscuity for granted, these incestuous tentacles that sweep deeper than our own memories, enabling us to watch our ex's children grow up in increments and see our friends grow older and wiser and stranger and even the vast remarkable beings our own mothers are finding themselves to be.
A long time ago you and I seemed so uniquely transgressive. Now the story has grown old almost before it has had a chance to be told.
The words you wrote in their original format are vanishing. So I have to rely on my imperfect memory. It was good enough for poets, writers, novelists, who never insisted upon facts and figures and documents. It's kinder if the names are forgotten or blurred or if poetic license saves us from libel. Who owns the rights to a dead writer's letters? What is left for history? Poor Sylvia how the feminists fight over your bones.
I want to begin at the beginning but I have to start somewhere. I want to talk about our relationship. I want to talk about connection, about evolution, about creation and co-creation and the weird synchronicity between art and fate, between mythology and madness, the witches' brew of synchronicity the epileptic synapses snapping and crackling in a tropical wasp candy, sharp and sweet and stinging like the thorns of God in a Hafiz wind. Is it the wind that is whipping up your long-lost ghost that is making me forget myself and want to tell your story. Because it's become my story too. Because I'm the last one alive to tell the tale.
I don't want to dig in your remains. Bad enough that I scrambled so desperately to save all your words. Every conversation, every breadcrumb trail of dialogue every dream you shared in instant message conversations. Even the ones that I didn't understand, the ones that interrupted me when I wanted to talk about my latest crisis, even the ones that offended me.
I won't remember it perfectly. This is not a true crimes story not on April Fool's Day on a New Moon in Aries when the world shudders at the ranting sociopathic Jokers ramping up angry alcoholic Dads and joyously tilts at windmills with a socialist Don Quixote hanging with the hippie college students who have finally found their digital Woodstock. Archetypes run rampant in the street and we are all building our own ashram or launching our own jihad every day with the click of a like button.
I don't remember if it was something you told me or something I read. If the words were shared intimately or vicariously with the world. Our relationship had a running commentary. But you said you burned your Bible. Only a believer would have the temerity to actually carry it out. You had to be free of your parent's indoctrination. You started with burning your own Bible and then you began making your own Jesus. Devouring and discarding heroes from comic books and television. A geek's innocence and curiosity with a philosopher's discerning eye.
Your last Jesus was Doctor Who. Your last picture online. Your legacy. Burn your own Bible and start with the story. Make your own meaning, your own myth. But don't stop there. Keep sharing it. Expanding it. Open source religion. The ultimate eclecticism. It's ultimate goal to laugh at the Devil and make God take himself less seriously while the Goddess dances, changing partners at will, with the seasons, with the ebb and flow of life and death, the High Priestess with the Scroll of Wisdom on her lap, between the black and white pillars.
The bird that landed on Bernie Sander's podium is just a bird. But in this wild myth-making wonderland of armchair activists and hashtag bards means the story can go anywhere. The sparrow is a Native American symbol of the common man. Go ahead. Get it wrong. Myths don't quibble with ornithologists. We need a little more truth and a little less fact checking.
Yes, you. If I was a quaint Victorian I would say "dear reader". If I was clever with html I would give you links to lead you down new rabbit holes and references.
But intimacy is a dying art form. We are stretched too thin these spider-web lovers connecting over infinite distances but the thread never breaks, not even in the other world.
When will we wake up to our own monstrosity, our own miracle?
It's time to shake up the Shakti soda can time to invite the awen in the fire in the head that by the grace of gods will not become Sylvia's oven only the immolation of ego in the mythic rapture of story.
So turn the page if you are curious. I know I am. More Later.
