St. Andrews Cathedral

I love cathedrals and old churches. I love religious music (organs, Catholic choir music, gospel) and I love religious art. I don't believe in God. Not as an entity that experiences jealousy, hate, has a gender, or a race. The best way I can explain my spirituality is that it is nature. Nature made us all. Nature is a force we are all a part of. It doesn't judge, it undulates through the cosmos, making new galaxies, planets, life forms...it is very large, so large you can never know the end of it and so small that you can't see it with your naked eye, and everything in between.

It is the cycle of life and death. It doesn't seek vengeance or punish us. We punish ourselves. Nature is simply the pull of the universe. Gravity. Balance. Nature seeks balance. When a species gets too plentiful to feed itself it will starve. If it learns to live on nothing, it will get diseases. Nature will find a way to keep the balance.

Therefore, if we ourselves put things out of balance, as we have, it will find a way to right itself. If there are too many people there will be some form of limitation to our survival. Not as a judgment, but as a way to keep all things healthier.

Religion is our way of trying to give voice and words to the forces at work. It is hard for people to imagine a force greater than themselves that isn't in their own image. I believe that we have formed ideas about God based on what we know of ourselves. The bible has it backwards. The bible says something about how god created man in his image. I think man imagined god in his.

What I love about churches is that here I see man seeking his best self. In the statuary, the saints, the beautiful architecture, the music...it is the human imagination trying to embrace something beyond self, something close to universal love. It's true that often man may leave church or synagogue or temple and go kill another man...but religion is his attempt to get beyond that to his best self. It is his effort to find and give acceptance.

Which is beautiful.

Many terrible atrocities have been committed in the name of god. Humans have often believed that god is on "their side". If your idea of god is that god takes sides then either your idea of god is dreadfully flawed or else god is not a good being and I can never side with him/it/her. Nature doesn't discriminate against races, gender, or class. We all die. Every last one of us. We all will have sorrows and troubles.

I take these thoughts into churches and while in the pews I meditate on how man is constantly tangled in his own muddle of spirituality. He cannot seem to get beyond his own image. His own reflection into the greater pool of life. I would like to see in the pool the light that is the opposite of the dark. I would like to see the life bubbling up in it and dragging itself onto the shore where I can know it. Or I would like to dive into the pool myself to see what is outside of myself.

I sat in the cathedral yesterday and experienced it as man's great inspiration, his attempts to get outside of his own skin and let the world in. One of the things I love about catholic churches are the votives. I think it's lovely to light a candle for someone. I think it's lovely to use candles as a request for prayers. There are always candles lit. I love to watch the candles and know that here are human cares being released. I added my own.

I lit (and paid for, thank you!) ten candles. I lit them for the following: for peace, for plenty, for healing, for mother, for father, for child, for sister, for brother, for the forgotten, and for the homeless.

I found another church, this time a Church Of Scotland, which wasn't open. However, they had this prayer tree. I added a prayer to it.

A prayer for peace. A prayer for my country to stop killing people in Iraq. A prayer to end the war. I don't think my prayer is going to be answered, but what's important is that I put my wishes out there and that I have in my heart those who are dying in war right now and keep hope lit in myself that a temporary peace may come.

I am fascinated by the catholic statuary. Very gory stuff. Yet beautiful too. It would be equally beautiful if it were modeled after dark Africans, olive Arabs, or pale Asians. Catholics are certainly responsible for a tremendous amount of bloodshed and while I can never embrace the religion for my own, just as I cannot embrace any organized religion for my own, I think they've also been responsible for some of the most incredible art, architecture, and music.

These feet of Christ make me think of the song Johnny Cash sings "Were you there?" which is all about Jesus being nailed to the cross.

I would like peace and plenty for us all.

Raising Fists Of Fire

(or how to bring out the feminist in me)

I started reading Jon Krakauer's book "Under The Banner Of Heaven" which is his nonfiction book about the Mormon faith which we borrowed from friends. I have been saying for years that Americans need to stop trying to fix the oppression of women in other countries because there's plenty of it right here in our own back yard. What I was thinking of were all the women getting raped on our streets and being bullied and beaten by their own boyfriends and husbands. Who needs to go to the Middle East to find women being treated like chattel?

Chattel always makes me think "cattle".

