duty to know

I am currently reading a book that my sister, one of the most dedicated peace activists I know, encouraged me to read, Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations. This is a book compiled by Iraq Veterans Against the War and is comprised of the testimony of dozens of young, bright, and once idealistic U.S. military service members. In the tradition of the Vietnam War Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971, a group of recently active duty military gathered to talk about how their service to our country was abused, and how they found themselves engaged in highly questionable activities in the name of the "War on Terror." They reached deep into the personal reserves of bravery that they had only recently relied upon to face the harsh realities of foreign warfare, but now they used it to speak out about the atrocities they witnessed and committed in the name of the U.S. government and the optimistically but falsely named Operation Iraqi Freedom. I am forever changed by the gut-wrenching tales of their noble intention to serve our country and to improve another part of the world, nations they believed were in need of the assistance of a powerful country like the U.S., and how their intentions were subverted to the extreme by the offensive dehumanizing practices of our nation's military branches, egged on by the political leaders that we have put into office.

Story after story, these previously dedicated soldiers explain how their humanity was devastated by what was expected of them in these war zones. Rampant murder of innocent Iraqi civilians fueled by absurdly lax Rules of Engagement (the laws that are supposed to govern modern warfare to make it safer for civilians and non-combatants) is a commonplace, daily event in Iraq. Disgraceful treatment of human remains and devastation of families' homes, personal property, and tools of their livelihood take place with no forethought and no consequences. And this is only a mere mention of the atrocities committed against the Iraqi people.

Our military servants, those for whom supposedly patriotic Americans display yellow ribbons in a useless show of support, are being fucked, to put it bluntly. They are being lied to. They are told that they are being sent to countries who want and need our help to free them from their oppressive governments, but when they arrive on the scene, they find that the local populations have already been terrorized by previous troops, who were only acting as they were instructed, and now the local population live in fear and rage against Americans. Thus, our service members are being attacked by the very people they thought they were there to serve, and the hidden Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that greet them with a spray of hellfire at every turn reduce them to reactionary animals, desperate to stay alive as they see their brothers and sisters fall, and then all Iraqi natives become the enemy to dispatch for the sake of their own safety. The situation in these urban, highly-populated, war zones becomes a vicious, cyclical, "us-or-them" face-off, in which it is believed that only those who shoot first will survive.

Our deployed military members are being subjected to unendurable fear and are surrounded by death and threats on every side, then are forced to make split-second decisions about dire, ethical dilemmas at every turn. They find themselves acting callously, cruelly, inhumanely, then later look back on their own actions and recognize that they made critical mistakes. Normal, caring, conscientious people find themselves posing for "trophy" pictures with dead Iraqi citizens and blown up cars, pose in destroyed, ancient holy sites with their hands recently stained by the blood of the people who call that land their home. Then they come to find that their acts are futile, that their sacrifice and service is not guaranteeing safety for anyone, not for the American people, not for the Iraqi people, for no one. Our country's continued participation in this war is consuming human lives and human sanctity with an insatiable voracity, and we are duty bound to listen to those who have made the greatest sacrifice. Our fellow citizens, those on the front lines in this immoral war, are asking us as to listen their stories and to take action to prevent any more unnecessary suffering or loss.



As one National Guard member stated in the Winter Soldier hearings, "I remember a man running toward me carrying a very young seventeen- or eighteen-year old Iraqi guy, very thin, and very pale. The guy was missing parts of his arm; his arm and his forearm were only held on by a small flap of skin. The bones were protruding and he was bleeding profusely. He had shrapnel wounds all over his torso and his entire left butt cheek was missing and it was bleeding profusely, and it was pooling blood. To this day I have that image burned into my mind's eye. Every couple of days I get a flash of red color in my mind's eye and it won't have any shape, no form, just a flash of red and every time I associate it with that instance. Not only are we disrupting the lives of Iraqi civilians, we are disrupting the lives of our veterans." (p. 40-41, from the book title listed above, emphasis mine). If you believe that America is on a righteous mission in Iraq, you are mistaken. The very men and women who are fighting this war are pleading with us to listen to their stories and to stop this war that is killing American and Iraqi sons and daughters, American and Iraqi brothers and sisters, American and Iraqi mothers and fathers. I believe most people I am likely to reach through my writing are already opposed to the war, but I ask of you to share this information with others, and I ask you to ask yourself, are you doing enough to stop the war? Do you really know just how bad it is?

