Category Archives: life

I Can See Clearly Now (Almost)

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31 years of love and loyalty

It started as a little swelling on my eyelid. A little pressure. I could ignore it, but should I? Life went on, but sometimes I would peer into the mirror, squinting to see better. What WAS that thing?

Over the course of a week, it transformed daily—hourly—into increasingly offensive versions of a vision-occluding sty. Finding meaning in almost everything is not a problem for me. And in this case the metaphorical significance of this ocular impediment was not lost on me.

I’ve been struggling to see where I’m supposed to go next.

Life changed on me, unexpectedly, as it often does, last April. It was a shock to my system, though, because the change was not on my terms, but on someone else’s. I am the epitome of privilege, because painful change (not on my terms) has happened only rarely in my life. Like when a lover left the country, and me, without warning once a long time ago. Or some major upheavals resulting from having a severely mentally ill mother. When major change (even the good kind) is imposed from without, the breath leaves the body. The eyes go wide. The feet stumble to keep up with the shifting earth beneath them.

But change, whether agonizingly chosen, instinctively leaped upon, or dropped like a bomb into one’s world, is always an opportunity for growth and personal transformation. In that way, even the most dreaded, hated avenues to this kind of growth are gifts beyond measuring.

So why the sty? What don’t I want to see? Is there a truth out there that I am unwilling to look at? Scared of? Is it just ontological skepticism keeping my vision blocked?

Truth with a capital T can be a slippery little devil. If you’re like me, you don’t often want to see it. And sometimes you do.

Slippery Truth… it’s like a little water snake poking its slick little head up to peer around before diving beneath the water again. All the people who care about me can see it, but I swim on, oblivious. Then, it gets my attention in small but shocking moments. The Truth snake—deep bone-level unhappiness, disturbing knowledge of betrayal, or a heartbreaking understanding that I am no longer valued—slithers into my bathing suit. Instant terror—which in hindsight I always realize was an overreaction—and before I know it, the Truth snake is slipping away again, soon to be a distant memory.

When will I grab the snake and look it in the eye, smiling at it, thanking it for the gift of knowledge that it brings? I eventually do. Why does it sometimes take so damned long? And this time…why must I create a giant infected pustule in my eye to show me the absurdity of my refusal to see?

My recent unexpected change –intentionally not addressed here directly due to matters of honor, practicality, and self-interest—sent me into a brief, but intense, cycle of grief, including denial, anger, bargaining—all within a day or two, then, for me, fear, harder to move past, and, more quickly than anticipated—acceptance, even relief. The clarity and surety of my need to move on was profound, and I wondered how the Truth snake had failed to convey that message, as I had found her in my bathing suit a number of times over the last decade or so. Am I really that slow a learner? Loyalty and love tend to hold me back. Let me rephrase that, I allow loyalty and love to get in my way of choosing positive change, and so change has to fall on my head like a volunteer ladder offering itself as an escape route.

I always survive. I always figure out what is best. I always, inevitably, end up stronger, when I emerge from the birth canal of transformation. But for now I cannot seem to see clearly the path ahead of me, though I know the path behind me is behind me for a reason.

I find myself a decade at least from retirement standing at the beginning of a huge unknown. Single, self-sufficient, both tough and tender, I am unsure. And I am sure. Regular employment has made me complacent. My certainty that this mechanism for transformation is ideal, necessary, and, in fact, the only alternative if I am to continue to grow and evolve the way I want to—it does not change how fucking scary it is to say goodbye.

Remember that philosophical question teachers ask their students? What would you choose, freedom or safety? The answer says so much about you, your circumstances at the moment, and your ability to see your own Truth with a capital T.

Whatever happens next, from now on I will be the only one allowed to apply value to myself. The only one to decide what is best for me. The only one who will dig in and extract marrow from my bones for causes and reasons to be determined only by me.

I am at the very edge of seeing where to put my feet. My outward vision is, for a moment more, blocked by a pestilent sty in my left eye. But it is coming to a head. Literally. My third eye finds itself clear as ever, and these two ways of seeing are in cahoots to get me to the place I need to go. An eruption of knowing is just around the corner. I seek help from within and without. I know my path is clear and glorious, and that when I finally see it, I will leap onto it with wings on my feet.

 

 

Stranded in C’ville? Checking My Privilege

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I arrived in Charlottesville, VA last Monday. One week ago today, in fact. I got almost all the way here under my own steam. In other words, as usual, I drove. But the last 22 miles into town were under the steam of my old friend Annie. She had to fetch me from the automotive garage where I landed ignominiously when my car shuddered to a stop on Highway 29 and whispered, “I’m done.”

Here’s what happened and what I’ve learned.

