A couple great "responses" to the issues raised in my last post:

‘"I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.’  Armistead Maupin said this, wishing that he had "come out" as gay earlier in his life. But the comment might apply just as easily to lots of us who conduct our lives in fear of what other people think. Life is short, and then you die. No rehearsals."

via Maggi Dawn and

"No one should abandon duties
because he sees defects in them.
Every action, every activity, is surrounded
by defects as a fire is surrounded by smoke."

(Bhagavad Gita, I8.47)

via Cindy Lawson.

Well, after 24 hours of antibiotics, my fever is gone and I feel almost back to normal.  I was in bed most of the day yesterday (N tending to the baby), and that helped so much.  I feel like a new woman.

So I’m going to try to put into words some of the rumblings I’ve been feeling inside.  Apologies for any lack of coherence.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve watched two really great documentaries:  The Corporation (about the sicknesses inherent to corporate America and beyond), and You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train (about Howard Zinn and the social causes with which he’s been involved).  I left both so energized.  Like someone had nudged me awake, and I was seeing life anew.

I’ve long self-identified as one concerned with social justice.  Before moving to the Bay, my husband’s line of work (community organizing) and the neighborhood in which we lived were daily reminders of racial/social/educational/economic inequities.  These were ever in my face.

But here we are in a different season.  My husband is in school, and I’m writing.  We’re both caring for our son.  And we live in an area where it costs boatloads of money to live.  (Can anyone say “enormous student debt”?)  The streets are all clean and in good repair.  The grocery stores don’t have guards.  Very few cars were made before the year 2000.  Really, the economic diversity in the area has mainly two categories:  a) students and b) millionaires.

So it’s easy for society’s inequities to fade into distant memory.  It’s easy to feel the gentle sunlight and afternoon breeze (it’s sunny and between 60 and 80 degrees here nearly year-round) and feel as though all is well with the world.  To feel that all is well, and, frankly, a little boring.

But these movies…they woke me up again.  They gave me permission to do something other than focus on my little life in my little household.  They gave different images and role models than much in the media today, all of which inspire engagement with a world where all is not well.  So very not.

So I’ve once again been dreaming of what I can do with who I am and the kinds of things that stir my soul, to lead a more spicy life.  A life of greater engagement with the world’s unwellness. 

But here’s what happens in my dreams.  I get tripped up on the fact that most social causes a person can participate in involve demonizing someone.  An individual.  A group.  A stratum of society.  And all I’ve learned and contemplated of the human psyche, and the social and environmental factors involved in any social ill, makes me unable to comfortably do that.  As far as I can tell, we’re all of us caught up in systems.  Systems that make some of us mean and some of us nice.  Some of us conscientious and some self-absorbed.  Some bitter, some arrogant, some fearful or ashamed.  It’s systems that form our politicians, systems that make rich people rich and poor people poor, systems that cause some from each category to move up or down that ladder.  Who isn’t shaped by their environment?  By their joys and wounds…by the joys and wounds of others?

I can’t comfortably point at any group or individual and say, “You!  The crap is all your fault.  You’re completely to blame.”

Can I join with others to address society’s ills when such others might be saying these very things?

And this leads me to my next thought:  I think I’m too principled.  I think I care too much about being genuine.  Is that possible?  I care too much about never participating in things that I can’t fully, consistently back.  I’m wondering these days whether there isn’t a healthy place for lowering one’s principles.  Lowering them for the sake of doing things in the world.  Working for social change.  Connecting with others.  Participating in religion, even.

What would it look like for me to not fear the wrath of the authenticity police, those boogie men who crouch and watch for me to say or do anything contrary to my convictions?  I’m sure there are some who could really use a dose of that wrath.  But there are those of us on the opposite extreme, who need to stop fearing it.  Whose fear of it, oh so ironically, actually keeps us from doing much at all about all our “authentic convictions.”

I’m not about a guilt-based life, but I am about a spicy one, where I’m not asleep to the spectrum of light and dark in our world…where I’m satisfyingly involved in the spreading of the light, and containment of the dark.  As tempting as it is to let my environment lull me back to sleep, I want to shake that.  I want to be awake and alive in the best sense of that word, and, though getting a little dirty in the process, try to care a little less about being 100% principled all the time.

What do you think?

I’ve just begun Paulo Coelho’s Pilgrimage, the non-fiction tale of Coelho’s spiritual journey.  Much of the journey is quite literal - a walking path taken across Spain when Coelho was 30.  So far I can hardly put it down.

