I have a sunburn on the insides of my thighs because I went kayaking on the Cowlitz River a week or so ago and I didn’t think to put on sunscreen.
I think that fear of the sun is over-rated – what with being a pasty-faced white girl living in the dearth of Vitamin D that is the Pacific Northwest and all – also I still think of myself as invincible. Mostly, I didn’t have any sunscreen and it was cloudy.
Though I don’t balk at ingesting whatever it is that makes the shelf-stable Cup O Noodle taste like food of the gods, I am loathe to slather oxybenzone et al on my body’s protective though permeable surface layer. “If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t put it on your body,” the maxim goes.
Cup O Noodle as sunscreen? Probably not.
Photo from wikimedia.org; creative commons license
So as I was sitting here watching Lynda.com videos on creating infographics and hiking up my yoga pants to get a really good scratch on my thigh, I glanced down and noticed that I’m peeling. Of course I’m peeling. I was sunburned.
The peeling spots appeared to be little circles on my skin, like really thin dried skin stickers kind of held on by sweat or spit or magnetism and yoga pants; but when I went to peel the stickers off I found that they were the holes in the otherwise intact skin. The positive and the negative inverted.
Hey, I’m as much a monkey groomer with bad depth perception as the next guy.
When we are in liminal states like identity clarification or financial unraveling, we hope the holes are little stickers that can be easily picked off, but it doesn’t seem to work like that. By the time we figure out it’s the whole layer of skin that’s going to come off, overwhelm and doubt can creep in. Being responsible for peeling off a whole layer of skin in one sitting is a big day.
So I think the trick is to realize that 1) sometimes not all of the skin has to come off -and sometimes more than one layer has to come off; 2) mostly skin heals itself when you nurture it with natural oils and aloes; 3) you can often be doing other stuff while you haphazardly scratch your skin when it’s particularly itchy; and finally, 4) everyone’s skin is different and heals in its own way and time.
Off to more infographic videos. Maybe I’ll make one about sunscreen.
In case the title didn’t give it away, this one contains material which may be considered offensive. Video link is very graphic.
What Makes Me Applaud Violence:
One of my very best friends came over and we were catching up. I have known her for 11 years. Our families have spent weekends together, camping and playing games. Her kids are my kids. They are fabulous people. Mean card players.
One of their stunning, smart, funny, articulate, fearless daughters is babysitting for me this summer. I’ve known her since she was five. She now stands about six foot tall. Long blond hair. Completely beautiful girl, inside and out. One of their sons is my Cup O Noodle-eating soul brother. I want my daughter to marry him, but she’s only 11, and he has a girlfriend. He’s a good six-four with smiley blue eyes and a heart of generosity and valor. I’ve known him since he was seven.
Meg mentioned that my soul brother, her son, had had a scuffle at school. “What happened?” I asked.
“One of the boys said he wanted to _____ (sister’s name), so he took him out.”
He punched out a punk kid for being disrespectful about his sister? “Perfect!” I exclaimed.
Sincere. All-in. Fist bump. Teary-from-pride eyes. “If you need any support on that one, I’m first in line behind you,” I told her. Some words don’t need to be spoken, but these were.
The Backstory to Put My Colosseum Fervor into Context:
I’ve been doing some investigative digging at the intersection of rape culture, social media, vigilantism, feminism, power dynamics, gender relations, and free speech. I have daughters and sons and so these topics are important to me on a variety of levels.
It’s been three parts stomach turning and two parts social study. Not surprisingly the concept of “douchebaggery” frequently appears.
No douchebags. Made using the tool hosted at tagxedo.com.
I love the word “douchebag.” I would only feel hinkier about admitting that if I had decorum or plausible deniability. Though it does degrade, by association, the feminine care product from which its name derives, “douchebag” describes individuals who practice the baser version of humanity recognized by misogyny, bullying, and exploitation. Sometimes there’s no better word to do the job.
Free Speech:
Free speech is a two-headed beast. Free speech does not just protect noble expression. We can say the most reprehensible thoughts imaginable and as long as we don’t threaten imminent harm, we are within the bounds of law. But what does that look like when a drunk high school student’s friend makes a 12-minute video of him laughing about and mocking an unresponsive 16-year-old female student who has possibly been drugged and is being gang-raped and possibly urinated on and posts it on YouTube? Is there anything criminal in that? How can there not be? And yet…
Douchebags.
