For the Children

Afghan Refugee Children

Bosnian Refugee Children

WhipWoman

Existentialism and Postmodernism, Journal I

I have never been able to accept the idea of alienation as having legitimacy, but rather I accept it as a common fallacy of the human mind. I’ve been reading Heidegger’s On Being and Time, and the idea that alienation is symptomatic of the human mind but none the less artificial is one that rings truer to my core.

I have never felt isolated from my natural world, or my fellow (wo)man. Ever since I was little, even when I was deep in my Catholic upbringing and believed in the individual soul, believed in humanity as separate from the rest of the natural world, I still felt an undeniable connectedness to the natural world. I felt most spiritual as a little girl when I would wander off into the acres of woods behind my house, and find some beautiful special place to sit and just experience the world around me—the sounds, the colors, the textures of light filtering through leafy canopies and hidden groves. That was my church, even as a little girl of six—I felt like when I dug my toes in the soil, that my toes were part of the soil; that when I swam in the deepest part of the watering hole in the creek, that I could feel the water flow through me, not just around me; that when I pressed my hand onto a cool mossy rock, I could feel the moss grow and move and change beneath my fingers, almost mingling with my skin in essence and being; and most of all, when I felt sunshine on my face, I felt it in my heart, in what I learned from my Christian teachers was my soul. But my soul does not lie in some compartment within my body—it lies in everything I see and touch and incorporate into my being, and every penetrating and exhilarating emotion it evokes in me. So no, I have never (fortunately) experienced a feeling of being cut off from the natural world. And if I feel that connected to what is “inanimate,” you can imagine what I feel from and for people, how unified I feel when I bond myself to other people.

But I do think some (if not many) people have that connectedness squashed at an early age, for whatever reason. I think modern western individualism and capitalistic competition has replaced much of our connection to and reverence for the natural world—when we commodify people and we commodify our natural world, we must by course of action disconnect in order to allow the exploitation and moral rape of our natural world and the people in it.

About Me

I am alive... The air I breathe thickens by the moment with the passion of existence and the beauty of the unknown. I float on a wave of awe and curiosity that does not consume me, but elevates me.

I seek not to conquer the world, but to realize my place in it, my part in the infinite fabric of existence through my finite rooted experience in this realm, in this reality, in this earth-organism.

I am woman, I am the sacred feminine, and in me is housed "that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death." Someday I will be giver of life.

I accept my biology, my rootedness in this physical reality. I am not a slave to my genetic impulses nor to my bloodmemory that reaches back millenia into the lives that through the passage of time and aggression and love and drift gave way to my own. Rather, I embrace them. I am compelled to seek a morality that is both evolutionarily rooted and progressively utopia-bound.

This dichotomy is sacred, and as humanity forges on, I hope it can embrace its natural rootedness in the natural world while reconciling our infinite consciousness, our capability for transcendence.
This is my dream.

Clint Mansell

This man makes music that makes my soul ache.

death couldn't tear me from you

men without faces dragging me away from you as i screamed and reached out for you.

it was in that sepia black and white, and my hair was long and dark and i was wearing a long creme colored dress with a ruffle that came just above my ankles, like a dressing gown or a sun dress. the picture was gritty. you had been shot, were incapacitated and cornered in a room with wood floors and wooden walls. you were barely conscious, and men were closing around you and i knew they intended to hurt you. badly. i tore lose just long enough to almost reach you, but one of them hit me, hard, connecting with my ear, and i was knocked back away from you, but I tore back up, unphased, screaming and tearing across the floor on my hands and knees to reach you. the men descended upon me, it took so many men, drug me back across the floor with my heels digging into the wood, my feet bleeding and splintering as i thrashed wildly, crazed, in some desperate frenzy, spilling tears of rage. and you tried to stand, to come after me, bleeding from your stomach, but there were too many of them. they tore us apart. but we never stopped fighting.

death couldn't tear me from you.

i would tear loose its grasp and come back to you.