Monumental current events have a way of worming their way into much that I read, so it isn’t much wonder that Katrina came to mind as I read the following passage:

Everything in our surroundings [along his path in Spain] reflected an uneasy peace, the peace of a world that was still in the process of growing and being created - a world that seemed to know that, in order to grow, it had to continue moving along, always moving along.  Great earthquakes and killer storms might make nature seem cruel, but I could see that these were just the vicissitudes of being on the road.  Nature itself journeyed, seeking illumination. (36)

Do you think this could be true?…a way, maybe, of depersonalizing the devastation that nature inflicts on itself?  Or, rather, personalizing it in a different way than we often do?  Rather than nature being cruel, maybe nature is traveling its own path, doing its best, like many of us are, to balance and counterbalance its own self out.  When too much pressure builds up here, an earthquake or volcano gets released.  When too much moisture or heat builds up there, a huricane spins and dumps the access where it wasn’t before.

I don’t know.  A journeying nature is somehow easier for me to respect and relate with, easier for me to swallow than one that’s malevolent or randomly unfair.  It doesn’t diminish the suffering so many bear because of that journey, but it puts the suffering, for me, into a different light.  It also begs we ask the tough questions of why, when nature does its thing, the poor are so often those that suffer most.  That’s a different set of questions than the ones around why nature is so mean.

I’ve also been reading Mary Oliver this week.  Two of her poems have been echoing again and again in my mind as prayers…prayers in response, again, to Katrina.  Prayers for hope that light follows darkness.

The Lily

Night after night
darkness
enters the face
of the lily

which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse

of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content
to stand there

in the garden,
not quite sleeping,
and, maybe,
saying in lily language

some small words
we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,

its lips
are so secret,
its tongue
is so hidden–

or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience

of vegetables
and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon

becomes the golden sun–
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?

At Black River

All day
its dark, slick bronze soaks
in a mossy place,
its teeth,

a multitude
set
for the comedy
that never comes–

its tail
knobbed and shiny,
and with a heavyweight’s punch
packed around the bone.

In beautiful Florida [or the Gulf region…]
he is king
of his own part
of the black river,

and from his nap
he will wake […or she, Katrina]
into the warm darkness
to boom, and thrust forward,

paralyzing
the swift, thin-waisted fish,
or the bird
in its frilled, white gown,

that has dipped down
from the heaven of leaves
one last time
to drink.

Don’t think
I’m not afraid.
There is such an unleashing
of horror.

Then I remember:
death comes before
the rolling away
of the stone.

I read this and am dumbfounded.  Absolutely dumbfounded.  Shocked and outraged and speechless, really.  THIS IS NOT OKAY.

A couple of posts that nourish and speak to me:

This at Midtone Blue   

This and this at Sacred Ordinary

Thank you, Blue and Fran.

For the last week my world has had a homebound orbit, circling almost entirely around our newborn son.  I’ve felt such joy and gratitude, such gladness to be right where I am, right who I am, nestled deep into this life that I’m living.  Whispers of the greater world have trickled in, but not until yesterday did I actually take time to read more deeply of the tragedy gripping our nation’s south.

And now I’m floored.  Or rather filled with a profound kind of dissonance.  While I’ve been basking in what feels like the benevolence of our world, thousands have been doing the exact opposite.  The exact opposite.  They’re living in hell.  Right now.  Right freaking now.  How can this be?

One of the hugest challenges of my 20s has been learning to come to terms with suffering, to grow so absolutely exhausted from kicking and screaming in the face of it, from personally flailing around in cesspools of it, and all the questions it raises for me and in me, that I’ve finally fallen limp with my fists newly open.  “I accept you,” I’ve finally learned to say.  “I accept that you’re in our world, that sometimes nights are endless, that pits are bottomless, that no amount of wishing or praying will make you go away.”

But now I’m confronted with an entirely new challenge.  An entirely different beast.  It’s joy.  Joy and peace.  How in the world, given suffering’s Reality, does a person come to terms with such things?  At many points in the last decade I’ve wanted to slap optimistic people.  Or shake them into actually seeing the world for what it is.  Only eyes closed or averted, I’ve thought, could go on registering “good place” when looking at our world.

But that’s not how I’m seeing things at all anymore.  I’ll never ever say this world is only good.  I’ll never look at things like New Orleans and think they’re just a blip on an otherwise glassy sea.  I weep as I learn about what’s happening there.  I weep and mourn and donate and pray.  But I can say, in addition to that, that I am genuinely happy.  And I do think kindness and gentleness exist in our world.  And that sometimes they even wrap us up and fill us up and make us glow in a kind of heaven.

And this is what’s confusing me today, what’s being impossible to get my mind around as I look into my baby’s eyes, guzzling warmly at my breast, and then the eyes of hungry babies half a country away.  God, what a world.

In the Darkness, in the Light, it just keeps on.

There is much to mourn in this world, much that deserves seriousness.  But you know, I think the opposite is true, too.  Like this, for example.  I love it.