Two of the boys were charged as delinquents for rape (“guilty” for minors), but the coach, whom tweets indicated may have known about the incident the night it happened and who neither reported it nor benched his players when allegations surfaced, got a two-year contract extension. The prosecutor said the girl’s family didn’t originally want to press charges because she didn’t want to be drug through the media mudpit.
Social Media and Bullying:
And tweets and Facebook and pictures…
Amanda Todd, another teen victim of peer douchebaggery, has a tragic tale that serves as both cautionary tale and wake-up call. As a 7th grader, Amanda visited webcams with friends. A guy online sweet-talked her into flashing her chest. One year later, he stalked her online and threatened to distribute her pix far and wide if she didn’t “give him a show.” He did. She didn’t know how he got her info.
Police showed up at her house on Christmas to let her know what had happened. Amanda didn’t press charges because she wanted to move on. Friends turned against her. She became “that girl” among her peers. She suffered major depression. She moved.
Watch the video below for the full story. Slut shaming killed her.
Not just boys are douchebags.
And here’s another one. Kid in high school in Colorado makes the team and gets hazed a la sodomy by his team-mates in the back of the bus on an away tournament. The team did well. Principal’s son is the victim. Dad of victim finds out when his other son hears the coach’s sons bragging about it. Coach’s sons are perpetrators. No lawsuit, no real consequence. Coach is part of influential family in town. Families played together since kids were young. Family of victim is ostracized. They move. Don’t rock the boat, Baby.
Girls aren’t the only victims in the “boys will be boys” douchebaggery.
Vigilantes:
If you don’t know about the guys in the Guy Fawkes masks, welcome to Anonymous, a loosely organized hacking collective that takes its inspiration from the dystopian cult movie “V for Vendetta.” The group is known for inflicting DDoS attacks on sites they find offensive (banking, corporate, etc.) and hacking into and distributing extracted personal information (DOX) of people whom they target as perpetrators. Their signature announcement is to hack into websites where the perps live with their voice distorted videos, warning the guilty to be on the lookout.
Response to the Steubenville rape divided the community. On one hand there was the “Steubenville law enforcement is covering up for the football team and, by the way, satan lives there.” And on the other hand camped the, “That girl asked for it. How dare she try and break apart the football team?!!” people. The social media attention either hampered the investigation, was responsible for the justice that did prevail, or was a witchhunt, depending on whom you ask.
I want to be able to simultaneously applaud Anonymous AND root for a fair and effective criminal justice system, but I gotta be honest: it’s hard not to side with Batman on this one.
I talked with a spokesman for the Ohio Attorney General’s office who has jurisdiction over the grand jury that is going to reconvene allegedly sometime to see if there are other’s guilty in the Steubenville incident. Though the grand jury has failed to meet on two separate scheduled dates, and no new date had been scheduled as of a week ago. It’s possible that vetting evidence and doing so according to the legal process to make a slam dunk arrest takes time.
I’m writing that and thinking, “Oh, c’mon. How long does it really take if you want to figure something out? I bet they’re just hoping the press will die down and the whole thing will go away.” And I get that. But I also get that getting that just keeps the whole stupid rape culture thing framed in the “boys will be boys and she shouldn’t have been there” BULLSHIT that is the booster banner on our collective mental gymnasium wall right now.
Even if our daughters make shitty decisions to go to parties without a cadre of friends who have each others backs… even if, like Amanda Todd, they are complete morons and flash their boobs to guys they don’t know online, couldn’t we agree that we are always going to take the side of the person who gets unwelcomed things shoved into their orifices?
Deric Lostutter, the leader of the band who headed up the Steubenville campaign is facing a five to ten times longer incarceration for being involved in the hacking of the team’s website. I did mention above that the coach got a contract extension, right?
A journalist named Alexander Abad-Santos has created tremendous coverage on the case.
The Problem with Vigilantes:
…which works really nicely until they accidentally identify the wrong person. In the case of Amanda Todd, Anonymous ID’d Kody Maxson who, clearly a douchebag as winner of an online underage naked girl screenshot video award, was exonerated on all charged attached to Todd’s case.
…or until they get pissed at Israel and blame them for heinousness in general. I like Israel.
