Monday, November 28, 2005

Ursula

Seven years ago today after 24 hours of labor in the darkest hours of morning I miscarried a baby. My sons were 3 and 4 years old, I had just returned to college that semester, and their father and I had been separated for a year. It was not an ideal time to have another baby. Furthermore, the man by whom I was pregnant was a raging drug addict whom I loved very much, but who had no capacity to love me and didn’t want me, or anyone ever, to be pregnant with his child.

And yet, I was happy. Hell, I was downright courageous. I was going to have that baby, and I was going to make a good life for all three of my kids, and even if we were poor, we would have had a lot more love than some people ever know. Of this I was sure. So I loved that little bundle of cells growing in my belly fiercely. I invoked all the bear mama energy I could. No one or nothing, no negative thoughts or nay saying would keep me from my mothering of another child, for that is the thing I do best.

I sang to my tiny baby, sang songs of love and devotion, sang Sinead O’Connor’s “Three Babies” over and over again. I wrote to her, I prayed to her. But this pregnancy felt different. I had a hard time connecting with this baby. With each of my other pregnancies I could feel my baby, not just as a physical presence in my body, but as a spiritual identity, as another personality interacting in my psychic space. This baby seemed lost.

I understood why a spirit approaching this reality could have felt daunted. With all of the challenges I faced with this pregnancy the idea of it had not been well embraced by all of my community, and this approaching child was not being made to feel particularly welcome by her father and his community either. So I pleaded with her. My journal from that time period is full of entries in which I ask, “Where are you? Why can’t I feel you? Are you really coming?” and in which I say, “ I love you. I want you. I’ll do anything for you. I will make your life good, I promise you.”

She heard me. But she had to go.

But oh! She went dragging my heartstrings behind. I thought I would die. I wanted to die. I wanted to lie in my bed and slowly let every last bit of my life force bleed from between my legs. The only things that kept me tethered to this reality were the sweet little boys of mine who made it. I knew I could never leave them behind for a phantom child who had only ever lived in the ethers. I also knew that my pain over the loss of this baby was more acute, more devastating because the little boys staring at their sad mommy in confusion and sympathy were what made the lost baby so real to me. In their warm, soft bodies I could feel tangibly what was lost to me. I was in agony.

In the months following my miscarriage I processed my experience in the way that makes the most sense to me. I studied it. I analyzed it. I researched it. I found that I was not alone. Millions of women miscarry babies. It is not an uncommon occurrence. But even more importantly, millions of women also grieve for their lost babies. In a culture in which death and dying are things we do on TV or that happen in far away lands, but not things we acknowledge or embrace, nobody wants to hear a woman mourn a child that was never even born. No one wants to feel your pain, so instead they greet you with nonsense, cliché sayings. “It was meant to be. At least you have healthy children. You can try again. It wasn’t good timing anyhow. There must have been something wrong with it. All things happen for a reason.”

I didn’t need any of that. I needed only for people to recognize that I hurt. Whether they could understand it or not, I had experienced a loss. I needed the space to grieve and the time to heal, which I have done.

In the ensuing years I have been able to look at my loss more objectively. I know other women who have lost babies. My dear friend just lost her 6th baby two months ago. I have known women whose babies died much later in their pregnancies or were stillborn. Another friend lost her only son just before his 7th birthday (and she didn’t make it, she took her own life within 6 months of the accident). During my midwifery internship in Jamaica I lived in a world in which women lose pregnancies, lose babies, lose children as a matter of fact in the course of their lives. Witnessing these losses made me question whether it was valid for me to have mourned so hard for a baby lost in the first trimester, whether it made sense that I would have experienced so much pain upon losing just one baby who was with me so briefly. I cannot say how I would handle a similar loss today. I think the gift of that lost baby was the catharsis of my grief process. I had been hurting and sad for many reasons for many years prior to that loss, and once I made it through the worst of my sorrow and depression following that miscarriage, I have never experienced that level of despair again. Gratefully.

