{and nobody’s got time for that}


I tweeted this yesterday, but the drawback of Twitter, of course, is chopping things up into tiny bits. This quote needs to be seen and savored in its entirety. It’s from the legendary dance diva, Martha Graham in a 1973 interview. She was interviewed countless times throughout a long and brilliant career, of course, but one of the biggest things she’s ever said that stuck with me was about struggling as an artist. She told the Christian Science Monitor, `You are unique and so am I. If you do not fulfill that uniqueness, it is lost to the world. No matter how uncomfortable it may be, you must pay your debts to the life that has been permitted you. And to do it with as much courage as possible.’

It’s the COURAGE that stood out to me.

It’s odd how some people seem to equate being a writer with suffering in some vague, indefinable way, as if the suffering itself, the self-deprecation and the, “Oh, I make no money with it,” is part of the gig. The attitude some people bring to the work really has nothing to do with the writing, the desire to write, or why we do so specifically for young adults. I distrust a writer who gets too involved with The Struggle (TM), this idea that The Arts and The Life are some sort of all-caps calling to which they’re supposed to sacrifice everything. Part of me constantly chafes at myself for indecision and nonsense, while the other asks, “Did you choose this life, or not?”

“There is no place for arrogance in the arts, but neither is there room for doubt or a perpetual need for affirmation. If you come to me with doubts about a particular move in a piece, or if you come to me and ask if what you’ve written has truth and power in it, these are doubts I can handle and respect. But if you come to me and moan about whether or not you really have a place in the dance or the theatre or in film, I’ll be the first person to pack your bags and walk you to the door. You are either admitting that you lack the talent and the will, or you are just looking for some easy attention. I don’t have time for that. The world doesn’t have time for that. Believe in your worth and work with a will so that others will see it. That’s how it is done; that’s how it was always done.”

Emphasis mine, of course.

I don’t know the origin of the phrase, “Work hard in silence, let your success be your noise,” but this quote pulls that to mind. Oh, the self pity, the “look-at-me” posting of daily word count (I know that for some people, this is a necessary part of keeping themselves accountable, but not only is it really painful sometimes for other people who write very much more slowly, but daily word count is really… significant of nothing), the sort of whingeing of worrying aloud we do, when we see someone else “stealing” our plot or idea – all of this is unnecessary. Terry Pratchett always said that there are stories simply “sleeting” through the Universe. There’s enough for all. There is room for all. There is art for all. It only requires that we reach out and embrace it. Believing in our work, our worth, our will. Which is just kind of huge.

“The world seethes with ideas the way a week-old carcass seethes with maggots, and they are individually just about as valuable. Standing atop the carcass shouting, “The eighteenth maggot on the left belongs to MEEEEE!” is well… bless your heart, as they say around here. And even if both you and I, creative carrion birds that we are, grab for the same maggot, we’d get very different results.

…so, stories are like dead whales. One falls from the sky every now and again, and we all jump on it.”

– Ursula Vernon, on why writers really shouldn’t worry about story ideas being “taken” because there are stories out there, forever, like there are whales washing up on beaches forever, which will nourish all of us bottom-feeder writers forever, amen. Really, it’s a charming analogy, just as charming as whalefall, which is whales washing up dead on beaches… Okay, so NOT charming, but whatever. Circle of life. Just like ideas, and writing, and all of this work. Circle of life.

So, the next time I find myself in the presence of undue “suffering” in my chosen profession, I’m going to imagine Ms. Martha plié-ing across the floor to escort that person OUT of the field. (At least out of my hearing and field of vision, if nothing else.) Gracefully, of course. Because nobody has time for the transparent bids for sympathy in a job we took onto our own shoulders. Believe in your work and your worth and go on.

{just common, everyday rage}

All the Rage

This morning Leila told me that something I said put her “everyday rage” into a boil. Somehow the phrase “everyday rage” immediately made me think of Martha Stewart’s old Everyday Living, that pastel monthly display of tasteful refinement, tasteful and refined, that is, if you live in some upstate mansion and can afford a lot of staff to do your gardening, sewing, and homemaking crafts. For the rest of us, it’s printed Pinterest: pretty, but just a collection of fail. Rage is more fun. And also comes in cheery pastels! Click to embiggen the magazine spread.

{responsibility, guilt & forgiveness: a 1970 rap on race between james baldwin & margaret mead}

BALDWIN: We both have produced, all of us have produced, a system of reality which we cannot in any way whatever control; what we call history is perhaps a way of avoiding responsibility for what has happened, is happening, in time.

