Rainy day brain ramblings

It’s raining, and I’m eating strawberries. It's early for rain, and it's early to be eating strawberries. They’re not in season. It was hard to find a container that didn’t have some severe squishy going on, but I’m eating them. With just a little sugar.

This tastes like memory to me. It tastes like dessert after Easter dinner at my grandmother’s house. Fluffy white meringues of Schaum Torte. Even fluffier peaks of whipping cream and the decadent brilliance of strawberries out of season.
Red juices running over the clear glass plates that Grandma brought out, only for Schaum Torte. The plates are shaped sort of like peaches and are completely appropriate for the inexact shape of the mound of white meringue. A round plate would have made the tortes look sloppy.

By the end of dessert, the sludge on my plate is pink. The meringue isn’t crisp anymore, but I’ve eaten all the strawberries.

I remember strawberries as a luxury. This is possibly a slightly modified memory, but I feel like they were something to be eaten only in season when the prices were down or as my neighbor's freezer jam later in the summer.
And so eating them at my desk for no apparent reason, while reading an exquisitely crafted book, watching the early not-yet-spring rain happen, feels like a nap in a sunbeam. I'm stretched full length in it, a happy, warm cat.

Keeping my oar in: A first stab at the black beast.

In which I try and fail to write about my "examining my girl-self" project and turn to a prompt that leads me to That Other Essay I Have Been Avoiding.
This comes out of a prompt in Elizabeth Andrew's Writing Your Sacred Journey...prompted to write about a way in which nature is not always pleasant.


When I was in eighth grade, I joined the church youth group on an end of the winter camping trip. It was a warm sort of March, made for endless afternoon broomball games in the slushy surface of the frozen river. As a group, we made good on Camp Luther's highway clean-up promises. We found the usual sorts of things you find at the side of northern Wisconsin's highways: shoes, beer bottles, soda cans...underwear. Things that make you wonder. We were given instructions that if we found roadkilled deer that we mark it and call in the truck that would take it away to a wildlife center for critters to munch on.
About midway through the day, my partner Jenn and I found such a deer. It had frozen and thawed many times over the course of the winter and had a sort of dehydrated, sunken look. It hadn't any eyes and crows had been at its insides as well. We stood and looked at it for a long time, taking in the broken legs, the way the constricting muscles had pulled the vertebrae of the neck back, bending the head over the spine. The formerly dense fur was patchy and sticking together in wet spikes.
It was, at that point, the largest dead thing I had been near.

When I was little, our neighbors' house had eves made for bird nests, and starlings and house sparrows used them every year. Each spring, some of the nestlings would overflow, long before they were supposed to be testing their wings, to meet their death on the ground below. I patrolled the back yard, looking for these unfortunates, ostensibly to keep my neighbor's indoor/outdoor cats from eating them. I still remember the sort of guilty-nervous swoop of my stomach when I found the small, featherless bodies, eyes still closed, looking more like bruises on the sides of their overlarge heads.
My summer rambles around the neighborhood were relatively unsupervised, and between bike-rides and games of empty-lot kickball, I'd often check back several times, looking in on the progress of decomposition and insect activity. If I didn't see Damon and Pythias (my neighbor's mythically named cats) in the yard, I wouldn't tell my neighbor about the dead bird. I liked to keep it to myself, a little science experiment.
Over the 16 years we lived in that house on Summer Street, we buried a lot of fish, birds, bunnies and cats under the pine tree in our backyard. By the time I was in high school, I started to think about digging them up to see if I could reconstruct the skeletons of the larger animals, even my beloved bunny Fluff. I always felt sort of ashamed about it, but I still wanted to do it. I never did.


When I began looking for colleges, I searched for a place that would let me know how to determine age, ethnicity and sex from skeletal evidence. I made my decision based on several phone conversations had with Professor O'Connell, skeletal anthropologist extraordinaire. I had a lot of great opportunities. I went to the city morgue in the company of another professor to examine the remains of a man who had been found in a field. It was possible that his fingertips had been removed to make identification difficult. We determined, based on spiral fractures in the phalanges, that it was wildlife chewing on his fingers that removed them, not the straight-across tool-marks that might indicate human action. Professor Myster pointed out to us skull features we'd only seen in the lab (mandibular tori, for example...bumps in the bone of the lower jaw. I have them too). We watched the insect life that had come to the morgue along with the man's remains thaw out and move about. I remembered eighth grade's frozen and thawed deer, for this man had also spent some time in the elements. His skin reminded me of pictures I'd seen in National Geographic of the Ice Man. (Oh, how I used to inhale anything Nat Geo had for me about human remains in archaeology!)

