Category: Practicing in the Heart

Through a Child’s Eyes

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Meta-Blogging, Practicing in the Heart, SpiritualityLeave a comment

Here, finally, is my response to the Day 18 prompt I found somewhat entirely tiresome on the day of. Chalk it up to the ongoing tension (which I have named previously) between the fiction-ness of many of the Writing 101 prompts and the commitment to non-fiction I have made for my writing here.

Craft a story from the perspective of a twelve-year-old observing it all. For your twist, focus on specific character qualities, drawing from elements we’ve worked on in this course, like voice and dialogue.

The prompt in its entirety actually gives you a very specific scenario to narrate through the lens of your invented 12-year-old. And I can’t deny the intriguing comparisons that were allowed by reading a few different takes on the prompt by different bloggers. However, the prompt left me once again where I have been several times throughout my Writing 101 journey: I haven’t had the particular experience in the prompt’s scenario, so I was left with the task of distilling said prompt to a core essence, the code to unlock and make the prompt true and real for the kind of writing I do on JALC.

And that’s where I checked out of the process in annoyance last Wednesday night.

I mean, I did a little bit of stream-of-associating about the topic in the days since then.  I’ve been watching DVR’ed episodes of CNN’s The Sixties TV series, and the episode about JFK’s assassination sparked a recollection that I was home sick from school the day John Hinckley, Jr. shot Ronald Reagan. “11 and a half is close enough to 12. Maybe that can be my ‘child’s eyes’ post.”

I thought about the original prompt’s scenario — a neighborhood domestic drama — and fruitlessly tried to come up with some sort of family or neighborhood event I had witnessed that could be fodder for a post. “I got nothing. Was I really that sheltered and self-absorbed during my tween years?”

So: a little bit of noodling here and there. But mostly, I just pushed the task to the back of my mind in a very annoyed and put-upon kind of way.

Until it hit me.

It is precisely my level of annoyance and self-created victimhood around these prompts that is the childish perspective asking for exploration in my post.

After all, the initial invitation to register for the Writing 101 challenge makes it eminently clear that participants have the freedom to re-interpret and remix the prompts however they see fit:

You can mix assignments up however you’d like. Respond to the prompt, and ignore the twist. Try the twist, but write on your own topic. Use both the prompt and the twist.  The only mandate is that you write every weekday.

The Blogging U organizers are about as far from being authoritarian writing dictators as one could ask them to be. In fact, they created a structure with lots of freedom and flexibility, to accommodate the wide diversity of writers and perspectives on the continent of WordPress.

Einstein_tongueSo then who is the child/teenager identity in me? The one that has found it necessary, not just to write my re-interpretations with a matter-of-fact notation “Inspired by such-and-such prompt,” but instead to call such obvious and painstaking attention to the ways I’m having to “jump through extra hoops” to “make the prompts work” for JALC.

In some interesting ways, the contemporary self-absorption of that is strikingly similar to the historical self-absorption suggested by my inability to find notable family or neighborhood events I witnessed at 12 to write about.

It’s amazing, this process of growing towards spiritual maturity. Just when I think I’ve got a trajectory going, there’s another subtle form of self-betrayal to watch out for.

———-

Image credit: http://www.replicatedtypo.com/sticking-the-tongue-out-early-imitation-in-infants/6082.html

 

 

 

 

Writing for my Health

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Gratitudes and Thank Yous, Meta-Blogging, Practicing in the Heart, Spirituality, The Voices in My Head, Topics of Study5 Comments

More time with the Writing 101 backlog. Tonight’s entry is brought to you by the number 18 — the day whose prompt I should be responding to — and the letter “U” — for how uninspired that Day 18 prompt has me currently feeling. So let’s look at Day 14 instead:

Pick up the nearest book and flip to page 29. What’s the first word that jumps off the page? Use this word as your springboard for inspiration. If you need a boost, Google the word and see what images appear, and then go from there.

Today’s twist: write the post in the form of a letter.

———-

Journaling, the world seems to agree, is a good thing.

~ Janet Conner, Writing Down Your Soul

Dear Spirit,

It’s an interesting coincidence that the Writing 101 prompt asks me to “write in the form of a letter,” when that same approach is a key technique Conner suggests as a way to help “journal-writing” become “soul writing.”  The ritual of addressing the words externally, whether to God or Spirit or Inner Wisdom, serves as reminder that someone is there to listen to what I write and even sometimes to provide an answer. Whether you understand that “external” someone as out in the cosmos or housed in that still, small voice within, I think this reminder of writing’s capacity to be in dialogue and meditation is a potent one. And a reminder well-worth receiving.