I have always been vaguely aware that men, in the last couple thousand years, have gotten permission to treat women like lesser beings almost exclusively from religion. They can open the Koran, the Bible, or Josef Smith's weird doctrines to find every kind of encouragement to demand "obedience" from the "weaker" sex. In no place will you find more proof that women are bad, that they can't be trusted, that they are traitors, and of course, whores. Because for some reason, God, in all his manifestations seems concerned that women might take over the world if not kept under check.

If women ran the world there are some pretty fundamental changes that would occur. We would probably still have wars, because women will fight just as hard to protect what's theirs as men will, but there would be a lot fewer of them because most women are too busy working their asses off to obsess over invading other countries. Rape would be one of those atrocities that would almost never happen; like cannibalism it would fade into obscurity. The majority of pedophilia would disappear.

This book has effectively flushed out my feminist ire. I have many times said that I am no feminist. I don't relate to man bashing. I like men for their own peculiar strengths as much as I like women. My sense of self worth isn't tied at all to how I compare to men. It bothers me to hear women sport slogans like "Whatever man can do, woman can do better" which is a lot like engaging in a pissing contest which is one of those masculine quirks that I find pretty gross and pointless and women being just like men makes them also no better than men. I have always thought that women should see that their worth doesn't need to be measured against a man's worth. We are all equal, but different. I really don't believe that either of the sexes is superior to the other.

I am not the same as a man. Except that we're both human.

I love chivalry. When a man opens a door for a woman, or offers her his coat in the cold, I don't see it as a sign that he thinks women can't open doors for themselves or that they are weak incapable beings. I have always seen actions like these as signs of respect, caring, and as a man's ability to stop thinking of himself for two seconds to open the way for a lady to pass through. There isn't enough of that kind of thoughtfulness and when I see it it makes me happy. Feminism has made men afraid of chivalry. Which I think is very sad.

However, reading about a religion in which women don't even get to go to heaven unless their husbands "call" them to heaven using their secret name makes me want to rise up with fire in my fists and knock down every man who ever made a woman believe that her spiritual life rests in a mortal man's hands. I want to burn all religious books in which women are called whores because they've been raped by man, because man's appetite cannot be controlled. If we're going to throw that word around at all I think we're going to have to call at least 50% of all men whores too.

But why do we need to throw that word around at anyone? I don't believe that God calls anyone whores, I don't think there is any cause for that word to be used in any context besides one in which a person engages in exchanging sexual favors for money. And just for the record, I don't think a prostitute deserves less respect because of her profession than anyone else deserves and I don't believe that God loves a prostitute less than a virgin or a man. In fact, next to a man who abuses his wife and/or children, I think a prostitute is a much better candidate for heaven.

Not that I believe in heaven. Because I don't.

I've said many times that I don't believe in God in a biblical sense. And I don't. I believe that God exists not as a personality that experiences human emotions but as a spiritual force in nature that is greater than ourselves.

I am not even a quarter of the way through this book but I can see it's going to stretch the elasticity of my beliefs and my perceptions of other people's beliefs. One thing this book confirms for me without question:

Fundamentalism in any religion is evil. If there have been atrocities, it is usually the fundamentalists at the bottom of it all. Every religion has them. In Islam it is the suicide bombers. In Christianity it is the people who are killing other people because they believe that life is the most sacred thing on earth. In Mormonism it is the polygamists who have taken inbreeding and marrying children off to old men to new heights of evil.

There must be some fundamentalist group attached to Buddhism, but I have not heard of any yet. It's hard to twist the Buddhist concepts into evil, but I'm sure if anyone can do it, humans can.

I feel very fortunate to know so many good men. Men who have a healthy respect for women...men who stand with the women in their lives as equals. I wish all women could know what it feels like to stand side by side with the weaker sex* working together at living this mortal life well.

I guess women have a lot of ass kicking left to do in order to free themselves from their chains. They should probably start by writing their own religious doctrines like men have been doing for a couple thousand years. Us Americans should probably stop looking in other countries' back yards for oppression to "fix" because there's a whole lot right here in our own.



*Ha ha ha.

I was going to make some apologies to go along with this post but I'm not sure I really need to. Hopefully anyone reading it can tell that my argument here is not against faith, necessarily, or with an individual's relationship with God but against the doctrines of faith and the people that use them to oppress and abuse others. If you are not such a person, than I am not addressing or criticizing your actions or your faith.