  • I probably drove a few too many miles after I could feel how unhappy my car was about accelerating from a full stop. Has putting my finger in my ears and singing “LA LA LA LA” ever, EVER been a good strategy?
  • The reason I came down here is pretty basic: I love this place. Did my happiness at being here change because I didn’t have a car to drive around? Especially since I DID have a car to drive around, because Sarah, another awesome friend of mine, literally gave me unfettered access to her Subaru while she recovered from foot surgery and worked from home.But to be honest, I did feel unsettled all week. I mean, I had fun, saw friends, took a walk in a Virginia snowstorm, enjoyed the Festival of the Book, was warm, fed, blessed, and engaged in more great conversations per day than I can count. But I had a hard time sleeping and felt anxious.So what was it? Uncertainty? What was wrong with my car? How much would this cost? When will I have my own wheels back? And a little bit of “Waaah, no fair?” Ew.How on earth could I feel so sorry for myself when I am in one of my favorite places (maybe my favorite place ever), with some of my favorite people, doing some of my favorite things (from nerding out at panels and lectures about books to drinking Virginia wines to basking in C’ville beauty). I’m a spoiled, privileged person who needed to be slapped upside the head. 
  • In case I was not slapped hard enough, this happened: I got my car back Saturday. It took a while for the part to arrive because of the snow. (Note to self, don’t take weather personally as it is definitely not about you.) YAY! I had my car! I was so very VERY excited!

    Hugging my car when I got it back from garage… the first time

    Exclamation point-worthy happiness! I was so psyched that I even had Annie take a picture of me hugging my car before we headed back to town to join the March for Our Lives on the downtown mall. I got away with a car bill less than $500 and I was going to get to head home almost on time.Then my car died again. The poor thing could not make it even 30 miles without suffering terribly and saying, “No, no, I’m sorry but I can’t.”

    Getting towed… round 2.

    Tow truck (money). Wait till Monday (time). Wait till 2 in the afternoon on Monday. (Are you kidding me? I can’t wait anymore! I’m so spoiled and impatient I can barely believe I exist! Put me out of my toe tapping misery!) Then Cranston the mechanic said, “In my professional opinion, I’m afraid you need a … new transmission.” (More money! More time! More lessons! More slaps upside my head!)

Meanwhile, in a land called reality, as I scolded myself every day to be grateful, and was (mostly) successful, the March for Our Lives happened (check out the pix in that link). Record numbers of people at demonstrations all over the country and world. Young people taking to the streets in numbers even greater than during the Vietnam War (social media is the game changer there). I didn’t make it to DC as I’d thought I might, but I marched in C’ville with Annie and Sarah (who was on crutches no less)

March for Our Lives C’ville

and we joined our voices in song and, much more importantly, lent our ears to the students who spoke so eloquently about not wanting to die at school.

And… Writers and scholars, in town for the Festival of the Book, lifted their voices to elevate the conversation around many topics, from the racial history of the country to how to hold onto hope. Poets read their poems of anger and faith. Thoughtful, measured discourse happened. Beautiful words and beautiful ideas.

Perhaps the most moving event I attended was a conversation with Khizr Khan, famous for his speech at the Democratic National Convention and for being insulted by our president.

Khizr Khan in conversation with Douglas Blackmon

His faith in the Constitution of the United States is impassioned and informed. He truly believes that voters will do their job to make radical change in the coming elections, snatching our nation from the brink and from the clutches of racist egoists with no agenda beyond their own self-interest.

In light of his sacrifice, wisdom, and undaunted optimism, I think I can deal with the inconvenience and expense of car trouble while a few hundred miles from home. I’m neither refugee nor victim. Neither disenfranchised nor unemployed. I’m privileged beyond imagining in a world gone mad. I’m grateful that I am here. Grateful I have a car that will be soon fixed. Grateful that I love people and am loved back. Grateful that I can read and write. That I feel joy. Often. That I have a pot of tea even now, sitting by my elbow, and that it comforts and soothes me.

I want to do better.

My week of “hardship” is nothing more than a non-sensical blip on the radar screen of my privilege and, though I’m not done learning, I am glad it slapped me upside the head.

My dear friends Annie and Sarah

 

 

 

 

Virtuality Check (not your typical blog)

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I pinch myself. Is this my life? Or am I asleep on a beach having a vivid hallucination-induced dream. Like the convoluted geographically intricate dreams I wake in the middle of. Dreams in which I don’t know where I am, but there is a staircase or a porch. Something specific going somewhere or leading away. It is often made of unlikely objects, like wine crates, or giant pencils the size of barn beams. It seems plausible if a little unsettling, as the dream progresses. Sometimes there are moments of relief, joy, empowerment that explode unexpectedly. Other times I must take flight to escape a predator of uncertain origin, or a horrid dream-world plot twist.

The dream is invariably more real than any idea I might have about the dream. Or anything one might think of as actual, perhaps glimpsed through a curtain of eyelashes: a sun-soaked beach, the blue, distant horizon, a sandpiper at the edge of my beach towel.

But I don’t feel like I’m on a beach. Or otherwise plugged into a matrix of hallucinatory alternative reality. But still. I look around me and I can see the brush strokes in this “real life” and beyond, in the virtual world humans have created. The realm of tweets and counter-tweets, airbrushed, bumpstocked, drydocked, flimflammed reactions, counter-reactions, hyper-reactions to… that’s the part I don’t know.

Who wrote this version? Is there a theme? Is the theme the gradual dissolution of social consciousness and the relentless creation of narcissistically motivated power?

Times like this, other places I’ve been, or lived, seem more real and near than the place I find myself now. This chair, that table, this window, that bank of snow. Where did they come from? The story of their arrival is known to me, but is it known to me because it took place or because my brain trusts it as real? The brain that invented the whole story, perhaps, in a detailed mental construct, a subconscious screenplay, complete with smells and tastes.