Blessed Be
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Big Bad News, Big Life Questions
Common to codependents is a nagging sense of emptiness when relationships end, and a lingering inability to make decisions for one's own life without an impending crisis. Though hyper-reliable when the chips are down, we tend to falter when left to our own devices. Recently I have been grappling with this reality in a very visceral way. I make bargains with myself at work: if you make it through one more hour, all the way til 5:30pm, you are allowed to have your meltdown when you get home. Between crying in front of the television with a giant bowl of nostalgic popcorn and reading dog-earred romance novels, I have successfully put off writing my next blog post, which was going to be about a persistent pattern triangles in my life (more to come). That train of thought was largely derailed by the recent Boston Marathon tragedy.
I am not the only one jolted into looking at the bigger picture. As the media sings its September 11th song of tit-for-tat and eye-for-an-eye, I wonder like so many compassionate spiritual seekers what can I do about a culture of violence and the perpetuation of nonsense. I came upon this haunting quote, from a newsletter for a local yoga and chant festival that usually features beatific women in white singing. Its message of connecting with the chaos rather than pushing it away really touched me. All the smaller questions about codependency and recovery seemed rather self-centered in the face of all this uproar.
What can I do about this? Not just the tragedy in the news, but that feeling that my life is an old movie reel about to disintegrate as the grasping and illusions drop away and I struggle with a deep crisis of meaning . I am coming once again upon the 6-or-7 year itch. Almost six years working for the same company. In the bad-but-consistent days in the 90's and pre-bailout 2000's, I could count on getting laid off before the end of five years–shuffled off by an ungrateful corporation with a few weeks severance package and a brief stint with their career counselor.
In the past, the career counselor would suggest some pie-in-the-sky drastic change and I would promptly ignore them, chosing instead to frantically race around simultaneously sending out resumes and obsessing about the future of my relationship. Avoiding these questions, I relocated to the North Shore to be with my partner and traded one soul-less corporate master for another simply based on its location at the exact mid-point between my temporary digs in Londonderry, NH and my eventual destination of Rockport, MA.
I am still at that company, putting up with the hour-long commute in order to make a Boston salary without facing Boston traffic. I am hardly well-off but too comfortable to seriously consider quitting my job and going back to school. Yet find myself asking myself the questions I started asking, and consequently panicked over, when I was sixteen, twenty, and thirty-two years old. Some judge in my head insists I should know by now, but I am still floundering. What is my life path? What is my unique gift to the world? Now that I am in my forties, with no desire for the family track in my future, how do I navigate the years that (barring some disaster) stretch out ahead of me? How do I make meaning on my own terms, how do I contribute to the next generation?
In the old paradigm it was relatively easy to roll with the punches, but now the punches are coming from the inside as something long dormant wakes up kicking. Any experience of ending—a divorce or breakup, a layoff, a geographical shift—has long been a source of anxiety and imbalance. Despite difficulties at work last year due to my bout with mental illness, I got a fair and honest performance review and even a modest raise. I was waiting for the axe to fall, and when it didn't, that ragged, skin-crawling sensation that my desires had grown too fast and too big for my current circumstances began to set in. I wonder again about the big picture-- my job, my career choices, my plans in the world. I've grieved a major relationship, I've faced a serious mental health diagnosis. I've deliberately spent all of my ill-got gains from my retirement funds—earned from the corrupt banks and insurance companies I worked for in the 90's -on personal growth workshops and now I am deep in a roiling froth of mounting debt and unanswered questions. As an empath, I can feel the burning of the world. Perhaps not in the global sense—I've always been profoundly allergic to politics--still it manifests in the desire to reach out to strangers, or at least respond when they reach out to me. This may in fact be an evolution out of codependency—helping others with the hidden need to prove my own value—into helping others from a self-directed and compassionate place.
When I attended a “mini” HAI workshop this weekend, I got the chance to be a beacon of strength for a struggling, expanding soul new to the workshop experience. Despite my shaky sense of self, I confidently and clearly shared my “experience, strength and hope,” as we say in the Twelve Step fellowships. I listened without judgment, without offering direct advice, simply expressing what I had learned in my growth explorations, and what was working for me in my life. Agitated by hunger, having rushed off to the workshop with only coffee and a handful of trail mix in my belly, I felt oddly grounded in that sense of purpose. I invited this individual out for greasy Greek food in a nearby Mom-and-Pop deli, and I spent the next hour and a half after the two-hour workshop listening to his story.