On Rights

I am not a fan of collective group rights when that group is smaller than humanity. I think that demarcation of people into groups causes so many problems, so much more harm than good. A problem of self-determination arises, and my simple answer would be that all people have the right to choose their own system of governance, regardless of whether or not they belong to a group. The formation of a group based on this desire would necessarily follow, but I would not claim that I have the right to have my own club for blonde people because we are all blonde and all like Chinese food and all think Jim Carey is hilarious. If an established government were systematically oppressing people of that certain category, then I would say it is the right of every individual to be free of that oppression.

Proponents of cultural rights would say that what is a human right and what is moral would fall into a category of cultural relativism—no universal standards. I believe this is horseshit. In her book Sex and Social Justice, Martha Nussbaum makes a brilliant assessment of this problem. Paraphrasing will surely do her no justice, so I’m going to quote the whole darn thing.

"On the one hand, it seems impossible to deny that traditions perpetrate injustice against women in many fundamental ways, touching on some of the most central elements of a human being's quality of life--health, education, political liberty and participation, employment, self-respect, and life itself. On the other hand, hasty judgments that a tradition in some distant part of the world is morally retrograde are familiar legacies of colonialism and imperialism, and are correctly regarded with suspicion by sensitive thinkers in the contemporary world. To say that a practice endorsed by tradition is bad is to risk erring by imposing one's own way on others who surely have their own ideas of what is right and good. To say that a practice is all right wherever local tradition endorses it as right and good is to risk erring by withholding critical judgment where real evil and real oppression are surely present. To avoid the whole issue because the matter of proper judgment is so fiendishly difficult is tempting, but perhaps the worst option of all. It suggests all too clearly the sort of moral collapse depicted by Dante, when he describes the crowd of souls who mill around in the vestibule of hell, dragging their banner now one way now another, never willing to set it down and take a definite stand on any moral or political question. Such people, Dante implies, are the most despicable of all: they can't even get into hell because they have not been willing to stand for anything in life, one way or another. To express the spirit of this chapter very succinctly, it is better to risk being consigned by critics to the “hell” reserved for alleged Westernizers and imperialists—however unjustified such a criticism would in fact be—than to stand around in the vestibule waiting for a time when everyone will like what we are going to say. And what we are going to say is: that there are universal obligations to protect human functioning and its dignity, and that the dignity of women is equal to that of men. If this involves assault on many local traditions, both Western and non-Western, so much the better, because any tradition that denies these things is unjust."

Sweet Jesus that was amazing. I cried the first time I read that. That is how I feel. I don’t think there can be a reconciling of the two. I think that if there is a cultural tradition that violates a human right (or many human rights), it is an unjust practice and needs to be annihilated. The existence of group rights stems from the violation of individual rights. Sarah and I were talking about this today, and while a group whose rights are being systematically violated needs to call attention to its plight, I do not think that group has the right to violate individual rights because it has some sort of group right. The only real group that exists is humanity—the rest are pseudo-groups, claiming intrinsic value where none exists.

Anarchy and the true self-determination of pure socialism and communal governance: I could write a whole essay here.

Religion needs to be wiped out. There, I said it. Bertrand Russell, a brilliant man, once said: "It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age, but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door. This dragon is religion." I believe this is so very true. Religion is a debilitating disease that cripples the human mind and causes so much damage to humanity in comparison to the minor services it offers. People bank their entire existence on lies created to maintain the status quo, to keep the oppressed under the foot of the oppressor, to squelch opposition and to stifle human growth. Look at the places around the world where religion reigns supreme—more often than not they are where the most horrific human rights violations occur, and often in the very name of religion. Consider the wars waged over whose god is the right god, or whose version of the same god’s laws is the right version. It’s sickening.

Religion, like race and sexuality, is just one more way for people to delineate, to separate people into groups that are “different,” who are “unlike me” and therefore I can be emotionally numb to their suffering. I can firebomb their homes, I can rape their children, I can pump their mothers full of shrapnel, I can hack their fathers with machetes, I can piss on their bullet-riddled and blood-shod bodies, because they aren’t like me. They belong to that religion, they are non-believers, they are the anti-Christ, they are the Great Satan, they are the infidels, they are going to hell, they are a member of that sect, they don’t follow my Pope, they are a member of a different group, to which I do not belong and can rightfully combat to defend what is mine, what I believe, who I am, the group to which I belong.

