What I Do

Late last week I'd sat down to work, ready to input edits I'd made to my Very Pretentious Work of Fiction, when I plum started crying. I know it seems like I cry a lot, usually into food, and this is why I identify so strongly with Tina Fey and all the other crazy, hairy-legged artists. Thinking about  their glamorous mood disorders and anxiety medication, however, makes me sad, because I suspect deep down I'm not crazy enough to be brilliant. I'd love to be as hilarious as The Bloggess, but it turns out she struggles mightily with mood disorders and here I sit, not on a single anti-depressant whatsoever. That's only because I don't have the health insurance to procure them, but never mind that, never mind. For a creative person I am disturbingly sane. But that's not why I was crying, I cried because Tina Fey has been lurking around my yard again, hiding in the irises and putting her hand through the mail slot. I'm sorry, I just--it's very hard, and I get emotional. I wrote to my friend Nathan Fillion about it, asking if he'd show up in his Captain Tightpants outfit to scare her off, as he does every week for our house mother Rachel Maddow, but he wrote back saying please cease and desist, he didn't want to have to contact the police but he would. Which is how Nathan jokes, but I'm thinking of telling him it's sometimes hurtful.

He should know.

Anyway, there I was, crying this time over white sheets of writing and not over my tuna melt, which wasn't ready yet, and watching Tina Fey pull crab grass from my yard. I am getting the hang of talking myself off ledges. I am learning that I can't save lives other than my own. I have heard the answer to a question which troubled me for years, concerning purposes and plans and does the Divine choose to play my life like a chess board? I heard that it does not, that my essence loathes the idea of purpose and so the Divine is pleased not to bridle me with one. Armed with this knowledge, I have naturally begun to consider writing smutty novels. I have read this Shades of Grey nonsense and while I am glad that the world has offered something to please the female libido, for once, I couldn't believe how poorly it was written, how alienated our erotic heroine was from her own eroticism, and I think our Lady Gardens deserve better. Someone must tend them, and it must not be Brian McKnight. It can't be worse, after all, than writing pretentious fiction, and I rather like this idea of myself: a bottle-dyed redhead sitting in her garden with bees in her hair and amorous stories flowing veins to page (and back again, as you know if you've ever written Lady Porn).

I'm starting to hope you have.

I took two days' leave of absence from all writerly aspirations, and what I learned then was that 1) Malcolm Reynolds is one thing, but Fillion is unreliable at best, and 2) my dreams have begun to feel less like hope and more like a thing that weighs me down, and I'm tired of that. For so long I have focused all my energies into earning money, aplomb, a thing that could accurately be called a career to lack of eye-rolls at parties, and for what purpose? My identity  has become wrapped up in 'should' to a degree that drags my heart. It unmoors me deeply down, because so much trying to be removes me farther and farther from the truest bud of my real self, and my grittiest, most truthful self is the only power I'll ever really have.

I am so weary of having something to prove.

Writing is what I do, and I will always do it. So while I tell you artists to keep making your art, I do mean it so, but here is other half of that story, here is how the flower comes to full bloom: I will love you if you never make art again at all, if you earn not a dime, publish not a page. Go and make your art the way you have sex, because it pleases you, and for nothing more.


And so we must learn to love ourselves. I don't know it yet, but I hear this insistent voice whispering that to turn away from all measures of success and back to the joy of creating for it's own sake is the best thing I can do for myself, and thus the best I can offer the world.

So that's what I'm going to do. Now if you'll excuse me, it's just occurred to me that Tina Fey might be after my honey and I'm going to go take her back to look at the bees and see if that doesn't calm her down. Wish me luck because I think she is escalating.

xoxo
-La V

Spiritual D.N.A.

Exhibit A (1)

I was baptized on All Saint's Day or Reformation Sunday (depending who you ask) as an infant, in an Episcopalian church. My parents were not regular church-goers at the time.

Reformation day celebrates the day Luther challenged the Catholic church. The origins of All Saint's Day skew more Catholic than Protestant. It celebrates those who have attained a beatific vision of heaven--which isn't, really, very Lutheran--and originally was meant to celebrate the prayerful bond between those in heaven, those in purgatory, and those on earth. Decidedly un-Lutheran.