In reading a piece on a new book of essays by the inestimable Ursula K. LeGuin, I ran across this brilliant recounting of a conversation between eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead and eminent poet James Baldwin. An older white lady and a middle-aged black man, in 1970 New York, having a public conversation about ideas and personal philosophies and faith – this conversation is just filled with some stunning ideas. I always recognize that linking to things means you read the first sentence and then pass it on without reading it, so I’ve waited until I read it all to post this, but there are just some gems too good not to share. Read, and pass it along. Read it, even if you think you’re too busy for Deep Thoughts (TM). No, you’re not.


BALDWIN: “For whom the bell tolls.” … It means everybody’s suffering is mine.

MEAD: Everybody’s suffering is mine but not everybody’s murdering, and that is a very different point. I would accept everybody’s sufferings. I do not distinguish for one moment whether my child is in danger or a child in Central Asia. But I will not accept responsibility for what other people do because I happen to belong to that nation or that race or that religion. I do not believe in guilt by association.

BALDWIN: But, Margaret, I have to accept it. I have to accept it because I am a black man in the world and I am not only in America… I have a green passport and I am an American citizen, and the crimes of this Republic, whether or not I am guilty of them, I am responsible for.

MEAD: But you see, I think there is a difference. I am glad I am an American because I think we can do more harm than any other country on this earth at the moment, so I would rather be inside the country that could do the most harm.

BALDWIN: In the eye of the hurricane.

MEAD: In the eye of the hurricane, because I think I may be able to do more good there.


Like Mr. Baldwin, sometimes our disappointment with humanity and American culture in specific is so great because we expect a lot from such a capable species, such privileged people in a privileged place — and we expect a lot from ourselves. We need to demand a lot of ourselves… and we need to keep looking with expectation at ourselves collectively, as a culture, as well as individually. We will improve, if only because we must.


BALDWIN: …Look, you and I both are whatever we have become, and whatever happens to us now doesn’t really matter. We’re done. It’s a matter of the curtain coming down eventually. But what should we do about the children? We are responsible; so far as we are responsible at all, our responsibility lies there, toward them. We have to assume that we are responsible for the future of this world.

MEAD: That’s right.

BALDWIN: What shall we do? How shall we begin it? How can it be accomplished? How can one invest others with some hope?

MEAD: Then we come to a point where I would say it matters to know where we came from. That it matters to know the long, long road that we’ve come through. And this is the thing that gives me hope we can go further.


Read this whole piece, and I encourage you, as you have time, to read the associated pieces on the problematic concept of a “melting pot” in America, the reimagining of democracy for a post-consumerist culture, and an affably contentious one on on religion. If you enjoy reading like this as I do, you could bump the website a donation – these treasures do need to be unearthed and shared in contemporary times, and the work of educating a culture – work like painstaking – certainly takes a lot of hours and labor (and no, nobody paid me to say that, and I don’t even know who runs the site).

{an untrammeled mind}


After Psalm 137

Anne Porter

We’re still in Babylon but
We do not weep
Why should we weep?
We have forgotten
How to weep

We’ve sold our harps
And bought ourselves machines
That do our singing for us
And who remembers now
The songs we sang in Zion?

We have got used to exile
We hardly notice
Our captivity
For some of us
There are such comforts here
Such luxuries

Even a guard
To keep the beggars
From annoying us

Jerusalem
We have forgotten you.

These lines came to mind after reading the latest SorryWatch about a charming non-gated Bay Area community of charming people genteelly behaving in ways both racist and uncharming. Oh, the irony of people living in a suburb of a city called San Jose, objecting to people of Latino ancestry… Anyway, onward to kinder thoughts: this poem isn’t my favorite of her works (that is “A List of Praises” which is utterly delightful), but I favor this poet, Anne Porter, excessively, not the least because her first book of poetry was published at the age of… eighty-three. The wife of influential artist Fairfield Porter, Anne Porter, who passed away at the age of 99 in 2011, typed away on a clunky manual typewriter until her last day, scribbling bits of poetry on the backs of envelopes and invitations, keeping everything, even her creativity, until the very end. She is quoted in a 2006 Wall Street Journal article as saying, “People don’t use their creativity as they get older …[t]hey think this is supposed to be the end of this and the end of that. But you can’t always be so sure that it is the end.”

Let no one tell you what your limit is, except you. Hold to your determination to do and to be, defend it to the tiniest scrap of territory. “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense.” Mr. Churchill’s exhortation extends to all of us. .

