FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

It seems appropriate to resume writing on a double anniversary.  It has been a full year since my last post, and this week marked four years at my desk job.  Neither one of those things is exactly celebratory, but they do work as a backdrop for today’s ruminations.  I’d like to share with you what I wrote a few nights ago, attempting for the nth time to complete a blog post:

“I am a little ashamed to see that it has been a year since I last wrote.  I realized my absence long ago, but the little obligations that pepper life are numerous and demanding, and the longer I go without writing - whether it is a blog or a song or a thank-you note to a friend - the less momentum I have from my previous expulsions of internal dialogue, and the more self-aware I become of the entire process.

…But it’s funny, as soon as I typed the paragraph above, I got up from the computer and sat back down at the digital piano that sits next to it.  I played through a progression that has been spinning through my head for several months, playing until I was satisfied enough for the moment.  I got up, grabbed my charging cell phone which is being resurrected from a day of dead battery, and called a friend I haven’t spoken to in a few years.  I left her a message, then sat back down to type this paragraph.

…After I typed the second paragraph, I got up to do laundry and finally, close to a year after my new computer was built, began installing iTunes.”

I’m working three separate jobs - the full-time office job I’ve spoken of since my first post, teaching various voice students on weeknights, and acting as my church’s music director on the weekends.  The small windows of time I have in my home are a blur of cooking, cleaning binges, complaining about all the damn cat hair, and collapsing into a haze of video games or aimless internet browsing.  Social efforts wear me out, and so does glancing over the graveyard of my creative efforts - a coloring book, a sewing machine, recording software.  Owning these things is not the same as creativity, the same way that buying and shelving books doesn’t make me more knowledgeable.  But they’re stacked up in my room all the same. 

My reality is common, and I have to remind myself that I chose this.  I pay my rent, I buy my food, I buy something unnecessary that catches my eye, and I concede myself to perpetuate the cycle.  This is equated with responsibility, as enough.  But on its own, the process feels numb and programmed and…dehumanized.  And I realize that this is how most of us function.  Reading this article, I wonder again - at what cost?  (Do read it, it’s worth consideration.)  Earlier this week, a blogger known for traveling the world on a tiny budget and promoting a general exuberance for life wrote that one of her fears was “waking up one day to discover that I’ve fallen into a life of soul-killing disappointment and quiet desperation”.  I suppose it’s the Thoreau reference more than anything else, but my eyes widened as I thought to myself, “That!  I’m…that!”

You must believe me when I say that I know my life is one of extreme privilege and independence.  This is not lost on me, and it keeps me grateful, or at least consistent.  But more noticeably consistent has been the decline of my own vibrancy.  There are moments when I still feel like I could build something just for the sake of creation, because it’s beautiful.  Someone once told me, “Creativity is the highest act of reflecting God, who is the ultimate Creator.”  It strikes me as true.  It also strikes me as lofty in an age of disregarding art as superfluous, mere decoration.  I can understand how I’ve come to consign the majority of my awakeness to an illusion of control over my own provision.  I can understand how aberration from this well-worn pathway causes discomfort in well-meaning (or not) people, and it is almost as much for those people that I have embraced a “normal” and “steady” job as it is for myself.  Yet for every voice that has preached their message of prudence, there has been a disproportionately larger group who dissent, who recognize me, who don’t much care for the angled “we can’t all be astronauts” argument.  I have a harder time hearing them, or believing them.  But the longer I silence myself, the more I find I’ve disappeared.  And I have to evaluate whether pacifying my body with my most believable promises of rent, groceries, and shiny distractions to take the edge off is worth more than I am.

So, back to my earlier blog clip.  Despite exhaustion and an ever-lengthening mishmash task list with Sisyphian overtones, I began again, and that lurch set me in motion for all the little things I kept setting aside for the vague “later”, whether they were chores or connections or inspiration.  I hope, especially so in documenting it, that I will remember the curious feeling of unleashing, being set in motion, and that I will not be so enticed by familiarity and cowardice that I lull to a stop once more, at least not the same one.

I have a long list of other things I’m looking forward to sharing and discussing with you, but they can wait.  For now, just this, my little moment of movement.

Hannah and I took one of our walks again last night. We set out at sunset; now that it’s February, the five o’clock hour comes before the light cedes everything to the dark, and we walked in the last of the shadows up the road toward one of our regular haunts.The Brooktondale cemetery spans the history of the village. Some of the graves indicate birthdates from the 1700s’s; last week, I nearly stumbled into a freshly dug rectangle of earth that had sunk a couple of feet from all of the freezing and thawing that January brought with it. I must admit: the brand new grave was a shock. We don’t often bury our dead in the dead of winter, but rather, wait until the ground softens in the spring. Until then, coffins are kept in storage, awaiting the days when new life can come up, and old life can be returned to the earth.Our routine is that Hannah stays on her leash for the half-mile walk up to the cemetery. By that time, she has usually done whatever doggie “business” needs to be done. When we get to the graveyard, I let her off the leash, and the two of us wander. Sometimes, we follow the road that circles the graves. When I walk the road, I pay close attention to who is “inside” and “outside” the old road.As you might expect, outside the road are the newer graves. Some of them stand solitary, like place holders, waiting for the rest of their family members to come join them. Some are already part of small colonies who share the same names, a testament to the fact that many in this area do not wander far from here. They are born, educated, married and buried within a few miles of this community, and when they come back to the earth, they re-join the family that many of them never really left.Others, though, are jolts. The first few times I saw the solitary graves, I had to leave the road to read why these graves stood alone. A stranger might think that someone had been ostracized by their family. Allowed to be in the same graveyard, but cut off from the comfort of being close to family.Turned out, that wasn’t the case at all.Just off the curve of the road sits one of the graves that are increasingly common out here in the country. They’re made of marble, but on the front, lasers have carved out elaborate drawings that depict the life lost. Gone are the Victorian symbols of death and mourning–no more half-covered vases or crosses or weeping women. Rather, the entire front of the grave may be covered by some modern-day laser Norman Rockwell landscape of a farm, or an eight-point buck, a pair of beloved dogs, or even, hauntingly, the laser-etched portrait of the recently deceased. I do not know if these images will stand up long to a Northeast winter, but for now, walking through this portion of the graveyard is like touring an art gallery of self-portraits: “here I am,” the pictures say. “Here’s what was important to me. Here’s how I want you to remember me.” Here is where I’ll find the grave of the young man who died in a car or farm accident, or the teenager who died of an incurable disease.If those graves give me a bump when I see them, there’s another solitary grave that I have almost trained myself not to see when I walk through. Set off almost to the edge of the woods that border the graveyard, at least 20 yards back from the edge of the road, sits a piece of red granite that practically calls to you the first time you walk through this place.She is alone. Beside her stone is an American flag–always–and on her gravestone are the markings that indicate her branch of the service. She was a soldier once. She was in her 20’s. And she died in the 1990’s. I don’t know where she died. I do not know if she died overseas in some desert land, crying for her Mom when the IED went off too close to where she was. Or whether she was the victim of a traffic accident on a base somewhere. Or, whether, to our shame, she was the victim of a fellow soldier. But whatever. She is gone. And her family, perhaps confronted with losing their first (their only?) child, has buried her close to the woods, close to where the deer come out of the forest to nibble the grass of the cemetery. Close to where the redheaded and downy woodpeckers have created their own colonies. Close to the pair of red-tail hawks who nest in the trees and use the farm fields that lie outside the cemetery as their hunting grounds.She seems lonely where she is. So far away from all the other graves. But her grave is well tended. Something new is there all the time, and the American flag is changed regularly–it will never look ragged or unkempt. Still, I can’t bring myself to spend any time sitting with her or trying to know her story. Does that make me a coward?—-Last night, the dog and I walked for a long time. The long shadows disappeared, and by the time we were on our second loop through the graveyard, it had gotten dark. When I was a little kid, I would have been frightened, but not now.As I rounded the bend in the road, on the “inside” of the road, two lights shone. I walked closer. Three small headstones were gathered close, family members all, and in the near-zero temperatures, it was as if they were huddled together. But somebody who had loved those three people had buried pillar lights among the three graves. They were triggered to come on when the sunlight disappeared.I walked closer. The snow had been falling while the dog and I circled. Not a heavy snow, but that crystal snow that, when the light hits, makes you think you’re surrounded by fairy dust. I knelt down by the stones, and brushed from each one the dusting of snow that made the dead nameless.Then, calling the dog to my side, I put her back on her leash, and we walked back home, to the light and the warmth and the love that waited for us there.

