Riddled

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.

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

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

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

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

"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

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.