superconnected
My other mania was making brightly colored tissue roses. I couldn’t stop for days after shaky baby’s party. I was working out the trauma of all the crafts we didn’t do at her party because I was so disorganized. But somehow shutup or I’ll stack you, accordion pleat you, wrap you with a chenille pipe cleaner, and fluff you doesn’t sound as funny as shutup or I’ll frost you.
“when you’re finished with the mop then you can stop
and look at what you’ve done the plateau’s clean,
no dirt to be seen and the work it took was fun
well the many hands began to scan around for the next
plateau some said it was greenland some said
mexico others decided it was nowhere except for
where they stood but those were all just guesses,
wouldn’t help you if they could”
Meat Puppets Plateau
I rediscovered the Meat Puppets because I was trying to explain to my husband that he looks like Curt Kirkwood when he just lets his hair get all long and raggy and goes unshaved. He really does, too. Kinda.
Staring at photos of longhaired, five o’clock shadowed Curt Kirkwood, preferably in a pink gingham dress, was my greatest comfort during a particularly uhappy moment in my romantic life twelve or so years ago. And at almost fifty he’s still pretty damn delicious. And he’s in Austin, where all good rockers go when they die (oh or Nashville, not sure which is better, Austin by a hair, though Steely Dan had been working out of Nashville for a while, and Bon Jovi’s there now right???). And lo and behold! They just put out a new album! And Curt is spewing his abrasive, probably aspbergers, nobody’s going to impose their agenda on me language– yum.
Anyway.
Top down is just not me.
For a long time I’ve been trying to get on top of my life by doing the Flylady thing– flylady.net, you know. I have tried so hard to impose easy, one-size-fits-all, brief, doable routines on my life that could be accomplished in a small amount of work each day, as opposed to either major disgusting house or major housework misery all day on a weekend day, which I just refuse to do, routines which would make it all come together with a minimum of misery, angst and resentment.
Don’t get me wrong– it has helped. A lot. I throw away a lot of crap, and then I no longer have to organize, put away, or dust it. I try to go by the handle everything once rule- go ahead and decide if it’s junk mail or important and file it, whether in the circular file or the important file, right away instead of having to touch it once when I get it out of the mail box and again weeks later when I finally get around to organizing the mail pile. I keep certain surfaces clear or easy to clear so that they can be easily and quickly disinfected often so I don’t have to get out the flamethrower because I haven’t cleaned them since last year. My house is in much better shape (at least I think it is???) than it was before Flylady.
But as a general rule, no matter how well it works, no matter how much sense it makes, top down is just not me.
There was a study in the late 70’s-early 80’s about programming styles of boys and girls using logo. In a nutshell, probably the nutshell of warped memory because I haven’t looked at the thing in twelve years, the study differentiated boys and girls like so. The boys decided what they wanted to do and then attempted to cram the reality of the programming language into the desired result– top down. The girls looked at the reality of the programming language and used that as a jumping off point to create from there– bottom up.
I see this in my life every day. Husbands relax after work (imposing desired result, regardless of reality all around them) while wives bust their asses, becoming resentful and too tired for sex, parenting, housecleaning, working full time (embracing external reality and starting at the bottom). As my brother says, men just don’t have that take on too much gene.
Managers strive to bring together reality and top down desired result, attempting to encapsulate and convey the desired outcome to staff, who relax and don’t concern themselves with the desired outcome because they aren’t paid to and they just want to deal with their own little fiefdom. My best friend’s husband keeps putting glass in the city recycle bin because it makes no sense to him that they don’t recycle glass. I don’t guess I’ll ever be a process engineer or computer programmer, but my husband can’t build a fire for shit or string a kite that will actually fly. I can, as I demonstrated beautifully on cold, clear, windy Easter night after his kite kept diving earthward and his knots popped off.
When I load the dishwasher the dishes almost always come out sparkling. My husband loads the dishwasher chock full, even though when he does that half the dishes come out dirty. He says, I refuse to be held hostage by my dishwasher.
Held hostage by your dishwasher?
How about tuned in to reality so that you can be effective, so that your kite will fly and your fire will burn?