During the last crazy stretch at work, I not only fell away from blogging publicly, I also fell away from the daily practice of writing in my pen and paper journal. And let me tell you, Spirit, man oh man, did I ever start to feel the ill effects of that choice.

journal-writingBy halfway through the 9-day break from my morning journaling, I could quite literally feel the bile and the poisons building up in my system — frustration, anxiety, negativity of all shapes and sizes — without release. Without a safety valve. Without giving myself the space to vent off the poison and, by the very nature of that process of writing and voicing and studying, to — often, if not always — create a distance between my core self and the negative ego-state I was venting off. To always be able to write myself to some space of release, and to sometimes be able to write myself to a solution, or at least to a deeper level of insight.

For all that I could see the cost I was paying by last Monday, I wasn’t quite able to manage my time adeptly enough last week to reconnect with journal-writing* during the final crazed days of proposal work.

I finally cracked back into my journal last Friday morning. And the internal space and clarity I feel now that I’ve been back to this morning practice is palpable. It’s like I can almost feel that old-fashioned pen nib drawing the poisons out of me, like it draws ink out of a bottle.

This shift, last week to this, is loud enough for me that I’m going to consider long and hard in future proposal cycles — or other busy times — whether I can really afford to take this resource away from myself.

That particular question will actually be a study to take on sooner than later. We have a big family vacation coming up in July, and my sense is that the travel and excursion schedule may be sufficiently robust that morning journal-writing could be damn hard to accomplish. But on days where the morning routine doesn’t work, could I still commit to 15 minutes’ writing meditation later in the day? Before dinner? Before bedtime?

And once I experiment with the benefit of a daily journaling practice — independent of when in the day the writing occurs — is this something I can bring back home to use during crazy work weeks?

That’s definitely my prayer for tonight.

* I am still avoiding the phrase “soul writing” — I’m only about halfway through Conner’s book, so I don’t yet feel clear on 1) what exactly distinguishes “soul writing” from other forms of journaling; 2) whether my daily writing would “make the cut” to be considered as soul writing; and 3) whether or not I even want to reach that standard. For now, I’m talking about my journaling as “journal-writing” — ‘cos I know that term fits and is something I value.

———-

Image credit: http://yogainmyschool.com/yoga-journal-writing-a-window-to-the-soul/

 

Me and Garcia Lorca, in the Produce Aisle

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Meta-Blogging, Practicing in the Heart, The Voices in My Head3 Comments

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! — and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

~ Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California“

When did I become someone who shops for groceries at 9’o’clock on Wednesday night?

800px-Refurbished_Coles_supermarket_in_BerwickWho am I kidding? I know when it happened — it was when I decided that instead of sacrificing all of my life for my career, I was going to use this fresh, Bostonian start to become a master juggler. Remain dedicated to my nonprofit and reengage with singing and tend to my home life and also have this whole sideline as a feminist blogger.

None of those pursuits erase the body’s need for sustenance. So, the post-choir stop has become a Thing for me. And here I am.

Late-night groceries aren’t the same here as they were in the big city. Not as many college kids and grad students keeping their crazy hours. (I remember those crazy hours. I miss those crazy hours.)

It isn’t exactly like that scene in the post-apocalyptic film where folks find their way into a grocery store and forage for sustenance. But it’s close.

We seem to have an unspoken agreement, the other customers and I. Do not acknowledge one another’s presence. There’s lots of aisles and few shoppers: everyone gets their own territory and no one will get hurt.

I feel like a spy tonight, stretching the boundaries of the unspoken code. Glancing, looking, watching. Wondering and assessing.

A young woman wearing scrubs and tennis shoes: I guess she might be getting off-shift. The fabric is patterned with hearts — red, black, white. Does she work in the children’s ward? There’s an older gentleman, keeping his jacket zipped up to his neck. A mother and her school-age son: isn’t it past his bedtime by now? More professionals like me, decked in their work attire.

Also: a few guys who I’d place as from the one little college that is up the road from here. The casualness that encompasses their wardrobe — baggy shorts, loose tank tops, unshaven faces — makes me wince to think about gender programming and the self-consciousness that persists around what clothes I will allow myself to wear in public. Even when “out in public” is as banal as grocery shopping.

