Being Seen and Being Ignored

So you may have seen this video that's doing the rounds of a young woman walking the streets of New York City.  The director has a camera in his backpack, and as they record 10 hours of walking (wow, tired feet?), there are over 100 instances of her being spoken to by men on the street.  Or spoken at, it probably feels more like.

I tuned into the contradictory feelings and thoughts that welled up in me on watching this video.  One part of me was really pissed off that this woman not only couldn't walk the streets without feeling harassed.  She also couldn't walk the streets and be able to forget herself. Beautiful? Mindful of the narcissism that engenders in this beauty obsessed cultured?  Want to get out, walk, lose yourself in that beautiful way that creates a nice little dose of mental health? Well, don't expect any respite when you leave your door because you're not going to be able to forget it for long.  'Cause those curves of yours, they make you belong to everyone else, baby.

The contradictory and jealous part of me (she's a pretty girl and I'm getting older) is a little jealous of all that attention.

But then what comes after that?  What gets left for women AFTER this kind of thing STOPS is a silence. But it's not a nice silence. It's a heavy silence full of condemnation. Because while you might have hated the attention before, on one level it made you feel good (the level that wasn't intimidated and harassed) because it's exciting to be admired and to be found attractive.

The dead zone after that confusing space is a reminder, once again, that you are on the other side of the beauty barrel. It's a reminder, from the cradle to the grave, that you are always going to be judged on how attractive you are.  Whether you've got it or you ain't, you won't be able to forget that the outside of you is seen, or ignored, and that it will make it so much harder for you to bring forth what is inside because of that.

I think that's why some women who wear burqas claim that they give them a certain amount of freedom.  Seen from this perspective, you can understand a little of what they might be getting at.

In Praise of Comfort

Is it nature/nurture or just simply different biological composition that drives some women's hearts to "go out" to those who are in need of comfort and some men to ignore it?  Is there something within the different bodies that enable women to know more easily how important and life-changing comfort and reassurance are when you're feeling small, that your words make a difference to someone else's wound (even a small difference), that this is important work to do for each other?  That everybody is scared and that we need to learn to trust each other again, even on a provisional level, for social cohesion?

Perhaps it is because many women, either through disposition and cultural encouragement or a combination of both, learn how to do this for each other and so learn the benefits.  Perhaps many women simply need it more than many men.  Perhaps too because cultural placement still allows women to show their weaknesses to be salved - at least out of the boardroom - whereas it's still not really allowable for men to do so.  It is not safe and therefore many men keep their shit to themselves to deal with.  And a lot of men have a lot of shit they're keeping to themselves.  A lot of men are miserable and in hell and in need of comfort and assistance and don't know what to do to change their situation ... and if you're hanging on by a thread with your own gaping hole you're less inclined or able to help others with theirs.

It is still not so manly to be a dispenser or a receiver of comfort, is it?  At least for some men.  I do wonder if comfort is still seen as women's work.  They're the nurturers.  And emotions are weak and have no place in the economy.  If you are feeling weak and ill, then you need to deal with it yourself.

Which is entirely true.  A child sustained by good parenting will grow up learning to salve their own wounds when they bleed.  They will also learn to ask for help when they bleed a little too loud and not feel shame.  That also is a way of dealing with it yourself, even though paradoxically it involves another person.  Even those without childhood sustenance can learn to do this.  "It's okay, sweetheart," we learn to say to those parts of us that throb.  I am always astounded when the throbbing lessens.  Now that, my friends, is empowering.

Now, I know it's not fashionable to make distinctions between the sexes but nevertheless the distinctions remain.  If I am feeling unwell, it is women I turn to.  Overall, men have proved pretty much unsatisfactory in my life when it comes to giving comfort.  Perhaps it's because women haven't taught them.  And so when I am in need of comfort, and am able to bring myself to ask, women are the ones who provide the reassurance and the CNS calming and who make my scary places safe.  Women are the protectors, the palpaters of hidden nightmares.


Maybe comfort and calming is women's work.  I don't know.  Maybe we are the ones to dispense comfort to an ailing planet or else no one will.  Maybe the things that need fixing in the world, and the mindset changes that need to come if they are to happen, require women as the instigators.  Perhaps women are positioned, much more easily than men on the whole, to see the gape that remains when the salve is not applied, and the beauty that comes when it is.