“It does not profit a man to marry. For what is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic danger, delectable mischief, a fault in nature, painted with beautiful colors?”

St. John Chrysostom

Sensible, decent Jimmy Carter got it right again. “This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. It is widespread. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue, or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a higher authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights across the world for centuries. The male interpretations of religious texts and the way they interact with and reinforce traditional practices justify some of the most pervasive, persistent, flagrant, and damaging examples of human-rights abuses.”‘

Francine Prose has once again turned her attention to the status of women (did I just see you yawn? Go ahead. Click away if you wish.)  in various cultures world-wide.

While it has become fashionable to bash Muslims as being the most severe in their treatment of women; after all, the most strict enforcement of sharia sees women being whipped for showing an ankle or their face, or being stoned to death for adultery, we continue to overlook the “death by a thousand papercuts” that both Christian and Jewish women are subjected to, even in this country, where, to hear some tell it, women have got no cause to be bitching about inequality.

But, you know, when Jimmy Carter makes the painful decision to quit the church to which he has belonged his entire life because of its insistence on the inferiority of women, we need to be paying attention.

The right wing in this country comprises not only teabaggers who think all taxes are the devil’s handiwork and that Obama is a socialist, it is also full of folks who believe that women need to be at home, making babies, and keeping their mouths shut.

And yes, I know. I’ve written about this before. I’ve written both as an angry woman reclaiming my body and as a scholar attempting to understand why we do not take the suffering of the body seriously.

As I wrote upon the death of Terri Schiavo:Terri Schiavo’s death has affected me, not because I knew the woman, but because I know about the thing that drove her to her collapse in the first place. Eating disorders. Hatred of the body. The desire to hurt the thing that will not be controlled-the body, the female body.

So much of what I write about comes back to the body. It is the topic I cannot stay away from. It is the source of my politics. It is the source of my art. It cannot be separated from my brain. I am not a Cartesian. It’s not just that I think; it’s that I feel, and I touch, taste, smell. It’s that I have orgasms, that I know the touch of flesh on flesh. It is that I have felt a baby pass through my birth canal, have felt the stirring of life within me. It is that I have been penetrated by another human being. It is that I have experienced pain. It is that I have looked at my body and seen a reflection of imperfection that I wanted to fix, and in seeing that, I have starved it, purged it, wished it different. And so, having been so much an inhabitant of my body, that I declare that bodies are the site of resistance. It is that I think the government has no right to tell me which of my senses I should privilege, and which of my senses I should discipline.

But because I am also a thinker, I think often of the sources of body hatred in this culture. They are myriad. We all know them. Today, I focus on one. This is inspired by a number of things, too many to go into here. But I picked up the Bible again recently, and concomitantly, I re-read Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. It has made me want to write the following.

Let’s start with Genesis. With the creation of man and woman. Did you know there are two creation tales? The one that we usually remember is the one that says that woman was made from the rib of Adam, that he came first. But that’s not the first one.

Chapter 1, Verse 27. ”So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

In this version of the story, God is both male and female. Both male and female are expressions of God’s essence. And yet, that’s not the story we are told in Sunday school. Frequently, if we are told of Eve at all, we are told of her being the source of original sin. And what was original sin, exactly?

But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

Eve didn’t give humanity sin. She gave humanity knowledge And God’s punishment for that had been like something handed out by an angry father. “How dare you speak back to me. How dare you question my authority. I will make you sorry that you were ever born.”

Not only that, Eve becomes aware that she has a body, and in that awareness, a whole other world of sensory experience is opened up to her. Think about it: What does the term “to know someone biblically” mean?

As Scarry writes:

Part of the knowledge that comes with eating of the tree of good and evil is that they stand, without protest, as creatures with bodies in the presence of one who has no body. It is crucial that these two be said together: the problematic knowledge is not that man has a body; the problematic knowledge is not that God has no body; the problematic knowledge is that man has a body and God has no body-that is, that the unfathomable difference in power between them in part depends on this difference in embodiness … their awareness of the body will soon be correspondingly be heightened: the body is made a permanently preoccupying category in the pain of childbirth, the pain of work required to bring forth food…

And so, God places a curse on Eve and Adam’s bodies. He makes it that they will die. He curses women to bring forth children in pain. He makes their bodies the source of suffering. He makes the fact that God has an urepresentable body and humans have a body the source of suffering, of separation, of pain.

And I think that we’ve been laboring under that ever since. Do I believe the Genesis story? No. Not personally. But it doesn’t matter. Because so many people do, and for them, the body is the thing that got us into trouble with God. And other people’s bodies are still getting us into trouble with God. Unruly women, gays and lesbians, teenagers having sex, people insisting that they have the right to determine how and when they die. It’s all, according to some, designed to piss God off. And we know what happens when God gets pissed off. Look through the Old Testament. There’s plenty there. You want something that will really set you back on your heels? Look at the Book of Lamentations.

Elaine Scarry has an entire section of her book devoted to God’s lack of body. Yes, of course, in the New Testament, God does have a body in the form of Jesus Christ. And there’s a hell of a lot of suffering that gets inflicted on that body. But in the Old Testament, God does not have a body. And what’s more, the Fourth Commandment specifically commands that humans not dare to imagine what that body might look like-at least not by making graven images of it.

What does it mean that God does not have a body? To quote Scarry:

But to have no body is to have no limits on one’s extension out into the world; conversely, to have a body, a body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction (e.g., bodily cleansing), and wounding, is to have one’s sphere of extension contracted down to the small circle of one’s immediate physical presence. Consequently, to be intensely embodied is the equivalent of being unrepresented and (here as in many secular contexts) is almost always the condition of those without power.

In other words, to be represented by a body is to be finite, to be less powerful, to be controllable. It is not the suffering of Christ that is offered by the right wing as the source of their politics. If it were, their politics would be more compassionate, would recognize the body as the source of pleasure but also of pain. Instead, they make references to the Old Testament, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to Leviticus, to all the parts of the Bible where God seems to punish humans for simply being human.

So, I’ve been thinking about all of this as the drama of Terri Schiavo has played out. I’ve been thinking of a young woman who believed her body was the enemy. Who set out to control it in the only way she knew how. By purging it, and in purging it, destroyed it.

***************

Francine Prose returns to many of these same themes. She, too, sees women’s bodies as the sticking point for male-centered religion. Let’s face it, women’s bodies are so damn messy.

Ranke-Heinemann tracks much of this back to the body-hating, pleasure-despising strain introduced into the early church by the Essenes and Gnostics. Later, the early and medieval saints and theologians would show little interest in concealing their horror of sex and the body. According to one thought often attributed to Thomas Aquinas, any variation on the so-called missionary position was as sinful as having intercourse with one’s own mother.

The debate over sex with the beautiful versus sex with the ugly had its twisted roots in the belief that there was an almost mathematical ratio between pleasure and sin. The greater the pleasure, the worse the evil. Apparently, too, there also was considerable worry about ejaculation as something that drains and weakens the male, a dangerous process in general and particularly in the presence of the predatory woman who, unlike her mate, doesn’t lose in sex a life-sustaining fluid. The rabbinic admonition to think of a woman as “a pitcher of filth with its mouth full of blood” was echoed in the work of the twelfth-century theologian Petrus Cantor. “Consider that the most lovely woman has come into being from a foul-smelling drop of semen; then consider her midpoint, how she is a container of filth; and after that consider her end, when she will be food for worms.”

Julia Kristeva, the French feminist, has argued that the “abject,” literally, that which we throw away from us, includes all of our bodily fluids. And women simply have more fluids than men. No wonder, then, that religion, which strives to have a spiritual relationship with God, is disgusted by those things that keep it earthbound.

Women cannot help but be aware of her relationship to the earth. She bleeds each month, most often in tune with the moon. When she gives birth, it is in a rush of fluid, and blood, and shit, that firmly anchors the process of becoming human to the things about our bodies that we claim disgust us.

Theologians debated for years whether Jesus shat or pissed. They could not accept that a perfect being would produce waste products. What to do then, with a creature, that produces waste products constantly–and does not die as a result?