The Room Where Bunny Trails Collide:
What’s the “So What?” here? We have kids, some of us. We are familiar with the idea of kids, the rest of us. Kids aren’t supposed to have to negotiate the messed up world of vindictive little bitches with access to Facebook pages or school-wide bullying based on unchangeable attributes. One of my daughters is approaching middle school. I want her to be safe. I want her to have fun. I want to tell her how to stay away from douchebags without her having to know the extent of the potential douchebaggery. I want her to find the making of dorky unicorn videos hysterical for at least another decade and emerge from that phase at some point in her mid-20’s ready to be respected for the tremendously valuable soul that her body houses.
I have sons. Eventually they will have puppy crushes and wind up on some flat surface with a girl. How do they stay out of lawsuits? “They shall remain virgins!” you proclaim? Um, okay.
I want there to be a clear difference between good and bad and I want there to be justice however it happens.
To give you the best I have come up with so far, I am going to provide a bunch of links. I hope they help you. Feel free to attach more and share your thoughts in general.
Happy. A documentary that talks about connection and compassion. Very powerful section where an anti-bullying speaker gets an entire student body into tears about how they’ve treated a couple of students who bravely share their victim experiences with the group.
(This reads more like a disjointed list of thoughts than anything resembling a cogent position. About six different blogs co-jangled, but here’s a draft.)
In Between:
In my heart, I am a yogini, adroitly maneuvering the spectrum of flexibility that spans from the physical to the existential.
In my thighs and neck, I see a different reality.
Through the opaque cage that is my internal world, I can see the powerful and prolific Creative banging her egg tooth against that shell.
In my body of work, I see a lot of “not there yet.”
And yet the literature reads that “I am enough.” When vendors begin taking the ever renewing essence that is me as payment, I will have more peace with this idea.
Getting familiar with one’s Creative process is just a voluminous pain in the ass. And by that I mean a blend of kind of cool and really goddamn hard.
Journalism is a nod to potential truce between creativity and logistical sustenance. It’s at least intellectual discipline and writing practice.
So copyright: the ramble
On one hand Creatives deserve to be compensated for their efforts.
It seems to be all about the money, the ability to finance the work, and the tenuous dance between creating and eating. But it’s really also all about expression and art and fun and responding to each other’s stuff.
In the video below, Andy Baio explains the challenge that the mashup culture brings to the tentative courtship between the creative process and existing copyright laws. It is lengthy and worth the time if this is your thing.
Nothing is Original:
Try to create an imaginary world where you borrow nothing from this one.
Gravity? Sorry, that’s ours.
Ecosystems? Somebody else got there first.
Suppose you could create original characters not based on our humanoid physiology, could you do the same thing for conflict? It took me 15 seconds in a Google search and a quick skim of this article to find which seven conflicts and plots Annie Evett identifies. It is plausible that Evett compiled the list from other compiled lists. I’d heard about the idea of limited plottery “somewhere” which gave me the idea to type in “how many original plots.” I could have also checked here or here. In this one, and this one I found the argument that expands the mathematical complexity by factoring in variables such as genre and plot motivations (internal v. action for its own sake).
All links above are well-written, and each author took the time to flavor and frame the information with unique examples, but the information is basically the same.
Same with songs: only so many story arcs to fit into those stanzas.
So what is the original essence of any work that is protectable?
So News:
What good does it do for journalists to copyright straight news? Not like events unfold according to some evenly assigned inherent proprietary rights. Press is free, information is free. But what the hell does that mean for journalists (and artists) who want to make money with their work?
What will be the fallout of everyone having access to media capture and instant distribution? We’re in the process of severing the last tendon of the intermediary’s neck and now find the only threats to full free-flowing access of everything all the time no matter what are copyright lawsuits, bandwidth, non-hacked servers, and government staying out of the way. Well, and of course decency and civility.
Conspiracy theory disclaimer: I have difficulty envisioning government and media conglomerates allowing financial flow to be redistributed to the artist class without a squawk. Also when the internet is largely used to create groundswell support against large corporations who lobby lawmakers and who, some feel, threaten our environment and food supply, one wonders how long the freedom will be unfettered. End rant.
I am relatively certain that as I work my way through this topic, I will come to value the Creative process and the people who surrender to it far more than I will the middlemen who make the money off of them and the power brokers who try to tell them what they can say. I bow in awe to the platforms that facilitate the distribution (FB, Google, Vimeo, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) – and the concept of a copyright law that protects creators from outright pilfer.