I remember Professor Myster's excitement in the field. It seems strange to admit to excitement around death, but it was very academic. It made me feel less weird for all those years of backyard decomp studies. It made me feel like I'd found a place, like I had chosen correctly.
The world needs these people who do not find the processes of death terrifying and stomach-turningly disgusting, and I was ready and willing to join the ranks of these men and women.

I spent the summer between my junior and senior years holed up in the osteology lab for hours with boxes of bones that had been taken from the desert 80 years before--Hamline's teaching collection. I put to use my skills in bone measurement, defining age at death, the sex of the individual, learned also to keep the skeletons I had laid out respectfully covered with red cloth and to smudge with sage before and after--and whenever something felt off in the room. (And there were times when I suddenly did not feel like I was alone.)

Even as I gloried in this work, my mind was crumbling on itself. The black sludge that traveled the genetic lines from at least as far back as my great grandfather began to bubble up in me...I always have images of that cartoon ice-age critter in a tar pit when I think of this time. The more I struggled, the more exhausted I became, and so I gave myself over to it. All my uncertainty, all my feelings of unworth. I allowed those feelings to get in the way, allowed myself to believe it was easier to just give up. Friendships dwindled; my senior project died. If DB hadn't been enrolled in school and determined to finish, he would have gone as well. I wonder, sometimes, if he had, if I would have crawled back to my parents' house. Taken a leave of absence and come back at some better time. Come back to my bones.

And I've lived with this feeling of life interrupted/gone awry for the last eight years.
Eight years of being ok with a sort of slacker underachievement that would never have appeased the gods of my younger days. ...and really, didn't appease the gods of my early twenties either, but I hadn't the will to crawl out of that damn tar pit.

Out of intense longing, I've never closed the door on this time of my life. I have to do it now. It's part of me. In some parallel universe, I have no doubt that I pour over skeletons, both modern and ancient, unwrapping their secrets. I may even be an entomologist, taking insect evidence from dump sights. I dreamed, for a time, of following in Professor Myster's footsteps and going to the U of Tennessee to study decomposition at the "Body Farm". Maybe I'm hangin' out down there, teaching and studying, the next in a line of delightfully off-kilter academics who don't mind decay.
But I don't live in that world, so I must find a way to lay it down and pick up the dream that is real in this world. I know that moving forward now requires me to face this part of my life that I have--to this point--acknowledged, but not yet embraced.

As I go through the detritus of my young creative life, and find pieces of real brilliance and pieces that make me love me all over again, I'm sure there is also wealth in the years of my life between 21 and 28. I think the first step in discovering that wealth might be accepting the mistakes and decisions I made as my own.
We all come upon the life we're supposed to live in different ways, and the way the world is opening up before and behind me right now scares the hell out of me. ...the comparison springs readily to mind, so forgive me...scares me like all the dead things in the world haven't been able to.

My friend KC told me something fantastic the other day (and she has lived through a lot of the same things that I have and has the benefit of nearly 30 years on me). KC is an avid outdoorswoman. She kayaks and white-water canoes like a pro. She said: "Do you know why most people capsize in their kayaks?" I, knowing nothing of kayaking, shook my head in the negative. "People tip because when they hit the rapids, they stop paddling. They grab the sides of the craft and try to find their balance that way, rather than paddling through it. You just have to keep your oar in."

That's the advice with which I'm moving forward. No more tar pits, just sections of river that are more rough than others. (I imagine that the sense of getting through the rapids is exhilarating.)

Being Woman

As I was writing my "spiritual memoir" for class, I came—belatedly—to the realization that so much of my spirituality was tied up in frustrations with my own femaleness. We are “made in the image of god”, but god was “god the father”. My young brain couldn’t wrap around that any easier than my more "mature" brain can. I don’t accept it. What I do accept is that I am part of the collective that makes the world full of meaning and sacredness. That sounds mad and more than a bit fluffy, but it doesn’t have the affect of divorcing me--in my body--as something that is the image of a god.

When I’m having a good dance night, I have no doubt that I am made in the image of god[dess]. It is easy to think “What if the world was danced into being, rolling off the undulating spine of the Creator?” In the power of a really talented belly dancer’s muscles, I see the flex and flow of all the possibility that women have.

If I may digress for a moment: I think that is why belly dance is unlike any other dance, and it drives me absolutely bats when people reduce it to “ohmigodsexy”. It is that. I’m certainly not going to deny it. I, and zillions of other people worldwide I’m sure, want to lick Sharon Kihara’s abdominals, but it is more than that. It is challenging. It is the body glorying in itself, expressing the potential of creation as it accents the most biological bits of a woman all the while melding them into the whole. It is the mind working with the body; it is very controlled. Belly dance is not reductively sexy. It is empowering—more about the dancer than the audience. And in spite of this, I have met so few conceited belly dancers. That, I think, is testimony to the power of dancing for oneself. No justifications, no false pride, as woman tries to reconcile herself with an activity that is not for herself.