Increasingly, I find the body phobia of each of the three monotheistic religions to be pathological, and that pathology turned into holiness.

I think I’d rather stay a woman. Grounded. Of the earth. Messy. Real.

 I do not know what it is to be a woman in Israel. I cannot pretend to, as I have never been there. I have friends who have lived in Israel, some observant Jews, some not, but other than that, I don’t have much of a clue. Yes, of course, I read things. But I just want to point out, before I begin,  that I am not speaking as an Israeli woman.*

I am speaking as an American feminist who is trying to figure out the mixed messages that women are sent in Israel, and the frightening world of surveillance that many Israeli women live under. (And if Israeli women live under surveillance, multiply that exponentially to get to Palestinian women’s experiences.)

But I was struck by two stories that appeared close to one another in Ha’aretz, one of the more leftist Israeli newspapers. In one story, a woman was arrested for praying at the Western Wall (frequently referred to as the “Wailing Wall.”) In another, women can be forcibly inducted into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) if they are thought to be faking their religiosity.

As many of you know, all Israeli young people–male and female–are required to serve in the IDF.  According to War Resisters International, Israel violates young people’s human rights in that there is no conscientious objection status for men, and only partial c.o. status for women.

A woman can claim c.o. status:

Art. 39 (c) deals with the exemption of women with a particular religious background. According to this article: “A female person of military age who has proved, in such manner and to such authority as shall be prescribed by regulations, that reasons of conscience or reasons connected with her family’s religious way of life prevent her from serving in defence service, shall be exempt from the duty of that service.”

Men are allowed to claim religious education (e.g. studying to be a Rabbi) as a basis for exemption, but with women (who may not join the Rabbinate,) the right to claim c.o. status is directly linked to her family’s level of religious orthodoxy. Article 39 seems to assume that a woman (who is apparently old enough to fight and die for Israel) is still subject to her family’s religious beliefs. In other words, she is not recognized as her own person, but as an extension of her father. The religious exemption is not based on objection of war, as Judaism is not a pacifistic religion; rather, it is the family’s fear that she will “stray.”**

The legislation on exemption of religious women is based on Jewish tradition, which does not permit daughters either to stray from their father’s authority or to live in a mixed-gender society. Military service by women would conflict with both these proscriptions, hence with the traditional religious way of life.

Art. 40 specifies exemption on religious grounds. According to it, exemption is permissible when: “(1) reasons of religious conviction prevent her from serving in the defence service and (2) she observes the dietary laws at home and away from home and (3) she does not ride on the Sabbath.”

I would be curious as to whether there is someone reading this who can enlighten me why these same observances do not preclude men.

November 22nd saw the introduction of a bill that will radically change this.

The Ministerial Committee on Legislation on Sunday approved a bill aimed at curbing the growing number of secular girls evading service in the Israel Defense Forces by claiming to be religious.

The bill, which was proposed by the Defense Ministry, advises that the Israel Defense Forces keep close surveillance on every prospective recruit who cites religion as a reason not to complete service. This way, say minister, the IDF will have an easier time determining which claims are valid.

The article does not detail how a woman’s religiosity will be determined. Will she have to take a test? I assume that this will automatically preclude any Conservative or Reform Jew from claiming the exemption. But what does a woman have to do to prove that she’s religious “enough.”

Approximately one-third of women seek the exemption. This is seen as a problem, but this bill is also seen as a continuation of the struggle between the secularists and the religious in the Knesset.

The most chilling part of the bill is the surveillance apparatus that these new rules will create:

Hasson called his bill an opportunity intends to equalize the conditions under which women can receive exemptions, characterizing the ministers’ proposal as one that would simply enable the establishment of a team of private detectives whose sole purpose would be to follow up on women already exempt from their military service

Imagine: private detectives whose sole purpose is to follow women exempt from military service to make sure they are religious enough.

Having just read that article, you can imagine my bewilderment when I read this article:

Police on Wednesday arrested a woman who was praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, due to the fact that she was wrapped in a prayer shawl (tallit).

Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz said the act was a provocation meant to turn the wall into a fighting ground. “We must distance politics and disagreement from this sacred place,” Rabinowitz said.

Rabbi Gilad Kariv, associate director of Israel’s reform movement, said that all over the world women are entitled to wear the tallit, and only in the land of the Jews are they excluded from the social custom and even arrested for praying.

Last week Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Shas party’s spiritual leader, said during his weekly sermon that the women in the feminist movement are “stupid” and act the way they do out of a selfish desire for equality, not “for heavens’ sake.”

I have quoted most of the article because I find it appalling. In effect, a woman was arrested for wearing a prayer shawl and reading the Torah at the Wall. She was arrested because the courts have ruled that visitors to the Wall must comply with its dress code.

In the practice of something private, praying to G*d at a holy site, this woman was arrested. Someone was watching her. Ironic, huh? Not religious enough? You’ll be noted in some little book. Trying to practice the religion? Back in the book.

Both cases are about how women are not seen by Israeli law as equal in the eyes of God. They can die for their country, but they cannot pray for it–at least not in places that have been reserved for men.

Why does this infuriate me so? I’m not Jewish. I support a two-state solution, in which both Palestine and Israel would be recognized as sovereign nations. (Yes. I’m aware that Palestinians are second-class humans in Israel. I’m not trying to have that argument.)

But I find it interesting that, when you have determined that women are lesser beings, the perimeters that you put around acceptable female behavior is so constricting that “too much” –whichever way you go–brings you into conflict with your society.

Israel is a modern nation. The United States is a modern nation, but we have our own issues that are similar to those of Israel. For example, women are still exempted from conscription. I do not believe that anyone should be conscripted, but if the draft exists, then everyone–male and female, rich and poor–should be eligible. I don’t think that women in this country will have full equal rights until they can be drafted. ***

Military service for women is fraught with danger–not only from the enemies, but also from your fellow servicemen.

The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and the downward spirals many of their lives have since taken.

In this country, there are those who continue to insist that while women are also children of God, they are first their fathers’ daughters, and then their husbands’ wives. Their personhood is defined by their relationship to men.

Such seems to be the case in Israel. The only route to conscientious objection in Israel is to claim that one’s father’s religious beliefs preclude one from being exposed to military culture. Where is the claim that you simply do not want to participate in what you perceive as an immoral war? Can you serve in a non-combat position?

Perhaps this blog post makes little sense. I cannot pinpoint what made my eyes skip through the headlines to settle on these two separate stories. But as I read both of them, I envisioned Israeli women in a box.

And, as I hear our politicians negotiate a health care bill that would preclude women’s access to medical procedures because of some legislators’ moral concerns, I realized that we’re in a box, too. Maybe a different shape and color. But a box nonetheless.

*See Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things You Need to Know about the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.

**Friends of mine were part of the Peace Now! movement in Israel. They were at a rally when a friend of theirs was killed by a fellow Jew, who objected to those who objected to Israeli policies.

***Newt Gingrich once famously said that women should not serve in combat positions because sitting in damp fox holes would give them yeast infections. (He said it more crudely.)

Update:

I’ve just assigned an essay to my students for them to read.  By chance, the Western Wall comes up in the essay.

From Richard Rodriguez, “The God of the Desert,” Harper’s

“After the Six Day War, the Israeli government bulldozed an Arab neighborhood to create Western Wall Plaza, an emptiness to facilitate devotion within emptiness–a desert that is also a well…

Western Wall Plaza levels sorrow, ecstacy, cancer, belief. Here emptiness rises to proclaim its unlikeliness to God, who allows for no comparison. This is His incomparable Temple. It does not resemble. It is all that remains.”

I was at the mall recently. I loathe the mall, and yet, I find myself there fairly frequently. It is the closest place to my apartment for basic necessities—the Target there has a food market, so I can pick up eggs, or milk, or my prescriptions without having to drive downtown.

As usual, I was people watching. The mall seemed full of locals, and I started noticing something. Virtually everyone was carrying around extra weight. Lots of belly fat. Some of them were so slowed up by the extra weight that they lumbered. I started looking for lean people. There were a few, but as a percentage, it was less than 20 percent.

I know that we’re engaged in a national crisis over American obsesity. We blame television, and our sedentary lifestyles, and the availability of cheap, high-fat food. We drink too much soda. We eat too much candy and potato chips and fast food. We don’t exercise. It’s all our fault. We’re the richest nation on earth and we’re a bunch of slobs. Blah Blah Blah.