Is my friend’s husband’s stubborn refusal to embrace the recycling reality a stupid refusal to see reality, or a thoughtful protest? I mean, it is truly wrong that our city does not recycle glass. I get that.
Some see at what is and ask why. Others see what isn’t and ask why not?
Or something.
This is a very, very basic difference. It would be unproductive to say one approach is better than the other. Even if bottom up is better (and I believe, know, that it is), never, ever the twain shall meet. I can knock my head against my husband’s reality all day long but it will only piss us both off– me because he isn’t doing it ’right’ and him because I am helping him and that pisses dudes off.
Sometimes top down is even useful. I find that at work, dealing with the folks I supervise, top down is sometimes needed or else anarchy will prevail. Anarchy isn’t such a bad thing… unless it is accompanied by people forgetting why we’re there and failing/just not bothering to serve the folks whose tax dollars pay our salaries. So, sometimes I do have to go all top down on ’em.
But at home…
It just came over me Monday when I was off and home alone.
This constant attempt to impose routine, and the consequent unhappiness because I can’t/don’t want to do it and so my life is still in disorder because I failed to tick off the items on my to do list, isn’t helping. It just isn’t.
I’m knocking my head against some basic realities.
I’m struggling to find the right simile or metaphor for this. I haven’t yet, sorry.
These realities are just not going anywhere. We have so much time and so much money. We have certain needs– food, sleep, shelter, transportation, paycheck, emotional and physical and social comforts. My husband sees things a certain way. All of these are realities I can knock my forehead against until it bleeds. I stretch and stretch, trying to manage both ends. At the front end I impose a top down strategy involving lots of proactive things like buying in bulk and routine– and still find myself stuck on the other end, out of money and out of energy, with needs unmet.
I can make running up the slide a way of life if I want to. And I have.
The endless to do list, the daily and weekly attempts to finally game the system, hit the sweet spot, make routine work for me, just wear me out and make me feel like a failure.
So it came to me Monday to try something different.
How about just being where I am and paying tender attention to that particular thing? How about setting down all the balls I am just barely managing to juggle — work, home, my own mental and physical health, parenting, marriage– and giving whatever single thing I am doing my full attention.
Instead of doing fifteen minutes in each room in the house, changing rooms each time the timer goes off, how about cleaning the kitchen for a while, as long as I want, and then going into my room and cleaning there as long as I want?
How about going to bed when I’m tired?
How about being off ADD meds which help me be supermom and just being scattered me for a while?
I gave this a shot Monday. I felt like I was in some kind of superconnected state. I say this because healing school work is the only thing I can compare it to. I was flowing through my day, and it was sweet. It made me nervous, like the first time without training wheels or water wings… but I am convinced of the essential rightness of it.
Those realities were still there… I could stop any time I wanted and try to claw my way up the flinty perpendicular bank of that flow– not enough time, not enough money, day slipping by, have to go back to work tomorrow, must be proactive, must impose routine, must go work on my budget and short and long range forecasts and plans, must accomplish this and this and this in order to create this outcome, must convince husband to save time and aggravation by finally succumbing to the reality of our dishwasher, or our dogs or child or… but why?
I might even make some progress scrambling up the bank. But all those loose ends would still be waving sweetly at me in the breeze– my failure at top down, my reality at bottom up… scrambling up the bank would probably just make my fingers bleed.
I thought, you know, this shit is all going to be there. Why don’t I just do what I want to do right now, and later I’ll probably want to do something else, and it will all get done, or it will still be there.
I didn’t check email. I didn’t budget. I didn’t create a list or calendar of things that must be done on or by certain days in order for my life to work out. I was just … there. I did some dishes. I folded some laundry. I did some writing. I printed some photos. I did some reading. I ate. I just was.
I’m not describing it very well. It really was a moment of zen, though. I haven’t had one this big since I read Haruki Murakami’s Windup Bird Chronicle. Not that I can remember anyway. It’s so funny how a truly useful paradigm shift just sneaks up on you slowly and silently.
One more listen to Plateau… who needs action when you’ve got words?
Good night!
Here’s your sign
I have a darling soul mate friend who, among so many other amazing things, is a gifted LPC and is also Cherokee.
