Informed Consent
Let me start by saying, this world is a mess. We are in dire straits—and in the face of such extreme threat, only extreme responses make any sense.
I will warn you now that what follows will not be what usually appears on this blog. It will not be a psychoeducational article you can forward to your mom or a docile musing on the merging of spirituality and attachment theory. It will not be politically neutral. It will not be polite. It will not even all be prose. Some of it may offend you, or trigger your anxiety. What follows is my attempt to transform my grief, my fear, and my despair into something useful—into rage, rage enough to fuel resistance in the form of sustained and meaningful action.
I hope my words will make you angry, too. Please consider this your Informed Consent.
*****
Sledding
My daughter turned four years old last month. I’ve never taken her sledding; we don’t get much snow, and there are few good hills in our neighborhood. But I grew up sledding. It was one of my great childhood joys. So I want to take her sledding in the mountains this winter; she might just be old enough for the tubing hill in Winter Park.
I want to take my daughter sledding while I still can. After all, there may no longer be snow in the mountains when my grandchildren are her age. She may be the last generation to hold such bright, frosty memories in her heart—blue sky, red noses, white slopes, laughter and aching lungs and snow-burned cheeks.
*****
Protest
My poetry is my protest,
the loudest voice I can muster,
an alchemy of words
transforming grief and rage and fear
into a bridge
to a brighter and softer world.
To make poetry is
to fracture despair
and craft of the sparkling shards
a kaleidoscope of hope,
a radiant image of what should have been—
what still could be—
if only we could learn
to be kind.
*****
My Demons
I use an app to chart and manage my chronic illness; it tracks my sleep, my daily fatigue, the fluctuations in my symptoms, and my heart rate, and then combines the data into a daily score to help me predict how my body will handle the day. This past October and into early November, my scores started to skew. Looking closer, I noticed my heart rate was abnormally high. As persistent high heart rates took a steady toll on my body day after day, it took me a while to realize what was going on. And then I realized it was my old friend, Anxiety.
He is a sharp-nailed, scaly demon who loves ripping up the inside of my chest, squeezing my lungs in his piercing claws, and ramming his knobby head into my heart until it judders out of rhythm and makes me feel sick. He's a hungry beast; I have to feed him new worries every day to keep him content, to make him feel useful, like he’s doing something to help. Over the years, I have learned to manage the skin-tingling hypervigilance and the cold lightning in my belly—but I hadn’t felt anything this intense in a decade.
Then, abruptly, on November 10th—the day I wept at church; the day I finally set down the pain of my clients long enough to cradle my own—Anxiety left me. And his brother, Despair, slithered inside, twining around my organs and locking in like cold steel.
Since that day, Anxiety has not returned. And all this time, I have been in a war with Despair, trying to evict him, trying to reclaim the territory he seized, trying to thaw out my insides. You want to know the only thing that has worked?
I’d like to introduce you to Anger. Look at her—that white-hot, shimmering beauty glowing inside a cloud of steam with her endless, hungry energy grasping constantly for change, that sleek, loud, muscular vixen who gets shit done. She came barging in like a queen, demanding my full attention. Despair gets sweaty and sick in her heat and doesn’t stick around. Anxiety stays away, too; she loves upsetting the status quo and throwing all the quaint, oppressive rules out the window, and that stresses him the fuck out. It’s a relief, honestly, having her around.
These days, I’m renovating, finding the courage to clear out a little room for Anger, so I can invite her to stay for a while. I want to get to know her better, let her teach me, let her hone me—maybe even introduce her to my friends. I think we could get a hell of a lot done, all of us together.
*****
Apocalypse
An apocalypse is coming,
a reckoning of our own making,
a day when the works of our hands
and the treasures of our hearts
will be revealed.
The fire will come.
The forests will burn
and the seas turn to steam,
and all that will be left
is how well we loved
and how much we gave.
Today, in a thousand tiny ways,
we are choosing what we will save.
When the house has all burned down,
it will be too late to go back for your sons;
all you’ll have are the keepsakes you couldn’t bear to leave behind
because you were so sure the boys heard you tell them to get out.
