The Real You

Vpose There’s lots of talk about The Real You in meditation and Buddhism. Your true self. Try to imagine “you” without your history, your preferences, your intellect, your opinions, your habits, your neuroses, your body and all that’s associated with it. What have you got?

For me, whatever it is isn’t, like, a person. The closest definition I’ve found is Consciousness. If everything else is stripped away, what I’m left with is consciousness, perception, Emerson’s “transparent eyeball.” But is that really a me? It seems more like an us, which is probably the point. I’m okay with that as an abstract concept, and even as something to strive for (without striving, of course). But I find it hard to imagine being loved – as a friend, partner, comrade, as that nondescript consciousness. The only time it makes sense to me at all is with my dog, V.

Why do I love my dog? I can’t explain it. I am heartbreakingly overwhelmed with love for her, love that far exceeds her objective talents or qualities. I love her very existence, her essence, outside of anything she does for me (not much) or feels for me (ditto).

Or maybe it’s just her furriness. Her internal and external furriness, and the smell of her fur, and her tolerance of my curling up around her fur and smelling her fur.

Where does that leave The Real Me? Perhaps that mysterious entity is the thing that loves V, entirely and completely and unconditionally? I’d be good with that; better if I could be that unconditionally loving force to everyone. I’d be good even starting with anyone. If I can someday grant unconditional love and acceptance to any single human in my life, I’ll assume I’m on the right path. Universal acceptance is still countless hours of meditation or an intense psychedelic trip away.

Bribery Ain’t The Half of It

USC Look, I’m as grossed out as anyone over the bribery & deception scandals that have been unveiled in the past week, and I’m happy to see these people of privilege (POP) get indicted. But this is just one example of the much larger issue of inequity in education in the US.

There’s nothing novel in that statement, and maybe that’s the problem. We treat inequity like it’s an innate, intractable fact of life and are rarely horrified by it. Continue reading “Bribery Ain’t The Half of It” →

The Truth and Jussie Smollett

noose Jussie Smollett is telling the truth. Or telling a truth. Or telling us something truer than the truth.

“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried.

O’Brien wrote about war, the unfathomable experience of war. He believed that the facts, the truth, were insufficient to depict his experience, to get his message across, to transmit the horrors of being a soldier in Vietnam.

If that is unfathomable, how can we who are not possibly fathom the lifelong, manifold experience of being a Black, gay man in the United States? Continue reading “The Truth and Jussie Smollett” →

The Only Way to Be a Dick

While there are hundreds of ways to make a positive difference in the world, there is one way to be a dick about it: declaring your way is the only way. I’m not talking about reasoned critique or debate. I’m talking, of course, about PETA. Continue reading “The Only Way to Be a Dick” →

Elizabeth Warren’s Identity Crisis

pocahontas I started writing this a year ago, and I had hoped I wouldn’t need to post it, but here we are with a seemingly decent public figure digging her own political grave in a desperate, nail-ripping grasp of identity.

I’ve never met the woman, but here’s my outsider analysis. (Factcheck-free!)

Elizabeth Warren was brought up on a story both romantic and empowering. Told that one of her ancestors was ostracized because of her Native American heritage, and was loved and married despite that (wholly unacceptable!) racism, Warren wove the story into her own identity from the time she was a little girl. And who wouldn’t? Hell, I cling to my genetic half-Judaism like it’s the last lifeboat on the sinking ship of white supremacy. What thoughtful, educated, observant white person would want to be White? I mean, we want all our stuff and political and economic supremacy of course, but we also want to claim some history of oppression, some feeling of done-wrongedness that will act as a palliative to our privilege. Maybe we can balance out a little of our imperialist, murderous, slaveowning genes with a sprinkling of the “good guys.” Maybe we can find some African genes in our 23 and Me results (nope, just more Mongolian: Khan slut). But for many the ultimate prize is Native affiliation, especially in the US.

I went through a big Indian phase – read tons of Native books (mostly novels), bought Native jewelry and knicknacks, spent a lot of time traveling Navajo/Dine country in the Southwest. Because Indians are fucking cool, man. We simultaneously embrace these conflicting concepts of Native people in the US: the drunken, uneducated, poverty-stricken people living on pitiable reservations; and the wise, equanimous souls who understand silence and the universe and our relationship with the natural world. They have potions and spirit animals and songs and dances and secrets and wisdom. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that?