This week she got on a roll and sent me as one of her usual email forward group a lovely, personal piece of writing. She wrote of sittting at home with her ten year old on New Year’s Eve, listening to gunfire interspersed with the firecrackers down in the historic district just as we were over here on the wrong side of the tracks. Like her, perhaps, the only reason I bothered to stay up that night was to fulfil my promise to my pee wee shaky baby that I would take her out to see the fire works at midnight. I truly couldn’t have given one shit, but there was something about that promise.
Something told me, that night, as I stood on my porch alone, searching the clear night sky and smoking one last cigarette as my husband took the kids to bed at about 12.05, to step under the cover of the eaves, because a bullet coming down is going just as fast as it was when it was discharged up. Days later, I did see that a small child was killed here by what was most likely a stray celebratory bullet… Anyway, between waiting for midnight to give her son the traditional New Year’s blessing, as her mother had given her, and her mother’s mother had done before her, between telling her son stories of New Year celebrations when she was a child, she was reminding him that they were safe.
This, and a stop in Cherokee NC over the holidays for a reconnection with the clan, got her going. She wrote of the Cherokee law requiring blood revenge, and how, thirty years after the law was abolished, the Cherokees were decimated by US Government betrayal and the Trail of Tears. Her thoughts ran from the Trail of Tears, to the Twin Towers, to Al Qaeda’s tactics and the terrible loss of life on both sides and the situation in the Middle East today.
Her detailed description of the Cherokee lifeway including the blood revenge requirement was enough to give me a little rush of awe.
But she asked her email group of friends for our thoughts. Here were mine, slightly edited for many reasons.
I have often wondered, and continue to wonder, if this sort of philosophising is the luxury of a decadent, bourgeois society, and if all my peaceniking would be completely meaningless and ridiculous had I been born in Sudan or Bosnia or Kurdistan… but then I think of the Dalai Lama, and what the Tibetans have been through and how he continues to speak, write, and conduct himself, and wonder if thinking these thoughts, even if only by little old anxious, exhausted, judgmental, and exceedingly bourgeois me, could still be of use. Certainly lots and lots of folks in our decadent and cruel society are turning back toward each other and our original mother, nature… things could be getting better… healing school work tells me– as does any thought about the Dalai Lama’s teachings, actually– it doesn’t matter one way or the other. I’m just blowing off some very rare extra brain energy here– embarassing myself by showing my attachment, I guess. Whateva. Human. Wounded. Just where I am supposed to be.
Anyhoo…
“Writing this [response to your thoughts] has humbled me and reminded
me of where I want to be, right now.
Do you remember that wonderful group you did at my house? With the red circle and the blue triangle or whatever? We came to an amazing truth that night. We were able to switch back and forth, at will, between the thought that made us so damn angry, and the thought that made us feel comforted and happy.
Holding the anger and hurt right there alongside the peace and the joy is what it means to begin to heal.
At the end of the group you mentioned that song ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, and I said, so if every person would simply be responsible for and learn to live with his or her pain– holding both anger and hurt, and peace and joy, at the same time– and STOP taking it out on others, there would never be any more violence, ever again. I felt myself profoundly changed that night.
Of course when my husband and I hurt each other verbally we still lash out and try to the other down HARD… Some times it just hurts so much, and I can’t believe the depth of my feeling of betrayal, fear, anguish and hatred, and while I can’t speak for him and I’m sure he’d express it some other way I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. And some of that is about one of us being a jerk, and most of that is about our own lack of self esteem, peace, coping skills, or healing for our own wounds which have nothing to do with the spouse we perceive to be hurting us at that moment.
We don’t become peaceful over night.
Okay, here’s what I think about our Sign.
I believe in the cosmic reality and necessity for revenge, blood, justice. It is a part of who we are as humans who have been temporarily separated from our God or divinity. For some of us, revenge or murder or vengeance is part of our soul contract or sacred tasks for our lives.
I also believe that we have to do some level of containment in the middle east.
But here’s what I think about revenge…
I don’t believe in a simple cause-effect relationship between the ability or failure to stand up for oneself or take revenge. I don’t think there’s a sign.