After ringing out, as I take my bags in-hand to depart, there is a break with protocol. A flash of recognition, acknowledgement. She works here, and this Wednesday shift has become a Thing for her, too. With the regularity of our seeing each other, why not take the risk to connect as humans, even if it’s the lightest of touches?

“Have a good night.”

A shy smile and head-nod in return. “You too.”

There’s a saying confettied across Facebook and Pinterest. The wording shifts, and the attributions are fantastical. (Plato? The ever-popular Ms. Anonymous?) But the gist of the message is: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”* If I were to hold this knowledge to my heart, rather than pretending knowledge while preserving my separate-ness, how would my heart open?

What connections might I risk to make?

———-

[Post-script] This was a response to the Day 8 prompt for Writing 101: “Go to a public location and make a detailed report of what you see. The twist of the day? Write the post without adverbs.” I haven’t done a super-intense editing pass to make sure that every single adverb was erased. In fact, there’s one adverb I left in on purpose — I tried and tried to write around it, but I couldn’t make the set-up to the Zombieland clip work as elegantly sans adverb as I could by leaving that lone “exactly” in the texture. Sometimes rules were made to be broken, right? [/Post-script]

* The most credible sources for this I’ve found thus far: Ian Maclaren and Wendy Mass.

———-

Image credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Refurbished_Coles_supermarket_in_Berwick.jpg

A Reason or a Season

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Gratitudes and Thank Yous, Meta-Blogging, Practicing in the Heart, SpiritualityLeave a comment

[Set-up] The Day 6 prompt for Writing 101 is a character study, a prose portrait of “the most interesting person you’ve met in 2014.” I know what follows is more an artifact of imagination and projection than anything else, but this individual has been on my mind now and again for the last few weeks, so I’m going to keep trusting my inner guidance in this, as with so many other things, and write the words I have in me to say. [/Set-up]

———-

misty-forestOne of the things we’ve been doing as part of growing roots up here in Boston is to attend services and find other (small) ways to become involved at one of the local UU parishes.

All told, it’s sort of been an odd time to be “dating” this new church. The customary minister has been on sabbatical, so the Sunday services have been a patchwork of experiences, from lay-led services (that so often sound more like academic lectures than actual sermons), to guest ministers, to services led by the congregation’s brand-new ministerial intern.

I know enough about how long it takes to get through divinity school to expect that Jeff is actually in his late 20s. However, he has that indeterminate appearance so many young men have — at least to my aging eyes — where his age could possibly be anything from 12 to 29. His frame is slender, such that he looks just the tiniest bit dwarfed by his minister’s robes. The eyes behind his glasses shine with warmth and brightness, but the glasses themselves, paired with the ministerial accoutrements and the care with which I have seen him perform his duties have created in me the strongest impression of seriousness.

The first time we saw him lead a service, Mr. Mezzo even criticized him for that seriousness. “I just prefer a minister who’s less formal, more able to laugh at themselves,” he said in our car ride home that day.

And I understood that, but I had my own theory. “Imagine being so young,” I said, “and you’ve been tasked with providing spiritual leadership and guidance to an established congregation full of people with decades more life experience than you, with more years of involvement in this congregation than you. A congregation that won’t stop comparing your performance unfavorably with that of their oh-so-beloved minister.*

“I remember how intimidated I was with the responsibility of teaching my first college class as a kid of 24, and that was just a low stakes music appreciation class! I can imagine choosing to act with a certain level of gravitas if I were in his shoes.”

———-

My level of church involvement and attendance is still pretty minimal, so I haven’t have opportunities to get to know Jeff to any particular depth. A couple of conversations during coffee hour, a number of services and sermons. My perception has been that he’s come a bit more fully into a comfort level as his months of service went by. I was glad to see that.

In a weird way, I was also glad to see the announcement that Jeff would be finishing his internship with us at the halfway mark rather than completing two full years of service. He was entirely gracious in his announcement of this news, and shared that he was in a process of discerning whether it sensed best for him to continue the path of UU ordination or if a different faith tradition would be better-suited as his spiritual and ministerial home.

And I get that, I really do. A college friend of mine went through a similar journey as she entered divinity school — leaving the faith of her fathers (Catholicism) to be ordained as a UCC minister, because she knew the call to ministry in her soul was true and deep and not to be denied. I also have my own small degree of resonance, recalling the ways I was brought up an a devoutly atheist household** and remembering my own journey of exploration and discernment towards the understanding and acceptance of Spirit I now possess — however ego-limited, nonetheless true and deep and not to be denied.