However, people seem to forget that we are human first, religious second. We are human first, ethnic second. We are human first, nationals second. We are human first, women second. People forget. They don’t see that overlying tie that binds us all together, and lose sight of the forest for the trees. It is this group-concept that causes so much destruction in our human history. Nationality, religion, race, ethnicity, all are group-concepts that cause so much suffering and strife. Whatever happened to the forest? I still see it. I just wish everyone else did, too.

Let's Break Down My Philosophy

Whether we are fundamentally biological creatures is irrelevant to the discussion of our purpose on this earth. Our purpose, whether it comes from something innate or something constructed, can be conceived of in a way that makes life on earth meaningful and beautiful and purposeful and glorious. That purpose can either serve the good of all of the world, or it can be self-serving or group specific, without regard for the rest of civilization, life, or non-life that it co-exists with. We have a choice as to what kind of purpose we choose to accept for ourselves. If we accept that it is to exist solely for ourselves and some transcendent, elusive, ambiguous and spiteful deity, than we have chosen that path for our lives. We can choose to live for material things, to subscribe to the god-religion of capitalism and personal gain and selfishness in effort to acquire as much as we can in this life in terms of physical and monetary wealth, and then hoard it and pass it on to our offspring to continue the same sick, self-indulgent, pathetic and hollow existence of accumulation.

Or we can choose more. We can choose to feel. To embrace beauty and light and one another. We can choose to love. We can choose to expand that love beyond a single person or a small group of people and to embrace humanity, the world, the energy and beauty of the universe. We can choose to stop trying to control the earth and accept that we are a living, breathing, passing part of it. We can choose to exist for the hope and beauty and love that, whether biological or socially constructed, is undoubtedly present in the human psyche. We can choose to live for oneanother. To make it our responsibility that other people can experience these goods as well. To make it our purpose to foster all that is beautiful and wonderous and ensure that every member of humanity is able to feel these abstract goods in this life, that they do not needlessly suffer, that our fellow humans and our world are healthy and growing and able to exist in beauty and light and hope and harmony.

This is not idealism. This is logic. This is compassion. This is hope that a better world is possible. This is progress. This is humanism. This is love. This is a morality derived of all of the above. This is the purpose we can choose for ourselves. This is the morality we can choose to embrace. Morality is not the prohibition of swearing. It is not an obligatory church schedule. It is not out lawing gay people from marrying. It is the mechanism by which we may all live together and embrace our potential for beauty and love and happiness while minimizing our potential for destruction and pain and suffering. This is a simple logic. The things that uplift the human spirit are moral things. The things that embrace our potential for good and move us toward compassion and humanism and harmony with our earth are good and moral things. The things that degrade the human spirit and infest humanity with suffering, that further pain and misery and hatred and anger and death and destruction, that infect our natural world with toxins and waste and cut wounds so deep in the earth that they will likely destroy much of life, not to mention the capacity for human functioning: these things are wrong and immoral and detrimental to not only human life but to the fragile system that is our earth.

This is my morality. Take it or leave it, but I'll be damned if someone can explain to me how our government or our economic system is moral and good.

Unless we get our heads out of our asses and stop playing hands-off with morality and stop being all touchy-feely about cultural relativism and state sovereignty and personal beliefs, we are headed for a major crisis world wide. I am fully aware that it is going to take the Armageddon of the next century brought about by the extreme wounds we've caused this planet and our complete disregard for the well being of our fellow man to snap the western world out of it's self-idolizing Prozac-popping material-worship. Even then, with the fundamentalist religious ideologies that abound our populations, I am seriously concerned that we as a whole will fail to heed the blatant message our planet and the unbalanced order of civilization is trying to convey, and we'll instate something worse than we've already got now.

I wish I could make everyone see.