{poetry friday: p7 sistahs do… tritinas}

A warm draft of rising air blew softly through the barn cellar. The air smelled of the damp earth, of the spruce woods, of the sweet springtime. The baby spiders felt the warm updraft. One spider climbed to the top of the fence. Then it did something that came as a great surprise to Wilbur. The spider stood on its head, pointed its spinnerets in the air, and let loose a cloud of fine silk. The silk formed a balloon. As Wilbur watched, the spider let go of the fence and rose into the air.

“Good-bye!” it said, as it sailed through the doorway.

“Wait a minute! ” screamed Wilbur. “Where do you think you’re going?”

But the spider was already out of sight.

~ A Warm Wind, from CHARLOTTE’S WEB by EB White

There are tiny leaping spiders and fluttering moths invading my house, and I’d really like one of us to move out. Which makes it odd that both of my attempts at tritina this month are based on the season of Spring, and one is even based on ballooning or kiting spiders, the way some species of spiderlings find new homes once they’ve hatched. It’s kind of rare to see, in late autumn or Spring, but most of us who saw the 1979 Charlotte’s Web movie are prepared for the sight of tiny spiders floating by…

 photo charlotte3.gif

Poor Wilbur’s fear is especially poignant, in thinking of May as the season when graduates begin the last count before they, too, launch themselves into Real Life (TM) after releasing the final moments of school for awhile – or forever. How brave – and how terrified – one must be to fling oneself into the wind! Yet, the tiniest species of spiders do it, sometimes more than once in their lives, and some, throughout their lives. Flinging themselves, head down, bum to the wind, into the wide world, on a breath of luck…

Launch

An agile acrobat whose skills are sweet
This spiderling, with heart in tiny mouth
Aloft and lightweight kites along its thread

A warp of weaving hangs upon this thread
No practiced pattern could be quite as sweet
As joyful jumble spinning. From the mouth

Of babes, this brave display! O, seal the mouth
Of doubters who had thoughts along this thread
Intrepid youth could never be but “sweet”

Sweet the mouth of freedom, taste the future’s tangled thread.

A sibling to the sestina, the tritina is a shorter poem composed of 3 stanzas and a final line that stands alone. Like the sestina, it uses a set of alternating end words–in this case three words chosen out of a suggested six, which were sweet, cold, stone, hope, mouth, and thread. This is a form that gets away from the writer easily, often incorporating tersely stated truths that are unexpected. Themes of hope, spring/change, departures/death run through each of our poems, which is a rare similarity for us, though somewhat unavoidable given our limiting choice of end words. Even as we grow toward the sun this month, there’s evidence that it’s still a bit cold… but there’s a gradual thaw, and a resurgence of optimism – it’s what we hope for…

The Sisters, equal to the task, despite coming and going and grading and graduating and doing all of the other things which come rushing upon us in May, have come up with some evocative and interesting work – no spiders, but a bit of Spring-themed stuff as well. Laura‘s growing nasturtiums, while Kelly is playing with color. Tricia is balancing her two offerings between love and loss – and speed dating, while Andi’s got stone underfoot in her woods walk. Sara is highlighting war photographer Dickey Chapelle, and, Liz recreates the folk tale Stone Soup into poetry.

Tons more Friday poetry offerings can be found at Poetry for Children hosted by Sylvia Vardell. Meanwhile, just one more here – the bonus poem I wrote to “warm up” to this form. Happy Friday!

Vacaville 199

Sol Invictus

Out of the deep, in utter darkness, cold,
It calls, and yearning as in faithful hope
Waits light to keep its heart from turning stone.

Ask what could freeze a greening heart to stone?
And what could leave a faithful spirit cold?
A changeless dark without the light of hope.

Audacious promise in the seed. The hope
That thrusts a hardy shoot through fields of stone
And brightly heralds spring, despite the cold.

Sun conquers cold; hope thaws the heart of stone

{you’re not the boss of me: conscience and authority}

mental_health_month

Hello! It’s still National Mental Health Month, and I’m back, with a shiny new thought!

(I’ll take this opportunity to give fair warning: still posting about religion in the broadest sense, and if that’s not your gig, here’s where you can find the MOST adorable video of baby piglets, ever. I’ll see you around.)