I’d like to offer some thoughts.

I have been re-reading Caroline Knapp’s brilliant book: Appetites: Why Women Want.   In it, Knapp (who died way too young at 42 of cancer) wrote of women’s appetites: for food, for sex, for material goods. She did not condemn desire. Rather, in a complex argument that I’m treating schematically here, she looked at how desire is twisted in our culture. For white, middle-class women especially, (and Knapp admits that her observations/experiences are based on her own position as white and middle class) thwarted desire lies at the heart of many of our cultural maladies.

It is the illusion of choice that thwarts the desire. It is the illusion that a well-educated, intelligent white woman is going to have access to real power in this culture that ultimately turns desire in on itself, twists it, cripples it, so that the thwarted desire becomes the source of suffering. In a way, it’s the Noble Truths of Buddhism. In another way, it’s what it’s like to be told you have power in America when you do not.

And Knapp argues that for women, who despite the seeming accommodations made for women’s liberation by the powers that be, are especially affected by this thwarted desire. As I said, she’s writing as a white, middle-class woman, and how this thwarted desire manifests itself in other groups of people is not in her expertise.

But her argument spoke to me.

Knapp was an anorexic. In a way, this provokes a “ho hum” reaction in me. After all, just how many more books do we need to read about white anorexia? But this book spoke to me because I also have an eating disorder. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ve dealt with bulimia for the last several years. I thought it was a thing of the past. Occasionally, (but not for the past ten days, thank god) bulimia called to me. And sometimes, I answered that call.

It’s embarrassing to admit. What sane, dignified, intelligent person wants to admit that sometimes, after eating a meal, or a bar of chocolate, or an ice cream sundae, she would stick her finger down the back of her throat and vomit? Especially one who is the mother of two daughters and who is desperate for them to not emulate that kind of behaviour? I found ways of being secretive about it, including going outside and vomiting in the backyard, away from the house. In the dark. Alone. So no one could see. It wasn’t a full-scale relapse. But it happened often enough that I could smell relapse in the miasma of my own vomitus.

My bulimia is fueled by a few things. Basic brain chemistry, for one. My genetic line on both sides of my family condemn me to craziness of various stripes. I am beyond grateful that my brain chemistry can be treated with drugs, and I no longer worry about the fact that I have to take antidepressants. Illness is illness. Despite the fact that I am in the happiest relationship of my life, that I am in love, that I am loved, that my children are doing well, and that nothing, at this moment, seeks to harm me, I feel powerlessness and a need to run. It’s a potent combination, and there have been  days in the past where that combination has knocked me on my ass. Or, knocked me to my knees, bending over a toilet.

I will tell you one more thing before I get back to those folks at the mall. Every time I threw up in the past, I was entirely conscious of what I was doing. The conversation went something like this: “Throwing up is not going to solve your problems.” And the response in my head was always something like, “Fuck you. It’s going to make me feel better.” In a situation where I cannot seem to move myself out of the position I’m currently in, the fact that I could manipulate my body endorphins, exercise control over my food intake, hurt myself, was moving myself. It was power. False power. But power nonetheless.

I am starting to take my power back. I am working my ass off on some writing projects that I hope will get me somewhere I want to be. I am reaching out to people who I love. I am running, or biking, or hiking, and loving the world in which spring tentatively claims the frozen earth.

But,  I look around and I see a lot of folks who are obese. And I found myself wondering why there has been such a growth of obesity in the past couple of decades. And all the reasons in the third paragraph still apply.

But I think obesity is a metaphor. I could just as easily be focusing on the need to shop. Or the need to drink. To take pills. To obsess. But, just for now, I want to talk about food, because food, for me, is an issue.

I think that my problem with food is reflective of a larger problem in our culture. We, as a nation, do not know how to make ourselves feel better. We do not know how to move ourselves out of the positions that the vast majority of us find ourselves in. We have been gradually stripped of our power. We cannot afford to buy the toys that we could that distracted us. When I was a kid, many, many people had RVs, and boats, and a new car every year. Middle class folks. But the middle class is drowning, and the poor, well, the poor are long underwater.

So, what do we have? We have food. Cheap, fattening, sweet food. And our televisions. The solace of food is what many of us give ourselves because we have nothing else. We can see what we want: it’s there on our television sets every night. Taunting us. But we cannot have it. We send our children off to fight in an unjust war. We work our barely-getting-by jobs. We struggle to make ends meet. And we eat. It doesn’t change anything. But for those moments when that sweetness is on our tongues, we feel better in our powerlessness.

As is typical any morning, I woke up a couple of hours before anyone else, and I started reading papers on the Web. This morning, on the Guardian, one of the major stories is about a new wave of crime in South Africa that is being called “Corrective Rape.”  This abomination in terms is the belief that if a lesbian is gang-raped by men, the lesbian part of herself will be driven out, and she will emerge from the violence as a heterosexual.

I thought that I would devote an entire diary to this topic, but I found, this morning, that I just could not go there. Rape is epidemic: not only is rape a tactic of war in most of central Africa, I have read recently that rape is being used in Haiti to enforce social discipline, and now, in South Africa, to enforce heterosexual norms.

Not to mention the huge numbers of rapes that take place in the United States each and every day.

Instead, I went searching through things I’ve written before. I hoped to find something that would explain to me why, why, hatred of homosexuals and women continue to persist in this world. Why, for example, the fact that Obama is even considering not overturning the bigoted “Defense of Marriage” Act–a legal abomination if ever there was one.

So, what follows is my wrestling with what it is about homosexuality (and by that same logic–women’s bodies) that frightens fundamentalists so. (And I mean fundamentalists of the three major religions–all of whom have strictures on the female body and against homosexuality.)

This diary is not intended to offend anyone, and yet, I have a feeling it will. It’s not intended as a criticism of Christianity; it’s an attempt to understand why theocrats hate and fear homosexuality so much. If we lived in an Islamic country, I’d be making similar arguments, but the majority of the theocrats in this country are Christian. Therefore, I ask these questions of the relationship between Christ and those men.

The theocrats’ hatred of the body is a particular fascination of mine. It’s a topic that haunts me, and, as things get increasingly worse in the United States in terms of the attacks on privacy, and as I feel the water getting hotter and the frogs still not jumping out of the pot, I search for answers, for words, for a way to understand them, extend compassion to them, and change their minds. Yes. I want to be the queen of the universe and make these people see the light. I really want to release them from their fears, because I think they are a people driven by fear. Fear is the basis of addiction. And fundies act like addicts in ways that I’ve articulated before.

And so, I feel obliged to try to feel my way through the relationship between the erotic and the spiritual. The sacred and the profane. Here’s my thinking.

Attempting to find the connections between the sacred and the erotic seems a fool’s enterprise. Immediately, my own intellect begins to mock me, presenting images of lascivious priests, porn shop editions of the Kama Sutra, or jokes about the ResERECTION or the Second Coming.

But, when I can release myself from the shackles of my rational self, I can admit some things. I don’t know if god exists. But I do know that my understanding of the sacred, those moments when awe replaces fear, is linked to my understanding of the erotic-those moments when the distance between two bodies is breached by contact. The hum of flesh against flesh.

I recognize this aspect of myself, this desire, need, to find my connection to spiritual bliss in genital contact. After all, so many of the feelings used by mystics to describe their encounters with the divine have always sounded to my ear like descriptions of orgasm or its afterglow. When scholars make this argument, that religious ecstasy is sexual ecstasy sublimated, they are accused of reductionism. But what of persons such as me, who feel in ways that we are not always able to articulate, that sexual intimacy is as close as we’ll ever come to feeling the fire of the divine? Am I the only one who feels this way?

To speak about sex as if it is capable of elevating us is to risk being accused of not being spiritual enough, of living only on an earthly plain, of privileging the body over the soul. But why? There are few religions that celebrate the body as the gateway to the divine. Mostly, we are advised to subjugate the body to the spirit, to discipline it, to control it, to prevent it from carrying us into excess. And this has never made sense to me.

It has on an intellectual level. I understand the notion of dualities: sacred and profane, suffering and pleasure, good and evil, man and woman. As someone who has studied gender in historical context, I could riff for hours on the association of women with the body, men with spirit, and how both women and the body became the gateways through which evil, the Devil, sin found ways to enter the world.