I also admit to wondering whether the congregation really gave Jeff a fair shake with this position. Instead of being actively mentored week after week by a sitting minister, he was being used as “substitute teacher” during that minister’s sabbatical. And, what with the number of church members expressing to me how “unfortunate” it was that Mr. Mezzo and I were starting to attend church during this sabbatical:

You’ll see how Reverend ______ is just so much better than this.

Well, if I (minimal participation and all) have gotten such a strong picture of the level of regard these folks have for their sitting minister (and of the attendant, not-so-subtle disdain they have for anyone who isn’t Reverend ______), I kinda think Jeff mighta been able to pick up on it, too.

So between my imagined resonance with his journey, and my soft regret for any discomforts he may have felt during this year, I have been holding Jeff in the light and wishing him all manner of support and guidance and acceptance as he journeys forward. May he find the home that best feeds his soul and where he can most authentically be of service.

I’ve been too chicken-shit to reach out and tell him this. Like I said, he and I barely spoke once or twice. The idea of emailing to share any portion of this just feels awkward and invasive and as if I’d be forcing him into the box of the story I made up about his life, rather than honoring his own knowledge about his own lived experience.

But, however on-point or off-base my understanding of Jeff’s decision may be, even if I never see him or speak to him again: this much I know to be true.

A small prayer, whispered up to the ether. You will always be part of  the church’s family tree in my drawing of its branches. Thank you. I wish you well.

———-

* More on that later.

** Yes, that’s a del thing. At least as far as I’ve experienced it, it is.

Image credit: http://www.seedsofunfolding.org/issues/02_11/feature.htm

 

The Quicksand of Inertia

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Meta-Blogging, Practicing in the Heart, Self-Acceptance, Stuff about StuffLeave a comment

Xena_640px-ROC_quicksandAll week, as I was posting my responses to the Writing 101 prompts, I had the half-beginnings of other posts germinating — ideas and titles rolling around my brain, as well as possible citations/quote-sources accumulating on my Pinterest “bookmarks” board. However, things were also very busy on the work and home front, so there wasn’t time to do anything with those germinating ideas.

Instead, I kept telling myself that I’d find time over the weekend to start catching up. Maybe I’d have a couple double-post days where I responded to the prompt and laid down some independent thought, or at least I could get some drafts started that I could then flesh out and schedule for posting somewhere down the line.

And yet? Yesterday, when as it turns out, there was no Writing 101 prompt even to handle?*

I did bupkis.

That’s slightly an overstatement. Mom spent part of the day with us. It was her first-ever visit to the house,** so the early-morning pre-arrival hours were spent in those last frantic moments of cleaning,*** and then there was the time spent visiting itself.

Still, she left early afternoon, so there was a good stretch of time where I could have been writing or outlining or something. Instead, I watched lots of things on DVR and did many sudoku.

Call it whatever you will. The energetic crash after a stressful week. A small eruption of the depressive brain chemistry I will be managing until the day I die. A well-served piece of down-time. Laziness.

All of those names are likely true in their own small portion. Beneath those different labels, the feeling-tone was rather like sinking into quicksand for a day. There were moments in it when I was awake enough to ask myself whether the TV zombie thing was really feeding my soul and my sense of enjoyment, and after a certain point, I was awake enough to sense that yes, I’d kinda reached my limit for truly enjoying the TV and no, these extra hours of watching past that point were not feeding my life. But I remained in the inertia and never really pulled myself out of it till the moment I crawled off to bed.

This fear comes from being handed a branch while waist deep in quicksand. While it’s easy and reasonable to be scared of sinking in the quicksand, it’s utterly terrifying to think that once you haul yourself out, you are unwittingly volunteering for the next awful thing to come.

But here’s where the whole inertia concept really starts working. Inertia tells you, “Sink. It’s easy and natural.” [. . .]

Amazingly, what happens next is a true testament. . . . Science be damned, the inevitable motion of life is a stronger force than inertia could ever wish to be.

~ Karli Marullli, “Inertia, Quicksand, and Other Things that Suck“

So, here we are today. Don’t know yet whether there will be a double-post day, or if some rough-drafting will occur to set up future double-post days. Don’t know how many hours I’ll spend doing work for my employer.**** But if nothing else, this post is up and the TV is off.

I’ll take it. Every step forward is a step forward. And every step matters.