Today in honoring the anniversary of the loss of this child I am more wistful, more wishing than sad. I have never been pregnant again and I still deeply long to carry a child in my belly and to bring that baby forth into my loving community and into the fold with my now more grown sons. I wonder who this person would have been. I have no way of knowing whether that baby was a girl, but we all felt she was. I guess I hoped she was, blessed as I am with only boys. When the fierce mama bear rose up inside of me to protect this little spirit I knew then that she was my little bear cub. My Ursula, my little bear. I had played with her name while she still lived in my belly and thought perhaps she would be Ursula Twilight, but instead she came just as night was breaking into morning, and so she is instead Ursula Dawn. I have a tattoo of a red bear in the sunrise on my left shoulder commemorating her. Now I permanently wear my heart on my sleeve.

Today in honoring the loss of this child I am thinking of her father whom many years later did come to love me. We are so close now, love each other so deeply, and I believe that closeness truly began to develop while I lay in my bed bleeding, fearing the inevitable loss before me when he came to sit by my side and rest his hand for the first and only time on my belly, and later when we walked together to the cemetery and laid to rest in the sacred ground the tiny unformed body and placenta and birth blood of our child, and earlier when our genetic coding and our DNA combined in one entity however short lived. And today he is no longer a drug addict. With 13 months clean behind him he still faces every day the challenges of learning to live his life fully present, fully willing. But he is still so scared to bring forth another life on the planet, is still so unsure that he will ever have the skills to commit himself to partnership with me or anyone, let alone to fatherhood.

Today I hope that he will give birth to himself and find the love he needs for us to bring our love to fruition and perhaps together to give birth to our love in another body.

Three Babies
(Sinead O'Connor)

Each of these
My three babies
I will carry with me
For myself
I ask no one else will be
Mother to these three
And of course
I'm like a wild horse
But there's no other way I could be
Water and feed
Are not tools that I need
For the thing that I've chosen to be

In my soul
My blood and my bones
I have wrapped your cold bodies around me
The face on you
The smell of you
Will always be with me

Each of these
My three babies
I am not willing to leave
Though I tried
I blasphemed and denied
I know they will be returned to me
Each of these
My babies
Have brought you closer to me
No longer mad like a horse
I'm still wild but not lost
From the thing that I've chosen to be

And it's `cause you've thrilled me
Silenced me
Stilled me
Proved things I never believed
The face on you
The smell of you
Will always be with me

Each of these
My three babies
I will carry with me
For myself
I ask no one else will be
Mother to these three

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

what is love?

I realized shortly after I began this endeavor that some of what I might want to write about I couldn’t since I told all of my friends and family my blog address and sign it with my name. I am sure I am not the first person to have this dilemma. I might start another blog and not tell them all about it. Again, I am sure many folks out there have anonymous blogs in which they exhaust their exhibitionist tendencies to share their deeper secrets and more risqué experiences without fear of those who need not know finding out information never meant for them.

I feel like that’s the kind of stuff I want to write about now. I wonder, who’s REALLY paying attention? If my kids’ dad is I might not feel could speak freely. As much as he’d hate for me to put him in the same category with Alan, I have to say if Mike, with whom I share an extremely complicated and non-traditional life partnership situation, were reading I’d be hesitant to speak my experiences openly, but for very different reasons. I trust I could say anything to my mom at this point and she would respect my choices and decisions. Since my adulthood she has developed a profoundly blind faith in me, which works for me. Thanks, Mom.

Today my friend told me she looked up polyamory after reading that that was something I might write more about. I felt slightly defensive, but only slightly really, because I feel so at peace with the reality that I love more than one person at a time. And just to qualify this, that doesn’t mean I am sleeping with more than one person at a time although I have in the past and may in the future. Right now it’s about the breathtaking expansion of my ability to love many while exploring the possibility of sharing my life with just one. Whether it makes sense to everyone or not I feel capable of loving in a very big way more than one person at a time. Or more than 2 people at a time. Right now I feel like I’m on the verge of loving more than 4 people simultaneously. Big, big love I’m talking about. Yes, romantic love, possibly the love of partnership.