The First Snow

It is snowing right now. This picture is from last year because I can't get a good picture of the snow coming down this morning, it isn't heavy enough yet. But believe me, I was out there in my ratty old bathrobe with my camera, grinning the big grin and I'm pretty sure that all of my neighbors think it's weird beyond words that every time it snows I run outside to dance around and laugh and take pictures and try to catch the flakes...

I know this is a terrible picture-but it just goes to show you that I'm not the only one in this family who loves snow. This is also from last year. This morning when I saw the first flake fall (I'm pretty sure it was the first flake because I have an interior snow monitor and it has been on snow alert for days now) I told Max to come see. I said "You have to look really carefully because there are only a few flakes coming down and they are hard to see." He stood at the window with me and just like snow deprived Californians*, we pointed out each ethereal swiftly falling flake with great fan fare. Max loves snow almost as much as I do.

I wish it would fall all day. I hope it will be falling when my mom comes today to celebrate her sixty second year on the planet. Her birthday was actually this past Tuesday but we can't get together on the week-days. She's just found out she won't have a job after next month (the grant that pays her salary was not renewed) so she's feeling a little low. She loves snow too so wouldn't it be great if we could all watch the snow coming down together?

Just as a little segue: is there any territory on earth that does not have ticks? I want to know how come I spent a lot of time romping around in the woods as a kid and I never got a tick, yet they seem to be everywhere now to the point where it seems like a miracle that I have never gotten one. I wonder about this frequently but it just now came back into my head because I know that it's never going to snow here enough to my satisfaction and I keep thinking that if we're ever not poor, maybe we could buy ourselves a little cabin in the hills where it snows more and go stay there often in the winter. However, I don't really want to go where there are ticks. That's one way in which suburbia kicks butt. If I had a farm somewhere I'd probably have to be twisting ticks out of our skin all the time. I'm not sure I'd ever be able to feel blase about that.

So looked at from the tick perspective I think urban homesteading is really the best of all worlds. Creating a little bit of the farm experience on a very small scale is quite appealing. It means not having to manage a large piece of property. It means being able to take care of what I have. It means being within walking distance of downtown which is something I really like.

Maybe I don't need anything else besides what I have. Being able to come to this conclusion again and again is very rewarding. Not longing for the impossible is soothing. I don't think it's asking the Universe for too much to be allowed to just keep what I've got which is pretty damn good. See how snow lays a veil of contentedness all over me? It's like magic.

This is a great day for baking. I have zucchini that needs to be made into bread or muffins and pumpkin which needs to be made into pie. I must make the pie because there's also whipping cream in the fridge which needs to be whipped before it goes sour. I think I'll also be making pasta for my mom's birthday lunch and open up a frozen pesto. I think we'll have a side of carrots with that; steamed first then lightly sauteed in butter, mustard, and honey.

We are supposed to be getting a very fierce storm this week-end. Especially tomorrow. The Oregonian was making a really big noise about it: two typhoons are crashing together over the PNW and unleashing 100 mile an hour winds on the coast, wind and torrential rains everywhere else. I love a good storm but I have to say that if our electricity goes out we're screwed. We'll freeze to death because I haven't finished my quilt yet and we are not amply supplied with decent extra blankets. Although, I take that back, we have three down comforters (one for each of us) and I don't think anyone needs more than that.

I bought some emergency candles yesterday, plus matches, propane lighters, "DD" batteries for the Mag lite flashlight, and plenty of Max food. We didn't have a single candle in the house because we stopped burning them after we had a house fire back in 2003. (The snow is really coming down right now. I keep stopping to gaze at it.) So we didn't have a single match or candle. I think it's wise to have them for emergencies.

This whole notion of being happy with what I have is something kind of different for me. All of my life (for as long as I can remember) I have imagined every endeavor on a large scale. I have spent my life reaching and plotting for the next move, the next moment, the next beverage, the next meal, the next triumph, the next job, the next project... I have found it intensely challenging to sit back and enjoy the moment at hand, or to say "This is perfect. This is exactly what I want." The point in life, to my mind, was to conquer it, not to live it. It's all about conquering the work force, powering through all of life's opposition, and never settling for less than everything in my imagination.