The Dalai Lama said that western women will be the ones to change the world.  Perhaps he was right.

The world is in sore need of comfort and assurance. 

Writer's Block

Public domain pic

My body has gone backwards.  I'm really tired of this.  I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars I have spent on supplements and tests over the years.  Thousands.  I am struggling to work enough to crack 200 bucks a week.  So going on sickness benefits will mean that my income will effectively double.  Woohoo!

Health going backwards and fatigue flaring at the time when my partner could do with me contributing my financial share, cracks open the guilt vault (and I could drown in there), makes me feel more stressed, and then my adrenals have to deal with more, and so the snowball rolls.  This has been a snowfield I'm used to playing in in one way or the other.  Being back here though in the midst is the closest thing to hell I can think of.

What do the Buddhists say?  There are four different sorts of suffering?  I can't remember what the other three are but the fourth one is "Not being able to get what you desire."  That's me, that's my life, that's the roadblock (which granted I didn't put there.  But it's my responsibility to move it).

How do you say internalised oppression?  That's me.  I think The Secret has a lot to answer for but I do think there is several glimmers in there that are relevant.  I do think that in a certain way the reality we have is the one we've created.  And I have created, against my own wishes, roadblocks to being able to live the way I choose.  Nobody stopping me.  Just me.  And so it's a couple of rounds of EFT tapping every day, homework from the therapist:  "Even though I believe someone or something will always stop me living the life I choose, I deeply and completely accept myself."  EFT rocks.  It moves and shakes things.  I don't really believe it's going to move or shake this issue or others.  Hence the other round of EFT tapping about "Even though I don't believe anything will change ..."

Learned helplessness, anybody?

I need to get my website up and running.   A digital container to put the work in, you know?  I have the idea for a logo.  Her name's Speedy Snail.  Lots of swirls around her.  Lots speeding on in her head, the body snailing along behind.  I went back to bed today and spent several hours reading.  Nice.  It's what I need to do.  But I fight it.  Because I feel totally useless.  I don't know how to not be well after 14 years.  I don't know how to do it gracefully.  I just don't.

I can feel this same sort of self-sabotage going on in my writing career.  Two different arenas have published two of my essays in the last six months.  Have I resubmitted anything to either of them?  No.  I feel a reticence to do so.  I even queried The Big Issue about whether they'd be interested in another My Word piece about roosters.  Yep, send it on through, Lorraine says.  Have I?  No.  Granted, I haven't written it yet and though I haven't done so, I've been writing a fair bit of other stuff, which is heartily inspiring.  I remember once, years ago, I wondered if I ever would clear the river.  I had writer's block - a desire to write but I didn't know what to write about.  These days, while I still have those times where I don't know what to write about, I know what fixes it - writing.  Anything.  And then within a day the river's rushing again and it's not so much not knowing what to write, it's choosing what I want to write most, and having the energy and time to do it.  Nice, eh?

But that self-sabotaging thing about not wanting to submit stuff to places I've published in before?  I don't know what that is.  It's in one of the deep caves of my unconscious where I see it's effects without knowing it's there.  Those unconscious beliefs are funny little things when they start to become conscious.  There's a part of you that is looking in disbelief at this thing you've just realised you think.  That you've thunk maybe for years.  And while part of you know that this is true, and that bringing it up to your conscious mind is the first step in clearing it away, another part of you sits numb disbelieving it all.   This being human is not only a guest house, it's a weird one.  A Tim Burton guesthouse with creaky bits and doors that open onto black holes and awesome oak staircases and coolness.  Sort of like that teddy bear video I posted on here yesterday - a little gross, a little creepy, but really, in one way, rather sweet (I mean, who doesn't want a bon bon layer?  Yeah, I know, I know, there can be problems with the bon bon layer, as teddy's operation so amply demonstrated, but that's what teddy doctors are for.  And good teddy nutrition).

That self-sabotaging thing about not wanting to submit stuff to places I've published in before is a known unknown.  It's one of the things I say to myself so fast and so deeply in the undergrowth that I don't feel it or see it or feel its swish as it goes by.  But I see the effects of it.  In this post, in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Erika Dreifus reviews the sorta recently released book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.  Titled Lean In:  Women, Work, and the Will to Lead Erika has this to say in response to it:

In this chapter, the overall message is that women suffer from underestimating their abilities more than men do. “[F]eeling confident–or pretending that you feel confident—is necessary to reach for opportunities. It’s a cliché, but opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.” From refraining from raising their hands in the audience to sitting on the sidelines rather than taking seats at the conference table, Sandberg shares examples of women holding themselves back.