So a white woman clings to that family story, as do her relatives, reinforcing it across generations. But when it comes down to it, it’s just a story. One that she repeats and uses officially and unofficially for decades.

To what end?

I can believe that she wasn’t looking for affirmative action or special treatment because of it, I really can. But she wanted something. Was it just a little less guilt? A little less complicity? A little more grooviness, man? Whatever it was was her own business, her psychological drama to bear, until Trump got hold of it. Then it became our problem.

Because Warren has taken a leadership role in Congress. She has stood up for the little guy, the disenfranchised, the poor, and stood up to the archetypal “white man.” Despite the inability to sound human and genuine when she makes a speech (an affliction that seems to infect nearly every living politician, usually forever; somebody get these people an acting coach!), she had potential. And I’m not writing her political death warrant, but she has wasted much of that work because of some bullshit concept of her racial identity.

As soon as her Native claims were brought into the light of day, she should have had the sense to come out and say, “look, this is a story my family was brought up on, and I’ve had a hard time letting go of it, because the Native peoples in this country are so special, I have so much respect for them, and I so wanted to be identified with them. But I have no tribal affiliation and no way to prove this claim, so I am letting it go, out of respect to the people who have suffered the injustices of being Native in the US. I have lived my life as a white woman, with all the privilege (and the prejudice) that goes with that. I will fight for native rights and sovereignty, and against the insults liberally tossed around by the President, as every red-blooded American should, because “Indians” are the true Americans, and all the rest of us are immigrants.

(or something like that)

Then she could just ignore all that Pocahontas shit, with the Indian nations possibly supporting her. Instead, she waited way too long and then tried to reify her fable by taking a DNA test, pissing off the recognized tribes and making herself a joke.

Part of me doesn’t blame her, because I know how hard it is to let go of labels you wear like military honors, or college sweatshirts, but Identity has so much destructive power, from sports fans that can’t let go of a racist mascot to men that can’t let go of abusive machismo. Yes, markers can be empowering or helpful or politically necessary, but if we can’t let go of them when they cause harm to ourselves and others, what good are they? To me, the greatest identity crisis is not trying to figure out who you are, but blindly accepting some inculcated idea of who you are without questioning it. Unfortunately, most of us never get past that phase.

Feminism & Racism: Up Close & Personal

femrac

Some of my feminist behaviors are actually acts of white supremacy.

Damn it.

I’ve been on a Racism Awareness journey over the past year. Well, for longer than that, but aggressively over the past year – reading lots, talking with folks on their own journeys, facilitating conversations on race as much as they’ll let me, going to conferences on equity, volunteering as Secretary on the Diversity Equity and Inclusion Committee at work … stuff like that.

Simultaneously, I have been on a feminist journey: a #me-tooing of my own. This hasn’t required any books, just a clear-headed, clear-eyed recognition of life as it is and has been for me for decades.

My habitual behavior in the realm of the latter is to recognize blatant sexual assault and blatantly sexist language (and in my case to apply feminist analysis to works of literature and art), but to “deal with” the rest as the necessary burden of being female in the world. To play the game, laugh at the jokes, tolerate the piggery. Because we can. Because we are strong enough to do so. Because we can take jokes. (Unlike men. Don’t panic, guys. She’s a professional comedian.) Because we know how to “play with the big boys.” I realized last year that this is not necessarily healthy, and I’m certainly not the only woman doing it. And while I don’t regret behaving in that way, it is a coping mechanism performed out of defensive necessity. I should not have to be tolerant in the face of offense or attack or abuse. I should be able to call it out and have it redressed. That has been a difficult thing to accept, because I take so much pride in my toughness, my ability to withstand sexist bullshit, but in reality it is much braver to upend the game than to play along. I also have to recognize that I have looked down on women who “couldn’t take it,” who chose to make themselves vulnerable by calling out the crap, and I am not proud of that.

It took a bit more formal education and a bit more time to recognize that there was another destructive aspect to the persona I’ve cultivated in response to sexism. I have made it a point to be heard, to express opinions, to speak out at work, to argue and disagree and confront professors because it is my responsibility to fly in the face of stereotypes of female inadequacy and submission and deference. What I never thought to recognize is that while this might be a stand against patriarchy, it’s right in step with the white supremacist culture in which I was born and raised and live.

