Strange sun today

Amidst the wildfire smoke, there was a strange sun out this morning - dim and orange, not illuminating the apartment as well as it usually does. Walking outside I felt like I was in a weird dream where a blood moon had become overly bright. 

My CSA newsletter notes that the smoke is affecting the yield from plants on their farms and I wonder if it's because of the strange quality of light I am observing here.

I have been thinking about climate breakdown, of course. It's not just the wildfires, and the way they now strike in areas they weren't seen in before, but the two heat waves one after the other, and the long drought that presaged these wildfires. 

I've been thinking about the Flight Free campaign, in particular, I think because I've been hearing a lot about plane journeys recently. Many people seem to find it unthinkable that someone with sufficient means would refuse to travel by plane. (It's my right as a middle-class millennial to travel, travel, travel, isn't it?)

(I have a lot I could say about consumerism and travel, maybe another time. I remember starting to say something here a long time ago.)

Thich Nhat Hanh refers to the sun as a second heart, "that great heart outside of our body," and the forests of the world as our lungs outside our bodies. He says this about environmental destruction: "We are imprisoned in our small selves, thinking only of the comfortable conditions for this small self, while we destroy our large self."

Similarly, I recently treated myself to a book by Ffiona Morgan - a old-school feminist witch, and the designer of the wonderful, beautiful Daughters of the Moon tarot deck - and found a place where she wrote about how women's bodies mirror the living earth, microcosm and macrocosm of the same divinity, "Goddess Within, Goddess Without."

And I'm recalling Ocean Country, a book about a Bay Area woman exploring the effects on climate breakdown on the oceans. She wrote that in the age of global environmental crisis, what we consider home must be bigger. What we consider family must be bigger.

When I breathe in ideas like this, I find it hard to feel deprived by a life that treads more lightly. It feels like not doing physical harm to my own flesh or bones. It feels like connection and devotion (to self, home, family, reality, our future).

I'm not sure what difference my choices make - that's okay. Sometimes it feels ironic how much attention I give to making the little pieces of my life more environmentally friendly, only to be confronted with a roommate or neighbor or family member who has far more room for impact than I do and thinks far less about changing their ways. But I won't be unhappy in the end, no matter what - I value the sense of the world that my choices give me, and they are good for my spirit.

Body thoughts: I promise I'm going somewhere with this

I was in love with ballet as a teenager, painfully so. As the vast majority of teenaged ballet students do, I eventually quit. Then I did something as a twenty-six-year-old that kind of surprised me - I went back to it, back to the same ballet school even. And I had such a wonderful time compared to when I was fourteen/fifteen/sixteen years old. It was what I needed, too, during a tumultous and painful period of my life - something absorbing that felt as familiar as church. After class, I strode around in the night hours collecting groceries, putting off going home, all glowy with sweat, my legs sore and strong.

 And I actually think I was a better dancer than during my teenage years dancing... I had much more awareness of my physical self, more intelligence about what my muscles were doing. I had more ability to have an interesting physical presence in the center of a dance floor.

But after a year and a half I changed jobs, my work hours changed significantly, the neighborhood I worked in changed, and it became a lot more difficult to get to class, so I stopped. And my life became, for separate reasons, a lot calmer and safer, and held itself together without ballet class.

I have further places to meander with this; to be continued.

For sanity and staying inside my body

Fall 2013.

I went to a secondhand store
today looking for a pair of
jeans. The rules
for staying sane are gentle
and have not changed:

When the body grows
(smaller or larger),
keep feeding it what
it wants, keep moving how
it wants, find clothes
that in all ways feel good;
keep knowing
what knowledge (pounds,
calories, and the like)
is not valuable to you.

The project of the past few
years is listening instead
to the wordless shifting
constellations
that pass beneath and across
my skin. To the wise
if sometimes frightening
wants and body-thoughts,
the certainties and
contentments of this animal self,
as well as to the spaces where
I can hear
nothing yet, where long-learned silence
(quiet, quiet)
is not yet unlearned

For dogma,
I will have
only this, that
nothing the body does
or doesn't
do is wrong,
nothing the body
does is wrong,
in my terror and longing
and unbelief, I am reciting
to myself: how
nothing this body
does is wrong

The only way I can fall asleep is clutching a heating pad to my chest

In the thirties at night. That wouldn't be notable for, say, Chicago, but this is coastal California; consider the limitations of our wardrobes, how our houses are (not) insulated, for example...

