thirty threadbare mercies

The outward expression of an inward grace.

Virtual Book Club: The Screwtape Letters & La Seduction October 31, 2011

Filed under: Books,Christianity — rheabette @ 3:03 pm
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Last week, I was on my way to Potluck/Book Club when Olive & I had our great fall.  So my thoughts while I was sitting on the floor of the apartment building trying to catch my breath and not pass out were thus: “Is Olive okay?  Dang, I am dizzy.  Shoot, I guess I sped re-read The Screwtape Letters for nothing!”  But, much later, I had the thought of  writing my response to the book here, and having all of you weigh in on it, opening the “Book Club” to any who choose to read this blog.  Of course, those of you that actually made it there that night can let me know if any salient points were made as well.

I assume many of you have  read The Screwtape Letters long ago, as I did, since it is common reading for Confirmands and other young people interested in Christian Spirituality.  So the invitation to re-read it was slightly disconcerting, as it is triggering for me to revisit the constricting version of spirituality I was espousing in my late teens.  However, knowing that C.S. Lewis was actually an Anglican who the Evangelicals have adopted as their own has made me wonder if I could read it with a new lens now.

First off, I was struck by a quote in the preface that I found very pertinent to the Occupy Wall Street protests: “The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern (p. x).” So, Lewis shapes his fictional account of a senior devil writing to his apprentice as if it were, basically, a bank or an advertising firm. We could sit here and talk about whether demons exist or not (Lewis does believe in them, I don’t), but I found it more useful to think of his demons as metaphors and see what I can glean from them about human nature.

What struck me most about this book this time around is what Lewis says about pleasure, perhaps because it coincides neatly with the premise of the other book I read last week, Eliane Sciolino’s La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life.  Screwtape instructs his protege to try to influence his human “patient” to spend his days doing neither what he ought or he liked, but basically to exist in a Matrix-like hum of dreary gratification of needs.

The man himself, enjoying a pipe, because he wants to, dammit.

The senior demon castigates his pupil for allowing his patient to “read a book he actually enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends (p. 58).”  Of course I saw the irony, as I was reading this book as an assignment for a book club, but I do spend my fair amount of time reading books I enjoy that other people may consider ridiculous.  Screwtape counsels, “You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the ‘best’ people, the ‘right’ food, the ‘important’ books.”  He finds it dangerous for the human to be experiencing real pleasure or real pain, as it is the intensity of reality that guides people to seek out God.

You may be wondering, how on earth does an explicitly Christian book like The Screwtape Letters coincide with the very worldly-titled La Seduction?  The place that they connect is the search for true pleasure, and that it is not just “nice to have”, it is a way of living life to the fullest.  Sciolino, an American journalist living in Paris, writes about how all of French culture is wrapped around the principle of seduction, which includes sex but is not synonymous with it, since it expands to include all kinds of pleasure, especially interpersonal relationships of all kinds.

I am finding in my own life that the people I continue to have issues with are folks who don’t seem to enjoy their life — they simply do what they think they should, and are therefore very angry with people like me who do not follow their prescribed rules, and, worse yet, seem to be having a good time doing it.  These are people who cannot appreciate a colorful dress, a rich cupcake, or a gallows-humour type of joke.  They think they know what is “best” for everyone, and that they need to “help” others by letting them know their concerns.  In other words, controlling sons of bitches.

No one likes to be told what to do, but I am finding that it goes deeper than that for me.  People who are not only controlling of others but also lead intensely controlled, rather drab lives themselves will never understand me.  I will never win them over with, as Sciolino calls it “a charm offensive”.  I am realizing that I need to seek out people who strive to enjoy life, in whatever package they come in.  When I am looking for someone to be friends with, or collaborate on a project with, I should look less at their acheivements and stated interests and more on whether they would laugh at a particularly baudy joke or if I thought they were the kind of person I could invite over to watch the latest Twilight movie and eat a carton of salted caramel ice cream.  If we went out to an outdoor restaurant, and a band started playing, would they get up and dance with me, even if they didn’t know the steps?  And it’s not just about finding people are “more like me”.  It’s about feeling alive in the presence of another, the true community of being with someone else who is living out loud, that brings me closer to the divine.

All in all, the book La Seduction was very interesting, because Sciolino brings a journalistic eye to French culture, not just an “ooh-la-la” Francophile perspective.  She is critiquing the culture along with pointing out the divine elements of it.  So, I present you with the steps I would need to take to be more like a French woman, based on Sciolino’s book.

How to be More French

Step 1: Pay more attention to process than result.  As a person who was once evoquivically a no-nonsense New Englander and is now a West Coast Expressive Arts therapist, this sounds good to me.  But it requires a certain amount of patience that I don’t always have.  I am constantly having to tell myself to “slow down, enjoy the present moment, this is your life!” when I just want to run out the door to the next thing.  The French, as well as C.S. Lewis, are all about the present.  Screwtape calls it “the point at which time touches eternity (p.68).”

Step 2: Conceal to reveal.  Arielle Dombasle tells Sciolino never to be nude in front of her husband.  “You shouldn’t.  Or he won’t buy you lunch.”  The French value of seduction is never casual.  You don’t lay it all out there like Snooki or even that overwhelmingly friendly person we all know.  It is considered literally an act of violence to be indiscriminately overpowering, with your smile, your perfume, your decolletage.  It must be skillful, in order to be fun.