Reaching this place with myself has been hard-fought. It is obvious, when I think of my younger self, that I have always wanted to get here. She was an angry girl. She wanted to be a warrior for women everywhere. She would, like Erik Draven in The Crow, find every perpetrator of violence (physical or otherwise) against women and beat that person to a bloody pulp, take away their power and their agency. (You dare make me uncomfortable in my body! I’ll show you uncomfortable!) It is amazing, just writing those words, how easy it is to still feel the rage of that young woman. I spent a lot of time cultivating that anger.

It was a false sense of strength, but I used it. I lashed out in words, thinly veiled diatribes in fictional form, but my words gave pause to other young women in my class who were feeling similar things. I shared this writing with girls in my high school, and for a time, I was a mini-celebrity among the other frustrated young women (and a few young men) of my class. The anger was not useful, but the outrage may have been.

For a long time, I forgot this part of me. In the arms of a good relationship, I grew a bit complacent, I think. I had a hard time connecting with the righteous anger that I needed to rewrite young Armina. When I was once again introduced to anger at a man who was directly in my life, and also a young woman who seems to desperately want to be a young man, I remembered myself as a young woman...so desperate herself to just be comfortable in her body. I, too, wished to be a boy when I was little. I would tuck my hair up under a baseball hat, trying to imagine my feminine roundness away. (And I was a round 7 year old.) I thought, perhaps not consciously, that the answer to being comfortable in my skin was to be a boy. That faded, of course, but my discomfort in my femininity did not.

I’ve only just now started referring to my peers and myself as women. This is not so much an age thing (though we are nearing our venerable third decade), as it is a desire to leave behind a diminutive. Woman, with all its baggage of disenfranchisement and inequality, is also the strongest thing to be, and I’m embracing that anew…or perhaps for the first time. It blows me away that humanity is still alive and kicking sometimes, and that is women. My ancestresses have pushed through feelings of unimaginable frustration, feeling love for their families, but perhaps equally boxed in, without other options.

I always (somewhat) laughingly think of myself in the 50s, drinking martinis until I float as soon as I’m alone in the house, or 1890s me with a glass of sherry, struggling to find meaning in being a mother, valiantly staying away from the opiates that I kept on hand for dosing sick children. And that’s just the recent memory stuff. The women on my walls have possibly had those feelings, though my IL grandma was employed all through raising a family. She had to deal with my grandfather telling her that she thought more of the job than she did the family. “It must have seemed that way to him, but I didn’t,” she told me. It was for the family that she worked so hard.
It is these women I join. My grandmothers are living evidence of sacred femininity. They have lived, loved and worked through times that could have diminished them even more than this one has tried to diminish me. We have struggled with similar things, and I hope to finally banish shame, discomfort and guilt from the blood of the women in my family.

The following poem was written not quite two years ago when my therapist was trying to drag me out of another period of being uncomfortable in my skin. I turned to Tori Amos' writings about archetypes and the divine feminine and decided to play with them a bit myself. I offer it up again in thanks and because I need to keep reminding myself...

“Archetypal”
They say that Cleopatra wasn’t Liz Taylor gorgeous.
It was her boldness and wit that drove Caesar mad.
In the stacks of the library at Alexandria,
they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

A continent away, Caesar’s men chased down Iceni daughters.
Their milk-pale, freckled bodies broke under the onslaught of centurion spears.
Their Mother-queen rode into battle,
bringing the night-dark wings of the Morrigan down on her enemies.

Rumor has it, both Cleo and Boadicea died of poison.
They might have talked strategy together,
red head, bent to dark one.
“Horses, my dear?”
“Oh no, elephants, like Alexander.”

And I really think that Jesus’ mother would have wept
to see her power consigned to her virginity.
“Why, Miss Magdalene can you go about with your hair unbound,
and I must smile benignly from beneath my halo?”

Hildegaard understood this.
Her Virgins went with their hair loose, under the sheerest of veils.
The bishops tut and tsk, and still the ladies of Bingen sang:
“How very hard it is to hold out against whatever tastes of the Apple.”

I would bring the apple to Hildegaard’s cell
and tell her of maidens whose bows shot snakes
that turned into herons.
“What crawls on its belly can also learn to fly,” she would say
and draw a mandala that would make it all very clear.