For writers of fiction, poetry, and essays, one of the ways to “sit at the table” can begin, quite literally, with sitting at a table of fellow students and an instructor for a writing workshop. I won’t comment here on the ways that gender dynamics and stereotypes crop up in these situations, because I’ll digress to a point of no return (besides, you’ll get a glimmer of this in the next section, “Success and Likeability”).

But the VIDA count reminds us of other tables and other seats. Where are women “sitting” in those venues? Where do they show up at in the tables of contents and bylines and within prominent literary magazines and book reviews? VIDA and its proponents seek institutional change, but what if that isn’t enough? Some female writers who may not habitually submit their work may realize that—like the woman whose tweet is cited above—they need to take some steps themselves.

But as Sandberg observes, even when offered opportunities, women don’t always accept them. One of the most eye-catching accompaniments to this year’s VIDA count was Amy King’s interview with Tin House editor Rob Spillman, who described that earlier VIDA statistics had prompted Tin House “to take a deep look at our submissions.” One of Spillman’s most attention-grabbing revelations was grounded beyond the slush pile: “Although we solicited equal numbers of men and women, men were more than twice as likely to submit after being solicited. This even applies to writers I’ve previously published.”

 Yep.  I sure get that.  

Painful Awakenings

Pic:  Fotos.org

In that curious and exotic way that an "unteacher" appears only when the student is ready, the Magritte painting appeared and opened several revelations to me.  First, our lives as women are not always as self-created as we might assume.  And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation.  We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father - the man holding the brush - and live up to his image of what a woman should be and do.  We're rewarded when we do;  life gets difficult when we don't.

~Sue Monk Kidd, Dance of the Dissident Daughter

I'm really enjoying this book.  It's not particularly my own story - I am, after all, a post-Christian sort of a Jesusish person living in secular Australia, rather than down South Georgia America.  Two very different worlds.

But oh, the differences just reinforce the samenesses.  I cannot deny that my culture is not still a patriarchal one.  I hate saying those sorts of things because I have grown up in it;  it has infiltrated me.  It tells me to keep silent, that it is better to not say anything, to not rock the boat, that things have changed since the days when women all wore hats in public and were not allowed to continue to have jobs when they were married.  But I cannot deny that my own life, beginning in 1970s Australia has not been impacted by patriarchy because I feel it swilling around in the shadow, the repressed anger, the fearfulness, because I can see in my own soul, in its own awakening into experiencing spirituality in terms that are real for me, how embedded it all is.  How we women still take it on ourselves, as a given by the culture, this idea that we are somehow less than.

If you are a man, it will take some awakening of your own to understand how deeply embedded it is, how entirely you can miss it, how deeply this culture is saturated with the idea that women are less than men.  I'm not sure how well you can really understand it.  Especially considering that so many women do not really understand it, because they suppress it.  Because it is a terror.

I love men, I admire men, I am in love with one right this moment :)  But I can tell you this much:  this waking up to yourself, to struggle to hear what you are really saying to yourself, to learn what it is to really be a woman, to learn to stand in that stuff without fear of reprisal ... you have no idea how deep and how hard it all goes, how impacted women become, like a mass of teeth, simply by living in the culture we live in.  How much of a struggle it is sometimes to just simply keep your head above your own water, to know what you feel, what you think, what you want.  How much - still - it is a cultural going against the tide to stand and fully be a woman, in a society that is still so very, very male-dominated.

I guess change is always confronting.  How hard it is waking up.  How truly amazing it is watching the women around me doing so.

Life will not be less than, when women are truly equal with men.  Life will be richer, and greater, and men will be more than they are now, when women are no longer considered less than they really are.

Hail Technology

Anthropologist Brigitte Jordan is interested in how knowledge gains authority in various settings.  Jordan observed a contemporary hospital birth in which a labouring woman was desperate to push.  The nurse looked not at the woman but at the foetal monitor.  She was waiting for the doctor who was the only one who could decide whether the woman was ready to push:  '... every time the woman tries to get her desire - her expressed knowledge about the state of her body - acknowledged and made the basis for proceeding with the birth, her version of reality is overridden, is ignored, is denied, or, most frequently, is sidetracked, deflected, and replaced with some other definition of reality ... as might happen to an obstinate child whose parent opts for distraction rather than confrontation.'  In the contemporary birth environment, according to Jordan, authority rests with the doctor and the knowledge delivered by technology.  The woman's expressed knowledge about her body does not even rate as knowledge.

