change

Between two poles

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“Automatic cars can facilitate our dark side.”

Many things feel as if they pull me between two poles. At one pole, I love seeing the paw prints of wild animals in the snow – mysterious visitors that I rarely see apart from this evidence of their earlier presence. At the other, I hate snow, and I particularly hate the melty, slick state of it right now (it won’t last long; colder temperatures are on the way). I took my life in my hands by heading down to the mailbox (no slips/slides/falls, luckily).

One pole pulls me to music: Weyes Blood’s “Seven Words”.

The other pole pulls me to poetry and all the memories and emotion tied to it, to the moment I lived it.

To Sleep
– John Keats
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
      Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
      Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
      In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the “Amen,” ere thy poppy throws
      Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
      Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
      Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.

 

I even sway  – or perhaps sway most of all – between two poles about how to communicate – at one pole, wanting to say so much but, at the other, saying very little. This is always the danger of communication or non-communication. When more seems to be at stake, when your feelings become much more entangled than you could have imagined, you start censoring yourself or stop asking questions and trying to clarify things to get to the heart of the matter. It’s almost involuntary. But I am aware.

And, with this awareness, I am defying my own inner limitations and trying to be courageous about stepping into the middle ground, between the two poles, to say, do and encompass everything and openness.

Photo (c) 2013 Lady May Pamintuan

Undisturbed

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The New Age book, finally completed (self-read audiobook on MP3, split up into chapter chunks), offered a few compelling thoughts and jumping-off points. I am struggling with one bit – that is, trying to respect what it commands – it’s such a pure and true passage, complemented by the poetry of David Whyte (whose work appears throughout the volume). I’d never heard of him (Irish mother/Yorkshire father; grew up in west Yorkshire before eventually moving to the Pacific Northwest of the US).

“Although true solitude — alert aloneness without diversions — can be challenging, it is often the necessary gateway to our deepest passions, and the discovery of what we must do to live them. As David Whyte writes,

…Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”

Needless: I Surrender

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Today is one of those needlessly and inexplicably emotional days where every thought or feeling seems to lead down a twisting carnival slide, rapidly rounding blind corners and not being sure whether to feel sick, exhilarated or scared.

I’m reading a lot – as I have given up TV (yeah, I know, can you imagine?) – and I am reminded why I struggled with reading for such a long time. Demanding full attention, it also demands full feeling, contemplation and consideration – no matter what it is. I have not wanted to dedicate full attention, feeling or consideration to anything in such a long time.

Right now I am reading some New Agey thing about the soul – not my standard fare but something I promised someone else I would read (years ago, in fact – so long that she has undoubtedly forgotten the promise by now, but I am someone who follows through on promises, even if they are decades old) – and there are passages that are striking some nerves in me, even if the profound moment is usually ruined by a New Age would-be guru Boomer taking everything a step beyond what is necessary for the narrative (for me, anyway, but probably not for this “soul search” he is describing). Oddly, as out of character as this topic is for me, it seems to be the right thing at the right time, even if I am getting a bit weepy and emotional thinking about things tangentially related to topics the book dredges up.

At the very edge of inner turmoil simmering away below the surface, I’m struck by the old pull between what we wish and what we know.

And then, there are always the Swiss.

Photo (c) 2009 Janet McKnight

December

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December has never been like this before.

Snowless, mild, clear and sunny every day. Awash in untold volumes of new music, the ears feasting on constant new sound. Afloat on seas of shared poetic waves and shared everything else, that has still somehow left me adrift in conflicted/conflicting feelings that have me reeling. Awaiting resolution of some kind, not knowing if any will come.

And still there is a new year ahead; I am counting the minutes. I have never so eagerly watched the calendar, waiting as the days tick by so slowly. After all, this kind of time, marking one year and arbitrarily moving to the next, is meaningless. This year it feels like it needs to be closed. Shut tight. Every year has its ups and downs, but nothing has been like 2o16 on a personal and more ‘global’ level in terms of shocks, losses, horror shows and the sprouting seed of fear for the future. I may want this year to end desperately but don’t know what the next one holds so can only focus for the time being on my own little bunker, life, corner of the world and concerns.

And, as the new year creeps up on us (please hurry), I hope anyone reading this will do the same – care for yourself and your loved ones and go from there. That’s the best I can hope for right now.