There is something powerful in reinforcing my commitment to my own path by describing the changes that I have wrought with the assistance of the strong, empowering communities I have been lucky to discover. Could this, I thought, with a burgeoning heaviness in my gut that might have been more than just filo dough and feta cheese, be my True Path? As if in answer I sent my first-ever post to the Emotions Anonymous email loop and the group moderator immediately asked my permission to use it in the monthly newsletter. Could that be the Universe validating this direction-- that someone besides me could benefit from my words? I have been tortured and tormented by my words and my thoughts for so long, freezing and releasing them in poetry and fiction, that I never thought that anything I said could help someone.
Yet I find that when I think of the big picture, how I would want to spend my time if I did not have to worry about financial fears, it would be in a path of “helping people.” In this violently evolving world I no longer want to waste myself in something that doesn't feed me spiritually or make the world a better place. I have no idea how to begin, except with those people in my immediate circles and those met by circumstance or synchronicity. When I fantasize about my ideal career I know I would like to become some kind of facilitator, using my words not for poetry or stories, but as agent of change by acting as witness to powerful expressions of growth, allowing others to find their own self-guided trail and compassionate path.
It seems fitting that I saw this sign at Halibut Point State Park in Rockport.
For the past three-and-a-half years I have been on a self-guided trail. Now I am in the center of the labyrinth, moving out of myself and back into the world. As the quotation on the plaque sent to me by one of my dearest friends for Christmas last year says: “She wasn't where she had been, she wasn't where she was going, but she was on her way.” I may not know the exact direction or even really have a map, but it helps to give myself permission to think about those career questions that annoyed and frustrated me years ago, the ones that begin, “If you had a million dollars, what would you do with your life?” I know that the frustration and irritation is part of the process of letting go of my self-defeating attitudes and behaviors and embracing the uncertainly and possibility of the future.
a
I am not the only one jolted into looking at the bigger picture. As the media sings its September 11th song of tit-for-tat and eye-for-an-eye, I wonder like so many compassionate spiritual seekers what can I do about a culture of violence and the perpetuation of nonsense. I came upon this haunting quote, from a newsletter for a local yoga and chant festival that usually features beatific women in white singing. Its message of connecting with the chaos rather than pushing it away really touched me. All the smaller questions about codependency and recovery seemed rather self-centered in the face of all this uproar.
What can I do about this? Not just the tragedy in the news, but that feeling that my life is an old movie reel about to disintegrate as the grasping and illusions drop away and I struggle with a deep crisis of meaning . I am coming once again upon the 6-or-7 year itch. Almost six years working for the same company. In the bad-but-consistent days in the 90's and pre-bailout 2000's, I could count on getting laid off before the end of five years–shuffled off by an ungrateful corporation with a few weeks severance package and a brief stint with their career counselor.
In the past, the career counselor would suggest some pie-in-the-sky drastic change and I would promptly ignore them, chosing instead to frantically race around simultaneously sending out resumes and obsessing about the future of my relationship. Avoiding these questions, I relocated to the North Shore to be with my partner and traded one soul-less corporate master for another simply based on its location at the exact mid-point between my temporary digs in Londonderry, NH and my eventual destination of Rockport, MA.
I am still at that company, putting up with the hour-long commute in order to make a Boston salary without facing Boston traffic. I am hardly well-off but too comfortable to seriously consider quitting my job and going back to school. Yet find myself asking myself the questions I started asking, and consequently panicked over, when I was sixteen, twenty, and thirty-two years old. Some judge in my head insists I should know by now, but I am still floundering. What is my life path? What is my unique gift to the world? Now that I am in my forties, with no desire for the family track in my future, how do I navigate the years that (barring some disaster) stretch out ahead of me? How do I make meaning on my own terms, how do I contribute to the next generation?