In response to Tyler

I am so overwhelmed at the indifference that surrounds me. Sometimes I think it will drown me. That is one of the reasons I can't wait to get out of this town, and I why I know you had to leave. So many people so absorbed in their own delusional bullshit, who can't seem to see anything beyond themselves and their own petty dramas in their shit-hole little backward towns. It is suffocating me. There are others, Tyler, who think like us. You've met a few, I know, and they are so important in encouraging and supporting that light within us, that spark of compassion that lives deep within us. There are others like us. Some days it seems not so, especially being here in this godforsaken town, but there are others. I have faith in humankind, in human dignity and love and compassion. I have more faith than I ever would have let myself believe I have, and while it doesn't live in some high-in-the-sky deity, it does live within every person I meet.

I see god in the face of every man, woman, and child I see. I'd sacrifice the whole of my happiness, my very life, for my faith in humanity. I'd die to save humankind, even for all the fucked up shit we've done to this world, I'd die to save us all. That is faith in something grand, something bigger than myself. But I don't think it's unfounded. I see that love in the eyes of lovers, in the eyes of a father with his baby girl, in the hearts of mankind, so courageous and quick to band together in an emergency, at times of crisis. Call me an idealist. I'll thank you for it. I'll be damned if I lose my idealism before the age of 21. I'll be damned if I ever lose it. "Idealists are the salt of the earth--without them, human life would become a stagnant pool of degredation." We are the dreamers. We are the earth movers, the soul-raisers, the spirit-lifters. We are the progress-makers and the changers of human history. We are the saviors. The utopians. The idealists. Without us, without a dream of what could be, why would life be worth living?

Indifference is just like any other foe. It need only be conquered by love and hope. I have faith in this war, and I believe with everything in my that my faith will carry us through the advent of civilization and save us all. Love will save us all.

The Indomitable Human Spirit

I have great love for all humankind. But there are those few dear people that I bond myself to irrevocably. To those people, my soul is forever joined in a way that makes them as much a part of me as the very heart that beats life through my veins. To each of those people I give myself wholly and unconditionally, and I will love them every day for the rest of my life and into whatever great beyond lies ahead. This is the sort of thing that makes life exponentially more beautiful. First and foremost, it is my belief that the beauty and joy of life cannot be fully experienced unless it is shared with another, and it is that bonding of our souls to one another that grants us the most fulfilling sort of peace and the most elated joy that humankind can possibly know. This is who I am, and no matter how I grow and change, this one thing about me will always remain my strong hold. It is only through our indomitable compassion for humankind and our deep human bonds that we can experience the meaning of being human, of being alive.

What's In A Name?

What's in a name? Apparently a lot.
Rebecca. Hebrew, originally from Aramaic. What it means, from several sources:
1. Beauty bestowed upon her, favored by the Lord. Her house is built with love, her heart is pure, she gives to those in need and seeks for the good in all.
2. One who mends, one who binds.
3. The captivator.
4. To snare or to bind.
5. One who is bound, tied.
6. Captivating, to tie, beautiful, desirable; Rebecca is the Latin form of the Hebrew name Rivka. The biblical Rebecca was the wife of Isaac and mother of Jacob and Esau.
7. Bound.
8. Biblical: Rebekah, noted in the Genesis account as a maiden of beauty, modesty, and kindness, became the wife of Abraham's son, Isaac.
9. To bind, to join.
10. Captivating. One who mends, binds, ties. One who is bound or tied.

