I think the pieces are finally coming together for me.
I was born a misfit here. I did not fit into the rigid fundamentalist, misogynistic world into which I was born although I spent the first half of my life trying to, till it came close to killing me off.
Then I discovered that other worlds existed.
I found the broken but so beautiful world of my Native America brothers and sisters, who took me in when my own white world had spit me out. With them, I got my first ever sense of having a right to even take up space on this planet, and my first taste of what the words family and community really defined. If it had been possible for me to change the color of my skin stay there, I would have. But that urban NA community was in its death throes even then and no longer exists.
Then I found another world that had me convinced there really MUST be a heaven after all, right here on earth and I had just found it: the Women’s Community. I had come all the way home, surrounded by powerful sisters who tenderly took me in, and in essence told me that my own culture had lied to me for a lifetime: I was NOT defective or sinful, or selfish because I could not turn myself into a soft spoken, ever obedient, self sacrificing daughter/wife/breeding machine. (And that, wonder of wonders, I was not only NOT “frigid” or sexually defective or “damaged beyond repair” either! I was quite simply, a lesbian!! Who the hell knew?)
I stayed with my sisters a long time, closing out the entire male half of this world as best one can. In those years of healing from prolonged sexual/physical abuse, there wasn’t a man alive who would have been safe within ten feet of me, no matter what a good man he was. I was a proud feminist lesbian separatist and eager activist. (With hundreds my sisters, after being denied a parade permit, I once closed down one of the main freeway arteries heading into Mpls, for several hours, and will never forget the healing moment facing down that red faced, shouting policeman who thought he could intimidate me. He was the one who backed up, not me,
Then time passed and things changed for me in ways I could not understand then, and I had to eventually move on. As I healed I began to see the goodness is some men. Gentleness, in fact, that I did not know any man possessed. So I could not stay with my sisters, for this was not allowed. I wondered if there would even be anywhere I could know I belonged forever.
Next came the fascinating world of alternative spirituality, and the New Age Community. After my deadly fundamentalist Christian upbringing I knew that this, for sure, must be my home ground. All people were welcome there without judgments. I stayed there, too, as long as I could, learned all I could, and was only a few months from ordination in the Spiritualist Faith, when I came to know that no, this was not where I belonged after all. Too much of me refused to see only through that lens either.
Since, I have stopped seeking any established physical community or culture in which to “belong and stay.” I just can’t do it; there is always some part of me that insists on flopping over the established boundaries, every where I go.
I guess instead I have created my own unique “community” of a surprisingly small number of trusted others (in my face to face life,) that I don’t live with physically, but see often, and a huge number of others I have come to bond with and love through this incredible medium, not a few of which just might be reading this right now!
I think I am understanding more fully now, the reason I could not stay in any on place permanently, and why I have never felt like I had a culture of my own.
I am white, but I don’t want to only live with whites.
I am a woman, but I don’t want to only live with women.
I am a gay , but I don’t want to only live with other gay people.
I have a spiritual base but I don’t want to only live with people who share similar beliefs.
I’m poor, old and disabled, but I don’t want to live only with other poor, old and disabled.
I am an American, but I don’t want to live only with Americans, in the American Culture. I also do not really want to belong to anyone else’s culture either.
I want to live with people of all colors.
I want to live with men and women and all the variety of those differently gendered in between
I want to live with straight, gay, bisexual, asexual, and transgendered people.
I want to live with people of all faiths and all spiritual pathways or none, and with atheists, agnostics and secular humanists. (With one GLARING exceptional no evangelizing, spittle spraying. rabidly fundamentalist christian will ever be allowed near me again)
I want to live with all generations, and people of all differing abilities, and economic classes.
Yes, I am an American who fervently loves the best of what my country represents.
But I would leave it tomorrow without a backward glance, if there was a land I could go to where the only pledge that would be asked of it’s rainbow colored, wonderfully diverse people was that we live together in cooperation and peace, and be good citizens of this world, committed the greater good of the seventh generation to come.
Now where is the reincarnation schedule? I want to book my return for when this culture actually exists on this earth.
The dream of a truly multi-cultural society will never die. Thanks for sharing yours. As many here have testified, it does at least exist in spirit & partially in partial community pockets throughout the country. It is still one of our highest ideals.
What I want to believe, (and so I shall!) is that we have one under conscturcion, in non material ways, even as we speak.
That tiny bits of building materials (us) are slowly assembling in places like this, and all over this world where, just a few with this dream run into each other and work on it together.
Like a huge Habitat for Humanity fpr Humanity house being build in very slow motion, by many hands working in many places, each on their own little piece of it.
Then with time, one small group of builders will meet up another with small group, and put thier two completed pices together, then more small groups find them and add their assembled pieces, until someday, a long time from now, a new Habitat for Humanity is actually becomes a reality.
That is such a wonderful belief.
I will slip in here to thank you for both of these diaries. While I admire your words and phrases very much, what stood out for me in your first diary was your recognizing the need to examine what you had written in another place. And then there was your courage in actually looking through your treasured memories.
Thank you very much. BTW, from my place in the ether, you look quite beautiful.
As do you.
I feel like I spent most of my lofe examining what was wrong or off balance with others, and with the world outside of myself, and then trying to fix as much of it as I could.
This portion of my life seems to be about searching for what was off balance within ME, and trying to fix THAT.
It would have been nice to have discovered how to do this much earlier than I did, because it’s absolutely astounding how it has changed my perspective on almost everythng.
Bakc later..need to go see if my doctor is taking care of herself..(grin)
In the spirit of your Habitat for Humanity House, here’s a repost I dropped in DtF’s diary earlier, which I think you’ll appreciate, translated by a poet I consider to be on the frontlines of the type of ‘cultural work’ (yes, let’s call it “work,” not “war”!) you’re calling for:
Keys to the Garden is a collection of the writing from Israel’s Middle Eastern Jews — who live a sort of second class, marginalized status themselves. Many of its writers were unaware of the each others’ work, even of their existence, until collected together in this American published book.