I have never thought of my assertiveness as consensual with white supremacy, but it is. It’s hard to say what threatens white men more – women or Black people – the threats are different and context is everything – but as a white woman I have certain privileges that Black men and Black women do not have, and I have taken advantage of that privilege more times than I can count. A big one with me is the right to be angry. While I might be described as shrill or hysterical if I openly express anger, I am not perceived as a threat and I’m not usually written off. That is not typically true for Black people in America, because it feeds into the manufactured stereotypes which I certainly don’t need to explain here.

So this idea of standing up to authority, of being what I am in spite of the powers that be: much of that has been an illusion. And coming to terms with that has been … interesting. It doesn’t mean I stop, but it means I bring a little more mindfulness to that behavior. Powerful white men have always benefited from pitting various “others” against each other, but it’s particularly upsetting when we do it without their (explicit) help.

When you start to recognize that we live in a society anchored in the bedrock of white superiority, your perspective on everything changes. The new vista isn’t always pretty, especially when you’re looking in the mirror. If you’re trying to head off another excuse for self-loathing, it helps to recognize that we are all soaking in it, and it takes a lot of work to scrub this shit off.

Prescription: The End of the World

elephants climate There’s a theory that one of the reasons humans are so depressed and anxious is because life is too easy. We are animals, and animal subconscious is primarily consumed with 3 duties:

keep from getting killed
keep from starving to death
keep your species alive

Evolution and our awesome brains, whatever other neat directions they may have pushed our species, haven’t moved us beyond these primary concerns. Nowadays most of us (let’s make this “us” middle class white people; whites are also the biggest US consumers of anti-depressants) don’t have to worry about 1 & 2 on a daily basis. (3 will have to be its own blog post.) The theory is that we are hard wired to be on the alert for threats and scarcity, so when they doesn’t exist, our brains help us create them with anxiety and depression. Similarly, allergies are your body reacting to a threat that doesn’t exist in a way that hurts you (making a poison out of a peanut), and also rarely happen in countries where bodily threats like malaria and intestinal worms are real and the immune system is kept occupied.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the harmful tendencies of the brain and how to negotiate with them. I formulated this particular negotiation because I’ve been tasked with creating some Climate Change content for a State Fair exhibit. Here’s a question:

What if we really, truly internalized the threat of climate change?

What if we woke up every day and calculated how every action we took increased or decreased our risk of decimating humanity? What if we did that every moment? What if our every action was a conscious meditation on fossil fuel reduction or carbon capture or community education? What if we lived our lives on a scalding planet the way Robert Redford does on a sinking ship in All is Lost? Have you seen it? I’m not the only person who had this experience: after watching the film, for a too short period of time, every physical thing I did felt deliberate and important; every dish washed, every door opened, every piece of clothing placed in the laundry felt glutted with meaning.

What if we could live every day like that? Would it give our restless brains something to do? Could we stop being anxious and depressed about nothing in particular and focus that energy on the survival of the species? Do you think this Anti-Depressant Marketing idea might get people to give a shit? CLIMATE COMPULSION FOR MENTAL HEALTH!

I have my doubts about getting this past the MN State Fair committee.

Imperfect Work

a minus I spent several months of last year trying to brainwash myself out of self-loathing. It was helpful, in that I learned quite a bit, and the intellectual path is the quickest way to my heart, but I don’t know that it accomplished its goal in any significant way.

The better way, probably, is to keep working on doing the opposite of what my loathing overseer demands, on a pathetically constant basis. I will (try) not to yell at myself for breaking a plate or overcooking rice, or assume everyone else’s ideas are better than mine (until I decide they’re all inferior – or vice versa), or make every moment quantifiably “useful,” or force myself to a certain level of perfection before I share anything with anyone.

That’s where you come in!

I haven’t written much lately, and haven’t blogged nearly as much as I was intending to overall. It’s hard to churn out even two posts a month when every piece has to be without errors, coherent, and cohesive. I’m not saying what I have permitted was good, it just isn’t full of bad-person-mistakes. It’s taken me a while to accept that perfectionism is a problem. To be honest, I still don’t. But I do recognize its destructiveness, and the hypercritical source of it. For some of us, if we don’t perform to a certain standard, we are unworthy of being accepted and loved. That is totally rational, as far as I’m concerned, but I know that I am fucked up and I Am Working On It.