Oh, and one last thing, a factoid offered in the spirit of public service. While searching for an image to accompany this post, I have made the unsettling discovery that there is such a thing as a quicksand fetish. Rule 34 strikes again.

* A detail I didn’t notice till yesterday: the folks at Blogging U give us the weekend off. (And themselves, which is only fair. After all, my employer doesn’t usually expect me to be devoting much weekend time to their endeavors.)

** Two prior attempts to schedule things during her time in the northeast — she’s a snowbird and spends half the year way far away below the Mason-Dixon line — had to be cancelled for various act-of-Gaia kinds of reasons. like blizzards and trips out of town to see relatives in the hospital.

*** Have you ever noticed that no matter how much a matter adult one becomes, there’s an almost-universal regression to that teenager-cleaning-your-room feeling when parents are due to visit one’s abode?

**** Alas, this is one of those rare weekends where I am expected to buckle down on their behalf — at least to some degree.

———-

Image credit: http://hercxena.wikia.com/wiki/Return_of_Callisto

Letters Never Sent

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Life-Long Learning, Meta-Blogging, Practicing in the Heart, Topics of Study2 Comments

So the Day 5 prompt for Writing 101 reads:

You stumble upon a random letter on the path. You read it. It affects you deeply, and you wish it could be returned to the person to which it’s addressed. Write a story about this encounter.

Today’s twist: Approach this post in as few words as possible.

Okay then. Being as I am not a fiction-writer and am instead more of a quasi-memoirist, and seeing as how I have never actually had this experience of stumbling across a random piece of correspondence, I’m going to have to take a bit of a sideways approach, here.

I will, however, try to adhere to the suggestion about keping things short — which is a thing that does not come naturally to me. But, like some smart guy once said, brevity is the soul of something-or-other.

———-

“atlantis is sinking but paradise is not lost”

Atlantis2 This graffitied phrase was on the foundation of an abandoned structure not too far from my Philly townhouse. I never knew what the structure had been, or what spray-paint poet had left this inscription on the vestigial remains of concrete and I-bar. But I would walk that route often, and the phrase was something I absorbed at a cellular level.

Some versions of the legend of Atlantis talk about the city as a paragon of enlightenment, beauty, creativity. A place of such technological advancement that it was brought low by the gods — either because the Atlanteans sank into greed and hubris, or because the gods themselves didn’t want the competition of dealing with such evolved beings. Either way, the island was swallowed by the sea, never to be seen again.

The metaphor, to me, was obvious. Your current endeavours or creations could all be wiped away by a wave of Poseidon’s hand. Yet new options, new opportunities will always emerge from what appears to be flotsam and jetsam. That’s a faith I hold true in my heart.

Eventually, the old structure and its message were themselves brought down: making way for the parking lot of a new condo building. (I’m sure there’s a Joni Mitchell fan or two who can appreciate the irony of that.)

But I still carry the words tattooed in my heart. Atlantis crumbled, but paradise is not lost. Paradise is never lost.

———-

Final tally: kept it to less than 250 words. For me, that’s a fucking haiku of concision.

———-

Image credit: http://zerowoes.com/articles/revealing-the-legend-of-lost-worlds/

 

A Place to Call Home

On By MezzoSherriIn Meta-Blogging, Practicing in the Heart, Stuff about Stuff, Uncategorized1 Comment

[Bookend] The Day 2 prompt for Writing 101 is about place: “Today, choose a place to which you’d like to be transported if you could — and tell us the backstory. How does this specific location affect you? Is it somewhere you’ve been, luring you with the power of nostalgia, or a place you’re aching to explore for the first time?” [/Bookend]

Let me tell you why I love our house.

It’s not all that easy to find a place with contemporary architecture up here in Boston: that heritage of the “center-entrance colonial” runs deep. So, even though I’ve been in love with that style since I was 13 and first visited the Frank Lloyd Wright room at the Met, I made peace with myself when we started looking at listings 15 months ago. If I held to that particular fantasy too tightly, we might never find a roof to place over our heads, so I was going to have to show some flexibility.