But they
—like this country; like our planet—
cannot save themselves.
Drop the useless baubles.
Go rescue the children.
*****
We Were Not Meant To Live Like This
We were not meant to live like this, immured in concrete cities, millions of bodies thick, streets clogged, teeming with humanity’s desperation. We were not meant to pump carbon into the atmosphere, to poison our oceans with plastic, to heap trash into pits that will last for a thousand years. We were not meant to forget that the milk in the jugs is the gift of a living, breathing animal who has borne young and that the bread in the bag was once wheat waving in the wind.
We were not meant to live like this, trampling each other into the dirt in a vicious race for vanishing resources, waging war with planet-killing weapons, guarding our arbitrary borders with guns as if we own the earth upon which we impose these invisible lines. We were not meant for starvation and slaughter, for children entombed in bombed-out buildings, for streets made desolate by hatred. We were not meant to need the term, “crimes against humanity.”
We were not meant to live like this, each of us trapped on one side of the immeasurable and expanding canyon that yawns between the rich and the poor. We were not meant for poverty, for its relentless hunger, its pervasive helplessness, its churning anxiety, its rigid and imprisoning cycles of injustice. Neither were we meant for wealth, for the gluttonous hoarding of riches infinitely beyond what we could ever use or enjoy, for the sick swelling and obesity of soul that we call “success.” We were not meant for hierarchy, or for the amplified voices of a privileged few to drown out the groans of multitudes.
We were not meant to live like this, raping our Mother, the Earth, tearing from her warm flesh all that she would give us freely if we could simply learn to ask and receive and be satisfied. We were not meant to plunder one another, to obliterate cultures, languages, religions, and landscapes in the name of progress. We were not meant to colonize, erasing beauty and wisdom we can never bring back. We were not meant to stand with our boot on the neck of our brother.
We were not meant to live like this, as if human dignity were a limited resource that only some can have, and only at the expense of others. We were not meant to fear one another, or to sacrifice our humanity in order to survive. We were not meant to be kept so busy scrabbling for rights and basic needs that we have no energy left with which to rend the system—which we must do if we are ever to rebuild a safer world.
No, we were meant for small homes on the edges of endless meadows and deep forests. We were meant to fish in clean rivers and gather fruit with gratitude. We were meant to work in the sun, to break bread in community, and to sleep skin-to-skin with our families. We were meant to grip the earth with our bare toes. We were meant to feel tiny beneath the stars. We were meant for abundance—and meant, also, to know that abundance is not the same as surplus; that abundance is simply enough; that wealth only matters if it is flowing through you to others.
We were meant to raise our neighbor’s children amongst our own, to share hearths and meals, pantries and clotheslines, sorrows and celebrations. We were meant to dwell in villages with wells of living water at their centers, where no one knows loneliness and solitude is a gift, not a culture. We were meant to adore our elders and revere our children, to heed the wisdom of our women and tend the softness of our men. We were meant to have time in abundance—time to play, time to make daisy-chains in the shade, time to tell the stories of our lives, often enough that we learn what they mean.
We were meant to join hands, and gaze into one another’s eyes, and be reminded of how much we need each other. We were meant to remember that we are spirit and dust, each of us both eternal and fleeting in our significance. We were meant for quiet, for art, for dancing, for rest. We were meant for mutual reverence. We were meant for love.
*****
Ancestral Rage:
A response to The Invisible Women of Prehistory
I carry the rage of my ancestors,
women robbed of their divinity,
uprooted from the wild earth,
scattered from their ancient circles
of feminine wisdom and communal strength,
and chained to the hearth
where they could no longer feel the wind on their skin.
I hold their tears in my throat
and their unheard wailing swells my guts,
an age-old stillborn grief.
But I carry their rage in both hands.
Millennia before the Christian God was born,
with his thirst for blood
and his cold transcendent glory,
humankind worshipped the Goddess:
Immanent
Warm
Present
Life-Giver
A voluptuous She,
breathing in the trees,
surging through the soil,
blessing the world with her birth-blood.