Thus, in my imagination, I have always been very successful...the best fashion designer (one with world wide recognition), or the chicest costume designer (one who works on all the best period movies and is obviously on Ang Lee's rolodex), or the founder of a wildly successful empire (whether it be an empire built around bath products, greeting cards, aprons, food, t-shirts, whatever), but I never imagined what it might be like to be done reaching. To find what I want without so much striving. To live a satisfying life without riches or fame or recognition.

That's not strictly true. I did once. One time in my life I looked around me and I felt that queer sense of calm that must come to everyone who has built the perfect life for themselves and allows themselves to acknowledge it. I felt my chest unhinge. I felt deep gratitude for my good fortune. My mind was at rest; no longer searching for the next level in life. I had found the right place, the right role for myself, and the right community. I had all the elements necessary to feel I was living richly without being rich. It was a moment when I realized that everything in my house actually fit in my house. It was all in balance. Even my nasty tiny bachelor style brassed out eighties bathroom had been transformed into a sweet small bathroom that was charming and not ugly.

I wonder...are we not supposed to actually acknowledge it when we're really content? Are we not supposed to notice when everything, even the little imperfections of our lives, are just the way we want them? I am superficially superstitious, which is to say that I am a skeptic and don't really hold that knocking on wood will ward off the evil eye, yet I do it anyway. You know, just in case. Common wisdom, (and also a lot of religious people) indicates that acknowledging our gratitude for our good fortune is by way of thanking the universe (or god) for our blessings. The idea being, I suppose, that if you appreciate it when you have it, perhaps you will be blessed with more.

I'm not convinced. Why? What could possibly be wrong with feeling gratitude and expressing it? Indeed, it seems a benign thing to recognize good fortune. To be happy with one's life as it is. Yet, the last time I felt it in my bones, the last time I looked around and knew that I was living a life that was perfect for me, that was just perfect- it vanished within one month.

One month. All of it-that good fortune, the happy life, the contentedness, the realization that I didn't have to reach anymore- all of it was ripped out from under my feet and we've been treading deep cold waters ever since. Two years running now. Still treading the deep cold dark waters.

I always believed that expressing real love, gratitude, appreciation for the little things, and being thankful for what you have help you keep those very things you're thankful for. I always believed that those who never see their good fortune are the most likely to lose it. I believed it mostly because of an unintentional belief in karma. The more good you generate, the more good you reap. The more bad you create, the more bad you attract to yourself.

I don't know if I believe any of that anymore. The proof is in the pudding, people who like proverbs are fond of saying. All my pudding has proved is that if you love something too much, if you are too happy, life will suck your marrow dry, and leave you with plenty to cry about. My defense mode says that you may as well beat life to the punch and be sure to always provide yourself with plenty to cry about, at least that way you can choose your own pain. That's also why I hurt myself so much when I was younger. If you imagine all the hurt and violence that others could inflict on you, and just go ahead and do it to yourself before they do, you really take the wind out of other people's sails. Once you've taken a steak knife to your own arm, there is pretty much nothing worse anyone can do to you.

Keep anticipating pain and arrive there first to ease the blow.

I don't actually consider that a positive or healthy philosophy.

Don't let other people, God, or the Universe choose your pain for you.

Now I'm caught between philosophies. I'm not actually sure what I believe anymore. I refuse to let myself sink back into that place where I must anticipate pain and provide it for myself so no one else can have the power to burn me, yet I don't believe in God so I can't blithely leave it all to "him" as many people in my community do. (I've been working with lots of religious people this week). In talking to other people (at work) about life's twists and turns, especially the ones we don't see coming and that leave us emotionally hydroplaning, I hear people saying "God gets me through it." Or "I just trust in God." Or "God loves me and that's all I really need."

I'm happy for people who can turn to a spiritual entity to take care of them when things fall apart. Though I always feel a little shock hearing people mention God, because where I used to live I didn't know a single religious person. No one I knew ever mentioned "God" in that familiar believing kind of way. It sometimes sounds more like a person has just told me that they believe in leprechauns. I imagine it must be just as shocking to them that I don't turn to God in moments of trouble. I also wonder if some of the people I've been working with feel that my misfortunes are the result of not letting Jesus in my life. It's not a question I plan on asking anyone of firm Christian faith.

