two sides of feminism

Feminist club.  The idea has been bouncing around EMU recently, particularly among a few freshmen girls.  I started thinking about it while I was vacuuming the other day (it's a good time to think, in case you didn't know).  Mostly I was wondering what shape it will take.  I suspect it will follow the pattern of old-school feminists, protesting male chauvinism and female passiveness, with loud and in-your-face feminine power.  I'm not against that kind.  In fact, I would probably go to their meetings.  But in some ways, the need for that kind of feminism is past.


Not that everyone in the U.S. sees women as equal to men or treats them as such.  There are certainly situations where women (and men) need to stand up for equal rights, especially when you consider the blatant inequalities in the salaries of many American job positions.  But in general, gender equality is more or less assumed, and while it may not be perfected, it's come a long way.


But.  I can't help but think of another kind of feminism.  The kind that stands up against sexism in the media, against objectification of women, against valuing us for our bodies alone.  My heart aches for every woman and girl who believes her only value is in her appearance.  Inner beauty is continually brushed aside in favor of this plasticized, unattainable, deceptive mask that we call beauty, and the truth is that living up to it is a fruitless, frustrating, life-draining journey.  Every woman in the world was created in the image of God, exactly as she is.  And we must stand up against exploitation of women who, by no fault of their own, are helplessly trampled under the feet of War.  They become victims of rape and war violence; they see their children fall to the weapons of soldiers or wither away from hunger and disease.  


These are the kinds of gender inequality that happen all around the world, every day, and we have not done enough to stop it.  I cannot be silent in the face of such injustice.   Because every time I see injustice and objectification toward any woman, anywhere, I feel it toward me.  We must stand in solidarity with our sisters and mothers and daughters - even the ones we have never met.


Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.  ~Isabel Allende


Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.  ~John Ruskin

sisters and selves

To add to the list of things that make me proud:  Watching my grown-up baby sister play piano, holding the attention of a room, seemingly unaware of anything but herself, together with the music.

She is so expressive.  It's what everyone commented on after today's recital.  It was so beautiful, really hearing the music that had vaguely floated past my ears, echoing throughout the house while she practiced.  But it wasn't the music that brought tears to my eyes.  It was the image of this girl I have known all her life, in her flamingo-pink shirt, curling her long legs under the piano bench, letting grace flow through her arms and hands and fingers, embodying the music in every gesture.

Thirteen.  It's the age when so many girls take the first step away from their childhood and begin to capture what it means to be a woman.  At this age a girl's beauty is liquid and transparent; glowing.  She is the essence of time, a parent's fondest memories and a future of potential combined.

For many of us, looking back, this was the hardest age to be.  Society's pressures are merciless and often painfully confining; I hate revisiting my thirteen-year-old self and seeing how I defined myself.  I want to tell her, my younger self, not to listen to those other voices - but it's no use labeling them as "other", because the loudest and strongest voice was my own.  Telling myself to conform to what I thought was the ideal.  Inwardly criticizing myself for being less.  Believing that I would never be what I wanted to be.

She lives inside me still, but I have grown so much, and now my thirteen-year-old self makes up only one small part of me.  Now every time I see a thirteen-year-old girl I want to somehow convince her that she is beautiful, not for what she wants to be, but for exactly who she is.  It took me years to learn that, but now I believe it and I know it is true.  As a girl continues on her journey to becoming a woman, her translucent beauty turns warm and golden, distinguishable from every other woman and startlingly beautiful.  It is our history, scars and all, that makes us beautiful.

So in perceiving my beloved sister today, I saw her clarity and flexibility, but I also saw myself.  In contemplating my own story, I understood the place where she now stands:  a knowledge of how far she has come in her journey, and how far she will go in the future.  I cannot choose her trajectory, but I hope and pray to be a loving, guiding hand.

breathe

I'm writing this out of conformity...

...sort of.  This is the time when everybody comes home and posts some kind of reflection/analysis/summary of their past semester.  But that's not exactly what I'm doing.

I'm home.  As much as spending time reading, talking, resting, thinking, relaxing, listening, without worrying or being busy, would drive me crazy over a long period of time, it is exactly what I need right now.  Just for now, I will not let myself worry about the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.  Sometimes (like now) this is the only way for me to have peace.  My soul needs the rest of me to stop and be still, and this time I am going to listen to it.  And I will come back ready to throw myself freely into everything next semester holds, whether old or new.  I will be ready.  (I'm going to change the world, you know.)