I look at the scriptural justifications for the ways that Fundies behave in the world, and most frequently, they cite Leviticus, or other books from the Old Testament. Or they quote Paul, who was not Jesus. Or, as I read in an issue of Harper’s, they cite the kick-ass Jesus from Revelations. That kick-ass Jesus scares the bejesus out of me, but perhaps he is easier for certain men to relate to.

When I was in Florida a few months ago, I saw a plethora of bumper stickers that read “Real Men Love Jesus.” I’ve been thinking about that bumper sticker ever since. What it means. Real men don’t love the faggy Jesus; you know, the one who had feelings, who wept, who felt suffering on the cross, who urged us to love our neighbors as ourselves, who commanded us to love one another. Love one another. Not to throw stones, missiles, drop bombs. That Jesus may well qualify as a sensitive new-age guy, a metrosexual, a wimp. How can a real man love that Jesus? Loving that Jesus means loving that part of themselves, and well, real men don’t seem to do that.

I cannot speak for other women, but I can speak from my position as a heterosexual woman. When I have read many accounts of male experiences of interaction with the divine, the most frequent image is that of a piercing or penetration by the divine spirit. The metaphor is important for several reasons. I would argue that one of the reasons that there has been such an insistence on separating sex from the sacred is the fear that describing sex and the penetration of the soul homoeroticizes the relationship between men and their gods. I have never seen an instance where a male mystic refers to being engulfed by the divine.

In many hagiographies or confessions about the coming to the divine, there is a sort of negotiation that goes on. A negotiation in which the stubborn soul refuses the love of God, and then at some point, there is surrender.

The negotiations between men and women are similar. And what is the point of the negotiation?  The point of the negotiation is surrender. What is it for a man to surrender to a woman? Is it to imagine what it is to be the glove, rather than the hand? To be the sheath. That is what vagina means, you know. Sheath. From the Latin. I find it fascinating that a part of the female body, the canal through which women bring forth new life, the first journey we experience as human beings-sliding through a fleshy tunnel into the light and cold-that the name for that conduit is not related to its function in birth, but rather, bears the name of a holder of a weapon. A scabbard-the covering in which you insert your sword.

Is this what men think of their penises as? Weapons? Swords? But a sheath is where you keep your knife to keep it safe, to keep it when you’re not using it for violence. It’s a place for it to rest until the next time it’s needed. When you place your sword inside its sheath, you’ve put down your weapon, you’ve disarmed yourself, you’ve made yourself vulnerable. You’ve surrendered.

In many of these hagiographies, men lay down the life of the sword for the life of the spirit. In many of the images of the warrior Christ, he bears the sword of justice. Perhaps I’m being oversensitive to phallic imagery, but I am speculating as to why the most fundamentalist of religious extremists hate and fear homosexuality so much.

What is the experience of spiritual surrender? In the accounts I’ve read, it’s the sense of penetration, of becoming whole, of feeling a divine presence move into your body. It’s not unlike the experience for women of heterosexual sex. I’m not a gay man. I don’t know if penetrative gay sex inspires the same feelings.

But I come back to the fear again. I come back to the fear of homosexuality. If your deity is male, and you want to be infused with his spirit, what is involved in that process? How can you maintain a distance between your experience of the sacred and more bodily experiences?

Late fall I was standing in front of the printer reading a freshly printed document when suddenly my uncle burst through the door shouting in his hard of hearing monotone, “You’re gonna have to call the cops or the coroner. She’s as dead as a door nail.”

A man given to drama, I quickly wondered, was this another scene? As I then fearfully thought, could he be speaking of my 80-year-old aunt he lives with?

Calmly turning my attention away from the papers I asked, “Who…who’s dead?”

The door wide open behind him letting in the crisp autumn air, he annoyingly shouted, “Cat!” as if I should know.

Shocked, I dropped the papers to my side, turned my body completely towards him and said, “Do you mean Cathy…” a radiant 39-year-old Shoshone woman with attentive unusual green eyes, breath taking in compliment to her wide bright smile, dark skin, and long black hair.

His pitch black eyes piercing, “Yes, Cathy,” again like what other Cathy is there?

My daughters over hearing the commotion moved from interior rooms towards us. Standing near the doorway, he directed his attention between them and me, “I just went over to her house. They said she was still sleeping. I said, ‘it’s afternoon…it’s time for her to get up.’ So I went into her bedroom to wake her and she was dead. Dead as a door nail.”

Two major causes of death here on the reservation, alcohol and suicide, he went on, “Her uncle said she’d been sick a couple of days before.” Wanting desperately to give other reasons for the cause of her death, “Still feelin’ kinda sick, she went to bed early last night.” But it was common knowledge among those who knew Cathy well; for several months she had quit eating and had been drinking instead.

Indians and liquor like two peas in a pod, so the American stereotype goes, I felt terrible. It was not right. Cathy was a bright, bright star. Not only because of her physical beauty and intelligence, but because of an innate radiance where in a crowd she held a force field that spoke of life—making life for those that knew her more meaningful.  

Dialing 911 I thought, why didn’t she know how valuable she was? A person who affirmed life, what made her life so unbearable that she wanted to die?

Of course, here in Indian country I was well versed with the answer to this last question. The answer in a loss of hope and the reason three teenage girls were found dead in an abandoned house a few months ago. Their deaths mysterious, authorities not knowing whether it was homicide, suicide, accidental death from drugs and alcohol—and not caring since after all, they were just Indians. Or… the 8-year-old boy who was found hanging in his closet this fall barely on the edge of life who had to be life flighted to Denver. Or…the promising 18-year-old boy while walking down the road the other month was killed in a hit and run. Or…the man who recently froze to death when below zero temperatures came early and he didn’t have any heat. Or… the young father raising three kids on his own who was beat to death last summer by two teenagers. Or…the girl who recently said, “It’s not a matter of if…it’s a matter of when,” when asked by a counselor about rape.

Not much to look forward when unemployment on this reserve is 67%. With death rates the highest and youngest (at 47-years-old) among American Indians due to suicide, murder, drugs, alcohol and health issues such as heart disease and diabetes as a result of the deadly colonized diet made deadlier by poverty. This of course does not even address the extremely high rate of domestic violence and violence, incest, and rape where 1 out of every 3 males can expect to be incarcerated in their life time.

Visibly upset, my uncle kept talking as I said to the operator, “I need to report a death.” Having difficulty hearing her, I turned to my uncle, lifted my finger across my lips to tell him to quiet down. He didn’t. He kept rambling about how he found her as he then tried to yell over me, instructing the operator how he’d be at the edge of Cathy’s driveway in a “blueish-green Ford Taurus” so the “cops” would know how to find her since there was no phone at her house to call in case they got lost.

Leaving the house with the same gust of energy as his arrival, without him it was deathly quiet as my daughters and I kept saying “Damnit,” deeply feeling a great loss.

My heart knotted, I wanted to cry. I needed to cry. Changing into my biking clothes, I grabbed my helmet and jumped on my bike. When I rode those 15 some odd miles on stark high plains roads, my whole mind and body would release, and I’d empty as the sense of the sky moved timelessly through and around me. Hoping for this kind of grace, I stood up and pumped up the hill. Turning onto Washakie
Park, my chest began to break open. Anger with sorrow bubbled to the surface and I gave myself over to them. In my mind, I made an appeal—an appeal to those unknowing who were responsible for Cathy’s death. No, not directly, but by not taking responsibility for the past, she, like many other American Indian people are lost in history. The genocide against them not forgotten, but worst, not even acknowledged. And, as a result, continuing. Her precious life lost testament of it.

With hot tears stinging my nose, I pumped harder, feeling that I…I needed to speak for Cathy, for those three beautiful teenage girls, for the 8-year-old boy, for my cousin who hung himself in jail, for my uncle who suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome, for…

For all those who are silenced and forgotten, who never got a chance to speak, who in loss of dignity never got a chance to live their lives long enough, free enough to discover and be who they really are.

Crying uncontrollably now, I remembered Leonard Peltier’s poem. Like Nelson Mandela, an American Indian martyr who has been in prison for 30-some-odd years for a crime he never committed. For being considered a threat to the American fiction as he refused to be silenced, he continues to write from prison. In his poem An Eagle’s Cry he speaks: “I am the Indian voice.”

“Hear me,” I continued his words, hoping the winds carried them to someone who cared, to people with open hearts who listened.

