As I sometimes do, when another author’s message speaks to me, I feel compelled to share it. Such is the case with this musing on what our bodies really need by blogger Hollie Holden (hollieholden.me).
Thank you for this poem, John Roedel. Beautiful words of a fierce and gentle anarchist. I share his perspective. Guess I am a conditional atheist, too.
“I’m a conditional atheist
God does not exist for me on
the tip of a sharpened sword
or on the lips of a sermonizing
hate evangelist who is foaming at the mouth
or in the licking flames of a torch held
by a marching bigot
or in any dogma that have been soaked in the ancient poison of guilt and self-shame
I am the black sheep in my family. I have pushed back against the dysfunction in our family since childhood. I asked for my needs to be met. I was ignored or ridiculed. I asked for safety. I was thrust repeatedly into harm’s way by my parents’ ignorance and obliviousness. I sought relief from my pain. I was labeled histrionic and, most frequently, “dramatic.”
To protect my mother, the near and extended family clustered around her belief system as if it was gospel, and she the patron saint of non-conformity. “We weren’t dysfunctional,” the chorus would crow in unison. “We are special.”
Our academic and business achievements and worldwide travel thinly covered the truth of a family awash in pain and self-loathing and mutual disrespect. Our family was the living epitome of cognitive dissonance. We acted one way – successful and self-confident, especially in the public arena – and felt completely other in the tight-knit family system. Scared and broken little girls each and every one of us.
Tight-knit we were. To reinforce the themes of superiority and hide the abject vulnerability of each member of the system, no one outside our circle was permitted to get very close. Unless, like us, they were broken and needy and in awe of my mother. then they were granted full admittance to the so-called inner circle and gratefully did my mother’s bidding.
Sinead O’Connor died this week. I had mixed feelings. The musicianship of this Irish wildcat was unmatchable. But her very public pain and defiance against her own dysfunctional and abusive childhood alienated her from a large part of society.
The very public act of tearing in half a picture of the Pope that had hung in her wretched mother’s bedroom was widely misinterpreted. Many of us seeking answers to our upbringings know the misunderstanding that can come when sharing our private pain publicly. It is frequently misunderstood and rejected.
Especially when it treads on other people’s sacred cows and belief systems. Note how long it took the world to take sexual abuse in the Catholic church seriously. I know for a fact many Catholics do not believe beloved priests are capable of such heinous acts.
These song lyrics were recently shared in the wake of Sinead’s death. A tribute song Kris Kristofferson write for her when she was booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan concert in 1992.
Abused adult children desperate for answers and relief from their pain may see themselves in these lyrics. God bless Sinead O’Connor. She sure wasn’t wrong in her belief that child abuse is the fount and mother of immeasurable untold evils in this world. Would that she had an easier ride on this planet. She certainly will now. RIP.
Sister Sinead, Kris Kristofferson (2009)
“I’m singing this song for my sister Sinead
Concerning the god-awful mess that she made
When she told them her truth just as hard as she could
Her message profoundly was misunderstood
There’s humans entrusted with guarding our gold
And humans in charge of the saving of souls
And humans responded all over the world
Condemning that bald-headed brave little girl
And maybe she’s crazy and maybe she ain’t
But so was Picasso and so were the saints
And she’s never been partial to shackles or chains
She’s too old for breaking and too young to tame
It’s askin’ for trouble to stick out your neck
In terms of a target a big silhouette
But some candles flicker and some candles fade
And some burn as true as my sister Sinead
And maybe she’s crazy and maybe she ain’t
But so was Picasso and so were the saints
And she’s never been partial to shackles or chains
She’s too old for breaking and too young to tame.”
My good friend Dale Estey and I decry the fact that – as we’ve grown older – we’ve come to realize there really is “nothing new under the sun.” There are few stories or facts so amazing or unique or unpleasant that we haven’t heard of them before – in some variation.
It’s a truism nailed in Ecclesiastes 1:9.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”Ecclesiastes 1:9
It is true there is little – fantastic or horrific – that shocks or surprises me now. Folks be crazy. So many stories or objects feel like attempted recreations of familiar and well-worn themes. Stories follow well-worn paths to eventual resolution. Products ebb and flow in supermarkets and box stores. There is a certain sameness to them all, in spite of the come-ons promising “new and improved.”