The feeling of having my hair brushed and braided by a father dead now many years, a truth that lives even now at the very edge of my scalp’s sensory receptors, is more real to me (sometimes) than the sweat under my breasts as I grunt my way through class at the gym, the smell of my favorite coffee shop, or the talking heads analyzing why no one actually in power wants to do anything about assault rifles in the hands of killers. For example.

What I realize is that my brain, powerful organ that it is, loses its power over reality. I reach out and touch something. You, if only you were here. Or maybe the cat. Or the keyboard. Virtuality check.

My heart is what is left, in the end, to know the difference. To know that the madness “out there” is not “in here” –and never needs to be. We can stay in truth. Or try hard to. That place where the versions intersect and something immutable is imaginable. Conceivable.

A fellow blogger recently reminded me of the Wheel of Fortune—the ever-spinning, ever-rising, ever-falling wheel upon which we can be racked, or whose center we can seek. The seasons will turn with or without me, you, Twitter, Starbucks, or the grid. The sun and the moon will rise and set, and shed their influence, and their light, upon the world, regardless of where on the wheel we are, at the moment.

For the past 24 hours my power has been (mostly) off due to a snow and wind storm. The still place in the center of the maelstrom of 2018—I glimpsed it for a moment in the night when everything was completely dark. The wheel moved slowly, and I could see the spokes as they seemed to float past me in their circling path. But at the center, nothing moved. Head back, to look up at the darkness, I felt maybe, barely, the shifting of that slowly turning hub, but in that moment, I was able stay still and centered and realize, “I exist.”

The Grand Canyon–Self-possessed and Flawless

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We’d gotten in at midnight the night before, and seen the black sky smeared with a blizzard of stars. That alone told us all we needed to know—this was a different kind of place. One that can surround a person with pure blackness. And it did, but for the sparse pools of yellow light shed by just enough lamps to get us from check-in to our lodge without falling into an abyss. With nothing to see—yet—we were able to sleep.

When I woke up, my roommate, Chris, was heading out to find coffee. Dressing quickly, I left our little room at the end of a narrow hallway. Turning toward the light that peeked through a pane of glass in a door at the far end, I shivered a bit. This was it. I was here. What was I going to see?

Pushing open the door I walked 15 feet, dodged a small tree, took four strides across a paved walkway, and stood before a low wall—all that was left between me and the Grand Canyon.

My breath stayed in my chest for a moment, then another, and then—unexpectedly and all at once—tears sprang to my eyes.

It is unclear how long I was there, but it was long enough that when I looked around again, I was lost. I had no memory of getting to this place. Had I moved? I must have, though I remembered nothing. I was not where I was when I first came out from the shadows of the trees into the morning light and saw the deep and layered, sloping and sheer, sun-drenched and shadowed, speckled and smooth, lined and creased, orange-red, mossy-green, white-brown, brown-white, brown-red, rusty-pink crevasse that splits the earth’s crust.

Eventually, after a few false starts, I found my friends in the dining room. I walked up to their table and the tears came again. “I’m so overwhelmed,” I blubbered.

How does anyone take a picture of a geological masterpiece and do it justice? She doesn’t. How does a person write about that moment when all the tiny, silly details of daily life melt in the face of deep planetary history? She doesn’t. Forgive this blog, my small attempt at photos and words.

Not that I really understood what I was seeing. I went to a geology lecture that helped. I loved the young man who spoke with such passion and poetry about the billions of years made evident in one mind-boggling natural formation that opened up behind him as a clump of us sat, dazzled, on stone benches in a rough-hewn amphitheater.

I won’t describe everything we did or saw, asked, learned, felt, or experienced. But I want to try to understand what the overwhelm was really about. Yeah, yeah, it’s big. A walk around the rim would be equivalent to a walk from New York to California—so it’s really big. Yeah, it’s old, and even though (as we were reminded repeatedly) the scale of time is a bit much for the human mind to comprehend, I visualized the period at the end of Remembrance of Things Past and reminded myself that punctuation mark represents human history on this planet that does not need us. The Grand Canyon at its lowest levels is over a billion years old, but still does not enter Proust’s masterpiece until several volumes in.

I think, really, it’s the beauty that flattened me. And the beauty is part of the size. And the size is part of the age. All pieces, inextricable.

The beauty is the kind that does not exist in my world. It is not a tree covered beauty. It is not a skyline beauty. It is not a rolling hills beauty. It is not a pasture beauty. Not an estuary beauty. Not a watershed beauty. Not a rolling wave beauty—or crashing wave beauty for that matter.

The exquisite subtlety was unexpected. For something that monumentally vast, old, and renowned to convey its magic so gently is astonishing and wondrous.

The delicate pastels, and how they changed as the sun moved across the sky. The glittering ribbon of the distant Colorado, glimpsed, from certain vantage points. The speckling of junipers clinging to the slopes. Rock formations, windows eroded into limestone, the temples, plateaus, outcroppings, and drop-aways—breathtaking yes, but quiet. The wind blew, creating a silence in my head, and as my eye wandered, the overwhelm was perhaps about an unfathomable accumulation of so many hundreds and thousands of individual, subtle, self-possessed pieces of flawless beauty.

I was within sight of the Canyon’s rim for a mere 34 hours. My visit taught me that, wow, I wish I could have more—a few additional days, longer hikes, slower walks, a few more sunrises and sunsets, expanding time to just sit, more chances to learn. But there was no hole in me from wanting more. Because the Grand Canyon filled me up and left me sated, grateful, humbled, happy.

