gravity

Whose Design?

2012-01-30T12:35:00.000-08:00

Well, the gravity got to be too much there for a while. I found myself circling the rim of a black hole for a bit. I suppose I’m still there. After a few days last week of feeling a brief spark of reason to believe, and responding to it with the thought, “I really want to believe,” I find myself angry again. Either there is no god, or else our omniscient creator is unworthy of love. If anything, he has earned our fearful submission, our baffled surrender to his whim, or our thanks that we have our own share of wonder and misery rather than that of those worse off than us. When events in our lives seem to point to some sort of meaning, when we start to think, “This is meant to be,” we must beware. If the fact that I recently decided to be an oncology nurse is followed by yet another dear friend being diagnosed with cancer and my father randomly sending me the collected writings of my grandfather, the leukemia research pioneer, it is not evidence that God thinks I have chosen the right path. It is evidence that cancer is all too common, that it touches my heart to the core as it did my grandfather’s, and that I have chosen to make meaning of it.

We tend to seek meaning in everything because that is how we learn. We seek out cause and effect relationships automatically, rarely challenging apparent causality. Correlation is enough to satisfy our hunger for meaning. Those who are lucky enough to believe what they are told about God think that those of us who cannot help but disbelieve are selfish and ignorant, willfully turning away from a very real, very present, absolutely perfect being. Why would anyone do that? If I could simply choose to believe that the death of a child was ordained by a perfectly loving being for some greater good that I cannot as yet fathom, why would I not choose to believe that? If I could believe that I would be reunited with all of my loved ones in an eternal realm of perfect happiness and love, how can it possibly be selfish to reject that? It isn’t intellectual arrogance either. I am telling you truthfully, if I could simply believe I would. I can’t. There is no divine beneficence. There is only the luck of the draw. A child is born, grows, learns, strives, is so very beautiful, and he dies suddenly, without any possible reason. What reason can there be? Tell me. I need to know.

What is this great presence you sense, believer? What if it is there for you, but not for me? What if when I seek it, it turns away from me like a locked door? I am no less deserving than you. I proclaimed belief in 1984. I confessed my sins, and easily accepted absolution. I read the Bible. I sought to serve from my heart and have never stopped. How is it that you see God in everything and I see the vastness of unending space-time from the tiniest subatomic particle here there and never-where to the farthest galaxies spinning billions of unfathomable light years away, but no God anywhere? Life is the only possible source of meaning I can see. Finite, irrational, magnificent creators of order we are, from our very DNA up through our finest library, beautiful whether the tiniest crystalline diatom floating weightlessly on the current, the most massive blue whale singing his hunting song to a friend on the other side of the Pacific ocean, or the most ordinary human who ever lived. Plain as he was, even that man was magnificent, improbable, organized, unique, beloved, and loving.

For you, believer, life and love is the proof. You believe that I am looking at a creation and refusing to see the creator. But despite both my heart and my mind wanting to believe, I cannot. What if I was just made that way?

Springtimes have needed you.
And there are stars expecting you to notice them.
From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.
As if it were all by design.
But are you the one designing it?

Rainer Maria Rilke

Baker Lake trail from memory

2011-10-03T14:28:00.000-07:00

From the use it or lose it school of life:

2011-10-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

• To strengthen my damaged vision, I will practice seeing by making art.
• To strengthen my foggy thoughts, I will practice mindfulness.
• To strengthen my wheezy lungs, I will breathe light and life by running, hiking, kayaking, and dancing.
• To heal my sad heart, I will love and be loved.
• To heal my sick stomach, I will stop swallowing my grief and fear.
• To heal my aching shoulder, I will reach higher and hug more.

Vision

2011-10-02T10:59:00.001-07:00

My vision is failing. Not entirely, but it isn’t perfect any more. I have glaucoma and hyperopia. I can see far better than near, and I need glasses. My eyes are too full of fluid, despite that I have cried almost every day for months now. It isn’t the same fluid. There is also lots of water in my dreams. Drowning fluid, quaking fluid, sad fluid, but that is beside the point. The focus of my vision is no longer on the right spot. It is a bit too far within me (too much introspection?), millimeters beyond the vitreous humor. My optic nerve, the connection between my vision and my perception is thinning. My retinas are cupping. It isn’t right. I ask why. Genetics, predisposition of about six different types, and something else.
My stomach hurts every day. All my life I have put my grief and my guilt and my fear into my stomach. My stomach kindly takes it in, ties itself into knots around it all, and lets me get on with what I must do. Until it can’t hold any more and it seeps out. This time I think it seeped into my eyes. There’s a logic to it, if you look at it just right. I’ve been working so hard. Harder than I’ve ever worked before. I’ve convinced myself that I must succeed in becoming a nurse or die a failure. That was stupid. It isn’t true. Any more than it was true that my mother died a failure because she finally surrendered to her own pain and grief and mistrust after decades of splinting and patching and medicating herself through what she had to do and what she had to bear. Any more than Liam died a failure because he had hardly even begun to live. Any more than Tom will die a failure because he can’t stop MS from stealing away his strength, his patience, his music, his ability to wander through the mountains on his two good legs. Life can take everything from us at any time. It isn’t a failure of will. It’s a fact. We can only succeed at being humble and powerless. We all fail in the end, or else nobody does.
Today is foggy and dark. I know I should be seeing more than I am. Having learned at last that sometimes the body bears messages for the spirit, I have asked myself for days, “What am I not seeing?” I know what I am seeing, and it is good, though it isn’t enough. I see my children, my husband, my family and friends. I see people in need. I see illness, injury, death, and so much loss. I see mountains and forests and the salty sea every chance I get. I see the work I need to do, the books I must read, the values and skills I must learn, the tests I must take and the people I must help. What I haven’t been seeing is the light at the heart of it all. I need inspiration, breath of life. There is no God for me, but there is something more to see than beauty and pain and the passage of time. How many times must I learn that I need to make art? I need it the way some people need to pray. I put one color next to another and I can suddenly see the tapestry as a whole again. It ceases to bombard me with confusing images of need and desperation, projections of my own fear, and settles into a rich and nurturing whole. I need to be who I am in the midst of it all, and who I am is an artist. Art is how I see everything, including myself. The thing I have not been seeing is my art.

Dear Friend,

2011-06-18T10:07:00.001-07:00

I got all wigged out about my painting. I really hated seeing it in that art museum-owned gallery. It is lost on the wall amongst all those other bad works of art. It's hanging between two cheesy paintings of birches and above a ceramic plaque of a friendly bear peeping out from between two trees. It looks like an art booth at a flea market. All the glow and color play is lost. It is amazing how deeply off balance I can still get about art. I'm pulling myself back together though. I'm also thanking the stars that I didn't get into grad school for art all those years ago. I'd be a complete nut by now if I were trying to make a living in the art world.

T was no help. He tried, but he didn't know how to reassure me that it is worthwhile to make art, even when it fails to come across in a show. A friend helped, saying things you would have said about how my secret magical side comes out in my paintings. I know that it is not coming across full strength in my art yet. I know that it would take years of painting steadily to get to the point where it did come across. I don't know if I will ever have the time, energy, and will to allow that growth to happen. I hope I will. I think I will have failed at life somehow if I don't. I also think I need to get stronger in order to do it. Instead I feel like I am getting weaker.

When I took Little Miss to the big theater on the college campus for her dress rehearsal yesterday I was led into a practice theater. It was a lot like the little practice theater at AC. Did you ever go in there? It was a high-ceiling room painted all in black with stage lights trained on the center of the space. D and I used to take a boom box and dance in the one at AC. When I was little I had an absolutely amazing art teacher who held classes in a space like that under the main stage at a little theater in Dallas. Suddenly walking into that kind of space yesterday awakened my creativity in a very immediate and powerful way. It was strange. I suddenly wanted to dance and draw and paint big paintings on the floor. I wish I could have a studio like that. It felt like going into my own head or heart, like an infinitely large space inside a small building, absolutely private and safe. I may have to look into renting or borrowing such a space from time to time. I don't think I can turn my bedroom studio into a space like that. With the big windows facing the bay, it is really the opposite kind of space. Sure, I could paint the walls black and hang velvet blackout curtains over the windows, but that would be all wrong.

I am looking forward to our road trip Monday. I am just taking my oil pastels, but I plan to get some good connection to nature and art in between all the driving and camp making work.

Am I insane?

Love,
R

Negativity

2011-06-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

I entered a painting in an open hanging at my local museum. It was one of my favorite paintings I did last summer. To my eye, it was colorful, mysterious, rich, and evocative. Painting it made me feel like the power to my senses had been turned up. It felt germinal, like I could paint a hundred spin-offs from it. I didn't though. I started nursing school, and haven't picked up a brush since. Well that's not true. I tried to paint, and I did some oil pastels, but I couldn't develop any momentum working that infrequently.

In the intervening months, I thought about art, wished I could find the time to paint, and painted in my imagination. The longer I don't paint though, the more I lose my connection to my own creativity and feelings. Paint helps me be more me. When I don't paint, I lose my inner compass, and couldn't even tell you what I care about or what i don't. I start hating things like sex and food and living. In other words, I don't paint for the art. I paint to stay sane. Yes, I want to like what I paint, but I mostly don't...so that isn't why I do it.