Dreams to be Realized

I want a garden. And a house. I want one deep in the woods, in Oregon maybe, in a clearing. It would be earth sheltered and covered with mosses and vines. I'd have an orchard and a vegetable garden and a strawberry patch and a whole field of lavender. And an herb garden. And I'd have mimosa trees and weeping willows and wisteria and wildflowers and lush, flowering, fragrant bushes along winding paths that led to the gardens and the orchard and the house. And there'd be a waterfall nearby, just close enough so I could hear the sound of it when I sat outside at dusk. Eventually, I'd want a rabbit farm, and some chickens, and maybe a dairy cow or a goat for milking. And I'd have a home full of children’s' laughter, and love. So much love. There'd be dirty little bare footprints all over the house, and I'd wash them on my hands and knees and smile to myself, because I'd know there'd be more to wipe up tomorrow, and that I'd get to do it all over again. I'd enjoy it, because it would be a small reminder to myself of youth and happiness and innocence, and all that children hold. And it would remind me of how my children are at home in nature, and how they love the feeling of moss under their bare feet, just like their momma does. And I would cook and make soap and candles and do dishes by hand and bathe my children and pass their clothes down to the younger ones and kiss their faces and then make love to my best friend who I shared this life with and I would go to bed ever night knowing that this was what I lived for. This was why we live, why we love. This was the beauty and the simplicity of life, and I would fall asleep every night peacefully and fulfilled.

And in the morning, when I woke, I'd kiss my lover softly to wake him, and kiss my children and tell them "Good morning and I love you" because every day I'd want them to wake knowing that they were loved and I'd fix breakfast with my lover and play in the garden and read to my children under big shade trees and then we'd climb the trees and laugh eat until our bellies were about to bust. And I'd rub their full tums and kiss their foreheads and put them to bed. This will be a beautiful stage in my life. When my children were grown I'd look back and smile at all the beautiful memories, and I'd be proud for the love and wisdom I had given them to share with the world. Then I would go back to teaching college, love my job, and make love to my husband every night and hold my daughter when she cried over a broken heart, and cry and kiss my children when they graduated from college. And someday, when I'm old, I'll know that my life was beautiful and wondrous and absolutely perfect. And I'd know that I couldn't have asked for anything more. I would have traveled the world, volunteered, helped others, raised children, ate good food, fostered love and learning through my dedication to education and teaching, found the love of my life, and made a beautiful mark on the lives of countless people. Then, I'd squeeze my husband's hand, my lover, my best friend, and know that I could pass easy into whatever lies ahead with a smile on my face and love in my heart.

What I Feel

I sometimes feel like I am too sensitive. I feel like everything, the world, the people in it, affect me too much. I feel sometimes that I am so swollen with emotion, with sorrow or joy or despair or hope, that I'm just going to bust and flood the world. I feel the bad ones more though. I feel a deep, overwhelming sense of sorrow at the thought of someone losing a loved one, of someone watching someone dear to them die, of someone who is hungry, of someone who is alone. Of someone who buries their child. Of someone who is so impoverished they cannot feed their family. I feel the pangs of suffering most severely. And it's not even my suffering, or any particular person that I know of. It's just suffering in general. I absorb so much of what is around me, it's like I'm hypersensitive or something. I feel EVERYTHING, and threefold. I watched an interview with a man in Louisiana today. He works at the emergency care center at New Orleans, and the man who runs the emergency program had his mother in a nursing home in Louisiana. Every day, she would call him, and say "are you comin son? is somebody comin to get me?" and he would tell her "yes mama, somebody's comin. They're comin on Tuesday. They're comin on Wednesday. They're comin on Thursday. They're comin on Friday." She drowned Friday night. The man telling the story barely knew the man of whom he spoke, didn't even know the mother he lost. Yet there he was, a grown man, sobbing, trying to tell the story on the air, and barely able to get out the words for all his grief. I found myself crying uncontrollably, so completely moved by the sorrow this man felt for his fellow man, and sorrowed myself for the loss felt by the man he spoke of. There is so much hate in the world, so much anger, and there is no room for it. With all the suffering in the world, with all the wonderment and good that can come of human emotion, to teach a child to hate is a sin against humanity. So much delineation, so much separating ourselves from others, so much saying that their pain is their pain alone, because they are different from me, separate from me. It may be unfortunate, but it is THEIR pain, not MY pain, so I need not concern myself. There is so much impartiality. So much disconnect. I am not a part of that. Sometimes I wish I were, but never really and truly. It is what I feel that makes me human. That makes me who I am. I would take pain over impartiality any day. Sometimes I see or hear something, and I am so deeply saddened, I literally feel my heart clench up in my chest and writhe within me. I finally understood why people associate the heart with human emotion. For me, it is where my body feels the physical reality of my emotion. I sometimes just sit and weep for the pain in the world. I weep for it now.