Love and Righteous Anger: A Personal 2017 Perspective

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How 2017 began–women marching.

I love women’s anger. Without realizing it, I’ve been waiting my whole life for women all over the place to finally admit how PISSED they are.

As a child, I was peripherally aware of my mother’s struggles against the entire fabric of society in order to be successful on Madison Avenue, rise in her field, be a divorced woman in the 60s when that meant social ostracism, all the while raising a daughter on her own with literally no support system she didn’t have to pay for.

I was aware of all that through a glass darkly, as I went about my business, blessed by my mother’s visionary decision to put me into a girl’s school where I could just be. But as I grew up watching her closely, as only daughters of single mothers tend to do, it was clear that she was never angry enough. She was too afraid that her anger would be a strike against her in a man’s world, or so I imagine. She swallowed ALL of it.

And then she went crazy. Probably not direct cause and effect, but sure enough, after her psychotic break, the anger was reallllly close to the surface. And who can blame her? The last 25 years of her life were spent paranoid and delusional, it’s true, but her conviction that she was and had long been a victim of countless injustices was based largely on the non-alternative fact that she was a strong, smart woman fully marginalized in a world run by men. Story of the world, right?

But not for much longer. Because we are so very, very pissed. Somehow, the rise of the Trump Machine primed women across our country to take it to the next level. (You notice I don’t say “all women” because there are those women who still vote for guys like Roy Moore, as if inviting men like that to fuck their preteen daughters as long as no one can have an abortion and whites can still get first pick of jobs and neighborhoods and colleges).

First, women marched. And they wasted no time about it. Within two months of the “election” of 2016, millions upon MILLIONS of women (and their kids and a bunch of very cool men, too) mobilized and marched the hell out of DC, NY, Boston, LA, and a many more American towns and cities, and in Europe, and Antarctica too. Yes, that happened. It was magic.

And with the rising up, it was almost as if there was a change in the air we breathe—we humans who breathe air because a woman birthed us to do so. A change in the tone of every moment and the feeling of every “hell no” that gets spoken instead of swallowed…. That rising-up has continued unabated for a year.

And in that year, the #metoo movement powered by empowered women has empowered other women to speak up and fling the truth in the faces of anyone willing (or, frankly, unwilling) to listen. And men are going down, right and left. The predators are slinking off, some of them with stunning lack of grace.

And women are not just marching and speaking their truths, they’re running for office.

Everyone is fully aware of the fact that, in 2018 and 2020, women are going to rise to seats of power like at no other time in history. Badass, go-for-it organizations like Putting Women in Their Place are making sure that happens.

Like so many of my sisters-in-arms, I am pissed and feeling unable to swallow that feeling just so the men around me don’t have to feel fragile and threatened and thus lash out at me and make my life a living hell. There is something to be said for solidarity. It is, truly, empowering

Meanwhile, in a parallel and vivid reality, I met someone. I met a man—one of the thousands of single men within 500 miles of me interested in a relationship with a grown-up woman not 25 years younger than they are. Yes, there are quite a few men who actually like women over 50 (this is good). But this man, you see, fits me. He surprised me. He won my heart. He opened his. I’m getting to know him more every day and, guess what? I’m really happy.

One of the many cool things about this man is that he does not take it personally that women are pissed at men. He has daughters, a sister, a mom, women friends… but guess what? So do most men—yeah, the ones who perpetrate and the ones who apologize for the perpetrators. Just being a person who knows and loves women is not a guarantee that a man will embrace feminism, demand equality for women, or even believe them.

But lucky me.

So what to do with this year of sorry lows and a great big high? Well. Here it is: we can embrace our rage—long overdue—at the system, at the patriarchy, at all the individual men who have power over us (in government, for example), and the individual men who demand we smile, put out, shut up, or who just take what they want without asking. We can embrace that anger, and still love a man.

Postscript: Feb. 25, 2018. Though this relationship, sweet as it was for awhile, did not last, it gave me hope and my position on all the above has not changed.

How 2017 ended.–companionship in the “bed office” morning of the 31st

 

 

 

 

Trust is Possible: a Thanksgiving Blog

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Over the last four and a half years, I’ve written here about the beauty of the broken heart, some painful, enraging truths about the patriarchy and its toxic effect on the 51%, lots of self-reflection, and different stages of my own journey through the tangled woods. Sometimes the tree branches seem to come alive and grab at me, darkly, as if I were none other than silly Snow White looking to be saved by tiny, ineffective fictional creatures. At other times sun dapples the forest floor and shows me the way through, so I can make my own story.

Looking back, most of what I remember about my life is having a hopeful, joyful heart. The bubbling gratitude that returns to me again and again. Not despite the bad stuff of life, but because of the deliciousness that fills in all the spaces around it.

But I still trip and stumble on my way. Identifying my own internal roadblocks remains part of why I’m here.

This year on the day of giving thanks, I am most profoundly grateful for a recent shift inside me.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, my daughter and I lit a small fire in a micro-pit (loaf pan) by lighting baking soda and rubbing alcohol. (Life hack if you need a ceremonial fire and don’t have a fireplace or outdoor firepit.) As the fire flickered on the coffee table, we quietly released into it things that we could identify that were clearly not serving us, and invited into our lives the opportunities, attitudes, beliefs, and people we wished to see manifest. Releasing fears, sorrow, limiting beliefs, and welcoming in joy, transformation, and most of all, love.