I believe that, though it is awful, terrible information to learn, that we have a duty to know what is going on in this war. It is so easy for us to sit back in our safe homes and be opposed to the war without ever having to really see, hear, or feel the horror being done in our name. While I count my blessings every, single, gracious day of my life that my sons and I have never had to know the wicked ills of war, I think it is an unfair privilege. We have a duty to know the pain we are being spared, and we have a duty to do everything we can to prevent more soldiers and civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan from living this fate. These stories will propel you to action. Please, visit the Iraq Veterans Against the War website and purchase the book and read it and share it with others. Donate to their organization and tune in to know that there are ongoing Winter Soldier events and writing workshops happening around the country. The first Winter Soldier event was not an isolated gathering of a few disgruntled rebels. There are more and more traumatized veterans returning home every day wondering what the hell we as a country are doing about ending this war in which they had to make untold personal sacrifices. We have a duty to know their stories. We have a duty to know the trauma they have endured, and we have a duty to know that many of them, those who survived, will never be the same again.

This brief audio clip shares just a few of the voices of veterans and active duty military speaking out against the war. Take a few minutes and listen, please. Every single one of us who plans to sleep safely in our beds tonight, without the threat of mortar attacks or our homes being raided, without the fear of loved ones dying all around us, and without the pain of recurring nightmares and ugly images forever emblazoned on our minds has a duty to know that we are very fortunate. And we have a duty to cry out for a world in which everyone can live in that same safety.

the personal IS political

Today feels hard. Though it is beautiful outside, I am plagued with thoughts of the world around me, those in war torn nations and those fighting the wars of ideology and international finance dictated to them by those in power. I am thinking of those without healthcare, as I wheeze my way through another fall day. I am thinking of NASA spending millions (billions?) of dollars doing whatever it is they did to the moon this morning, and how, though I do believe in space exploration and I know that the moon was not "bombed" per se, I also don't believe in, say, mountain top removal. The essence of these great rocks circulating through our solar system, I believe, is greater than lifeless dust.

But I diverge, which I guess is the point. There is so much to think about, so much to be concerned about, and I am overwhelmed by my desire to do "right" in the world, and beyond. So, I need to reconvene here, get perspective, and simplify. I can't do it all, and there will always be problems that need fixing, issues needing to be resolved, and everything in life simply isn't and won't be perfect. But I can do my part and find peace in that. Hence, this poem I write earlier this year.

And yes, I hung the laundry today, three loads of heavy towels, sheets, jeans, and sweatshirts, in this indescribably gorgeous fall weather, and it made me feel good.



The Personal is Political

Picture this:
Homework deadlines,
dishes to do,
dogs need walking,
plus the job,
the kids,
the constant everyday crises &
there I stand, feet planted firmly on the ground,
sun shining warmly on my skin,
as I pull each freshly washed piece from my laundry basket,
shake it crisply with a snap,
then clip it to the line.
Instead of quickly zapping our clothes dry with fossil fuels &
electricity spewed from burning coal
I stand in the sun,
move my body,
breathe clean air &
hang my laundry to dry.

I shop at the French Broad Food Co-op,
unionized labor, member-owned & full of food that’s locally grown &
organic products that do not poison the water & soil shared by all.
I purchase dried beans & grains from bulk bins
that use less packaging & less fuel to transport
than convenient, hydrated foods in steel cans.

I don’t use bags crafted from petroleum or trees to carry my goods
I’ve used the same canvas totes to haul groceries for fifteen years &
If I forget those bags I don’t fret
‘cause I’ve got two strong arms & can transport, if I must,
One apple at a time from my cart to a backpack, a bike rack, or car
to take my goods home.