The hardwood floor in our place feels cold enough to burn the soles of bare feet. Tonight before bed though I microwave the last inch of coconut oil until it is transparent and liquid, strip and stand in the lamplight, bend to dip the cup of my fingers into the jar. The best moisturizer. Considering myself through the lens of a nonexistent camera, considering myself through the eyes of an absent lover (think: that part in The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and I hurry. Open-water swimmers smearing their bodies with goose fat. Bending down, the cup of fingers, straightening, how quickly a drip of oil solidifies on the cold floor. Of course I regard myself during this exercise, and I am somewhat exasperated. Body strange, what are you doing — keeping secrets from me with such indifference. I admit I am angry about the excuses I feel compelled to make for you, even if only in my head. Control must be released again and again.

Self-cures / this evening

Lonely and restless, as I have been lately —
My instincts surprised me and said, find a yoga class, now,
tonight. It had been more than a year since my last one, but:
a place to be with other humans
without worrying about having
to talk or shake hands, just a place to be (sweat
and breathe) with other humans, it sounded,
and was, just right. Nights like this are why
I trust myself these days, knowing I am no poison
I am my own cure, this heart that
knows what I need and will say,
go to yoga
come back to your body, do what is
familiar and dripping with sweat
come home to your body
again

tell me how you learned to touch a body without

tell me how you learned to touch a body without
believing you were touching a soul
take what you tell me and trace your steps
backwards until we find ourselves somewhere
better resembling sense
and sustainability — backwards
all the way until you can
breathe   and feel yourself
breathing again

today i am suited for hibernation, little more:

today i am suited for hibernation, little more:
i am simple limbs, cotton and geology
with Venus at my back and my body
sedimented under blankets
and glass, i can lie still as a landscape, it's easy i swear —
instead of some spark of humanity or seat for the soul,
only this beautiful snow cave
where my brain used to be

Why I don't own jeans

Because standard sizing does not work on pants.

Because they don't allow a full range of movement.

Because I do not believe in tolerating clothes that squeeze and pinch you, anymore than I believe in tolerating people who squeeze and pinch you (and that's what 98% of jeans do, pinch either my belly or my thighs).

I have concluded that jeans do not deserve the time and energy it requires for me to find a non-abusive pair. And I believe in giving no more time and energy to a given concern than rightly belong to it.

So I mostly wear skirts. And the funny thing is that I really don't worship at the Altar of Femininity. But in my life, given my body type, they actually are to be the more practical garment choices.

And giving up jeans aligns well for me with the spirit of minimalist practice: A pair of jeans may carry more of a connotation or appearance of simplicity than a floral skirt does, but the skirt means I get more time, I get to be more comfortable, and I get to think less about clothes. And that is very nice.

Escaping / (freedom is seeing what is)

"it is looking in the mirror. seeing what's there. not seeing what your mind sees. seeing what is physically in front of you. that reflection is ok. that reflection is perfect. that is what you learn. and you keep looking. at each limb. at each freckle. at each hair. at each curl. each wrinkle. each line. each curve. and you look. and you see. and you learn. you are more than enough. you have the strength to be you.

"focus not on the walls but the gaps in the fences. for they are always there."

– Liv

Possibility and the stories we're not "supposed" to have

I weigh something like thirty pounds more than I did two years ago, the most I have ever weighed, and that's supposed to really distress me, but I have to say, it doesn't.

The bullshit consumer-capitalist/patriarchal messages about why I should be distressed, they make me anxious on occasion. But when I maintain awareness of those messages as external (imposed), I realize that I do not have strong feelings about the size of my body.

I also do not have any sob story about "letting myself go," or not feeling like myself anymore, or not respecting myself, or how I've been just existing, not really living, or any of that nonsense that we're supposed to talk about when we talk about gaining weight.

On the contrary, I feel wiser and more creative than I ever have before — intellectually, artistically — and there is so much vigor in my days. I have never felt so awake in my life.

