Freedom to be a fuck up.
Freedom to dive into the muck,
Smeared with shit.
But you know there’s a reason we’re doing this.
Compelled to do this.
Natural urge.
Are we worms, breaking down the garbage–
Last year’s leaves,
Last night’s cold silence?
Breaking it down,
Raking the ashes
Where the phoenix will rise?
To the mending pile
To the kitchen garden
To canning
To home-cooked meals
I had the thought yesterday I could pinpoint the date I ran away from DeSisto School because the Moody Blues played Tanglewood that night, and that information (even the setlist!) would be online. My “RA” was at that concert and many others from our dorm, too. If they hadn’t been I could never have run away. As it was, Carolyn, the dorm parent who had an apartment off the main dorm, suspected I was going to run and made me sleep on the floor in her living room. My roommate was put guard over me, sleeping next to me on the couch. I had to lie there silently and breathe even, calm all of everything but stay awake. My grandmother had given me a gold bangle bracelet–not real but I wore it all the time. It clunked on the floor when I started to make my way into a crouch so I took it off and left it on my pillow, knowing I’d never see it again. I inched across the floor, crawling a bit at a time and freezing, then going a bit further and freezing. When I got to Carolyn’s front door there was a Hebrew character hanging on it that kept knocking against the door so I had to lift it off and leave it on the floor. I always felt bad about that because I didn’t mean any disrespect to her religious beliefs but I knew she would easily take it that way. I just needed to be quiet.
I finally made it out of there and down the hall to my room, where I got dressed and grabbed $50 in one dollar bills I’d been stashing along with my other, regular roommate Beth. We were saving to run away in the fall when she got back from her enforced camping expedition with a group from the school. So I stole her contributions to that fund along with my own to run away with Craig. It hurt her. I didn’t mean to hurt her or do the wrong thing. It seemed like the right thing to do under the circumstances…but to be totally honest I just wanted the chance to be alone on the road with Craig. I was a little shit in a lot of ways but not out of malice. I had to do things. I don’t know. I didn’t think about how I affected others or more to the point it didn’t occur to me that I affected others much. I was smart and knew how to bravado my way, and I felt how guys looked at me too. I don’t think I took much advantage of that but I noticed it and felt its power. After being powerless for years it was heady and I was a lonely girl. But here it was different, something had changed. I wanted to be near Craig and I wanted him to touch me and I wanted to touch him.
The school, on a few acres of land outside of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was an experimental school. We were all butterflies…rather we were caterpillars and chrysalises striving toward being butterflies.
It was a bad place. I was actually kind-of excited to be going there after five long months in the hospital. It felt almost like I was going to college. I was going to get my shit together and make something of my life eventually. The first night I got there they let me unpack and eat dinner at the dining hall, outside of which I first saw Craig. They let me get into my pajamas and go to bed and lie there in the dark for awhile, getting my bearings, thinking this is a bit weird but OK. I was the new girl again, nothing new about that. I’m starting to relax when the door opens, the light comes on, and five girls pounce on me, holding me down. They had all my limbs and I fought but couldn’t move. I spat in one girl’s face. I don’t even know where that came from but that’s what I did. Like an animal.
They dragged me up to a room on the second floor that had bunks along the walls and about 10 girls sleeping in them and also on the floor. I forget what they called this, but these were all the girls at high risk for running away. I was here because I needed to earn their trust that I wouldn’t run. We had all these kids in a room on the second floor, and they blockaded the door with a dresser.
So this was the environment. A lot of money there. My parents had always done well for themselves even though their investments and houses kept us living poor in a lot of ways. It looked good from the outside but it was weiners and beans for dinner. lol. And cold. Not loving. Appearances matter more than what’s inside. Aaaanyway. DeSisto attracted a far richer set than any circles my parents traveled. Judd Hirsch’s son was there when I was. People spent a lot of money to send their unruly privileged troubled teenagers to a place that promised they would come out creative, productive, and even specially gifted citizens. It was a fucking concentration camp with a real chef to cook our meals and culture and nature all around, and Alice’s Restaurant.
Craig and I hit it off immediately. We both knew exactly what was going to happen so we didn’t waste any time pretending it wasn’t happening. I think it was the second day I was there–it was May, just after Mother’s Day–the afternoon was warm and muggy and brought a torrential thunderstorm, which the group of us stayed out in, enjoying the heavy, warm water pelting us. I looked at Craig and felt a burst of joy, stepped up to him and threw my arms around him. He was surprised but only for the briefest beat before he smiled and hugged me back, lifting me off my feet. That was it.