(And yes, I know there’s officially a difference between Frank Lloyd Wright’s style of architecture and what we usually call “contemporary” architecture. Still, something about them both — the cleanness of line, the use of natural textures, the big windows that elide the boundary between the natural and the lived environment — have always felt deeply resonant with one another. And they make my heart sing.)

houseThis is why it feels a little bit like a miracle every time I come up the driveway to see our house on the hill, beautifully asymmetrical and nestled in the woods. There, to the left of the front door, is the rock garden. It’s weathered two tough winters and a summer’s neglect during the 2013 house-selling season: I’m still trying to figure out what’s plant and what’s weed, but it’s lovely to see things coming in, green and pink and purple. The bird feeder outside Mr. Mezzo’s office window is a new addition this spring: we’re pretty sure word is getting out, because the time between “full” and “empty” keeps getting shorter and shorter.

Once inside the door, you want to head left to see most of the place. First up are the two extra “bedrooms” outfitted as relics of the 21st century, two-career family: his and her offices. Mr. Mezzo’s is office-only — he telecommutes every single day, and the gorgeous built-in desk here was one of the ninety-eleven things that made us knew we were home as soon as we toured the place. I commute to an office office most days, so my home “office” is more of a reading & writing nook that can do double duty as a guest room. My little desk is flanked by two tall bookshelves — which I heard once somewhere is horrifically bad feng shui, but I don’t care. They make me happy. In everyday usage, the daybed and trundle can be a place to sit and read, and they’re also ready to serve as a place for a sleepover guest to lay their tired head.

After these two doors is a small spiral staircase going up — we’ll come back to that soon — and then the heart of the house: the living room, kitchen and dining room.

The living room is open to the roofline, with high transom windows on one wall, and then a bank of (almost) floor to ceiling windows where the room juts out just a little farther than the rest of the house. The carpet is soft and plush and blue, and the sense of light and air, sun and shade is a treasure to me. This room is sunk a few steps down from the main hallway and separated from that hallway by these stairs and a wood railing.

The hallway opens to and ends in the big room that is kitchen and dining room. Tile and hard wood floors mark a clear distinction between the two rooms, but they open directly one to the other without wall or barrier. Again: light and air and an elision of boundaries. The tile patterning on our table reminds me of the designs Wright would design into stained glass, and Wright also comes to mind with the way you can sit at the table and have windows always in view. Whether it’s the kitchen windows and the back door to the vegetable patch, the living room windows (which are still in eye-line from the dining room), or the sliding doors that lead out to an enormous deck overlooking the lawn and the trees, the sense of living in beauty and comfort and nature are very present.

loftAs a final stop on this abbreviated tour, let’s backtrack to that spiral staircase and head upstairs. Here, our “meditation loft,” is another gem that led to the instant recognition of house-on-the-market as home. If I’d been more alert, I would have taken a picture during daylight hours so you could see how this room rests in tree and sky, green and blue. (And I might just come back tomorrow and do an image swap.) No matter what other tendencies towards entropy crop up throughout the rest of the house, this room has been something we’ve held sacred. It’s the seed of how I imagine the rest of our home can be, as we continue to unpack and declutter and settle in.

Now, I’ll admit: there’s lots of the messier details of life and home that I’ve been glossing over in this tour. You’ll notice, for example, that we didn’t head down to the basement and “unpacking central.” Some other night, another visit.

Nevertheless, a core fact remains: however much I would enjoy the opportunity to travel the world and see new places, what I most treasure is the nesting sense of having a home I love coming back to.

 

Clap Along: Happy or Complacent?

On By MezzoSherriIn Meta-Blogging, Practicing in the Heart, Self-Acceptance, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head, Uncategorized1 Comment

[Bookend] So the first prompt for Writing 101 is a simple one: free-write about anything you want to for 20 minutes, and then copy that free-writing into a blog post. Here’s where the synergy between pen & paper journalings and blogging work to my advantage. I was thinking today as I wrote my morning pages that there was blog-post fodder in there. Little did I know how quickly that blog-post would be taking shape, and how (mostly) un-edited an exploration of the topic it’d be…* [/Bookend]

Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof.

Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.

Clap along if you know what happiness is to you.

~~ Pharrell Williams, “Happy”

happyOkay, I am wrestling a bit with the happy/complacent thing. I definitely appreciate how in the last couple of retreat weekends there’s been an emphasis on reminding us to claim our love of life. More specifically: claim the way I love my life (not just life in general). I feel the importance of that, the way it’s something that moves beyond the victim identity. (And I’m realizing this happy/complacent thing could turn into a blog-post, and Connor’s language about victim mentality gives me an easy entree that doesn’t require me to give up all the secrets and intricacies of the center’s teachings.) And I’m conscious of the ways my classmate noticed my habit of deflecting happiness around the current state of things — always saying something like “There’s still more to study,” or “I’m still me in it, so I have a lot to keep learning.” So it’s interesting to me. I can feel a little bit about how that niggling piece of dissatisfaction, the eternal questioning, could be an expression of the victim-self. Always looking at my life and finding it wanting, rather than appreciating it fully today, exactly as it is. So I’m wondering how to have a fuller appreciation for all of the ways I have been given (have helped build?) a really good life. Really feel the gratitude of that, a certain peace of mind.