 

 

Weather: Wait five minutes

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Not since living in Iceland have I experienced the wild weather I experienced today. I drove to Gothenburg through the kind of blinding rain that obscures the entire road. The risk of hydroplaning high. Impatient cars fly by, spraying literal sheets of water onto the windshield. Slowing the entire pace of travel. Insane wind. And the sky igniting every few minutes with a show of lightning. By daylight, after hanging around in a parking lot listening to The Stone Roses and chatting with my brother via Facebook, the sun appeared. Later, as I joined a friend for lunch, I parked my car and enjoyed the mild sun, but literally as soon as I turned a corner, really wicked wind whipped up out of nowhere accompanied by torrential rain. I was just steps from the tram stop but was soaked before I reached the little waiting shelter. But less than a kilometer away when I got off the tram, there was bright sun again! What?

Seems that there is sun now but undoubtedly only for the moment.

 

It’s not what we thought…

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Everything turns out, in time, not to be what we thought it was.

Women’s fertility, thought to hit a precipitous slide downward from the age of 27 – or 35 – or some other number conjured up by dubious science, may decline in general/on average. But then it turns out fertility is not quite that simple.

“But it’s no wonder we’re so easily panicked. The fearful narrative around women’s fertility fits with a broader theme that’s become all too common as women have gained economic independence over the last several decades: we’re going to pay for our equality. Mothers going to work in the 1980’s were told they were subjecting their kids to an epidemic of sexual abuse at daycare centers. In 1986, Newsweek reported that 40-year-old single women were “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than find a husband. These stories and many more like them, of course, are completely false. Perhaps the best way to fight the panic is to question those who’ve made a business of selling it.”

Pregnancy after 40 is becoming quite common. In fact, in the UK at least, the number of over-40 pregnancies outnumbers the under-30 pregnancies for the first time in 70 years.

I lived for years in Iceland, where it is quite common to have children (many, in fact) when you’re quite young (late teens/early 20s). This is seen as the norm. When a non-Icelandic friend lived in Iceland, everyone around her hounded her about having a baby before she was an “old hag” (meaning mid-20s, I guess???). She did not have a child until she moved to Denmark, and by then she was in her late 20s. The Danes, though, insisted that she was “so young” to be having a child, and all the other women in her maternity ward had at least ten years on her.

And this very pressing issue – fertility – reminds me not only that life goes on but also that, as it does, there are so many other things we don’t know shit about but pretend to (or to trust experts about them): Addiction, aging, the brain, radiation, education, the powerhouse Japan was supposed to be… or even pasta. Nothing is definitive – it keeps changing as the environment around it changes. We really don’t know anything – even what consciousness means.

The same can be said of people, but that’s another and different challenge.

Every day’s a school day

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Over time, you kind of hone a sixth sense about people. Some nagging feeling somewhere in your body tells you that all the pieces do not match up. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out exactly what’s missing – but the sense is there if you are aware/listening.

Maybe “listening” (externally and internally) is the key. I am not sure most people know how to listen; am not sure people stop, slow down and have a long enough attention span to tune in to what they should be listening for internally. It’s strange. Mostly listening to these alarm bells (faint though they sometimes are) keeps me out of harm’s way or at least away from people I shouldn’t spend time with.

Curiosity, though, sometimes does lead one (me) down the wrong path… a least a few steps down that path. Briefly following someone even when the instinct whispers and then screams, “Something is amiss” is almost always a matter of being curious about what it is that’s amiss rather than blindly following and being disappointed. In fact it’s almost an achievement when I do find out what has not fit together.

It’s not really a way to live though – or to spend time. There are so many other pursuits and people who are worth the effort.

I, however, imperfect being that I am, have to learn that lesson now and again – repeatedly.

Empty

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On the warmest, brightest day I’ve seen since last spring, I hide in the darkness of my bedroom, working and watching tv shows. Lost causes have spiraled into further loss-making territory; old connections, long ago severed, take on more permanent disconnection when I learn they’ve moved on to greener pastures. Is that enigmatic? It gives me pause to reflect on my choices – how I chose the life I have and my independent place in it. I don’t want something different but can still wonder how different it might have been.

Does that mean that there are not occasional, but cold, empty days?

Is there such a thing as “natural” Cheetos?

Change could not come at a better time.

The end: He was a walking earthquake

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It was not the explosive, obvious things that did it. The end was precipitated by the small things, accumulated over time, and by the long, slow erosion of trust and repeated breaking of promises. No, maybe the promises were not believed in the first place, but each time they rang more and more hollow.

The year had been a tug-of-war between his manic neediness, which always drove him to the exact kind of madness that drove her further and further away, and led her to feeling she had been used. She grew more distant with each episode of recklessness he displayed. It used to hurt but became instead an annoyance, an alarm clock of the brain, set to “snooze” until the next time madness set in.

Guilt had been a driver – this guilt-driven need to be a caretaker, to help set an unsteady man back on his feet. She imagined, wrongly, that smoothing the path would make it easier to stand on. He was a walking earthquake.