As we did this familiar ritual, in companionable silence, I had a serious epiphany. You know how epiphanies can be. A sudden “woke” moment when what you have “known” all along is suddenly clear. For me, it usually means that words appear, elucidating the truth so I can look straight at it. What was an unidentified feeling or belief becomes a statement. The words give the belief visibility and shape. If it does not serve me, the words cause it to lose some of its power so I can deal with whatever it is. If it is an epiphany of empowerment, I can own it and consciously, affirmatively accept it into myself.

On this particular day, these words formed in my mind: “Men always disappoint me.”

Harsh. I might have winced (literally) as the thought formed words and opened up inside me.

Though these words were never spoken by me or even in my head before that moment, I realized that my body lived them. The belief, like a miasma, filled the little innocent spaces in me so that as I opened myself to love, experience, and the men in my life, I was sabotaged by it.

“Limiting belief” is an understatement. This belief was a threat to my happiness and well-being.

Lucky for me, I have a toolbox I can whip out at a time like this to begin the uprooting process. But I knew instinctively that I might need to bring in the big guns this time. I called upon a fellow traveler and dear friend, shaman and healer, to guide me through the discovery, the releasing, and the healing.

Knowing where this belief originated was not technically necessary to expunge it, but I’m a curious sort. I like to know, and, for me, knowing with my head is usually (though not always) a key to a door that allows healing through to my heart and the rest of my being.

My experience, in any particular lifetime (choose one), of being silenced or abandoned or assaulted by a man or men in power, is hardly unique. It is the story of women. We all take these lessons into ourselves in our own ways. But they are just stories and can be rewritten.

The individual men that I love or have loved, from my father, to my son, to my brothers-in-law, cousins, friends, lovers, are inside me. Some have brought me nothing but warmth and love, others have done their worst. But what I realized is that society as a whole, going back to almost the beginning, is so infused with the unbridled, unbalanced energy of the yang, so dominated by the male of the species, that attempts to silence or squelch, deny, ignore, oppress, force, or disempower the yin are all around us. They are the overwhelming, overarching reality for all of us. In some countries and cultures, this energy is more intense and unavoidable than in others, but let’s be honest. It is unavoidable until things change for good.

Those sweet, gutsy, humble, strong men who see the forest for the trees, who understand the toll our world’s way of doing things takes on half the population, they are the ones we fall in love with, right? The ones we want to surround ourselves with. The ones we want to raise, marry, hire, elect, along with the women we also raise, marry, hire, and elect, obviously.

So what the hell does any of this have to do with Thanksgiving? Gratitude, of course.

This year I am grateful that I have transmuted my belief about men to an understanding of my own journey through the eons, and an understanding of something even deeper than that. That though it is difficult to trust, trust is possible. And it is still and always has been, for me, easy to love. Love can heal the harshest ache, and I am grateful for love.

 

 

 

 

Me Too

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He gave me a ride home from a party. He was older. Maybe eight or nine years older. He was a friend of the guys my friends and I were hanging out with that night. Pot-head frat types who played great music and had a big room for dancing in. In our first year of college, my nerdy writer friends and I quickly figured out that going to a few of the less mainstream frat houses was a cheap, jolly way to have fun on a Friday night. At this particular place, we felt comfortable. The guys were not grabby or patronizing. We could hang and dance. We felt safe. They were chill, ya know? And we were innocent. Naïve. Very, very smart, but… not really that smart.

Forty years later and I am still friends with one of those guys, someone I dated for a while, thought I was in love with, maybe even was. But I never told him this thing that I’m now going to post publicly on my blog. I never told anyone until the day in marriage therapy when it bubbled up. I said the words out loud for the first time and my then-husband looked at me, incredulous. Twenty-five years together and I had managed to avoid mentioning that I’d been raped. By a trusted semi-stranger in my own apartment at eighteen, a week into my third semester at UVA.

I spent most of my life telling myself a version of the story in which somehow it was “my first sex” and an inevitable, even normal way to “lose my virginity.”

Normalizing sexual harm, male aggression, female powerlessness—yes. I did that. I participated in the massive cover-up that is our male-privilege normative society. I did not want to admit I’d not had power in that moment. I wanted to believe I chose those offensive eight minutes, because what would it mean if I had not? So, feminist that I am, I did not say the word rape to myself, let alone anyone else, for decades. Years of therapy in which I dealt with a lot of crazy shit did not excavate that little artifact of experience from my subconscious. So what finally did?

Don’t know, really.

Fast forward to 2017. The grossest kind of misogynist is in the White House. The entire government seems hell bent on disempowering, disenfranchising, and just plain dissing women and anyone else they don’t want to give up their white male privilege to. And yet none of us who sees what’s going on seems willing to go gentle into that horrific night.

And now, this month, October 2017. A worldwide movement of saying, “Me too.” Me fucking too, ya bastids. It is a huge problem, okay? And you can’t shove all nine zillion of us under a rug.

Many are embracing “me too.” Some question it. Some think it does not do enough to create change or real dialogue. Others ask, “Why is it always on women to tell the hard truths?”