There is such a poor selection of narratives to choose from when we look at the cultural canon, and not just when we're talking about weight gain. The narratives that we have needed have been withheld from us on the grounds that they would not be useful for selling things to us.

It's quite important that, as we are seeking the shapes of our lives, we do not settle for these pre-fab stories. They are easier, but they do not satisfy. The only stories that can do justice to our lives are the ones we ourselves are doing the hard work of discerning. The honorable truths. Truths whose existence affirm the wideness of what is possible.

And my truth today is that I gained weight, and it was not a fall from grace. I gained weight, and it means little more to me than that I weigh more and take up more space than I did before.

The gap between what our experiences and histories "should have been" and what they actually are — just like the gap between what we ourselves "should" be and what we actually are — is a manufactured illusion. Only what has happened has happened; only what is, is.

The art is in seeing what is, as reality in its own right, instead of merely in relation and subordination to what "ought" to have been. And the art is in the way that discerning and speaking our realities, "allowed" or not, opens reality up wider for others too.

Giveaway: The Thing About Thin

Hello friends and familiars,

I left one book off my "Read in January" list, not even on purpose, but it happens to be the book that I have an extra copy of to give away.

The sixth book on the list is The Thing About Thin, a nonfiction work by Sui Solitaire of Cynosure.

It slipped my mind as I compiled that list because I read it in unusual circumstances — I was one of her beta-readers prior to its release last month as an e-book, because it was partially inspired by a post of mine.

The post in question was one from last May, called "Self-esteem & happiness are not the ends."

The Thing About Thin uses its ideas a jump-off point, and it is fittingly subtitled Body Image, Eating Disorders, Resistance + What Really Matters. 

Other than my blurb on the book's page, this review covers nicely what I would say about the book if I were good at writing reviews. Basically: It's insightful and wise and strengthening, and I think its ideas are important medicine.

If you'd like to win this copy of The Thing About Thin, leave a comment with your email address. For an additional entry, you can spread the word at your own internet-space and leave me a second comment with a link to the pertinent post.

I'll close the comments at 11pm Pacific Standard Time on Monday the 27th, and randomly choose one entry.

Bonne chance!

On the process of exercising our own voices

"...[T]he same thing happened to me that has happened to many other women who've set out initially to recover lost and silenced feminine voices. Too constrained or timid or plain bewildered to speak for ourselves, unready, perhaps, to open certain doors in our own consciousness, we take the part of another...and break her silence. It might be our mother or grandmother, a woman of our own ethnic background or religious tradition, or one who has undergone a significant experience that we have, too, like illness, divorce, conversion, or exile. We choose our alter egos carefully and practice ventriloquism under the guise of scholarship or journalism, and eventually, often before we realize what's happening, we've begun to exercise our own voices."

– Carol Lee Flinders
At the Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst

This rings true for me. For you?

I thought first of Faith's recent post on sexual harassment and fear, because she expresses anger on behalf of her younger sister in it — though I don't want to impose Carol Lee Flinders' analysis on her.

The incident that comes to mind from my own life: the sadness and anger I felt when I overheard my younger cousins assessing their bodies with the most ancient-sounding of sighs. Before I could recognize my own eating disorder as outrageous and grievous, before I could want health and peace for myself, I had to want it for them. And so I spoke about them, and a year later was ready to repeat my sentiments on my own behalf as well.

It is beautiful and right to become angry for others and advocate for them. And it is most beautiful and most right when it reminds us to expect and demand no less for ourselves — because it is consistent, because justice belongs to everyone, because we deserve no less than anyone else does. No less.

The space on the horizon between the clouds and the sea

Today is peaceful.

I did some more beta-reading for Sui, which leaves a mindful mood in my veins. And I went for a walk with no aim and no hurry, and no bag of Things, just my house key in my pocket. It brought me to the top of this hill to sit, and hum the Doxology, and watch the waves breaking two miles away.

For me, there is the should noise of "exercising" —

Bike rides or walks should be at least __ miles long.

You should get sweaty and breathe hard.

You're not healthy if you don't.

You'll start gaining weight.

You're out of shape, and that's worrisome.

Aren't you concerned about all this?

You should be.

— and then there are the pleasures of moving and being outside in the fresh air.

And the air here in winter really is a pleasure. So soft. Gorgeous temperature.