My husband is an artist. For his doctor friend Dr. Marc Blasser, Hank painted a portrait of a rhino in situ on the plains of Africa. The rhinoceros is a special symbol for Marc. (His email handle is “King Rhino” for heaven’s sake. He is clearly committed.)
So when my husband delivered the painting some years back, Marc admired the finished product but, upon closer inspection, stared quizzically at the painting and asked: “Where are my oxpeckers?”
When my husband told me this story, I was a little taken aback. Oxpeckers? Seriously? Well, yes. They are a real thing. See all those little guys on the back of that hippo below? That’s them.
I knew vaguely of a symbiotic relationship that existed among African wildlife with some kind of birds. I did not know – until this recent conversation – what they were called.
Large African animals of many varieties – rhinos, hippopotami, giraffes, gazelle, water buffalo, et. al. – have an implicit deal with the oxpeckers. The large animals tolerate what might otherwise be the incessant and annoying presence of the birds.
The oxpeckers peck away at will on the lumbering beasts to rid their skin of pests, such as lice and ticks, and a variety of other savory and tasty bugs. In return for this favor, the animals do not kill the oxpeckers outright with a swat of their massive tails (like giraffes might do) or eradicate them en masse by suddenly submerging them under water without warning, (as in the case of hippopotami). That would be biting the bill that feeds off them.
It is a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship between beast and bird that you might be able to identify with if you’ve ever been covered with unwanted masses of lice or ticks. Personally, I have not.
Inspired by this story and the delightful and unusual moniker of these birds, I set out to integrate them into our life on a more permanent basis. We are in a new house and needed to set up a new internet domain. Oxpeckers Haven, I thought. Perfect.
There won’t be another domain name in the neighborhood to match it and it will likely cause the same sort of delighted comment that I had. Maybe a laugh or two, I mused.
Oxpecker. I admit I did not initially recognize the potentially obscene connotation. As it turned out, oxpeckers would not pass the internet service provider’s censors. Then I thought about it. Oh right. Well, it wasn’t as if I tried to call the domain name “bull’s penis” or somesuch. Maybe that would have made it through. I guess the offense was the suggestion of vulgarity.
I was doomed by the authority of the ignorant and presumptuous ISP censor. I was forced to concede that ours would not be the new internet home of Oxpeckers Haven. We chose a more banal, if personally meaningful to my husband, domain name: PanAmRTW. That may well be the subject of a blog post up the road.
Pity the poor oxpeckers. I sadly came to realize why I would never have learned about oxpeckers in geography class at the conservative and prudish school system where I received my elementary education.
Which, in the humble opinion of this lowly scribe, is bullpuckey.
I often wonder what our ancestors would think if they miraculously came to life and wandered into our modern life. Culture shock in extremis, most likely.
How we fill our days is motivated by need. We all have to keep body and soul together. How we do that is 180 degrees away from the ways our ancestors worked and lived.
My people on both sides were working class and mostly rural. Some made it to the “big city” to find work. But when the population of your “city” is a fraction of 1873 New Brunswick Canada’s entire population which was made up of 35,000 souls, well … that’s tiny.
My great-grandfather Lemuel Parker Brower was a machinist. His job was taking care of the town clock in Fredericton’s City Hall. See it up top there in the picture below. Lemuel Brower was taking care of it daily around 150 years ago. The clock functions pretty much the same way today as it did back then.
Lemuel and his wife Julia had twelve children together. They were not French Catholic where large families were the norm. But they both came from the countryside and Lemuel was of Dutch descent. The Dutch farmers had passels of kids to help run the farms. As did many other European descendants.
Later I saw the apartment building in Fredericton where Lemuel and Julia raised those twelve kids. Think of a modern two-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t much bigger than that. The urgency to launch those kids into their own lives once they were of age was not only an economic but a space imperative.
Their eldest – my grandfather Orlo Lemuel – found work in the Hartt Boot and Shoe factory. He worked there all of his life until he finally retired well into old age. That option has also changed dramatically in our modern era.