So five weeks later when he and Tex stood outside my window and told me they’d been kicked out of the boy’s dorm to fend for themselves for the night…when he said they were running away and he wanted me to come with them, I had to say yes. I would meet them later in Lenox. But my summer roommate heard the tail end of this and they shut me away in Carolyn’s apartment because everyone was at Tanglewood for the Moody Blues.
I made it out of the dorm and skirted the buildings, down to Route 183, turned left and headed up the road, jumping to the side into ditches or shadows every time a car was coming because I was walking straight toward Tanglewood. A whole lot of adrenaline going through me that night, and it is going through me now, thinking about it. Ha! The wonder of Google…I can tell you I walked 3.6 miles to Lenox wearing my very stylish and practical outfit which included moccasin boots–no support at all. But it was my best don’t-fuck-with-me-I’m-cool outfit. There is power in image.
It was very late when I got to Lenox. Traffic had died, the concert long over. I walked through the empty streets…I didn’t really know where I was but I thought I could find the place we were meeting. Starting to get a bit scared I turned down a street I was pretty sure was the right one and I hear something and saw at the same time motion across the street in a recess–he stepped out and I ran over and hugged him and never had a hug felt warmer or more welcome, ever.
We walked over the mountain to Pittsfield, singing Ozzy songs and enjoying our freedom and power in the moment. In the early morning we all bought one-way tickets to Albany at the bus station, along with a couple packs of Marlboros.
And that is in large part how I came to be in the Cultural Education Center on July 17, 1984. A Tuesday. Thirty-five years ago yesterday.
It’s been a rough few years, and this past year has been the roughest yet in many ways. But it never has been easy, as Betony says in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Life isn’t easy, and nature is often brutal, pitiless. Humans make it harder than it has to be most of the time, though.
I’ve been thinking about doing Human Nation News (HNN) since 2003 or 2004, but I guess it needed to stew a bit. The idea was basically that we are all here on this One Planet, in the vast cavernous space around us, and we have come to the point where we must recognize we are One People. The Human Nation. The purpose was to write about this nation, focusing on our commonalities through story. To connect us through the stories of people everywhere.
This was way too broad, though–made even more broad when I set up the fraternal-twin websites of Handmade Shoes and HNN. Gestating in the same womb, but each from its own zygote. Handmade Shoes is soul musing, a journal, a place for dreams and for sorting through my life and finding my way. HNN is more outward-facing but still firmly planted in soul soil. I’ve been dabbling in here for a few years, testing the waters and allowing myself space free from others’ eyes for the most part. Things do need darkness to grow sometimes. Even the trees, who love the sun, will tell you that.
Back in the early 2000s when I went deep into the darkness of my own mind and soul, propelled by the accumulated and ongoing insults of life with humans, I also went into the woods. Nature, who offered me succor and magic all through my childhood, once again became prominent in my daily life, and as I walked outside with my dogs (first Heidi, now Lucy) daily around the neighborhood and every weekend at Thacher State Park, I became friends with the beings we encountered. One tree in particular, an old maple at Thacher, became a “someone” to me, and I greeted her with joy each time we passed by. Over the years I would often stop and talk to this great being, and when I was feeling utterly lost I would come right up to her and wrap my arms around her and cry, letting out all the poison.
This tree did not mind. In fact, I felt that she appreciated my attention and talking and even tears. Until, after many years of greeting this being and talking to her and loving her, I was once again in a very dark place (I know the dark places well) when I visited her. I put my hands on her trunk and my forehead too, and said, “I feel so bad,” and felt that badness all through me, in all its possible meanings, from all the accumulated and ongoing insults of living with humans and being a human. The tree, this magnificent old being, took me down deep into her roots, into the darkness where the creatures of the dark live and never see the light. There she told me not to be ashamed of the darkness. She told me darkness feeds Life.
Over all these years wandering in the woods I have come to understand that the Human Nation is one among many other nations Here on Earth–which goes against my indoctrination, which says humans are the ones that matter on this planet, we are the smartest, we are the conscious ones, the most important ones. We alone of all living beings have Soul, and all the other beings on Earth are for our use. Our use.
Except we treat “other” humans as though they were expendable/beneath notice and, often, as though they are there for our use. To make profit off them. Within our own groups, even the smallest groups, we treat certain members as though they do not matter as much as other members, effectively rubbing them out.
Human history is very dark, filled with brutality that has its source in a concept of power as physical (and physical wealth is an extension of physical power). The atrocities that have been carried out upon our own species in the quest for power have never been adequately healed because the victims have been obliged to get back in the game or perish: a game whose rules are defined by those who have managed to grab power over others. Unresolved trauma gets passed through the generations, leading to perpetuation of brutality through retribution and acting out patterns of abuse upon those who are physically and economically weaker.