But when I see my tiny, insignificant, pointless little waste of canvas and pigment on a museum wall surrounded by a dozen other future garage sale rejects...I really just want to burn it all. I feel terrible for burdening the world with more human crap.

At least this negative crap isn't taking up any physical space.

The Queen of Ghosts

2010-08-08T19:13:00.000-07:00

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

by Wallace Stevens

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Wallace Stevens, “A Rabbit as the King of Ghosts” from Collected Poems. Copyright 1923, 1951, 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Source: Poetry (October 1937).

2010-02-19T09:11:00.000-08:00

Solitude Tree

2010-01-20T10:58:00.000-08:00

Bare, and dry as bone,
branching armature
in lamplight white
and shadow black,
one sleeping tree twists in its socket
in the too green grass as I pass,
slowly gestures a plastic space,
a hand turning an imaginary world.

I sat down to wool-gather, perhaps to draw, or paint, and out pops another worthless poem. What if this is all I can do now? and yes, I really like the word armature.

Letter to a Christian

2009-10-31T12:26:00.000-07:00

Dear _______,

I was deeply touched by your very honest and personal letter, partly because I never would have guessed how similar our stories are. My first sexual experience was also a date rape (at age 15) which left me feeling absolutely ruined and which led to many destructive choices down the road, including promiscuity, alcohol abuse, and isolation far from my home. Even now, my husband and I are treading the painful path of dealing with how he feels about the many men I slept with and how badly some of them treated me. It is hard for him to square his adoring view of me with the slutty behavior of my past, and it makes him violently angry to think about the things some of those men did and said to me and how worthless they made me feel. He obsesses over it. I also had deep depression and suicidal feelings because of the resulting sense of worthlessness and hopelessness. It was part of what led me to accept Christ at the age of 19. I did feel like I needed forgiveness and a new start then. After more years of healing, though, I saw that I was more of a victim than a perpetrator. I needed to forgive more than I needed to be forgiven. I needed to understand why I made the choices I made and who was harmed by them. I was not ruined by sex. I was ruined by my own beliefs about what happened. I was hurt by sex, but it was my own belief that I should be a virgin until I married that really messed me up. I intend to teach my children that sex is a natural and enjoyable act between two adults in love. I will urge them to wait until they are sure they are ready and are in a committed relationship with someone they love and believe they can trust. I will also try to help them decide that nothing anyone does to them can “ruin” them. As they get older, I will try to explain some of the complicated dynamics that make sex into a powerful weapon and what they can do if they are pressured to do something they don’t want to. I know in the end that they must decide for themselves what their values are. My mom was a feminist, and she tried to teach me something very similar to what I hope to teach my kids, but I decided for myself to be a virgin bride because I always valued honesty. I didn’t think I should wear white if I wasn’t a virgin. Isn’t that silly? But it broke my heart when my virginity was taken, and I never will get the big white wedding I dreamed of as a child.

I’m not sure where to start to explain how being an atheist works for me. I suppose I should explain that I am not as hardcore as I sound. I cannot honestly say that I know for sure that there is no God. I have had my own share of miraculous events, and I still cling to the hope that I will be reunited with my beloved dead some day. But I cannot believe in the Abrahamic God...Yahweh, Jehovah, or Allah. To me, he seems so barbaric that even if he is real, I cannot worship him. I’d rather burn for eternity. The core of my problem with Him is the blood sacrifice. What kind of decent God requires or even allows the crucifixion of an innocent man to atone for the sins of all mankind? I have never done anything to merit eternal damnation or blood sacrifice. Can you imagine damning your kids to eternal hell for stealing a candy? for doubting something that makes no sense? for failing to love a barbarian god whom they have never seen a speck of proof of? For being of the same nature as Adam and Eve? Where is the righteousness in that? Can you imagine thinking crucifixion is a suitable solution to the problem? Would you reward them for murdering the best human ever? Would you reward them for accepting that bargain 2,000 years after the fact so they can go to heaven and avoid the unfortunate pain of hell? I cannot worship a God that values an impossibly difficult leap of faith over honesty and thoughtfulness and open mindedness. I cannot worship a God who offers exclusion and punishment to those who cannot help but doubt. I cannot worship a God that no two humans can fully agree on, and on whom most war is founded. It seems so fundamentally wrong to me that I reject that God absolutely.

I don’t mean to rant. I value open mindedness, and I don’t know everything, but I have made my choice for strong reasons, and I am angry about the violence being done every day in God’s name. I hate it that a woman dies in childbirth every single minute of every day on this planet because she cannot get medical care and yet Christians deny her access to birth control. I hate it that Muslims think it is okay to stone a woman to death for the sin of being a rape victim. I hate it that my Jewish neighbors won’t eat at our house because my kitchen isn’t kosher. I hate it that gay kids have to cope with the self loathing that comes from growing up gay in this largely Christian nation. The thing that makes me angriest, though, is when Christians try to force the rest of us to follow their beliefs by legislating morality. If I don’t believe it is a sin to have gay sex, then why should gay marriage be illegal? To me it is just a different lifestyle, one I do not understand and will not pass judgment on. I really do believe that religion does more harm than good.

It is hard to give up on God, though. It hurts beyond belief to think that this brief life is all there is, and to believe that every loving relationship in my life will be severed by death. It is almost unbearable, but it forces me to cherish my loved ones and each glorious day more than I might otherwise. It makes me want to fight for what I believe is right because if this life is all we get, how can we justify building our happiness on someone else’s misery. It’s their only life, too! It makes it even more important to be just and honorable and loving because there is no second chance or divine forgiveness. I am exactly who I am. If I murder, I am a murderer. If I steal, I am a thief. Any forgiveness I receive can come only from my victims. I will not be redeemed by blood.

I believe in my own goodness. I believe my children are inherently good. Every day they demonstrate to me that I am right about them by being loving and thoughtful and honest. I have always thought it sort of funny that believers think atheists have no reason to do good. Does that mean that Christians are only good because God says they should be? Is it because they want to go to heaven, or because they fear hell? I believe in doing good because it is the right thing, because I have to live with myself if I don’t, and because we cannot have a civil society without civil behavior. Besides, it feels good to do good. Goodness is its own reward. I know that is not true for everyone, but in my experience, being religious does nothing to redeem a bad apple.

You put in quotes from Matthew Henry and Rick Warren about how one must have faith despite lack of evidence, how one is judged by how one acts when God’s presence is undetectable. I can’t. I chose to believe in 1985, but I could not turn off my rational mind. Plus, the further I move from faith, the more honest and whole I feel. I don’t have to pretend. I don’t have to shut down lines of reasoning because they plant doubt. I don’t fear debate and discussion with others about what they believe because I am absolutely certain that I have followed the best path for me. I do feel awe and reverence in nature but, like Carl Sagan and John Muir, I believe that the miracle of my existence and that of our living world is every bit as wonderful without an author. My life has meaning because I live each day as the rare and precious improbability it is. I have the energy to volunteer and to pursue my core values because there will be no second chance. I don’t know everything. I know I might be wrong, but odds are most humans are wrong. There are so many religions and philosophies, most of them must be wrong. What reason do you have to choose the path you are on among the thousands of choices? If you had been brought up in the insular animist culture of Myanmar, you’d almost certainly be an animist, wouldn’t you?

You asked if I pray and where I find comfort and guidance. I never could pray, even when I was trying to believe. I guess I don’t have enough imagination. I seek comfort in nature. I am always uplifted by the beauty and wildness of the natural world. I seek guidance from within myself by walking, journaling, and meditating in nature. You asked if I think I’ll see my Mom again. I honestly don’t know. Just because I don’t believe in organized religion doesn’t mean that I am closed to the possibility that there is more to consciousness and personality and the universe itself than I know, or that somehow we do carry on after death. I think it is unlikely that I will see her as she was in my life. I take comfort in the knowledge that the water in her body was released into the clouds and into the web of life when she was cremated. I touch the salt water when I go to the shore and take comfort that her elements are there where her ashes were scattered. I feel like her spirit carries on in my heart and in my children. I hope that when I die I find that we are all reunited somehow. After she died, I read books about near death experiences, seeking some sort of evidence that I would see her again. This is the most painful part of atheism, as I have said before, but it does make me really appreciate the people in my life every day.