Long, long before a distant Father God demanded Isaac’s life,
and ordered genocide in Canaan,
women were holy
and there was no war.
Men, with their impressive strength—
bulging biceps and rippling calves,
backs glowing with sweat,
broad and hairy chests heaving—
they understand only power-over.
How could they not?
They have always been able to dominate.
(Imagine how that capacity can warp
a soul,
a race,
a species.)
Their forefathers made spears and taught themselves to hunt;
the spilling of blood, the taking of life,
has always been their offering.
Women must know strength a different way:
not power-over but power-with.
How else is one to lead, with a babe at the breast,
another in the belly,
and a third leaning against the hip?
Every mother knows
you never win by forcing your way;
you must get down on your knees,
and be gentle,
and hold out your hand,
and then the storm subsides,
and your little enemy relents
and climbs into your lap to ask for a hug.
This is how we must heal our world:
by kneeling,
embracing,
communing.
Power-with is a circle of grandmothers who know their worth.
Power-with is a sister’s arms bracing a woman in labor.
Power-with is a chorus drifting through a grain field at harvest.
Power-with is women laughing together at the loom.
For this reason, I believe
women were always meant to be our leaders,
and without them,
we have lost our way.
*****
The Older I Get
The older I get—the more I learn, the more I love, the more I lament—the more I am convinced that Patriarchy and White Supremacy are the two greatest forces of evil in our world.
Call them powers and principalities. Call them systemic oppression. Call them man-made constructs. Call them Satan. Call them whatever you want. But we do not need salvation from our individual sins nearly so much as we need salvation from our collective evil. In all the ways that we collude with Patriarchy and White Supremacy—in our laws, our votes, our spending, our entertainment, our education systems, our neighborhoods, our relationships, our unexamined beliefs—in all these collusions, the petty ones as well as the atrocities, we condemn ourselves to live in Hell.
This is Hell. We are here. If you don’t see it, then it’s only because you are benefitting from Patriarchy and White Supremacy. And any world where a few benefit from the suffering of the many—that is not a world worth preserving.
What we need is not another revival meeting or a National Day of Prayer, but a full-on harrowing of Hell.
*****
A Blessing
For those made vulnerable by the wombs they bear but cannot control;
For those who love outside the lines;
For those born within bodies that do not match their self-knowledge;
For those seeking shelter with the ashes of a lost home still clinging to their skin;
For those who carry the scars of their ancestors’ bondage in the script of their very cells—
For all those who have grown up beneath a barrage of injustices,
Who have had to wrest their freedom-to-Be from the jaws of the wolf,
Who have fought to make the world recognize their human dignity—
For all of you, a blessing:
May you know the joy of controlling your own lives.
May you experience safety in your bodies.
May you raise your children in peace, and gift them a good world to live in.
May you find comfort in community.
May you know hearths where you can lay down your armor and rest.
May you dream bigger dreams and hold hope within you like a lantern.
May you receive leaders who see that your needs are tied to the wellbeing of the whole.
May you become leaders who teach us how to transcend our tribalism.
May you have all the good things.
*****
The Lord’s Prayer
Father above us,
Mother among us,
hallowed is your name throughout the earth,
and sacred is your image in each of us.
Your kingdom come;
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven,
and now as it was at creation.
Send rain upon our dry fields
and revive our burning forests
to give us this day our daily bread.
Forgive us our disconnection,
and teach us to receive your affectionate nearness
as we forgive those whose disconnection has harmed us.
Lead us not into destruction,
but deliver us from ourselves.
For yours is all life,
all love,
and all beauty,
both now and forever.
Amen.
*****
Selected Bibliography
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, & Love by bell hooks
Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger by Soraya Chemaly
Jesus & John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith & Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes du Mez
The Invisible Women of Prehistory: Three Million Years of Peace, Six Thousand Years of War by Judy Foster & Marlene Derlet
The Cross & the Lynching Tree by James Cone
My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma & the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts & Bodies by Resmaa Menakem
White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, & the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin
Comments