And I suspect I will feel guilty or inadequate somehow that I don’t have the energy to carry the banner of: “Go ahead and take my stuff. I’ll just make more!”
To be other than relatively equal parts of sheer terror and quivering excitement about the changes and opportunities coming is to not be paying attention. I don’t apologize for that because I am in between.
In school studying journalism and each week’s assignments are blowing up my mind. Learning how to manage my creativity and workflow is something I’ve never really done before and I feel like a stranger to myself. Having to produce week after week in stretching, practical, technical ways is a powerful antidote to self-doubt. Keeps me too busy to think about the future, men, or logistics. Nose down, next step.
That’s not to say that I’m not filled with self doubt, but I think it’s from the debris field. Everything feels up in the air: how I talk to myself, what I expect from myself, what I want from my life, and how I engage with the world. I didn’t realize how insular I am. So very, very self-protected. Have had to be.
I think I am excited about the future, and hopeful, but I’ve never really felt that before, so I don’t trust it yet. Will be nice to get THAT behind me. You know: the feeling that I’m fundamentally broken and the next shoe is about to drop.
Talking to my sister about the other gender today. Told her about a blogger I heard about who took a year off to just date – no strings, no agenda. Just date.
“What did she come away with?” was her question. “Don’t know,” was my answer.
Not sure why the thought of dating seems so viscerally repulsive. I’m sure I like guys instead of girls, but at 45, the whole Pavlovian dating / intersecting rubric feels like a whole lot of slightly moldly bread. And who likes that?
Remember the movie with Bill Murray where he wakes up repeatedly to the same day? Probably in my thirties, I could have told you how the plot wound up, but this many years later what sticks is the emotional roller coaster he went through as events iterated ad nauseum. Getting outside of self-imposed limitations feels like that. But I have learned how to spell nauseum.
I’m trying out the “Law of Attraction” as a filter to for my self-management. The idea is that our subconscious and underlying beliefs draw to us the stuff of their imagining. That is terrific for people who dream of ponies and fairy sparkles but I’m up against a rough neighborhood. My conditioning has me convinced that I can have love OR success and certainly not both and quite possibly neither. So when I start heading toward success in one area, the wheels fall off in the others. It feels like that movie.
I was at my sister’s for dinner the other night, and my mom was there.
As things go, school is FANTASTIC! I am back in it. My days are filled with research and interaction, technology and writing, ponies and fairy sparkles. Gold stars. Real ones like “Can I use your assignment as an example for my next class?” Expansive ideas — real ones that can lead to cash flow. But when Mom asks how school is going, I am suddenly in junior high. She isn’t asking me how school is going. She is asking me to justify my value. I’m 45 and she’s 83.
(And shut up, she is too. You don’t know her.)
Panic. Look to sisters for immediate assistance — nothing. Each of them takes another peanut butter bar. In “I Dream of Jeanie” would Jeanie have been able to disappear if she’d had to move her nose manually?
I’m pretty sure something really stupid is going to come out of my mouth and I imagine my lips glued together. Not sure what to call ‘IT’, but IT is happening again. Fighting against the magnetic vortex of suckage that IT inevitably brings makes me need a peanut butter bar something fierce. Don’t talk, I tell myself. Just don’t say ANYTHING.
“School is going well. I enjoy it very much.” The straight, honest answer escapes before I even know I’ve spoken. But it was innocuous. Hookless.
“But how are you doing?” Outsiders might classify that as genuine concern.
“But?” “Are?” “Doing?” Meanwhile, I am taking the first of many bites that will soon become half a pan of peanut butter bars and trying to count how many simultaneous attacks the woman can launch. Three at first count. My mother accused me of lying, told me she is surprised when I do well, and let me know that to her my worth is based on my performance. Hmmmm…
“I am doing well. I enjoy it very much. I have turned in all of my assignments.” Goddammit! You saw it coming, didn’t you?
“Oh, good, you have! Does your teacher like you?” Not even kidding. A clapping point for turning my work in?! A professional journalist who designed my program is giving me gold stars and my mother wants to know if I’m popular. And that still has weight. Yep, definitely middle school.
