In My Skin

I walked out to the mailbox today in socks and flip-flops. I felt such rhythm and joy swinging one leg in front of the other as I walked up my driveway and crossed the quiet street. The sky was a soft blue and the November air was fresh and clean. I realized I hadn't left the house in a day or two. This is not so uncommon when you work from home, have no children, and have deadlines leering at beckoning you. Or maybe it is uncommon and I'm just a freak. You tell me.

I decided it was time for a walk (after a quick change of shoes -- not for fashion's vanity, but for the sake of my feet and shins). Besides, I wasn't getting anything done sitting around inside. The coffee didn't seem to be working, so I resorted to physical activity to give me some zip. I don't love physical activity. This is why I'm too soft around the middle. But today, I moved my body and it felt good. I imagined getting into the habit of feeling good in my body. Wouldn't that be something? (Yes, for me, that would be something.)

Last week I posted about the danger of the single story, how we reduce people to a fraction of themselves when we have just one story about them. How often do we do this same disservice to ourselves? I have a dominant story about how I live and move and have my being in my body. It's not a story that makes me happy, but I've been telling it and listening to it for years. Parts of it are true, but it's not the whole story.

It's time for my body's next chapter. I've known this for awhile. I keep ignoring it, conveniently forgetting it, pushing it away. But today it showed up not as guilt and pain, but as the possibility of joy and ease. I'm not talking about losing weight because I'm too heavy (although I am), or getting in shape because I'm so out of it (although I am that, too).

I'm talking about a shift in the way I approach my body and the physical world. I live so much in the world of words and ideas. I need to reunite with my body, embrace it as my own. I need to stop disconnecting body from mind and spirit.

I don't quite know how to write this next chapter, how to let the rest of the story unfold. But I usually don't. Even when I'm writing, I often don't know what I want to say or what I need to tell until I start. And then the pieces come together, bit by bit, and the story unfurls.

What story of yours is getting stale?

The Other & The Single Story

image by h.koppdelaney

You are not me. I am not you. Our experiences are unique to ourselves. And yet, we are connected. We share some things, even if that is only living on this planet and being human. But I suspect we share much more. We breathe, we speak, we bleed, we weep. We laugh, love, live. We are. I have friends who are teaching me about the concept of turikumwe, which is a word that roughly means we are together. 

But if we allow ourselves to believe that we are different, big problems occur. Racism. Hate crimes. War. If we dehumanize  one another, if we strip away all of the similarities and focus only on the differences or the things we don't like or understand, we can create "the other." When we see others not as individuals, but as anonymous members of some faceless group, we make them part of "the other." And then we are free to do terrible things.

If we buy into the idea of "the other," we can give them a single story that reinforces this narrow view. All blue people are itchy. Everyone from that country has ingrown toenails. Their kind don't like what we like. When we give "the other" a single story, we miss their humanity. We miss their worth. We miss the whole world.

In The Translator, Daoud Hari's memoir about his experience of the genocide in Darfur, he writes: "How can you be safe if your people are not safe? And so who are your people? Perhaps everyone is your people."

Perhaps everyone is your people.

Or, as the diner owner said in the movie The Muppets Take Manhattan, "Peoples is peoples."

I found this next video (and the quote above from Hari's book) on Marianne's blog, Zen & the Art of Peacekeeping. In it, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus talks about the danger of the single story. If you're a storyteller, a story listener, or a peoples, I hope you'll watch it.

What an unproductive day of love looks like

image by henrybloomfield

Today, the most useful thing I did was clean up gobs of cat poop and take a two hour nap. This is because I was up until 6:00am. Yes, Up until Six. I'm a night owl, but sweet goodness: that's insanity. I stayed up so late that my night owl transmogrified into an early bird. And this bird is tie-erd. I was helping my husband with a Big Important Project with a Tight Deadline. As we closed in on the finish line, I said, "I'm proud of you for doing this."

"I'm proud of you," he said.

"Why?"

"Because most wives wouldn't put up with this shit."

And I gotta tell ya, I felt just the teeniest bit smug (in a loving way), because: Damn. He's right.

I expected to get annoyed and impatient at some point through the long night, but it never happened. I think it's because my brain has been swimming in the sweet endorphins of creativity and friendship lately. I'm cooking up some projects over here, and it's exhilarating. Exhausting and terrifying, too, but mostly fun and empowering. And I've had good company along the way. So helping out hubby until the wee hours approached dawn didn't feel like such a burden.

So. We were up until 6:00, and then I managed to catch a few spotty hours of sleep until noon when I had to get up and go to an eye doctor appointment. Once there, a very skinny man in khakis and a pine green shirt dilated my pupils to the size of thimbles. Thimbles sound small, until you compare them to the size of your eyes. Then thimbles are ginormous. I looked crazy. The hubster said I looked high. I think both were a little bit true.

