Just got back from a session with Lori, my life coach (have I mentioned that she coaches over the phone if you are not local [and sometimes even if you are]). She said so many great things I have to share them and also make sure I have this stuff banged far enough into my own brain to make some real change.

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From Sherri Tepper’s Gibbon’s Decline and Fall:

They became a club: the Decline and Fall Club. They swore an oath to one another. Even after they left school, they would stay close to one another. They would meet every year, and each of them would find a place to stand where she could be woman as woman was meant to be, and thereafter she would never decline or fall from that place.

It was Sherri Tepper’s books that started it all for me. A friend of a friend loved them, and though it took me years to finally pick one up, first I read Beauty,
then I read everything of hers I could find. The slow, long ascent from where I had fallen started one sunny afternoon after I had read The Gate to Women’s Country.

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I had a lot of thinky time at the museum. It occurred to me that when I go to exhibits lately, I think about how lovely it would be to be a painter. I could just paint canvases and everything would be okay. I could just work on painting after painting and they would be beautiful and it would be all I would need to worry about. As if painters have no rent, don’t eat, and don’t have to pay taxes.

And so I think I want to be a painter, but what I really want is to write without worry or fear. To be able to create without questioning the viability of the creation. To be, I guess, an established artist who can spend more time on creation. Although if I can’t choose to spend more time writing, whose fault is that?

Every time I try to break an aspect of life down to a simple view, exceptions and complications just start rising out of “simple” like kudzu vine. “Follow your bliss” is simple. Why does it start getting wrapped up in ‘but’s? Is that the world or me screwing up simple, or a healthy mix of both…

O, poor Hamlet, so confused and overwrought. I feel your pain. Perhaps I myself should write a play…..

Anyhow.

I am at complete loose ends this week. Updates….*stares blankly* um…..

I am loosing weight still! I seem to have found the magic combination that works wonders for me. The Wii Fit and I still get on wonderfully together, and I love getting on it everyday and working out. Throw in some fancy water, a smoothie, and some sort of reasonably balanced meal, and I’m loosing a steady 1/2 – 3/4 of a pound a day. If I chuck the diet to the four winds for a day and eat what I please, I seem to generally gain 0.2 pounds back, which just really isn’t enough to cry over, because the next day I get back on track and the numbers keep sliding down. When I first started wii fitting, I set my goal as the maximum that they would let me; to loose 22 pounds, I believe. Well, I am now 7.5 pounds away from that goal.

I think that just might be cause for a huzzah.
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Has it ever occurred to anyone that the heroes always end up dead after the quest because we kill them? Because after they have fought to save the world we, the world, want no reminders of the extraordinary lying about, staring our ordinariness right in the face and challenging it. Is there no place for a hero after their final battle is done?

Strange thoughts scurry about my head. What you should really do is go watch Sita Sings The Blues.

(Thanks to Tim for the link.)

My Tattoo

That is my tattoo, minutes after it was done earlier this year.

I got that tattoo, my first and likely only one, to remind myself of all the things I had learned over the year before last. I had a feeling, as the lessons were of the inner knowing sort, that I would forget them over time. I figured that having a permanent reminder etched into my skin that I would see every time I took my shirt off–and sometimes peeking out through the neckline–would be a foolproof way to jog my memory.

It is staggering, the effort we can put into forgetting.

I have for some months now forgotten everything that I had learned. It’s been a slow decline over the months, but I lost almost all of it just recently. I find myself now sitting in a life that looks very similar to the one I left to go learn all those new heart lessons about happiness, richness, abundance, and joy.

Not all is the same, and those small pieces have saved me from sinking entirely back into the mire. Today was a low point indeed, where I looked around at the job I have that I do not want, at the apartment I have that I cannot afford, at the love that I feel which may not be reciprocated. And it all seemed very bleak indeed. I questioned the last year and my efforts, which seemed to have been wasted. I felt like there was no progress toward any of the things that would make me happy at all. I felt that I had let everyone I know down because I had not lived up to my potential. I had taken many of the things out of my life that I enjoyed to focus on one or two goals that I felt were important.

When I had worried and fretted myself into a froth, when there was nothing left to think and no idea to entertain as to what to do next, I suddenly remembered to turn back to all those books and DVDs that I had learned from along the way. And I realize that all my failure to progress was simply that I had stopped following my happiness.

I had begun to doubt, to question, to disbelieve, and to hem in my life, my personality, even my desires. All my explanations seemed reasonable for doing so. I think they always do. And so I began to be grateful, to think about the things that I have, to reaffirm the things that I want.