I spend a lot time evaluating within myself whether or not this is actually true, whether it really is love that I feel for these different people. I fear it could be instead a desperate search for validation, some kind of dying to quench the incompleteness I feel out of a relationship, and that these needs are a result of some shortcoming of mine, the acting out of some neurosis born of childhood neglect or abuse. I feel really bold saying it so publicly like this. But I think I can be so bold with that theory because I am not afraid that that is what is going on. Just in case anyone was wondering, yeah, I’ve thought of it. Maybe the love I think is real isn’t.

However, I suspect that it is. For one thing, I don’t feel terribly incomplete being out of a relationship. I feel a little lonely and a little horny sometimes, but I have an outstanding community that reaches far and wide in which I feel well loved and appreciated and supported, and this meets the majority of my social needs. I do not feel that I am the desperate feminine yin side of the circle longing and craving for her masculine yang.

Also, it helps to have a definition of love with which to work. What is love? Oh, I’ve heard it sung in a thousand songs, seen it played in a thousand movies, and yet how do we as a culture actually define love? How do we personally? According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, love, the noun, is “1. A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.
or
2. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.”

Love is a feeling. That makes sense. Whereas, love, the verb, means
“1. To have a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward (a person).
or
2. To have a feeling of intense desire and attraction toward (a person).”

OK. That makes sense, too. Love as a verb is the state of having the feeling of love. And yet, I suspect we are selling ourselves short. There are an awful lot of people out there with these feelings they define as love who are abysmally poor at expressing, living, or acting these feelings in a way that truly embodies the emotion. But, since we as a culture do not apply a definition of love that expects or states what actions are involved with having the feeling of love we are all doing the best we can making up that aspect of things as we go along.

I really like a different definition of love. In her book “All About Love: New Visions” bell hooks makes a compelling case for our need to define love more actively thereby taking some of the mystery and fantasy out of the most necessary emotion and act on the planet. She writes:

“I spent years searching for a meaningful definition of the word “love” and I was deeply relieved when I found one in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s classic self-help book ‘The Road Less Traveled,’ first published in 1978. Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as ‘the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.’ Explaining further, he continues: ‘Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.’ Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.”

I like this definition because it is a definition that takes all the “I have no control over my feelings” punch out of the concept of love. People do not just fall in love with no will or intention or choice in the matter. There is no special chemical reaction that takes place between two people that equals love. That’s not to say that people do not have intense energetic, emotional, and perhaps chemical responses to each other, but that in and of itself is not love. Hell, in one of the worst, most emotionally devastating and unhealthy relationships I’ve ever been in we had consistent and profound experiences of that nature. But in retrospect I know for sure it was not love we were experiencing.

People certainly fall into feelings of affection for others and may find themselves inextricably and powerfully drawn to other human beings, but that is not the equivalent of loving them. To love someone you must act.

As such, bell hooks goes on to say:

To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”

If we enacted love as a composition of feelings of affection for someone plus the acts of caring for them, respecting them, trusting them, recognizing their wants and needs and their innate humanity, committing oneself to them and their spiritual growth, effectively communicating with them while all along not compromising our own spiritual growth, well then a grander experience we would all have living and loving. We would get more done. We would spend less time in pain. There would be far less abuse of any sort on the planet.

I subscribe to this more encompassing definition of love. That said, this is how I have come to the conclusion that I can love more than one person at a time, even if it includes a romantic or sexual connotation to that love. It is possible for me to have affection for and simultaneously care for, recognize, respect, commit to, trust, and communicate with more than one person. I’m not saying it isn’t challenging, because it is. I am not saying that I might not make mistakes in my process, because I do. I also willingly admit that the deeper and more time consuming any one of these commitments become the more challenging it is to meet the terms of the commitment to an other relationship or relationships. But it is possible. But it is only possible with an extremely effective and ever present dose of that honest and open communication.

bell hooks did not write “All About Love” as an endorsement of polyamory or non-monogamy or anything like that. She wrote it to help us culturally and personally figure out how to love one another more effectively so that we may all quit struggling and suffering under the false suppositions we have learned about love. I highly recommend this entire book to everyone, everywhere.