Just for now
Just for now

It's that time of year
Leave all our hopelessnesses aside
If just for now (just for now) leave awhile
Just stop right here

Just for love

it feels like this:

mosaic

It is almost break because I am unfocused and random.  That's backwards, you might say; it should be that I'm unfocused and random because it's almost break.  But this is the way I function now.  Backwards.

Here's a backwards thought for you.  I went to a new church on Sunday and it felt all right and all wrong, all at the same time.  The people there were so friendly and accepting - it radiated through the air.  I could tell how much they cared about each other, about newcomers, and especially about praising God and expressing their faith.

But little things wriggled under my skin and nagged my thoughts into forming words.  The idea that we should focus our time and energy on those who are interested in learning about our beliefs, because "our number one goal in life is for as many people to come to God as possible".  I mean, it is.  But also, it's not.  The idea scares me because it takes the emphasis off of each individual person and puts it on numbers.  We need to love people with God's love - so deep that we will never give up on someone, even if they (at first) aren't receptive to what we believe.
And most of all, I don't want to give up on other people because I hate the thought of them giving up on me.

So I am formed of bits and pieces at the moment.  But I am hoping they are ordered chaos, maybe a kind of beauty in their unexpectedness.  I'm ready for this end-of-semester change.  I will be so sad to see many of my friends leave for their worldly adventures next semester - but I've been anticipating it for long enough that I'm ready to see what next semester brings.  I hope it will be full of love and willfulness and blending of souls and strange beauty.

unorthodox methods of coping

If you ever struggle to process something that is full of emotions, I recommend watching Zoolander.

No but seriously.  I learned something about myself tonight:  When I'm wrenched inside from too many kinds of feelings, the best thing I can do for myself is step back from them for just long enough to be able to think clearly.  Then the best thing I can do is talk about it, write about it, live into it.

Tonight I went to see Brent Anders' senior show, called REAL.  It was about vulnerability and the secrets we keep because we're afraid of what they might mean.  Twelve short plays, all unique, but united in this theme.  And it was amazing, because it was so hilarious and yet so poignant and raw.  It showed so clearly the stories associated with change, alienation, abuse, and self-destructiveness, and most of all, they are the stories of all of us.

It brought tears to my eyes many times.  It made me reach out for my two dearly loved friends who were there with me.  And as the three of us left, we all felt so burdened by what we had seen and felt, and we reacted in different ways.  I knew I was feeling the pain of so many, and I knew I wasn't big enough to contain it all.  I needed to let it be a shared pain.  Grace's anger at the world's injustice inspired me - sometimes anger can be a powerful fuel for activism and change.

So after we got back, I watched Zoolander for half an hour with some other people, until I was ready to think and talk.  Later we found ourselves in our room, talking about hope or lack of it.  Here's an example.

Grace:  ...That's been on the back burner for me.
Me:  I hate burners!
Bekah:  Life should just....be a stir fry!
Impassioned agreement ensues.

The reason I love these two girls is because we can express emotion in the most illogical, random, exhausting, inspiring, fulfilling ways.  Tonight, while talking about our frustrations at the world's closed-mindedness and oppression, we had a pillow fight (inspired by Grace's comment of "I want solve all the injustices of the world.  I just can't do it by throwing things!").  Surprisingly, it helped a lot.

So the moral of this story is, don't be afraid of thoughts and feelings that crush you with their weight.  Know what you need to survive them, and understand that whatever you need is okay, but just don't be afraid.  The world will not be made a better place without you feeling a bit of its pain.  And through everything, hold tight to those who love you.

i will always love quotes

Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty - they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.  ~Martin Buxbaum


When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.  ~Chinese Proverb


I don't like standard beauty - there is no beauty without strangeness.  ~Karl Lagerfeld


There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.  
~Gilbert Keith Chesterton


Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting - a wayside sacrament.  Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Beauty... when you look into a woman's eyes and see what is in her heart.  ~Nate Dircks


We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.  ~John Ruskin


Beauty... is the shadow of God on the universe.  ~Gabriela Mistral, Desolacíon

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen.  But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing.  ~Marie Stopes

transparency

Recently I was watching the movie Midnight Clear, which is about five sad, lonely people whose accidental interactions with each other save them from their own desperate pain.  And as I was watching it, I kept wondering, why do we put up walls?
One of the five was especially poignant to me.  An old woman who lived alone, a lapsed churchgoer, an abandoned mother.  Few people noticed her, but when anyone was concerned for her, she readily made up stories about her grandchildren, about family coming for Christmas, anything to make them think that she was happy.  That everything was okay.