You asked what I hope for and in whom I place my trust. It sounds arrogant to say that I trust my own heart and I trust the people I love. It isn’t arrogance, though. I can’t help being who I am and following my own internal compass. I do not trust people who claim to know who God is and what God wants. To me, that is the ultimate arrogance and dishonesty. I don’t mean you here. You are not telling me what I should believe. It is religious leaders I refer to. The only one I know really well is the pastor of a Bible church, and he is one of the most seriously messed up individuals I know. He means well, and seeks healing for himself and his flock, but I really think that his beliefs keep him from seeing the truth and healing, and I believe his search for answers in the Bible leads him to interpret scripture as creatively as any other religious leader, including jihadist ayatollahs in Iran. His family is as wounded and unable to heal as he is. He has been crying every day for the past four years over the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. His wife hates herself because she cannot write the novel she has been trying to write for the past 20 years. I really believe it is because she realizes that she needs to be honest in order to write, but if she is honest about her own lack of faith, her entire world will fall apart. Their children are as messed up as they are. On top of it all, he recently decided to get out of the ministry and take a sales job. He sought a “Christian” company with “Christian ethics.” He is now selling air purifiers for a pyramid scheme company called _________. He had to pay $10,000 to become a salesman for them, despite the fact that this was the last of their savings and they are in imminent danger of losing their home. Now he is selling a product that puts harmful ozone into room air. The company intentionally uses verbal sales tactics and not documentation so they can make claims that they are supported by the American Lung Association and NASA. When I did a bit of research to see if I could support his efforts by recommending his product to people I reach as an American Lung Association volunteer, I learned that the company is specifically cited by ALAW, Consumer Reports, and NASA as a company which is making false claims and whose product is harmful to those with lung conditions. How’s that for Christian ethics?! Add in the Catholic priests who diddled little boys and girls under their care, protestant televangelists who fleece their flocks and screw whomever they like, and the thousands of other examples of abuse of religious authority, and you’ll begin to see why I despise people who dare to preach.

You also asked why I continue to celebrate Christmas and Easter. It is just because we started the traditions when my oldest was small, and I cannot take that away from my kids. They enjoy the traditions even without the beliefs underlying them. I fumble my way forward same as all humans do.

My greatest role model, ________ told me, years before I called myself an atheist, that she did not believe she had ever done anything to merit Hell, and she believed that the dead live on only in the memories of those who loved them. She never went to church, prayed, or spoke of faith or God. Yet there is no denying that she lived a wonderful, full life and reflected the values of love and family and generosity. When I compare her to the Christians I know well (and I don’t mean you here), the Christians don’t look so good. They mistrust science and reason because they fear being led astray. What kind of real God would be threatened by scientific scrutiny? They don’t take responsibility for their own emotional growth and their impact on the world around them because at heart they don’t believe this life matters as much as the next. From my perspective, they are throwing away all that is real and important for something imaginary. It is insane! Just as Christians think science is dangerous, I think faith is. Once you believe something because you choose to, or because someone says you should, and you discount evidence to the contrary, you are set up to be a lifelong sucker. It’s just like George Orwell’s “doublethink.” Once you can accept that God created the world in a week less than 5,000 years ago and that the planet is billions of years old and all life evolved from single celled organisms in primordial goo, your ability to reason is done for. They can’t both be true, and only one theory holds up to scientific scrutiny.

I feel unkind, bashing Christianity this way. I don’t want to insult you or _____. He is doing such good work as ___________. Fighting the abuse of children has to be one of the most important missions possible. And I know you are a beautifully loving and giving and brilliant woman. I don’t for a minute believe I am smarter than you. I just don’t believe you two are good because you are Christians. I believe you are good despite being Christians. I know you will disagree. I am content to leave it at that.

Lovingly,
Rachel

Chloe's Boots

2009-09-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

I'm trying something new, as of two days ago. I'm going to make some sort of "art" every day, if I feel like it, and post the results of my effort. I'm intentionally keeping the pressure on myself to produce as low as possible, but I do have a goal. The urge to make art again has been growing for weeks, and is accompanied by a sense of restlessness I haven't been able to shake. I need something I'm not getting from books, movies, music, or other people's art. I have been looking for my own art, and not finding it, I guess. The only chance I have of satisfying this craving is to give art a try again. As I have examined the specificity of this craving, I find that I know what I need to do, for a change. I am usually clueless about where I'm trying to go with my art. I hesitate to say too much about what I'm looking for at this early point, but I want my images to evoke a sense of vertigo and flight. I want a fully saturated range of shades from dark to light. I want mystery, rough texture and earthiness. I want enough realism to allow the viewer to believe in the space to some extent, and to be comfortable with any figures I may represent, but it needs to be loose enough to evoke a sense of things being slightly out of control, wild, and unreal. I don't want to get bogged down with my choice of subject matter or emotional tone. I'll leave that wide open for play. My mentors for the moment will be Francesco Goya, Guy Anderson, George Tooker, Edwin Ushiro, and Hayao Miyazaki. Let's see where that takes me. I'll keep posting my efforts.

The work I did yesterday was practice. I was practicing my observation skills and getting my hands dirty again for the first time in ages. Don't take it too seriously.

Racism, alive and well in the USA

2009-09-11T16:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve never seen such a climate of mistrust and antipathy toward the president of the United States of America. Granted, I’m only 43, and I’m sure things were worse during the civil war, the Vietnam war, and probably a few other choice points in history. Granted, some level of antipathy has been there all my life. Even in my twenties, I understood that Clinton’s impeachment had nothing to do with his ability to serve well as president, and everything to do with politics. His enemies found his Achilles’ heel and tried to bring him down with it. Liberals like me mistakenly thought Bush’s Achille’s heel was his lack of foreign relations skills. We did our level best to bring him down for getting us into the wrong war at the wrong time. President Obama’s Achilles’ heel is that many white Americans are not comfortable with a black president. His enemies are using the weapon of mistrust to try to bring him down. They are using your unexamined, unspoken, guilty little secret, racism. Never mind that he is the most qualified president we have had since the founding fathers, in terms of education, intellect, temperament, and natural leadership skills. Never mind that he more truly represents our nation today than any white man could. His personal history is black and white, Christian and Muslim, welfare and Ivy League. His story is quintessentially American.
I should be philosophical about it, I suppose. All is fair in politics, after all. But I can’t because Clinton and Bush made really big, stupid mistakes. To some extent, they brought it on themselves. As far as I can tell, Obama has not. Instead, his enemies are spreading lies and rumors about him, playing up our most disturbing, nameless fears. The stories are designed to keep you profoundly uncomfortable, even afraid of the untrustworthy black man. “Obama wants to socialize health care.” “Obama is like Hitler, fooling Americans into creating death camps for ‘undesirables’.” “Obama wants to euthanize the elderly.” ‘Don’t let your kids see his stay in school speech and be indoctrinated by our most liberal president ever.” “Obama’s birth certificate has never been produced.” “ Obama is responsible for the biggest budget deficit in history.” Really? Do you believe the shit being spouted by the likes of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and their like? Why? Why believe that instead of doing a little bit of research, not on conservative blogs and talk shows, but on factcheck.org. You can even read the health care bill (as it stands now) on congress.com. The stories are racist. Believing them is racist. Holding this president to a different standard than any other is racist. I cannot let it go unsaid any longer. I’m fighting the racism right now.

Death Panels

2009-09-11T16:58:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin claims that “Obama’s” health care plan includes a provision that will result in the creation of death panels of doctors who will decide when your life is too costly to maintain. Off you’ll go to be euthanized, thus saving the insurance company lots of end-of-life expenses. Typically, the overdressed Alaskan sociopath has grossly misunderstood the facts. We do need the “death panel” provision, which has unfortunately been cut thanks to the furor the megalomaniac bimbo from the 49th state raised.
When my mother was hospitalized for her final illness, we had to choose day by day to what extent we would honor her wish not to be on life support. Each decision was excruciating to make. If we said no to the ventilator, she would die. If we said yes, we were going against her wishes. Did her odds of survival justify saying yes? We were not ready to let her go. One doctor gave her 50-50 odds of survival. Even I thought that was overly optimistic, but his input was important in making decisions. We badly needed a conference with her pulmonologist, her nephrologist, and her hospitalist to discuss the choices. Fortunately these doctors saw this as part of the job and did not charge for their time. But what if she had had a slower course of disease...say, cancer? What if we needed an appointment to discuss when to withdraw treatment because it would only prolong her suffering? Would insurance cover that? What if we needed to discuss palliative care? Is that permitted in conservative ideology? Or is it too similar to assisted suicide? Do they have the right to force her to keep fighting even when it’s obvious she hasn’t a chance and the fight is simple cruelty? The right to die takes on a whole new meaning.
I tend to watch the antics of the conservatives with a shake of my head and a look of disgust. My first reaction to Obama’s statement that they were dropping the end of life counseling provision was, “Oh well, that’s a reasonable concession.” But it isn’t. We’ve let a flat out fabrication undermine good medicine. I was a hospice volunteer years before I had to handle my mother’s end of life care. I have seen how much end of life care matters. Most of us will need it eventually. I know that hospice will continue to fill in the gap for many, but we should be making insurance pay their share. It matters. Please write to your representatives and ask that this provision not be cut. We need clarity, not concession. Define end of life care so Americans can understand it.

Conversion: Chapter 1

2009-07-31T17:51:00.001-07:00

I was raised in a casually Presbyterian family. We went to First Presbyterian Church in downtown Dallas for weddings, funerals, Sunday school, choir, youth group, and the occasional Sunday morning service. It seemed more social than religious to me. Even in my preadolescent years, I recognized the template each sermon followed: amusing anecdotal tale, a smattering of toothless jokes, a gentle moral lesson, and an assurance that we, the congregation, were right with God. A couple of times I was exposed to a more passionate version of faith, in the form of a new youth pastor with a guitar and a burning desire to ignite our hearts with love for Jesus, or a weekend at my friend’s Baptist bible camp at which everyone was encouraged to witness for or accept Christ right then and there. I responded, but didn’t maintain interest for long. My default personal belief was pretty liberal. I believed all religious faiths had a road to God, not just Christians. In my naive and idealistic youth, I named my highest values as Truth, Beauty, and Love. I believed that God was basically a loving presence, and that He was most present when we humans loved one another. I think I formed this belief because I wanted a good God, and so I ascribed my own highest values to my personal deity. I had a powerful need to know the meaning of my life, and to be a force for good in the world. I’m sure it was rooted in some childish need for love and approval. It drove me to seek a God that was never there.