I wear the hair on my legs & in my pits that god grew there
Not just because I think it is a fanatic beauty standard that women must be clean shorn, rather I choose never to give my money to corporations that
profit from enforcing that beauty standard &
are responsible for our throwing
tens of millions of pink plastic razors into landfills every day.

I remember one day in elementary school as I claimed my food from the lunch line,
An older woman, the proverbial lunch lady stopped me, and she told me that
I was the only child who came through her line every day and said, “Thank you,”
for the food she put on my plate,
This woman, my grandmother’s age
who worked tirelessly for a minimum wage
She told me that I made her feel good,
Appreciated.

To this day I remember her lesson, and now
I raise my sons to be boys who say, “Please” and “Thank you,”
I raise sons who will be the kind of men I want to know in this world,
Sons who are sensitive, aware, able to do dishes & laundry & cook their own food,
Sons who ask questions about why gender differences are so important to some people,
Sons who are outraged by military training camps & inform their peers why they
should help shut down the SOA.

And this year I have been spending a lot of time & energy
studying & training.
I have had to sacrifice time with friends & family,
I have been missing parties & festivals & poetry
staying up late with books in my lap
to learn this new skill,
follow a new career path
that will allow me to serve humanity,
to empower others & ease suffering as my profession,
rather than seeking to earn my living from work that could
pollute or alienate or cause harm.

If I seem self-righteous I apologize in earnest.
I’m sorry.
It is not my goal to make others feel self-conscious for the choices they make,
only to bring our collective awareness to the truth that is
We make choices & our choices have consequences.
We can prioritize differently &
You may prioritize differently from me,
but as long as you make choices consciously
You are contributing to the kind of world in which you want to live.

Every kind word you do or don’t say,
Every cent you spend,
Every thread of clothes you wear,
Every bite of food you eat,
How you earn your dough &
Where you choose to go
Ripple their impact
through our fragile, vulnerable globe,
And I am just trying to spend most of my time kicking only pebbles into that pond &
Speaking out against those who launch boulders.

(The picture below is what my laundry hanging mechanism actually looks like...)

september has arrived with nothing less than the promise of fall

I woke this morning and that phrase came to me as soon as I pulled back the curtain that covers my bedroom window to reveal the thick, cool fog that was enveloping my mountain. I wore knee socks under pants and a sweater when I left the house, and a sense of dark nostalgia was piqued when I inhaled the crisp air. Fall is here, the season of my birth, the time of the darkening, the quieting, the cooling of our days and nights.

When I got home this evening, I was struck with it again. The temperature in my house had dropped, and I was struck by my sense of foreboding, by my sudden urge to build a fire to ward off the cold. It felt premature, this longing for a fire in the hearth. Wasn't it August just yesterday, the dog days of summer?

I changed out of my work clothes (an odd, new phenomenon to me since I began my internship, I was wearing slacks I had actually ironed in the morning and professional looking clogs too impractical to walk the dogs) and into jeans and a long sleeved pullover to take my four dogs on a late walk. It was almost eight o'clock, not an uncommon hour for me venture out, but this evening I realized that this was the first evening in quite some time that I was gambling I may be returning home with just enough light left to see.

As I walked through the dimming with my pack, once more I felt a tinge of fear. We were heading into twilight and I was a lone human traversing isolated woods, only I felt I wasn't alone. I was having visions of bears out lurking, hungry bears, as they, too, would be feeling the first chills of fall and readying for their hibernation. Would we run into each other on my late jaunt?

I thought deeply as I walked, the typical phenomenon of my over-active mind going into complete overdrive when there is no other verbal traffic to interfere, and pondered why the arrival of fall necessitated I feel this sneaking sense of dread. Was fearing fall an evolutionary imperative that assured my ancestors would hurry and put up a winter's worth of preserved food and seasoned wood so they would neither starve nor freeze before the season's end, and I was tapping into some quiescent remnant of that instinct that I no longer need having access to grocery stores and fossil fuels? I also noted that though the moon is waxing, my cycle is waning to that hormonal drop off that will commence my menstruating soon, but hormonal downshifts sometimes precipitate dark, anxiety-ridden thoughts in this particular bleeding woman. Perhaps my hesitancy to embrace the seasonal shift was simply a case of PMS?