But something has been happening. The darkness has been coming up to be acknowledged and healed, in my personal life and in the world. Concurrently, a reemergence of the consciousness of our interrelatedness with one another and all of life on Earth has been gaining clarity and force–connecting direct back to the true source of power: the place where we all ultimately connect.
Now, after all these years, I’ve decided that Human Nation News is to be an exploration of the re-emerging consciousness that we are all interconnected–not only all humanity but all living beings. This includes the compassionate observation of what comes up to be healed and let go as we dismantle the old physical power paradigm and embrace the life-giving power that resides within each of us. It is also a battle cry in the eternal War of Love, sending dispatches out to humanity in the name of all life Here on Earth. Calling to all who feel their innate value and who understand that each human possesses this innate value regardless of their position in the current crumbling hierarchies. Calling to all who, conscious of their own innate value as living beings, also recognize the innate value of all living beings.
Codependency is the unspoken and largely unconscious agreement to tolerate and even help sustain another person’s continuation of not addressing issues and problems they need to address, in exchange for that person’s tolerance and sustaining of your own continuation of not addressing issues and problems you need to address.
Going within quite a lot lately, in many ways. Memories–a deep dive into memories for sure, and digging to find ways to forgive myself and others. It helps to observe the detritus of the natural world melting and becoming the fertile soil for new life. It helps to witness the value in darkness and decay.
Tonight I found this journal entry while looking for something else, and it spoke to me. Lyra Bellaqua is the main protagonist in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and I am currently reading La Belle Sauvage, from his new series, set in Lyra’s very early life. This full moon, I have heard, is about balancing and purging. Loving your darknesses and other’s darknesses. So this fit and I felt like sharing it. Love to all.
04/30/2017
I have a coterie of harpies that watches for any sign of happiness in me, so they can come over and shit on it.
They are very vigilant and sensitive.
But Lyra met the harpies in hell and made allies of them. This is what I will need to do. This is what I have been doing since I was 34 or so. Since I finally realized I didn’t believe in the world I’d been trying to fit into.
Traveling through hell is a stripping away of lies. Stripping away all the lies about who you or others thought you were, what your life is, what is important and not important. Stripping away the fiction of time—that we have time, and that our story is written in time and we must bear it, constantly adding to it, until we finally die.
I am writing this morning because I’m so stuck I don’t know what else to do. Dying inside not writing. It wakens me.
I See You and I Love You. ~Robin Crow
Last night was crazy—the wind blowing from the west and into my apartment, every crack a gale. I went out with Lucy when I got home (around 4:45, so we can walk before the coyotes come out). But the wind…we had gone only a little way before I realized we couldn’t even take a short walk safely. So we turned around and I started to shout at the wind—joyfully, playfully. I said, You go girl!! And the wind increased! It blew harder and I was a puny human and shouted all the more, laughing. This was coming around the house to my door, and I was confident, so close to home. Then I tried to take my snowshoes off, and my fingers started freezing immediately. I couldn’t get them off and I couldn’t feel my fingers. Shouting to Lucy now, to come on, we’ve got to get inside snowshoes and all, but she walks away from me, scared of my shouting and snowshoe banging, so I shout harder, telling her we’ve got to get in! She comes, and we get in, and I realize how stupid I am, saying You go girl to Nature. Mother Nature.
The wind blew from the west all evening and well into the night. I fell asleep—after plugging the cracks in my doors and windows with every spare towel, sock, scarf—with my hat on, blankets pulled up over my face. It felt like a bad wind. An attack. A reminder of my precariousness.
After the Storm
Before I begin, I wish to say that I make my “living” through technology. It is what puts money in my bank account so I may continue to have a warm place to sleep and cook and love and otherwise live my life outside of work. I appreciate the tool, but I hate it, too. I hate how it seems to pervade every bit of life. But it isn’t really technology, it’s how it is used—which serves to foster more dependence, more looking forward to the next thing instead of being here, now. We take pictures at a concert instead of allowing ourselves to be swept into the music. We take pictures of our food, of our loved ones, of ourselves, instead of really being there. We check work email from home, so we won’t be confronted with a pile of it when we get back. We allow ourselves to be swept along by the current rather than drinking the depths of true experience.
Anyhoo.
My older brother Gregg came to visit me on his way home from an elk-hunting trip in Colorado a few weeks ago, and he told me about his time out there with our cousin Jeff, in a sparse but evocative way so I could feel the place and Gregg’s experience of it. He was a little reluctant at first to talk about it because he knows I eat vegan, but I urged him to tell me, and he did, and he also told me other things about his life that I did not know, and it was a very lovely and healing evening.
Along the way in this conversation, Gregg told me he had an old iPhone and GPS for backpacking, and asked me would I like them? I said, sure. Of course.