In college I started to seek some verifiable truth about God. I attended Intervarsity Christian Fellowship meetings and took a class called “Judaism and New Testament Christianity.” I formed a close friendship with the wife of the IVCF leader and, after answering my many questions and assuaging my doubts temporarily, she “led me to accept Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.” Jesus seemed like a really powerful man-god, displaying the best values of love, charity, courage, and peacefulness. I wanted to internalize his guidance, and as far as I could tell, accepting Christ would cost me nothing. I was “born again.” I pursued that course of faith with the best intentions. I prayed, I read the Bible, I went to IVCF meetings. But even then I didn’t believe that I needed forgiveness, nor did I fear eternal damnation. I could not imagine a God who would consign people to hell for failure to follow the narrow path of fundamental Christianity. Immediately upon my conversion to fundamentalism I became aware of an overwhelming sense of emptiness. I was utterly unable to convince my heart that anyone was listening to my prayers. It began to feel like I was playing some giant make-believe game which I really needed to end because it felt unnatural and wrong. I became depressed as I realized that I could not make the leap of faith required. It went way beyond doubt. I could plainly see that I was trying to believe something which was unsupportable in the face of reality. Jesus was great, but he was dead. I could not believe in, much less worship a God who was so fundamentally brutal and unfair as to demand blood sacrifice to atone for the simple “flaw” of curiosity and willfulness. I kept trying though, to varying degrees for another twenty years.

Two years after I was “born again,” I took an outdoors course, consisting of 22 days of backpacking in the North Cascades mountain range in Washington State. Ten students and two instructors carried food, camping and cooking equipment, climbing gear, clothes, and barest of necessities, meeting at designated re-supply points once a week. Our packs weighed an average of forty pounds, and we covered about 150 miles on foot over rugged mountain terrain. We had tarps instead of tents, and went without such luxuries as soap, shampoo, and toilet paper. We were taught to take only photographs and leave only footprints. We learned to use compasses and geological contour maps to navigate. We got up before dawn to ascend steep inclines and watch the sun rise over high cirques and meadows. We climbed peaks that had never been climbed before. We meandered up and down through soul searingly beautiful mountains and forests in every kind of weather. I remember trudging in heavy rain through forest which had been decimated by fire, awed by the stark beauty of the blackened trees and blazing purple fireweed under the heavy gray sky. I remember sitting on a boulder above a high, curving valley blanketed in wildflowers, watching a train of fluffy white clouds skirt by with surprising speed, following the curve of the near valley wall, filling my nose with the smell of ozone as it briefly engulfed me in white fog.

I was pushed beyond my physical limits many times on that adventure, and I felt mortal fear as I never had before. I was the pale, slim, bookworm daughter of a Dallas librarian. I had never climbed anything higher than the stairs up the bleachers at my college before that trip. On the second day in the wilderness, we crossed a talus field, a tumble of boulders ranging in size from football to panel van. I was already exhausted when we approached it, from hiking several miles and gaining a couple of thousand feet in altitude as we ascended from our starting point. I was off balance and feeling fairly crushed by the extra 40 pounds on my back. I was still breaking in my new leather hiking boots, and had the mole-skinned blisters to prove it. As I committed myself to the traverse, I became aware of how easy it would be to break a leg. It began to seem very unlikely that I could cross those giant boulders without falling, as they tipped under my boots and my backpack pushed and pulled me off balance. I fell behind as I became more and more cautious, crouching down so I could use my hands and half crawl across the talus. I was getting panicky about falling behind and not being able to make it across. I began to hyperventilate. One of the instructors had to climb back down to me and put my arms over my head until my breathing slowed, then coach me across the talus. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. I learned what it means to feel your bowels loosen with fear as I approached my first technical rock climb. I didn’t believe the ropes would protect me from head trauma and broken bones because I could see that I didn’t have to fall far to mangle myself on jagged rock, and we were days from any sort of help. A terrifying high point of the trip was a traverse across a ridge of sharp shale with extraordinarily steep drops off either side. All ten students were roped together as we crossed. If one fell, we all would. I crossed it, walking upright and tall, though I was sure we would fall and be shredded to ribbons on the blades of shale. My reward was to lie on my back on a high mountain peak, feeling like the mountain was breathing under me, lifting my closer to the black of space, just visible behind the blue of the sky. The price of my courage on that and other occasions was paid each night. I had the most terrifying nightmares of my life. Each night, I dreamed of falling over sharp stone into a malevolent void, an empty and voracious black hole which would inevitably devour me. It was simple mortality made real to me.

Living in nature, completely removed from the many numbing distractions of society such as books, music, television, and food, forced me to see the simple structure of life itself. I began to see how hostile nature is to human life. We are so fragile and defenseless against cold and hunger, sharp edges and hard objects. We are slow, clumsy, loud, smelly, weak, and defenseless. I felt humble and small as I walked through those immense and ancient mountains. I came to love and admire the trees, so old and well rooted, beautifully adapted and in harmony with their ecosystem. I found myself gazing into the eyes of birds, deer, marmots, and pika. I felt like the wilderness had a soul, ageless and silent, looking knowingly out from the eyes of the animals. I was pleased, rather than scared to wake one night and find a small animal trying to nest in my hair. I came to appreciate my own ability to adapt as my body became leaner and stronger. I was not a part of this wild place, but I was in it long enough to begin to see it for what it was.

Then came my solo. Our instructors took us to a warm, lushly forested valley where we each set up a small campsite along a river. I was isolated in my own patch of forest with an 8’x10’ tarp, a sleeping bag and mat, warm clothes, and a water bottle I could refill in the river. I fasted for three days, alone in that place, with nothing to do but listen to the river and the wind in the trees. I soothed my empty stomach with cold river water and waited for something to happen. I built the best shelter I could craft with my tarp. It was as symmetrical and secure against the weather as it could be. I was uncomfortable for the first two days, bored, hungry, hot, and plagued with mosquitoes, which gathered in black clouds on the inside of my tarp. By the third day, though, I began to feel strangely calm and no longer hungry. I felt as if my mind and body had slowed and become attuned with the trees and the river and the breeze and even the stones. The trees were threaded with spider silk and dew, lit up with golden sunlight. It seemed like the very fabric of existence was visible as light. I felt more at peace than I ever had before, and I remember thinking, “There is no need for God. Life itself is enough.” It was so simple and so profound to me, and the truth of it was inescapable. God died right then and there for me, though I didn’t quite let go of Him just yet. I wasn’t ready to face the ramifications of atheism then. I needed to work through them slowly and find my own path to the truth.

Why believe?

2009-07-29T13:33:00.000-07:00

This is a work in progress. As I come to accept that there is no God, and bone up on all the rational arguments against His existence, I find myself wondering why people choose to believe. The following list represents my thoughts thus far on the subject. I'm pursuing this because I do think that belief in any god does more harm than good for most people, and especially for society as a whole.

People don’t choose to believe in God because evidence supports the theory that He exists. People choose to believe because in our society, it is their best option. It is a fully rational choice to make. Here’s why:

1. Social Convention. To disbelieve is to go against the powerful forces of conformity and tradition. Those who do not believe are portrayed as a threat to the American way of life and all that we as a nation hold dear.
2. Family and peer pressure is similar to convention, but more personal. Being an atheist challenges the dearly held beliefs of those close to us, and there is no denying that this causes friction and misery. The fundamental rift between believers and nonbelievers is irreconcilable, so most of us keep our atheism to ourselves.
3. Self image. Atheists are seen as cold rationalists, lacking all normal feelings of sentimentality and romance. They are thought to be arrogant, unable to feel humility before the magnificence of “the created order.” They are less sympathetic characters than suicide bombers to most Americans. They are considered unelectable to any public office. Coming out as an atheist is harder than coming out gay.
4. Social networking. Churches, mosques, and synagogues are vital centers for social and business networking. Furthermore, sharing a faith confers some degree of trust automatically, because it is assumed that the same moral structure is in the heart of each member of your religious community, plus there tends to be a narrow socioeconomic spectrum within most church/mosque/synagogue communities.
5. Perception of ethics/morals. Atheists are thought by many of the faithful to have no moral center and no reason to behave ethically. Although this represents a grievous misunderstanding of most atheists, who often come to atheism because they feel a deep need to know the truth and be part of a rational society (in which ethical behavior is the result of fully internalized reason rather than some threat of punishment by an all too forgiving deity), this belief prevails. I wonder why believers think we’d all revert to monsters if God weren’t watching.
6. Odds/benefit ratio. To believe is thought to cost you nothing, and even if the likelihood that there is a god is immeasurably low, the benefit (eternity in paradise) is infinitely high. It is the ultimate lottery. Statistically, it makes good sense to believe. The same is true of the inverse, the threat of eternal hell. The risk that hell exists is immeasurably low, but the price is immeasurably high if it does exist, and it costs nothing to believe. Of course you buy in. The truth is irrelevant.
7. Avoidance of pain. Losing faith is like losing a loved one. At least it was for me. There is no fatherly figure listening to my pain, loving me despite my imperfection, carrying me through the rough patches. My ultimate imaginary friend is dead. I still grieve, especially at Christmas and Easter. Both occasions are absolutely hollow and banal for me now. I resent having to participate, though I try to rationalize that generosity and festivity with the people I love is worthwhile in any guise. The most painful part, though, is when I have lost a loved one. The thought that I will never see them again is unbearable, and the thought that every relationship will eventually be severed by death terrifies me.
8. Preservation of mystery. Who wants to live in a world without magic, mystery, and miracles? What do we do with our overdeveloped temporal lobes if we cannot participate in worship and prayer and divine ecstasy? We seem to have been designed for faith. I don’t believe we were.
9. Vestigial survival trait. We evolved to seek pattern and meaning because that is how we learn. Historically, the gaps in our understanding of life, the universe, and everything were huge, and we needed something huge and godlike to fill them. As these gaps, though still immense, begin to shrink, and the fabric of existence takes on a more distinct and comprehensible shape, God ceases to fit. The urge to believe in God is vestigial.
We also evolved to be social creatures. Faith has provided a shared sense of identity to hold societies together, and also the strength to believe we can prevail even when prospects seem bleak. Belief is a survival trait.