Nah, I know what it is, and I've been bluffing all the time. Somewhere, deep down inside, I have always been afraid that I am cursed for bad things to happen to me in the fall. It seems that in my life, if bad things are going to happen to me, they are going to happen during the fall, and these aren't just going to be trivial bad luck days, they are liable to be hellaciously dark experiences that change the course of my life. Such as...

Eighteen years ago as I entered my freshman year of college, a childhood girlfriend of mine was murdered in a mall bathroom in the new town where she had just moved to start her first year of school. A few weeks later, another girlfriend and I set off to Boston for a series of four consecutive nights of Grateful Dead shows, for which we had ordered tickets long in advance. One of those shows just so happened to be on my 18th birthday, and when the mail order tickets arrived we were thrilled that the tickets for September 25th, my special day, were embossed with gold foil, and we had been singing "I've got the golden ticket!" Willy Wonka style in eager anticipation, yet the pall of our friend's death clung around the edges of our minds as we embarked on our journey. The whole trip ended up being edgy. The shows were good, but it was hard to really connect with the bliss being so far from home with this recent murder on our minds. Then our ride decided to leave town early, and we had to sell tickets to one of the shows to make enough money to get a bus back to Pittsburgh.

Our bus was due to leave town at 3AM, and the taxi we called to take us to the bus station never showed. After almost missing the bus, we spent the next TWENTY HOURS in a public transportation nightmare that was complete with creepy perverts, a missed connection in the chaotic NYC Greyhound station for we two, sleepless, weary and freaked out girls, and the most phenomenally absurd happenings, like Bill and Ted riding the bus to their stop in King of Prussia and drunk Indian men getting trapped in the bus restroom and pounding loudly begging for help to get out. To top it all off, I came down with a wicked bout of the flu, so by the time we rolled into the Pittsburgh station, I wanted to climb into bed at my mom's house and never leave again. There were good times on that trip, and some great stories emerged from it, too (right, Al?), but as time has worn on I have found that those memories are forever tinged with the sorrow around the tragic loss of our friend.

Two years later, fall, I was quite pregnant and had the first uncomfortable stirrings of asthma in my lungs, which has grown successively worse each year. I cried when the doctor diagnosed me and handed me that first cursed inhaler. The other chronic ailments from which I suffer have all cropped up, some with a vengeance, in the chilly days of autumn, as well. That same year, the day before my birthday, my sweet puppy Zelda was killed by a car on the busy street in front of my house.

In later years fall brought me the break up of my relationship with my kids' dad and another nasty break up after him, the devastating miscarriage of my third baby, the powerful and frightening dissolution of my beloved's sanity that resulted in his involuntary commitment the same year we bought our house which left me alone, ever since, responsible for our property, and the stillbirth, on my 33rd birthday, of a dear friend's baby delivered into my terrified hands.

Darkness touches all of our lives, and some of us dance more intimately with the darkness than others. I have long felt that I am one that has been called to work, at times, within the veils of life's dusk and murk. Perhaps that was why I was born so close to the autumnal equinox that heralds the time when our Northern Hemisphere culture shifts into the chill and obscurity of cycle's end. Or, perhaps my own birth, when I came to my mother, herself a very young woman without the stability of a loving, safe partner and supportive family, was marked by darkness and stress, and thus it comes around to me when my body begins to sense the shift into harvest's end.

So what can I do? I'm not really afraid; I am merely lost in the musings of what my repeated and unbidden sense of foreboding today might mean. I am actually a remarkably ecstatic human being, no longer prone to the heavy weight I often felt as a young woman being initiated into a life of navigating the turbid, composting cycles.

