Posted on by d

No us, no them.

I work for a company with people who live all around the world, including Israel and Palestine.

Just as not all Americans are bad people who love guns and think a “god” gave them this land to take as they see fit, not all Israelis feel that way either, and not all Palestinians hate Israelis. The Israeli military is not all Israelis, despite the fact that everyone is forced to serve. Zionists are not all Israelis. Hamas is not all Palestinians. The news never tells us everything.

I did not choose to be born in a place my ancestors stole, but I am here, and if you know anything about me, you know that I really give a shit about that. A lot of Israelis feel the same way about where they were born, too. They deeply love and respect the land where they live and are intimately connected to it, and they also understand that they share it with other people (obviously this is the abbreviated version, and there are different understandings about how and why everyone is there). Regardless, like many Americans, they don’t have or desire anywhere else to “go,” either, so instead, they work for peace and mutual respect and the end of an occupation mentality. And there are many Palestinians who do the same. They work from opposite ends of experience, but they meet in the middle and try to understand it all.

Many years ago, I traveled there, and I stayed in Jerusalem for a while, an epicenter of Abrahamic religious tension – the three biggest patriarchal religions all claiming to own rights to some ancient bricks, requiring that anyone desiring of the religious experience of touching them walk through metal detectors first.

Just like we have here in the US, there are a certain type of people who feed into this tension, and who believe in the might of military and weaponry to oversee it. It’s not everyone, though. Later during those travels, I stayed with an Israeli family. During a religious observance when all the electricity was shut off throughout the town, I snuck out with the family’s teenagers so they could go meet their Palestinian friends and hang out under the cover of darkness. And they were teenagers, smoking cigarettes, laughing, making eyes at each other, speaking each other’s languages and enjoying the excitement of illicit activity.

I can’t see another “free Palestine” post today. Stop it. I believe in the freedom of Palestine, too. I don’t, at all, approve of these settler rampages that destroy Palestinian homes, olive groves and businesses, believing in their god-given redneck right to steal the land. I do not approve of the Israeli army killing people (especially backed with weaponry provided by the United States). And I do not approve of Hamas taking people hostage, raping or killing people, either. A land of generationally traumatized people is at war with itself, breeding atrocities. There is no end to this. No one wins.

If there is a god, and if that god is why we are, in all of these patriarchal religions, the sole species blessed with the gift of reason, we are not at all serving this god by acting like this. “They” are every bit as much of us as we are “them.” We are all human, and we are the worst kind of animal; we have been caged by our own rage and fear and are now terrified, without trust, faith, or the ability to truly use the gifts this god as purportedly bestowed upon us.

Pray for Palestine. Pray for Israel. Pray for humanity. Or in lieu of all that, just be a good human. Work for peace and the evolution of this species, because if we aren’t already there, we are on our way to hell.

*** Feature image by hosny salah from Pixabay

Posted on by d

On letting go of extraordinary ambition

The feeling of it is indescribable.

In a place like the one where I am now, it’s very easy to get caught up in the dreams of others, tossed into a pot of brilliance as we all are.

I remembered though, recently, that my walk is my own; I don’t have an entire life ahead of me anymore, just half of one, probably. My life already reads as a list of grand adventures and minor accomplishments, and I have little desire to let go of some of the things I had before immersing myself in academia: a garden, a wildness, time to create and enough of an income to provide for my daughter and pay for a pleasurable life lived within our means.

I’d felt isolated, but now I know why. The separation was only painful because I was unwilling to accept the truth: I am different, I am in a different place in my life, I believe that knowledge is power, I’m already good at what I do and being able to study and network with top-notch professionals is an icing on the cake. And I know exactly where the few people I can count on here are. This is literally all that matters right now.

I came here with much more noble ideas. I am finishing my stay with the realization that I am at a zenith. It’s time to reflect.

It’s a story that was told to me many years ago, but I only chose to remember half of it. I would eventually come to this place. I would eventually have things to accept. I would have to come to terms with what I’ve always known: regardless of how loudly I shout, I’m more effective when people don’t know who it is that’s yelling.

I will relax into doing something for sheer joy, with the knowledge that my choice to do so is a radical act in and of itself. It doesn’t require age to earn the privilege of pleasure or creative expression. Anyone who’s been doing the hard work of trying to make the world a better place deserves to settle into the goodness of a present, and we deserve to have the time to create that space if it’s not already there.

I don’t need to be a hero, I just need to live, to show my daughter how it’s done, to make sure she and others have the space they need to be joy.

Posted on by d

These eyes.