I only bring all this up because the snow has got me in a meditative frame of mind. I feel calm inside. I have zero faith that my life is going to be smooth, or that I will get to keep the things I have now that I love. Nor do I believe that if I am a good enough person I will attract mostly good to my life. The only thing I really do have faith in is the irrefutable. Weather happens. People are born. People die. These are the things I can really know for sure. Everything is ephemeral, shifting endlessly, and there is almost nothing I can count on besides the irrefutable.

Maybe next month things will seem brighter-maybe I won't have to give up my health care and get a minimum wage job, maybe good fortune will find us again-but I think the only sure course for me to follow right now is to enjoy the minute pleasures as they come. The tiniest bits of joy are maybe all we'll get. I wanted snow this winter and if no more comes, at least I had this beautiful morning with the quiet, quiet snow. It's stopped now but I think I got the best out of it. Writing here in my office gives me a wonderful view of the sky and I missed very little of it.

That feels a lot like joy.

My plan right now is to be happy with what I have. To be thankful. To hope that our life will smooth out and get a little bit less sketchy. However, I won't be feeling these feelings or cherishing these hopes, or allowing contentedness to blossom in my heart as a part of any faith or karmic plan. I will cultivate this little bit of happiness and hope because it feels a lot better than the alternative. I will cultivate happiness against a backdrop of uncertainty because that's what life is demanding of me. To count on nothing but feel hope anyway.

Is it some kind of sign that a blue Heron just glided past my house in an elegant line?

*Ha. But we're not Californians anymore, AND I have been an Oregonian at heart since I was eight years old.

The First Carrot

(And all kinds of talk about faith and karma and other heavy topics.)

This morning I came in with more beets (all small in size), one carrot, one tomato, two impossibly small yellow crookneck squashes, and a few more pickling cucumbers.

I also managed to pick this modest vase of flowers. If I want more flowers I'm going to have to go out there and pull up a truckload of weeds which are choking everything out. I'm going to have to deadhead the roses and pinch off the dead flowers from the daisies and zinnias.

Where I will find time for this while caring for my child who refuses to go outside unless I fight him tooth and nail, while Philip sends in resumes and looks for work which he needs to have if we are going to avoid having to sell our house, I really don't know. If I were to manage to squeeze out even a few moments to accomplish any fraction of the above chores...I have to pray my sore back doesn't turn into a broken back. I wake up every morning unrefreshed with that nasty ache in my shoulders, neck, and back. I think it's my bed trying to kill me in my sleep, but I can't seem to catch it in the act. It would never stand up in a court of law.

A low grade insistent insidious depression has been gracing me with an annoying inertia. I have no energy to do anything even when I have the time. Partly that's because having the store made my household come in last place for a year. Things are so out of order (and I have all the furniture and my whole studio from the store packed in my garage) that to do any small thing here requires a huge chain of events to precede it. Like, if you want to put away the emptied out canning jars as we use them, you must first make room for them somewhere which requires shifting everything in the kitchen just a little.

There's also this colossal anxiety. Always. Every day. Panic in my chest. Dread. Which mounts to an untenable cacophony every single day I listen to my boy complaining about pretty much everything in his life and how he may as well have not been born. Philip does a great deal to add to that cacophony with his own anxiety and the fact that he is always saying the right things to piss our boy off just a little more. How does a six year old access so much negativity? How does he come to see a spat with the neighbor kid as conclusive proof that he will never find any boys his own age who like to do the exact same things as him and he shouldn't even bother because there aren't any in our WHOLE TOWN?!

I guess the apple didn't even bother falling off the tree.

On a lighter note, if I just push everything aside for a few hours by using my superpowers to freeze the whole world in it's tracks, I could do my first batch of pickles of the season today. Maybe. If I can muster up the energy while I put Max in his closet with his game boy, just maybe I could do it. I've got enough from my own garden for a small batch. I love dill pickles.

One thing that feels really good and is a tremendous relief to me is the clean wood floors in my kitchen and dining room. AAAAAhh. No more repulsive animal and people stained oatmeal colored area rug. It's wonderful to walk on that smooth clean mopped surface. Cool to the toes, not harboring diseases or nasty little what-have-yous. The kitchen floor was just scary. I am not crazy about having wood floors in there, I mean to say that while hardwood is my all time favorite flooring, I'm hard on everything I own and use and the kitchen is a room in my house that gets tremendous wear. It just seems like that finish on the wood is going to wear out super fast.