But care, too, was a part. But the actual care only went one way, at least in action. Everything else was empty words.

The litany of grievances was endless, but after a lengthy limbo, she simply wanted to be free of him, of all of it. It was nothing but trouble.

Women (“…only like me for my mind”)

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I don’t really want to be told by old-guard “feminists” (or anyone for that matter) that my support for anyone other than Hillary Clinton is wrong. Or why it’s wrong. The voices of feminist leaders, such as Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright, trailblazers and leaders in theory and practice, are normally so measured and reasonable. While they have taken on the mantle of speaking for many in the past, which has been appreciated, co-opting the voices and choices of other women now is inappropriate. It is no wonder that women of all ages are angry. The idea that we should be told for whom to vote under any circumstances is egregious and over the line. To be told we betray all women by not voting for Hillary Clinton is feminist apostasy.

In defending Hillary Clinton and her candidacy for president, both women have pulled out the generation card and slammed the younger generation of women in what can only be called a sexist way by claiming that younger women’s support for Bernie Sanders stems from following the path where they might find boys at the other end. Not only does it imply that young women’s only concern is meeting, impressing and gaining the attention of boys – it discounts the well-reasoned support women of all ages have for other candidates. (And couldn’t the same have been argued so long ago when Steinem went to work at the Playboy Club in the service of getting an undercover expose? She was going to bat for true feminist causes but was doing so by “going where the boys are”.) I am not discounting the value of this work, but if looked at only on the surface, which is about how Albright and Steinem looked at young women’s political choices right now, they look about equal.

At a recent Clinton rally, Albright reportedly said, “We can tell our story of how we climbed the ladder, and a lot of you younger women think it’s done.”

I think anyone alive today knows that it is not done – not for women’s equality, not for racial equality, not for economic or social justice at all. We know that Roe v Wade is never a done deal. We know that there are still massive strides to take in getting equal pay. We know, in fact, that families – men and women both – are struggling with the consequences and sacrifices they have to make to have families. Women end up struggling more, on the whole, because of the inequalities at work and because of the biology of their having to be the ones to carry and give birth to children. That is not going to change, but society’s approach can.

So no, no one imagines that the work is finished. Yes, we may take for granted the work that has been done – for example, no one demanded that I get him a coffee when I entered the workforce. I took for granted that no one could have such an expectation of a professional woman (or man). An older colleague who worked in a technical capacity since the 1970s schooled me on my obliviousness and ignorance (she and her few female colleagues were often maligned this way or saddled with extra “women’s work” like fetching coffee or something that had no formal place in their work description). Perhaps it is good that people my age and younger grew up completely ignorant of the fact that it was once acceptable to make these kinds of petty demands of you just because you were the female employee in the room. But forgetting may, in fact, lead to complacency – and I suppose this is at the heart of Albright and Steinem’s argument.

But being complacent about how far we still need to travel to get to gender parity is not the same thing as making a conscious, well-informed decision not to support Hillary Clinton.

By not supporting Hillary, are people somehow not supporting all other women (as Albright implies, saying there is a “special place in hell” for women who do not support other women)? Are we obligated to support Hillary just because she is a woman, particularly when she has let her views, her talking points, her votes, her perspectives, shift casually to suit her purposes at any given moment – sometimes in ways that damage equality and grant favor to corporate over human interests?

Other than “Hillary fatigue”, the urge to fight against the sense of inevitability and her attitude as though it’s “her turn” now – I have to ask, “Does she deserve the support?” At this stage, no. If she ultimately gets the nomination, I will support her. She will still be better than whatever the alternatives are. Hillary is not my first choice because Hillary feels insincere, insubstantial and untrustworthy. It is not that she cannot get the job done. It is not because her views change because in fact, if someone’s views change and grow more nuanced, that is one thing. But changing to pander to the rising voices of the day – that’s disingenuous. Her time on the world’s stage has been so long and public that we have a very clear view of just how disingenuous she has been over the course of time.

While I very much support Bernie Sanders’s aims and like the idea of the US moving toward “democratic socialism”, I am a bit burned out on the whole idea that there are not more of Sanders’s ilk among younger politicians. I will vote for Sanders or Clinton, whichever gets the nomination, but the idea that we can be carried forward by the oldest of the Baby Boomers (in fact Sanders was born at the tail-end of the previous generation) is a sad commentary on the state of American progressivism. Clinton is a tired reminder of the old guard, and the Baby Boomers in general need to start handing over the reins already. I feel as though we took many steps forward with Obama in handing over responsibility to a new generation of leaders, but the only reasonable voice we have is an old man. (And the young politicians are snake-like zealots and anxiety-riddled, almost-human robots. Nothing remotely presidential… or sane.)