To not let the dark envelope me into gloom, I knew I needed a remedy. I took tonight off from all responsibilities, and I tended to myself. I played Songs: Ohia albums and got lost in Molina's mournful croon. I ate warm, nourishing foods: lamb, broccoli, quinoa, and gluten-free raisin toast. I treated myself with a batch of my own homemade goat milk, maple, pear custard, because my friend Elon, the brilliant acupunturist, tells me that warm pears are supportive fruit for lungs, and fall is the lung season in Chinese medicine. I infused and drank hot, deep, supportive herbs: dandelion and ginseng and wild yam roots, nettle leaves, and horsetail needles. And I spent time at my long neglected craft, writing this blog for you.

freak

I am participating in an exciting project, the first ever Freaks of Asheville calendar, which will be out for 2010. I have already had my freaky photo shoot, and now I have to submit a freak statement. I just wrote this declaration of myself, and I feel particularly glad that I wrote it on the solstice, a holy day during the wheel of the year to which I am seeking to connect more, and particularly poignant since the last time I blogged was at the equinox. I am sure this statement will be cut down dramatically in order to appear in the calendar, so I am sharing with the world the brand spanking new, editor's cut of my personal, freak story. Enjoy.

Justina. Statement of freakhood. Summer solstice, 2009.

I suspect I am not alone amongst the “freaks” in remembering that even as a young child I always felt different, felt like I didn’t fit in, felt always alone in a crowd. In high school I did it all: made great grades, smoked cigarettes, excelled in sports, did drugs, performed in theatre, had sex, sang in chorus, got in a car chase with the cops, got a scholarship, and did this all with a wildly shorn mop of dyed black hair, lots of piercings in my ears, and carrying on a punk rock meets flower child aesthetic to which neither the punks nor the hippies could relate, let alone the nerds, jocks, or stoner kids. I felt like a freak long before I learned to revel in it.

During those alienated high school years I discovered that my love of nature, my passion for justice, and my deeply primal urges to be a wild, earthy girl actually connected me to the Wiccan tradition, and I decided the minute I learned what it meant that I was a witch. To this day, I remain a witch. My pagan spirituality is inextricably intertwined with everything I do, and everything I do sets me apart from the mainstream, supposedly normal values of our culture. As a witch living amongst the forebears that burned my ancestors, I have been the freak.

I believe it is my responsibility to serve the earth and her creatures - human, animal, and plant beings alike – thus, I have lived that by gently birthing and mothering my own children, serving other families in the ancient tradition of midwifery, raising and rescuing animals, growing, wildcrafting and using herbs as food and medicine, protecting the land, protesting for peace, and attempting to live compassionately through my every choice from how I speak to my neighbors to where I buy my goods in hopes of diminishing my support for sweatshop labor, disposable products, and the many profanities of capitalism. As an activist whose purpose is to serve the planet living in a fast-food, throwaway society, I have been the freak.

A powerful tenet of my belief system is that all acts of love and pleasure serve a higher purpose. My joy, my delight in my actions, my delicious orgasms make the world a better place, not just for myself, but for all. My soul is awakened and inspired by art in every form, particularly by music and poetry. I perform raw, radical poetry as a way of sharing my art with the world and expressing my individual perspective. Like a shaman starved of otherworldly experiences, I devour deep, guitar-heavy, rock-n-roll and electronic psychedelic trance music that transports me. I dance ecstatically, stomping my prayers for peace and transformation into the Earth’s sacred ground. I make love to my partners and to myself as though sex were an ancient form of worship for all creation…. because it is. I permanently alter my body with decorative piercings and colorful, tattooed artwork, each blood-let, needle-carved alteration a chapter in the story of my journey, so that even my appearance becomes part of the giant, collaborative art project that is human existence. Amongst other artist/performer/participants I help create ritual festivals to showcase our creations in temporary societies in which the art is the focus, ceremony is part of every waking moment, and at the end of the day we burn effigies to release all that is unwanted through a spiraling inferno that itself becomes the performance, the art that is our intention. As a unique creatress in a society that values homogeneity and as a woman who always dances like no one is watching, but all the while hopes that everyone is watching, I have been the freak.