I have not upgraded my phone since 2012. It is a perfectly serviceable and quirky LG keyboard phone, doesn’t capitalize when it should and capitalizes when it shouldn’t,
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away ~Paul Simon
but fine for texting and vocal communications. It was running out its days, though, getting on in senescence, close to death. I’ve known it for months, but wasn’t going to do anything about it until the emergency hit. Life has a way of working itself out, though, if you step back and let it. So in late October I received a package from Gregg containing a Lowrance Endura Out&Back and a sweet little iPhone, fully charged and ready to go.
But I didn’t do anything about it right away, because my old phone was working fine, and I know, from long experience with companies and technology, that what should be easy never turns out to be easy.
So on a rainy Friday in November, my Saturday, I ventured out to get my hair cut, some groceries, and to switch my phone over to (angels singing) an iPhone. First I stopped at Verizon, but could not find a parking spot near the shop. It was raining hard, so I elected to go get my hair cut and the groceries rather than push on ahead.
About 45 minutes later I found myself in the same parking lot, with a good parking spot and the rain abating, steeling myself for what would follow.
I show the woman at the back of the store my antiquated cell and my new-to-me iPhone. No problem. We can get you sorted out. She hands me off to her coworker, a young man, who begins the process, which takes time on his computer so I have space to witness what is happening with the other guy who came in behind me. Turns out he lost his phone. He doesn’t have any more money to spend per month. What can he do?
He was so apologetic, as if the Verizon lady held his balls in her custom-fitted gauntlets, ready to squeeze. Really. Well, of course he would need a new phone, and an upgrade as well. Only a few dollars more per month, not much at all. He acquiesces, grateful for the privilege of increasing his monthly payment, probably consoling himself that he’ll have a new phone to play with. I don’t know.
∞ ∞ ∞
It is all looking good for me as I answer the questions I’m asked, but along the way my salesguy picks up the iPhone and sees it is a 3G.
We are not supporting 3G as of next month. And actually we will not be supporting this phone either (nodding to my LG). Nothing less than 4G. As of next month.
I’m processing this all, and basically repeat what he has told me, in different words to make sure I was hearing correctly. So, you are telling me that this (holding up 3G iPhone) we are now calling garbage, even though it works perfectly? Even though children in Africa are forced to mine the metals used to produce it and it will go to a landfill to poison the waters in time…we are calling this
3G iPhone
garbage in the name of technological advancement? (Read: corporate greed.)
The salesman nods and tells me I can get a new phone for only $7 extra each month, $1 more for a Smartphone.
I say, again, So you’re telling me that this perfectly good phone—we are calling it garbage because you aren’t going to support 3G anymore?
He nods, looking at me like I’m slightly deranged. I pick up my obsolete phones, thank him for his time, and walk out past the apologetic man and the bouncer at the front of the store.
And other than telling this outrageous story to a couple of people, I was ready to have that be the end. So what if I don’t have a cell phone? So what? Fuckers.
But really, you almost NEED a cell phone these days. My bank sent me an email just a couple of days later telling me they will no longer use email to send me access codes to my account—only texts or phone calls. People expect you to have a Smartphone—my cell phone is a rarity. It cripples you in this world if you don’t have access to the technology that is used by the majority.
Tonight for some reason I remembered that I work in technology, and I know there is always another way to do something. So I looked it up. Turns out Verizon is refusing to activate phones less than 4G. Which to me means, if I can figure out how to activate it myself, it will work. And I did. And here is how to do it, right from the horse’s mouth:
How to Perform the Over-the-Air Activation
People. Do not be ensorcelled by technology and corporate rule. Do not forget your sovereignty. Do not bow and scrape in stores. Do not bow and scrape, ever.
Peace.
We were walking up the dirt road that cuts midpoint in the short loop around the farm, and I had just reminded myself of what I wanted to remember from earlier in our walk:
Why would you ever want to be any place but here and now?
Where you have a choice.
…Just coming up the hill toward our turn for home. Lucy is interested in something ahead, away from where we are going. Not tugging-me interested like it is a deer, but definitely interested. I’m noticing but not thinking much of it when I glance up and see, about 50 feet away in the misty light, a male wolf. It nods once and brings its head up looking to its left. A mild shock runs through me and I whistle–three short and one long that curves upward–then turn right for home.
Of course it couldn’t be a wolf. Must be one of those coyotes that have been howling in the distance come near. It would be easy to succumb to fear, but aside from the prompts of my programmed experience I am not afraid. I feel a masculine presence and see that nod.
I sent my thanks and the blessings I had then to give, and came home and wrote this.
This world, every day, all around, is for us to witness and love.