Mary-Rose MacColl, 'The birth wars', Griffith Review 22:  MoneySexPower

It's been a long-learned wisdom that I need to daily ground myself within my own body.  It's taken me years to really see how easy it is to disconnect, especially in this sort of world where I do not need to go draw my own water or plant my own vegetables.  There is a dread that comes with the realisation of how easy it is to switch off from the loudly sane inner voices saying perfectly reasonable, beautiful, wonderful things.  Many (all?) of us learn at some point that we can get up and leave, sit six feet above our own bodies.  That it is a way of getting distance on things.  That sometimes you can think better sitting up there.

Sometimes life calls for that desperate need, to escape, to suppress, to take flight.  If you can't buy a plane ticket, you can at least go on a six foot trip.  But there are payments to be made from taking this trip too often, and it does then become an awfully difficult and yet ultimately beautiful thing to learn how to crawl that six feet back into your own stuff and discover yourself.  How much more there is sitting in here.  

Of course, abdicating from ourselves is not simply as a result of trauma but is often what we learn to do within a painful life.  It is, after all, a terribly pedestrian thing to sit abdicated.

We do not believe what damage we can cause half asleep until we do, how many lamps we can knock over in the dark, how many dog's yelping feet we can step on in the night, how many pieces of dark furniture we can trip over in the dark and send ourselves sprawling.  We often do not want to stop being half asleep because of the terror, the terror, the terror of being awake.  

Because there is, isn't there.  The stark whiteness of freedom, like one of those godawful new energy saving light globes that make you, a living, breathing, pink thing, resemble a morgue inhabitant.  That's how being awake looks when you're half asleep and so some of us will never understand the awful irony that living where we think is safest is the most dangerous.  Of how much more we can see when we refuse to live half asleep.  That yes, it is terrifying but it is also beautiful.  It is life, and it's fucking messy.

You know, I really am not a technophobe.  But this human penchant to abdicate from the world, the way we abdicate from our bodies (same coin, really), sits heavily alongside big machines that beep.  We want freedom, we say.  But we are confused, we are scared, we are terrified of our choices, of making the wrong decision.  If only someone or something will just tell us what to do!!!!!   If we have a king, an expert, someone wearing navy, to tell us what to do next, then we will be safe.

But we will be even safer if we are allowed to be included in the equation too, alongside the machines and the people who have studied for years to gain expertise.  But what  can one single person do in the face of those things?

In this way I am glad I shall never experience this situation of giving birth, especially in a hospital.  I cannot think of anything more terrifying than being in a never-before-experienced, painful, scary situation with my own body and of being called upon to abdicate myself from it so the system flows better.

Not that a foetal monitor or any other technology is a bad thing.  But then, humans are not things either.  We have knowledge too.  In a different, more messy way, certainly, than a streamlined machine.  In a human sort of a way.  

You know, I cannot imagine that if it was men giving birth that they would still be relegated so, their experience downplayed and ignored, right in the midst of the amazing everyday sort of miracle that is bringing forth life, right from out of the middle of your own body.

You know, regardless of whether you see it as a real story or a myth, there is a lot you can glean from the Adam and Eve breakaway story.  About the fall into the false self, the egoic, fearful nature, and what men and women have a tendency to do in that sort of space.

(Much as I hate generalisations, I'm splitting the world into penises and vaginas in this post).

I had an interesting conversation with Dena on the weekend about the penchant women have to look to relationships - as seen most explosively in those with men - to make them whole instead of looking inside to the Self to, as she so delightfully put it, the place "where-God-and-you intersect".  I so like that, it has so stayed with me since that conversation, bubbling and resonating.  Pointing to that strange propensity within myself.  I do not know how much of what I am learning I can translate up from out of my gut into these little squiggles that make up words.  So much of it is not-yet, so much is untranslatable.

While I was meditating the other day, I saw, suddenly and sharply, a mass of some sort, perhaps a rock, that had a split deep into its middle.  And the light, a golden, deep light, burst forth and shone down into that crack, filling it up.  This is the way my Self talks to me.  I can't ever quite know if it is God or me talking.  They're too close to split.