Step 3: Seek beauty.  In architecture (the Eiffel Tower is thought of as a beautiful woman), in humans, in daily life.  Easy.  I truly believe that in creating and admiring beauty we are fulfilling our roles as co-creators with God/Goddess.

Let's be honest. If I went to France, I'd probably just read, albeit in a beautiful place!

Step 4: Engage in intellectual foreplay.  This one is hard in the states — debates very easily turn into nasty struggles between right and wrong.  In our current culture, few people are enjoying the clash of ideas, they are just shouting louder and louder to be heard, in the hopes of being affirmed.  That’s why I find the Occupy Wall Street movement so interesting — it’s a lot of question raising rather than answer giving.  The debates around it have often been “But what is the RESULT going to be?”  We could learn something from the way the French can enjoy conflicting ideas and still leave the conversation with everyone’s dignity in tact.  I confess I am not great at this one.  I tend to bow out if I feel I’m not being listened to, rather than find a new way to convince the other to see another side.

Step 5: If you get catcalled in the street, let it make your day!  It is a sign of approval and playfulness in France, but considered rude and sexist here.  Another difficult one — I guess it all depends on context.  There is a big difference between a person saying “You look lovely, you are ravishing”, and the guy who called me “Sexy Ass” yesterday.  Perhaps the difference is in one, you keep your personhood, and an adjective is added to it, and in the other, you are being named as an object.

Step 6: Respect history.  I get this one, and French culture has a legacy of creating fine things that is something to be admired.  But as a true American I love progress and change, and I don’t like things that just harken back to “the good old days” because those days were actually quite bad for anyone non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual.  Joel and I have a special song we sing for when things are “Old-timey”, as is a very fashionable trend in San Francisco right now.  I don’t mind celebrating the past, but it needs to be in a context of justice.  Sciolino is scathing in how she points out ways France needs to treat their citizens of color better, and I appreciate that very much.

Step 7: If your husband cheats on you, celebrate his virility!  I don’t think I would ever find myself “lucky” to be with a “sexually potent” cheating man.  I truly believe in fidelity.  It is not a very popular view in this day and age, but it is not coming from a place of being a prude.  I actually believe that commitment deepens one’s experience of life, that important lessons are learned over time in a committed sexual relationship with one partner that cannot be learned any other way.  Not everyone will have such a relationship, and that doesn’t mean they will live a bad life.  But I don’t believe men need a longer sexual leash, I think they need meaningful experiences of intimacy.  Sciolino condemns pornography as “anti-seduction”, and it fits into Lewis’s value of pleasure AND reality.  So, this is a complicated matter, but I don’t think I would enjoy all of the sexual mores of French life.

Step 8: Have a gastronomic orgasm.  The French actually enjoy their food, and this is probably why they eat less of it.  This one, I really do want to take on.  Food is about nourishment, and I think there are ways you can feed yourself healthily and experience a certain amount of pleasure each time you eat. The body and the soul are not disconnected, and that is why so many people have food hang-ups.  They try to either eat solely to fill their body’s needs, or their souls.  The balance is really hard, but I am going to try it more consciously.

And that is my greatest take-away from both of these books.  I am going to seek true pleasure, based in reality, and leave behind the things I think I “should” be doing.  I think more life energy will flow from me this way, and I will actually be more effective in what I am trying to do.  This may look odd to you — it will not mean gorging myself in any manner of hedonistic form, but it could mean staying in and reading all night, allowing myself to fully enjoy one glass of red wine and 6 macrons.

Please weigh in in the comments on your thoughts on The Screwtape Letters, and either La Seduction if you’ve read it or the outline I gave above, if you’ve not.  What do you think about my premise of the importance of true pleasure?  Virtual book club, commence!

 

Falling face first into humble pie October 28, 2011

Filed under: Mothers,One year olds,Parenting — rheabette @ 9:29 pm
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My dear friends,

If you want to learn the bitter irony of the boomarang nature of the universe, say to your strong but slightly clumsy husband, “I bet when our daughter breaks her first bone, it will be with you.”  Then, a week from making this nasty and totally pointless statement, take your ever-so-graceful self to pick said daughter up from her nanny share, wearing platforms and carrying 2 bags while holding her as you walk down a marble staircase.  You will find yourself sitting your ass down deep in a vat of humble pie, as you topple down the steps and, while your baby clutches to you, her leg slightly twists and ends up being fractured.

Lately I have been wondering if I have been piling too much on my plate, as it has felt like I’m right on the precipice… well, of a fall.  I have also been pondering how to gather the support around myself that I need to handle my busy life in a more regular, consistent way.  With this latest challenge, my community has been so wonderfully supportive, with prayers, food, rides, and encouraging messages.  And believe you me, I’ve needed them.  Spending the entire day yesterday at the medical center, doing tests on Olive that often made her cry painfully, then waiting for hours for results was harrowing.  When they showed me the x-ray of her little leg, I couldn’t even see the fracture, but I could certainly feel my heart breaking.