Fabric

2009-06-17T11:01:00.001-07:00

Glimmer-threaded,
green-feathered
grandfather hemlock,
dewfingers drip
a thousand trembling orbs,
each a gold-green crystal inverse,
an inverted snow-globe shrine,
star-hearted foci of silence.

Summer Day Ditty

2009-06-17T10:05:00.001-07:00

Slimshanks leaped,
fastfolded knee-to-chin,
elbows locked in and
crater-crack splash,
saltsilver shards of green glass bay
cold speckle my legs,
slow-surfing the bobbing dock
and laughing.
Seal-pup sleek, up pops
my love.

moment

2009-04-22T15:37:00.000-07:00

rose in cut glass craves earth,
but stiffened with her moment,
she iridesces, velvet and moist,
welcoming the penetrating gaze
until she is permitted to drop
petals by threes and fours,
weep sap, and melt clumsily
into the warm, loving ground.

limerick

2009-01-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

Chloe, Chlo-A, Chloetta
likes her mother bettah;
her father's no grinch,
but in a pinch,
her mother can knit her a sweatah.

Riddled

2009-01-11T19:37:00.000-08:00

It's the earth's back yard.
It's a bug light for meteors.
It's the blushing cheek of God against the breast of Mother Earth.
It's a soul vault.
It's the mind that conceives sunrise and sunset as a full circle.
It's the air mountains breathe.
It's the abyss over which we hang by our feet.
It's the reflection of a puddle.
It's a big, blue cross hanging over a downtown intersection.
It's the fabric you can puncture, but never rend.
It's straight-pinned to railroad tracks
and tattooed to oceans.
It can't come in.
It threads itself endlessly through my squinted eye.

2008-12-20T18:47:00.000-08:00

Our 96 year old house after the first day of snow. We got about 6 more inches after that, and are due for more over the next 24 hours.

To the soundtrack of a Charlie Brown Christmas

2008-12-20T17:43:00.000-08:00

I figure I have, at most, three viewers. Hello, love of my life! Hello old flame, whom I wish lived about 2000 miles closer! Hello rare and precious friend.

I am excited that we have been buried in snow this week, necessitating a rugged and heavily clothed approach to Christmas preparations. We have been doing some fairly glorious sledding. I have gathered most of the items from which the magic will be spun on Christmas eve. I have begun to anticipate the smells of Christmases past as I make my family's traditional dishes, and also to anticipate the children coming downstairs after Santa comes, their squeals of delight and their happy faces. It is one of those times when everything comes together despite the gaping holes left by the absence of loved ones, despite the emptiness of the religious overtones, despite the commercialism. What is left, after all these years, is the joy of seeing my children believing in magic for a day. It is also the precious gift of remembrance, the smells that take me back to my Grandmother's house, the ornaments I remember hanging on dozens of other trees. I am not a traditionalist, by any stretch, but for the past decade or more, I've felt like I live in a world I hardly recognize. I could never have predicted 20 years ago what my life would be like today...cell phones, the internet, my mysterious infatuation with science, my complete loss of faith in most things I took for granted, my strange husband, my even stranger kids...none of it is remotely as I imagined it would be. Why am I not an artist, and how the hell did I end up in the upper left corner of the country?
Christmas is a blessed bit of continuity in my unexpected life.

Still here

2008-11-18T18:48:00.000-08:00

I'm still here, in case you were wondering. I'm slogging laboriously through Anatomy and Physiology, trying to eke out an A despite a hideously disorganized and immature teacher (hello, underpaid community college adjunct!) I have to wear a ridiculous respirator in the lab to keep my asthma under control in the presence of irritating formalin fumes from the preserved kitties, and my teacher actually laughed at me for wearing it!
I just worked my skinny old butt off for two weeks learning the muscles in humans and cats, only to have her not ask at all about the tricky extensors and flexors of the hands and feet, which should have been on the exam; to ask repeatedly (as in about four times each) for us to identify the rectus abdominus, the tibialis anterior, the sternocleidomastoid, and the external obliques; and to ask five questions the lab manual specifically said would not be on the exam. It's annoying having to keep this woman in line!
I'm busy, but I'm quite happy for the moment. I love being in school, and I really love science. I feel a vague nostalgia for art, and look longingly at my art materials occasionally, but I still believe that there will be time for that later. The chance that there will not be matters less and less.
I wish I could skip Christmas this year, though. I hate spending money on a Christian holiday. I think that as an atheist I should be exempt. Tell that to the kids, though.

Nasty-gram to a vandal

2008-11-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

Last night a vandal slashed tires in my neighborhood, targeting cars with Obama bumper stickers. Just as a person who steals is a thief, the person who slashed those tires is a terrorist. The effect of his behavior is that people are now afraid to express their beliefs and opinions on their bumpers. This terrorist has undermined their freedom of speech. They are also worried that some worse act may follow, perhaps cut brake lines or a brick through a window. These victims do not feel safe in their own neighborhood. This terrorist cut into limited family budgets and kept people who are vital to the health of our community tied up dealing with disabled vehicles. Even those of us who were not targeted are victimized because we do not feel safe either, and our lives were disrupted by the effect of this action on our community.

I don’t know why the terrorist targeted Obama supporters. Perhaps he is a racist or a religious extremist. Perhaps he has bought into the hate and fear which so distorted some people’s view of our new President-elect. I do know that the terrorist has undermined his own cause. He has reinforced the notion that conservatives=racists=hate-mongers=religious extremists=terrorists. Like the Christians who repeatedly target the Scientologists down the street with vandalism, he has given his own cause a bad name. He is no better than the religious freaks who flew planes into the twin towers, and his actions have aligned him with their destructive sort of ideology.

I realize that people who commit acts like this in the dark of night are cowards. They rage against blacks or Democrats or other religions because they feel a sense of powerlessness and impotence in their own lives. Whatever their reasons, though, by their actions, they make themselves criminals. I hope they realize that, and I hope they can see that the only way they can redeem themselves is to confess and make reparations. Until they do, they are criminals, vandals, and terrorists.

When did I become such an angry woman?

Twiddle

2008-10-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

"I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
- Mark Twain

"Reality is whatever refuses to go away after I stop believing in it."
- Phillip K. Dick

Seven of our 90-ish resident Orca whales have apparently died, including the almost 100 year old matriarch. It makes me sad. I have seen them so many times, I have come to love them. I love the mysterious world they live in, and the mammalian breath they can hold for uncounted minutes. I love that they sing and love each other, and that they are still fundamentally mysterious to us in so many ways.

I've been wanting to go to San Juan Island for a couple of weeks. I haven't been there in a year and a half, since Mom's first posthumous birthday. I feel a compulsion to take the long ferry ride through her beloved green islands, to sit on her beach, and to just be for a bit. I need to let my pieces fall back into place. Maybe I'll see the whales.

My Apology

2008-10-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

Christianity pisses me off. Every time I stumble through Christian stations on the car radio, I say either, “stupid Christians,” or, “fucking Christians,” depending on how painfully strident or prostrate the snippet they inflict upon me in their 2 seconds of air time is. It isn’t rational. It is a gut level, knee-jerk rage I feel every time I see another cattle-barn mega-church or hear a classic Christian phrase like, “God’s plan for us,” or “equally yoked.” I do have some good reasons for objecting to Christianity. All non-believers are familiar with them. Christians annoy everyone with their proselytizing, their smug assurance that they, and they alone are going to heaven, that they alone know God’s will. They try to change the laws of this beautifully secular nation to reflect their narrow values. They famously fail to follow the teachings of their so-called savior. Jesus was all about social justice, non-violence, and deepest integrity. He would have been best buddies with Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, and John Lennon, but they actually think he’d prefer to associate with the likes of Sarah Palin or Billy Graham. Jesus was all about this life, today. He was about doing the right thing, not saving your sorry-ass soul. Heaven is a despicable lie designed to keep the underdogs of the world working for nothing so the rich can keep getting richer. Christians hurt us all with their condemnations of gays, their antagonism to other religions, their narrow-minded certainty that they know what is right for everyone, and their ignorant willingness to throw away what is magical and beautiful in this life for the promise of the next.

