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Maiden elder
A regular reader of this blog, a younger woman who hasn’t yet posted anything, wrote me a long and eloquent email about women, beauty, and age. She included a request:
I’d love to read your take, and others’, on the tremendous soul-accepting difference between “looking younger” and “looking more beautiful.”
Immediately, an essay that I wrote recently and haven’t yet published jumped to mind. It’s called “Maiden Elder,” and I think that the excerpt, below, that I quote from it, initiates some satisfaction to her request.
“Maiden Elder” excerpt
In Issai Chozanshi’s The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts, a philosophical “guidebook” for samurai written in the eighteenth century, the demon in the title advises a swordsman, “When you follow your own true character and are not a slave to your passions and desires, your spirit will not be troubled.” Speaking from my own true character, feminism works for the freedom of all human beings, glamour grows from a person’s knowing herself and following that knowledge, and maiden and elder have little to do with a woman’s age and everything to do with her exceeding their culturally determined boundaries, such as limitations on her self-representation and self-creation, both of which I equate with self-discovery. Self-representation is an external manifestation of one’s own true character. My definitions of glamour and feminism are intended to stir the imagination. Maiden elder is a term of endearment.
- December 30, 2009
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media
- Comments 2
Kissing him
You’re eating a meal with someone and he mentions a delicious taste from the food in his mouth. You want to share that taste with him. You want to kiss him, deeply.
Imagine the beginning of the same scenario, through the first sentence of the above paragraph. Then . . . rather than wanting to share and kiss, you feel repulsed. Lips, tongue, teeth, palate–what could be worse?
I’ve experienced such attractions mostly with men and such repulsions with both women and men. I felt those kinds of repulsions in my younger years, but I suppressed them much better than I now can. I did my best to stay unaware of them. People feel without awareness all the time. In effect, they feel without feeling. That causes confusion, unhappiness, misreading of others, and a loss of clarity, clear sight, and intuition. In that state, people’s actions bring unhappiness to both themselves and others. If you don’t know how you feel–and feeling requires awareness of one’s body–your thinking cannot save you.
- December 26, 2009
- Filed under: Body and mind, Love
- Comments 2
December butterfly
I mistook a butterfly for a yellowed bougainvillea leaf. Butterflies are not common in Tucson during the winter. I was cleaning the front porches and didn’t recognize the butterfly as itself until I’d almost swept it into the dustpan. I assumed that I’d killed the insect but noticed as I placed it on a ledge of the wall above the pavement of the porch outside my bedroom that it moved its legs. Then the weather and the shade turned too cool for me to comfortably finish my work by hosing the porches.
I returned today to hose them, having forgotten about the butterfly until I saw it on the pavement of the porch–I’d sprayed it. Inadvertently killing an animal feels utterly miserable, and that’s how I felt. I was like a child scolding herself into tears.
The butterfly’s still brilliantly yellow wings surprised me as I once again picked it up to lay it to rest where I’d left it the day before. I continued hosing and brushing away the water with a broom, now and then looking at the butterfly, feeling both sad and humiliated by my unawareness of it until I’d damaged it. I found myself apologizing to the butterfly and thanking it for its beauty. Before I went indoors I noticed the butterfly stand up. I saw it walk.
Just looked . . . after several hours. Bedroom door open, the butterfly, bright and delicate as a petal and a step away from me, contrasts with the clean red concrete of the porch floor. Maybe the lightest breeze earlier in the day had animated the butterfly, so that I thought it still lived.
Other people might show you a photo. Indeed, I took one before beginning this paragraph. But I deleted the picture from my camera within less than a minute. Beauty can be a peace that asks for privacy.
Smoky miracles
“Shop Around,” the 1960 hit by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, has been playing inside my head for the past couple days. In the lyrics a mother tells her son to find a girl whose love is really true and advises him to shop around till he finds her.
Shopping could be on someone’s mind today because it’s almost Christmas and she may still need to buy some gifts. But that’s not my story.
“Shop Around” is a joyful song, and its morals are down to earth: Don’t settle for just any good looking match and Secure the one who loves you. I just watched Smokey and the Miracles perform the song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YPdVqwk978), and he’s especially suave and sparkling, even with out of sync vocals and visuals.
My friend Frances, with whom I’ve shopped numerous times, says that I’m very clear about what I’m looking for, whether that’s groceries or clothing. We’ve been friends since our early thirties. She says that if I find what I want, then I don’t keep looking for other items, and if I don’t find what I want, then I go someplace else or forget about the desired purchase for a while.