So I am going to attempt to post once a week for the next several months. Putting out that much with work & projects & language study & volunteering & meditation & exercise & dog & guy necessarily dictates a minimal amount of edit time, but in order to head off any sleepless nights and screen blindness, I’m setting some rules around it (which I will Not Hate Myself for Breaking).

This is post number one. Discúlpame.

Sinema Sworn in on a Law Book!

sinema Why is this worthy of comment? Why isn’t this the standard? Did the book burn Mike Pence’s fingers as he briefly touched a symbol of our country’s founding fucking secularism? What does it mean that she is more unique in Congress for being “religiously unaffiliated” than she is for being bisexual?

Radical Facts

Dictionary.com gives me hope.

I’ve received their word of the day for the last decade, because I am a nerd. Over the past few years, they have occasionally sent little articles as well. Mostly innocuous and ignored – quotes from famous writers or where holiday-related terms originated – but I have noticed some more topical stuff popping up as well. I never opened any of it, but after they declared misinformation the word of the year last week, I finally got curious. Were they tipping their hand? Was one of the only popular sources of factual information not discredited by our current government actually taking a subtle stand against the world as it is?

Yeah. I really think so.

Clue #1: Words of the Year since Trump’s election

2018: misinformation
2017: complicit, in an analysis of which they called out Ivanka Trump’s rebuttal that, “If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit,” as patently wrong. “Whatever your politics, this meaning is not up for debate… being complicit is decidedly negative, as it means that a person is involved with someone or something that’s wrong.”
2016: xenophobia, which they warn is “not to be celebrated,” citing not only fear-mongering Trump quotes and the Brexit phenomenon, but human rights abuse statistics from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Amnesty International. Dictionary.com also enlisted Robert Reich and his giant drawing pad of awesomeness to explain the word. Robert fuckin Reich.

Clue #2: historical & current events

You didn’t know Dictionary.com had a historical & current events section, did you? I have revealed the great secret! The first three pieces you’ll see if you find your way to this section are:

the Great Depression
Black Panthers
Trail of Tears

Bold choices, especially since the description of the Black Panthers is overwhelmingly positive, and highlights this quote from Claude Wilson of the Daily Tar Heel:

The Black Panthers’ open carry tactics led the then-Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, to enact the Mulford Act, which outlawed the public carrying of loaded firearms. Isn’t it interesting how conservatives suddenly became pro-gun control when it was black people who were open-carrying?

Of the 11 articles in this section, 6 of them refer to atrocities against people of color or the subjugation and abuse of women, including the Salem witch trials, prima nocta, lynching, and Roe v Wade.

Clue #3: Still not convinced that Dictionary.com is part of the resistance? Check out a couple of selections from their in-depth examination of complicity last year [bold type mine]:

President Trump’s statement following the events in Charlottesville in August, in which he said “both sides” were to blame, showed his complicity with ideologies that promote hate, especially directed toward marginalized groups.

Additionally, the new EPA chief Scott Pruitt has been complicit in his refusal to acknowledge that humans play a primary role in climate change. And, we can’t forget that information on climate change was removed from the government’s website this year, as well.

We chose our Word of the Year, in part, because of noteworthy stories of those who have refused to be complicit. In the face of oppression and wrongdoing, this refusal to be complicit has been a grounding force of 2017:

We saw an estimated five million people participate in the the [sic: Dictionary.com typo!!!] worldwide Women’s March on January 21
We saw NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 protest against systemic injustices gain even more traction in response to President Trump calling for players who kneel during the National Anthem to be fired or suspended
We saw women, as well as people of all genders, come forward with personal stories of sexual harassment and assault with the hashtag #metoo
We saw high-profile resignations from the Trump Administration, perhaps most memorably from the Arts Council, who submitted their letter of resignation in the form of an acrostic spelling of the word RESIST

In just these few articles, Dictionary.com recognizes our President’s alignment with hate groups, anthropogenic climate change, a non-binary range of genders, systemic racism, and praises the resistance to all of it. How excited does this make me!?

Too excited? Should I really be this excited about what are, when it comes down to it, simply facts? Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe my standards have dropped too low. But in a week where CNN repeatedly gave toadies for the oil industry a platform to call climate change a greed-driven hoax without questioning their motives, maybe Dictionary.com deserves the time I’ve devoted to this blog post. It makes me happy that the love of words leads to a love of truth, whether than truth is wrongly defined as political or not.

