hollow words or insulated feelings?

I am embarrassed sometimes that I use the internet this way. That it has become a place to expose my feelings like it has for so many people. Maybe it’s like going to confession, or visiting your favourite old tree. You can say everything and not be judged, and if you are, you can’t look them in the eyes and feel the judgment. It is anonymous, like confession.

I am deeply sad right now. Dissappointed with most of what’s around me, but this isn’t news. Some days it’s worse. I listen to my mother talk about my sister and my nephew on the phone. She’s more erratic than usual, no surprise, learning your dying by something specific will do that. I listen to her though, and I hear a hollowness in her voice, like she’s saying emotional things, but there is no emotion. She’s angry but it feels like nothing. I wonder how often I am like this. I say love, and often I don’t feel love, or I say it when they’re not around and it makes me cry, I say it to the air or to an image of them in my head. I’ve been crying alot. Things are unclear with someone I think I love very much. I can’t talk to him right now. I’ve been thinking so much about it, I don’t even know what I would say If I actually talked to him. I had this thought that if I thought any harder about it, my brain would start to bleed. I sometimes think there is something wrong with me. Like mentally wrong. I think so hard. I am always trying to figure things out, and I mock people and call them arrogant for thinking they have found the one thing that will solve all our problems. Bio-diesel, recycling, sprititual movements, books, money, compassion, love. Who can blame them. It gives people hope to think there is something that will save us.

I listened to all these people last night who are doing social justice work. I was documenting them as part of the Peace Summit. Nothing stuck for me. All the words ran right through me, except for 2. Knowledge Economy. Only 2 that resonated. That this place, my blog, my confessional, my old tree, is housed in one of the only environments where there is the potential to level the playing field. As I know from all my thinking, there is no one thing that will make it all better, no one person, and no particular word. I don’t remember when it first came to me, and it’s not anything particullarly brillliant, but I realized we need to try as many things as possible, the things that feel right for us. Not just the two options, but the 3rd and maybe the 4th. Not just harm-reduction, but abstinence too, and they don’t eliminate each other, they are options. If we are an open society, then that would mean we had choices, not just the lesser of two evils, like everytime I go to the ballot box. Heads hurting again. I should take my advice and try meditating, my brain is needing a rest.

Cancer is our legacy.

My mother has pancreatic cancer. It might be the kind that is less aggressive. It has metastisized on her stomach and liver. She has no obvious symptoms. She is tired, but her spirits are better than they have been in a long time. Maybe it’s because she knows she has less time, maybe it’s because I’m staying with her a bit right now while I figure out where I need to be, mostly I need to be close to her. We have been getting along better, laughing alot and being more affectionate. She has been sick most of her life and isn’t interested in a brave fight against cancer. She doesn’t mind leaving, and I’m not interested in a brave fight to keep her here. I am interested in spending good time with her, and being there for her as much as I can.

My mother getting cancer of course makes me think about it even more than I already do. She is one person, and one person experiencing the disease of our culture. The cancer, the growth, the thing that invades our bodies and most often kills us. If the last hundred years were to have a particular legacy it would be cancer. Over a hundred years of plundering, raping, and poisoning, the earth and its inhabitants, with enthusiasm, or should I say greed, or addiction? Cancer is often used as a metaphor, something deadly that must be removed. An invader. I want to understand it. I always feel like understanding something will help me find some peace with it, or feel less helpless that my mother is going to die of cancer. Although we joked the other day it could be a heart attack that kills her, she’s had 4.

The misery blog

Well I tried to write something happy, and it sucked. I can just rename this misery blog, come join me in my misery, and my insights on misery and universal stupidity.

I went to this herb farm a few days ago run by a woman named Robin Wheeler. I was there for 5 days. I cooked, canned, picked and got happily bonked in the head by peaches, painted, slept, ate, didn’t shower, got dirty, and listened to the rain pound on the roof. I looked over books written by people who escaped from the city and are happily living country life, they also had money. I came back. Woke up the next morning, looked at the concrete towers surrounding me in my mom’s apartment, and the crap on the TV and was struck by how abnormal it all was, everything I was looking at, sitting and living in. I thought about this place I just spent some time in. It felt normal, and that everything she is doing seemed to be about respect, and making amends to the land.

I have many parts to me, I know that. I have the part that falls in love with dresses I can’t afford. Likes parties where I can dress up, eat nice snacks, drink, and have brief conversations with people. I am going to work in a medium where there is huge waste and cost prohibitive materials. I also feel it in my body when I have taken something from a tree or a plant that I shouldn’t have, and experience genuine guilt. I cried harder for a Cypress tree than I did for my father when he died last year. I grew up around horses and felt closer to them than any of the humans in my life. I wrestle with the part of me that is in love with the idea of being in New York City, and the other part, the part that knows that cities are killing the earth, that they are unsustainable, and even with all the green roofs and recycling programs, we can’t erase what’s been done. Cities rely on girls and boys like me( but with more money) who fall in love with “things”, and want the fancy life.