Shopping, shopping, shopping–decades and decades, 2 husbands, women and men. Frances would say that I know now what I want.
Smoky miracles. Aren’t all miracles smoky? We may know what we want, but all the causes that create the effect that is a miracle remain mysterious.
- December 20, 2009
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
- Comments 1
Salon
I held a salon and it was great fun! I use the word salon to describe the conversation I hosted, because it partook of elements essential to the salons of 18th-century Paris, where women of intellect and education, called salonnières, received guests and facilitated polite conversation–stimulating, fluid, focused, intelligent, and harmonious. Conversation is erotic, in contrast to small talk and chit chat. Conversation is an erotic art, by which I mean it is an art of connection.
- December 19, 2009
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 2
Faithful
Faithful husband
Faithful wife
Faithful friend
Faithful servant
Faithful dog
Faithful follower
I’ve been thinking about faith, and the above list came to mind. What does it mean to be full of faith? How is that different from a stereotypically or archetypally faithful relationship or role, such as the ones I’ve mentioned? (I think that each item in the list operates both as stereotype and archetype.) Read more
Sacrifice and softness
People believe in sacrifice and define it as giving up or even destroying something that you care about or love for a greater good. Sacrifice is a severe kind of surrender, because people can only sacrifice something that they presumably would prefer not to give up: like parents, who sacrifice their sleep for the sake of their infant; like a career woman, who sacrifices her marriage for her work; or like a soldier, who sacrifices his life, period. Sacrifice is difficult and may bring altruistic pleasure but just as likely none. Sacrifice results in loss. Selfish people don’t sacrifice.
I’m not especially selfish (if selfish means operating only for one’s own benefit), but I don’t believe in sacrifice as the culture I live in defines it, and I don’t understand the attendant self-punishment or necessary suffering. I’m a strong person, but that differs from being hard, and my hardness does neither me nor anyone in my life, from intimates to strangers, any good. For me, sacrifice is a softening of blocked or inhibited feelings, of fears that have collected in the body. That way, sacrifice is pleasure, like a sigh of relief or healing tears.
Selling, creating
Today’s email included an “ad” from someone with whom I attended high school. For an online interview about his new book. He sent the email to the alumni list. Ads like that, from books being touted by authors to courses being offered by instructors to exhibitions by artists about to show up at the opening reception, arrive all the time. In your email, I’m sure, as well as mine.
Can’t say that I’m an exception to self-promotion, as I’ve sometimes advertised my performances and new books in the currently common manner. Not to mention that this very blog and website, in which my intentions are to give information about my work, to present ideas and experiences about various topics, from love to everyday life, and to enjoy a kind of conversation with people who respond to the posts, can all too easily be categorized as publicity in the name of self-representation–because commodification of people into image and product rings truer than generous intentions in a society overwhelmed by an orientation towards surface and celebrity rather than soul, imagination, and creativity. People selling themselves–it’s full of puffery and false promise.
So . . . I question the goodness of the intentions that I note in the previous paragraph and wonder if indeed ego is masterminding them. In that sentence, ego means the false self critiqued in various spiritual practices–the ego that clangs and clamors for attention, that aggresses on the planet and the heart, that leads people away from happiness. I understand the need to make a living, the desire for a satisfaction in one’s work that comes from people’s appreciation of it, and the healthy narcissism that is an element of self-confidence. The false ego overrides healthy narcissism and drives a person into unconscious self-absorption.
At any rate, the idea, feeling, and activity of selling myself have become especially distasteful. Creating myself, as usual, feels a lot lot better.
Fresh threshold/geranium
I just had my two front porches painted a gorgeous red. I’d give you a photo, but the color on your computers would probably not match the creamy, dreamy richness of Benjamin Moore geranium in Low Lustre Moorgard (with a lifetime warranty!). When a friend of mine came over the other night, she noticed. She said something like, “How do you keep the porch so clean?” When I gave “new paint” as the answer, she asked me for information about the paint. That’s how great it looks and feels. Many–most?–porches in Tucson, when painted, are some version of terra cotta, and the color is often very faded, similar to the pale, muddy orange that my porches used to be. They had been painted long long ago, way before I lived here.
Every summer my father bought a bright red geranium for a planter on the back patio. Bright reds can be harsh, even in flowers. His choice was a mellow red–brilliant and comforting. Like the beauty that my front porches have become.
And depending on the time of day, geranium casts a warm pink reflection on the white walls of my home.
New color energizes the threshold. I and others enter and leave with a freshened spirit.