Tu Cancer es Mi Cancer

You have a friend with cancer, let’s say breast cancer because it seems both more common and less scary than others (just lop it off, right?). It was caught early and it seems like she’s going to be fine, if breastless. She’s not, like, your best friend, so this isn’t a direct hit on your life. But she’s close enough that you can’t dismiss it as another inevitable, anonymous cancer story. You truly care about her. You bring food and offer support and “like” or “cry” or “anger” all her facebook posts. You are not a Bad Person.

But she’s not what you think about at 2am, staring at the ceiling. You think about You. Specifically, You in contrast with her. You start to construct a questionnaire, like those at the doctor’s office that tell you whether you’re an alcoholic. Yours is something like this:

Are you older or younger than her?
Did she smoke? Do you?
Is she nicer than you?
Does she drink? A lot? How much less than you?
Would you describe her as a “positive person”? Are you?
What’s her medical history? How healthy are you?
Does she meditate? for how long? Does she seem enlightened? More than You?
Does she exercise? What kind?
Where did she grow up? Was it on a nuclear test site? Wasn’t there a paint manufacturer around the corner when you were a kid? Was this before they banned lead? Why don’t you ever see those neighbors on facebook!?

And you think you can take all your answers and hers, give them each a number, calculate a cancer score for each of you, and objectively determine whether you are more or less likely to get cancer than she is. Then think of ways to dramatically derail your life so you can beat those odds.

But it’s all bullshit. This is the story we tell ourselves. It’s a lot like our success story, our ideas of the right and wrong things to do to lead us to the desired conclusion. It’s magical thinking, and it’s utterly unhelpful. It saps energy and presence and eats away at you. Of course there are proven behaviors that should reduce risk, but that’s not what this is about. This is about constructing a story against which you can praise or blame yourself and chart your future – a way to give yourself control over something that is essentially out of your control.

Crafted after your scary health diagnosis, this magical storytelling is worse than unhelpful, it’s destructive. Blaming yourself for your affliction is, first, untrue (because there is no free will, folks – your cancer is the product of your genetics, the block you grew up on, the people you’ve known, and the behavior of every atom in the universe which crafted your inevitable journey toward every single thing you’ve ever done); and second, it’s adding insult to injury. Even if you do believe you were responsible, what does that matter now? It helps nothing. The post-diagnosis should be all healing and living and decision making and all that fun shit. When it comes down to it, Your Cancer is not about you and your concept of self. But even more than that, Her Cancer is not About You.

Get off it. Be a friend. Get over yourself. I mean, it’s normal to think this way, but stop now. It’s totally normal to turn your friend’s cancer into your rumination fantasy, right?

There’s no way I’m the first one to do this, right?

Hello? Is this thing on?

Thanks for Not-things, 2018

In Nest Birds Wildlife I am thankful for countless entities in my little life, and I’ll happily tell you all about them some drunken night, but this year’s statement of gratitude has come out of a different place.

I am thankful for being unmoored.

For feeling insecure, for being unsure, for being uncomfortable

For every time I didn’t have a strong opinion, or wasn’t willing to fight for my side

For every time I realized I was wrong, had been wrong, for years, decades. I am so very wrong.

For every person I lost respect for and every one that no longer inspires feelings

For every thought I no longer think & every song I no longer hate

I’m probably no better than my Thanksgiving 2017 self, but many mini revelations have left me feeling vulnerable & ignorant & exposed & inspired in the past year and I am hungry to put all this not-ness to work.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. (Pema Chodron)

Filler is better than Emptiness (Buddha would disagree)

It is hard to tell if meditation does any good. Anyone who does it for a while can give you examples, real or imagined, of how they are less stressed, less angry, more patient, but is anyone really measuring levels of ire or compassion? Tracking the increase in seconds between agitating action and reaction? Unfortunately for us datageeks, no. We can convince ourselves that meditation has had an enormous impact on our lives or none at all, and who’s to say who’s right (especially since the latter don’t typically put in the amount of practice necessary for adequate scientific comparison. Quitters!)

I choose to believe that my recent feelings of awakening, of intellectual openness and learning and discovery, are a combination of the state of the world, the state of my world, and, crucially, the state of my consciousness. I have soooo much to discuss with you all, but I need a bit more time to process.