Shortly after getting the news that her leg was indeed broken, I, in all my infinite wisdom, picked a fight with my husband about how we would get home (not having a car really makes this stuff all the more stressful).  We bickered for a little while, until I turned to him and said, “I think we’re just really sad that our baby has a broken leg.”  He agreed, and we figured out the plans to get home with much more compassion for each other.  Every single day I pray that Olive will be safe.  This morning, I told God how mad I am that she was hurt.  But I’m not really mad at God, I’m pretty effing pissed at myself.  My mom friends, knowing that I would be castigating myself, have all told me about the millions of scary things that have happened to their own kids.  And I’m not in some wallowing self-pity place, I’m just feeling sick to my stomach watching my poor active 13-month old have to scoot around slowly with her full-leg cast, and knowing it happened on my watch.

So I’m combating the pit with my best defense, humor.  Olive’s cast on the streets of San Francisco is like a huge neon sign that blinks CARELESS MOTHER!  Which prompts everyone and their sister to ask what happened, and give me a frowny face.  I usually say that she was protecting the town from a vicious pack of baby ninjas, but sometimes I get more specific — if the person is walking a canine, I say “a dog sat on her.”  If they are loading a truck, I say “she was unloading a shipment at the docks”.  However, if it is a parent asking me, I know I only need to say “I was carrying a lot, going down a flight of stairs and…” they can finish the sentence, because, that’s parenting.

My humorous defense may be silly, but it keeps me from getting all melancholia about it.  Kids get hurt, a lot, and I need to get used to it.  The kid I have is amazingly resiliant — she literally only cried when she was feeling the physical pain from the fracture being touched, and always bounces back in an incredible amount of time to her dancing, curious self.  Our last stop yesterday was to the injury center, where they were to put the cast on.  I was exhausted, hadn’t eaten in many hours, and was flying solo as Joel had to bring the borrowed car back.  But when I walked in and the 2 people putting on the cast were named Oliver and Rose, I knew everything was going to be okay.  She charmed them instantly, barking like a dog and laughing when they pretended to be scared, letting them hold her and dance with her around the room.

It is ridiculous to spend even one moment in hindsight thinking, but I have been known to be rather ridiculous, at times.  I suppose the one “take-away” I am allowing is that I need to ask for help more often.  I was carrying too much, and it was unnecessary.  But continuing that line of thought takes me to a rather un-humble place once again.  Who is to say that ANYthing I could have done could have kept this from happening, or that the alternatives would have somehow been better?  She could have been hurt worse.  And who is to say that scrapes and breaks aren’t important learning experiences for kids, about how to overcome adversity?  Basically, I need to let Olive get hurt, not take it personally, and not become a Helicopter Parent.  Part of loving is being able to fully show up for that person’s pain, to be able to bear that unfortunate things happen, we don’t have to judge them “good” or “bad”, we just have to be present for them.  As Yeats said, “Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement; for nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.”  So I will live in this mansion of love, no matter how smelly it may sometimes be.  It is true that brokenness usually leads to wholeness, if love is present throughout.  And this tough little girl has that in spades.

 

Spoonful of Weird October 24, 2011

Filed under: Parenting,Personal,San Francisco — rheabette @ 3:14 pm
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It has been an odd week here in San Francisco.  We had two earthquakes on one day, the same day that there was a city-wide earthquake drill in the morning.  The weather has been all over the place, chilly and foggy one day, hotter than Hades the next, often both in the same 12-hour time period.  And people seem to be going a bit batty in the midst of all of it — or, at least, I am.

One night last week I woke up from a dead sleep with a premonition that something was going to happen to Olive — literally seconds after I opened my eyes I saw her roll over hard and hit her head on the side of the crib.  She cried, I grabbed her and comforted her, and considered how odd Mother’s Intuition is.

Another night that week I woke Joel up to groggily tell him my plan for us to make our millions, which can be summed up in three words, “Grilled Cheese Spoon.”  “What?  What are you talking about, Rhea?”  “It’s a… spoon… made of… grilled cheese.  You eat your tomato soup with it.  GRILLED CHEESE SPOON!”  At this point we both went back to sleep and didn’t remember about GCS until later that night, when Joel made Olive grilled cheese for dinner.  It jolted our memory and we went into furious negotiations about who we could get to make a special press for the spoons and what restaurants would want to feature it.  Yum.

This is a grilled cheese ornament, which is also awesome but not as rad as my grilled cheese spoon because you can't eat it once Christmas is over.

In this city where people say yes to their whimsy, it could actually happen.  I saw this sign advertising something called The Good People Party, which was some sort of art gathering/experience.  The wording was positively bizarre but my favorite part was “$12 gets you in.  Includes marshmallows.”  This had me laughing all the way to work.  $12 is an absurd amount of money to get into a strange party in which you might make a turkey out of your hand print or you might put your keys in a bowl, but if it includes dessert made out of sugar, corn syrup, and gelatin that I can buy for $1.00 at a corner store, well then I’m sold.

