Pursuing Pleasure While Poor

It's bitter, but not surprising, how the creative, creek-stomping, count-your-blessings good life breaks down when there's not enough money to pay rent. The world is so skeptical of under-employed college graduates, artists, and low-income stay-at-home moms. At least once a week I read or hear a digital tirade against people like myself. You know…us parasites on food stamps? We unemployable college grads. who majored in English? We moms who simultaneously undermine capitalism and feminism because we’re raising our babies on less than $50,000 a year.

I confess: I made that number up because I’ve been poor so long I don’t even know what kind of income supports a household that can pay the bills every month.

So even on the best of days, it’s hard to justify the good life. It’s like you only get a ticket to live the dream once you’ve crossed some socio-economic threshold I don’t fully understand. It makes me wonder how the holistic healers of the world make ends meet. It makes me wonder if those brilliant women who post crochet tutorials ever have to pick up groceries from the open door.

I also find myself trapped in a double standard. I am compelled to make the world beautiful. I’m honored to give back to my community. I am often presented with opportunities to make connections and a little money from my hobbies.

But I’m broke and in my shame, I feel unable to give. I feel unable to pursuit those opportunities. On one level it’s a material problem. I can’t promote my hoop-dance classes at a local event if I don’t have printer paper to print flyers or am uncertain I’ll be able to swing the bill to rent a space. So there’s one opportunity lost under the proverb “you have to have money to make money.”

I understand the limitations created by the material-financial aspect of the struggle, but it’s the shame-component that’s insidious.Making connections, making art, stomping in the creek, that’s what life is made of. That’s free. That’s beautiful. That’s all I fucking have. Yet still the regular raging bombardment against the poor, like we’re villains for pursuing pleasure while poor. The glaring, continually cited, examples are cell phone, tattoos, and cars. The media starts screaming, “How DARE she walk into family services wearing nice jeans” like every poor woman should wear rags. Hypocrites hide their credit card debt under bottles of prescription anti-depressants while they condemn the 2% of Floridian food-stamp recipients who failed drug tests.

So I’m here to make class warfare. I’m proposing a key component that all my brush-ins with Marxism seem to ignore. I’m talking unpaid labor and beauty as cultural capital. Play every week at open mic.? You’re rich, my friend, because you give. Raising smart, beautiful babies? You’re a teacher, girlfriend, and deserve the status given to teachers. Keep a garden that showers your loved-one with tomatoes and zucchini. Yours are the hands that build society. This is my anthem to the volunteers, the storytellers, and the folks who know where the best creeks are. This is my anthem to folks who fill their time with the works of hand and mind.

You are worthy. I am worth. We are rich. We are generous. We are living the good life…with or without the permission granted by little pieces of green paper.

Where My Girls At? Searching For Coyote Woman

Coyote saunters across the myths, legends, and stories of the American west making mischief wherever he goes. In Din`e bahane`: The Navajo Creation Story, Paul G. Zolbrod explains that, "One of the most controversial characters among the Navajo is Coyote, prince of chaos, who is also the most notable catalyst. Transformer, troublemaker, trickster, deity Coyote is all of these, and more. He stole the stars laid out by First Man and scattered them, willy nilly, across the heavens. Yet, from Coyote's unruly behavior, changes came about that made life better. From Coyote's foolishness, mortals gained wisdom, learned what, and what not, to do. Coyote, as the forerunner of change, created ways of doing things so that customs new moral codes, ceremonies, designs for living came into being." Coyote shakes up the status quo to either make change or reaffirm the importance of tradition.

You can browse online and find pages of stories about how Coyote tampered with the stars, fell in love with a star, helped a young boy become a warrior, or established boundaries between life and death. However, you'll quickly notice that these are Old Man Coyote stories or stories about a sexually rambunctious Coyote whose dick is so long it frightens women away. Coyote loves women. He chases women. In some stories he helps them and in others tricks them into having sex.

One Blackfoot legend describes how Coyote created women from leftover buffalo bones.  The story ends with the declaration that, "And even to this day, if you have one group of men, and another of women, the men will want to sit by the fire and smoke. But the women talk. And whether it is because they were made out of the left-over bones that clicked and rattled, or whether it is because A-pe'si, the Coyote --who is a noisy creature himself--had a part in their making, no one can say." All women carry a bit of Coyote magic in their blood.

"Coyote Woman Dreaming" by Susan Seddon-Boulet

However, Franchot Ballinger  observes that stories about Coyote (and Trickster figures as a whole) almost invariably cast the protagonist as male. As a sexual creature, an object of satire, and a transgressor of social structures, Coyote occupied a traditionally male space. Even today, our social imagination typically casts men as the rovers, the wise fools, and shamans.

Coyote-Woman steps into this vacuum carrying a slightly different kind of medicine in the pockets of her crochet coat. Like Old Man Coyote, she is an Outsider. She saunters back and forth between wilderness and civilization learning the lessons that both worlds have to offer. She plays the fool, capering, clowning, and joking with the best. She is often called a fool because she rages against boundaries and breaks the rules that "only a fool would break". However, in reality, her foolishness is clever, wild, and irreverent.  As Ina Woolcott explains, "Coyote's medicine includes understanding that all things are sacred and that yet nothing is sacred."