The fancy life vs country life. Country life is not idyllic, I know that. It isn’t really an escape either. You have less people to deal with and fewer social buffers. It is hard work, daily hard work. If your choosing to take care of land, and make amends, like Robin has. I say make amends because of something I heard her say when she was talking about a piece of land in the nearby area. She talked about in terms of being raped of it’s diversity, turned into a lawn, so city folk can have fancy and country at the same time. She also said it just needed the right people to take care of it and it could thrive again. Make amends. These feel like powerful words. I have harmed you repeatedly earth and I want to do whatever I can to let you know that I care about you, and I don’t want you to die. I don’t want all the animals to die. I don’t want to live in a world without Tigers, Elephants or Polar Bears, a world without Redwood and Yew Trees, a place where the air, water and soil are toxic. This is where I live, and this is what is happening, and if it means anything at all I am sorry. I am sorry that people are so stupid that they don’t get that putting poison on food gives people cancer, depletes the soil and kills animals. I am sorry that we lack the wisdom to realize that profit is a lousy motive. If it means anything, I want to do better for you. I can’t promise I won’t fall in love with anymore dresses, and I won’t want fancy things some times, but for as long as I’m here, I will take better care of you. I love you. I love you like I love nothing else.

before I left my apartment I wrote this blah, blah that’s kind of like the rest, but..

a little different.

http://www.liberatefreedom.com/archive/2006/10/15/freedom-—-to-give-our-brightest-deepest-truth

I was just re-reading this article written by Derrick Jensen in 2006. It’s about freedom and slavery. I have one of those metal chords with magnets hanging from my ceiling next to my desk- it’s my idea chain. Something resonates, or connects with some larger story I think I want to tell and it goes on the chord. I found a button the other day as I was cleaning out my desk drawer. It was a quote by Paul Robeson- “The artist must take sides. They must elect to fight for freedom or slavery”. I read this button and the words felt like they were the most perfect thing I could hear. I am packing up my place, a place I’ve been fairly miserable in. Trapped by a rent I can’t afford and bills I can’t pay. I read here, I wrote here, and I hope I have gotten clearer here. I read “A language older than words” by Derrick Jensen two years ago. When I finally got through it, I felt something change in me. I realized I was strong enough to hear and see what is going on in this world I live in, even if it breaks my heart. What is truth? My truth? I don’t always know, I just know that I’m not free. I know that when I eat my fruit I wonder about the crap that’s on it, and if it’s going to kill me. Buy organic. Why do we even make it an option between making stuff that causes cancer and stuff that prevents it. Blueberries with pesticides, blueberries without? You choose. I realized the other day, after walking with Murray down to the lake and seeing a huge pile of garbage outside the garbage can, that really we just don’t give a shit. We don’t care about our freedom, other people’s freedom, our earth, the animals, the fish, the plants, the babies, the women, the men, the elders. We don’t care. We don’t care enough to say no to all of this. To pick up our own shit, to be ourselves in all our imperfect awkwardness, to stop if people need help, to love each other, to really challenge each other to do better, to do what makes us happy, to share, and to see each other. All I hear is blame shifting. I’ve needed alot of time to heal and am still healing from the violence I was raised in, the violence I live in on this planet. I hold this place inside me that is young and hopeful, innocent and full of love. She, I can see how people suffer, even the people who dump the garbage at beautiful Brohm Lake. They don’t care, because they have lost hope, we don’t care, because there doesn’t seem to be a point, because the Government is just going to do whatever they want anyway, and so will the cops, so will the medical and education systems and the developers that are planning our communities.

I don’t want to feel this way. I never want to go there, to the place where I realize most people are content with slavery. Enslaved into a system that requires us to be addicts, ignoring the needs of each other and the planet. I am leaving my apartment in a few days, and in the process of getting rid of as much stuff as I can. I’m putting the rest in storage for a couple of months until I figure out how I can do this all different. I don’t know if I can. I don’t know that I’m prepared to give up my stuff, or do what it would take to live in a way that feels better to me or if it even matters. my deprivation or cutting of ties isn’t going to change it, it could just push me further into a too serious, earnest and kind of boring place. Right now I don’t want to set up another apartment, accumulate more stuff, eat more fruits and vegetables covered in poison because organic is too expensive, get a partner, bring a child into the world so they can do the same. I wish I was one of those people who believed I was just here for me, and that I should just have a good time and fuck everyone else. I want to some days. I want to be one of those people who doesn’t give a shit, who doesn’t care. Oh well.

a time management exercise

practicing time management today. I get so easily distracted I need to find a way to manage it. I have wasted so much time it hurts. First block is going for a walk. Dejavu just this second about the writing about going for a walk. My brain feels weird, my whole head. I feel so angry. Congested with something, I feel like it’s coming from my stomach, but I don’t know. I have one minute until my walk starts. I’ll stop now. Come back at the next break.

Back from the walk. So many creeps out early or at least one in a red car, slowing down. Pig. I don’t know that he was slowing down to look at me, but it seemed like it. It doesn’t even matter what I was wearing, it never does. I don’t wear makeup, I am not skinny, and I dress in whatever I feel like wearing, this morning jean shorts, and a grey t-shirt. I have been approached while wearing a raincoat overalls and army boots, I have had cars slow down beside me when I was wearing leopard tights heels and a long vintage leather coat. It doesn’t matter, women are for sale, so why wouldn’t I be. Anyway, there were also sweet birds on my walk, but pretty quiet, except for the noise in my head, maybe that’s why it hurts. Too fucking loud in there. I have 13 minutes to start writing about something I sort of care about. I care about my friend who asked me to write. I care about the money I could make writing for her and I care about design. So why is it so hard for me to write these blogs for her. I don’t want to dissapoint her. I’m making it harder for myself than it is. I’m thinking of it as an obstacle to overcome. I’m making it hard, and I don’t think it has to be. I’m being a bit of a baby. Now I have 8 minutes and want to set a timer on my computer. So I’ll stop here for now.