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.

This is a call for comments from people who read this blog. I know there’s more than a few of you because I can see my stats…

I’ve decided to return to the Immanent Grove for a long retreat - at least three months of cold, stark, meditative living in the middle of nowhere for the Winter. Yup, three months it is: a girl’s gotta follow her heart.

In the few weeks between now and then, I’d really like feminish to be as lively and active as possible. I’ve realised how much I’ve got to say. (And at least here the readership is voluntary; I can’t say the same for the victims of my TV/ supermarket/ front-room rants…) But I’m also pretty sure this can act as a provocative forum - especially for the E1 ladeez.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you to Lingual Tremors for putting together an excellent 23rd Carnival of Feminists.

The theme is women and healthcare, including a cluster of writing on ‘Health care in a Handmaiden World’. The post that most caught my eye was from Indian Writing on What’s not in a name: names given to unwanted / unwelcome girl babies in some sections of Punjab/Haryana.

Go read!

Hat tip to Jacky Fleming again.

Thank Heavens for funny women.

Reasons why the feminist blogosphere is great, No.1:

A wave of ladeez have recently opened themselves up for any questions about the whys, wherefores, what-have-yous and whatjamacallits of feminism.

It all began with Molly Saves the Day, and quickly spread to Pandagon and Feministe (Jill’s just begun responding). Even the Happy Feminist has promised to play the game too.

Woo hoo!

This is Alice Walker, writing in her In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South (1974)

… Our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

Here’s the context of the quote, for completeness’s sak…

As Virginia Woolf wrote… in A Room of One’s Own:

“Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working class. [Change this to slaves and the wives and daughters of sharecroppers.] Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns [change this to a Zora Hurston or a Richard Wright] blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils [or Sainthood], of a wise woman selling herbs [our rootworkers], or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen. . . . Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. . . .”

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

I ended last week’s fast the evening of the second day.

Those first two days I felt drawn-out and a little bit wonky. Time passed slowly, droolingly and lethargically. I felt empty; spare.

I stopped happily and gently, enjoying the savouriness of a bouillon soup.

In fact, it was kind of the cosmos to arrange the early-finish, because first thing the next morning we received a phonecall from the Patterner’s grandmother up the hill:

“I am dying”

We flew out of the front door and into the car in, I warrant, no more than 15 seconds. There are now some small roadworks in the village, so we even had the chance to blow a red light.

The doctor and ambulance seemed to take an age; time steadied and thickened. With one hundred percent concentration we stayed with her, following our breath and helping her to follow hers. When fear came up in myself I had to immediately take care to dissolve it - and to call on every last drop of my resources of meditation to be present, calmly present, so that she could be present too. We could tell that only if she was calm and not-fearing could her Heart and Will make it.

The women came - Paulette, Anne-Marie. Soon she was swaddled in wool blankets, soft towels and crisp linen; the sweet-smelling feminine trousseau. We comforted and coddled her away from the abyss as Anne-Marie brushed her hair: That’s better. You can’t go to the hospital without a quick brush.

Within a few hours and after a few more alarms she was there, on a wheeled bed in the corridor, shaken and exhausted but returned. Her particular shade of grey was, we remarked, still somewhat better than the grey-whites of certain barely-bodied-humans swooshing past, each chased by their own urgent, white-coated entourage. At one point her blood began to rise up, rich and red, through the drip-tube.

“That’s a good red,” I said. “Just like a British Letterbox.” (”I’m surprised they make it in France”, I might have added, but didn’t.)

She smiled a weak but willing smile, and the Patterner and I fell into humming chorales as we waited for Radiology.

One day, one day…

I hope I’ll be able to see the Plough / Big Dipper / Great Bear as anything but a saucepan.

How can a feminist still see it as a saucepan?!

Thank you to Villa Villekulla for tagging me…

One book that changed your life:

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
I met a cool young bloke in a queue in Durham when I was somewhere between the pits of misery and heights of drunken delirium, aged about 16. I was just beginning to eat again, defiant, muddled and troubled (he didn’t know). A few days later I received in the post Hesse’s Siddhartha (and a ten page letter). Reading it I got hopeful, excited and light. It was a fresh way of looking at things, making the stuff of life stark and beautiful. There was no hiding.