And yet. I don’t want to sink into complacency. I don’t want loving my life to take me to the place where I think I’ve arrived. Where I allow myself to fall asleep in my privileges, to play princess in the castle. To believe that because I’ve been gifted with a good life, I can just enjoy these comforts and stop studying, stop growing. Wallow in my privilege and to hell with anyone else and their challenges. So that’s part of what i fear will occur if I were to permit myself full-on happiness with my life, rather than the milder happiness-with-a-question-mark (or happiness-with-a-caveat) that I usually permit myself.

It’s an interesting level of self-distrust that fear conveys. If I’m “too happy,” I’ll get lazy. But if the study, the writing, if this all comes so naturally to me — then is the fear even remotely on target? It feels rather way off the Soul’s Truth of things. Like if I can more fully trust and honor the ways I love the learning, the ways I love awakening (both on an individual and a collective level), the way my Soul Ph.D. is connected (at least in part) to the gathering of knowledge and the synthesis of all these facts and articles and insights that come my way. If I can more fully trust that, then there’s a space to trust that if I were to be fully happy in my life, then I would move more fully into my soul’s natural expression. So allowing myself more happiness with loving my life could create space for more gathering, more learning, more awareness. Possibly see the potential here as loving my life being an awakening movement, rather than an anesthetizing one. Wow. Definitely a new angle on the proposition.

[Bookend] Thus endeth the free-write. More than 20 minutes’ worth and without the super-messy on-ramp of my opening paragraphs. Not quite as coherent and well-transitioned as the posts I normally try to write, but as a kernel of an idea, not all that off-the-mark from other things I’ve written here. Cool! [/Bookend]

* I did make a few silent edits, to protect the privacy of a couple individuals and fill in an extra clarifying word here or there when I had drifted too far into speaking my own private language. I definitely worked to keep those edits to a minimum.

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Image credit. http://treesflowersbirds.com/2012/06/05/a-happy-little-tale-that-almost-wasnt/

 

Tipping into Jealousy

On By MezzoSherriIn Flagrantly Feminist, Practicing in the Heart, The Voices in My Head, Topics of StudyLeave a comment

This morning, I spent some time writing in my pen and paper journal* to study the eruption of anger and envy I was wrestling with last night. Given everything I said — even in the moment of my emotional tantrum-ing — about my heartfelt wish for a full-society evolution past the chokehold of patriarchal, misogynist structures, then why was I so quick to fall into that resentful funk?

As best as I was able to sort it through, there are two primary threads to it: a sense of distrust and, more prominently, my addiction to being accepted and acknowledged.

First, the distrust. I’ve already written about the eerie sense of similarity I feel between Elliot Rodgers and George Sodini’s actions, and the ways both those mass murders are part of a long and ugly tradition of misogynist crimes. So even as I try to hope that things might finally change in the culture, I’m also feeling a lot of distrust that anything really will. Maybe there will just be this temporary explosion of rhetoric which quickly sinks back into complacency and the status quo.

I very much hope that isn’t the pattern that unfolds. And for all my snarky distrust, I have some portion of hope in my system. The tone of the discussion just senses different this time around. I’m not naive enough to think that everything will unfold as uninterrupted progression from today forward, but I wonder if we’ve reached (or if we’re approaching) a tipping point of cultural awareness. Once enough folks wake up, I believe, the old opiates won’t work to stop evolution.

blue-ribbonBut the deeper, darker piece of self-examination has had me taking a really close look at how my addiction to being right and being acknowledged is so strong that part of me is really envious and resentful around the idea of the culture reaching this tipping point.

Like, I get that the awareness of misogyny has to become common knowledge for things to change, but if it becomes common knowledge then those of us who were at the vanguard, thinking and talking about these issues ahead of the curve, then we won’t get credit. And the truth is, even if I can claim a place in the vanguard, it’s probably only a molecule’s worth if real estate. But man, the desire to “get credit” for that molecule’s worth of territory is hella strong.