Those are not the only reasons I get so angry every time I am reminded of the existence of Christianity, though. I am angry because I was brought up to believe that shit. I was told that God loves me, that he knows my heart and really loves and accepts me. I was told that I would see all of my departed loved ones again in Heaven some day. I was told that my soul was eternal and would be united with God, himself, on judgement day. I never really understood it all. I couldn’t quite understand what I could ever do that would merit eternal hell. What kind of god would allow someone to burn for all eternity? How could there be any reason or benefit for that? That was the beginning of the end for me. God must be an asshole to be so cruel. Then I started thinking about the meaning of blood sacrifice, that God wanted Jesus, his only son, to die on the cross to redeem me for my sins. How barbaric! Sorry, but I’ve got no use for an asshole god like that. I have done nothing in my life to merit hell or blood sacrifice, and I’d rather burn for eternity than worship such an asshole! Then, in 1987, I had a spiritual journey. I fasted for three days, alone in the woods. I learned that life is mystery and miracle enough. There is no god, and no need for god. It took many more years for me to let go of it all, but that was the day my god died.

I really want to believe that I will see my beloved dead again. It is the most unbearable thing of all to think that I will not. It is unbearable to think that I will be parted from my own children by death. I want to believe that we are here for a reason, that our spark of life and brief arc of existence means something. I cling to the evidence I have. I cling to the rainbows and visions my Mother may have sent. I cling to the rare miracles I believe I have seen. They don’t add up to god any more, but they allow me to believe that there is more than we see. I still need that, and I guess that is the real core of my burning anger. I want a real discussion about the shape and origin of the universe, about our duties as members of society, about the wonder and potential of art and science. Instead I get creationism and bigotry and the politics of narrow minds. I have to spend $8,000 a year to get my kid the education he deserves because the public schools are busy pandering to the lowest common denominator. Do I blame Christians for all that? Yes, I do. Hell, I’ll even blame them for the fact that the US can’t go metric. Christians are skeptical of science. They think scientific curiosity is one of the devil’s tools! They think we’re in the final days, so global warming doesn’t matter. They are jamming on the brakes so we can’t reach for the next great paradigm. That’s why I hates them, Precious. That’s why.

Take my ears, please!

2008-09-26T10:53:00.001-07:00

Welcome to my pity party:

I have an inner ear disorder, Meniere's disease. It gives me my own personal symphony in my ears: I have a steel pipe being dragged through a distant alley in my right ear. My left ear has been playing the persistent hum of fluorescent lights for about 6 years, but for the past four weeks, it has also been entertaining me with the constant buzz of single engine planes, complete with Doppler effect. I got used to the pipes and the fluorescent hum, but the planes are getting to me.
Meniere's also causes vertigo. I don't tend to spin, though. I rock, or else I just feel off balance and motion sick. Mild vertigo wages a constant assault on several areas of my brain. It causes irritability and fatigue. It also causes something termed the channel effect. It's the tendency of vestibular disturbances to reduce the amount of information a person can correctly process at a time. I can usually keep dozens of tasks on schedule, managing my education, my family schedule, housekeeping, and bookkeeping, and still pay attention to the lively and fascinating chatter of my brilliant and verbose family. When Meniere's is active, though, I make stupid mistakes all the time. How am I going to make a 4.0 in Anatomy and Physiology this quarter if Meniere's is back to stay? I'm stubborn, though. For now, I am saying I will just have to work harder and be more careful.
Meniere's also causes hearing loss. I have been deaf to conversation in my left ear for about 6 years. My doctor has assured me that the disease is only in my left ear. I have known he was wrong for about 5 years, but only yesterday got the proof: I have lost 20 decibels at 500 hertz in my right ear. Now, in addition to the tinnitus and pressure I've had in both ears all along, and the rocking vertigo which argues that both ears are sending conflicting misinformation, I have documented low range hearing loss in both ears. I have a future of deafness to look forward to. Hopefully I won't have significant loss in my right ear for another 20 years. That is how long it took my left ear to get that bad. You never know, though. I guess I should listen to lots of music while I can.

I'm done moaning for now. I had to do this because it has been knocking around in my head, making me anxious and unhappy for almost a month now, and I thought I could yack it out on my blog and move the fuck on. Wish I could really unload it that easily, but there ain't no goddamn cure.

Chloe the Farting Princess

2008-09-12T18:57:00.000-07:00

Chloe was born to a loving mother and father in a kingdom far away. From an early age the little girl had a strange gift. Her farts sounded like flutes, smelled like roses, and she could play any tune you might care to hear with that talented little bottom of hers.

Sadly, Chloe’s mother passed away when Chloe was still very young, and her father married a woman with two daughters just a bit older than Chloe. Chloe’s stepmother was not nice, nor were her two stepsisters. They forced Chloe to cook and clean, and, having no ear for music, they did not allow her to fart in the house.

In this kingdom, so far away, was a lonely prince. He had searched and searched for a beautiful girl to be his princess, but had not yet found her. So the king decided to have a royal ball, and invite all the young girls in the land to see if one might be beautiful and talented enough to win the heart of the prince. Royal servants were sent to the farthest reaches of the kingdom to place an invitation to the ball in the hands of every marriageable young girl in the land.

When a royal page arrived at Chloe’s house, she answered the door with a smile and a happy little trill of toots. The royal page’s eyes glazed over a moment, he swayed a bit, then said, “My, what a lovely aroma. Is it roses?” He shook his head as if to clear it, then continued, “Here is your invitation to the royal ball. Every young girl in the kingdom is invited to attend.”

The excitement in Chloe’s home was wild in the days leading up to the ball. Each of the stepsisters was certain she could win the prince’s heart if her dress was sumptuous enough, if her hair was piled up high enough on her head, if she smelled sweet enough. They all made Chloe sew their dresses, fix their hair, paint their nails, and tend to their preparations all day long. The poor girl was exhausted, but she was also excited. Each night after her stepsisters had finally gone to bed in their mud masks and curlers, Chloe sewed her own ball gown from the scraps of her stepsisters’ dresses, and perfumed it with her heavenly farts.

The day of the ball finally arrived in a flurry of final preparations. Chloe’s stepsisters primped and preened, piling their hair into mountains of curls, painting their faces, lacing their bulging bellies into their tight dresses. They looked almost lovely, if you didn’t look too close. Meanwhile, their mother had a plan to keep poor Chloe home from the ball so she would not get the chance to steal the prince’s heart. The rotten woman knew that Chloe had been secretly working on a dress of her own, and that it was the most beautiful dress she had ever seen. If Chloe wore that dress to the ball, the prince was sure to fall in love with her rather than one of her stepsisters. Each morning, after Chloe had fallen asleep, exhausted from her many labors, her stepmother had come in and quietly picked loose the seams of Chloe’s dress. She didn’t pick them all the way loose, but just enough. When Chloe came downstairs in it on the eve of the ball, looking like a true princess, and her clumsy stepsister stepped on her hem, the whole dress simply fell apart and crumpled around her feet. Poor Chloe was heartbroken, her farts sounding a low lament as she crouched over her ruined dress. She knew she would never make it to the ball now. She wept and wept as her stepsisters rode off to the ball in their carriage, looking like a pair of bloated Barbie dolls.

The scent of Chloe’s sad gases, and the mournful tune they made carried out over the garden on the evening breeze. It wafted this way and that, like a butterfly amongst the trees of the nearby woods, and stole softly into the home of a forest fairy. The fairy, whose name was Priscilla, flitted out to see where the music and the lovely scent came from. She was enchanted, and very curious, so she followed the heartbroken lament carried on puffs of sweetest rose until BUMP! She crashed right into the bottom of dear Chloe, still weeping over her ruined dress. Chloe, in surprise, ended her lament suddenly with a discordant note that sounded like a bullfrog in love, blasting the fairy back a few feet. Priscilla hit the wall and slid down it, laughing so hard her tiny tummy ached. That was the best fart she’d ever heard!

“Ooh, who are you?” asked Chloe while the fairy still writhed on the floor in laughter.

Priscilla said, “I’m a fairy, of course. Where did you learn to fart like that?”

“I’ve been farting like this since I was a baby. Why?” said Chloe.

“It means you are part fairy, Chloe,” replied Priscilla, “ Only fairies fart roses and woodwinds. Say, our fairy clan is having a big party tonight to celebrate the blooming of the wildflowers in Fairy Meadow. Our orchestra is short one flute-farter. Would you consider coming to our party and playing with the fairy fart orchestra?”

“Oh,” said Chloe, looking sad again, “ I was planning to go to the prince’s ball tonight. He is looking for a girl to be his princess, and I made a beautiful gown especially for the...the...oh, boo-hoo-hoo....” Chloe started crying again.

“You mean this mess of silk and tulle around your feet?” asked the fairy. Chloe just nodded and cried. “I can fix your dress in a jiffy,” and, to Chloe’s amazement, the fairy began pulling silky gossamer threads from thin air and turning out shimmering lace and fine seams with it. She darted from the fabric piled at Chloe’s feet to Chloe’s shoulders, and back. Working her way down Chloe’s figure, she twirled and flitted, stitching together a graceful, beautifully fitted dress suffused with the magic and mystery of fairy artistry. Chloe looked wild and lovely, and as naturally stunning as a wildflower.