People hopscotch from job to job today like kids in a schoolyard playing the old hop, skip, and jump game. The idea of loyalty to a company and vice versa is a long-dead value that went the way of the dodo bird with the introduction of the microchip. Where steady, meticulous, quality work was the agreed-upon social standard for work products in days gone by, now it is speed and profit.
I am reminded of Bill Gates’ strategy when he started Microsoft. Gazillions of buggy Microsoft Office products were released and sold worldwide deliberately for sound business reasons. Create a dependence on “our” product and get to the market first. We’ll fix any problems later.
And so it is the norm now that we see version after version and upgrade after upgrade of our commonly-used tech products and software. iPhone is on Version 14. I swear Version 13 came out six months ago. Whether the changes are significant enough to justify the cost of upgrading is an individual choice.
Often the changes are as insignificant as a few more pixels in the phone’s camera or a marginal increase in the size of the screen. I’ll stick with my trusty old iPhone 11 until it no longer serves the functions I use it for.
Need expands to fill the space allotted. When my great-grandparents were raising 12 little kids in a two-bedroom apartment in the “big city,” they made it work. Astonishingly.
In rural New Brunswick, Canada, where small family farms were the norm, it took some time for the notion of smaller families to take hold. It would take the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and World War One and the Great Depression to alter society significantly enough to pare down the expectation of how many kids a family should have.
I think of my grandparents Lemuel and Julia often. They made do and raised a solid family who went on to do solid working-class work for most of their lives. Their lives were not flashy nor vital in the grand scheme of things but they were important: to their community and to their family.
One hundred and fifty years ago, there wasn’t a single piece of bling amongst their possessions nor had a single article been written that mentioned their existence. Until now.
I write about overcoming a difficult childhood and healing from it. I credit many self-help books I encountered along the way. They often had the right message for me at the right time.
I have also written that I write – I believe – from a place of privilege. Healing is a luxury not everyone can afford.
Let me explain. Most who are drawn to the healing path have come to it because life, as they are living it, has become unbearable. Most important, they believe there is a better way of doing things. That there is a better way out there for them to be.
I don’t shy away from the source of my perspective on healing and dysfunctional families. I was raised in a classic. And like most dysfunctional families, they didn’t get that they were doing anything “wrong.” In fact, they would have been horrified to learn that they had.
That awareness kept me plugged into a family I should have walked away from with love much, much earlier. They meant well.
So in the backdrop of people’s lives are a host of agendas and subtexts. Their belief in the vows of marriage keeps them in an abusive or unsatisfying marriage. Many continue to preen and seek approval from parents who are not worthy of the label, regardless of their biological role in your birth. We are also loaded with a host of other beliefs and constraints that are loaded on us from birth onward.
“Daddy doesn’t mean to hurt me.” “My husband really loves me but he has an anger problem. It’s not his fault.” “I’ll become a doctor even though I want to be a pilot to keep the parents and extended family happy.”
Self-negation is insidious like that. Whenever we deny what really matters to us to “go along” “fit in” or “be loved,” a microscopic portion of us erodes. Sometimes whole chunks fly out of our being. Some people live their whole lives like this. Bland and colorless and safe.
As a result, they never get a clear picture of who they are or what matters to them. They roll along in life – neither satisfied nor dissatisfied – until their lives are over.
So-called seekers know better and want better. It is the wife who – in spite of her low self-esteem – knows she shouldn’t be beaten and called down. It is the adult child who painfully realizes that though Daddy might not have meant to hurt them, his continued toxic behavior is doing just that. If he will not acknowledge this behavior and take steps to change, you must walk away to protect yourself.
The lucky ones who seek a healing path do not have an easier life. In fact, pursuing the healing path can lead to a whole host of upheavals and painful estrangements, and changes you didn’t expect.
And a commitment to healing and self-growth can only come about in an environment of safety where basic needs are met. In spite of the stereotypes about the writers and artists living in poverty while cranking out great works of fiction and philosophy, at minimum, they must have shelter, clothing, and enough food to keep them reasonably healthy.
My proviso is that. Attempting to heal while you are in the middle of something can be futile. You may have to accept that whatever you are doing today just to survive is the best you can do. In fact, it is mandatory.