Ultimately, I tried to boil things down to the essence and asked myself baldly and bluntly: “What do I care about more? Humanity’s evolution or getting the credit?”

The answer is that the soul-force me DOES care more about evolution occurring than anything else. But it’s a closer race than I would prefer it to be, measuring my investment in evolution against my investment in acknowledgement.

It has been really sobering to see how virulent this addiction is, and then to force myself to face up to the truth of it. Facing up to the real truth — that yes, even this thing I am so tangled and addicted to, this yearning for acknowledgement, yes, even this I am willing to give up if it means the culture can shift.

But, of course, the giving up of the addiction is a day-by-day (minute-by-minute?) practice, rather than anything as simple as turning off the faucet…

So, as with so many things: more to study. Progress rather than perfection, ongoing awakening rather than an arrival point.

* Yes, I keep an analog journal in addition to a blog. Why? As with so many of the dangling participles I leave around here, that’s a story for another day.

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Image credit: http://nursegail.com/nursing-profession-most-trusted-gallup-poll/blue-ribbon/

More on #YesAllWomen

On By MezzoSherriIn Flagrantly Feminist, Practicing in the Heart, The Voices in My Head4 Comments

CassandraBoxGreat Galloping Gaia, it’s 10 PM and I’m just now starting to write. This does not bode well for my sleep quantity tonight or well-restedness tomorrow.

Ugh.

I was trying to come up with something coherent to say about the propagation of the #YesAllWomen hashtag that wouldn’t just be a bricolage of quotations from other authors about the topic.

https://twitter.com/wagnerfilm/status/470831393639890944

And then somehow, I started re-reading this post & comment thread about street harassment, and then this one about the ongoing mental calculations so many women must compute when faced with the question of  “Schrodinger’s rapist.” And down the rabbit-hole I went.

Yes, dear reader, I was a small part of the conversation when that term was coined and first unpacked. No wonder I’m so exhausted by this latest unfolding of bearing witness and backlash. I was charred by a small firestorm of bearing witness and backlash during JALC’s first life-cycle, 5 years ago.

My small hope is that perhaps this time around, there’s more of a chance for widespread awareness-raising and maybe just maybe some cultural change. Because at least this time, the bearing witness has leapfrogged out of the feminist blogosphere into wider communications channels. Here’s a few:

However, I’ve seen mentioned along the way that the woman who started #YesAllWomen has actually locked down her twitter account due to the level of harassment she was receiving in “thanks” for her activism. That’s not exactly the kind of detail that makes me feel optimistic for humanity’s evolution towards kindness and empathy.

And then there’s the ugliness of my own sexism and envy.

Don’t get me wrong: in my heart, I know that the patriarchy is bad for everyone, and that the best way to evolve past it is for everyone — woman and men, cis and trans, gender-neutral and any other form of gender self-identification I’m too ignorant to know — to work together.

In that spirit, the better part of me is glad and grateful to see the voices of male allies in the #YesAllWomen conversation.

Still, when I see a male author making a point like this?

and this is important, so listen carefully—when a woman is walking down the street, or on a blind date, or, yes, in an elevator alone, she doesn’t know which group you’re in. You might be the potential best guy ever in the history of history, but there’s no way for her to know that. A fraction of men out there are most definitely not in that group. Which are you? Inside your head you know, but outside your head it’s impossible to.

This is the reality women deal with all the time.

There’s a really ugly part of me that’s annoyed. Because this is the exact same kind of point we were making 5 years ago in the original “Schrodinger’s rapist” thread on Shapely Prose. And we got excoriated for it. Gas-lighted, name-called up down and diagonally across the feminist bingo card, the whole damn ugly she-bang.

And I want very much to defuse my annoyance. Phil Plait (the Slate author who inadvertently got my back up) has done nothing wrong. He’s respectful, insightful, he even walks himself back from the possibility of straying into mansplaining territory. In short: everything I would wish for in the family of allies working to build a less sexist and more humanist culture.

Still. D’you ever feel like you’ve been living the life of Cassandra? Why did so many years, so many deaths, so many acts of violence large and small have to occur before this kind of message was even remotely able to be heard across a wider landscape?

Maybe I’ll be more open-hearted and less cross and churlish after a good night’s sleep. (Which I might get tomorrow night, if I’m smarter about starting my writing earlier in the damn evening!)

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Image credit: http://mysteryarts.blogspot.com/2009/12/breaking-curse-of-cassandra.html