feminish

Off to the Immanent Grove again, for a while.

I shall try to despatch a post or two from there, if I can. There’s no broadband (in fact there are no phones, except the cabin telephonique out in the field), and I’m not sure how it’ll feel squeezing in some computer time between ‘Household Delights’ and ‘making flat the soil next to Big Meditation Hall’, but Hey, there’s a first for everything. I’ve had a browse around and not many bloggers seem to post when they’re on retreat, so we are in fact talking about a feminist exclusive here.

Watch this space….

(Or enjoy eating my feed)

Courtesy of Ginger over at Diary of a Freak Magnet, we are brought the latest Carnival of Feminists - humour, satire and smiles a plenty with this one.

If you giggle at this picture, (courtesy of Ginger) you’re sure to love it. Schmoozy on over there and check it out!

This one’s for someone called Dom,

an old friend who sent me an email a few days back. If I remember correctly, our first encounter was a couple of eons ago when, at 2 in the morning, it seemed (to me) like a good idea to knock on the tiny fire-escape door between our college rooms to ask him if, by any chance, a little Something from his free student union ‘freshers pack’ might be going spare…

I was moved by his email’s kind words and tickled by his insightful analysis of Hackney trains ( “full of character and characters; Christian preachers, burqa-wearing mothers with denim-clad toddlers, young Afro-Caribbean guys who have been working so hard that they sleep standing - and me, the only suit-wearer, feeling a bit like I’ve been sent to do a survey…”).

But it was this question that hit my nail on my head (as-it-were),

Tasha, in almost-total ignorance of your life right now, I have to ask one thing: Is there room in your life for humour and the unexpected? (So inextricably linked, I know, but I couldn’t decide which one should take priority). For me, this has been my salvation in all the big moments. If not, I will have to come find you, jump out from behind trees and tell you jokes.

Now there’s a threat if ever there was one.

Never mind your meditating, Natasha, never mind all this earnest ’simple life’ stuff and all those ‘interesting’ books you’re reading and all those nice thoughts you’re having, and all those organic good-for-you legumes you’re munching ever-so-mindfully, the real question is - in fact, the only question is - are you having fun?

It’d like to say “no”, if only to enjoy being startled out of solemn meditation under a ficus religiousa by a man in a suit with a joke. But, because I don’t know how long I’d have to wait in this profound state for Dom to learn himself some jokes, catch the Ryan Air and track me and my bodhi down, it’s probably simpler to confess that I have been giggling a lot and am still pointlessly frivolous.

In the spirit of which, and against my better judgement, I’d like to share two videos. Both made me laugh. Both are pointless. (If you have a deadline, please spare yourself. I believe they cost the Patterner a few bars of his Third Movement yesterday…)

The first is Britney Spears (How many female popstars does it take to fill up a petrol tank? How bizarre can celebrity be?):

X17: Britney in Action Scroll down a little to see the video.

The second is Kamini - the black rural rapper that has taken France by storm since his homemade video hit YouTube last month (2m downloads to date) - brought to you today in tribute to the general hilarity of Rural France which has so kindly taken us both in:

“Gone to a monastery, you say?”

I do.

But what, I wonder, does that mean to you?

The Immanent Grove, I call it, or Innisfree.

Wizards?
“Noted for appearing more extensive inside than out”
Small cabins? Hives for the honey bee?
And peace - peace that comes dropping slow?

Midnight all a glimmer? Noon a purple glow? Lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore?

It’s true, I tell you. All true.

Though to be honest there was actually only one self-proclaimed wizard and she was hospitalised on the first Sunday. The world is surprisingly eventful when it is stark and honest.

I could tell you about the Immanent Grove’s unassuming French farmstead outbuildings a few centuries old, the couple of dozen acres of plum trees, the slime-greened poly-tunnels, the two large oak trees and a bare pond - which is what you’d see if you drove along the Route Departmental, weren’t speeding, hadn’t just drunk half a bottle of Duras and happened to glance across the valley through the mist. You wouldn’t be able to see the lotuses, unmanifested in the mud, nor the meditation huts nestled in the scrub brambles, or the wild bees in their hung swarm on the poplar branch beside the walking meditation path. But, like I say, it’s more extensive inside than out.

I’ve trod the pavements grey and have known the urban un-peace, the concrete-echoed droning un-rest. And can tell you that they are absent from this particular Innisfree. Here, waking before dawn, there is four hours under midnight’s glimmer - four hours of silent coming and going outdoors between bells, tea-urns, meditation, breakfast and chi-cong, every step on the frozen mud taken under the silent cloak of the shimmering ceiling of stars. There’s only the sound of your own steps, the cats fighting and the owls whoo-hooing. It’s good to be away from whirring hard drives, whistling central heating and whining fridges - they’re over in the other building, with the nuns, their iPods and the DVD library.

