feminish

The sun is warm here on the dry rocky plateau of the causse, and there are improbable numbers of flies from the sheep and goats. They have developed an unfortunate habit of mating on my shoulder. (I would normally call myself fairly fly-tolerant, but this proximity of parasitical procreation is pushing me over my bug-loving edge.)

The thing is, is the sun ever not warm?! Is the sun ever not shining? Sometimes on cloudy days I remember how hot and bright the sun still is - it’s just that the clouds are in the way. The sun is still shining, even on the greyest days.

I have a little game when I’m feeling stuck with something, or caught up in worries. I ask myself,

Where are the stars, Natasha?

It works every time. They’re there, and there and there and there. Just millions and billions of light years away, but in every direction, even in daytime. When I remember where the stars are things look different and I feel better (even in the middle of a newsroom).

I’ve been angry this past 24 hours, and I’ve been doing my best to take care of my anger. I’ve written a lot, I’ve talked to myself a lot, and last night I took refuge in the stars, which were bright (and the Great Bear didn’t look like a saucepan after a while….).

There’s a good little practice I once learned about what to do when I’m furious, when my buttons have been pressed. You know the kind of times. The times when you want to kick a wall, or throw something - or shout. (And if there’s a door nearby I’d want to slam it.) In these times, I do my best to follow this little gatha:

I close my eyes and look deeply.
Three hundred years from now
Where will you be and where shall I be?

As the zen master says,

Looking at the future, we see that the other person is very precious to us. When we know we can lose them at any moment. We are no longer angry. We want to embrace her or him and say,

“How wonderful, you are still alive. I am so happy. How could I be angry with you? Both of us have to die someday and while we are still alive and together it is foolish to be angry at each other.”

The reason we are foolish enough to make ourselves suffer and make the other person suffer is we forget that we and the other person are impermanent. Someday when we die we will lose all our possessions, our power, our family, everything. Our freedom, peace and joy in the present moment is the most important thing we have.

We can talk about ‘men objectifying women’ or ‘women’s oppression’. We can talk about how we’re hit, raped and exploited; how our work is never done, always underpaid and scarcely accorded the status it deserves.

We can talk about how we’re trapped in our clothes, magazines, make-up and heels; or how we’re framed into self-less, unthinking sex-bodies by films, ads and porn.

And my mind says,
Yes, that is the case. Yes, I see that - I have myself experienced these things. And yes, like you I am angry.

I am angry in my head and I am angry in my tummy - and I am angry with the people and systems I blame.

But do I want to be angry? Do I have to be?

It is true that anger will, quite probably, make me join a protest. And it will, almost certainly, fire me up into outspoken challenges of the status quo. It is my anger that drives me to read and think and struggle to understand why on earth our culture and values and behaviours are like this. And it is my outraged incredulity that, more often than not, sparks me off to post here on feminish.

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I got angry yesterday. The kind of anger that made my throat tight, my heart thud in my chest and my stomach knot against food.

I’ve always thought I wasn’t an angry person.

Some might say I used to get stressed, be stroppy, throw ‘tantrums’ [two new words for my just-opened feminish language-bin]… but I don’t think they’d say I was An Angry Young Woman.

I was angry yesterday with the mason - for cutting a new lintel too short, putting it in the wrong way up and letting half the house subside an inch in the process. It’s true that I raised my voice and wrung my hands and leapt up and down a little more than the situation probably required. And it’s true that before I knew it I was also angry with the Patterner.

But what really hit me yesterday was the thick intensity of the storm raging inside my whole body. There was way more going on than just the pierced words and facial gymnastics that squeezed their way through my physical casing - but it’s hard to see exactly what.

It’s funny to see how much I am a mystery to my own self.