Maybe not, though, it actually still looks pretty good when I mop it.

I don't have a lot of spiritual faith. Most of what I believe in I believe because I can see that it's true. Like karma. The concept of karma is even in the bible. It isn't called karma, but it's there. The whole concept that there are consequences for behavior, whether good or bad, that will lower on our shoulders. When we live thoughtfully with compassion for others we tend to have better relationships and people will reach out to you in times of need. If you live selfishly and meanly then you will find yourself shut off from all help in times of misfortune. This is a concept you can verify in your life. Try it and see. It's true that you will reap what you sow, though perhaps not immediately. That's not something I have faith in, it's something I believe because I've seen it born out my whole life.

I also believe that everything happens for a reason and that everything that happens is supposed to happen. I came to this sometimes uncomfortable conclusion in my early twenties when I found it couldn't be refuted by a reasonable mind. I don't think there's a person on earth who hasn't wished to refute it at some point in their life. But if something has happened, you can't reasonably say it wasn't meant to happen. Maybe YOU didn't mean it to happen, but it was meant to happen because it did. You can reasonably say that YOU didn't mean something to happen, but if you unload your own intentions and back off a little, you will see that the Universe, or God did mean it to happen, because it happened. Humans do not control the universe. Nature, facts, life cycles, maybe even God does, but we don't. So ultimately, what we mean to have happen in our lives is only a small part of our life. We have only control over the choices we make, not on the outcomes of our actions.

Somehow I think I may not have spoken as clearly as I had hoped.

It has always bothered me when people say "He/She wasn't meant to die so young!" But how can that be true if He/She is, in fact, dead? We are surprised when people die young, we are devastated, we are sorrowful, but how can we know what is meant to happen except by seeing what is happening and what has happened?

I take comfort in these beliefs. I have never been able to believe in the idea that God will take care of your needs if only you have faith in him. Oh yeah? I don't know about that. That's not something born out by proof in my opinion. I guess it depends on how you think God interprets our needs. I know that there are a lot of people out there who desperately need food and are dying because no food is available to them. Does this mean that what they really need is to starve to death? Or that they don't have enough faith?

It's entirely possible that when the bible mentions God always taking care of his children that it means only in a spiritual sense. Not in a literal corporeal sense. But if that's so, then I think it's unconscionable to tell people that God will take care of their needs as a form of comforting the poor, or the sick, or the lost and letting them think that if they pray enough and give the church money or whatever it is having enough faith means, that their sickness will be cured, their poverty lifted, or that they'll find their way back to themselves.

The idea of faith bothers me a lot. Faith as in: a belief not based on proof.

I do believe in the other definition of faith: confidence or trust in a person or thing.

They are not the same. Often, religion asks you to have a faith not based on proof.

I guess I'm thinking about all this right now because I believe that whatever the future holds for me and my family, whether we have to sell our house and rent something to get by, or whether we are fortunate and find work and get to stay here in some degree of comfort, I believe everything will unfold just as it's meant to. What we can do for ourselves is keep slogging away at trying to find work, put our best feet forward, try to tame the chaos that having and then closing a store has wreaked in our lives, and if we still end up a wreck, then that's just what we have to go through. As scary as it is to me to face joblessness in this strangling economy, I do not get to decide the ultimate outcome of my life. I steer it as best I can and then the rest is up to nature, luck, the forces that be, and possibly even karma.

The thing that worries me is that getting therapy, chiropractic medicine, massage, and counseling for Max, plus necessary trips to the dentist all cost money we can't afford to spend. Not to mention visits to the vet. I don't feel I'm in a position to take care of these important things until we have an income again. It's a classic American problem. It doesn't matter how important all of these things are, if you don't have the money for them, you don't take care of them.

I think I need to drink more coffee. I just heard from Philip a minute ago that the new pot of coffee I brewed spilled all over the counter because I failed to put the pot in correctly. Damn.

What's weird is that we are exactly where we were a year and a half ago. Exactly. As though we have made no progress at all. It kind of freaks me out. How long can a person go without work? No, don't answer that question, I already know the answer. I'm going to go investigate the coffee situation and put my head in the grounds.