Actually, this is not a shiny new thought. These are all really OLD thoughts, but they seem new to me as I seem to be having the most delayed adolescence in the history of the world. That’s another drawback I’m seeing from being raised in faith – at least raised in faith the way I was raised — you’re okay with letting someone else do your thinking for you. I was, anyway, for a long time. It seemed… normal. Acceptable. Pro-tip: it’s not. It’s not normal, nor is it really acceptable in real faith communities that aren’t cults! What was the point of you being born with a brain, if you don’t use it? We are supposed to support the idea that we alone have a 1:1 relation with Divinity and are responsible for ourselves, and our own beliefs, but it’s amazing how the word “Christian” gets used to define a monolith groupthink concept that’s another way to say, “we all hate abortionists and gay people.” To which I say, “Wow, really? No, thank you, if that’s all you’ve got.”

Fortunately, there’s more than that. Or, at least, faith compels us to believe there is.


The other day I saw this statement online:

“Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority.” …And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say, “If you won’t respect me, I won’t respect you,” and they mean, “If you won’t treat me like an authority, I won’t treat you like a person,” and they think they’re being fair, but they aren’t… and it’s not okay.”

In the rest of our lives, we have this idea of …fairness and of …reality (oh, this is a whole ‘nother blog post)? Wherein respect is earned and we don’t just accept what people say because they’ve said it. They have to prove themselves to be worth listening to… In religious life, however, that isn’t the case a lot of times. We’re told This Guy Is In Charge (it’s verrrrry rarely a woman, even in this new millennium) and it’s to this guy we have to listen. I remember learning the “captive audience doctrine” when I was in high school government and thinking, “…ah. That’s what I’ve been most of my life.” Between parental lectures, teachers, youth pastors, and sermons, it felt like I’d been being forced to listen forever.

Intrinsically, the problem boils down to authority. I’m… er, mostly authority averse, despite the fact that I’ve never had so much as a traffic ticket and a $.40 library fine can make me twitchy (maybe that’s why?). I’m in conflict, at least internally, with those who perceive themselves as having authority, a remarkable amount of the time. In part, it goes back to the ideas of guilt and shame – in a religious context, the Authoritative Other has historically been the one punching-down those below them, looming over on the lower orders saying, “You People are x, y, and z!” Well, obviously, no one does well as a “you people” person; no one wants to be grouped together by some alleged inevitable inability. Sometimes these Authoritative Others are responsible for the shame which religious individuals internalize, as they do their best to convince us that our own moral code/guidance is suspect, and that we need them. I think we need to be a lot more …selective about who we believe – who we believe in, and who we listen to, in faith communities and in communities of thought in general. We need to more carefully choose our guides. And yes: choose. Because the choice of whom to listen to is still ours.

All that being said: sometimes the worst Authoritative Others are ourselves. We make up rules for behavior that no one put on us but… us. In order to tell my True and live an authentic life, I not only have to listen to myself, I have to make rules for self-governance and take the responsibility to stay in a realistic balance between the person I want to be, and the person I can be.

Be perfect is a verbatim mandate in religious texts. The law is perfect, and its purpose is to perfect the soul, King David said. But psychologists are alarmed by the concept of taking that perfection literally. Logically, it would seem ridiculous to even try — but some people are raised with the idea that it’s within their grasp, if they just… try.

Aaaand, we’re back to pretending again. Real life – living a real life of authenticity in faith – is so much harder if we keep closing our eyes to reality. If we keep imagining our selves as somehow better than other people and more able to achieve this impossible standard just because we’re Special. And yet: this is how some people are raised, in faith. This is how I was raised. Is it any wonder that sometimes it’s hard to fit into mainstream life? Being “chosen” or “separate” can make you view the world through a fisheye lens, with all the wrong things exaggerated.

Aside from any leaders or spokespersons, whatever our faiths, I am just like you. You are just like me. When seen as we, we are all flawed. Fragile. Striving toward wholeness, for our own sake, not under the guise of any authority; for our soul’s sakes, for the purpose of fulfilling our potential. We may never get there. But we have been given our lives to try — to fall, to lie there and contemplate — and to try again. Which makes it worth getting up some days.


PS ~ Thank you to the lovely people who have written me notes about these thoughts off-blog. I appreciate all of the smart people in my life, especially those who speak French so nicely.

{Non, je ne regrette rien…}

mental_health_month

May is National Mental Health Month! And I totally didn’t even remember that until I was halfway through writing this post and thought, “what does all this crap about guilt have to do with anything???” At the mo, since I’ve talked a bit before about the joy of it, today I want to talk about the toll that being raised in faith takes on a person. This is also my moment of giving you fair warning: today’s post is about religion in the broadest sense, and if that’s not your gig, here’s where you can find some adorbs pics of baby capybaras. I’ll see you around.

(So, April was relatively benign acrostics, and now May is religion AND shame. How did you luck out like this???)