These roots to go sideways and fall into a man run so oooh deep.  And you know, I used to think that this propensity in me was so strong simply because of my past history.  That my ability to fall quickly and hard was because of the things that lacked in my growing-up years.  But now I'm not so sure.

Us chicks, we get the deep-down intuitive, moonish, gutlevel stuff that most likely scares the shit out of you blokes because it scares the shit out of us as well.  And we've been trained to disregard it too by a culture that too often functions in the male elements to the detriment of the female.  That needs those female elements to make up the whole.  But they're easy to ignore.  They're often not translatable.  And a part of us women want to disregard it sometimes, because it's scary and its deep, because we're wounded, because it's powerful, because it changes stuff.  But geez, it's where all the good stuff flows :)

(Edit:  Of course I am not meaning to imply that men also do not have the capacity to gutfeel and intuit.  Because of course they do. And part of the higgledy piggledy imbalanced culture too is that men are not taught as well as they could be to value their female side.  And conversely, women to value their male.  If you can split these things.  I am making broad brush strokes here, but bear with me :)

It joys me to see some women I know, both online and in real life, regaining that stuff.  It heartens me when they speak that stuff into my life.  It's like a torrent sometimes, those trickles of words.

The propensity feels weird.  It feels like a dreamscape.  It feels lke something that's birthed in you without your consent.  It flips you sideways instead of stands you strong, grounded.  It gives your power away without you even realising you're doing it.

But of course, the beauty, and the terror, is in the discovery - so often the discovery - that it is not an it, it is a you.  And with that return to reality comes the pain and yet the headrush that while you may be finding yourself in a cage, it is of your own making.  And you have the power to dismantle it.

Here's to smashing those bastards down :)

 Pic:  Place of Healing by Mara earth light

Tree Woman

This is one woman who will endure physical and verbal beating for what she believes. She has gone from living in a dirt floor hut to being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. (Well, okay, sure, it's lost its lustre since you can now be awarded one for simply not being someone else, but hey, Wangari Maathai has sure earned hers).

It never ceases to amaze me how much one person, or a small group can accomplish - way more than the sum of their parts. Wangari is one amazing woman, and she has had one amazing life.

When the Kenyan dictator of her country, Daniel Arap Moi, decided to build over Uhuru Park, the only parkland in Nairobi, she stood up to him. She incurred his wrath and denigration (ye olde standby - when people start speaking up, demonise them. If they are an oppressed part of your culture (ie women), call them mad, denigrate their worth, call them onto the cultural carpet, tell them they're not behaving how women should behave, respecting their men).

Proving that not much has changed since Nebuchadnezar, Moi was wanting to replace Uhuru Park with "a giant skyscraper, some luxury apartments, and a huge golden statue of himself." Maathai's protests earned her a spot in jail, charged with treason. It took her three years of fighting and death threats and violence before Moi backed down on his venture after international protests began snowballing.

Maathai's Green Belt Movement began in 1977 in an effort to tackle deforestation, soil erosion and lack of water. What began at the grassroots, a bunch of women planting trees, now has seen 40 million trees planted throughout Africa. Inspiring stuff. Grounding women back into the earth that supports them.

Maathai now speaks internationally about deforestation and global warming. I encourage you to check out the Green Belt Movement site and the article in The Independent which first switched me onto this wonderful woman.

As a scientist, Maathai is warning now that man-made global warming threatens to make the rainforests dry up and die, whatever she does in Kenya. She could save them from Moi – but can she save them from us?

"People don't realise how much they depend for their own survival on this ecosystem and how fragile it is," she says, almost pleading. "The world's forests are its lungs. Thick, healthy strands of indigenous trees absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide and keep them out of the atmosphere. If the Congolese rainforests were entirely destroyed, for example, 135 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would be released – equivalent to more than a decade of man-made emissions. So if we lose these forests, we lose the fight against climate change."

The rainforests can be killed from two directions – by the saws of men like Moi, or the warming gases of people like us. That is why she has left the land she loves, armed with the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 2004, and travelled so far: to try to persuade us to let the forests live. "There are moments in history when humans have to raise their consciousness and see the world anew. This is one of those moments. We are being called to assist the earth in healing her wounds, and in the process we can heal our own. We can revive our sense of belonging to a larger community of life. We can see who we really are."