The Episcopalian church ordains women. I happen to believe that women should be ordained. My mother, last time I checked, does not.

Exhibit B (1)

When my mother was young, her own mother dropped her off in front of a church on Sundays, offering money in her hand. My mother would wait until my grandmother drove away, then walk in her church shoes to the drug store and spend the offering money on candy or at the soda fountain.

I like this story about my mother.

Exhibit C (1)

When I was a baby, my mother was approached by Jehovah's Witnesses. She was young and, I imagine, hungry for a spiritual tradition. My father, who had been raised Lutheran, called bullshit and they began attending a Lutheran church. I'm grateful for this, as I would have made a terrible Jehovah's Witness. It is far more difficult to be a bad Lutheran; I still don't know if I've accomplished it.

My father's people were Swedish and German and Lutheran by tradition.

Exhibit D (1)

Three years after me, my infant sister would be baptized in a Lutheran church. She identifies as Lutheran to this day.

Exhibit A (2)

By the time Ayla was born, I had left the Lutheran church and was dabbling briefly in non-denominational Protestantism at a very large church. Around the time Ayla was one, I stopped going to church altogether. To this day, I very much enjoy not going to church. My free Sunday mornings still feel like a gift. Like hitching up my petticoats to wade in a cool river.

I have developed other ways of nurturing my spirituality. Ways that fit my frequency. They are gentle and grateful. They scorn guilt. They focus on love.

Exhibit B (2)

Neither of my daughters have been baptized.

This was difficult for my mother.

Exhibit C (2)

"If you think God is a boy, he's a boy," says Indy. "If you think God is a girl, he's a girl. That's it." She shrugs. What's the big deal? "I think God wears lipstick," she adds. She tells me the most fantastic things. She wants to be Catholic but "daddy never lets her". (Not true). God lives in the stars but also in the flowers. God has a face like a tree but does not have blonde hair, just the picture has blonde hair.

"I think God is a boy," says Ayla.

Her world view has always skewed patriarchal.

It is possible I've given birth to a conservative.

Exhbit D (2)

Indy seems particularly spiritually inclined. She has a lot of questions and talks about her dual-gendered version of God often.

But both girls agree that church (their grandmother takes them on occasion) is boring.

Exhibit A (3)

I spend a lot of time wondering what things are passed to us through blood. Some things are easy: from my ancestors I've inherited fair skin, small eyes, a creative drive, a dramatic flair. But what about other things? What about the way I view the world, my ease in it, in my own skin, with others? My parents raised two daughters in one spiritual tradition. One left, the other stayed. It was painful for some members of my family. I know this.

Studies on identical twins suggest that our propensity to believe in a higher power has a genetic component. So do our political leanings.

Exhibit B (3)

I didn't leave the Lutheran church because it was a bad church. I left it because it wasn't right for me. My spirit craved a different tradition. It asked to be separated from the routine, the creeds and recitations and lessons I'd learned by rote, that I practiced without meaning or celebration or any earnest yearning for the Divine.

I think these very things that left me feeling dry and alienated from my spirit are the same things that bring others comfort and peace.

I believe there are an infinite number of ways to celebrate the infinite Divine and I believe in a Divine that smiles on all of them.

So then: which was in my blood--the Lutheran, or the leaving?

I believe it's both.

A Story Of My Life

Until I was nearly eleven, I was sent to St. John's Lutheran church and school in Denver. The sanctuary had a high vaulted ceiling speckled with lights like stars which I would lay back and count during sermons. The narthex included a living-room sized coat closet, and I recall hiding among the coats, the furs soft against my face, and quiet, and whispering Narnia. Secret doors opened to a hidden passageway, stone-walled and spiraled, exactly like in a castle. There was a basement full of costumes and props, old Renaissance gowns and fake swords, and in the balcony was a marvelous pipe organ, hundreds of pipes arranged descending by height, all glittering and imposing and pleasing to my young eye, which liked order and magic and shine.

My classmates and I often passed between the school and the church, which were connected by a corridor. On the wall of the hallway we traveled was a sculpture, which was mysterious and frightening and commanded my attention every time I passed it. It was a simple wooden cross, with hundreds of nails pounded in to different degrees, so that the surface was not smooth but jagged. It looked like by running your hand across it, you could catch your skin and bleed.

