Tag: relationship

Interdependence, ex-vegetarians, crossing the streams.

sarah

Been thinking so much about being vulnerable with people and asking for help, while sorting through surprising and painful life changes. Noticed this old quote kicking around as a draft and liked it all over again today. It’s about food, but I’m thinking about feelings when I read the bit about not trying to get out of debt, not trying to be self-contained.

In his book Long Life, Honey In The Heart Martin Pretchel writes of the Mayan people and their concept of kas-limaal, which translates roughly as “mutual indebtedness, mutual insparkedness.” “The knowledge that every animal, plant, person, wind, and season is indebted to the fruit of everything else is adult knowledge. To get out of debt means you don’t want to be part of life, and you don’t want to grow into an adult,” one of the elders explains to Pretchel.

… This is a concept we need, especially those of us who are impassioned by injustice. I know I needed it. In the narrative of my life, the first bite of meat after my twenty year hiatus marks the end of my youth, the moment when I assumed the responsibilities of adulthood. It was the moment I stopped fighting the basic algebra of embodiment: for someone to live, someone else has to die. In that acceptance, with all its suffering and sorrow, is the ability to choose to live a different way, a better way.

— From The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, page 5.

Ex-vegetarian inspiration strikes again.

Family names, Kurt Vonnegut, figuring shit out.

sarah

Oh look, a half-finished draft that has been sitting around since January 2009. This is still my leading idea about family names.

I’ve been considering the idea of giving all my kids different last names. Resurrecting various maiden names or something, picking them the way people often pick middle names out of their whole pool of known family names.

I think it is mainly being married that has me thinking about names and name systems. It’s easy to skip that whole “married name” business, but if you want to give your kid some kind of awesome, non-patriarchal name you actually have to come up with a plan. That gets complicated really fast, even in the common, surface solutions like hyphenating last names or using the mother’s family name in an attempt to go matrilineal (by passing on her dad’s name). All of those schemes run into the usual problems if there is a break from monogamy, if anybody leaves a relationship, breeds with more than one person, or dies. The “team name” gets broken all the time, even if you are trying to play along. Even just making up a new last name doesn’t solve the question of what the grandkids would be called.

Family structures and systems are fucking intense. Where do they all come from? Which ones are good? Research questions.

This multiple last name idea has been wildly unpopular with everyone I’ve mentioned it to. Intensely unpopular. Instant frowning. Worst idea ever. I still kind of like it. Galen and I already have different last names and we manage to be a family team. Maybe it would be good, if we had kids, to remember that they were individual people and not just “ours.” Maybe a team name is just a manifestation of compulsory/wishful monogamy and maybe we can do better than that. It scales well across multiple generations, unlike, say, hyphenation. I’m lucky enough to know a lot of my ancestral family names, and it seems like maybe reusing them would be a fairly robust way to remember your lineage if you moved or were displaced. Or maybe it would just make it impossible to find each other again.

Lacking a unified last name, maybe we could give our household its own name, to make it easy to refer to. That happens sometimes with places populated by roommates. (I’m thinking of places I’ve known called The Husbandry, The Folk Museum, The Queens Den, The Triple Crush Palace…). That doesn’t solve anything about family members who don’t live in the same home, but it’s a start.

This is unresolved. I just found an old booksale purchase called World Revolution and Family Patterns that I’m hoping might contain some inspiration. I also found a Kurt Vonnegut quote via Bex that I have filed away.

12. … Even when Vonnegut dared to propose a utopian scheme, it was a happily dysfunctional one. In Slapstick, Wilbur Swain wins the presidency with a scheme to eliminate loneliness by issuing people complicated middle names (he becomes Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain) which make them part of new extended families. He advises people to tell new relatives they hate, or members of other families asking for help: “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?” Of course, this fails to prevent plagues, the breakdown of his government, and civil wars later in the story.

Complicated middle names: noted.

“Because love always causes a descent into the Death nature…”

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These are quotes from Women Who Run With The Wolves that have been sitting here with no context, unpublished, since February 2009. I think I was interested in talking about love beyond infatuation, love as an action or alliance instead of a feeling. I still am.

I haven’t posted anything here, or done much writing at all, for many months. Spitting out some old drafts seems like a good re-entry. I seem to do this every now and then. Maybe I can promote it as a personal feature instead of a bug.

Anyway. Old quotes.

A part of every [person] resists knowing that in all love relationships Death must have her share. We pretend we can love without our illusions about love dying, pretend we can go on without our superficial expectations dying, pretend we can progress and that our favorite flushes and rushes will never die. But in love, psychically, everything becomes picked apart….

What dies? Illusion dies, expectations die, greed for having it all, for wanting all to be beautiful only, all this dies. Because love always causes a descent into Death nature, we can see why it takes abundant self-power and soulfulness to make that commitment.

More…

In wise stories, love is seldom a romantic tryst between two lovers. For instance, some stories from the circumpolar regions describe the union of two beings whose strength together enables one or both to enter into communication with the soul world and to participate in fate as a dance with life and death.

And more.

It is true that within a single love relationship there are many endings. Yet, somehow and somewhere in the delicate layers of the being that is created when two people love one another, there is both a heart and breath. While one side of the heart empties, the other fills. When one breath runs out, another begins.

Dot in the Dreamy Garden

sarah

Dot in the Dreamy Garden by kt james (via)

In her golden years, my mom suffers from Dementia with Lewy Bodies (think Parkinson’s + Alzheimer’s).

Here we are in the garden. She’s calling me Jim (my father’s name) and thinking she’s having a dream…

I expected this video to make me sad, but I felt happy watching it. I spent a lot of afternoons sitting in gardens with my grandpa in his advancing dementia, and our interactions were often like this. Me guessing what would help him or soothe him, just sitting and telling each other we loved each other with words and pats and hand squeezes. My trying to understand his observations but not really getting it; him trying to understand my observations but not really getting it; both of us trying to be ok with that. I’m happy that sometimes when communication breaks down, it can break down into just inarticulate love.

And I just posted about putting ugly things in context to make them beautiful.

Douglas Rushkoff on individualism and disempowerment.

sarah

Another affirmation that cooperation can be more empowering than only looking out for number one, this time from economics and media theory. This is Douglas Rushkoff in his opening invocation at Personal Democracy Forum 2008 (transcript, video/audio). If you’re going to listen to a whole presentation, I prefer his similar 56th Annual Korzybski Lecture but I couldn’t find a transcript of that one.

The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. The Vesuvian Man, Da Vinci’s great drawing of a man in a perfect square and circle— independent and self-sufficient. This is the Renaissance ideal.

It was the birth of this thinking, individuated person that led to the ethos underlying the Enlightenment. Once we understood ourselves as individuals, we understood ourselves as having rights. The Rights of Man. A right to property. The right to personal freedom.

The Enlightenment— for all its greatness— was still oh, so personal in its conception. The reader alone in his study, contemplating how his vote matters. One man, one vote. We fight revolutions for our individual rights as we understood them. There were mass actions, but these were masses of individuals, fighting for their personal freedoms.

Ironically, with each leap towards individuality there was a corresponding increase in the power of central authorities. Remember, the Renaissance also brought us centralized currencies, chartered corporations, and nation states. As individuals become concerned with their personal plights, their former power as a collective moves to central authorities. Local currencies, investments, and civic institutions dissolve as self-interest increases. The authority associated with them moves to the center and away from all those voting people.

(Emphasis mine.)

I really notice the undefined “we” in that speech. He is expecting to be heard by people who take European history as their own history.