This is also a city in which there are about 30 million parties per day, which can both be fun and wildly overwhelming. In a single morning we attended a baptism, a renewal of marriage vows, a huge block party, and the Tricycle Music Fest, all before 2pm.  Then the three of us took a giant nap, totally partied-out and exhausted.  Parenting ITSELF is overstimulating — you have be ON every minute.  It requires a tremendous amount of presence, and when the day is done if I can keep my eyes open long enough to get into a state of awake relaxation, it is a minor miracle.  I am a person who craves alone time, to read, write, and just BE.  But moments for this are a near impossibility with a small child, so I am riding the wave of the present moment, grateful if I can just get the both of us out of doors without vomit in our hair.

This quote from Anton Chekhov helps, when I feel so overwhelmed by all of my many commitments that I wonder where my life is even GOING, anyway, and if I am investing in all the wrong things: “…you must at once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.” It is that alone that keeps me from throwing it all away and following the path of a Grilled Cheese Spoon salesperson.

 

Dancing Queen, Young and Sweet, Only 13 Months. October 19, 2011

Filed under: Birthdays,Dance,Parenting — rheabette @ 8:54 pm
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Today is Olive’s 13 month old birthday.  For her first 12 months, I’d post a picture on her month-birthday on Facebook, wishing her a good one.  But as babies grow into toddlers, they become much harder to snap photos of!  Olive is constantly in motion.

A rare moment of lounging.

Speaking of her locomotion, the girl simply LIT UP the dance floor before my class yesterday.  Every other Tuesday, I take her with me to the Women’s Building for my ODC Rhythm & Motion dance class for the warm-up, after which Joel fights his way through 50-70 dancers to come collect her.  Olive has been going to this dance class since she was in utero, and I think she feels totally at home there.

For the first few months of her life I actually wore her while I danced, and she flapped her arms and legs in time to the music.  Now she has graduated to a stroller, where she sits and has a snack and is wide-eyed at all the sweaty dancers and their flailing limbs.  But I get there early to get a good spot and chat with my dance friends, and she is allowed to chill with us while we stretch.  However, she takes that opportunity to show us HER moves.  She does this hilarious chest bump, with her arms over her head, a spin-tastic twist that almost lands her on the ground, and a salsa-esque torso shake, worthy of a flower in her hair.

At first she was content to dance alongside me, but now she has found her inspiration in our teacher, Dudley.  She crawls right up to him where he’s stretching and copies everything that he does, following him around the room if he changes position.  When he leaves to get water she cries and takes off after him.  He mused yesterday that perhaps she knows his voice from all the time of hearing him in class, as a fetus and then as a little one.

Anyway, her moves are incredibly fun to watch.   She loses herself in the midst of all those people and does a full-body shake, not caring that they are all looking at her and chuckling.  I am one of the gigglers, shaking my head at how adorable and free she can be.  I hope she never loses her wildness, retaining a sense of who she is no matter who is around.

So, today, this post is just for her, toasting the joy she brings to my life.  When I render my list of complaints about this life, she makes nary a one.  Happy 13 months, baby girl.

*Update: Here’s the pic Dudley snapped with his phone of Olive “teaching” the class!  Next time we will get video of it, for sure…

"Arms up, people! Why are you all standing there giggling? Extend!"

 

Occupy SF: A call for more families! October 18, 2011

Filed under: Mothers,One year olds,Parenting,Protest,San Francisco — rheabette @ 4:57 pm
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Olive & I had an eventful morning of Tartine-eating, park-going (her, with her godfather) and priest-meeting (me), which wore her out enough to take a colossal morning nap.  Olive naps on my chest, so while pinned down to the chair I pondered our wide-open afternoon.  Still high off of our positive experience with the Occupy SF Solidarity March on Saturday, I checked out the Occupy SF website to see if there was anything going on that we could be a part of today.  Lo and behold, there was a rally at 1:30pm at City Hall, to support the occupiers’ right to assemble in Justin Herman Plaza.  So, I posted that we were going on the Families Occupy SF Facebook page and once Olive arose we gulped down our lunch and took to the streets.

And it was… weird.  I had been reading some flack about the SF protestors on Facebook today — people saying that they are either all just white, skinny jean wearing, American Apparel shopping entitled jerks or vagrants.  I thought “Not so!  There were tons of families and people from all walks of life and styles of dress there on Saturday!”  Also, the movement is what we make of it.  Everyone I talk to is inspired by the occupiers and believes in the kinds of economic justice they are calling for, but today, the rally was… mostly crazy folks and vagrants, with a few humor-less idealistic college kids thrown in.  There was one dude, dressed in a clown wig, who terrified Olive and kept yelling “Offense 99, Defense 99!” while waving pom-pons and jumping.  Another guy kept trying to get his pit bull to “say hello to the babies!”  No thanks, buddy.  Admittedly, we got there a bit late (did I mention Olive’s giant nap?), but there were very few people there.  They yelled, “We are the 99%!” but it was more like the 14%.  And of course I managed to alienate the 2% of the 14% by saying something disparaging about Oakland.  Good job, Rhea — way to know your crowd with your snobby SF humor.