In the old paradigm it was relatively easy to roll with the punches, but now the punches are coming from the inside as something long dormant wakes up kicking. Any experience of ending—a divorce or breakup, a layoff, a geographical shift—has long been a source of anxiety and imbalance. Despite difficulties at work last year due to my bout with mental illness, I got a fair and honest performance review and even a modest raise. I was waiting for the axe to fall, and when it didn't, that ragged, skin-crawling sensation that my desires had grown too fast and too big for my current circumstances began to set in. I wonder again about the big picture-- my job, my career choices, my plans in the world. I've grieved a major relationship, I've faced a serious mental health diagnosis. I've deliberately spent all of my ill-got gains from my retirement funds—earned from the corrupt banks and insurance companies I worked for in the 90's -on personal growth workshops and now I am deep in a roiling froth of mounting debt and unanswered questions. As an empath, I can feel the burning of the world. Perhaps not in the global sense—I've always been profoundly allergic to politics--still it manifests in the desire to reach out to strangers, or at least respond when they reach out to me. This may in fact be an evolution out of codependency—helping others with the hidden need to prove my own value—into helping others from a self-directed and compassionate place.
When I attended a “mini” HAI workshop this weekend, I got the chance to be a beacon of strength for a struggling, expanding soul new to the workshop experience. Despite my shaky sense of self, I confidently and clearly shared my “experience, strength and hope,” as we say in the Twelve Step fellowships. I listened without judgment, without offering direct advice, simply expressing what I had learned in my growth explorations, and what was working for me in my life. Agitated by hunger, having rushed off to the workshop with only coffee and a handful of trail mix in my belly, I felt oddly grounded in that sense of purpose. I invited this individual out for greasy Greek food in a nearby Mom-and-Pop deli, and I spent the next hour and a half after the two-hour workshop listening to his story.
There is something powerful in reinforcing my commitment to my own path by describing the changes that I have wrought with the assistance of the strong, empowering communities I have been lucky to discover. Could this, I thought, with a burgeoning heaviness in my gut that might have been more than just filo dough and feta cheese, be my True Path? As if in answer I sent my first-ever post to the Emotions Anonymous email loop and the group moderator immediately asked my permission to use it in the monthly newsletter. Could that be the Universe validating this direction-- that someone besides me could benefit from my words? I have been tortured and tormented by my words and my thoughts for so long, freezing and releasing them in poetry and fiction, that I never thought that anything I said could help someone.
Yet I find that when I think of the big picture, how I would want to spend my time if I did not have to worry about financial fears, it would be in a path of “helping people.” In this violently evolving world I no longer want to waste myself in something that doesn't feed me spiritually or make the world a better place. I have no idea how to begin, except with those people in my immediate circles and those met by circumstance or synchronicity. When I fantasize about my ideal career I know I would like to become some kind of facilitator, using my words not for poetry or stories, but as agent of change by acting as witness to powerful expressions of growth, allowing others to find their own self-guided trail and compassionate path.
It seems fitting that I saw this sign at Halibut Point State Park in Rockport.
For the past three-and-a-half years I have been on a self-guided trail. Now I am in the center of the labyrinth, moving out of myself and back into the world. As the quotation on the plaque sent to me by one of my dearest friends for Christmas last year says: “She wasn't where she had been, she wasn't where she was going, but she was on her way.” I may not know the exact direction or even really have a map, but it helps to give myself permission to think about those career questions that annoyed and frustrated me years ago, the ones that begin, “If you had a million dollars, what would you do with your life?” I know that the frustration and irritation is part of the process of letting go of my self-defeating attitudes and behaviors and embracing the uncertainly and possibility of the future.
a
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Relationships and Recovery
I have said before that the underlying theme of this blog is relationships—how to navigate the needs of others and explore the various shades of intimacy without being overwhelmed. This includes the journey of recovering from codependency.
