It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Into the Wild Places -- A poem for my daughters

Don’t teach my daughters to fear.
Show them instead how to go into the wild places
the forests and deserts
the labyrinths of concrete, asphalt
the frost, flame, and famine of their own
bodies,
minds,
hearts.
Let them leave long blue hairs on lovers’ beds.
Let them carve paths in the mosaic cobblestones of foreign cities and drink too much beer in a smoky polyglot hubub.
Let them shorten their skirts, tattoo their breasts, and raise their voices in the throb of human music.
Let them dig with their minds, unearthing the truths buried in statistics.
Let them weave solutions of fact, fury, and compassion.
Let them fuck joyfully – when, how, who they choose.
Don’t tell them the fire burns.
Show them how to leap the flames, to sear doubt and a good steak.
Don’t tell them their petals char to dirt in the heat.
Show them steel is forged in the inferno and that eternal roses bloom from iron.
Don’t warn them the trees are high and the branches frail.
Let them climb above the birds, skin their knees, and learn to fall.
Don’t ask them to cross their ankles,
wash their hands,
tie their shoes,
shave their legs,
pretty their faces,
trim their waists.
Let them roll in the mud, eat too much cake, drink more than they should, curse and laugh from their curving bellies, and dance without grace.
Don’t ask them to leash themselves to your fears.
Show them instead how to go into the wild places.

Connection, Trust, and Kicking the Football

A ewe picks her lamb out of the flock of other wobbly, frolicking cotton puffs – recognizing her baby by sound and smell.  Horses separated from their herdmates call back and forth across fields and canyons, screaming their fear, excitement, and isolation.

Animals are wired for connection.  For many species, herd, pack, or flock instincts promote survival from predation or, in the case of predators, facilitate hunting.  Community bonds enable them to eat, mate, fend off or avoid attack, and raise their young.

The human animal has the same needs – food, safety, sex, nurturing.  We are wired for community and connection.  For millennia, humans have gathered in tribes, villages, and cities, growing food, building infrastructure, caring for children, pairing and un-pairing, forming bonds – connection.

You would think we’d have it down by now.

Yet, it seems like the simple acts of community and connection – expressing needs, asking, listening, seeing the common nature of our humanity have become mired in a swamp of confusion about belonging, ostracism, rules, and separation.  How often, in our everyday lives, do we reach out and truly see each other?

A friend reminded me the other day of a quote from C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  The little girl Lucy is asking nervously about meeting the lion Aslan.  She wants to know if he is “safe.”

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

This friend reminded me that, like Aslan, connection is not safe.

But, it is good.  Connecting with others seems ridiculously difficult for a behavior that is so necessary to survival.  We stand in crowded elevators, carefully examining our own shoes.  We scan our phones while waiting in lines – anything to avoid accidentally intense eye contact.  When disaster strikes, as it often does, we find ways to distance ourselves from both the victims and the perpetrators.  It didn’t happen in our country/state/city/neighborhood.  The shooter/bomber/villain was crazy/evil/an extremist/from another country/of another religion/from a broken home/spoiled as a child/neglected as a child.

We find labels and boxes for everyone and everything.  Labels categorize.  They sort.  They organize.  They separate.  Rules and structure, while necessary to social order, can also do much to keep everyone in his or her own box.  Isolated. 

We like the idea of community, of connection.  But, when it comes down to the moment, most of us are deeply uncomfortable with the realities of connecting with other members of our local or global community.

Connection and even daily interaction have prickly edges, sharp places where we poke into each other if we get too close.  Our offers may be rejected.  We might feel guilt over having to deny a request.  We are afraid to truly see another human in need or pain, afraid that we might actually find out how thin is the line between “them” and “us.” We demonize those who do “bad things” for fear that others might recognize what our hearts see – the shared humanity between perpetrator, victim, and observer.

We crave moments of true connection, of seeing and being seen, of feeling a part of the world rather than an observer perched in the nosebleed seats of life’s grandstands.  We crave connection, and it scares the shit out of us.

In the moments where our humanities collide, we are naked.  If you’ve ever looked into another person’s eyes without flinching, you know what I mean.  There aren’t any barriers; all of the things that we hide, from others and from ourselves, flow from us to the other person.  Connection takes trust.  And trust makes us vulnerable.

It is easy to feel like Charlie Brown with the football.  We screw up all of our courage, put our trust in another person or group of people, and have it yanked away, only to find ourselves lying on the grass with our socks in a tree.