As for me, I don’t even want to analyze it or question it. Instead I’ll simply wholeheartedly applaud the countless women who are saying, not just to their sisters and friends, but to everyone who cares to read their status on Facebook, their blog, or their Tweet: ME FUCKING TOO.

Are people surprised? I don’t know anyone personally who is shocked that women are routinely, daily brutalized in small and huge ways. If people are surprised, I simply don’t want to know that. I would be too angry. Seriously. Enraged at the stubborn obliviousness people hide in, like a closet of privilege that protects them from uncomfortable truths. Because think about all the times that (let’s face it pretty much every) woman has been catcalled or assaulted. Shoved into a corner with a leer and a wink. Groped in the empty hallway and then silenced by shame, threats, or feigned innocence (“Honey I didn’t mean anything by that!”). Blamed by society for her experiences of harassment or sexual violence because of her clothes/attitude/choices. Propositioned by employers or superiors, or just treated like shit for being smart, sexual, ambitious, tough, emotional, or badass. And raped. Violently or quietly or multiply or repeatedly. By the stranger, the trusted friend, the uncle, the boss, the neighbor, the husband, the priest, the therapist, the teacher, the guy who is just pissed off because she did not acknowledge his right to possess her.

And these are not “bad experiences.” These are not “experiences” at all. Experience is when you go outside and there’s a rainbow. Or when you spend the day in the museum. Or you have an afternoon of glorious sex with the windows open. Or jump in the car for an impromptu road trip. Those are experiences. We participate in them. They occur. They can be sought or they can be serendipitous. But no one is perpetrating them.

Assault, sexual intimidation, rape—these are not things that “happen”—they are done by men to women against their will.

So given the reality of “me too”—what about the men? For every me too there is a man who took action. To grope, grab, hold down, threaten, penetrate, bribe, intimidate, belittle a woman. To order her to get on her knees, or fetch him a beer, or smile, or shut up and enjoy it, or just plain shut up.

What about the men who know about it, see it, hear it? How dare men be surprised or “taken aback” by this long-overdue public awareness announcement from all those women on their social media feeds. Where have they been?

I don’t remember much about that semester, after that “ride home.” (“Your friends want to stay. I can give you a ride home if you want.” “Really? That would be great.”)  I remember spending Thanksgiving at a friends’ house in Philadelphia. I remember nothing about Christmas. I know I was not completely in my body. That feeling of not “being yourself?”—that’s when part of you leaves and the rest of you feels incomplete. School—always my happy place—had lost its luster. I did not want to go to class. I did, of course, being always more than adequately “good” at doing what needed to be done. But, you know. The thrill? It was gone.

I left school that second semester of sophomore year. I went to visit my dad for a couple weeks. Returned to Charlottesville. Got a job. Went back to school. And, not sure how, but I gradually regained my optimism, my desire to go outside and see a rainbow.

These experiences take a toll on women. Women survive and “move on” because they have to. These women—so so many women—may, briefly or for decades, have their inner knowing knocked out of them when men steal their power and rob them of…so much. Women may be set back—literally—and need to catch up yet again, to prove that “WE TOO” will persist and all the shit you do to us won’t keep us down.

But it’s hard. It’s exhausting. And it is absurd—a folly, a civil wrong—that it is still on us to fix this mess not of our making. Men? Grow the hell up and stand up for your sisters literally EVERY TIME. In the board room, the classroom, the bedroom, everywhere. If you are not one of the perpetrators, prevent those who are from getting away with it and joking about it later. If you are one of those dudes—if you rape or insult or beat or catcall or belittle or grab or assume—STOP. Just stop now and live with honor for the rest of your days.

And as for me, the rape on the hallway floor of my apartment was one of several catalysts in my youth that prompted a lifetime of self-reflection and an insistence on growth and forward movement. A refusal to accept any status quo. A refusal to stay hidden.

Anticipation in the Now

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Ever the questing soul, anticipation is my default state. Thus one of the in-the-process lessons I am constantly learning is to live fully in each moment.

(When I’m writing fiction, I never proceed with an end in mind. Interesting, considering that is literally the ONLY time in my life when I could reasonably be expected to anticipate an outcome.)

In my actual, non-fictional life, I regularly wonder about, look forward to, fantasize about (and sometimes dread) the future. The power of thought, I believe, can manifest real results. I also strongly believe in road trips—life’s superfun way to teach me how to be in the now while thrilling to every next moment.

There is no moment in life that is certain—I’m certain about that. So aside from those concert tickets, a dinner date, planned vacation, my children’s visit at the holidays, and other such events, I cannot anticipate what will come next for me. But I feel certain (despite being a week away from yet another birthday) that I am young enough, brave enough, and have enough to offer the world that much is possible. Maybe not absolutely anything, but a helluva lot.

The more I travel (it’s still not enough), the more I think, as I explore strange new worlds: I could live here. Or here. Or even here! Who made up the rule that I have to stay in one part of the country? Turns out that was my stupid rule, so I can veto it from now on and pack my bags at any time.

Though I have not (as far as I know) met the man with whom I’ll spend the rest of my life (after looking with serious intent and (mostly) an optimistic heart for 11 months and counting), I realize that seeking love is a common practice among both women and men my age and that the odds are not at all hopeless. I will find that connection with a man, someone I will recognize as somehow familiar and yet thrillingly new. And (the other key element) he’ll find me. This fact is something I anticipate and, one day, will make real.