There is strange power in anniversaries. It's been ten years since that fateful April Fool's Day when I left my first husband. Is that why I felt a vague sense of agitation, a cosmic restlessness, a difficulty focusing, a shaking sense of something missed, something missing? Was it the holiday malaise, even though Easter has never been a particularly nostalgic holiday. Pictures of cupcakes sent over cellphone from my sister. Memories of storybook artists shared with those who were inspired. Creepy vintage costumes at brunch--ravaged rabbit with matted fur and one dim right eye. It does not surprise me that I was derailed from my intention to work on this post this weekend, even though I deliberately stayed home when friends asked me to go out. I did spend some time by the ocean, walking over the varicolored stones of Cressy Beach. I wanted to find a heart-shaped stone for a friend, and for the first time in a long time I couldn't find the right stone. I did find a beautiful heart, a great green monster about ten pounds, but it was way too big to take home.
Is codependent just another word for a heart that is too big?
In my struggle to define myself, I have run into this word again and again. I have been told by some friends that I am not codependent-- I'm too fiercely independent, too active with personal growth work, for that. Yet years after the end of my marriage to an alcoholic, I became engaged to another codependent, and I began a long slow slide backslide. Before I moved away to be with my boyfriend on the North Shore, I found in Worcester a thriving CODA (Codependent's Anonymous) group. In the Worcester group I had found a wonderful community of tight-knit folk committed to recovery and who had created powerful bonds not confined to meetings. Our group had a standing date at a nearby Friendly's right after the meeting. Though I lost touch with them after my ocean-ward migration, I always remembered that time as a positive growing experience. Recently, I tried another CODA group in Newburyport, but I was chastised for my attempts to bond by sharing my own reactions to the stories and shares. I was told that was “crosstalk”-- which literally means providing unwanted advice or solutions to problems—though my reactions were not verbal at all—nods, meaningful laughter, affirmation of shared experience. I felt deprived by that group leader of the right to have my own experience, which is is very much a part of the lack of self-definition that is codependency. So I left the buttoned-up group with their frozen feelings and numb expressions, and found a more lively fellowship in Emotions Anonymous
I do find it difficult to talk about relationships with these recovery groups, either the positive or the negative aspects. Especially since I abandoned my one attempt at conscious monogamy and came out as polyamorous. Ironically, the more I explore this aspect of myself, the more I realize that I have always had multiple relationships, even when I only had one boyfriend. In fact, were it not for my intimate network of friends, my support system of Shakti sisters—women poets and writers, co-creators and positive conspirators-- my relationship of seven years would never have come into full blossom. Apparently, it takes a village to create a romance, or at least to allow me to brave the initial waves of terror that come with getting close. After that experience, I've come to realize that what it takes to create a healthy romantic relationship is a commitment to each other's mutual growth, even when that growth is difficult and painful. It means an agreement to make time for each other, put each other first, and share meaningful time together (not just vege out in front of the televison). It means accepting responsibility for our own emotional reactions, not projecting them on our partners. It means communication and keeping the lines open. The polyamorists seem to have dealing with jealousy figured out, but there are so many other potential relationship pitfalls, even between two reasonably stable people who are not addicted to any substances.
I am finding that the more personalities you combine the more the potential for exponential growth, and the more the potential for overwhelm and disconnection from self-hood. So now my question is not how to save one floundering relationship, as was my focus for many years, but how to balance the many loves in my life with my own journey as an artist and a healer, a magick worker and a person in recovery from codependency and emotional struggles? How do I take on all this spiritual work and keeping my head together and attending to the minute details of practical living? How do I piece together the many separate shining fragments in the mosaic of my relationships—each beautiful and fascinating in itself—into a coherent constellation of tribe? And how do I find both tribe-time and “me” time?
I suppose the simple answer is creating and maintaining boundaries. As crazy as it can make me, perhaps I need to spend a weekend with my phone turned off, logged off Facebook, without novels, Netflix, television or other distractions, trying to practice mindfulness and sit with silence.