This inspires me even while I feel the futility in a way. (And going deeper, while in spiritual terms I still hold to a tiny naiive childish flicker that the world will be made anew some day, maybe that belief is why we are so languid, who believe such a thing. Why care for the earth when it is going to be made new? Only a people living in our times, as cast adrift as we are from mother earth, would ever be so deluded as to think such things. We are most certainly city kids).

How can things change when it comes down to people who are encouraged within the very fabric of their society, to consume more and more? What happens when climactically the most powerful in the world are ... us?

So often I am overwhelmed by the way everything is set up. Our very cultural fabric, and our riches, our torpor, impede us from getting involved. And so to see people who have broken through that ennui and are willing to stand up is inspiring to me. I was enamoured to see my favourite gardener, Peter Cundall, arrested protesting against Gunn's pulp mill in Tasmania the other day.

It all feels so helpless and pointless because the power is with the governments, and the governments are composed of people who wish to stay in power, who have all sorts of pressures from all sorts of different venues, and who are rich and corrupt despite what they think about themselves, and so what we have is a proposed emissions trading scheme which will see and so what you get when you are hashing out a proposed emissions trading bill is one, the Greens tell us, which will actually will see greater investment in coal in the future. WTF?

But then that's always the way it's been, isn't it. The big people at the top are smothered by their own power, their own position, their own red tape. Even when what's debated is the planet we live on, the air that we breathe, the trees that breathe for us. It is up to people at the bottom to make the real difference. It's always been the way. Power to the people :)

HT to Mike

The Dance of Body and Mind

I'm telling ya, there is something to this chakra business. Not of course that it could be scientifically proven or deduced, in the way that we often expect truth to be available to us. Some describe it by saying that chakras exist on the spiritual plane of our bodies. I wouldn't know. I'm not all that interested in being able to scientifically test whether these chakras exist so as to prove them to other people and validate my own experiences. All I know is that when I meditate upon these balls of energy in my body, I begin to inhabit my own body again. It is sometimes distressing to realise how much of my life has been spent removed from my own body, in a sense. I have intellectualised, or fantasised, when I could have been dancing too.

It is a funny thing, but I never really felt like I could dance. All clunkiness, you know? I didn't understand how other people could do it. And so in my late teens and early twenties, when my friends and I were regularly getting together on a weekend and drinking and dancing at the pub, I would sit out on the sidelines. I felt too unbalanced to dance.

The whole idea of the chakras is that loosely there are three that are related to your body, three related more to the mind and the spirit, and the one in the middle, the heart chakra, that binds them all. It is a nice thought, isn't it? It is also interesting to note that, regardless of whether these things actually 'exist' or not, I consistently notice that those chakras related to mind and spirit are very strong in me - I have a strongly developed sixth sense - and the ones that are related to my body are often undefined and difficult for me to tap into unless I work to strengthen them. This is certainly my weakness. It is becoming so apparent to me I wonder how it is that I could have missed it for so long. But then, it always feels like that, doesn't it? We see what we see and wonder how it was that we couldn't.

Last night I did some chakra meditation, and I could feel the effects of this uncomfortable period I have been going through in the last couple of months. All of a sudden I have felt back at the beginning again, before I started all of this creative and bodily exploration. Almost without realising it, I have become way more ungrounded and fearful, feeling a certain disconnection from myself. Thing is, I spent so many years feeling that sort of disconnection that I suppose in times of stress I slot back into it, unless I am aware. I suppose that it is no coincidence that this period of unsafety of the past few months has dislocated me out of my own body.

It is no coincidence that most people I know seem dislocated from their own bodies. It's a product of living in a Western society. We lose our heart because we lose our feet, and so we lose our heads. I can only pray that the Body does not forget what it is joined to. Sometimes I think we are living in the converse of the Renaissance. At that time, people were supremely confident about the ability of humans to rise up to greatness. There was a flourishing of creativity in that period, of discovery, of realising how much people had been held back in the past. Where is our vision, these days? Where is the vision of the Body? Oh, I see smidgeons of it here and there. I see it is returning. I see that one of the greatest things we seem to be grasping hold of is the untenableness of grasping hold of anything else except God. Perhaps this is all we need.