She was so afraid to let people help her.  It's hard to be vulnerable.  But why does our society tell us that there is nothing more important than independence?  Even when we are staggering under the weight of the world, when we are broken, lost, when we have forgotten what hope feels like...even then we can't simply admit that we need other people.

I do this too.  But here's the truth:  I'm not enough.  I am not strong enough to even survive one day in the harsh, cruel world that would be this life without the people in it.

"We should never, ever make a hierarchy out of pain."  These are the wise words of a friend, spoken after a group discussion about sexual abuse.  We all have our stories, and we all have been through pain.  The worst possible way to respond to this is to say, "You don't understand."  Of course not - nobody understands exactly how it feels to be you.  But at the same time, of course they do.  They have their own pain to bear.  And there is no more blessed way to live through pain than to lean on those around you.

So, God give me the humility to ask for help when I need it, and the clear sight to see and embrace the people around me who need to be loved.

Here's an excerpt from a book I just finished, called The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  Less poetic than some, maybe, but profound all the same.

"How will you get home?" she asked.
"Most nights, I walk home.  I hitchhike.  Somebody usually picks me up.  I've only had to walk the whole way a few times."
She started to cry.
FOR ME!
Who knew that tears of sympathy could be so sexy?
"Oh, my God, Arnold, you can't do that," she said.  "I won't let you do that.  You'll freeze.  Roger will drive you home.  He'll be happy to drive you home."
I tried to stop her, but Penelope ran over to Roger's car and told him the truth.
And Roger, being of kind heart and generous pocket, and a little bit racist, drove me home that night.
And he drove me home plenty of other nights, too.
If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.

this is peace.

I think sometimes things in life can't be labeled as good or bad.  They are just what they are.  Maybe life is one continuous act of reaching out for something real and solid and true...and in those moments when you find it, you cling to it, because otherwise you might crumble into a pile of uncertainty and groundlessness.

I can find peace in a moment.  Even on days like today, when life makes me walk away from what is right, there is still the sun breaking through the clouds and in my window.  It's so close I can reach out and touch it.

So I'll run straight into your arms 
You're the bright and morning sun 
To show your love there's nothing you won't do.
You've opened my eyes
So I can see you all around me
You light up the sky to show me that you are with me.

being content

certainty is a bright full moon with wispy cloud wings, and I walk with upturned eyes and hands and soak up its rays.  own your choices, because they are all you have to say about the world.  admit your ownership, claim it gladly, the way your heart shouts "yes!".
this is not your shadow.  happiness is about knowing, and sometimes the choice is there.  I can choose to be happy, and I will trust in the sureness of hope.

----------

for the less poetically inclined, this is to say that I am finally at peace with a decision that's been agonizing me for months.

thinking of circles

Sometimes I think the Native Americans understood.  And if I believed in reincarnation I would say I was one in a past life.

As I've studied Native American literature this semester, I've fallen more and more in love with their way of life.  There is something in me that just loves the circularity, the interconnectedness, of Native American thought.  Maybe it's that I've been struggling to find this in my own life.  But regardless of the reason, it's easy to believe that a holistic approach to life would solve a lot of problems in the world.

The Native American concept of sin is not the act of disobeying God, it is the act of failing to coexist in harmony with the community that surrounds you.  The earth is a beloved Mother, the animals are sacred, and in everything the people seek balance.  What if we believed that any kind of hostility against another person was a sin against God?  And what if we truly understood the earth to be a loving, giving, mothering being?

It would be the end of war.  The earth would be freed from its state of polluted, shameful disarray and restored to its natural beauty.  And we would shape our actions to unconditionally love each other, our God, our mother earth, and ourselves.

I have been taught to love the sacredness and beauty of this living earth.  So today I will be content to wonder, is there anything that can capture the poetry and grace of a fallen leaf?  Or of trees bursting forth glorious yellow and dazzling red.  The twisting branches of a tree against a blue, blue sky swirled with clouds.

These things surround me, and I am so very blessed.

tears of grace

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace, only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

-Anne Lamott

There are times in life when the air is thick with the presence of God.  It happens sometimes when people worship with abandon, when there is passion and joy and reverence on every face.