One aspect of that silence could be filled with meditation. When people ask me if I meditate, I tell them about walking on the rocks at Cressy Beach. So many shifting shapes and bright colors. I am taken in by the “rip-rap” of things, the sense of a vast presence, bigger than every one and every thing that describes and defines me. When I first began The Artist's Way, I saw the rocks on that beach as individual planets, perfect works of art, and I felt the deep belief that nothing I could create could be so fine and singular in purpose. I was rejuvenated, awakened and awed-- my rigid perfectionism was for a moment no longer in my way. Art is true co-creation with God, or so boasted Julia Cameron. And in that moment, those moments, I was willing to agree with her grandiose vision. I was willing to let go and let God/Goddess, I was willing to give myself up to the flow.
And that is what recovery is all about.
There is strange power in anniversaries. It's been ten years since that fateful April Fool's Day when I left my first husband. Is that why I felt a vague sense of agitation, a cosmic restlessness, a difficulty focusing, a shaking sense of something missed, something missing? Was it the holiday malaise, even though Easter has never been a particularly nostalgic holiday. Pictures of cupcakes sent over cellphone from my sister. Memories of storybook artists shared with those who were inspired. Creepy vintage costumes at brunch--ravaged rabbit with matted fur and one dim right eye. It does not surprise me that I was derailed from my intention to work on this post this weekend, even though I deliberately stayed home when friends asked me to go out. I did spend some time by the ocean, walking over the varicolored stones of Cressy Beach. I wanted to find a heart-shaped stone for a friend, and for the first time in a long time I couldn't find the right stone. I did find a beautiful heart, a great green monster about ten pounds, but it was way too big to take home.
Is codependent just another word for a heart that is too big?
In my struggle to define myself, I have run into this word again and again. I have been told by some friends that I am not codependent-- I'm too fiercely independent, too active with personal growth work, for that. Yet years after the end of my marriage to an alcoholic, I became engaged to another codependent, and I began a long slow slide backslide. Before I moved away to be with my boyfriend on the North Shore, I found in Worcester a thriving CODA (Codependent's Anonymous) group. In the Worcester group I had found a wonderful community of tight-knit folk committed to recovery and who had created powerful bonds not confined to meetings. Our group had a standing date at a nearby Friendly's right after the meeting. Though I lost touch with them after my ocean-ward migration, I always remembered that time as a positive growing experience. Recently, I tried another CODA group in Newburyport, but I was chastised for my attempts to bond by sharing my own reactions to the stories and shares. I was told that was “crosstalk”-- which literally means providing unwanted advice or solutions to problems—though my reactions were not verbal at all—nods, meaningful laughter, affirmation of shared experience. I felt deprived by that group leader of the right to have my own experience, which is is very much a part of the lack of self-definition that is codependency. So I left the buttoned-up group with their frozen feelings and numb expressions, and found a more lively fellowship in Emotions Anonymous
I do find it difficult to talk about relationships with these recovery groups, either the positive or the negative aspects. Especially since I abandoned my one attempt at conscious monogamy and came out as polyamorous. Ironically, the more I explore this aspect of myself, the more I realize that I have always had multiple relationships, even when I only had one boyfriend. In fact, were it not for my intimate network of friends, my support system of Shakti sisters—women poets and writers, co-creators and positive conspirators-- my relationship of seven years would never have come into full blossom. Apparently, it takes a village to create a romance, or at least to allow me to brave the initial waves of terror that come with getting close. After that experience, I've come to realize that what it takes to create a healthy romantic relationship is a commitment to each other's mutual growth, even when that growth is difficult and painful. It means an agreement to make time for each other, put each other first, and share meaningful time together (not just vege out in front of the televison). It means accepting responsibility for our own emotional reactions, not projecting them on our partners. It means communication and keeping the lines open. The polyamorists seem to have dealing with jealousy figured out, but there are so many other potential relationship pitfalls, even between two reasonably stable people who are not addicted to any substances.