Of course, that idea that we can do nothing of ourselves, that we are the branches - well, it doesn't sit well, does it? I think it's something we all need to learn for ourselves, what that looks like, feels like, plays out in reality. We think that acknowledging that we are just the branches is taking something away from us, making us smaller. I suppose much of life involves God showing us what it looks like when the focus is instead not on what we lose but in what we gain. Life giving water instead of broken cisterns of our own hewing. This takes so long for us to learn, does it not, this overcoming the horror that we are not the Great Originators? But over that hump is the vista that we don't end up losing anything at all that is not worth chucking in the first place, and we gain everything we could desire. This is our giant collective blind spot.

The Body has sat outside of itself too much in the past. It has allowed itself to be violated by the culture. It has sat outside of itself so much that I think it is just beginning to get in touch with the levels of its own self-hatred. This is scary work. You need to be safely connected to the heart to begin to acknowledge and recognise the disconnection. Perhaps this is where we are at? I don't know.

I am seriously tempted to start up some yoga again. The lovely discovery of yoga was that it was like a form of dancing to me that I could do. How wonderful to discover that I could do these movements, these postures, with something like grace. And afterwards, the most wonderful thing of all, the settling of my fears and insecurities in some strange way. It was like tapping into my body, actually moving in it, twisting it (sometimes into such forms I never would have thought I could twist it into) settled and calmed the fears. In writing this post I am understanding over again how it is that I don't need to have all of my fears removed, as if they are a cancer within my body that I must have surgically extracted. It is enough instead to be held, and have them quelled.

I have had a deep loathing of my own body for many years. It is way too hairy, lumpy, wobbly. I believe I have still not quite come to terms with it. I also believe this is like a manifestation of some things I have going on inside of me. I am not willing to share my body with anybody else until I have come to some sort of healing, to some extent. Doing yoga, I felt that I was entering into my own body in a way that made me realise how hollow I often felt within it, how not at home I was within my own body. Like us. We're often not at home in our own Body either.

But we're becoming more so, I believe we are. I have no evidence to back up that claim except what I feel in my own heart. Do you feel that too? I think it is about acceptance, of ourselves with all of our hairiness, lumps and wobbly bits. But even more than that, it is something overarching that we need to realise. I think it has something to do with vision, with seeing, more than it is to do with getting rid of all of our many and horrible sins. I think that is a byproduct of the seeing way more than anything else. I don't quite know what it all looks like yet. I know that it is the same sort of vision and scale removal and grabbing hold of something that is not from ourselves that enabled those first century Christians to chuck all they had in common with each other. We haven't experienced anything like that yet, not really. I think maybe we've all had glimpses of it. We haven't even begun to dance yet. I don't think we believe yet that we are able to. I think maybe we are just starting to hear the music.

Hear Me Roar

Tess posted a poem several days ago that resonated with me so. I just came across it again, resonating with Lucy as she created some visual journal pieces as inspiration, that I have reproduced here without any permission at all :) Chicks rock.

The Woman in the Ordinary

The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
The woman in the block of ivory soap
has massive thighs that neigh,
great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet.
The woman of the golden fleece
laughs uproariously from the belly
inside the girl who imitates
a Christmas card virgin with glued hands,
who fishes for herself in others’ eyes,
who stoops and creeps to make herself smaller.
In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,
compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,
like a handgrenade set to explode,
like goldenrod ready to bloom.

by Marge Piercy

Here's to us chicks rising up on the wings that God gave us, not hampered and restricted by the blerty blerty crap crap poo places we've been constricted into by the past, by rigidity, by tradition and by fear.

Yes, I'm still wearing a bra :)

On latex and botox

Been pondering a bit more about the human body, after my mini nervous breakdown this week. Pondering how it is interesting that we get to live our lives in a visible encasement, each different than the other, dealt out in rather unegalitarian fashion, some beautiful, some ugly. And about culture, and the ways Christian cultures especially teach inadvertently that our bodies are bad. (Magpie Girl has a really interesting post today about why she is not teaching her kids the abstinence route. Thought provoking whether you agree with her conclusions or not).

Been pondering the media-and-advertising-driven obsession with our bodies, with the outward appearance. As evidenced by my posts this week, this is something I buy into and feed into whether I like it or not. I hate that I am affected at all by such inherent superficialities. I hate the focus for women on beauty. I hate it because I know that ultimately, boiling it down and painting with broad strokes, what it comes down to, whether women will admit it or not, is power. Women want to be gorgeous because it affords us a superiority, a haughty-eyed buffer between ourselves and others, an interesting mesh of having a tool that keeps people at a distance, draws them close, and keeps them dangling on a string. This ridiculous over-focus has been criticised as vanity in the past. But our culture loves it, encourages it. But the machine munches women up in the process, steals our strength, steals our self-worth, steals our bodies. Steals the things that belong to us.