The great work begins. (Tony Kushner, Angels in America)

Self-Loathing and the Second Language

se habla espanol I’m writing this from Costa Rica, where I have ensconced myself in una escuela intercultural in an attempt not just to improve my Spanish, but to get over my fear of speaking it. I had another one of those “no shit” revelations last week, to wit: I can choose to be happy about how much Spanish I’ve learned instead of being disappointed in how much I’ve forgotten or have yet to learn. Yeah. Who would have thought that was an option? Not me. It’s certainly not my default position. I have always been disappointed in my failings in Spanish, at least ever since my very first year of studying the language in 7^th grade. I grew up in a neighborhood of Mexicanos y Puertorriqueños = I should have already known the basics before I ever stepped into a class. Seemed reasonable to me at 11. And at 40. Continue reading “Self-Loathing and the Second Language” →

What’s Wrong With Wanting to be Perfect?

perfect You know how all those hippy-dippy new-agey pro-therapy weirdos are always saying you can’t really love someone else until you love yourself? I’ve always said I believe that, but to be honest, I never really understood the logic behind it. That started to change last winter, when the weather crept into my heart and I was filled with … I wasn’t sure what, but it manifested as anger, my fallback emotion. I was blowing up more than I have in years – particularly at Ben & the Dog. And while the specific trigger for my anger was at times a legitimate complaint, it did not justify the intensity of the reaction. Being, let’s say “blessed” with self-awareness and apparently benefiting from years of daily meditation (maybe? a little?), I didn’t revel in feeling angry the way I used to and I knew there had to be a personal reason for it. Continue reading “What’s Wrong With Wanting to be Perfect?” →

Unlearning the Lines

The_Memphis_Blues_4 I am a lyrics junky. I know lyrics. Not just beloved lyrics, either. I know the lyrics of hundreds of songs I actively avoid, and probably twice as many that evoke not a single emotion. I’m guessing this takes up about 5% of my working brain.

I am also hard-wired with lyrics that are totally fuckin wrong. It’s happened more than once that after blithely, boldly singing along with a song for decades, one day, for whatever reason, I stop and actually pay attention to the song I’m accompanying, instead of getting wrapped up in the drama of my own (private) performance. Listening to the song with adult ears, I realize I’ve had it wrong this whole time. And now that I think about it, my version made no sense at all, whereas the actual lyrics were really pretty clear and sometimes disappointingly banal. Continue reading “Unlearning the Lines” →

Hey, look! It’s almost winter again!

According to my last post, I was “almost back” in June.

You’ll be happy to know I have been enjoying myself these last several months, though working for money more than I would like. I’ve had lists upon lists of things to do, have done some of them, and have enjoyed quite a few. Alas, those things are also such handy writing avoidance tools, that I’ve composed barely a page all the lovelong summer. But I promise you, dear reader, I will have a piece for you before the next national holiday. And another after that.

That’s probably enough commitment for this Autumnal Equinox. Happy harvest!

(almost) back, baby!

It was a difficult winter – physically and emotionally – and it kind of set me on a path of self-examination that has been both illuminating and burdensome. That’s my excuse for not writing in I’m-not-going-to-check-how-many-months. I put this out there now to let you (singular? plural?) know that I’m still here and would really like to discuss some things with you in the near future. You up for it?

Ben is still here, too, but I can’t speak to his plans.

Best to all,

How Winter Kills*

winter Woman & Guy go out for dinner & a movie at the art museum. Pleasant conversation follows – good film, bad audience; good food, bad waiter – as they join the line of cars waiting to exit the parking lot. Woman, sitting in the passenger seat due to her low tolerance for alcohol, looks at her sideview mirror and remembers she got the car – finally, right?! – washed today. Did the mirror get moved? She asks the man if he can see out of her mirror. He doesn’t answer. She waits. She calls his name. He responds with mild defensiveness. She sighs, “it’s just … exhausting!” She presses her palms against her face, hard, and wills herself not to cry.

And just like that – winter depression makes its grand entrance! Continue reading “How Winter Kills*” →

App vs. Enlightenment

sorry for the crap image; our phones have terrible cameras & WordPress is TESTING ME

Early on, I mentioned my meditation app in passing. Since then, I’ve been forced to confront some spiritually materialistic tempations of the app, temptations in the lure of which I was a squirrel on an unsustainable California almond farm.

The good news is that the app has corrected itself! I no longer have to be strong (or start being strong)- the poisoned nut has been removed.

Here’s the deal. Continue reading “App vs. Enlightenment” →

clawing my way to enlightenment

Author: Zee Bee