There was, however, one AMAZING mom there.  Homegirl had gotten herself up, made incredibly witty signs, strapped her adorable one-year-old son into a Red Flyer wagon, and braved piss-smelling BART elevators to get them down there.  I can’t say enough about how awesome this lady was.  She singlehandedly made my day.  She recognized one of the police officers and took a picture with him, asking him to “look like you are sternly reprimanding my protesting baby”.  He played along but changed it up, choosing to put his hands together in supplication, saying “Please be good, baby protestor.”  Our babies played together, climbing up and down the steps of City Hall.  There wasn’t much else to do — the protestors were mostly standing around, holding their banner, or passing out brownies that they “weren’t sure” the ingredients of.

The mama who made my day, and her wonderfully curious baby, in front of the not-so-massive protest.

The sign says "Aren't we supposed to SHARE?"

Her other awesome sign: "I was practically born yesterday but I still know 99 to 1 isn't FAIR!"

The rally as we were leaving it. You can see clown wig guy in front there.

Here’s the thing: the Occupy movement is REALLY taking off in California, as this graph from the New York Times shows:

But the movement is in its infancy, and it will be shaped by the folks who come out to these kinds of events.  So, will I be back to support this burgeoning movement against corporate greed?  You bet I will, but I’m not going without y’all.  Next time, I will organize a bunch more families to come along with me — I can’t count on meeting a mom as kick-ass as the one who showed up today every time unless I do the footwork.  So, who wants in, and is willing to check out an Occupy SF event with me sometime soon?  Join the Facebook page or just comment here and let me know!

 

Classy Old New Yorker Spotlight: Bill Cunningham October 17, 2011

Filed under: Art,Artists — rheabette @ 3:34 pm
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On Friday night, my dear friend Stacey “babysat” me and Olive while Joel was the DJ at his friend’s SF wedding.  If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know I have a penchant for “bad” entertainment: movies, books & TV shows that are just that side of campy and brilliant.  When your life’s work is as serious and intense as mine, you need lots of inanity to find balance.

Well, Stacey hangs out with me once a week, and invariably I want to watch something awful like Showgirls or Step Up 3.  This time, she put her foot down.  “We have to watch something ACTUALLY good, not good-because-it’s-cringe-worthy.”  “Okay, I guess a break from the low-brow is healthy.  Maybe next week we’ll re-watch Hackers.”  “No.  I need like, a month.”  “A MONTH?!  Was watching Burlesque while horrified/amused/embarrassed that my mother recommended it to us that bad?”  “Yes.  Let’s feed our brains.”

So, we checked out Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary about the elusive 81-year-old street fashion photographer for the New York Times.  I have been spending a lot of time with actual monks and nuns lately, but Bill constitutes his own form of aesthetic artist who is literally married to his work.

Bill himself, the man on the scene.

The doc is fascinating for many reasons, but the true shock was seeing Bill’s apartment/studio in Carnegie Hall, which was about the size of a public restroom and FILLED with wall-to-wall filing cabinets of his photos.  There was a tiny space carved out for a cot in the midst of it.  He hung his clothes (which for all his love of wild outfits is an incredibly tame self-imposed “habit”) on the cabinet drawers.  He parks his bike in a utility closet on the first floor.  You can say in words “he is utterly devoted to his work” but it is another thing to see it in how he creates such little space for his own personal effects in his living environment.

As I’ve said before, I really love the style of people of a certain age (that is, those who have many candles on their birthday cake).  The blog Advanced Style, is a fabulous celebration of older New Yorkers like Iris Apfel and Ilona Royce Smithkin.  There is something particularly admirable about older folks who live in New York — that city will chew you up and spit you out and somehow they’ve managed to not only survive it, but to grab it and shape it and put their unique stamp on it.

Iris, looking ravishing as usual.

I reflected to a new friend the other day that I would love to live in New York, but I don’t feel that I have enough ambition so I chose San Francisco instead.  She sort of laughed at me, pointing out that I have enough ambition to have 2 jobs, a marriage, a baby, a blog, a spiritual practice, an arts practice, and a social life.  I was a bit chagrined, but still — the kind of pluck you have to have to make it in New York is all of that and then some.  I am currently trying to devise a trip there in December, to show Olive the pulsing teaming lifeform that is that city.  Perhaps we will stop by Occupy Wall Street there and see how the original compares to our version here in SF!

Anyway, Bill Cunningham is as dedicated to his work as an artist as my friends in spiritual orders are to their vows, and he got me thinking if there is anything in my life I feel that ferociously about, that I could lose myself in so completely.  I don’t feel that the work I do as a therapist is the kind of work that you SHOULD lose yourself in in such a way.  You have to retain a sense of self so that you have something to offer to the client and to be a whole person.  I think I could really find that singularity of purpose with writing, but lately it has been hard to even meet my goal of writing every day, never mind making it the binding principle of my life.

That begs the question — should I be balancing all my passions, or letting one consume me and giving my all to it?  As a mother, it is a moot point.  I am undeniably a better mom to Olive when I have my priorities in check and am trying to find the balance of my calling/passion and the mundane everyday tasks of living.  And I will never totally give in to a “thing”, as relationships are my number one commitment.  I guess I just love knowing that people like Bill are out there.  His monastic form of art-making brings beauty to the world.

How do you like to create art — do you lose yourself completely and give up all for it, or do you find it here and there, cobbling together a patchwork life of art and dishes?