Been pondering how it is that we can be so out of connection with our surroundings. Was lying in bed this morning thanking God for my latex mattress. I know, strange prayer, but you know :) I love my latex mattress. It cost a pretty penny but will last me for 25 years and it's supportive and doesn't allow dust mites to collect in it, and I like it, you know? We have been sleeping together for over a year now, and he's very supportive. (I haven't named him yet, but I might :) So anyway, I was thanking God for my latex mattress and then I went off into a rambling digression in my head about how I didn't know where the rubber that went into the making of this mattress came from, what country. I didn't know how many people harvested the rubber, or how the mattress was made. Then I thought about the different types of mattresses that people have slept on over the years and centuries (I know, I think a lot), and how it is that even though I love my latex mattress and it is more chiropractically supportive and comfortable than, say, a mattress made of hay, the person that slept on a hay-filled mattress had a connection to that mattress that I will never have with mine.

Often there would have been a physical connection, if they had stuffed their mattress themselves. Or at the very least, there would be a connection because they knew where their mattress had come from and where the filling had come from and who had stuffed it. I'm not thinking so much here about the environmental impact, the footprint involved in the making of my own latex mattress, the shipping from another country and the like. I'm thinking here in a more hippy mystical way about the connections that go on between the objects our bodies come into contact with every day, about how knowing the history of an object allows you to somehow enter deeper into that object, and how knowing that object in your own personal way means that you come to see that object in a different way than someone who just happens upon it. You can see the dark and light and the cracks and warps and the underlying inherent beauty that only comes with the passing of time. It's the kitchen table that you bought locally 20 years ago that might appear ugly to others because of the deep scars or blotches in it, but each blotch for you is a reminder of the early years of your kids and their meetings with scissors and other sundry ruinable items.

I've had varying periods in my life where I have felt attractive. Mine is the quirky Bette Midler variety, the kind of face that covers an interesting terrain depending on what expression is passing across it at the time (oh, I have a photo of myself I want to post here someday, if the friends who are also featured don't mind, where I was purposefully making a face that actually scares even me when I look at it. It betrays all known scientific laws. Man, it is so ugly, it makes me laugh). You can only make yourself ugly, I guess, when you feel secure enough to do so. I'm not so sure I would be making that face at the moment :) My little mini nervous breakdown this week has been informed by that ugly, hard little pocket of unacceptance that still lives in me (hopefully somewhat depleted after this week, one can hope). I know where that pocket has come from and who informed it, many years previous. It is a strange experience, having the human brain that I do, that I can observe that hard little pocket, note its shape and its size somewhat, and yet my awareness of it doesn't diminish it (well, it's the beginning of its diminishment, of course, but aren't we somehow surprised that shining the light of our own observance doesn't just blow it out of the water, but it's a much longer process than that and involves one Other than me).

I met a most interesting woman recently, an artist of the easel as well as an artist of her own life. Making something beautiful out of the everyday, she does, with great regularity. Sees what isn't and walks into it as though it is. A life of faith and creativity. I don't know if she believes in God or not but she walks in his lands regularly. I could see this from being with her for an hour. There was a photo on the kitchen sideboard of her and her husband, both laughing. It was the most beautiful photo. She's of average looks. It didn't matter. She knows how beautiful she is.

She is not a commodity. I am not a commodity. Neither are you. Perhaps the most beautiful women of all are the ones who know and understand this, who have come to terms with themselves, with who they are, what they have to offer, the seeds of themselves that live in them that need to sprout. They are beautifully free.

Now I Have Become Myself

by Mary Sarton.


Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before--"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

Irony

Waiting in the supermarket aisle (I was waiting behind the guy who spent $241.32 on his groceries so I had a bit of pondering time), I was looking at the women's magazines (Cleo et al). Two of them had as cover text the words "Love Your Body!" and another one had "Your Body is Beautiful!"

Of course central to all three of those covers was a size 2 model who has been on the Half-Strength Cabbage Water diet for the last three years and gets the airbrushing treatment anyway. Yeah, right.