Today was the end of the Daniel Fast.  There was a prayer vigil from 6-9 (during which time I was at a rehearsal for conducting) and then Celebration at 9.  I came straight from my rehearsal at 9:15, hurried but glad.  and as communion began, I sat in the back row with my thoughts.
If God is the love of my life, why is my life filled with so many, many other things?  Every so often I think about this but I always get stuck on the hows.  I understand the whats and the whys, but it's how to live differently that I never seem to get.  And I can't understand why I am forgiven every time.  Every time I come to God ashamed not at what I am, but at what I fail to be, I am forgiven.

But then I come to the mystery of grace.  I have been so extravagantly blessed, so easily forgiven, and I deserve none of it.  As I sat there in a room full of people singing to God, a dear beautiful friend came and sat with me.  She hugged me and asked how I was, and I asked her to say a prayer for me..."to be able to accept grace, even though I don't deserve it."

And that, as always, was all I needed.  it's a struggle to find the right words, to describe the way it felt to be there.  It was the kind of atmosphere where people closed their eyes and held out their hands and hearts to God.  where people prayed out loud and kept singing after the music stopped.  where I forgot that I hate to cry in front of people and let tears travel down my cheeks.
they were tears that wondered at grace.  they embraced the impossibility of something so much bigger than my questions, insecurities, and self-criticisms.  they gave thanks for the room full of people who love God with their whole hearts, souls, strength, and minds.  to say it simply, being there was such freedom - to give up the things that bind us down and worship God freely.  And when we sang the line "So I'll stand, with arms high and heart abandoned", almost every arm in the room was raised.

some kind of perfection

today I am happy because people are beautiful and the earth is glowing.  the leaves are golden, the sky is impossibly blue, and the air tastes like justice.

The earth was full of life and there were dandelions growing out the window, thick as thieves, already seeded, fat as big yellow plungers.  She let my hand go.  I got up.  "I'll go out and dig a few dandelions," I told her.
Outside, the sun was hot and heavy as a hand on my back.  I felt it flow down my arms, out my fingers, arrowing throught the ends of the fork into the earth.  With every root I prized up there was return, as if I was kin to its secret lesson.  The touch got stronger as I worked through the grassy afternoon.  Uncurling from me like a seed out of the blackness where I was lost, the touch spread.  The spiked leaves full of bitter mother's milk.  A buried root.  A nuisance people dig up and throw in the sun to wither.  A globe of frail seeds that's indestructible.
-Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

unintentional insults

"Are you interested in medicine or anything?  You seem so intelligent."

The musician and writer in me cringed.

i hope my violin teacher doesn't read this

As a violin performance major, I'm supposed to practice at least two hours a day.  I probably average about an hour and a half, including the times I practice for chamber music.  But this isn't about that.

It's about this:  What really matters?  And what makes us choose the things we do?

Being a good violinist is an integral part of who I am, and I'm afraid to think of how losing that would change me.  But -- being a phenomenal violinist is not at all my dream.  Because I know that if that ever happens, it will mean I sacrificed some of the things that are the most important to me - the things that matter.

Is this just an attempt to justify myself?  When I intentionally choose to practice less than I could, it's easy to explain this choice by saying that other things are more important.  But is it right?

When I struggle with the choices I'm making, sometimes it helps to identify the things I value the most, so I can see where my priorities fall.  So here's what's important to me, in the broadest sense:
faith.
relationships with people.
finding and embracing truth.

That sums it up pretty well, actually, and all three of them overlap.  And in this moment, none of them involves dragging my tired self to a practice room.  Instead I will curl up on a couch with a book and maybe a spectacularly knitted blanket, and I will be content in doing the wrong thing which, in the end, feels right.

incomprehensibility

Today I went to the Early Church at Our Community Place, where I am so often confronted with the goodness of God.  Today I can't describe it except to say that I always find what I need.
We are the temple in which God dwells.  We are the living stones which are built up day after day.  
"Work is love made visible."
I like when things happen at just the right time.


Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret.
...
You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.
And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,
And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,
And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,
And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.