One book you have read more than once:

20thC Photography: Museum Ludwig Cologne

I like pictures a thousand times more than I like words. I’m not sure there’s any book I’ve read more than once, let alone a feminish one. For me, finishing a book is such a major achievement I can’t bear to double-up my tally by repeating one. (I still recall with horror the time my sister finished Mathilda for the second time, and then - it was 10pm at night - proceeded to turn it over and start reading again at page 1. I realised then that there would be some things in life which I will never understand).
This fat, flickable book of 20thC photography, bought for a song at a remainders shop, is a real friend. It’s about bodies, joy, pain, beauty, glamour, suffering and the gritty reality of 20th Century human existence. It’s personal and it’s political and I can pore over the same photos for hours.
The one above is Tina Modotti’s Mother and Child

One book you would want on a desert island:

Well, it would depend on how deserted the island was. Assuming total isolation, I’d go for the world’s biggest, fattest, idiot-to-expert guide to astronomy, given that the stars would be the only ponderable things actually there with me. If there’s stuff going on on the island, like fauna and flora (and bugs), I’d like the world’s biggest natural history book. I wouldn’t worry about feminism if it was me alone with the cosmos.

One book that made you laugh:

Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
All of them, but especially this:

One book that made you cry:

Thich Nhat Hanh, Call Me By My True Names

This book of poetry may also be the one book I’d want on a desert island:

…I’ve dreamed of drinking dewdrops
that sparkle with the light of far-off galaxies.
I’ve left footprints on celestial mountains
and screamed from the depths of Avici Hell, exhausted, crazed with despair
because I was so hungry, so thirsty…

One book you wish had been written:

A light, engaging and grounded book about how to be a calm, clear feminist in 21st century daily life.

One book you wish had never been written:

Lawrence Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England 1500-1800 (1979)
For me, this is the archetypal case of lazy, masculine history that gets status (in this case an unendingly in-print paperback Penguin edition) simply because the bloke in question is a Big Name and there’s a nice grand narrative which fits readers’ existing prejudices.

But it’s bad history, plain and simple. It’s so famous and so widely-read and -quoted, I think this book is part of the reason most people think we’ve ‘progressed’ from higgledy-piggledy extended families where parents didn’t care about their kids, half of whom died before they were five anyway, and much less about their partners - to a happy bliss of nuclear family intimacy, love and stability in the 20th Century.

It just wasn’t like that! Extended kinship groups as he describes were already gone by 1500, there’s evidence of deep family love even further back than that - and I stick my tongue out at anyone who claims nuclear families were a blissful norm in the 20th Century.

One book you are currently reading:

A very special copy of Alice Walker’s Living By The Word, signed by her after a talk at the Hackney Empire and given to me by Miss Morgan on, if I remember correctly, the top deck of the Number 11 bus to Liverpool Street. I’m impressed by the peacefulness of it, and by the fact A.W. can be so grittily incisive about so much. And I’m in awe of her fulsome ecofeminism.

One book you have been meaning to read:

A History of Women in the West (All five volumes)
After I’d already spent the cost of two volumes on photocopies in libraries, I realised it’d be cheaper to actually buy them: a myriad collection of awesome articles on women’s lives from the Greek Antiquity to the late 20th Century (with lots of good pictures). Even second-hand they were still pricey, but I ordered the shipping-by-sea option of the cheapest set from the States and broke into the higher echelons of mastercard debt. They eventually arrived in Westminster after I’d already left the newsroom for my sabbatical in Europe, in a fantastically huge grey canvas sack, weighing a tonne. They reached me in East London just in time for me to send my brother off with a tenner to get a wheely carry-case from Petticoat Lane. I plonked them in, with a couple of Luce Irigaray’s and the Patterner’s own meaning-to-read collection (which included Ulysses), and off we headed on Eurostar. We hefted and hulked the bag through the Paris Metro, but it didn’t survive the Patterner’s flying leap down a 10 metre flight of stairs, and so we had to continue our journey carrying the book-tonne by hand.

The sabbatical has become eternal and the meaning-to-read books sit ominously on our bodged oak-and-stone shelves. So far only two of the five volumes have made it out of their foam packing… so when I say I’ve been meaning to read them, I really mean I’ve been meaning to read them - actively, expensively and exhaustingly, for quite a while.

UPDATE:

Ah Yes! ….I tag: The folks over at the unconvention, Norvicensian, rgrp, Jolie at Confessions of a Blogwitch, and all the E1 Ladeeez.

This is by Jacky Fleming and first appeared in her book Be a Bloody Train Driver (Penguin, 1991).

I found it in the fantastic Funny Girls: Cartooning for equality, a history of women’s campaigns for equality as drawn in 130 years of cartoons.