The most arresting feature, however, was the at the top. Around the place where the head should have been, silver iron contorted into the shape of a headscarf. The scarf enshrouded not a face, but a pool of black. Many years later, when I would see the Lord of The Rings movie, the ring wraiths would look startlingly familiar to me and it would take me a moment to figure out why: their voided faces looked almost exactly like the sculpture.

Not long ago, my dad told me that this particular sculpture was the focus of some controversy among the church members. An unintended result, I'm sure, but for years, this strange black void with the hood obscuring its face was what I pictured when people said the word God.

Image by Joseph Easterbrook.

*****

I am writing at home today. I drove to Starbucks, but my unwanted companion was there. I know his car, noted it so I could avoid going in when he's there. He is there almost every day. He sits alone for hours and watches people, occasionally attempting to strike up conversation. He doesn't read. He sets a large digital clock on the table, it has the temperature displayed on it, and he watches that. He is a misfit. I know this sad. Sometimes I feel I ought to indulge him, make conversation back. Occasionally I have. I feel I should develop compassion for this man. The sight of his car makes me angry. He makes me feel self-conscious, noted. When the morning rush clears, he and I are there alone. I prefer anonymity. I wish to be unknown.

He makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes I feel him watching me.

*****

I collect images of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I have her on rings, necklaces, pink candles from Wal-Mart. I love the looks of her. Her brown face, her blue or green robe with all its glittering stars. For me she represents not a human woman, but a female face of divinity. I love that she is likely an incarnation of the Corn Mother, or the Aztec Tonantzin, which speaks to the fact that across the ages, nearly every culture has recognized a divine presence and has bestowed upon one thing many names. As I got older, I chose to stop believing some of the things I'd been taught and one of the things I abandoned was the idea of an exclusively male god. I choose to believe in feminine images of the divine, and I love seeing her as depicted in the images of Guadalupe: infinitely loving, deeply compassionate, present in the earth and stars, maternal and divine.

**I was inspired this week by this post by Elizabeth at the lovely a moon, worn as if it had been a shell, on Our Lady of the Dry Tree**

Happy Awaiting Spring and Renewal Season!

This is a flash blog. For Friday.

Not that kind of flash.

NOT YET.

I was going to give up guilt for Lent. Then I remembered that the whole purpose of Lent is to feel guilty.

When I was a kid, we went to church on Ash Wednesday and the pastor put ashes on our foreheads. It was really awkward having the pastor touch you, and having to pretend like it was normal to be walking around with the accessory of death and carnage on your face. You spent years memorizing John 3:16 and constructing lambs out of cotton and now they give you this? I was always glad to be a Protestant who went to church in the evening like a respectable religious holiday observer. Those Catholics had to walk around with the smudge on their foreheads all day. They had to wear it, like, at the mall.

Show-offs.

Last year I resolved to make a King Cake and I never did.

It's ok, because I'm not Cajun.

My parents did their best to raise me right. The Lutheran church is funny because, other than the Soup And Salad Supper, it doesn't have many ceremonies or rituals; and those it does are all a little hush-hush, preformed in silence and nobody look at the pastor in the eye. This is due to our fear of becoming like those gaudy, histrionic Catholics. Unless we are talking about the traditions of "don't flash your underwear to the congregation during the children's sermon", or "don't mock the pastor when he gives the benediction", those traditions are actually pretty fun. I never heard of anyone 'giving anything up' for Lent until I was in high school, and then all the girls were really doing it to lose weight. We're not fooling anybody.


My family viewed most displays of religious enthusiasm with mild disdain. We are Lutherans, we do not raise our hands, we do not even clap for the children. In case you didn't know, it is the 8th cardinal sin. Not that we believe in cardinal sins. It is ok to laugh when you think the guy giving the reading has just proclaimed "Jackass!" in church, but nobody better even think about mentioning the influence of that namby-pamby Holy Spirit. So the rituals were few, and those that we did engage in, we never discussed. (Above all things ,we must not be mistaken for Pentecostals). As a result, I am repelled at a gut level from talk of typical religious expression (giving up for Lent, fasting, praying) and attracted to less typical, slightly pagan forms of ritual (labyrinth walking, meditation, lighting candles, baking cakes).