I am a productive person. I generate. I create. And I work my ass off. Secure in a career I really enjoy, I still often wonder if I might yet take a new road. Not necessarily an entirely new highway heading in an entirely new direction, but an exciting tangent, a path, that uses my skills and experience in some tantalizing new recipe. Something to anticipate with curiosity and confidence (and a dash of caution).

Being happy in my now is the goal. Being excited about the (unknown) future—that’s a good place to be too, as long as I don’t become mired in fear or lose sight of my current blessings.

 

Rauschenberg at MoMA: Inspiration, Collaboration, and the Turned-on Mind

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Winter Pool, 1959

I’ve been thrilled by visual art most of my life. A combination of blessings, like where I grew up  and one particularly inspiring teacher when I was still very young, created me, a person who is literally vibrationally activated when I’m in the presence of exciting, great art. And there is a lot of great art in this world.

So on August 12, 2017, as my beloved Charlottesville was under attack by domestic terrorists, I was having a very good day. This hurts a little, in that place inside me (a vestigial mental construct left from my odd, if art-infused, childhood), but the bigger, better place inside me knows that it was okay for me to spend the day at MoMA with a friend, renewing myself by visiting the Rauschenberg exhibit called: Robert Rauchenberg: Among Friends.

You can read about it. You can (aka should) go see it if you are within a few hundred miles of New York City. There are great pictures and video clips on the MoMA site (linked above). I’m not going to describe the exhibit for you, or review it, or narrate what was in each room, elucidate each chapter in his artistic journey.

Rauschenberg’s work as stage set for dance.

Just want to say a few things. Like this: the exhibit is a window into a great and thrilling mind. Rauschenberg’s openness and his seemingly endless flow of ideas and “I’m going to try this now” moments, his humor, his relationships, his appreciation of fellow artists from composers like John Cage to choreographers like Merce Cunningham, and visual artists from Jasper Johns to Sue Weil to Cy Twombly. All of these things added to his inspiration. An angsty life of isolation, darkness, competitiveness, bitterness was not for him. He was an effluence of joyful creative pollination.

Rebus, 1955

His life and how he chose to live it, devoted to his art, to his ideas, to the ideas and art of others, inspired by the ideas and art of others—that was as much a thrill as seeing the art itself—both the majestically large pieces and the small pieces, all of it both conceptual and very real and glorious.

I mean he tried things. Nothing was “not worth” his exploration. He’d have an idea and bam. I have no idea how his “Erased De Kooning Drawing” was received critically. Who cares? He went to visit the great De Kooning himself and said, hey, I want to try this thing. I want to make a piece of art that is an erased drawing. How about one of yours? De Kooning was like, okay cool. Here is a piece I actually like a lot so have at it. Rauschenberg gave it a shot. He doesn’t seem to have started an entire phase of his art based on erasing drawings, but it was a thing he did. Jasper Johns came over and said, cool. Let’s frame it.

Canto II, the Descent (from Dante series 1958-60)

The drawings of all 33 cantos of Dante’s Inferno. I could have spent the entire day just on those. My God.

Charlene, 1954

His florid, red pieces—gorgeous assaults. I want to fill a house with them and then never leave it.

Automobile Tire Print, 1953

The tire tracks—John Cage’s Model A, one tire dipped in black paint, Rauschenberg’s 20 pieces of typewriter paper stapled together.

Hiccups (not as it was displayed at MoMA), 1978

Hiccups, the 97 zippered-together pieces of handmade paper, each an explosion of color and each a unique assemblage of transferred items run through a lithograph press.

Grapheion, 1988

His lithographs and silk screens. I mean those ALONE….

Gold Standard, 1964

His use of all media from toothpaste to old clothes to rusty nails to glue to film to silk to tossed out shipping boxes to canvas and paint and about a thousand other things.

His 9 Evenings combining an incredible mix of artists and audience-participation and lights and performance.

Monogram, late 1950s

His humor. The stuffed goat in the tire. Majestically itself. Having gone through several versions. I mean, how can you just have one version of a stuffed goat in a tire?

Bed, 1955

His incredible fabulous combines, (most of the pieces shown in this blog) a term he made up to make people stop asking him “WHAT IS THIS?”

Some of his pieces are statements, some of them just… something excellent to look at. Well, no, I take that back. They are all statements, aren’t they? Statements of an aesthetic and a consciousness and a will to create.

I love how being in the presence of a lifetime of art—his or any artist’s—Van Gogh, Renoir, Pollack, O’Keeffe, Kahlo, Rothko, Nevelson, whoever it is—invites you into the soul of that artist. I guess it’s like that with reading someone’s writing, seeing someone’s dance, hearing someone’s music. But the difference is that you can be inside a room with ten visual creations at once, in an exhibition with 500 pieces, maybe. You can’t simultaneously watch 500 ballets or read 500 poems or listen to 500 sonatas.

So this experience of visual art is like an immersion, a flood. You open yourself to it and you are filled with it. If you let yourself, you almost become that person for a moment. Or maybe for a lifetime, because you have so fully experienced that outflowing of another human, one so willing to commit her or his ideas to the plane of perceived reality (I’m being very careful here). For some that is a risk and for others, maybe for Rauschenberg, simply an imperative, like reproducing, or an instinct, like breathing.