This is Coyote-Woman's brilliant power. She sees the world as sacred, but not untouchable. She builds no churches and believes that old, mysterious, and holy objects belong to the world, not on high shelves and museum cases. She honors tradition and history as a living thread that is continually rewoven into new forms.

In fact, she is a new form herself. Coyote-Woman reclaims that traditionally male mythological space as she teaches women to reinvent themselves, test their limitations, discern worthwhile risks from danger, and sing ideas into being.

If First Mother gave women corn and men tobacco, it was Coyote Woman who evened out the deal later. 

Between Worlds

Yesterday Sze Huei Yek over at Rebelle Society wrote a thought-provoking article taking yogis to task for "pseudoscience speeches." She basically argues that while she has personally benefited from her yoga, yogis should be mindful of the claims they make about the practice as a whole. Those claims, Yek worries, simply are not valid--at least not in the world of science where valid claims are based on observation, hypothesis, and experimentation in statistically controlled situations.  It's that distinction, that willingness to remind folks that science has its own set of rules and procedures that makes me wish I could bake Ms. Yek cookies!

I only keep a toe in the world of yoga, but I see the same problematic tendency toward pseudoscience in the pagan community. Paganism was my entry point into meditation, breath work, and energy work, which are also common practice in yoga. Paganism came with a history and worldview that frequently clashes with the history and worldview that I honor as an intellectual, an experience that I imagine intellectual yogis struggle with as well.

For years I experienced this strange, often surreal divide between what I think of as my Academic Self and my Witchy Self. As my Academic Self I sorted through peer-reviewed journals, formed structured arguments, and marshaled both evidence and logic to support my claims. I lived in a world where I prided myself on thinking deeper, challenging assumptions, and demanding proof. Though my writing processes remained intuitive and alchemic, the work was intellectual and belonged to the respectable world of academic. As my Witchy Self I traded scholarly journals for bonfire chants where I channeled the knowledge of my ancestors. I still tried to think deeper, but the only proof was experience and the assumptions that I challenged where the foundation on which that respectable academic world was built.

I learned to roll with it...kind of like code-switching, I suppose. I kept my worlds apart and capered like Coyote Woman between the intellectual and intuitive worlds.

Until the day I recognized one of my professors from a pagan festival. I felt oddly outed, like some kind of hippie-spy exposed in the sedated corridors of a rural Midwestern university. Or worse, I worried, perhaps I would unwittingly become the person who outed a respectable professional as a woman who danced with animal spirits.

I decided to keep my quiet and keep my world divided, but the conflict was officially exposed. As a mindful person, I knew that I had a problem when I cringed to hear this professor offhandedly mention goddesses. I knew I had a problem if there was alarm in my head screaming, "You can NOT talk about this here. This is embarrassing. This is wrong. Everyone will think you're silly!"

However, I did not sing or pray to solve my problem. I read. I  reread Wicca 101 books, I hosted a handful of pagan circles where we discussed spirituality, and I tracked down Ronald Hutton's Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. 

The process allowed me to see that my conflict wasn't rooted in an inherent conflict between the worlds of academic and intuitive experience, nor an inherent conflict between science and religion, nor the incompatibility of being pagan and knowing a bit about history. The problem lay in refusing to call apples “apples” and oranges “oranges“. The problem was pseudoscience.

For example, let's take the basic claim, "Wicca is a valid religion." Too often modern pagans attempt to validate their faith by arguing that it's an ancient religion. It's not. It was created in the 1950s by Gerald Gardner. It was undoubtedly inspired by Gardner's interpretation of ancient history and ancient history is undoubtedly filled with goddesses, symbols, and stories that are worth exploring today. However, Wicca itself, as both a label and a practice came out of the mid-twentieth century. To claim otherwise is to repeat the problem many pagans accuse Christians of having: attempting to pass mythology-tradition as history.

I also believe that making false claims about Wicca’s history does the religion a dreadful disservice. The world doesn't need more "old" religions rooted in outdated worldviews and rituals. The world needs new world-views that embrace what humanity has learned over the centuries about science, sociology, and living in a diverse, humane society. The more we are willing to learn about history and science, the more we know about the realities that exist beyond the traditional borders of academia. The more we learn, the more we can do to validate practices and beliefs that flourish outside the accepted world-view.

Similarly, when pagans and yogis make their claims from within their tradition, they work to validate that tradition as its own body of knowledge. Not everything can be proven with science. Nor does it need to be. Therefore, I believe we do better work when we make claims like, "Kryia yoga teaches...." or "Modern pagans are inspired by ancient religions that believed...."

There are valid paths to knowledge beyond the rules of peer review and scientific method. However, I think it’s misguided and sometimes deceitful to try to pass one of those methods off as science. It’s that mislabeling–that “pseudoscience” babble that’s invalidating–not necessarily the claim itself.

As a society we're all struggling to balance intuitive experience with a mechanical, scientific world-view. However, it's a mistake to convolute personal experience with scientific study and make false claims about the history of a religion or the effects of breathing through the left nostril. Doing so just makes for poor science. However, when we embrace practices like yoga and Wicca as distinctive branches of knowledge and tradition, they flourish. It may not be science, but it is good. 