Chloe stood in amazement, looking down at her incomparable new gown, and breathlessly said, “Thank you.”

Priscilla waved her hand in a dismissive gesture and said, “Glad you like it. Of course, I could have done something really spectacular with fairy fabrics, but this should suffice to impress any human prince. Well, hadn’t you better get going?”

“Oh, yes,” said Chloe, startled out of her amazement. She thanked the fairy once more and fled, on foot, to the ball.

Chloe burst into the royal ballroom late and out of breath, her cheeks pink from the fresh evening air, tendrils of blonde hair curling around her face, freed from her hairdo during her run to the palace. She looked stunning in her fairy dress, and all eyes turned to her, including the prince’s. He was spellbound by her beauty. Her natural radiance and her magical dress set her apart from the other girls of the kingdom as if she were the one real rose in a room full of silk roses.

The prince abruptly abandoned the girl he had been dancing with and glided over to Chloe, his hand outstretched to invite her to dance with him. She nodded her head in gracious acceptance and moved to the dance floor with him. The band, which had fallen silent upon her entrance, began playing a lively jig, and Chloe and the prince let their feet fly in joyous dance. Her eyes were sparkling, his were gleaming, huge smiles on both of their faces as they spun and bounced nimbly around the dance hall. All the other dancers moved aside, stunned, and watched the two in envy. Chloe and the prince danced their joyful jig in rapt silence, simply smiling at each other and thinking they had each found their one true love. As the jig came to an end, Chloe gave a little shiver of excitement, and in the silence before the next tune, she emitted her most gleeful and beautiful fart song ever. She giggled a bit, and as the scent of roses wafted around the room, she saw that the mouths of the other dancers had fallen open, not in awe, but in horror. Chloe started to blush as she glanced back at the prince. He was stepping back, his mouth also open, his brow furrowing into a look disgust. Feeling as if her perfect dream were suddenly evolving into a nightmare, Chloe realized that everyone in the ballroom, including her handsome prince, was revolted by her fart song. She flushed deep red as her audience began to erupt in harsh laughter. She ducked her suddenly hot and embarrassed face into her hands and ran, almost blindly, for the door.

Chloe emerged from the dance hall at a full run, with no plan to stop, ever. She ran past her deserted village, past her own home, and into the woods beyond, until she was too winded and defeated to run any more. She tripped on a stump and fell face first into a pile of leaves and moss on the forest floor. Once again she cried and cried, morosely farting as she sobbed. She felt awful, thoroughly rejected, misunderstood, and mortified. How could she ever show her face again. She couldn’t even imagine going home because her rotten stepsisters would never let her forget her moment of supreme embarrassment. She cried until she got the hiccups, and her face was covered with tears, bits of leaves and moss sticking to her wet face and hands. Then she sat up and stared, trying to think what to do, tears still trickling down her face. As she sat and thought, a faint sound began to intrude upon her thoughts. It was wild and rhythmic and strange... music, but like none she had ever heard before. She cocked her head and listened hard, and suddenly she knew what the sound was. It was the fairy fart orchestra!

Chloe stood up, brushed most of the leaves and twigs off her face and dress, and began to pick her way through the woods toward the music. She wandered deeper and deeper into the darkening forest, following the sound. Finally she came upon the fairy gathering, inside a ring of ancient, moss-covered evergreens. A shaft of moonlight splashed silver light on glimmering fairy wings and lit up thousands of tiny white flowers on the mossy ground. Fireflies were weaving flickering green lights through the sweet night air. They seemed to be dancing with the fairies. Atop a big flat rock near the edge of the meadow, the fairy fart orchestra was in full rumpus. There were about twenty fairies, dancing like Japanese taiko drummers, in perfect rhythm as they played. Chloe started to dance. She couldn’t help it. The rhythm was so wild and free, she just had to dance with the fairies. She raised her arms and let herself move to the beat, stepping forward into the fairy circle. As she did, the fairies began to move aside to make space for her, to invite her into their midst. She saw Priscilla wave to her from her place in the orchestra, and waved back. Chloe felt a wild sense of joy and freedom here with the fairies. She thought briefly about her recent embarrassment at the palace, and about how miserable she had been just moments ago, and she shook it off like a bad dream. She started to fart with the fairies as she danced, weaving a wild and wondrous melody with her flute-like toots over the deeper, more rhythmic rumbles and drum beats of the orchestra. It was a truly magical music they made together.

Chloe danced and played with the fairy fart orchestra all night. They played loud and fast. They played slow and sad. They played the very mystery and magic of the forest all around, and they didn’t stop until the sky began to blush pink with sunrise. It was the most fun Chloe had ever had, and she felt she belonged with the fairies as she never had with other humans. She wanted to stay with them forever, but as day began to dawn, Priscilla and the rest of the orchestra came to Chloe and started to say thank you and goodbye to her. Chloe started to say, “But I want to come with you...”

“We’ll be back, Chloe.” the fairies said. “ We will play and dance here again at the next full moon. You are always welcome to join us. You are our very own flute farting princess!”

So Chloe started the long walk home, retracing her steps of the night before. She was tired, but exhilarated. She had a secret, a wonderful, wild, joyful secret she would never tell another human. When she finally crept quietly into her own home, where her family was still sleeping off their night at the palace, there was a small, private smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. In her bed at last, she closed her eyes and pulled her covers up to her chin and began to dream of dancing with the fairies.

24 years ago

2008-09-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

From bed I fall
for vaporous dawn and pearly skies,
skip and leap down steep slopes
to the rails:

infinity, straight-pinned to earth.

Like clocks tick,
my feet take tracks.
Liquid shoulders roll,

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

The sun rounds,
up through the horizon,
mirroring sunset over a distant land.

The rails curve away.

Long, mindless trek,
gone so far, must have flown.
I sit, rail hard under my hand on the bridge,

Sun up, sky solid.

Over Still Creek, thick with algae,
I drop a rock.
Green-cake breaks with a muffled plunk

ripples liquid dark below.

I have to pee,
never can stay
still for long.
Faintly more aware I walk
home.

Too much science

2008-08-31T23:13:00.000-07:00

After years of repeatedly throwing herself headlong into a wall in fierce pursuit of her elusive muse, our heroine finally thought of a new tactic...sidle up on the muse quiet-like and slow, while reading a heavy textbook to avoid any suspicious look of creative yearning. Of course, the muse is a mythological being, and any real creative pursuit should focus instead on potent catalysts, sustainable fuels, and rich substrates. Consequently, the muse will become "saturated" with substrate and the initial velocity (v) of the catalyzed reaction will react a limiting value called the maximum velocity (Vmax). Goddamn overly fascinating textbook. Now, what was I saying?

Psyche

2008-08-31T19:14:00.000-07:00

The soul is nothing,
My desperate self cast against emptiness,
and comes with its own physic,
a doll I prop up in my chair.

Mark,

2008-08-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

Over twenty years ago you told me you believed that life spirals out in ten year cycles, each rotation bringing us not back to where we were, but to someplace very similar. I thought you were full of your usual bluster and bullshit and idiosyncrasy, but you were right. Every ten years, at the start of a new decade of my life, death visits. There are other landmarks I seem to pass about every ten years, but death once a decade is the most striking.

The first death in my life was my great uncle when I was ten. It was strange, surprising, and disturbing, but mostly unfathomable. I didn't realize before then that death could happen to someone I knew.

At twenty I faced my own mortality during 22 days in the wilderness of the North Cascades. By day I slogged and hauled my weak and weary flatlander bones up and over dozens of stunning, awe-inspiring, soul-searingly beautiful mountain passes and summits. By night I shivered in my sleeping bag and dreamed of falling endlessly into the void over razor-blade shale and tumbling boulders. Life by day, death by night. In the final week of the trip, I spent three days fasting in complete solitude under the shelter of pine trees laced with sun-gilt gossamer, rich humus smell of dirt for sustenance and cold babbling creek to slake my thirst. On the third day my mind and heart slowed down to the resonance of the place and I saw that there was no need for gods. Life was enough.

At thirty, I almost died. I came close enough to sense the void again, but this time I was under cold fluorescent lights, my skin was clammy and greenish from septic shock. I was run down from weeks in Thailand and Myanmar, living like the indestructible globe trotter I never was. My family was summoned and came from the four corners of the world to see if I would survive that first night. On some level I didn't. Any illusions I had about my own permanence or importance were lost when I discovered that there is no fighting death. It bloomed in my chest and raged in my blood, and I was not even conscious most of the time. I suffered and emerged and could take no credit for my fortune.

When I was forty, death took my mother. As she breathed her last, and my gaze drifted out the window to the great Red Cedar tossing its boughs in the wind, I felt the pull of the void again and said, "I'm not coming with you, mom, not yet. I've got kids to raise and a life to live." Mom gives us rainbows whenever we meet, my brother and me. She really does. The first was just before her memorial when we met at her favorite beach on San Juan Island. It was a strange feather of rainbow, high above the beach in the middle of the clear blue sky.