Revenge has its own consequences, which are unforseeable. It is also not possible to see how or why the sins of previous generations will or will not be visited upon our children. There is a plan– we do not know what it is– the only thing we can control is our own choices, but still, horrible things happen to decent, loving, peaceful, civilized, educated nations and persons.
The grief of the mothers and fathers who lose their children, or the children who lose their parents, or the young veterans whose lives are broken by physical and emotional mutilation in war, regardless of which side they are on, is a cycle which we continue to perpetuate, and it MUST BE STOPPED. And it has to stop somewhere.
God’s (or whatever each person calls the creative or higher power in the universe) love is reflected most clearly in the fierce love felt by usually a mother, but often by other caregivers too, for a helpless newborn and the child and adult that newborn will become (if we are lucky).
That love is, in my opinion, the only thing that reaches beyond the grave, and it is the closest we come to understanding God in this life.
It’s not that we need to love every person we encounter the way we love a newborn. It’s not that one has to become a parent before one gets it– it’s not about the external circumstance of parent or nonparent. It’s that we need to remember that fierce, immovable acceptance and nurture– for ourselves and for others– the very minute we feel tempted to lash out.
It ain’t easy, but it is the answer.
Remembering that powerful tie to other humans regardless of language, color, culture, or whatever marital or parental heartbreak you’re embroiled in at the moment, is the only chance for survival of our species, and it is no wonder that early religious cults centered around feminine fertility– those elders knew something we don’t. Our society does everything possible to sever connection between babies and adults, between humans and the ecosystem which literally keeps us alive, between humans and humans. That disconnection allows us to blindly assent to so many dangerous, hurtful and destructive practices, from how we parent and relate to others, and how we raise meat to eat, to how our industry dehumanizes and poisons most while enriching a few, and we will die from it.
[And that may be our divine destiny, as individuals and a people, and that's fine.]
When that bond, that tie, is severed by violence, whether through violent communication, parenting or relationship styles, whether a ten year old dies because he stepped on a land mine from an old war, or whether blood revenge is taken upon a murderer– both the innocent ten year old and the murderer were someone’s child. When we violate others with words or actions we are violating God and we are poisoning ourselves.
When I think of the Middle East I think of the little picture or Catholic-style prayer card I saw one time at my sister in law’s house– small children clustered at Jesus’ feet. The picture read something like: Jesus would never call them ‘collateral damage’. In our attempt to stop the violence, we are not doing a very good job of getting the bad guys, but we’re doing a great job of slaughtering the innocent and the bad guys continue to do their horrible work.
I believe that we as a race will not, cannot, ascend until we see every human being as precious as that innocent newborn he or she once was, and that has to start within each person. It starts with how we parent. It starts with how we react when our spouse is being an asshole. It starts with how we manage our own pain.
There isn’t always a cause effect when we make changes in how we see and live our lives. Some really bad people really prosper in this world, and some wonderful or at least innocent people are burdened by terrible pain and problems. We don’t know why and we can’t make it all better like we want to.
All we can do is let it begin with us, one tiny step at a time. Reading the wonderful books Sex God by Rob Bell and The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton. Blessing our children as often as we can with quality time and kind words, like [my friend was] doing on New Year’s Eve– especially since we know that in just a few days or hours we’ll be screaming at them or seething silently because they are being such little brats.
Biting our tongues when our spouse or a customer or coworker is being a total jackass– you didn’t start it, but if you try to finish it you’ll just make it worse. Reporting or working to stop injustice especially to those who cannot help themselves– children, animals, the incarcerated, the elderly, victims of genocidal campaigns just as Native Americans experienced.
Working in counseling on the huge hurts we have endured or are still facing in our lives, to nurture ourselves through the pain and make the best decisions we can to try to change what we can and accept what we can’t. Making a routine of asking for the ‘me time’ and support we need and offering it to others. Nurturing ourselves so that when others need us we don’t become dried up angry old martyred bitches and our giving comes from a place of nutured, endless joy.
Thank you, darling friend, for sharing your awesome thoughts and reminding me of where I stand on this. You are the greatest.”