I don't know why I'm telling you all this except maybe to avoid that awkward moment when you ask me what I'm giving up for Lent and I raise my glass and say, "Not drinking wine on Tuesdays".

I am Vesuvius and this was supposed to be shorter.

I hope you will join me next week when I am challenging myself to write a week's worth of true flash blogs (not that kind. Not yet) of 350 words or less. I realize this is an extremely boring challenge to everyone except me. You probably just fell asleep and banged your forehead onto your keyboard and sent that sexy email to your mother-in-law on accident. Sorry about that. You perv.

Feminine Divine

"I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he's not into strong women is fooling himself mindless: he's into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in their makeup bags." --Tana French, Faithful Place.




*****


I have this memory of gazing down at baby Indy, all fat-cheeked and sweet smelling, deeply peaceful in her sleep, and saying to her, "You are a reflection of the Divine."

I had been reading--here she is again--Sue Monk Kidd's "The Dance of The Dissident Daughter". It felt like healing. Like balm on a raw soul-wound.

This was during the pregnancy when more than one person saw my swollen belly, my little daughter, and said to me: "This next one's a boy, I hope!"

The pregnancy of seeing the slight hitch of disappointment in strangers faces when they asked what this one was and I said, "A girl".

A time when I almost--almost--learned to say it apologetically.

"Another girl." Sorry.

Strangers faces saying: Too bad.

Then there was Sue, telling me that if the Divine could be male, it could be female too. That women are as capable of understanding, comprehending, interpreting, and communicating with the Divine as men are.

And then I looked down into my female child's face and saw Her: Divine.

*****

I am in awe of the women around me. Women who are incredibly, divinely strong. By 'incredibly', I mean they are strong through times and situations they should not possibly be strong through. Things that rightly should make any person crumble. It might take a woman years to find her voice but once she does, I don't think she ever stops listening.

That's what I can't get over. These women I know, or know about, who find themselves in terrible situations: terrible marriages, terrible poverty, terrible illness or violence or circumstances--and somehow find it within themselves not just to keep going, but to evolve. To start over. To reach down to the bottoms of their very selves, take stock of what's there, and then leave things in the dust: Parental expectations. Societal expectations. Bad husbands, bad jobs. Bad turns of luck.

They go into a sort of hibernation and then they emerge: beautiful winged creatures. Free and lovely things. Things that show me what sorts of strength I may be capable of, if I had to be.

I am so honored to watch.

I had a friend tell me lately she went through a number of turns that left her, as she put it, reduced to her core. And there she was, just her and her center. Not ravished like a wind stripped tree, but raw like a thing just starting to bloom. Such pretty wings, flapping slowly. Waiting to sense what's on the breeze.

I had a friend tell me "I'm a proponent of marriage, but I'm not a proponent of amazing women being stuck with shitty husbands." This woman who works, raises children alone, goes to school, dreams beautiful dreams of making life better for others.

I had a friend tell me that one day a switch turned off and she couldn't stay in her old life another minute. A woman whose core has proven to be built of stronger stuff than her sweet demeanor would ever betray.

I thought I was a strong woman. And then I see these people. Adversity hits, and what do they do? They push back their sleeves. Dirty their hands and scrape their nails against the absolute bottom of the well.

Their hands come up clutching bounties of stars.

****

I was thinking of this last night as I fell asleep. In the Bible, the wisdom of the Divine is personified as female.

They call it Sophia.

That girl-child in whom I recognized the presence of God: her middle name is Sophie.

When I tried to conjure up a symbolic image for this point in my life, I kept seeing darkness all around. But I was holding a little light. I could see more in the distance.

Last night, thinking about these people, I finally saw what was beneath me.

Wild waters. An ancient, living ship. Carrying me home.



I am Vesuvius, and I was afraid but I wrote this anyway.

**Credit for the above photo goes to Lady Cierra Lorenzen, who probably needs a website; to "the timer on her camera"; and to the general awesomeness of all the Lorenzens for probably generations back, but specifically to Kiah, Cierra and Lucy.