My path as a witch and a scholar has taught me that the sacred feminine is every bit as valuable as the sacred masculine, which our culture exclusively exalts. I have studied women’s herstory, have learned of the power imbalance between women and men, and I know that gender is a societally created construct that serves to control men and women alike by binding us to strict but narrow definitions of who we can be. Yet, I am a large woman, a loud woman, an outspoken, forthright, powerful, independent woman who loves the touch of another woman’s skin upon my own, and I am a soft woman, a stay-at-home mama who loves being barefoot and pregnant and tending to children, a cook, a baker, a homemaker, a hearth tending, nurturing woman who loves the feel of a man’s strong hand on my body. As a feminist living in a patriarchal society, I have been the freak.

As I grow more into the tradition of service to humanity I have sought to expand my skills as a healer. I scale ivory towers to pillage knowledge I can return to my people and use for our mutual evolution. I have learned to mediate the dissent between others, facilitating the high art of communication to prevent the schism that its absence creates. Currently I am studying in a Masters program to become a mental health counselor, and simultaneously I am learning to counsel others in a way that intrinsically honors each sacred path, and I am building a bridge of understanding between the hallowed halls of academia and the oft-maligned underground of the counterculture. As an outlandish but overachieving student performing excellently in the whitewashed world of graduate school, as a self-appointed ambassador declaring the weirdo perspective is valuable, too, I have been a freak.

Witch. Midwife. Homebirthing, breastfeeding, homeschooling mother. Activist. Pacifist. Animal lover. Environmentalist. Poet. Performer. Rock-n-roller. Ecstatic dancer. Sacred whore. Psychedelic shaman. Burner. Tattoed. Pierced. Queer. Feminist. Healer. Scholar. Mediator. Counselor. Ambassador.

This litany of mismatched descriptions names me as I am. I am a freak, the unifying quality of being exactly who I want to be in a world that wants to standardize, minimize, and tame me. I push the margins even as I am marginalized. I am a freak.

dear blog.... some poems for spring

Dear blog,
I miss you. Grad school is totally kicking my ass. I swear I will be back someday soon. In honor of the vernal equinox, I am leaving you with a couple of poems from the days of yore, when I was still able to write poetry. These were written during the childbearing days, so now date back to the mid-nineties. Wow. I have been a grown up for a long time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This first piece was written during a wonderful writing workshop, the only I have ever attended. It is a letter to my then very young children, written at a time when I believed that my youthful wild days were over. I have been very pleased to learn they are not.

I am not fat.
I know I may look that way, but I am not.
I am not old.
I may seem that way, but trust me, I am as young as you.
I am not evil.
I may scream and bark and harp and swear, but I am good.
I have feelings and needs like yours, you know.
I once walked topless on a beach in Washington State, and
another time was topless in the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.
I won't do that again, probably,
but it's OK with me if you do.
I am not a housewife.
I am not anybody's wife, except maybe spring's.
When my years reach the century mark,
which I duly hope they do,
Remember all of this:
I dug deep holes for garden beds (I've done that topless, too).
I climbed to the tops of trees.
I carried many, many pounds of feed bags to cows and
many pounds of babies to birth.
I sang and danced and acted on stage and
had sex outside, even in the rain,
walked up steep mountain paths on dark moonless nights
to get to kegs of beer or
swimming holes
or lovers awaiting my touch, and
I've climbed steep, dark paths of my heart
to get to feelings indescribable.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


This piece, I think, pretty much speaks for itself coming from a woman who conceived three times in five years during her early twenties.

I am fertile as the crescent moon.
My ova hang in clusters like grapes so ripe
they burst through their taut skins.
I conceive like nobody's business,
am forced to will away conception days and days each month.
Hormone levels soar exacerbating yeast,
Yet even in my itchy, juicy, sporishness
I feel like bread dough ever ready to rise.

(for Melanie)