 

Occupy This: Baby’s First Protest October 15, 2011

Filed under: Parenting,San Francisco — rheabette @ 6:21 pm
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I wrote a post 2 1/2 weeks ago about Occupy Wall Street, and in it I said that I was standing in solidarity with the protesters, though I could not go to NYC to protest with them.  Little did I know, the movement would blow up to include 900 cities, and the protests came to me.  Saturday is the day in our household that we do laundry, see friends, and try to catch our bearings from the busy week.  However, today we switched it up and headed downtown for the Solidarity March, joining a contingent of neighborhood families who were hoping to show that the 99% is not all naked people and teens.  Even though it’s corny to go all “save the children”, I had to make my sign to support the families I work with on a day-to-day basis.  On the other side was a quote from Fr. Richard Rohr: “Forgiveness is the great thawing of all logic, reason, and worthiness, and the primary way we move from the economy of merit to the economy of grace.”

We were encouraged by the huge numbers of people, and the diversity of the crowd.  There were certainly plenty of families, which is actually saying a lot in this town, which is known for its “family flight”.  Joel was feeling particularly weary about politics, and it was a boost to go downtown and see so many other people willing to give up their Saturday afternoon to chant “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” and “Whose streets?  Our Streets!”  In fact, this movement has gotten a lot of flack for being all over the place and not clear about their demands, but it was pretty much on-message today.  Everyone there was pissed about what has happened with the economy and the lack of accountability for the major corporations who appear to have bought our country.  I have been waiting so long for people to get mad enough to start DOING something, and at last that day has come.  I have no idea what will come of it, but I hope it’s what this lady is foretelling:

The protest started in the Financial District, waved its way through SOMA and finally came right through Tourist Country.  The tourists were mostly not amused — they came to this city for the trolley car and the Irish Coffees at Fisherman’s Wharf, not for the natives to get all restless on them!  We yelled “Out of the stores and into the streets!” to dissuade them from buying yet another pair of skinny jeans in order to assuage their anxiety, futile as that may have been.  But the MUNI drivers got it — the dude in the cable car that had been brought to a total standstill started ringing the bell in time with the “This is what democracy looks like!” chant.  In the midst of all the yelling and drums and honking, Olive took her nap.  A group of old folks cheered at us, “Thank you, young people!  You have the spark!”  Another chimed in “And now you have to continue on, because my feet are killing me!”

People had signs about being sick and not being able to afford health care, about losing homes, jobs, livelihoods.  Of course there was the requisite naked guy, but there were also the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who always make me feel watched over, no matter how bizarre their outfits might be that day.  It was funny that 10 years ago, the slogan we all had on handmade buttons was “Make art, not war”.  The new generation’s said “Make out, not war.”  I felt my years, but sometimes it’s fun to be an Old Head.  Here are some of my favorite scenes from the day:

Olive wakes up, wonders what all the ruckus is about...

Humans not politics

Amen to that!

Olive getting a bird's-eye view on the masses with her papa

One of the many families in attendance

Shout out to cake!

So, all in all, Olive’s first protest was a huge success.  I can’t even tell you how much time I spend thinking about our personal finances, how to get out of the hole of school loan debt, and create a better life for Olive.  Today, instead of spending the day stressing about it or even looking at charts of how the country got into this mess, I actually did something.  Much to my chagrin, I have found that I do believe in the resurrection.  Therefore, I have to participate in making this world reflect that, for the will of God’s love to be done on earth.  Today, that meant taking a noisy walk with a bunch of people daring to hope that things can change.  Tomorrow, who knows?

 

Happy Bullshit: In which I read the newest celebrity memoirs, so you don’t have to. October 11, 2011

Filed under: Books,Mothers,Parenting — rheabette @ 10:43 am
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There seems to be a trend in celebrity memoirs titling, in which a publishing maven discovered, “If we take something bad, like a ‘mess’, or ‘catastrophe’, but we put the word HAPPY in front of it, then everyone will think — ‘she’s just like us, she’s had her knocks’ but also ‘now she’s HAPPY so it’s all okay!”  Hence, Punky Brewster‘s parenting memoir, Happy Chaos, and Jane Lynch‘s memoir, Happy Accidents.  Of course I’ve read both of them recently.  Since I spend a lot of time reading heavy theology books or depressing novels, I like to lighten the mood sometimes with these pithy celebrity memoirs.  Sometimes it’s a score, like Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and sometimes it’s a total fail, like Betty White’s If You Ask Me.

"Ew, Rhea St. Julien why you such a hater?" I hate because I love, Punky.

Soleil Moon Frye (AKA Punky)’s Happy Chaos was really just one step up from spending an hour reading a Twitter feed.  The most interesting parts were literally the pictures of her with 80′s and early 90′s stars, like Brian Austin Greene and Mr. T.  The worst bits were her “parenting tips”, which included such gems as, “Bring wipes everywhere you go!” and “Have Demi Moore as your birthing coach!”  Really, she seems like a fine person, very sweet and obviously a loving mother, but writing is not her forte.  Obviously, her book was written for people like me who grew up in the 80′s watching too much TV and are now mothers.  But that doesn’t mean we enjoy vapid writing.  No, we do not.  In fact, I really more skimmed this book than read it cover-to-cover — I’m a busy lady, and this book was quickly relegated to bathroom reading status.