And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart,
even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection,
even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy,
even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead
are standing about you and watching.
...
Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
-Khalil Gibran

moving stars

"Dragonflies came and hovered over the pool.  They were all colors of blue -- powdery sky blue, dark night blue, shimmering with almost black iridescent light, and mountain blue.  There were stories about the dragonflies too.  He turned.  Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time immemorial stories, as old Grandma called them.  It was a world alive, always changing and moving; and if you knew where to look, you could see it, sometimes almost imperceptible, like the motion of the stars across the sky."


-Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

chapel

One of the best parts of my day was letting tears fill my eyes while I watched a girl in purple sock feet pour her heart out over a piano.  As long as there is emotion and passion and togetherness, there is hope.

These echoing words aren't love.
I'm being taunted by my own thoughts.
The world doesn't need more pain.
I'm just repeating what's already been said.

Being broken can be mended
But my pieces have been lost along the way.
I'm not together the same
But only I notice I'm missing.

There's light on these dark walls,
And as I pray each day it's lighter.
And there are rainbows slipping through
The prisms I carry inside.
The promises I feel are real
They crumble the brokenness I felt
And my soul won't rock to sleep at night
With its lips sewn shut.
It's bringing light (and life and sound and song)
To this silence.


Grace Engle
http://emu.edu/blog/podcast/2010/11/03/light-the-silence-take-back-the-night/

light in the silence?

for Take Back the Night week we watched Searching for Angela Shelton - about one woman's journey to meet and talk with everyone else in the country with her name, and telling her story of childhood sexual abuse along the way.  because the only thing they had in common was their name, it was supposed to be a good picture of what women in America go through.  24 out of 40 of them had experienced physical or sexual abuse.

There are times when something is sad and you cry and feel better; and there are times like this, when you can't comprehend the magnitude of grief.  Your mind screams at you to distance yourself from the emotion of what you're seeing because otherwise you'll shatter.  And I kept thinking that it's so hard to find God in the midst of his people's cries of pain.

How do I live with that?  How am I supposed to respond when it feels like the world's hurt is stronger than the healing?
The theme of Take Back the Night is Light the Silence.  It's about hearing voices of hope, and how if we speak in unity we can overcome the pain.  Looking back on my own life thus far, I remember how some of the times when I felt the most hurt and pain were also some of the times when I most clearly felt the presence of God.  So I believe it's true, even when it doesn't feel true.

I don't know how to light the silence.  but I'm trying to trust God to show me.

three kinds of Beauty

I had a truly thought-provoking Halloween costume for the first time maybe ever.  Grace and Bekah and I, together, were Beauty.  I represented Biblical Beauty:  Moroccan djellaba, scarf head covering, sandals, no makeup or jewelry, and a black X over the mouth to represent silence.  Bekah represented Worldly Beauty:  miniskirt, halter top, high heels, big earrings, straightened hair, lots of makeup.  (It took the longest to get her ready out of the three of us.)  And Grace represented Inner Beauty and dressed the way she normally would -- with lots of self-expression:  green dress, hot pink jacket, sparkly scarf, cornrowed hair, and bunny slippers.

It was supposed to be a challenge, to make people think about what true beauty really is.  Beauty is the essence of self.  It doesn't restrain or conform.  Where Bekah and I were constrained and unnatural, Grace was free, and she was truly beautiful.  

I don't know what most people thought of us.  Some people said it was a good idea, anyway, and we did win the costume contest at Fall Fest.  But I hope it was more than that.  In a culture where surface beauty is overwhelmingly present, I hope we stood out as a protest.  I'm sick of seeing girls and women everywhere place value on themselves only for how they look.  I can't keep watching other people and myself stifle parts of ourselves for the sake of what we perceive as beauty.  I want to live in a world where we value thoughts and words and faith and actions and questions and truth and community.  I want us to stop trying to use our looks to gain power while pretending that our very souls aren't shrinking inside us.  I want us to embrace our whole selves, flaws and all.  What if we believed that imperfections can be beautiful too?  We are all so very human, after all, but we are made in the image of God and nothing can be more beautiful than that.

So I will search for Inner Beauty every day.  It's a journey, like almost everything in life that's worth searching for.  I am going to try so hard to believe that true beauty is the most powerful thing.  It's what you feel when you look at someone who is so flamboyantly themself...you just have to smile, because you see their raw and measureless beauty.  And that is worth so much more than a mask of artificial beauty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

beginnings

once upon a time, Meg had lots of thoughts about life and the way the world should be.  and she needed a place to write about them.  so she started a blog and named it after a plant which some people would call a weed, but is in fact deeply metaphorical.