A riot of color welcomed me, and a quiet cacophony of hummingbirds and bees, butterflies, other little things come to get drunk on flower sperm and help keep the vibe alive. I was there to see it for her, to relieve some of the pressure of maintaining a garden, of dealing with glaucoma, of not being able to see the finer details anymore. 

She was something of a hedge witch though. She knew where she’d planted things, could still see when the deer had helped themselves to the boneset, knew when it was time to prune so plants had more energy to regenerate. She had me wage war on the anemones, the beautiful white flowers that built networks just under the surface of the soil and spread like a California wildfire. This war, this endless war, had me returning each week to listen to the sounds of the wind in the poplars, to uncover beetle nests with delight, to run to her like a child because I’d found the first monarch caterpillar of the season and it was eating something other than milkweed.

What was this plant, I wondered? She held it close and then far, then sniffed at it, closing the worse of her two eyes in hopes of catching a clearer glimpse.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” 

I was on the clock, so sharing wonder was as far as I could digress. I’d left my phone in the car, the one with the plant ID app. She would have been a bit disgusted, I think, had I consulted it first, a bit angry with everything, the kids these days, kids being relative since there I stood at nearly fifty, wide-eyed with wonder at a caterpillar, holding it out to my 74-year-old friend.

I was still young, to her. Though mine, too, were beginning their decline, I could still be her eyes, so I needed to be good at it. I pinched a sprig and put it between the pages of a book, the book I’m reading, the book I can read. I would look it up later, come up with a way to tell her how I found my way to its name. 

She was already losing so much magick, so much magick. I hoped that after I left, she sat and looked at the shapes I’d created as I cleaned up the beds and gave the plants room to breathe. I hoped that she sat there and listened to the music—the wind in the poplars, all the sweet pollinators who’d come to her oasis, the offering her garden gave her in exchange for the love she gave it, for the love that I, through proxy, now continued.

Posted on by d

fire cycle fire

Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Unsplash | sanguine meander

so many thoughts passing through so quickly i’ve forgotten them, having been driven to the present cyclically.

it started with thoughts on how much i enjoy cannabis and a practice often referred to as ‘restorative yoga’ – a deep state deep stretch that realigns my spine in such an organized, methodical way. it’s an ecstatic process of feeling myself from a multitude of perspectives that all boil down to, essentially, three. the mind starts to run and oh yeah, relax your hip and you’ll literally lower down three inches and focus on the breath, bam, you’re back. do that again. but also, feel free to groan because that stretch is so deep it’s like the hand of God digging deep into your glutes and all around your hip sockets…

i mean, for me it is. fuck yeah feel the self-love. can you blame me for loving it this way? feel free to moan. in the end no matter what kind of moan it is, it is the depth of human feeling. i think it all goes to the same place, that deep well of emotion we are, most of us, so capable of. No fantasies of who we are once we’ve all wormholed our way together through a vast array of the dimensions and expressions we are capable of, perhaps even believing at some point that we’ve finally seen it all – and it’s only then that we stop falling, but we also die.

In these deep centrally connective spaces on my body i hold these visions, some of which are true and some of which need a little more space before they can be released, so they can be let out completely, leaving not even a hair behind. gone. full mobility has returned along with ecstatic release.

i spray the room with magic to clear all that has been let go, to bless and send it further on its journey. may it glide its way out the window and fall to the ground. may its decomposition fertilize soil and create space for new growth, new experiences and new ideas.

clearly, i will also bleed soon. i will feed this land.

 

 

 

Posted on by d

that one and this

i felt in her a kindred spirit, one who needed both a buffer from the world and space to observe it.

what kind of love was this, however, in which trust allowed for full creative expression? it was not what i felt i had. it would be the death of us, i was sure, the day i truly came alive again.

some things are worth the suffering. i needed to return to the world and expand again in it. both of us were innocents. we had empty toolboxes.

it’s okay. there is loss there, but loss is okay. there are gifts in it and i welcome gifts. for weeks though, i questioned what kind of person i might be: i was feeling expansive and social and willing to let my guard down and have energetic exchanges. i wanted to know where my grief was. I know better now, though, that really, it depends on the archetype. There are four of these who accompany me on my moon cycle, and I embody one at a time.

Fun stuff, being a woman. We are shapeshifters.

This is an interesting exercise, of once again dedicating focus on my cycle this way while I simultaneously experience deep loss and major transformation, both of which I  welcome as co-pilots on this new journey. Take me where I need to go but if I may be so bold, let’s all put effort into a gentle landing. This is the inward time, where I harvest, and likely my grief is here, waiting for me to take her in and acknowledge her presence. I still do not know but I don’t judge myself for it anymore either, and I no longer worry. We will see each other when we do.