Oh, and lake water lapping? If you pause a moment, feel your feet on the ground under the desk, your bum on the chair and your neck held upright by your back, you might then notice your chest rising and falling ever so gently, the lake water air of your breath lapping right up to your nose and then slowly down again, rising and falling. You don’t need to go to Innisfree for the soothing low sounds by the shore.

I return to retreat at the Immanent Grove today, for a while… perhaps a week, perhaps more…
It will be good to be more human than woman again.

And good to be more woman than feminist.

I send a brisk, fresh autumn gust to you all. Enjoy the clouds - they’re probably better for the eyes than this screen…

The latest Carnival of Feminists has just been published over at Body Impolitic. It’s packed with great posts from blogs I’ve never heard of (as always…) and is illustrated with fantastic images. Go peruse!

[I’ve snapped this detail from the Carnival - it’s a photo of late 19thC actress and singer Lillian Russell]

Sometimes a photograph just grabs me, like this one. I can’t remember when I first saw it, but its stark, respectful honesty has stuck in my mind:

Lauren, 23, bleaches her stained outfit backstage
at Little Darlings, where she is an exotic dancer
Las Vegas, Nevada

I have now discovered that it was by photographer and film-maker Lauren Greenfield whose latest work is the documentary Thin and its accompanying book. Greenfield went inside a Florida treatment centre to tell the stories of four women who are struggling to eat. Although the stories are deeply sad, and although the treatments don’t seem (to me) to touch the real essence of these women’s suffering, the tone of Greenfield’s film is stark and respectful, just like the photo above. Women are having a hard time in this 21st Century world, and we’re lucky to have Greenfield’s gaze on us.

Here is a powerful preview to Thin:

Lauren Greenfield is probably best known for her documenting of ‘girl culture’ in America. You can see her awesome “Girl Culture photoessay” for Time magazine and other remarkable Girl Culture photographs published on her website.

Yesterday, someone came to this blog having typed “HOW TO RAPE SOMEONE” into Google.

(Hello, whoever you were in Falmouth, Maine, USA, using Firefox 2.0 on Microsoft Windows XP. It was 11.15pm for you and your IP was: 72.224.132.# (ROADRUNNER-NYC). I’m sorry you only stayed on here for 0.0 seconds and didn’t have a chance to read the part of my post about not raping women.

If I was a Christian, I’d be praying for you. I’m a meditator, so I’ll be breathing for you instead, doing my best to understand that this kind of Google search can only really come from somebody who is already suffering themselves.)

As you can probably guess, this troubles me. It troubles me that someone is interested in finding out (though granted it could just be research for a fiction book). And it troubles me that we’ve created this thing called the Internet where interested folks can find out. It’s not exactly something they’d ask down the pub, in the Classifieds or over the water cooler at work.

I ran the same Google search myself, to see how they’d got to me. I have a porn filter on my search preferences, I was using google.com, and I was mildly relieved at the results. The first is “How to Prevent Rape”, the second a little more dodgy (I didn’t click through), then there’s “Reduce the Risk of Becoming a Victim of Drug Induced Rape”, “Punishments for rape”, a social welfare article about rape victims, “Can someone rape and not know it”, and then my very own “Flesh, cloth and rape” post, from which Google picks out the phrase: “If you break into a house and find a woman there, don’t rape her. If your friend thinks it’s okay to rape someone, tell him it’s not”.

I felt a small wave of gratitude for Google come over me, and wondered if there was greater censorship than my (self-chosen) porn filter. I was then surprised to find that the term “how to rape” figures on Google’s search trend radar - there’s a fairly vague graph you can examine here, which tells you little more than that there was a marked decrease in searches for ‘how to rape’ in January and February 2006, whatever that might mean.

I’m still troubled by what drives a human being to want to search for those things; and I’m still troubled that we humans have created this beast of the internet that can (in principle) help people find out. After all, “HOW TO RAPE SOMEONE” is a different question from the much more reasonable “WHAT IS RAPE”, and presumably it comes with the corollary “HOW TO RAPE SOMEONE WITHOUT GETTING NICKED” .