The job I have will give me some breathing room and let me purchase a real home. I am grateful for it.

The home I have now is beautiful and I am enjoying it while it is mine to occupy.

The love I feel is beautiful and wonderful and entirely worthwhile, and the object of that affection is beautiful and wonderful and entirely worthwhile, and he shows me through actions if not always words that slowly, there is growing reciprocation.

Live in joy.

I was watching The Daily Show, and last night’s guest was Bill Maher, plugging his new movie, Religulous. Now, from the clip I think I might find the movie itself interesting and funny, as it is meant to be. But I found the conversation between him and Jon Stewart about religion, i.e. myth, very telling. You can find the clip here on Comedy Central’s website: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=186755&title=bill-maher-pt.-1.

Ok, using the adjective telling is me being nice. Honestly, I’m pretty pissed about this same prejudice that I run up against over and over when dealing with the study of myth. Most people today who are not overtly religious, as Bill Maher mentions, think the ‘myth’ of religion, the story part, was all invented by primitive people who were just not as advanced as we are today and didn’t understand a thing about how the world works and invented these stories to make the world feel a little safer.

Yes, those primitive people. Those Mayans who charted the heavens so precisely their calendars are still correct today (bring it, 2012, I’ve got your number). The Egyptians who built the pyramids, the tribesmen who built Stonehenge. Pythagorus. Socrates and Plato and all those classical Greek thinkers whose theorems and philosophy we rely on as the structure of our society today. Clearly I could go on. Knowing the scientific method does not make us smarter than ancient peoples. It just gives us another tool to use to explore the world.

I think the disconnect happens because there are many people today who believe in the stories of their religions as literal. (And this is the part of Maher’s interview that I agree with.) Ancient peoples did not literally believe that the sun was swallowed by the earth-goddess Nut every night, or that it was dragged through the heavens every day by horses as a chariot, or that it was eaten by a dragon at sunset. Or perhaps the more correct way to say it is that the ancient’s worldview as wide enough to accept the representational myth as no more or less true than the fact that the Earth circles the sun every day. In other worlds, the ancient people accepted a multi-level reality. The purpose of the story, then, was not to explain how the world works. They knew how the world worked; the Earth revolved around the sun (thanks Copernicus! Seriously, people, that’s what happens when you kill all the sages who don’t believe in your story). Myths explain how people work. What makes us tick. Trace the stories of the gods and you find a snapshot of cultures throughout history, how they lived their lives and got along with each other (or how they failed spectacularly to do so).

We pretend like we don’t have myths now; like Hannah Montana isn’t teaching little girls how to act in our culture, or that movies (and the books they are based on)  like Nights in Rodanthe aren’t working to modify the cultural paradigm of the passion of love being for the young and comfort being the most one can expect from love as we age.

But back to Maher. He claims myths are ridiculous. He gives an elaborate demonstration of how, when you try to explain the story of the myth in a rational way to an audience, it completely falls apart. And it’s true. Logically, myths do not have plots to string them along (which makes perfect sense if you realize that plot is an invention that began with the novel in the early 20th century). Literally myths make no sense. But myths are metaphors. They are meant to be interpreted widely, to be relevant and of use to future generations, passing along the archetypes buried within them to be re-invented by the individual or the current age, as necessary. But the key is in the interpretation. The stories of religion were never meant to stand on their own. They were not entertainment. While some might be entertaining, they have a larger goal. They test social structure. They teach right behavior (and ‘right’ in this context means whatever society expects correct behavior to be). They can act as signposts to a deeper understanding of one’s own self, or to a deeper understanding of others. So of course they are ridiculous. Look at codpieces, for God’s sake. Or Marie Antoinette-style wigs. Society is rarely rational.

What gets me worked up is in America myths are being judged by a very narrow, 21st century mindview. And that mindview, as Maher hinted at, wants to throw myths, i.e., religion, out with the bathwater. And while I agree that the institutions of some great religions (notably Western ones, let us remember) are harmful to people and sow discord, the archetypes in the stories of the religions are still there. The story is faithful to the original intent. I mean, honestly. Tibetan buddhists believe in any number of incarnations of the Buddha and in boddihisatvas and that their religious leaders are incarnated gods. And yet the Dalai Lama hops on a plane once a week and checks his e-mail regularly. All those computer programmers in India who happen to be Hindu can see the world as it is and live in it and code all day long and still have room in their wider view of the universe for Ganesha to help them advance in the workplace.

Faith isn’t blindness. Blindness is blindness. Faith is opening up your world to expanding possibility and investing belief in the statement that there is more than one truth in the world.