“Hear me crying out of the wind. Hear me crying out of the silence. I am the Indian voice.

“I speak for our ancestors. They cry out to you from the unstill grave.

“I speak for the children not yet born. They cry out to you from the unspoken silence.

“I am the Indian voice,” I begged, “Listen to me.”

Tears blurring the road ahead, “The Indian you think you see is not who the Indian is. He is a construction.”

Trying desperately to illicit understanding to whomever it was I was speaking to, “Imagine…” I said. Believing I saw understanding faces forming in the clouds, “…now imagine this…

“Imagine this to be you…

“You—believe you are connected to the spirit of all things. This makes you sensitive to the beauty and truth of life. This informs your every decision—from the way you treat your partner and family and tribe—to the earth. You know, what is good is what gives, supports and protects life. Your government and society reflect this belief.”

The sun glittering in the golden fall wheat topped grass I wailed as the urgency of my sorrow gained force. The prairie dogs hearing me came out from their underground homes, stood on their two hind feet, stretched their long bodies and necks to see me—as if to ask, to say, what’s wrong? You okay?

Calmed by their generosity, I wiped the snot that had rolled to my upper lip on the back of my arm and quietly continued, “And…then…as you are living this rich and plentiful life, a very different kind of people move in. People who are oddly different in the way they worship a man in the sky that tells them men are better than women. This same god who tells them they are better than any other kind of person who is not like them. A man,” I stress, “that tells them the earth and people who do not believe or look like them are there for their use, are there for their personal gain.

“But because of your honor for life, you think—‘well, not every body is the same. There is an eagle, and a hawk, and a… We are all different. And each of us are to be valued for that difference.’ So you say to this new people, ‘Welcome. You live there, and we will live over here.

“You know this works, as this is how you have lived with other tribes who are unlike you for millennia.

“But, unfortunately,” I cautioned my listener as I coasted, “this is not how these new people think. They believe their way is the only way. They define you by their standards. They write about you so they become the supreme authority on you.  Controlling your destiny through their language and words, in their literature you are savages and wildmen, ruthless with no soul, you are illiterate and stupid, you are…

“By making you subhuman they justify the swallowing up of your land, your resources, your beliefs, your wealth, your identity, your spirit in the same way they swallowed Africa, Asia and other peoples and countries. Then, they spit you up in various versions of themselves calling it ‘colonization’ then, calling it ‘globalization’ now.

Watching a herd of paints, sorrels, blacks and bays run across the ridge line, earnestly I continued, “You quickly discover the only thing that is sacred to these new people is acquisition. To you this is evil—as the idea of appropriation in any form is the antithesis to the freedom inherent in the right of life and living.  

 “Outrageous to your way, whenever they capture one of your women, she will be raped. You believe women to be culture, to be life—and so, you know the meaning of this act. Used to warfare as skirmishes where at the most 1 or 2 people will be killed in a year of battle, when they attack your village everything will be destroyed. Women and children will not be spared. With women and children gone, so is the ability of your people to survive.  When you make any agreement with them, it will not be honored by them.

The smell of wild sage cleared my mind and heart as I continued to speak, “Totally unprepared for the brutality for what is considered the largest holocaust in world history, 18 million of you will die within the United States territory alone. Another 130 million will die in Central, South, and far North America. You will die from disease, from warfare, and out and out genocide. What is left of you will be herded like cattle far away from your home land, placed on a small piece of land without the means of survival, given germ invested blankets to keep warm and traded food for your children. A plan of genocide that is so successful, a 20^th century admirer with the name of Hitler will emulate your oppressor.

“When you refuse to hand your children over, you will either be killed or sent to prison.

“For several generations your children are taken to boarding schools far from you. There, they learn to hate themselves as Indian and their traditional ways. Pitted against one another, your children learn the deviousness of survival. Without your protection, your children are raped nightly, rented to pedophiles. sold as cheap labor, used for medical experiments, sterilized, die to starvation and untreated minor diseases, on and on.

“Only one half of your children will return to you. The others who don’t, you are told ran away. But you know this is not true, because they never came home. Those that do come home are completely unfamiliar to you. Not only have they lost their traditional ways of life and family, they have lost themselves.

“With your children’s hearts on the ground, they try to kill the oppressor they have internalized through self destructive behaviors. Or, in over identifying with the oppressor, they try to kill the disgusting Indian they see in the face of their brothers and sisters.

“Your oppressors’ children call your children, ‘deviants, rapists, blanket ass worthless drunks, violent thieves, murderers, untrustworthy dirty savages, greasy stupid Indians…’ Those that read and listen to these descriptions of your children, having the privilege of race and culture to reject what is written and said, do not. Having the power to release you from being locked in this historical nightmare, they choose to avoid looking deeper into the face of truth, and taking responsibility by standing up and speaking for truth.”

Nearing the road Cathy lived on I slowed down and stopped at the end. Straddling the bar with my feet flat against the tarmac, I looked towards her house. Envisioning her young children and extended family grieving in the small living room as she lay still in her bedroom, I asked in my heart, what will it take?

Knowing that when we do nothing, not only are we condemned to a life of meaninglessness, but so too is the whole human race, never rising to the greatness we are meant to be.

Watching the coroner and police arrive, with my right hand I reached down and touched the earth as I put one foot on the pedal, and with the other, slowly pushed off. As I coasted down the hill toward my house, in a prayer to Cathy and all those helping her make the journey, I lifted my hand above my head and circled four times in honor of the people in the east, west, north, and south; then raised it higher to touch the sky, then back to my heart as I whispered, “To all my relations, A’ho.” 

On several occasions, in some form or another, I believe that I have begun the very composition that I hope to complete now. I’ve been somewhat introspective recently, and writing can sometimes help me to further explore topics upon which I am already reflecting. More often than not, however, writing leads me to ramble and to talk in circles and I am left with no conclusion at the end of a sentence, paragraph, or composition.

Sometimes, I realize that the subject matter is much bigger than I, that it could not possibly be figured out in during one hundred brain storming or free write sessions (let alone one) and I am left with no answers. At times, I end even more bewildered than when I began.

All that being said, I am thinking quite a bit currently about the nature of relationships and the way that we as people allow human interactions to shape us, our identities…

I cook quite a bit. Once upon a time, I even entertained misguided dreams that I might one day become a chef. Since, I have come to the more realistic realization that I am not organized enough to work in a kitchen as a professional. Besides, if I were to do that, perhaps I’d not enjoy cooking any longer.

I did not begin cooking because of any expectations associated with gender roles, nor would that have any bearing upon why I still do it.  I cook simply because I enjoy it, because it allows me to create. Just as when I write I experiment with different combinations of words, while I cook I experiment with different combinations of flavors and seasonings until I come up with something that suits my tastes (and hopefully the tastes of those for whom I cook). Chances are, the combinations of flavors that I am “creating” have been attempted in the past - just as with the words that I choose to manipulate.

Cooking is as well, I have decided, one of the ways in which I try to get people to like me. Maybe, just maybe, if they like food that I have prepared, they will see something worthwhile within me. Since I realize this, I suppose I am doing this on at least a semi-conscious level.

I also noticed (or at least I thought that I did) that people used to tend to like me more when I was drinking. So, I used to imbibe spirits and feed others in order to lift theirs and to feel as though I was liked. I am certain that I still do this now, I just try to do it a lot less.

Close to a year ago now, I spent a weekend in Las Vegas for a friend’s wedding and I was nervous about going without my husband. I knew that I would most likely drink too much and I worried that I might do something stupid. I know that I have never told him that and I don’t think I divulged my fear to anyone else, either. Aside from drinking too much; however, I avoided doing anything else that I would have considered stupid. I have faith that my husband would agree.

I don’t know that I am happy about that. I don’t know that I am happy about my decision to put myself in a situation which, in the past, has led me or influenced me to make some poor decisions. At the time, it was a struggle for me to be comfortable with my husband’s trust in me. In general, I sometimes struggle with the the amount of trust that my husband places in me (a lot). I’d like to think that I have the same trust and faith in him. However, the situation has yet to be reversed.

I like to think that I am honest to a fault with my husband, but this is probably not the case. I often do not let him know of my intentions even when I am aware of them ahead of time. Often times, I am honest with him about things that occurred in the past. This kind of honesty feels to me the way that I imagine going to confession would feel.