From the ending of the “Forward” by Ammiel (who also edited the volume), written as bombs fell in his parents’ homeland, Bosnia:
Ammiel Alcalay:
After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993); The Cairo Notebooks (Singing Horse Press, 1993); Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights, 1996); Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinovic, translated from Bosnian (City Lights, 1998); Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (City Lights, 1999); From the Warring Factions (Beyond Baroque, 2002); Nine Alexandrias by Semezdin Mehmedinovic, translated from Bosnian (City Lights, 2003); Politics and Imagination (forthcoming); Outcast, a novel by Shimon Ballas, translated from Hebrew (City Lights Press).
interview (pdf!) and towards a foreign likeness bent: translation (pdf!)
Thank you for all of this, Acturus.
There are times when I think it will be the poets, writers, musicians, and artists. those who speak the languare of the human heart and spirit, who will be among the those who can lead us out of this.
If it is too late, and we have taken ourselves too far down, then what they leave behind will be the most acccurate record of who we were, and who we wanted to become.
Those of us that have been to visit the “new place” are really excited about how it is all coming together. . .as I know you know, scribe.
Ready to go at a moment’s notice, just like you are.
Hugs
Shirl
Imagine, diversity without division. How wonderful that would be. I still beleive in it. I have to.
I know I would leave this behind, too, if such a place existed. For now I will try to help create it one step at a time.
Yet another good one, Scribe. Don’t know how you can find it in your heart, but you always seem to do it. Kudos, Kiddo. Keep up the great and open mind that you do have to share with us here. Lots of hugs back and to all the rest here. I can not capitulate any better than you have here.
I honor your journey, and thank you for telling us more about it. Yes, introspection is part of our work in Act III of our lives.
You got me thinking of where I’d look for the most diversity in North America. Short of the starship Enterprise, I thought of university communities,medical centers, Vancouver, theatres and..Star Trek conventions.
But most places are more diverse than we saw in the 50s, wouldn’t you say?
And I too have been gratefully changed in my interactions with Native Americans, and even Native American writing.
I think most cities of any size are MUCH more diverse now. This metro area certainly is. But just a few years ago, I was living in a very small Minnesota town that made me feel like I’d tumbled back to 1960. ALL white and filled with good republica patriots who thought we should jsut blow all the “ragheads” away and be done with it, and good wives who wouldn’t think of meeting for lunch unless they asked thier husbands first, or else simply weren’t avaiable because the had to stay home and COOK lunch. I didn’t stay there very long. 🙂
Hmm.
You get one visit and one only, I believe. Your fellow passengers will be perfect as soon as you yourself are. Same goes for them, of course.
Why, in a world where there are none and have never been any, hope for species-perfection?
I don’t get it. We should cherish the imperfect world we have rather than lament the lack of a perfect one that is an illusion.
I hear that Heaven is perfect. And that nothing ever happens there. That’s how perfection is assured–nothing ever happens.
You have an interesting viewpoint. I don’t know what this Heaven is that you speak of, or that Heaven is perfect and that nothing ever happens there.
In my view, even the “imperfect world that we have” is an illusion.
Who is it that defines this perfection you speak of for us?
For me perfection is embracing who we are and being responsible for our own actions. It is also a continual desire and action towards growth and expansion. Ever seeking a place of greater understanding and love among us and allowing that all of us are unfinished masterpieces of an ongoing work. Our own work as we choose it.
In my view, which colors and informs my opinions, this concept of “Heaven” you refer to is a feeling of allowing and helping each other to grow. . .not an actual place that is somewhere out there up in the sky. It is an ideal or goal that is within. And to do nothing is to cease to exist, not something I think most of us aspire to. JMHO
Hugs
Shirl
so think (some, many) Christian Scientists–not to be confused with the very much loopier and far, far, more dangerous cult of frauds and con-men, the “Church” (LOL!) of “Scientology”, the nearest and the most dangerous thing we have to the former worldwide menace of Nazism–and, I do not make that comparison idly.
Your hypothesis that this imperfect world is an illusion is one which cannot be tested or disproved. Whatever this is in which we “find ourselves”, whether “real” or “illusion” is something we cannot step outside of for purposes of testing and observation; all the same, your assertion suffers from a particular problem which my assumption need not trouble with.
If this “imperfect world” is an illusion, that seems to mean either that you have simply preferred to define away the problem of imperfection, or, alternatively, that “we” are ourselves also just as much an illusion as the rest of the imperfect world (in which case, there’s little point in discussing or considering the matter) or, that “we” are real in some sense that the illusory imperfections are not.
If it’s this last that you claim, then you have a mess of problems–“reality” or features of it, in the midst of other, distinct, “unreality”, components (us) of reality, apparently “duped” by the unreal, the illusory, in which case it seems that the illusory imperfect world “trumps” the “real” and “perfect” world.
No matter how you slice it, your philosophy is a veritable Pandora’s Box of conflicting and needlessly multiplied exceptions and special cases –continually in retreat from a far more direct and simple explanation for the phenomena we perceive: we and the world we inhabit are, while imperfect, as “real” as anything that we are capable of knowing can be.
Your case is that we should do better to deny this imperfection on the view that to deny is to alter or defeat imperfection.
I’ve read the Christian Sience doctrinal texts; they lost there former fascination a long time ago when I learned how to ask better questions.
I see no need to chose one way or or the other. I think we can cherish this imperfect world, lament all the parts that are hurful and wrong, and dream of a more perfect world all at the same time.