So, from Fromm to Peck to hooks to Justina to you much love in your living and much conscious choice and will and positive action in your loving. I am working so hard to assure it is all in mine.

p.s. Happy Birthday Mom. I dedicate this post to you.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

what I really meant to say was...

My aim in writing publicly is not to brag about all the shows I've been to as my friend accused me of yesterday, but to use it as a tool for revolution. That's my goal in most of my endeavors, some of them more subtley connected to the movement than others. But I also like to have fun and write lists.

I've been reading and enjoying a book that in part prompted me to blog. The author has used the internet as an extremely effective communication and activism tool while participating in major global justice direct actions opposing meetings of the major financial puppeteers who are yanking the strings of every government, every policy that effects the well being of EVERY being on the planet. This book "Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising" (http://www.starhawk.org/writings/webspower.html) shares many such writings.

Starhawk, the author, is a witch and activist who had an incredibly formative impact on me in my teens when I read "Dreaming the Dark," amongst the first of her books. The book gave a name to my spiritual path and furthermore opened my eyes to the level of oppression women are still experiencing, even though at that point in my life I was quite convinced we all had much more pressing issues with which to contend than women's rights. The term "post-feminist" made sense to me then. Today I hold a B.A. in Women's Studies. It is the most compelling topic I've ever studied, and if you think there is no need for this sort of dissection of patriarchal culture, you are missing out on a valuable analysis on why the world is as troubled as it is today.

Oh, so much to say, so many choice topics!

So, "Webs of Power" is a very useful book if you already believe something is very wrong with our system and are aware that there is a burgeoning movement opposing "globalization," but you are not entirely sure what globalization means and who its instruments of implementation are and why people are losing their lives in the struggle against these entities and what the struggle really looks like from the inside. It will help to make it all more clear. It is a very engaging read that brings you into the essence of what the people on the streets in Seattle you may have seen on the news a few years back were doing and why. Plus it reinforces that those same people plus many thousands more are still involved in that same struggle and helps you to realize that probably you ought to get involved somehow, too.

Here is an excerpt that I immediately knew I wanted to share, a list of simple questions we could all ask ourselves (especially this time of year when the materialistic debacle that is our winter holiday season is upon us) that could be the first steps into recognizing just how we strum the strand of the web closest to us that results in someone else losing their already tenuous grasp on that strand that links them to all life.

"Are the people who produce the tools of my trade, my food, my clothing and luxuries paid a living wage? Are their health and safety protected? Are their children well educated? Can they afford to buy the products they produce? What is the true cost of this work, this product, this toy to the soil? The waters? The air? The complex and irreplaceable habitats of this earth? The health of our communities? Who pays that cost and in what coin? Money? Cancer? Extinction? Who profits?"

You could print this out if you want and take it shopping with you. You're invited.

(p.s. if there is anyone reading this who is more blogger savvy than I it would be great to get suggestions on things like inserting links and doing block quotes, 'cause frankly I'm using those features as I create and they just don't seem to be working...)

Thursday, November 17, 2005

list #1

I really like lists. I had a fabulous time last night at the Blackalicious show while this list rampaged through my brain. It made me feel pre-eminetly blessed for having had this wealth and diversity of musical experiences. The following is a list of all (that I can remember) the musical acts I've ever seen live, starting at the age of 8. I have an ambitious but incomplete collection of ticket stubs from many of these events that have helped me to remember. They are, however, in no particular order because I certainly can't account for them chronologically, but you may notice genre clusters (or you may not when the juxtaposition otherwise was far too surreal and enticing) as one act in a genre often spurred the memory of yet another as I went through this process of recollection.