I sometimes attempt to tell him things that he seems to have no interest in hearing or it is not an opportune time to bring up certain things with him (while we have a pretty honest relationship, I don’t know that I would continue to be so truthful, if I would want to, or if he would want me to, were I to share particular things in front of an audience) and so by the time I actually do end up sharing such things with my husband, he feels as though I’ve hidden something from him or that I felt I could not tell him before. I suppose this is true, but only to an extent.

I have, at times, suggested to my husband that we have an open relationship. I have noticed this trend in the other open relationships I of which I have been aware - that it seems one party feels as though they owe it to the other to have such an arrangement - it seems as though they feel their partner has had to “settle” for them, so rather than lose them, they allow their partner to explore whatever other options may be available to him or her. I imagine fear is part of it - a fear that one of us may not always measure up to the others expectations or meet their needs. It is as much of a fear that I will succumb to having my “needs met” by another as it is that I will face rejection of some sort because my partner has needs that I cannot meet.

So, what is the point of marriage if two people are to have an open relationship? I am not certain that I have a definitive answer. I struggle with this myself on occasion. I do not think that the act of sex should be the be all end all of a relationship. That seems quite silly to me. Besides, when people date or when one is not seeing someone exclusively, do they not often utilize several different people to meet their needs? Is there not someone to feed them, someone to entertain them, and someone to hold them? Why should we limit ourselves to just one person to be everything to us? Is such an expectation realistic or natural? Do relationships entitle us to have expectations of others?

I am not certain what is reasonable to believe or to have or to strive for. On the one hand, I believe that what I said above is true - many people occupy different places and play different roles to us at different times all throughout our lives. However, doesn’t more than just the act of sex exist between a couple? If what they share between them is “more than sex” why would either of them seek anything less outside of their relationship? Why go elsewhere just for sex? If it is more than just sex that one seeks with someone outside of his or her relationship with another person, will they have enough love or energy or desire to still share with their partner? What if the desire or focus shifts? Is it fair to their significant other(s)?

Do not get me wrong, if two people can find everything that they need only in one another, more power to them. I am willing to admit that such a possibility exists. To me, however, the prospect of soul mates is a myth, likely manufactured to encourage monogamy (at least on the part of women who were and may still be considered property - but that is, perhaps, to be explored in a later blog.)

I am not certain that I believe in romantic love. I have thought about it logically and the conclusion to which I come is this - romantic love is the same as the compassion that we feel for each of the people about whom we care, there is just more weight or a different weight placed on it because it is combined with a passion or lust or desire that we do not possess for the others about whom we care. I definitely do not think that”romantic” love can exist without jealousy.

For a very long time, I did not consider myself a jealous person. I have insecurities though that I definitely allow myself to project onto others in the form of envy. I have a friend who seems to logically understand jealousy and who states that she does not suffer from it. I am envious of her ability… I have another friend who states that he does not hold peoples’ faults against them and I’d like to have a better understanding of that ability as well.

Since arriving at the conclusion that I am actually capable of suffering from jealousy and behaving in a jealous manner and realizing that I do, in fact,  do so from time to time, I have noticed myself feeling envious less often. However, now I find myself envious of the simplicity with with some people seem capable of loving & living - people who are content just to be whether themselves or with someone else.

I have a friend who has been in a relationship with his girlfriend for ten years. He says, almost as though it is a justification, that it has been off and on. I think that most people would think that being in a ten year relationship is commendable and not in need of justification. Together, he and his significant other have two children. He refers to her simply as “his girlfriend” (which apparently annoys her to no end). He seems to justify the situation further by saying that he is “not an easy person to be with.”

Upon hearing this the first time, I thought to myself, “Who is easy  to be with?”

However, upon further introspection, I think that if we were to simply “be” together, regardless of the kind of relationship, to focus on the enjoyment of one another’s company and nothing more, to not place place too much unnecessary or irrelevant attention on “commitment,”  or to place too much weight or emphasis on our own insecurities or failures or too much on our own needs, then perhaps it would be easy simply to “be” ourselves and to “be” with one another…

…(if you’d like to read a far more eloquent post about this topic and you’ve not yet done so, you should read L’Dawn’s most recent blog posting, “Choosing Love”)…

“Does God talk to you?” I asked him. He paused for a moment. A few minutes before, we had both passed on taking communion. It could have just been me, actually–I was sitting closer to the aisle and I think he was waiting for me to move first toward the altar to “receive the elements” as I usually do. But sometimes, like today, I remain seated, waiting awkwardly until the communion plates and my chance to be included are taken away. “Not hungry?” he asked me. Not sure whether to interpret the words literally or metaphorically, I shook my head.

Looking around at the church, I realize again that it’s a simple church, and that’s one of the things I like about the place. Nothing gaudy or showy, just a place where people gather to quiet their spirits before God and hopefully hear something back. But even these sparse symbols are bothering me now. Watching the pink and purple Advent candles burning and listening to a cheerful song about the manger and the donkeys and the straw playing overhead, a nameless frustration grows. It doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. The symbols are empty–trite, even. I don’t feel it, and my faith in these stories has all but disappeared. While sensing the presence of evil has kept me on guard these days, God has been quiet.

So then I asked whether God talks to him. His response felt familiar. Considering times he’d sought and found solutions through prayer, God could be answering his prayers. But he acknowledged the possibility that a mind focused on finding an answer is simply positioned to realize the resolution on its own. He concluded that God either speaks to everyone in such a way, indirectly–or he doesn’t speak to everybody.

And then, of course, the question in return. Does God speak to me? I, too, pause briefly to consider it. “I think he used to. Not anymore.”

It’s almost time for the second service. I am the music director, and I need to step up and play keyboard as usual. I leave the conversation with my boyfriend unsettled and relocate to the front rows where the other musicians wait, chatting. As I sink into a chair, I ask one of the vocalists how his ministry idea is developing; he has a vision for a new creative arts presentation of the New Testament (the second half of the Bible). He updates me on the progress, and somewhere in the middle of the logistics, he says something about how the plans are flowing through him, but he is not directing them–how God is inspiring and shaping the project in specific ways. I echo back that “that is the best part, to be a vehicle,” remembering the feeling.

An hour or so later, my boyfriend and I are on the freeway, driving down to the beach, where someone from Craigslist is going to sell us their unwanted Wii Dance Dance Revolution game. We’re both excited; my boyfriend used to play DDR competitively, and I just want to exercise more. I’m thinking about freeway directions and video games when my mind shifts back to our earlier conversation about whether God speaks to us, and then to the church vocalist’s words. I pipe up, “I think I need to do music again. I remembered one reason I believe in God. You know how I’ve talked about some of my own songs being ‘given to me’? And how I sometimes feel like I am not the one creating the notes I’m singing, but something else is being ripped or pulled through me? Well, Kevin was talking about his ministry idea, and he said something like that, and it reminded me. It’s one of the reasons I definitely believe in God.”

My boyfriend responds, “It’s like that blog about Jeff Buckley.” He is referring to a blog we read yesterday. It had caught my eye because I hold Jeff Buckley’s voice and music in such high esteem–I’ve wondered more than once why God took back something so beautiful so soon. The blog included quotes attempting to describe the vague phenomenon of hearing something “otherworldly” in some singing. The words reminded me of a feeling. Opening up and being genuinely surprised at the music that came out. The sensation of being cleansed. It has only happened a couple of times over the course of my life, and I knew I was not responsible for it.

“Yeah,” I agree slowly, it is like the blog. My boyfriend smiles, saying, “Look at all the different ways that God is speaking to you.”

“Maybe,” I say, and make myself shrug. But I do think about it.

Two years ago, I realized that my identity had been stolen. Credit card debt had silently been accruing under my name for a couple of years on purchases I never made. It was terrifying to face the possibility of being held accountable for thousands of dollars (which I didn’t have), but even more terrifying to accept that someone could assume my identity. Which, in this case, meant my reputation in the American system of credit, a system built on invisible people. Who was Angela Vicente then? A series of numbers, a couple of faulty security questions and someone else.

Really, in the age of computers, we have all become invisible people. Consider the personas we take on behind our monitors. We can re-imagine ourselves, calculating our personalities and exploring our extremes. We can say the things we’re too afraid to say in person. We can experience a wide range of interactions, visuals, sounds, and information, and all entirely anonymously, our public identities untouched by our words and activities. Sometimes I think that this level of detachment and hiding brings out the worst in us because we feel hidden. Is that who we really are, when no one else can see us?