But I not only weep for the pain. Sometimes, when I see or hear something that I connect with, that inspires me or gives me hope, or something that strikes me at my very core in a way that rips me heart open because I UNDERSTAND, I cry. Not a weep for a loss or for a pain, but for the joy of sharing something with another human being. For the joy of that little girl on her father's chest and the comfort they hold for one another. For the joy of a man holding a woman, or even of a man holding a man. For the joy of human unity and of the subtle but oh so powerfully beautiful ways in which it is illuminated. I want to have children. I want very much to have children, so that I can raise them to FEEL. Raise them to absorb the world, to soak it up until they are as swollen with love and sadness and hope and joy as their mother was and still will be. I want them to feel what I feel. To see the world and the suffering in it, and to recognize the things that should change. And I want to give them the courage and the hope they need to change the things they can, and the solace they need for the things they cannot change. I want them to feel, to swell so full of emotion that they are completely unable to sit idly by and watch their fellow humans suffer needlessly. The will never be impartial, never be dead to the transcendent humanity that unites us all with one other. Compassion, empathy, unity, these are the only things that will save us. Love will save us all.

When I Look at the World

When I look at the world, I see it as it is. I am not an unrealistic person who sees only flowers and daffodils where suffering and evil exist. However, I see how the world could be. I see such intrinsic goods, such potential for beauty and love in humanity. We have this gift for feeling the abstract, for taking what is intangible and unknown to the beasts, and actually feeling it, even to the point that we would die for it. We have the unique ability to empathize, to reflect on the situation of others and to put ourselves in their place, to feel their pain, to feel compassion. No other creature on earth can boast such a claim. And that compassion is our only saving grace. We have so royally fucked over our planet and each other, so terribly have we destroyed what is seen by so many as a divine gift, our duty and honor to be the care takers of the world, that without this saving grace I would deem our species a plague upon the planet, unworthy of our gift of higher intellect and capacity for reason.

However, we do have the ability to love. And not just romantic love, which I argue is often self serving and egotistical (I love him/her because of the way he/she makes ME FEEL, which is actually lacking in any sort of intrinsic quality in the partner which would inspire feelings of love and awe and devotion based on who that person is, regardless if he/she was still in a relationship, returned the feelings, was romantic towards/considerate towards, etc etc the person who is "in love." But that's a rant for another day).

What we have in addition to romantic love (both the false, self serving kind and the true kind in which two people become so emotionally and mentally intertwined that they bond on what seems to be a cellular level, and it becomes inconceivable that they should ever part, for they are bound to one another on such deep and spiritual levels of connectivity and mutual understanding of one another and the world and the universe that to lose one would be in essence to lose the self), we also have the capacity to love humankind as a whole. I realize that this is largely underdeveloped in modern society, and indeed even purposely suppressed by those who stand to make a profit at the expense of others and from the indifference of those in a position to stop that exploitation and inhumanity. However, it lives in us all, even if lying dormant under mountains of stuff and glittery distractions and advertisements and daily petty dramas. It is there, waiting to be unleashed and to heal the world.

Surely we feel compassion and empathy toward our family members. But in essence are we not all blood relatives? Are we not all part of one, extended family? Is it not pure chance that you or I were born into the lives we have been born into, and not born into brothels or child prostitution or extreme poverty or starvation? Is it so hard to see that person as your likeness, as someone who could be you? Someone whose pain it is in your power to stop? Yes, we can only do so much as individuals, but together we can begin a healing process to mend the terrible wounds we have caused to humanity and potentially save one another from the sure doom we face.

That doom can only arrive with the indifference of good people, who will sit comfortably and idly by while those in power send those without further into the miserable squalor and degradation of poverty, slavery, starvation, and suffering until it consumes us all.

"And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak up for me."