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.