* * *
‘I summon you here, my love’
Spoon
(or is it ‘No I can’t just relax, knowing you’re coming back’?)
mama’s Bible
Monday, October 15, 2007
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mama’s bible When we were living in Hill Country Population 767, Texas I was between six and ten years old. Back then we got S&H green stamps at the Superette. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S&H_Green_Stamps I guess mom got sick of fooling with them. And I guess that’s what they depended upon to happen. But S & H didn’t count on me. I licked them and stuck them and counted them and saved them up to get a Bible with a white imitation leather cover. I probably had to save my pennies to pay the shipping and handling, too. I had to have it. It zipped shut. I think it probably took a while. We were educated, but we were damn poor. I made my Dad, who was an angry atheist thanks to his tour in Viet Nam (and I don’t blame him one f-ing bit), sign it for me on the This Holy Bible Presented To page opposite the picture of the Dead Sea at Sunrise inside the front cover, as if he and Mom had given it to me. 7/10/78. He did it. I was eight years old. I trace the roots of my bizarre, at least bizarre for such an agnostic, deconstructed, materialist, women’s studies corrupted, call-it-the-Universe type belief system, ability to quote just the appropriate scripture, to that time. I was a GA (shudder). I won a prize (probably a large quantity of Super Bubble) one summer at Vacation Bible School for reciting the name of every single book from Genesis to Revelation. Mom and I went every week to hear Brother Gary Buckner, a round faced blond man who was probably younger than I am now, preach at First Baptist. I got saved and ‘warshed’ there when I was eight or so, dunked by Brother Gary in the big baptistry with the heavy clear glass panel on the front. This means I perceive that I have not only my salvation, just in case it’s needed when the book of life is opened, but also the insider’s right to question and even tear down the belief system of my childhood. It’s easy to say all these things that I do, from the inside. What about those who don’t have that assurance, and can’t muster enough belief to go and get it done, but continue to worry– what if? And what do those people think, whose livelihood it is to ’save’ people and dunk them year after year? Do they think something really happens? Dunno. But I certainly marched out as quick as I could to get the cross marked in holy water on shaky baby’s hairless pate in front of various loved ones and my church congregation. I didn’t even wait around for her to choose for herself. Now she’s in too– what she chooses to do with it is up to her. Anyway, last night I was looking for the context for the title of a book I am reading– Like Trees Walking, a fictionalized story about the last lynching in Mobile, in 1981. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAdonaldD.htm [watch out, upsetting picture here, but also a good account and some thoughtful writing quoted] You know, the case Morris Dees used to break the Klan? I don’t think they mention Morris in this novel, and I’m still not sure what as trees walking means in the context of the book, although the words standing free of the Biblical context remind me of that chilling moment in Macbeth, when Birnam Wood moves on Dunsinane. The narrator in Like Trees Walking talks about his anticlimactic experience with water baptism.But that’s a side note. So I was scanning the shelf downstairs and I couldn’t find my white leatherette zipper Bible. First I panicked. All I could see was the NIV my aunts gave me when I graduated college. Did they think I’d read it more if it was in more accessible language? Please. Lord, let there be a King James here somewhere, I thought. Did I throw it away? I’ve certainly been in a purging frenzy over the last few years, wanting some control of what my children learn about me after I am gone. But my little childhood Bible, that I saved up S&H Green Stamps to get? Why wouldn’t I pass that on to my baby? Then I found my other King James, a big red plastic leather bound from my high school friend Nikki, dated 1993. I guess she thought I didn’t have one. Sigh. Never mind. That was the time in my life I was really churchgoing constantly, as an adult– where I became an Episcopalian. Almost fifteen years later I still have my membership in that little mountain church, that little den of intellectual questioning and historicist, deconstructionist, feminist analysis of our faith and our scripture. Anyway. Whew! Crisis averted. I could look up my verse in King James. Cause everybody knows, if it ain’t King James, it ain’t Bible. * * * As a girl, my mother used to sleep on the floor instead of in the bed, so that she wouldn’t get too comfortable and could get up in the morning to study. I’ve always wanted to know that steadfast little girl. Course, each week she also took her 35 cents allowance and bought seven chocolate bars and sat down and ate every single one right then. What a mix! Anyway I always wanted to know that little