With luck and time and the right environment, you may wake up one day in a place where you can commit to living life to its fullest. As with most things, it is a process. One day you may finally feel the urge to jot down and share the learning you picked up along the path of your healing journey.
Basically, you get to unpack and settle in. Speaking personally, it is an outcome that almost makes all of the pain and struggle worth it. Almost.
The vital importance of sleep is often underrated. My friend chiropractor Rabia Barkins is writing a whole book about sleep and sleep disorders. She has so much material, she is already thinking about a second volume. She endured sleep disruptions for some time and knows the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation.
I am not well-conversant with what goes on in the brain during sleep but what I do know makes sense. Sleep is R & R for your brain cells, as well as the rest of your body. With all the work it does for you during the day, and the garbage it picked up, sleep is akin to a four-to-eight-hour detox.
In an oxygen therapy program I did last year, the staff talked about “clearing out the senescent cells” your brain has accumulated over your life. As I understand it, senescent cells have stopped growing and just hang around cluttering up your brain and decreasing your overall brain performance.
So our oxygen therapy program sounded a little like clearing out an attic. Like your brain is a place that you keep throwing stuff up into year after year as a matter of living. What accumulates there gets dusty and starts to break down. Like we all do.
That is my layperson’s interpretation of senescent cells. Like any good decluttering, getting rid of them makes good sense.
Most of the time I love dreaming (nightmares excluded) and again know very little about what takes place during REM sleep. But it is this phase that is supposed to do a deep dive into whatever issues you are wrestling with.
I don’t put a lot of faith in believing that my dreams really sort out major life issues. It sometimes seems quite the opposite. They often make me more confused, if entertained. So if you look at dreams as some sort of arcane theater that none of us understands very well, then you can become more of an observer of your own dreams. Don’t ask me how that is possible. I just know I have done it from time to time.
I love the sheer lunacy of some dreams. Often they seem a lot like Alice in Wonderland without the Red Queen and a far less organized storyline. Dreams are so random. Stories about people I know or would like to know predominated for a time.
When she was still here, I frequently dreamt of Princess Diana and how she and I had become best buddies. I think I related to her vulnerability and disrupted childhood. The similarities ended there.
But they were great dreams. Lots of garden parties on bright sunny days on big estate grounds and delicious little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Vistas all around of lovely well-dressed people gossiping and socializing as only the Royals and their society might do. Diana would occasionally ask me for fashion advice which I would occasionally give her. This absurd memory still makes me chuckle.
It is noteworthy that those sorts of dreams occurred most frequently when my life circumstances were such that I was the last possible person on Earth to be invited to a Royal gathering. Pure escapism.
But as a television reporter, I had a genuine interaction with Prince Andrew. It was on a Royal tour he was making of Canada at one of those chi-chi garden parties on the lieutenant governor’s estate. I got a full-on view of the kowtowing and pandering around him, especially the media.
As history would have it, I am very lucky I didn’t get to know him one whit better than I did. Ew. Saved by destiny and his utter disinterest in a commoner news reporter from one of the Commonwealth’s “provinces”.
So whatever else I may dream about tonight, it likely won’t be the struggling Windsor family and their issues’ issues. They’re still working to find their feet it would appear. The harsh light of media and incessant exposure has taken considerable bloom off the Royal rose.
Tonight, I will head to sleep with another famous Brit in my head. “To sleep, perchance to dream”. Unlike Hamlet’s fear of what may plague him after he slips into unconsciousness, I rather enjoy my dreams.
I know piteously little about the mechanics or intricacies of sleep. I just know I like it and I need it. Off to find out what my brain intends to share with me tonight.
It is mighty hard to escape the internet. For me anyway. I am a bona fide, non-apologetic, drank-the-Kool-Aid “interweb” junkie.
So when I am forced to forgo internet access, I get spleeny. Like someone has taken away my favorite toy.
I find compensation since I have to. Without electronic entertainment, I have to devise my own. Without the illusion of connection to “everywhere, everything, all at once,” some familiar old friends come into play.
Imagination for example. I sit in my living room devising scenarios about how to alter it, improve it, change it more to my liking, or, most aptly put, make it more like me and my taste.