Blackalicous (last night)
Digable Planets (Saturday night)
King Crimson
Adrian Belew
Drums 'N Tuba (my favorite band of my adult life)
Les Claypool
Les and Frog Brigade
Primus
Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains
Tortoise
Buckethead
Van Halen (Sammy Hagar led)
Ministry
INXS
Robert Plant
Pink Floyd
Olivia Newton-John (my 4th grade hero)
ZZ Top (first time I ever saw my mom smoke pot)
Neil Young
CSN
CSNY
The Grateful Dead (most number of shows...it was a thing, OK?)
Phish (only once)
Bob Weir and Rob Wasserman are Scaring the Children
Willie Nelson
Waylon Jennings
Kris Kristofferson
Ani Difranco (2nd only to the Grateful Dead)
Hole
Beastie Boys
Smashing Pumpkins
Rusted Root
Drive-By Truckers
Alejandro Escovedo
Steve Earle
Steve Earle and the Dukes
Anti-Flag
Public Enemy
Tribe 8
Fugazi
Metallica (a close 3rd to Ani Difranco)
Patti Smith (best show ever)
Bare Jr.
Unholy Trio
Dar Williams
Richard Thompson
Linda Thompson (but not together)
Fishbone
Jesus Lizard
Be Goood Tanyas
Hank Williams III
Assjack
Superjoint Ritual
Bruce Springsteen (Look, I don't care what anyone says, he actually IS the Boss)
(the next brief section of my list brought to you by a junior high school experience in the 80's)
Bon Jovi
Motley Crue
Aerosmith
Def Leppard
Genesis (worst show ever)
G. Love and Special Sauce
The Nields
Ben Harper
Lucinda Williams
Indigenous
Robert Mirabal
John Cougar Mellencamp
Rolling Stones
Paul Simon
Arlo Guthrie
Whitesnake
Living Colour
Ladysmith Black mambazo
Warren Haynes
Jonathan Richman
String Cheese Incident
North Mississippi All Stars
R.L. Burnside
T Model Ford
Nashville Pussy
Doc Watson
Saffire the Uppity Blues Women
Blue Rapture
Jason and the Scorchers
Sons of Ralph
The Cult
Asylum Street Spankers
Dan Bern
Jump Little Children
Scorpions
Tori Amos
me'shell ndegeocello
Chickasaw Mudpuppies
Guns 'N Roses
Danielle Howle
Greg Brown
Pearl Jam
Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Evens
REM
P. Funk All Stars
Sound Tribe Sector 9
GFE
Orchestra Morphine (never got to see Morphine before Mark died, though, sadly enough)
Goose Creek Symphony
Bob Dylan
Little Feat
Joan Osbourne
Naughty By Nature
Ghetto Boys
Arrested Development
Megadeth
Anthrax
Blues Traveler
Melissa Etheridge
Bonnie Raitt
Marsha Ball
Big Head Todd and the Monsters
Allman Brothers
Neville Brothers
Lyle Lovett
Laura Love
Blue Rags
Bitch and Animal
Bottle Rockets
Southern Culture on the Skids
Korn
Stain'd (tee-hee)
God Speed You Black Emperor
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Reverend Horton Heat
Sonic Youth
Corey Harris
The Wailers (never Bob Marley, though, dammit)
Taj Mahal
Billy Bragg
Night Watchman (Tom Morello)
Zap Mama
Beck
Social Distortion (at the Electric Banana in Pittsburgh!)

Can you believe I have never seen Jane's Addiction? Me neither.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

what's in a name?

I mentioned that I had thought about creating a blog for some time. I have to admit that one of the big things that kept me from doing it sooner was my inability to come up with a name for my blog. Yes, what I called my journal, the catchy moniker that would live at the top of my page and of which my own URL address would be composed eluded me, and so there would be no spur of the moment public postings of my own unique perspective until I came up with a name.

Buddhamama, obviously, was taken. Though I dispute my mother's claim to alpha bitch (I think once I began breeding I quickly assumed the alpha status in our family), I certainly didn't want to use my pack position in my blog title. I wanted it to be witty but unassuming. I had to fight very hard against intolerable, innate tendencies to make the title, like other things I write, overly long and descriptive, mired in the sacred feminine, and worst of all, HIPPIE-LIKE. No hippie title for my blog, I simply wasn't going to have it.

I wanted a play on words. I wanted to play with words. I love words. They're like ingredients. I can mix them up in all these different combinations to make endless permutations of tasty treats for our eyes and our ears and our psyches and our souls. I love to feed you, I love to feed me. I want my blog to taste good.