Jane Lynch, please don't hurt me! I promise I didn't pan your book. I just made fun of the title a wee bit.

Who doesn’t love Jane Lynch?  She’s hilarious, and beloved for being an unlikely celebrity.  I’ve followed her work since her Christopher Guest movie days, and of course I love Glee as much as the next ex-outcast.  And really, her book is not that bad.  I may even go so far as to recommend it, especially for her reflections on finding sobriety.  She is brutally honest in describing how bitter and self-centered she once was, and how she still works hard on those parts of herself that are needy pits of need.  But her book follows the trajectory of all celebrity memoirs — hitting all the salient career points and telling you some juicy tidbits about your favorite movies/tv shows/stars, but never enough that you feel you’ve learned anything you would actually repeat in a conversation.  Except for Tim Gunn’s revelation in Gunn’s Golden Rules that he is voluntarily celibate — that one does come up now and again, even if it does require me sheepishly admitting that I read a reality star’s memoir.  I guess I have no literary shame anymore!

Since this post is already a celebrity name-dropping fiasco, I might as well give you an update on the Zooey D situation.  I went ahead and got bangs, and I shook my fist at Ms. Deschanel the whole time, since they look awesome and I’m pissed that I didn’t do this long ago.  I went to church the next day, and did get some Zooey D comments, but the reaction from the teenagers I work with was… well, it was hilarious and humbling.  At first, they said they literally didn’t recognize me, which I thought was a little weird, because it’s just hair covering my forehead – the rest of me is the same.  Then, they did not tell me it looked good, or that I looked like a certain someone, they said, “You look like an Asian lady!”  I was baffled as to how to respond, but gratefully one of them said “That’s racist” so I didn’t have to.  Then they got into a debate about whether or not I now look Asian, and if it is indeed racist to say so.  Welp, just goes to show, if you’re feeling all “Poor me, everyone thinks I’m a movie star!”, leave it to teenagers to tell you you look like a cashier at Duc Loi.

Suck it, Zooey D! I have fringe for my ponytail now and you can't stop me!!

 

The will of your love October 9, 2011

Filed under: Christianity,Prayer,working mom — rheabette @ 8:20 pm
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Mary Magdalene, in a dramatic 19th-century pop...

Dear Lord, please save me from becoming a totally self-absorbed psycho. Thanks, bye.

On Friday night, Joel and I had our first date in about a month.  Any normal couple who has a small child and only gets out for dates sans kid every once in awhile would take this time to catch an R-rated movie, go to a fancy un-kid-friendly restaurant, or check out an art exhibit.  Instead, we opted to drive 45 minutes away to sit in a pitch-dark room and chant and cry.  That’s right, we rented a City Car Share car, on a Friday night, and drove out to Burlingame to the Mercy Center to get our contemplative prayer on.  Romantic and edgy?  Not so much.  Amazing and interesting?  Definitely.

We used to go to the Taize service quite often, but this was the first time in a few years that I had ventured out there to sing and meditate.  The fact that this is not a normal date night activity was not lost on us.  We just both felt like total messes and figured that the best use of our time together would be to have an experience with God.  In the moments of silence, my prayers went pretty much like this, “I don’t know what I’m doing.  I have no idea what I’m doing.  What the hell am I doing, God?  What the heck am I going to do?”  Pretty redundant, but it did the trick.  Luckily for me, repetition is the way it goes at a Taize service, and they provide you with much more fruitful mantras to repeat than what I was coming up with on my own.

If you’ve never been to a Taize service, it’s usually candlelit (in this instance there is almost no lighting at all), and the songs/chants are led by a group of musicians, most often with a lovely old nun creaking out the main verse for you to follow along.  Sometimes in Latin, sometimes in English, sometimes a mix of both.  At a certain point at this particular service, they put the cross down on the ground and people file up to lay their foreheads on it and pray.  It’s all very mystical and beautiful and of course it gave me the most incredible anger.  I knew going to this service was really the only thing I could do with myself that night, but I also knew I was going to have to sit with my feelings, which were incredibly intense and overwhelming.  At first I was doing fine, bumping along through the preliminary emotions of fear and panic, praying the What-the-hell-is-going-on-dear-God-save-me prayer.  But when I went up to put my forehead to the cross, it was like being burned with hot coals.  Inwardly, I erupted at God, furious and self-righteous that all I want to do with my life is serve others and still have a family, and here I am, failing miserably at being able to do both sustainably. “Why have I been set up to fail at this, God?!”  I got up from the cross and stormed past the revelers, to crouch in my pew and steam.