It isn’t all bad, being raised in faith. In so many ways, for those who have sought shared identity in ritual and words and music — there can be, in faith, something life-giving, affirming, and precious. However, there also lurks in many practices a great many lies. Willing to disbelieve the lies I encountered, I consciously avoided the negatives for a lot of my life, but I know that’s not only deliberately disingenuous, willful blindness is not particularly helpful if I’m going live my own truths, much less write anything true about young adults being raised in/with/avoiding faith. It’s a tough and weird dichotomy, is this Judeo-Christian thing; basically Christianity is meant to be about love, but the hyperfocus tends to be the tension between “You should be a super good person” and “Basically you’re a terrible person.” The Christian world I grew up with seems to have concluded, “Right, you should be a good person, but we’re none of us great, and you particularly are crap and there’s really nothing you can do about it… but pretend.” Which is a complete fallacy and un-everything we’re supposed to be doing. But, here we are.

It is a hard unlearning, learning not to pretend. It’s a full-time job.


Sooo, Tech Boy and I had one of those long meandering conversations this morning (why do they always happen on Mondays? Or else Sunday nights? Methinks there’s something within me stalling about beginning a new week) wherein his degree in Philosophy trumps my “well, I think …” statements. It’s not as easy to argue with someone who can throw down a quote from Nietzsche at need, but someone has to be blindly optimistic in this world, right? Right.

Our discussion parsed the minor – but important – variances among regret, remorse, shame, and guilt.

First, you’ll note the absence of contrition – because that one seems fairly easy from both a philosophical and psychological point of view. Contrition is being sorry for wrongdoing — sorry enough to make restitution. A healthy response to the realization of wrongdoing, yes? So while we can continue to disregard that one, I wanted to mention it, because it exists within this same close linguistic and philosophical relationship. Regret also goes with it — people talk about having “no regrets,” but that’s actually a little worrisome, to me. Psychologists describe regret as having to do with wishing one hadn’t taken a particular action — for whatever reason. It might be just be because you got caught taking the action, it might be that the result of the action blew up in your face, or because the action made someone take additional action which was unexpected or upsetting. Remorse, however, is about the emotion, not the action. It involves self-reproof, and is what prompts us to be contrite. I guess people can have no regrets – but I find it unlikely, unless they are a master planner and have every move throughout their whole lives mapped.

Brené Brown once said, “Shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, eating disorders, suicide, violence, and bullying.” With that in view, shame and guilt are by far the most corrosive of the negative emotions defined here. Though often used interchangeably with guilt, shame differs in that it seems to be self-referential entirely. Shame is all about the emo, and is confined solely to that arena: feelings. Guilt, by contrast, arises in response to responsibility for our actions or thoughts or feelings toward others. This being the case, people who are entirely self-absorbed are capable of feeling great amounts of shame… Guilt, however, requires empathy, which isn’t of interest to the self-absorbed. They tend to be crippled instead by shame at their imperfections, then idealize the lives of others, imagining them living a perfect existence. This in turn allows self-absorbed people to envy others, indulge in hating them, possibly behaving hatefully and spitefully toward them, all because of a perceived “better than” lifestyle which gives an uneven comparison between others and themselves. Interesting, the concept of “fat shaming” and that type of thing stems not from concern about the shamee who is carrying extra weight but from a perception of the shamer that the weight that person carries is somehow a personal affront… to them, as a less heavy person. Obviously, shame perceptions and attitudes impede personal growth. Neither guilt nor shame seems to give most people a particularly positive outcome… and yet, people feel – and attempt to wield as tools or weapons – these emotions every day. There has to be something more to it.

It’s hard for many of us to take personal responsibility for things. When we’re pointed to our faults, we get defensive. That’s a gift that a healthy application of guilt gives us. We see our crap, we get upset about it, we fix it. End of story. As far as I can see it, especially in a religious context, shame gives us …nothing. A lot of people are even confused by the concept, because it is so closely tied with the idea of “you did something wrong.” And yet, a lot of people in American Christian circles, anyway, seem to feel it’s part of the gig. Humanity, in the cold mathematics of logic, failed all the tests way back in Eden, and by rights, deserved to be voted off the island. This is a Big story, a humanity story. When it comes to a personal story, many faith practices expect individuals to experience the shame of these failures as an individual, not as part of the human collective. Then the shame becomes personal – unmoored from specific persons and events in history – and individuals are burdened with the belief that we have much for which to atone.

And then, the pretending begins in earnest. Because, seriously: who can pick that up?

More thoughts as I think them.