I really like alliteration, too. I tend to overuse it in my poetry. I was exploring alliterative phrases with my name. Justi's juxtaposition. Dorky. Justi's juxtaposition of what? Well, of words, of course. But, I really like that word juxtaposition. How about Justi's position? Same thing, Justi's position on what? Oh. Justi's position on anything. It's my blog. I'm sharing my position. I am positing my truth. This writing exercise is my effort to posit on anything I want. (D'you like that one, Russ? Get it, posit on? That was for you.)

So what? Who cares what I have to say? It's just a position. It could be anyone's or no one's. It's subjective. But it's not offensive that way because I acknowledge up front, it's just a position. Take it or leave it. I am not that attached to it. I certainly don't expect you to be.

With this juxtaposition of words I thee wed. With this juxtaposition of words I devastate thee for lifetimes. Nah. With this juxtaposition of words the little piggy says wee-wee-wee all the way home. Tasty treats. Sumptuous verbal snacks. Take a bite...

Just in case you were wondering, I promise that my blog is not always going to be about my blog. The novelty is already starting to wear off. Other topics will gain sovereignty soon. I feel their insurgencies rising in my breast.

open up and say "ahh"

I have been considering the possibility of composing my own blog for sometime, but not forever. When I first learned of blogging it was through my sons’ father, my ex, who had just started his first, short-lived attempt at keeping a live journal. “Hmm, how arrogant,” I thought, “How completely self-indulgent to think anyone else in the world cares enough to read what you would write in your journal.” And in fact, I probably did more than just think it. Most likely I said it aloud, to him, ‘cause, well, that’s what I do: say things aloud. Loudly, oftentimes. So, Alan, I offer my very public apologies here for all the world to see. I was clearly mistaken.

But I do not retract my original theory on blogging being a self-aggrandizing act born of hubris because I finally decided I wanted to blog, too. My reframing of my opinion of blogs is the result of my exploration of other people’s blogs over the last few years and discovering that this can be an amazing tool. For one thing, committing to writing for public consumption on a regular basis is an excellent practice for any writer to keep, especially one like myself who is usually too busy, too overwhelmed, and too exhausted from the rest of my responsibilities to find free time to write, and yet I need to do so. Furthermore, there are a lot of great people saying things that ought to be said out there. There are also a lot of regular folks who are saying something compelling simply because they have a unique or insightful perspective due to their location, their experience, their particular slant.

I’d like to give you some links to blogs I have enjoyed, or from which I have learned.

First, my sister’s blog – with all due credit, I have to say her blog is ultimately the one that has propelled me the most into writing my own. Thanks, Mimi.
http://runforyourlife.blogs.friendster.com/blog

And my mom has a blog, too. I’m proud of her for putting it out there even if I heartily disagree with her flagrant disrespect for spelling properly. Keep on writing, Ma.
http://snavebed.blogs.friendster.com/the_alpha_bitch_collage

The following links are for blogs less personal to me, but such necessary voices, so well spoken, educating or saying things that have got to be said by someone, somewhere.

Baghdad Burning:
Girl Blog from Iraq... let's talk war, politics and occupation.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com

Herpes Nation:
Thoughts and Meditations on Holistic Treatment for Herpes
http://herpesnation.blogspot.com

And I assure you there are more, but I don’t want to send you to too many other places on my maiden blog writing venture. There will be more links in time.

So, what might you expect from my blog? Right now I feel really inspired by that lovely, old, feminist adage “The personal is political,” ‘cause I’m feeling mighty political these days, but I really like to keep it personal, keep it real. What is the point of putting my perspective out there if it isn’t MY perspective?

Expect to read about love and mothering, activism and earth caring, dancing like a dervish and poetry reading, food and sex, asthma and addiction, herbs and the moon, mind expansion and fear and frustration, polyamory, homeschooling, community and communication, and be prepared for anything.

Tonight’s composition was accompanied by an elderberry and olive leaf infusion.