After each of these passes, I felt like I'd been cut loose from whatever it was I had been thinking my life was about. I felt untethered and terrified, but also inspired, magical, like anything is possible. It's like being on a plane, and seeing that there is nothing I cannot leave behind. Gravity itself seems like an illusion. Art pulls at me then. I get very creative, poetic, strange and deeply alive, but it doesn't last. I always choose love over art. There are no other options, and I don't have the mind for both.

It's been two years since mom died, and I am trying to hold on to the depth and inspiration her passing brought me, but the days get lost in love and family. I can't maintain the weightlessness.

2008-08-25T20:12:00.000-07:00

2008-08-24T15:47:00.000-07:00

Like the new look? The old white type on black background was doing a number on my old eyes, so there ya go.
It's a soggy, droopy drip of a sunday here in B'ham. I'm sewing a McGonagall costume to wear for my second son's Harry Potter birthday party next weekend. It ain't half bad. Next I must transfigure my spouse into Snape. It's a bit of a stretch, but I think we can pull it off.
I'm also baking a peach pie to fool my stepdad into thinking I've cooked him a great meal this evening, when it will really be leftover ham made into simple pasta carbonara with garlicky lacinato kale and some glazed carrots.
I comfort myself with all this domesticity. I went to a Bat Mitzvah yesterday. It was the first time I ever set foot in a synagogue, and it was lovely. The synagogue itself was simple, small, lovingly and sensitively cared for. I already knew a large percentage of its members. Somehow all my friends and neighbors in Bellingham seem to be Jewish. It all kind of made me wish I was. Maybe it wouldn't matter that I've lost the ability to believe in the old patriarch if I could still go through the rituals of caring and participating in the passages of life and community. The Bat Mitzvah was a perfect ritual to honor a young woman. She had the opportunity to teach a lesson from a bit of Torah reading that was assigned to her. She chose to interpret the lavish promises and dire warnings of Moses at the side of the Jordan as warnings to us not to trash our world. Hers was a strident environmentalist message, similar to the one I'm often guilty of assaulting people with. She was heard and rewarded with praise for her thoughts and beliefs and wisdom, though she is only 13. What a profound honor for her. It was sincere and loving and very inspiring. It made me wonder what sort of coming of age ritual my kids might have with their non-believer parents. I formulated the ingredients in my ideal coming of age ritual: a course of study or physical trial to develop a sense of accomplishment, a mentor, a community service project, a ceremony, and a celebration. All of these were parts of the event I witnessed yesterday. I suppose a secular version wouldn't be hard to create, but what community would gather to support this offspring of atheists? I guess the Unitarian Universalists are always game.
It's all so much harder when you can't just work from a template. Why bother? Because the self-confidence, determination, and support that young lady earned yesterday will carry her far in this world, with or without the vengeful deity dude.

2008-08-22T23:30:00.000-07:00

This one didn't photograph well. The camera kept correcting my colors. The blue is really darker and colder, and the sky is distinctly more strange. I might try again with fancy manual settings, but I'm not optimistic.

Disillusioned

2008-08-22T23:22:00.001-07:00

I’m missing something. That’s why I keep trying to make contact with you, old friend. In the still moments of my days, I start to panic, casting around for something to engage me...a book, a song, something to learn, something to do, because I feel adrift. I think you know what I mean. Something about losing my mom a couple of years ago set something in motion, some chain of reasoning I couldn’t stop, and it left me with no god, no father, no mother, no connection to my past, no sense that I am connected at all, to anyone but my kids, and sometimes my spouse. It isn’t grief, nor is it some cynical or depressive pose. I don’t feel sad, I just feel very compact and a bit too light, like an astronaut without a mother ship. I float, see? I am a little too aware of how alone we all are, really, too aware of how fragile and brief it all is, and I don’t know what to do. This isn’t what I thought mid-life would be like. I thought the way I’d feel about my husband and kids would be similar to the depth, the all encompassing immersion I felt in the family of my childhood. It wasn’t all good. I remember inventing a father for myself, and cramming my brief encounters with my real fuck-up drunk of a dad into that ill-fitting mold. It fit, then, and I didn’t call him anything but dad. I loved him. I remember my mother, her love and her need and her never ending ill health. I always feared that she would leave, but I never really thought she would. I remember my magical grandmother. I thought I could carry her magic forward in my own life. It’s harder than it looks. I remember god. I remember being moved to tears by the certainty that some larger than life parent figure would always love me and guide me. I remember myself, all talent and faith and possibility. I actually thought I was special, arrogance of a youth that lasted way too long, apparently. So what do you do when you finally understand? Pick up and carry on? Is that it? Is there no way to make the present feel as convincingly solid and real as the past? Even the past has lost its solidity, like a play after you’ve watched the set come down and the actors come out without their makeup and costumes. I guess I’m disillusioned.

On a Roll

2008-08-16T14:34:00.000-07:00

So far, today has been delicious. I got my kayak out for the first time in almost a year. I injured a shoulder in February, and it has continued to be painful ever since. Despite that, I hauled my boat on and off the van and into the water with minimal help, and felt fine paddling. It was perfect paddling conditions in the bay...warm and smooth and still. I put in at Marine Park and paddled south past herons and eagles and the occasional school of fish to Teddy Bear Cove. I was hoping to see a hooded nudibranch in the eelgrass. I'm sure they were there, but I didn't see any. I love being on the water. It is such a strange thing to ride on the sloping shoulders of a heaving, teeming, thoroughly inhuman world. Sometimes the surface deflects my curious gaze like a mirror, then a swell rises in front of me and as it slopes upward I can see right through, as if there were no barrier at all. It is hypnotic and rhythmic and seductive. I'm scared to death of it sometimes. An acquaintance died in that water this year, on a sunny day, paddling with a friend.

Now I am alone, a very rare treat. My husband and kids are all at the theater. I could listen to loud music and dance...I could veg in front of something really worthless on the tube (I never do that, but I miss it occasionally)...I could bake something celebratory for my two little actors who are performing at said theater...I could sleep...I could draw or paint.... Whatever I'm going to do, I'm not telling you!

I guess I do feel like blogging

2008-08-15T17:52:00.001-07:00

I went dancing with a friend recently. It was the first time I've gone out to dance in a full decade, and it was insane...wild, slightly drunken, deliriously joyful fun. The band was, reggae with a very contemporary sound and big energy. In the weeks that followed, a poem percolated up through the gray matter (look to the upper left), and I found myself daydreaming, doodling, and scheming as I did before I had kids. Cool, thought I, there's still a kernel of my original self under all this efficient maternal hooha. Then, a month or so later, I hear from Jeff, of local comments fame (see below). This, o best beloved, is of gravest significance because Jeff does not know that I was ever less than fascinating. He knows that I was a distinctly dysfunctional artist and girlfriend type person, but he and I lost touch once I committed myself to wifedom and motherhood. Poor Jeff is a busy man, way too busy to delve far into the waters of rekindled friendship or even introspection, but I could just box up a big mess of kisses and UPS them to him for contacting me again because he has sparked yet another smoldering flame in my soul furnace ( and he gives great creative advice). I may be becoming a touch manic in my old age, but I prefer to think I am just reaching my creative and intellectual prime, and not a minute too soon. I cling to each ember and pray for critical mass. Stick around and watch, won't you?

My three rugrats

2008-08-15T17:46:00.000-07:00

long time no blog

2008-08-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

Hello Jeff, Thanks for reminding me I was once, briefly, a blogger. Not sure I want to maintain the habit, though. I'll have to think about it. I mean, really, do I want to share my innermost thoughts, or even my outermost ones with the world at large? If I do, is it right for me to wantonly waste the time of whomever might stumble upon my ramblings? Maybe I should. I have so many thoughts, and they often seem important to me. Perhaps a blog is a measure of the worth of ones thoughts. That's a scary one, that is.

Kisses and fond memories....Wraitch

She did it!

2007-08-03T19:54:00.000-07:00

My wonderful two-year-old decided to potty train herself today while I was cooking dinner. She told me about her fait accompli with beaming pride and I was suitably impressed. I know I said in my first post that I did not intend to post about my kids, but they are at the forefront of my mind almost always, and I am so impressed by the force of their personalities and by their drive to learn and do things for themselves. And it was truly the high point of an otherwise fairly forgettable day.

I did visit an art supply store in hopes of finding a compact watercolor set to keep in my backpack. I didn't find anything better than what I already have, and realized that what I need must come from inside. I must find the will to make a place in my busy day for art. It is my only reliable connection to whatever it is that is deeper and richer and more life-affirming than anything else. I love to paint. I need to paint. I want to paint. So why do I do it so rarely? Because I am also afraid to paint.

More on that another day.

2007-08-03T09:40:00.001-07:00

First Blog

2007-08-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

This is my very first attempt at blogging. I find myself doing so to my own surprise. I really just meant to check out how it is done, but it was so easy, I went ahead and did it. I am therefore coming up with my intention for this space after the fact. I guess this will probably be another rambling diary/ponderings blog. I do not intend to talk much about my kids and their doings because what I really need at this point is more evidence that I still exist under the mask of Motherhood, me, the artist and dreamer and dancer. I do intend to write about my art and kayaking adventures, as well as my education