girl. I haven’t thought of it in years but I remember so clearly now how I wanted to connect with the part of my mother that was once little like me. And wouldn’t my little girl want to know me? Wouldn’t she want at least the chance to touch and hold that beat up old white Bible that her mommy used to carry faithfully to church each Sunday morning when not much bigger (and definitely less smart) than she? It’s not about passing on a family faith. Lord (yes I still feel free to call on the Jesus of my childhood) knows it’s not about that. It is about letting her connect, if she wishes, with that little girl in ways I wished I could connect with my own mother. I have it in my hand. I waited until just this precise moment to face the task of either finding it, or not. It was on the shelf here in my little attick hideaway. The zipper has long since been broken. The white cover is cracked and dirty. I can’t tell if it is thin leather, or if it is a leather pattern painted/stamped onto heavy paper. There are a couple of places marked with torn paper bookmarks or underlines, and there’s a thirty-year-old Lift High the Cross sticker from a long ago revival, but there’s not much else there. When I was really going to church, I used the big red plastic Bible Nikki gave me, I guess– easier to see and read. Still, it’s here in my lap, and I’ll probably print this little story to put between its pages, in case I die before the occasion comes up for me to explain to her where it came from, what it means and what it doesn’t. |
a writer’s diary
I had resolved to burn/throw away/shred all my diaries. They represent some serious unhappiness in my life!
But… for some reason I’ve been thinking about death the last few years. Don’t laugh. Since it’s a somewhat necessary phase our human bodies go through sooner or later, in my mind, it’s good to go ahead and prepare and sort out ‘the meaning of life’ and what I want to leave behind.
I got this revelation in this last year. I was sitting on a plane. My mind always turns to thoughts of death when I’m on a plane. Then it turns to how almost statistically impossible it is for planes to crash– one in millions and millions of flights crashes, literally. But I always have to think it. I might die. Okay Jesus. I’ll try to be ready.
So I was thinking– if I die, what do I want to say? So… I need to be sure and say those things now.
In concert with that, I have been settling into my new home over the last– almost a year. I have thrown away so much crap… although there’s plenty more to throw away!! And I’ve cast an eye on my diaries– stacks and stacks of them since I was ten years old.
I read one time that part of one’s process of personal growth should be writing a biography. well… it’s all written. at least the sort of moment to moment, factual stuff is written. so… I am typing out my diaries and emailing them to myself. I will, most importantly, sort out the bits I want to give to my children and husband– and the bits i do not!! I will take a hard look. Hindsight is 20/20 and a valuable source of spiritual growth.
I started this week, a little every couple of days. It will take me forever at this rate. But I have time. I am starting an email account for my baby, and I will try to keep up with it, and give my husband information about it so that he can access it for her if needed. I know if I lost a parent, their writing would be so precious to me.
Man. I have been so unhappy!
I have a friend (nobody you know) whose doctor asked her to go to rehab. It isn’t that she’s hit bottom or anything. She’s miserable, but she’s functioning and taking care of her children, and she knows she’s miserable and she’s working on it. It’s just that rehab would help her have some new thought patterns with which to address her life and habits. [hey, ifI had a penny for every time I made a really stupid, stupid choice... drank too much, and all that goes with it... I'd have at least ten bucks, you know? ] So… this sort of thing makes you take inventory.
Okay I lost that train of thought, and I have to go quickly to get myself and my baby ready to go to Pump It Up to play, but anyway…
Oh, there it is again. She said, I just want to know when I’ll be f*cking happy. I said, girl, I am almost forty and I am *just now* learning to be happy. I’m ten years older than she is. And… I am really learning to be happy. Just now.
So it’s hard to swallow, going back and revisiting all that unhappiness, especially now. But… there’s a point to it. I have some insights now I didn’t have then. I’m a bit ashamed or embarassed to have had such a hard time. But I did, and it’s mine, and revisiting it with compassion and hindsight will help truly lay some of those patterns and hurts to rest. Right now I sort of, just don’t do certain things any more. It’s behavioral, rather than emotional or spiritual. Going back to briefly honor, have compassion for, and integrate the emotions is where the true healing takes place.
So, in the words of some rap song… there I go. There I go. There I go, go, go. Maybe once I put this to rest some actual fiction can come out.