But, here’s the thing?  Was Charlie Brown stupid?  Foolish for trusting, over and over, in the face of all evidence to the contrary?  Or, was he on to something?

We have two choices when it comes to trust.  We can be Lucy.  We can call the overly trusting person a “blockhead” and refuse to risk our valuable trust once it has been violated.  Or we can be Charlie Brown.  We can recognize that trust will be broken, it will be betrayed, it will not be safe.  But we can choose to trust others, and trust our common humanity anyway, knowing that the football will probably be pulled away again.

Why would we do this?  Why set ourselves up for a fall?  Why put ourselves in the path of failure, shame, and ridicule.

The answer isn’t because we expect or have blind faith that someone will hold the football still.  The answer lies deeper than that.  It lies in who we choose to be.  We can choose to be the person who trusts, who tries, who keeps trying to connect with a world that often doesn’t want connection.

 Or, we can choose to be the person who pulls away the football.

I retweeted a poem written by the singer Amanda Palmer last night.  It’s a piece full of connection that is far from black and white, an uncomfortable look at our complex, shared humanity.  Not surprisingly, the internet trolls, and probably some very well-meaning people, came out in droves to pull away the football, to condemn her for finding connection in a place of social taboo.  One of those trolls caught me, and my first response was to want to justify myself, to explain who and what I am – to make him see me.  My second response was to curl up and run away from social media, and by extension a society that doesn’t want my attempts at reaching out.

But, here I am this morning.  And here is the link to Amanda Palmer’s poem.  http://amandapalmer.net/blog/20130421/

Those socks up in the tree?  They’re mine.  It’s okay, leave them there.  Another pair will join them soon.  I choose to keep trying to kick that football.

Cover Ink

I

Swirls of rose and leaf wings fill the smile between the girl’s shirt and jeans

as she bends to scoop the fallen napkin from the wind-tossed grass.

Tramp stamp

Her black eyeliner is suspect, this tidier of public spaces in low-rise denim and textured hair.

She crumples the paper, spitting into the folds, scrubbing –

in the eternal gesture of motherhood –

Welfare mother

at the jam-blotched face in the stroller before her.  Her waist rolls as she bends, cresting between

shirt and jeans.

Fat slut

II

The spiky black legs of letters crawl across the backs of his knuckles

as he writes the check.

Gangbanger

Images ripple across his biceps and down to his wrists as he lifts the bags, turning out onto the sidewalk.

In the white-hot furnace of a city in summer, a young mother shoves her stroller across the street, barely checking for traffic, to put distance between her jam-cheeked baby and the dark man.

Thug

He sets the bag next to a lamp post, stopping to tighten the boot laces at his ankles.  A blonde woman passes, averting her eyes from the shaven head and script that loops up from his collar.

Dangerous

III

The collar of her blazer rubs against the ends of her bob as she fumbles for the keys.  A man on the street corner picks up his bags, walking away without a second glance as she climbs into her minivan.

Soccer mom

Yellow sun catches the crow’s feet as she shifts the rear-view mirror, checking her lipstick.

Time travels in small folds across the neck above the seatbelt.

Matron

The woman sips her latte, flipping her turn-signal, as she pulls into the elementary school pick-up line.

Public radio tells of another horror in a far off land while children burst from the buildings in a frenzied spring of freedom.

Middle-class cliché

IV

The young mother lays her son in his crib, brushing back a sweaty curl.  She strips off her top as she heads down the hall, a butterfly emerging from the dimpled space at the top of her ass.

As the shower laces across her skin, her brain reviews her thesis and data.  She meets with her professor tomorrow.

One block away, the skinhead opens a yellow door and unpacks his bag, putting paints and oil on a corner shelf.

The letters on his fingers sing of a time forgotten as they pull the brush across the canvas, painting the boy building Lego cities on the kitchen floor.

The professor shrugs off her jacket as the sun pushes through the minivan window.  As she turns to check her child’s seatbelt, a passing parent catches the red and gold ink rising across her back from under the lace camisole.

She has a tattoo?

V

The clerk pauses as a cover in the new shipment catches her eye.  She glances at the back, and puts the book on the shelf.

Can’t judge a book by its cover.

The tribal design that fills the book-jacket says nothing of the words beneath:

Loss, poverty, glory, summer, rhythm, pain, release, love, blood, lust, hunger, exhaustion

The picture says nothing, but when the words are known, it tells the whole story.