How I Met Coyote

Coyote Madonna by Terri Windling

Once upon a time, this gal  brought home her second baby, looked around the house, and decided her life was a train wreck. She needed a few days alone in the Wild Country to pull her head together, but what with a baby, a toddler, and an essay on Euripides’s “Medea” due on Tuesday, her options were limited. She certainly didn't want to pull a Greek tragedy on her beautiful family, so she decided to pray.

While she was praying, Coyote-Woman sauntered up. She pulled two bundles of sweet herbs from the bottomless pockets of her crochet coat and offered them to the unsuspecting mother. “Smoke the first bundle,” instructed Coyote-Woman, “And I’ll patch you up with the other.”

As Coyote-Woman started nosing around under the bewildered mother’s skirts, the gal asked, “Are you a midwife? I thought Bear was the midwife.”

Coyote-Woman laughed, “Bear Medicine? Do you want to curl up in a cave with your babies for the next five years? You’re not the stuff attachment parenting is made of, girl. Smoke my sweet herbs and we’ll walk the long road with our feet in the Wild Country and our hands tending the Hearth.”

So she smoked the sweet herbs and welcomed a Coyote Spirit into her life.

Coyote is one part spirit guide, one part imaginary friend, and something like an alter ego. She’s a devilish co-pilot and always takes up too much space on the dance floor. She capers between the mundane and the ridiculous, teaching folks how to stay sane in a mind-boggling world.

5 years after slipping into my life disguised as a midwife, Coyote-Woman continues to offer advice on navigating the contradictory worlds of yoga, feminism, hoop dance, university, crochet, marital romance, community building, and part-time employment in public education.

For the next few days, with some randomness tossed in between, I'll be exploring the stories, symbols, and meditations that make Coyote-Woman a powerful ally. 

Gardening as an Act of Faith - Redeux

Two years ago I contemplated gardening as an act of faith. You would think that in the elapsed time I would have moved beyond the optimistic novice stage. I have not. Last spring we bulldozed the half collapsed shed that sheltered the wildflowers from the lawnmower and in a cruel act of geometry, the bulldozer’s path deposited the ruins atop my original vegetable garden plot. Sullenly resigned, I decided not to plant that spring, a choice that the summer’s blistering drought somewhat justified.

Sister Rain Wind brought a rainbow...and devastated the iris bed

Now the yard is emerging from a soggy, cool spring in a tangle lush glory. The early tomatoes at Farmer’s Market are the size of small melons. My fingers long to sink into the dirt, but my faith is being tested. Monsoon-like rains flooded 9/10ths of our yard and turned the lowlands between the spirit tree and the highway into a river. Its current ripped the freshly planted iris bulbs from their earthen bed. The daisies, now unprotected, twice thrust shoots toward the sky and were decapitated by the lawnmower. Grass quickly ran rampant in the children’s fairy garden. My shovel broke.

Bringing the garden inside

In the wake of the iris tragedy, I avoided the garden until yesterday. A friend arrived and asked for the grand-tour. He asked about the numerous half-finished projects. My only reply was that I’m a gardening-procrastinator. He proceeded to irreverently uproot the zucchini that had sprung up unexpected among the cilantro. He gave me mint and renewed my faith.

By evening the chickens had ripped the zucchini sprouts back out of the ground. I replanted them.  I hauled over reclaimed timber to build a bed for the lilies I had impulsively purchased on sale last week. I planted the lilies in the dark. I prepared honeysuckled cuttings for transfer. I gathered bright bouquets of flowers from the abandoned gardens of foreclosed houses.

Lilies and glimpse of the fairy garden

If gardening is an act of faith, then I am agnostic. I remain uncertain that I will ever comprehend the green face of god. Yet even the Pope claims that non-believers can find heaven’s gardens on the path of their good-works. So I tend the plants entrusted to my care and hope it will be enough.

Portrait By a Neighbor - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Frederick Carl Frieseke · Sunbathing

 "Before she has her floor swept
Or her dishes done,
Any day you'll find her
A-sunning in the sun!

It's long after midnight
Her hey's in the lock,
And you never see her chimney smoke
Till past ten o' clock!

She digs in her garden
With a shovel and a spoon,
She weeds her lazy lettuce
By the light of the moon.

She walks up the walk
Like a woman in a dream
She forgets she borrowed butter
And pays you back cream!


Her lawn looks like a meadow,
And if she mows the place
She leaves the clover standing
And the Queen Anne's lace!

One day I'll mime Edna St. Vincent Millay leaning out from a Harlem apartment window to water a bedraggled pot of daisies.  I'll possess the gardening skill of a somber forest-child whose fingertips coax open blooms of night phlox and moonflower. In the meantime, I guzzle sun tea, drop the steeped bags and mint leaves into the bottom of each hole, and plant lilies by solar garden lights. There's no moon tonight. So much for poetry, eh?

From PhotoHuntress's LiveJournal

From Jame Conception (I think) on a t-shirt 

Some Poetry