It was almost 2 pm when I woke up. (I need 9 hours a night; the night before last I only got 5, so tonight I got 13. I need 9 hours of sleep a night and my body is very matter-of-fact about this.)

Waking up late too easily means waking up with a sinking feeling. So much wasted time, and now I'll never sort out my sleep schedule... But it's only the guilt itself that casts the shadow over the day.

I reached over to my stereo and pressed play, and excused myself from getting up for another six minutes so that I could listen to the last movement of the Italian Symphony.

You do what you can to rise with a light heart.

Read in September 2011

1. Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin
The political implications of intercourse from a radical feminist perspective. The first half of the book examines different (male) authors' views of sex; the second is all her. Quite a fiery analysis, quite absorbing. It made me despair at times of the male sex, but it's not really fair to count that against it.

2. The Weather of the Heart, by Madeleine L'Engle
I've posted two poems from this book before, here and here. Her spiritual musings are highly intellectual/her intellectual musings are highly spiritual; and she has a naturally lyrical voice.

3. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
Like a literary lovechild of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Emily Brontë. Such lovely prose...not flowery, but beautiful, to fit the elegance of life at a seaside manor in 1920s England. Very period-atmospheric, and sort of nouveau-Gothic.

4. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977, by Adrienne Rich
I like pretty much all her writings, but I love her seventies/eighties work. Lesbian feminist thought/poetry at its glorious and incisive best.

5. The Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin
Funky retro satire-thriller slash conspiracy novel...contemporary to the second-wave feminist movement and mostly just amusing, but the penultimate scene was a bit too real to be funny. I read it in about an hour and a half (unfortunately, because I had chosen it for a five-hour flight...).

6. Goodbye Ed, Hello Me: Recover from Your Eating Disorder and Fall in Love with Life, by Jenni Schaefer
Quite conversational (a bajillion short chapters) without being light on content. Made me realize that there are still aspects of the ED/diet mentality in my brain/life that I hadn't recognized as such and was still tolerating. That's not discouraging, though — what's discouraging is thinking that a sometimes-mediocre recovery is as good as it gets.

7. Trickster's Queen, by Tamora Pierce
A favorite fantasy author from my childhood, i.e. always good.

8. love belongs to those who do the feeling, by Judy Grahn
More lesbian-feminist poems from another second-waver, yes. (I've been utterly absorbed by the questions and ideas of the seventies this summer.) Very spell-like, influenced by myth and ideas of ritual. Her work was recommended to me by the two Canadian sisters.

Self-esteem & happiness are not the ends.

In the last two weeks of my culture theory class, we were reading this guy who talks about "the therapeutic culture" a lot. The book (it's good) is essentially a genealogy of that culture. He says that it is the dominant one in the Western societies at this point in history — a culture centered on the individual pursuit of self-expression and the fulfillment of one's desires.

I want to say something to distance myself from that. Because it is NOT my ideology, but I have blogged about body image and happiness from time to time and those are topics that often fall into the territory of that ideology.

In the case of "body image," for example: I think that the (female, in particular) relationship with the body and the self in general is an important topic not because poor self-image interferes with the ultimate end of happiness and self-love, but because it interferes with the ability to engage in the truly important human pursuits: justice, love, the realization of grace. The whole body image advocacy thing is a fail if the ultimate result is individuals who approve of themselves. The point of the whole body image advocacy thing ought to be, in my opinion, to clear away the barriers to doing things that actually matter.

Neither self-love in itself nor self-loathing is a meaningful pursuit. To be at peace with oneself ought only be an entry point into getting down to the meaningful business of life — engaging in the struggles and stories that extend beyond the individual.

This kind of ties into my personal peace with antidepressants. When I think about it, I don't really like that I have to take them, that there's something wrong either with me or with this world that requires my brain to inhabit the chemical equivalent of a very spacious padded cell, but I take them. Not in order to be happy, but in order to function. Because I have THINGS to do. You see?

Self-loathing is a hindrance in life, but it's a hindrance to more than happiness: Happiness is not my telos. I don't believe it's anyone's.

Without

"The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body."

a cool floodlit night. deep enough for birdsong.

if i set my hands at my ribcage and take a measure of
breath, (strength and woman-self,)
then hope is something about
the fit of my palms
about my ribcage. a
spell of as-
certainment.