As haters come out of the darkness, I will not let myself forget the light that is in us. Spend a day with art—every city has a place you can go, a gallery or museum with a room you can sit in and feel the flood of ideas and— beauty or not beauty—artistic spirit. Some say that is the very thing (not brutality, not hate, not rage or selfishness or the lust for power) that defines humanity.

Bathtub, 1973

The Wonder of Wonder Woman

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When the movie ended, tears welled up. My throat closed. I was overwhelmed with emotion.

Not a tear jerker movie, so why?

I always enjoy superhero movies. We all do—or lots of us, anyway. The possibility of good prevailing. The presumption that there is good. That there are people devoted to doing the right thing, fighting injustice and evil, for the sake of all the world. These heroes have grit and brains, sometimes brawn, and often super powers to boot. What’s not to love?

As I sat with my adult daughter in the theater watching the opening scenes—powerful, dauntless women exhibiting their prowess with weapons and their badass skills, swiftness, and strength—I was thrilled to my core. That feeling never stopped until the final scene. Diana’s evolution into Wonder Woman is superb—the way she always speaks her truth, calls a spade a spade, kicks ass, calls the patriarchy on its shit, does what’s right and not only what is expedient, is not willing to settle for “good enough,” and does not care one sliver of an iota what anyone thinks of her. She even loses the man she loves and… well, she survives.

While I relished every moment, at the same time I was thinking about all the little girls in theaters across the country watching the movie this summer. Not just being inspired by a real-live woman hero, but one for whom there are no excuses made for why she is what she is and why the men defer to her, admire her, and put their faith in her. The little girls sitting with wide shiny eyes in dark theaters across the US are seeing what little boys have absorbed their entire lives. (And by little boys I mean white little boys because little boys of any other color are always dealing with a different paradigm too.)

Our sons, not to mention our sons’ fathers and grandfathers—grew up in a world where this paradigm was their everyday reality. Not just in movie theaters where they saw men and boys ruling, being the coolest, fighting, winning, dominating, saving the women, saving the world, bossing and managing and commanding others—but in every history book, on every street, in their homes, in their schools, at their jobs, on billboards and in TV ads, in the halls of power, on the news. The very fabric of their reality was that they could, would, and do have the “right stuff.” That they can do whatever they want. They’ll be admired and rewarded for it. They will probably even be given a pass on a lot of bad stuff they also apparently “can do.”

For me, my sisters, the women I went to school with, my friends, our daughters—and every girl child born on this planet, pretty much since history was a thing—has NEVER had that. EVER. That thing the boys just get automatically. A system infused with an acknowledgment, endorsement, and affirmation of their power, goodness, potential, and significance in every sphere of life. Every sphere of life, you get me? They grow up just KNOWING they can and do rule. As in—the world.

When Cleopatra reigned over Egypt, Queen Elizabeth I was queen of the most powerful empire in the world, and Catherine the Great was empress of Russia, every advisor, every colonial governor, every other person in power in their countries and every other country at that time, in the time before, and the time after—were men. And the sacrifices they made to do what they did were not any that male leaders have ever been expected or obliged to make. So don’t throw these fabulous outliers at this situation as proof that what I’m saying isn’t true, because you know it is. The unbelievably rare exceptions call the rule into stark, horrific relief.

In spite of the beat-us-down reality with which we are flooded every moment of our lives by not just the media but life-as-we-know-it, women have made truly significant inroads. Painfully, inch by inch, up against odds no man can imagine. Not the odds created by being inferior and having to make it against their natural superiors, since that is a myth of mythic proportions that no civilized human says out loud any more. No. The odds created by the status quo and how comfortable everyone seems to be with it. The sexist objections and roadblocks coming from all quarters.

And still, we persist.

But imagine. Imagine a world in which every CHILD was infused and flooded with a different truth: that all humans have equal powers of wonderfulness. Every child can be fast, strong, cool, smart. Anyone can do any job, with the right skills and aptitude. (Let’s be honest, you don’t want me doing your taxes.) Anyone can invent, heal, design, create, govern. Anyone can learn how to save the world through science, theology, philosophy, technology, scholarship, political or economic reform, education, and love….

In that world, no gender or race could or would ever be able to get away with dominating another because all of us would have grown up with these beliefs instilled in us. No man would proposition or deride a woman on the streets. No man would get away with a slap on the wrist for raping anyone. No woman would have to accept less money for the same job, let alone accept that she is “less than.” Women in equal numbers would be senators, governors, CEOs, engineers, brain surgeons, heavy machinery operators, and airline pilots.

The pressure would be off men to carry all that responsibility. Who asked them to, anyway, poor guys?

I know and love the fact that more and more girls are wielding “swords” in the playgrounds of America this year thanks to Wonder Woman. They feel a glimmer of that feeling—that empowered feeling that they deserve.

So why did I cry when the movie ended? Why was I so choked with helpless emotion? Because even the most empowered of my gender, raising our daughters to know and to feel their own worth, their own stunning strength and brilliance, will never really know that feeling—to be ENTITLED to your power. Because there is a different and tragic law of the land, accepted by most without even thinking about it—a law that governs everything from the color of our Legos to the length of our shorts. From the dreams we have about our future to things we do on a Saturday afternoon. From the best possible scenario we can envision for ourselves to the darkest fears we harbor in our hearts.