A few days ago, my boyfriend asked me whether I thought his identity was my perception of him or his own perception of himself. Thinking of how different eyewitness accounts can piece together truth, I proposed that our identities are the sum of our own and each others’ perceptions. But what if our perceptions are both wrong? Even if this is how we perceive identity, what is it that defines the truth of our identity?

Throughout the course of my life, my defining characteristics have been “musician” and “Christian”. But as of late, these names don’t fit comfortably. My roommate, also a jazz vocalist, wondered at my listlessness and asked me, “You have fun when you’re singing, right?” And I paused for a moment before I realized out loud, “No.” To be clear, I love singing. I love the physical and spiritual aspects of sound. But for a long and frustrating period, I’ve heard sound fall flat without meaning. Spiritually, I feel the same disconnect. So I’ve slowly backed away from actively practicing both music and Christianity. To call myself a “musician” and “Christian” feels dishonest at this time. But when these things are taken away, am I less me? Or just different?

I look at my body in the mirror. I spend a lot of time shopping for clothes with a particular cut that will hide the parts I don’t like. After twenty-nine months of office work and dwindling activeness, my body has changed. I scrutinize the stretch marks and round belly. When did my chest start looking that wrinkled in the morning? Why is my face suddenly older? For two years, I didn’t use a full-length mirror. Returning to this view was startling. I remember the distinct feeling that I was no longer living in my real body, and that if I could chisel away the excess, the real me would be found underneath. Vain as that all may sound, my body represents me. Inwardly, I feel the bewilderment of a six-year-old, but I just turned twenty-four, and my body feels the fatigue of a much older woman. Which one is really me?

For my sister, ethnicity is an important part of her concept of identity. We are multi-ethnic, but we’ve had different experiences with that reality, having grown up in different decades. Our parents were married in the early ’70s when mixed marriages were less common. My sister recalls being a kid and running into some skin-heads who taunted her with, “Don’t you wish you were white?” Confused, she thought to herself, “But I am white!” Conversely, when I tell people these days that I am part Filipina, half of the time I hear back, “I thought you were just white.” While I didn’t grow up as immersed in Filipino culture as my sister did, the judgment usually has less to do with consumption of traditional foods and more to do with my skin color and eyes. But without the characteristic physical features or any involvement in the Filipino community or culture, how much does–or should–the technicality of bloodline count? Is it that my grandpa was Filipino but I am not?

The day after Obama’s election, my sister called me. “Guess what! Obama is multi-ethnic,” she reported. “Everyone talks about him being black, but he’s really multi-ethnic.” He hadn’t been her candidate, but she now feels a kinship with our new president over the experience of multi-ethnicity. It is the very first time in history that our country has elected a person of multi-racial heritage to represent and lead us. How apt for a country as diverse as America. We are still figuring out our identity, in so many ways.

Me, too.

I worry about being too much.

I worry about not being enough.

I cannot secure man’s attention because there will always be someone who is more. More beautiful, more interesting, more intelligent, more fit, more patient, more whole. And when I am too predictable, too sensitive or too insecure, I cringe at the thought of someone who is less–less of a burden. No woman has a perfect balance, of course. But with studies suggesting that around 50% of married men cheat, what kind of peace can I ever have with my own imbalances?

At some point, I started to believe that it was not a question of “if”, but rather, “when”. When he loses interest or patience, what do I do? Do I let it confirm that I am a mess? Or was he just a loser who wouldn’t commit to something real? I can tell myself, “He is not me. I am me. I did not lose me. He does not define me.” When I believe this, I am strong. But I soon wilt with the implication of his departure: “You are not enough to hold me here. You are too much for me to handle.”

These words ring in my mind. Various people have said them in different ways. I look over at my boyfriend, who has fallen asleep while I type. I feel his breath on my arm. He only speaks love and acceptance. But I continue to regularly offer my disclaimers, warning him of my imperfections to fend off any surprises. I seem to believe that preparation encourages tolerance, at least for a little while longer than if he had discovered my flaws himself. “This doesn’t scare me away,” he says. I say, “Not yet.”

I tell myself, “don’t mess this one up.” I think the words to the Damien Rice song “Cannonball”–I don’t want to lose. And I squirm because I await the loss. I lost faith, at some point–in faithfulness, in men, in the standards to which I cannot adhere. I walked through relationships like a zombie, expecting nothing and everything at the same time. This time, in continuously witnessing his generosity, adventurous spirit, and sincere heart, I don’t want to lose. But part of this is wanting to prove that I am okay, or even acceptable. To dispel the tags “overwhelming” and “inadequate”. Redemption. Tempered by risk.

At my most objective, I realize that my sense of worth is often displaced. It cannot hinge on people’s whims. It must depend on God. His hands formed me, and His breath flows through me. My Maker defines my worth, this makes sense to me. Still, the rejection of men hurts. Their dismissals endure like scars. When will I find a way to break the cycle of being controlled by my scars?

I have just arrived in Moscow for resuming of filming my new documentary after a wonderful, necessary holiday with my boyfriend in Greece. Of course he is part of my secret life. We all have many hidden parts, but he is not the secret I was talking about….

It’s funny for a woman who has spent the last years trying to bring her private world out into the light that there are still things that inevitably remain hidden. The truth is no one is ever really known. Sometimes when I appear at screenings of FLYING, inevitably people will ask questions about what the film leaves out. Many times women have stood up in the audience and asked me how the film could leave out spirituality? It is true that the film does not talk directly about spirituality, although many of the women who appear in it are religious. For example Svetlana in Moscow is the founder of Project Kesher, a group specifically created to help develop female leadership in the Russian Jewish community. Her spiritual life is not delved into in the film, nor is that of others. Although with Sveta we tried to edit more in, but simply the film could not hold the digression and so we had to take it out again. Films cannot be about everything as one finds out over again when one sits down to edit a story. Whatever is not on the subject invariably ends up on the editing room floor. And FLYING is basically about female sexuality.

So when this question comes up to me, I often respond by saying that while the film doesn’t speak about spirituality directly, it is informed and imbued by many things that I learned through my spiritual practice – things like being present in the moment, and equanimity. But if you watch FLYING you will not ‘see’ a spiritual woman, you will see someone grappling with her female identity and her sexuality. My new film is about the life of the high Tibetan Teacher Namkhai Norbu Rimpoche and his son Yeshi, also a Reincarnate Lama, called LEARNING TO SWIM. I have been following and filming Namkhai Norbu for twenty years and the film will finally be finished next year. So, perhaps now it is time to come out of the closet with another part of my life. It is time to talk about my Buddhist practice, which strangely may be harder than talking about my sex life!

How do you speak about your relation to the spirit? How do you speak about your need for the spiritual? How do I explain that while I am a Jew, I have been practicing Tibetan Buddhism for 23 years and that it has informed my life and my films? To be honest I rarely speak about religion. I only talk if asked, prodded and pushed, but I might talk about my sex life without so much as a question. That’s funny, huh? Maybe that’s a good example of a modern woman…. Even now I find myself pausing at the computer, wondering what to say next? My boyfriend, who does not practice any spiritual faith at all, recently asked me why I practiced Buddhism? I was really touched by his curiosity and I took a deep breath before responding. I wanted to find a way to explain to him so that he could finally understand. After many moments of searching for the right words, I said: “It’s about connecting to the universe and seeing the world as much bigger than you and your little problems….” When I saw the glaze in his eyes, I realized that my explanation didn’t help much. He has never had this experience, except maybe during sexual union, but he doesn’t have the idea to call those feelings ‘spiritual’.

When I meditate, I feel like I am in the vast galaxy of stars above the earth – not even myself anymore, but part of the sky, the clouds, the planets. And this feeling gives me a natural arising of compassion for others and also for myself and my stupidity and my suffering. Because our small lives seem so unimportant in the larger scheme of things. Buddhism plugs me into the vast beauty of our existence that is bigger than all of our petty problems.

My teacher Namkhai Norbu often says: “Samsara is always Samsara.” This means that we cannot expect there not to be suffering in human life; we must know that there will always be suffering, work with it and go beyond it all.

I am curious about other women’s ways to create a spiritual life? What are your thoughts and practices?