I subscribe to an email list that sends out monthly reports about what are the energy trends happening in our world. This month is about identifying beliefs and patterns that spin string balls from the crap factory. I have an impressive collection of crappy string balls. For sale, as it happens. It is too painful to think of these as attacks coming from the person who was hired to play the role of Chief Nurturer. Instead they are a gift from the gods to illustrate the insidious confusion and sick messages that sabotage my move forward in health and vibrancy. The idea is that if I can recognize them, I can address them and begin to strip them of their power. None. Too. Soon.
I married my mother and called her by my ex-husband’s name. But how do you divorce your mom? And still give her some honor. Are we required to do this?
We all have them: these voices of simmer down, stay small, and who do you think you are? The people who are threatened by our big-ness. They remind us to not be dicks to people we have influence with, to encourage toward audacious living. So next time you hear the cellos, just put the dessert out of reach and wiggle your nose. While we are finding the voices that pull us in the right direction, we may have to build these muscles in a vacuum. But we are not alone. Follow your passion, be unreasonable in your beliefs, and for the love of peanut butter bars, learn how to shut up when you don’t want to say anything. That last one was to me specifically.
“The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.
“Drawing on research from around the world, Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others) outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment–and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that’s already here.”
Haven’t written a lot due to psychic strain from MASSIVE and WONDERFUL internal shifting. It’s the opposite of writer’s block: it’s content overload. Per usual, I would prefer to have all the insights gathered in a tidy satchel; but I’m finding that by sitting on the shore scooping up nuggets to put in my bag, I am missing the bigger flow. I don’t just want to extract nuggets, I also want to create my own stories and reach more people with them. I jumped into the river and am learning to embrace the messy. Please bear with me as I write more infrequently than I like and more deeply than I can even follow upon re-reading 😉
The louder the wild woman inside me roars, the more tension I have with my deep desire to have all people like and approve of me. We’ll be hitting critical mass soon, at which point I will just be who I am comfortably. There’s intuitive mourning going on as I’m certain there will be unintended consequences and more sifting of my support group.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to see my nephew ‘dabble at play-acting‘ in his college’s theater program. To and fro, I listened to a fabulous collection of folk tales told by Jungian Psychoanalyst and college professor, Clarissa Pinkola Estes about the Crone. (Sit on your hands, Christian folk, the Crone isn’t a witch.)
Clarissa speaks of the Crone as an experienced woman, not blank, but one whose slate has been written upon. She uses her wisdom to guide the tribe, generations, and the self into a balanced and connected whole. We don’t operate fully without all of us being engaged. Her stories include the jester, the cycle of life, (the fascinating and pre-sanitized version of) Jack and the beanstalk, and in all of these she reminds us that our voice, our Creative energy, and our life-affirming spark of hope exist independent from our physical years. And though it will nauseate our children, she speaks beautiful stories of passionate love decades past the time when AARP membership becomes viable. She speaks of embracing the wealth of aging. Obviously I love her.
The Crone sees from the ariel view, and isn’t afraid to speak from that place. Yes, established religion (not God) is oft-challenged by such raw insight and throughout history people who aren’t awed by the influence of those with religious control have a history that ends in BBQ. But the Crone’s message is one of ‘dig deeper,’ ‘live more fully,’ and ‘behave — barely.’ Whether with plants or stories, she aims to heal, find meaning, and loose the stories within us. Again, love.
Yesterday was gorgeous here, and I had to get outside. I drove to Beacon Rock on a lark (left the house planning on a new set of earphones and a walk along the McMenamin’s promenade, but once headed east, got lured by the Columbia Gorge’s siren-call.)
It was another beautiful day in nature wherein our beautiful Earth and I communed magnanimously and uninterrupted. Perfect! Reaching the top of Beacon Rock I found I had the place to myself. This has never happened! I would be lying if the thought of ripping my shirt off didn’t occur — just something about being outside in the sun on a beautiful day on top of the core of an old volcano that makes a girl want to fly free…
It was marvelous!
About 2/3 of the way down the path, I heard what sounded like a guy on a cell phone. Peaking over the handrail, I saw a guy and a girl trudging up the hill. She was walking ahead and he was behind talking on his cell phone. C’mon, really? A few days earlier I’d seen a headline: ‘Is your wife happily married?’ It came to mind.
Before acknowledging my cavernous leap to judgment, I listened to figure out what he was talking about. Family emergency, IT troubleshooting, something to justify talking on his cell phone instead of communing with the lovely woman who had joined him on this trudge? Before leaping STRAIGHT into someone’s business, I want to rule out a justifiable reason for being a complete dick to one’s girlfriend. Only fair.