I am finding that the more personalities you combine the more the potential for exponential growth, and the more the potential for overwhelm and disconnection from self-hood. So now my question is not how to save one floundering relationship, as was my focus for many years, but how to balance the many loves in my life with my own journey as an artist and a healer, a magick worker and a person in recovery from codependency and emotional struggles? How do I take on all this spiritual work and keeping my head together and attending to the minute details of practical living? How do I piece together the many separate shining fragments in the mosaic of my relationships—each beautiful and fascinating in itself—into a coherent constellation of tribe? And how do I find both tribe-time and “me” time?
I suppose the simple answer is creating and maintaining boundaries. As crazy as it can make me, perhaps I need to spend a weekend with my phone turned off, logged off Facebook, without novels, Netflix, television or other distractions, trying to practice mindfulness and sit with silence.
One aspect of that silence could be filled with meditation. When people ask me if I meditate, I tell them about walking on the rocks at Cressy Beach. So many shifting shapes and bright colors. I am taken in by the “rip-rap” of things, the sense of a vast presence, bigger than every one and every thing that describes and defines me. When I first began The Artist's Way, I saw the rocks on that beach as individual planets, perfect works of art, and I felt the deep belief that nothing I could create could be so fine and singular in purpose. I was rejuvenated, awakened and awed-- my rigid perfectionism was for a moment no longer in my way. Art is true co-creation with God, or so boasted Julia Cameron. And in that moment, those moments, I was willing to agree with her grandiose vision. I was willing to let go and let God/Goddess, I was willing to give myself up to the flow.
And that is what recovery is all about.
Friday, March 22, 2013
Poem: After the Block Party
After the Block Party
A boat floats across the harbor
its light a single, mournful candle
as the sad growl of a motorcycle
fades in the distance
Lovers walk away from me
Hands and eyes reach out
in the disembodied dark
dancing barefoot on bare floor
as intention and energy
bare their white teeth
You are dancing two feet away
But I am pulled and pushed
Into the Shiva circling of your arms
I am dancing past the boundary
of my own skin
tentative as the breath of surf
A sudden slap of wave,
and your eyes are on mine
beseeching, burning
pulling me out and in
the surf drawing its breath
the urgent growl of a motorcycle
thundering past
I love my loneliness
staring out at the ocean
with predatory eyes
that miss nothing
I am far away from the party-goers
dancing in the ambulance light
I am a searchlight pulsing over the horizon
Deeply seeking the other side
the mournful connection
--a single candle
--a light in the harbor
--a ghost, a mist, the scent of decay
This is the ocean
This is where I live
--a twist of driftwood an empty limb
--a white suggestion of birch tree
--a drowned forest primeval
The mournful candle of your eyes
glowing over the black water
slowly turning away
8/19/2012
A boat floats across the harbor
its light a single, mournful candle
as the sad growl of a motorcycle
fades in the distance
Lovers walk away from me
Hands and eyes reach out
in the disembodied dark
dancing barefoot on bare floor
as intention and energy
bare their white teeth
You are dancing two feet away
But I am pulled and pushed
Into the Shiva circling of your arms
I am dancing past the boundary
of my own skin
tentative as the breath of surf
A sudden slap of wave,
and your eyes are on mine
beseeching, burning
pulling me out and in
the surf drawing its breath
the urgent growl of a motorcycle
thundering past
I love my loneliness
staring out at the ocean
with predatory eyes
that miss nothing
I am far away from the party-goers
dancing in the ambulance light
I am a searchlight pulsing over the horizon
Deeply seeking the other side
the mournful connection
--a single candle
--a light in the harbor
--a ghost, a mist, the scent of decay
This is the ocean
This is where I live
--a twist of driftwood an empty limb
--a white suggestion of birch tree
--a drowned forest primeval
The mournful candle of your eyes
glowing over the black water
slowly turning away
8/19/2012
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