"The cultural project of reducing the female person to an objectified body has resulted in a disembodiment of the female person and a depersonalization of the female body. Parallel to this separation from the body runs a consequent separation from agentive possibility."

being this strength and breath,
both breathless and yet inimitably solid.
what does the span of my palms
here at my ribcage
contain?
there is nothing insubstantial about the weight of my stride
across this earth.

i sleeping peaceful-bellied under a close ceiling of goose-down.
and body i am entirely.

Eye candy and brain food

Melissa on being seen. "I’ve been sharing stuff I thought was unshareable and prioritising authenticity, even though it’s made me feel quite afraid. I’m not a hundred percent there yet but the barrier’s starting to crack..."

Mentioned once before in passing: free guided meditation audio tracks.

"The Dog Theory of Fatness" (kind of sounds offensive; is not).

Sonnets about zombies.

Photo usage guidelines for bloggers. Most comprehensive treatment of the subject I've read; written by a blogger with input from a photographer and a photography agent.

The Eowyn Challenge: nerdiest fitness site ever, ahh.

"4chan's Chaos Theory." This is about Anonymous, etc.

The Riot Grrrl Manifesto. I printed this big and put it on my wall. Even though I'm a Christian. Ha.

And: riot grrrls + Maoist ballet dancers = this Bikini Kill music video. Dig.

"High heels yay, headscarf nay? Double standards in fashion symbolism."

Seo Min-Jeong's art installations.

Photography by female prisoners in Romania, via English Holly.

A dressing room experiment: "Finding Clothes That Fit." I think I'm going to do this.

Minutes in the blizzard

I like in
this wild snow
my body
the riotous feeling of
life pressed against death

and against
all sense how my legs
(fat,muscle bone andblood. health. strength)
carry me onward

the way I can unglove
my numb hand, press it
to my chest
under my coat and
feel it coming back to
life

And that is why gentrification is bad.

When I was home in October, my mom was showing me the scar from her recent abdominal surgery and it made me recollect how when I was little and we would all be chilling on the big bed after dinner, I would examine her stomach and she would tell me the different stories that go along with its various scars.


The stories are these:

Having been stabbed at a bus stop back before the Mission got gentrified (+1 scar),
she was rushed to the hospital and fixed up with some more incisions and tubes (+2 scars).
A few years later, she bore Big Sister, then me, then Little Sister (+stretching).
Then this year she had a little bit of cancer removed (+3 scar),
which they would not have found out about until too late if it were not for the fact that she had gotten stabbed some thirty years previously and had some scar tissue from that that was acting up.

Answers

(to questions submitted via The Box. if you find a question interesting, drop me a comment with your own answer. I'd enjoy reading it.)

how do you trust?
how? if you believe it's worth it but it doesn't come easily, I think you have to just muscle past your doubts and pretend to yourself that you do trust whoever it is...act as though you have the feeling of trust and security, until you actually do. this is something I am working on.

What song could you listen to over and over without getting annoyed?
"To the Lighthouse" and "Signs" are the two songs I can (and do) listen to on repeat literally for hours. my trance songs.

Hey, hope I'm not disturbing you but you left a quote in one of your comments before and it really rang true with me. I believe it was "women called beautiful because they threaten no one but themselves" I really wanted to write an opinion article about it for my women's studies class, but I need to know the source of the quote to do so. Could you please let me know where this quote came from? I'd really love to look deeper into the meaning of it. Hope I don't creep you out or anything! ;) Thanks so much!

That was a paraphrase from memory. The exact quote in context:

"I had been willing to accept self-sabotage, but now I refused to sacrifice myself to a society that profited from my pain. I finally understood that my eating disorder symbolized more than personal psychodynamic trauma. Gazing in the mirror at my emaciated body, I observed a woman held up to her culture as the physical ideal because she was starving, self-obsessed and powerless, a woman called beautiful because she threatened no one except herself."

It's from an essay called "The Body Politic," by Abra Fortune Chernik, which I read in an anthology called Listen Up. I would love to hear your thoughts...I think you should email me if you have time. :) [wie.ein.lied at gmail.com]