A couple switchbacks closer — just below me now — he said into his phone, ‘Oh, just hook it to your rear-view mirror,’ followed by some laughing and more small talk. Thirty seconds later we met at the corner. She was behind him now. He put his conversation on hold to give me a big smile and say hello. He was not unattractive. She looked invisible.
I nodded to him and passed him. He rounded the corner.
“Is he your boyfriend?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“Tell him to hang up,” I said as I walked by.
He must have hung up. From two switchbacks away, I heard him ask, “What did she say to you?”
I don’t have a penis, but if I did and if it was important to me to know it’s dimensions compared to other area penises, I would use this question as a diagnostic tool. Nothing says ‘My identity is based on how I perform, and particularly in comparison to you’ quite as much as this question. Let’s listen in:
“What do you do?”
“I am an artisan,”
“Then allow me to fetch your slippers as I am a humble peasant with, and this may seem odd, access to your closet.”
Nothing good there. Comparison. No room for connection.
Also, lack of interest. Asking ‘What do you do?’ easily dooms a conversation to mindless lines of inquiry like ‘And what IS the primary line of insurance you write’ or ‘How do you choose which flooring vendors to use?’ What human on Earth wants to ask OR answer those questions? Are you even reading still? Exactly.
Answering the question is no easier. Is the person asking how I make money, what is important to me, or who I am? I over-think things. It’s what I do. I don’t make money, and I could talk for days on the other two. Shall we get a refill?
What I dislike is that ‘What do you do?’ leaves too much to position on REALLY STUPID things. Chicks / Guys dig me more. My watch requires insurance. My driver kicks your bus pass’s ass!
I don’t believe in the power-over dynamic as a way to engage with other people. To my way of thinking, if we have been brought together, it is because we have something to share with each other. It probably doesn’t have to do with how we pay rent or who can support the bigger debt load. Our challenge is to find out what we have for each other in the places that really matter: connection, interest, encouragement.
This afternoon I was at a mingle mingle for a dear friend of mine who is retiring. She is funny, smart, loyal, and team-oriented. She sells insurance to fund her habit of mentoring disadvantaged girls and helping young business women get established (and Habitat for Humanity and Rotary…) because she and her husband are passionate about building other people. Asking this woman ‘What do you do?’ would not uncover that.
I was standing at a tall table, awkwardly, with a group of women I’d never met. I was contemporaneously chairing a committee meeting in my head at which we were discussing the merits of learning how to do casual conversations as a means of not scaring people away. I had made the point that chit chat bores the ever-living crap out of me — thankfully, not out loud — when a woman I had briefly talked to in line approached the table. She provided a painless distraction for everyone looking for a casual chance to flee.
She had mentioned she was related to my friend. I was thinking, ‘I am sure I will like you because you are close with someone I respect a great deal, so let’s find something in common.’ We tried valiantly with the chit chat, but it was simply painful, so I broke down and asked, ‘How do you most like to create?’
She lit up!
‘My husband and I were just talking about that,’ she said. And she excitedly explained an idea she has been dreaming about. She glowed. Speaking, writing, healing. Her heart is ready and her Soul is calling, and just like that, in the middle of an awkward mingle mingle, by asking a real question to a person who also doesn’t like chit chat, I found another a new friend!
__________
I have conversations with the people I don’t scare away 😀
My cosmology is in flux like the rest of me. I’ve done the strident Christian thing. I’ve defied the entire Christian paradigm with the Hebrew roots thing. I’ve got lots of big words and the ability to do great damage with them, and I have spent a wee bit of time being a complete Ass Hat about my fluctuating beliefs.
Throughout this breakdown Spiritual Awakening, I’ve been ignoring a categorical definition of my belief system for a couple of good reasons, most notably that I’m not sure I can put it into words yet and if I could, I’m not sure anyone else would understand what I was getting at. Or feel comfortable with what I was getting at. These are Spirit things, and they defy attempts to contain them.
Today, I’m good to call that which is bigger than I am Abba (Father); YHVH (I am that I am which I take to mean ‘I’m here so get over it’); the Creator, Source, and maybe Ein Sof. Happy Wikipedia-ing.