Much as I experience when sitting down to write this daily blog, disconnection from external stimulants allows me the luxury of enjoying my own internal dictates. My own thoughts.
I love to read, for example. I am thrilled by the right books and happily transported to worlds other than my own, filled with characters facing challenges I never hope to encounter.
Reading deepens my compassion for the human condition without the messy and distracting emotional work involved in real-life people dramas. To that end, reading is also finite. People dramas – as we who are raised in less-than-ideal families know – can last indefinitely. Or they can repeat predictably and tiresomely for years.
In good books, the protagonists are forced to deal with whatever situation it is that they were flung into. What would be the point of the book otherwise? For those who well know the classic, if now formulaic, Hero’s Journey, there is an identifiable story throughline in these books.
The hero is born and separated by the fates from all that is familiar. S/he prepares for and meets challenges. S/he is close to being completely undone by the magnitude of the challenges but s/he perseveres. S/he emerges, in the end, changed and triumphant by the growth experiences s/he has had.
So the current challenge this “hero” (i.e. me, if we rightfully assume we are the heroes of our own journeys), is battling a dead internet. Fortunately, like other heroes, I am forced to draw upon previously untapped internal resources to rise to the occasion and surmount the problem.
I have prepared this blog in MS Word. I will soon head out looking for alternate internet sources: the library, Starbucks, or most reliably, McDonald’s. All the while riding the telephone and Xfinity gods for a quick and speedy resolution to this grievous inconvenience.
Which, if I’m honest, isn’t all that inconvenient. I am rather enjoying the disconnection and downtime away from the incessant demands of the internet, email, and plowing through unwanted sales pitches.
Maybe I won’t dog those nice people at Xfinity too fiercely, after all. Maybe this temporary disconnection is a blessing in disguise. Heading over to my reading chair to see what might suit me to fill in the deliciously disconnected mental space.
When I came across this in a recent Facebook post, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. If these analogies had been created deliberately, then they are brilliant. However, I fear that was not the case.
The wonder of words. I write about them a lot. But in response to these, I don’t exactly know what reaction is appropriate.
Decry the state of high school education? Argue forcefully for the continued inclusion of English language classes in all secondary schools? Or pack it in, move to a desert island, and accept that the future is doomed.
Or maybe have a laugh at these earnest and well-meaning if seriously off-the-mark young people’s attempts at expressing themselves.
You decide.
Actual Analogies Used by High School Students in English Essays
When she tried to sing, it sounded like a walrus giving birth to farm equipment.
Her eyes twinkled, like the mustache of a man with a cold.
She was like a magnet: attractive from the back, repulsive from the front.
The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
She had him like a toenail stuck in a shag carpet.
The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.
There’s no denying that when bad things don’t come to pass – as you feared they might – relief floods in with a welcome physical response.
The shoulders drop. The breaths get deeper again. The nerves – if you are prone to them – begin to quell. I tend to tears sometimes. Pent-up emotion seeking an outlet.
So if you have been following me at all in the past few days, you’ll know I just faced what was in my life a barrel drop over Niagara Falls. With me in it, if that isn’t belaboring the obvious.
How many of these periods of terror and relief have I gone through? Seems like thousands but was probably only a few hundred or so.
The exam you are sure you weren’t well enough prepared for. The first date with someone that you really, really like. Sitting in the doctor’s office fearing the worse but hoping (praying) for the best. The interview for that job that you really want.
I am reminded of Sally Field’s Best Actress Oscar win for Norma Rae. In what was possibly the most public display ever of insecurity and vulnerability, she spouted out to the august assembled audience from the podium, Oscar in hand: “You like me. You really, really like me.”
Full confession. I know the feeling.
So today when an important meeting determining many of my future choices went very well today, I was tempted to blurt out those very words to the interviewer.
But given the stakes and a certain sense of decorum I am able to deploy – if and when necessary – I did not do that. I shook hands, walked out, and did the secret Laura Linney happy dance from Love, Actually in my mind when Linney actually manages to get Hugh Grant home.
I mean, I am not quite foolish enough to ACTUALLY get into a barrel and – as it were – barrel over Niagara Falls.
I like myself way too much for that. And for what I was able to pull off today, I like myself even better.
Expressive Compulsive 