But repetition is a funny thing.  The mantras go on for long enough that they start to get under your skin, to change your heart in spite of yourself.  The one that touched me the most this time around went like this, “The will of your love, the will of your love, be done on earth, as it is in Heaven.”  Following the will of LOVE, well, I could get down with that.  Earlier that day I had finished Wallace Stegner‘s Crossing to Safety, which was a lovely novel that was difficult for me to get through because of all it brought up for me.  There is an afterword, and then a bio of the man who wrote the afterword.  It named off all of the things he did in his life, and then it said something like, “out of all of this, the thing he considered the greatest accomplishment in his life was his friendship with Wallace Stegner.”  I teared up when I read this, thinking specifically of the friend that recommended this book to me, and how grateful I am for her.  If I accomplish nothing in my life, if I quit my career and while away my time here in some low-level service sector job, if I never write a book or produce anything “lasting” — but if I can keep my closest friendships, I will consider my life a success.  I have often thought that what I am on this earth to do is love, and specifically, to love my husband — that that is the reason I was born, to learn to love through this one person, as well as I can.  Since having Olive, that has expanded my sense of purpose, and if I totally fail at all externals and live a penniless existence in clothes from K-Mart but our bonds with each other survive… I will consider this a well-lived life.

Thinking about the will of God’s love being real in my life reassured me.  I realized I have really put a lot of my identity in what I do, rather than who I am becoming, and that is leading me to incredible anxiety when that is crashing down around me.  So, Joel and I had a good conversation on the way back about all that happened internally for us during the service, and then we went home and drank some red while watching a show about outlaw bikers.  Yeah, we’re not so precious afterall.

If this post seems a lot like the last one, that’s because my week has been a repetitive cycle — totally freak out, get all cursey and angry and crotchety, then find some sort of contemplative mantra to get me out of myself and save me from insanity.  That’s pretty much the only way I know how to get through it.   My only hope is to shorten the amount of time between psycho-freak-out-free-fall and mantra-ing my way through it.  I’m sure life will give me plenty of opportunities to practice, practice, practice.

 

The Jesus Prayer: The only thing keeping me from cursing everyone out October 6, 2011

Filed under: Christianity,Inspiration,Parenting,Personal,Prayer,working mom — rheabette @ 11:56 am
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The past day or so, I have been leaning HEAVY on the Jesus Prayer.  It has a nice rhythm to it, and since my mantra, if I’m not careful, is “fucky fuck fuckity fuck fuck FUCKing shit”, the Jesus Prayer is a nice second option.  You know, when I don’t want to have to start questioning whether or not I have Tourette’s.   So, what’s been making me so angsty?  Well, wouldn’t you like to know.  I’m not about to break Blog Commandment #1: Thou Shalt Not Blog About Work.  Let’s just say: It’s about work.  Dang it!  I broke the first commandment.  Back to the Jesus Prayer.

Really, I’m not hiding any specifics from you.  Nothing has *happened* at work to make me all kinds of pissed, I haven’t been wronged or anything like that.  Things are just changing AGAIN, and I need to re-work my tenuously held work-family-finance-health balance.  Last night, after a 12-hour work day, Joel and I sat and looked at our options.  3 out of 4 seemed possibly do-able to me, and Joel cynically added a 5th: “Jesus could come back in all his glory and save us from having to deal with this”.  Unlikely.  Still, we were able to sleep without horrible debilitating nightmares, knowing we had a couple of choices.

In the cold hard light of day, all of those options seem insane to me, totally implausible.  My only recourse is The Jesus Prayer, which, if you want to give it a shot, goes like this: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.  Or, as it goes in my head while I’m pounding the pavement of San Francisco, Lord-Jesus-CHRIST, Son-of-GOD, have-MERCY-on-me-a-sinner.  Over and over, in a staccato rhythm that is keeping me from going insane.  The Jesus Prayer is problematic — it’s Patriarchal, it’s sin-based, it’s simplistic.  And I NEED it.  I have found myself returning to it over the past decade, no matter where I am in my journey of faith — it has a hold on me that I know is mystical and deeper than my comprehension.  I don’t know if anyone else has ever used it in order to not become a pile of cursing madness, but I’m pretty sure Jesus is okay with it.

Another thing that has been very helpful this week has been reading about other people who are in the same situation I am: folks who have done everything “right”: went to school, found work, followed our dreams in some way/shape/form, and are now totally unable to pay for our lives, specifically, the debt incurred doing the former.  We invested in ourselves, and it turned out that the jobs we could get after such an investment don’t even pay for the education we received, never mind allow us to create a sustainable life for our families.  There have been a lot of articles and websites about this recently, but here are two of my favorites:

Ezra Klein’s Washington Post article on the 99 percent

Favorite quote: “These are not rants against the system. They’re not anarchist manifestos. They’re not calls for a revolution. They’re small stories of people who played by the rules, did what they were told, and now have nothing to show for it. Or, worse, they have tens of thousands in debt to show for it.”

JD Samson’s article on trying to be an artist in this economy

Favorite quote, from when JD was turned down for several apartments by a landlord: “Yeah, I don’t blame him.  He doesn’t give a shit about how kids email me all the time thanking me for keeping them from committing suicide. It’s not part of his capitalist business practice. “

So, I’m finding hope where I can, clinging to the awesome things like waking up to my baby smiling at me and kissing me, and how she said “Amen” at the end of Morning Prayer today.  I’m feeling an awful lot like this butterfly, struggling to fly despite the rock she’s attached to.  Or maybe, I’m the rock, and The Jesus Prayer is the butterfly, trying to get me to move, change, transform — to go from someone who drops the F-bomb over things like getting caught in a rainstorm to someone who finds beauty in the baptism of the rain.

 

 
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