My big thing is: be intellectually honest. Easter is pagan. If you’re a Christian, no amount of revisionist history can make it not be so. If you are a pagan, Happy Spring. If you feel led to look into a tradition that honors the Biblical Messiah’s victory over death, real or mythological, look into Passover. If you want to celebrate spring with milk-based foods and egg-shaped candy, good idea. It’s been cold and dark this winter, and three cheers for what Wonka has done with the jelly bean. I guess that’s what’s hard for me where I am. I know what all the sides are called, but I’m not sure how I want to identify.
I like the earth based components of Biblical Hebrew traditions. Not the ‘new’ Jewish traditions like the Passover Chicken and the seder plate egg. But the blowing of the shofar on the New Moon to reckon the new month and to call home the tribes; the counting of the omer the culmination of which is a meal offering of the harvest fruits symbolizing the giving of the spiritual wisdom (in this case, Torah) as food for human Souls; and especially the feast of Sukkot (Booths), during which we essentially make blanket forts out of tree boughs and spend time outside contemplating the transience of this go-round and doing whatever our hearts desire up to and including strong drink. A year off every seven to let the earth rest and recoup? If you could take the Bible out of them, Hebrew festivals are a pagan’s dream!
These celebrations are meaningful to me.
Another beautiful tradition that resonates deeply with me is called tashlich. It is Hebrew for ‘casting off’ and is based on the section in Micah where the prophet talks about YHVH casting the sins of the people into the depths of the sea. Westerners think of ‘sins’ as pathological moral blight. It’s not so in Hebrew where a ‘sin’ is a short-coming, a wounding — an area that lacks completeness and maturity, that hurts and leads us to do things not in our highest good. In Hebrew thought, sins don’t require pitchforks and crowd control, but rather healing. I can list off at least a handful of my wounded and immature areas without breaking a sweat.
Traditionally during tashlich, people go to rivers and streams and toss in bits of bread which represent their ‘sins’. There is catharsis as the water carries these crumbs away.
That’s the tradition. But I’m in flux, so here’s how I did it. Quite by accident.
I went for a walk early one day this week along Salmon Creek. (Tashlich is a fall tradition. As I write this, it’s Day Two of Spring). I didn’t turn on my ipod, and instead listened to birds’ tweets and Salmon Creek’s gurgles. A stray siren, some airplanes on their flight paths. I nodded to the work crew trimming the mahonia and walked purposefully and eyes engaged in case they were sexual predators on work release. Once out of view of the work crew, I meandered uphill and got my inner hippy on by standing in the vortex between two huge evergreens, feeling my feet grounded into the earth between them, putting my palms out to touch them both, imagining my life rooted here and now. I was quiet there awhile.
Trees are what & where they are; people come to them or don’t. They don’t fritter much. Trees just stand there and be themselves.
This was going well.
As I descended from that part of the path, I came to the place where my family used to go to do tashlich — back when we were a family. Grounded from my tree vortex, I knelt by the water. I use rocks when I do tashlich. (In the Pacific Northwest, we don’t throw food in our water.) I picked up a pebble.
“Not trusting that I have all I need,” I said out loud as I tossed it into the water.
“Using my dislike of people as an excuse to pull away from you.” And another:
“Getting stuck in a story of the past instead of boldly doing the creative work you have put inside me.” And another:
“Being mad at myself for taking so long in the cocoon.”
From places where we aren’t judged for the puss, it feels good to get all of it out.
“Letting what I think other people might think get in the way of being true to myself.” And another:
“Fear that I will succeed and then implode mightily.” And another:
“Not letting myself engage because I might get hurt.” And another:
Well, you get the picture. And as I picked rocks the size that fit the relative importance of these extraneous characters in my story, insight came. Letting go feels powerful and brave. I am ready to start taking action steps to live my new story. Action. It is time to surrender — let go of the outcome. The next step will appear. I’m not alone. I have support. It is safe to move forward.
I had been eye-balling a really pretty, larger yellow rock nestled in the sand. I picked it up and rinsed it off in the water. It was more beautiful wet as rocks are. “What do I want to take away from this? What words capture this peace I have inside me right now?” I asked myself…
I named the rock “Surrender” and “Action” and “Abundant Flow”*. (It splits home between my purse and my monitor stand.) I went home and registered a domain name for my writing business and today I signed up for a New Media Journalism Master’s Program.
2013: Best. Tashlich. Ever.
Surrender, Action, Abundant Flow: Who says rocks can have only one name?