I immediately recalled the hoo-haa a few months ago after AOL inadvertently released search data which included which user (a numeric ID) had searched for what (the data was swiftly removed but had already been mirrored here). I can deconstruct my visitor in Falmouth, Maine, and reflect on the bizarre ways in which their unhappy world briefly collided with mine… but it’s altogether more telling when you can pull together a user’s search history over, say, several months. The 3-month AOL database of search terms is startling, revealing as it does users’ deepest (and darkest) queries. CNET News.com pulled together a few user profiles, assembling their queries chronologically:

Based on the number of local searches, AOL user 1515830 appears to be a resident of Ohio’s Mahoning County. On March 1, user 1515830 was trying to find the amount of calories in chai tea and bananas. But on March 9, the searches took a darker turn:

Read the rest of this entry »

A few readers have got in touch by email to say how surprised they are by my response to feminist Christian Kathryn’s comments on my Wintry link-fest post.

I feel I should explain myself…

When I read, talk or write stuff, or just get on with my daily life, I always try to practice being as open-minded as possible. It’s a point of principle I’ve had since I was a child, encapsulated in Buddhist philosophy’s grounding principle of openness, articulated in this precept:

Aware of the suffering created by fanaticism and intolerance, I am determined not to be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist teachings are guiding means to help me learn to look deeply and to develop my understanding and compassion. They are not doctrines to fight, kill or die for. (( The 1st of the 14 Mindfulness Trainings ))

So, in principle, I don’t mind people being Christian and I certainly don’t mind people being Christian at me. Hiyever, I do object to fanaticism and I do object to intolerance. And if someone chooses to be preachingly Christian at a thinking spiritual lass like me, and on this rigorous and grounded blog, I would like them to be ready to receive as good as they give. For the record, I never tolerate spam, which I take to be text posted off-topic to promote another site or product.

But the most honest explanation of my hard response, is that my own spiritual life is based on rigour, and I get impatient when others aren’t rigorous and, further, when they expect me to buy into a non-rigorous position. I work hard to only trust and have faith in things that I myself have experienced to be true.

The spiritual dimension has worth for me only when it really deepens and enriches my daily life. For example, on the post in question, I wrote about how my mindfulness helped me be awake to experience winter; and yet (as far as I could gather) Kathryn wrote about how she was asleep to the fact it was Winter and, for some reason which I don’t quite understand, this was connected to her Christian beliefs. It struck me as foolish, and she fell hostage to my fortune. (( Btw, I also emailed her to ask her if her comment was indeed spam; if it wasn’t could she please come back and respond. She didn’t reply… ))

Fierceness (”letting off with both barrels”, as one of you put it) is nonetheless not my intention, so I shall do my best to be tolerant of everyone, even the unthinking and especially the fanatics.

Try me.

I’m steadily returning from the Immanent Grove… un-retreating after three days of stillness, resting and mind-blowing teachings on metaphysics I’m still midst fathoming. I learnt about Death - or, to be more precise, What Happens When We Die (there was no talk of 49 days and thirty-third heavens). Where do I go when my body no longer manifests? Where, for me, does this world go when I no longer have eyes to see it or a nose to smell it?

The answers were, as the locals here would say with their nasal Langue D’Oc twang, tres interressang….

But somehow, having driven past two hedgehogs slowly crossing the road last night, and seeing their squashed bodies on that very same spot this morning, I realise yet again that the Death Thing is more than just interesting to me - it is damn important; as important as it gets. Why I’m here. Where I go. What it’s all about. Sometimes I’m stunned by how powerful a question it is for me, by how strongly I want to work it out, and by how confident I am that one day I will…

And so I am throwing pots. Mucky, sticky cold wet earth that thuds and slodges and swirls off kilter. Only if I’m breathing right and am rooted well can I (with a struggle) centre it. Throwing a pot - pressing, lifting and drawing it into form - cannot begin until the clay is centred on the wheel, a meditative interplay between mind and body as simple and difficult as the Zen monks’ calligraphic circles (known in Japanese as enso). (( If you’d like to enso-browse you may be interested in Shambala Sun’s Enso Art Gallery. My current favourite is this one. )) It takes pottery mistress Laetitia 10 seconds to centre her clay with one hand. It takes me a hundred attempts, twenty minutes, a cup of tea (for morale) and all my bodily force. I celebrate with a yelp.

The pottery studio’s aural wallpaper is France Bleu FM. “A la cuisine!” the D.J. declares at 11a.m. for the womenfolk. And, after the saga that is the witching hour of midi and France’s three-hour lunch break, he announces “on a bien mangé, on s’est bien reposé”. These words are for the men. They play one-minute versions of Queen, the Beatles and Tom Jones. When my clay develops a swerve to one side or another I’m mortified to notice that it’s dancing to their exact rhythm.

The pottery mistress wanted to know more about British music, so between sighs and yelps at my wheel I attempted to describe, in French, the Britpop phenomenon:

Pooolp? I ventured, hoping she’d nod.

Bleurrr?

Wa-seez? …