I’m not sure how much of how I feel today can be pinned on hormones, and how much is just bona fide funk, but I’m not doing so well.  Last night at a writing class I got teared up a few times listening to classmates talk about the real-life stuff they’ve written into their fiction – physical abuse, sexual abuse, the trauma of immigrating and trying to learn a new culture while simultaneously being discriminated against.  The already-published stories we were assigned were equally tragic.  Actually all the ones I’ve read since this class began have been so.

I came home last night and just cried.  Cried and cried and cried.  We’re all such dear, dear people, plopped into this world by no choice of our own.  Who deserves being beaten up – learning to feel like it’s their own fault? – learning to stutter, to hide, to be ashamed?  Who deserves being violated in any way?  Who should go hungry, or be hated for having dark skin, for speaking with an accent, for not having the luxury of learning a new language at all?

I don’t know who God is right now, but if I could imagine a God aware of all that happens on our planet, in addition to that God being delighted by the glory of it all, I would definitely imagine him or her crying.  Just crying and crying and crying over all of us.  The ways we perpetuate the junk are so largely just ways of coping with the junk that got heaped on us in the first place.  Dear souls!  Dear people, trying to live and survive.

There are times when I wish I had a teddy bear God again, against whom I could cuddle up and feel safe and warm and protected.  A God I could believe would make everything right somehow, someday.  But I can’t find that God anymore.  At least not in any conscious way.  And when made aware of so much darkness – well, the void feels dark indeed.

I need to find a way to reconnect with the light that I know exists alongside all this darkness.  I need to listen to voices of hope and joy and healing and overcoming.  If any of you are so inspired, I would gladly welcome prayers or vibes like these being sent in my direction.

Today I’ve taken a step back from my work (fiction writing) to reflect on why I’m doing it.  Every so often I need this – a “taking stock” that refocuses my energy and helps me determine whether there’s things I want/need to do differently from week to week to better move toward my goals.  I came across another passage in Rollo May’s Courage to Create that has sparked some helpful reflection toward this end.  May writes:

“If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art.  For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols.  This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extent that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relation to the inarticulate, or, if you will, “unconscious” levels of the culture is destroyed.  They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world.”

This immediately made me think about all the short stories I’ve been reading.  These are art.  And the more I reflect on them “long and searchingly,” the more I see in them a reflection of the “spiritual meaning” of our age.  As far as I can tell, they portray homelessness in its deepest sense – that lack of rootedness, of place, of purpose, of meaning that has little to do with whether or not you have a permanent address.  I leave these stories lonely and cold, wishing for buoys of hope or warmth or relationship, doubting they’re there to be found.  I leave feeling like life has little sparkle, and day-to-dayness is a lot of that raw feeling you get when you haven’t slept enough, or you’re about to get sick, or everything you wished life could be just really isn’t happening.

Thinking about these stories this way makes me admire their writers for being such incisive namers, naming our age and the state of so many of our souls.  I want to be a namer, too.  I want to help raise consciousness about what it is we’re feeling and living through, what we’re hoping for and despairing about.

But in all my “taking stock,” I realize I don’t want to stop there.  I want to do more than hold up mirrors.  I want to point toward windows, and begin imagining what might be seen through them.  I want to stand at the edge of our age, quite personally in touch with the fear and frustration and meaningless that accompany disillusionment and the crumbling of foundations (in science, religion, politics, etc.), and look past that edge to participate in the creation of something more.  Something beyond.  Something hopeful, even if realistic and not disconnected from despair.  May writes, “[The courage to live into the future] will not be the opposite of despair.  We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country.  Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”

I want to be a namer, yes, but also a creator, courageously creating from the stuff of life that which enlivens, and sustains, and shines light on hopeful paths toward all that makes up “home.”

Well, this has been quite a week.  Quite a season, really.

Tuesday’s election was a culmination of so many weeks of campaigning, so many facts and opinions and critiques and promises flung about, so many political headlines and commercials and debates. By the time I went to bed Tuesday night I was mostly just glad the campaigning was over, regardless of which candidate won.

Most of the next two days I felt very little – in relation to the election or anything else.  I was on automatic pilot. Not present to myself or my surroundings or the people with whom I interacted in the ways I’d like to be.  I voted for Kerry, and am troubled by most of what the Bush administration does and doesn’t stand for, but my response to Bush’s win was mostly intellectual.  “What a time to be alive!” I reasoned to myself.  “It’s in times of conflict, times of turmoil, times of national and international upheaval and crisis that humanity gets shaken awake from its slumber, and moves to care and act on its convictions.  The interest and turnout in this election demonstrates exactly this.  These next four years and the ongoing global consequences of them could very well make this country more awake than I’ve ever seen it in my lifetime.”  For my part, my interactions with others were painted with this attitude.

Until last night.

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