The screwed up sleep schedule and the thimble-eye gave me a roaring headache, so I came home, hell bent on crawling back in bed. And then my little seven-pound cat wreaked havoc by dragging her poop-smeared butt down the hallway. And around the bedroom. So there was cat poop everywhere! It was so much fun! Including the parts where she bit and scratched me while I tried to clean up her poopy little backside. She even hissed. Have I mentioned she's only seven pounds? She's fully grown, but looks like a kitten. So the biting-hissing-scratching wasn't nice, but it was also kind of ferociously adorable.

And then I took that nap. Now I'm babbling to you while the hubs watches the big football game. I'm happy to report that the kitty cat is sitting quietly (sans poop) and my pupils have nearly returned to their regularly scheduled size.

Let's hope this blog returns to its regularly scheduled content (read: better content) later in the week, shall we? <Insert enormous thimble-pupil eye wink here.>

An Exercise in Autumn

image by Insomnia

The wind ruffles my backyard maple trees, still robust with yellow and crimson leaves. The dogwood has gone naked for the season, but the slim pear trees still shine glossy green in the afternoon sun. The hills surrounding the valley where I live have mostly faded to a resigned shade of tea-stained linen, but all is not lost. November is the last month of autumn, but it's not winter yet. Punches of red, gold, and green stand out more sharply against the dark, bare limbs of their neighbors. I'm always pleasantly surprised to see bursts of color and lingering green any time after Halloween. Each year I'm afraid fall will end abruptly once all the candy is handed out. 

After the brash, playful gluttony of October, November threatens to feel somber in my mind. But that is all in abstract. In practice, most of November is vivid and jaunty, when everything is still golden-hued and warm enough for a nice afternoon walk wrapped in a cozy jacket. It's also the beginning of the holiday season, and as much I lament Christmas music before the last Thursday in November, the holidays can still thrill me with their sparkle and shine and promises of goodwill.

The changing of the seasons here in the Northeast United States is a blessing, a return to the rhythms of the land in a time when very few of us in this country are connected to the earth in any real, visceral way. Even my civilized house cats don't have to brave the elements anymore. But their animal nature remains.

My little grey cat, a daredevil magician of a feline and weighing all of seven pounds, chatters valiantly at the leaves skittering by on the back deck. She keeps watch from her post atop the seat of a dining room chair, intent on chasing away each intruder as it flitters past. Sometimes a leaf vamps back and forth in front of the glass doors, teasing her, daring her to bat at it, knowing it is safe with the glass wall between them. Actually, the leaf knows nothing but the wind. My brave little cat knows about the glass door, but this does not deter her. She is playing and fighting all at once, no difference between them. The leaves thrill her in a way I can only admire and imagine. While I sit here writing about these things, she is watching and pouncing, living it all.

Where Dreams & Reality Collide

image by jeet_sen - Back with a vengeance

Last night I dreamt that I woke up in some sort of a behavior modification facility. I couldn't figure out how I'd gotten there, or why I seemed to be a prisoner. As events unfolded, I realized that I was considered a "problem case" and was under close supervision. The people in charge lied and said that I'd been there for three days already and had tried to escape, so they'd had to sedate me. The first part wasn't true, but I knew I had been drugged. I tried to tell people that I'd been on vacation with my husband just the day before. No one believed me.

It dawned on me that they thought I was mentally unstable and delusional. Do you know how terrifying it is to be completely sane while people treat you as full-out crazy? It's also extremely difficult to act normal and convince people of your sanity when they're already convinced that you're nuts. (I'm guessing my subconscious pulled from Act One of this story from "This American Life" for this part of the dream.)

But then a group of escapees rescued me and we were on the lam. I had to hide from the authorities and my peers who thought I needed help. I called my husband, figuring he could verify my story about being on vacation and clear everything up. But when I talked to him, he was oddly quiet. I couldn't tell if I had bad cell phone reception or if he thought I was crazy, too! Had he helped to have me committed? I hung up the phone, afraid that the signal was being traced to my location.

If I couldn't trust my husband, who could I trust? I started to wonder if my band of rogue rescuers was really working against me. What if I hadn't been rescued, but recaptured? By now, a friendly member of the organization's staff had found me and told me she knew I wasn't crazy and that I should be free to go. We went to a dorm room, and she told me to wait there while she took care of everything else. I was supposed to be safe, but I didn't feel safe. Could I trust her? 

And now the most disturbing part of the dream unfolded. With the help of my escapee friends, I realized that I really was delusional, and that I had to overcome these delusions in order to function in the real world. This enlightenment involved drinking some sort of gritty potion and looking out a window. It doesn't make much sense now, but it was perfectly clear in the dream, of course. Some people in the group thought I wasn't ready to handle this knowledge. But there was no stopping me.

I drank the potion, saw the truth, and then woke up -- shaken and scattered. I felt afraid. As I showered and tried to wash off the dream's lingering energy, I had a brief moment when I wondered: What if the dream was true and this waking life is part of the delusion? It was a very Matrix-esque moment.

I can parse this dream pretty easily, seeing as I've been on a journey of learning to trust my own voice and intuition lately. That doesn't make it any less creepy, but it does explain a lot. Still, I'm hoping for more pleasant dreams in coming nights.

Got any good dreams to share?