Photons from the road

Having a great time, and some great dreams indicating some renovations to interior architecture to accommodate growth. Here are a few of the photons I've captured along the way.

Esther Miller and Mina were wonderful hostesses in Black Mountain, NC (just East of Asheville).



And who doesn't love a giant red penguin??

A practice of Presence

Asheville is an arty, wonderfully weird community nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains. The mornings are cold and frosty, but once the sun rises above the mountains things warm up and the pines breathe their intoxicating scent into the air. There are lots of neat restaurants that specialize in local and organic food, plenty of accessible art, and terrific, independent bookstores. What’s not to love? Especially for an Enneagram Type 7 like me (nicknamed “The Epicure,” Type 7 is interested in everything to the point of distractibility).
I’ve been meeting with Sandra Smith, a consultant in the Enneagram (a conceptual system for understanding personality). The Enneagram doesn’t claim to describe The Truth about a person, it just offers a model for understanding one’s cognitive/emotional structure and the way it functions. Some traits are hard wired, and others are adaptations we developed in childhood that may be maladaptive in adult life. Understanding and awareness can lead one to a sense of being truly at home in one’s inner world, and can offer a way to continue to progress in a human journey of ongoing personal growth and transformation.
One of the features of my type structure is living in the future, reaching out for all the bright possibilities there. A positive consequence is that I can see a clear vision of a preferred future, and I can see the path that connects there to here. A hindrance is that I don’t always appreciate the here! Sandra says: Practice the muscle of Presence.
Today I’m strengthening that muscle by regularly reminding myself to be here, in the now. As I soak in the sunshine and wonders of Asheville, I’m practicing groundedness.

ART!

Saw great art today in lovely Louisville, KY. See the fabulous video by Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung:
http://www.tinkin.com/arts/obama/

On the road!

It seems surreal to finally be travelling, after so long planning and packing. Listening to "Into the Wild" on CD (thanks, Lib & Ross) steeps me in the primordial urge to cast off from safe ports and sail into the unknown. Maybe it was too much for me--I've ended up @ McD's for lunch. Oh well, I plead starvation. When a billboard pic of a bridge at sunset looked like a cheeseburger, I knew I had to stop without further delay. (And the wifi is a nice thing, too.) Time to get back on the road. Wearing KS near my heart. (Thanks, Bailey.)

Hail to Spring. Yes, really.

In spite of – or maybe because of – the snowy white winter scene that surrounds me, I feel a need to praise spring. In light of this last (it had better be) blast of winter, here are some words from the Unitarian Henry Thoreau, from Walden:

Everyone has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the [wood] of an old table … which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts, ––from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still … [The bug] was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn.

Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection … strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, ––heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, ––may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial … furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

All hail the beautiful and winged life that stirs in us today, in springtime.

On the drive home from LA

The drive home from Louisiana was great (the trip was great, too) but after a while the anti-choice billboards really made me grind my teeth. They started on I 55 in Mississippi and were especially prevalent in Arkansas and Missouri, continuing with great frequency along I 70. They were crude and emotional (a thumb-sucking fetus with the slogan, “Don’t kill me, Mommy!”) and often included Bible quotes yanked out of context (an ultrasound photo with the line, “Woman, behold thy son”) and I started to wonder why the pro-choice movement doesn’t counter with some billboards of our own.

The first one I’d like to put up would have 2 words: TRUST WOMEN, with the web address of Planned Parenthood or NARAL under that. I’d also like to see a “Prayerfully Pro Choice” billboard with a photo of a family praying, and the RCRC web address underneath. And a “Pro-Faith, Pro-Choice” featuring a family in church (and the RCRC address) would be a good one, too.

But here’s my over-the-top billboard idea. Picture a side view of a woman lying prone and draped on an exam table, feet in stirrups. A stern-faced male doctor with some outlandish googly goggles peers between her knees, while a government bureaucrat stands looking over his shoulder, noting something on a clip board. The caption would read: KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY WOMB! (Maybe the bureaucrat would have the face of Bart Stupak or some other bigot.)

I know it’s crude and emotional and potentially offensive to many, but see the above descriptions of the anti-choice billboards. At about $2500 a month it’s not an insignificant investment to put one of these billboards up. But the far right has succeeded in getting the U.S. congress and president to ban federal funding for a legal medical procedure with proven benefits to women’s health from the health care bill –– I think it’s time to admit that their crude, emotional and potentially offensive ads have worked.

In hijacking the national conversation about reproductive freedom, the far right has been able to claim that theirs is the ONLY faith-full perspective, and the only family/woman/child honoring viewpoint. Now they claim that choice equals genocide against African Americans. (See Melissa Harris-Lacewell’s latest in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100405/harris-lacewell)

I know, leftist liberal folks like me are supposed to be above the low down dirty tactics of the right wing. Yeah, that’s why the “elitist” charge sticks so well, and may be part of the reason Americans’ reproductive freedom is facing erosion like never before. I say: Let’s get dirty.

A note from New Orleans

In the midst of emerging spring, in the city whose natives describe her as “the crotch of America,” I wonder: Is there a chance to redeem the notion of the erotic from the purely sexual and pornographic?

Here are Terry Tempest Williams’ thoughts on “The Erotic Landscape,” from Red:

I wonder about our notion of the erotic –– why it is so often aligned with the pornographic, the limited view of the voyeur watching the act of intercourse without any interest in the relationship itself.

I wonder what walls we have constructed to keep our true erotic nature tamed. And I am curious why we continue to distance ourselves from natural sources.

What are we afraid of?

The world we frequently surrender to defies our participation in nature and seduces us into believing that our only place in the wild is as spectator, onlooker. A society of individuals who only observe a landscape from behind the lens of a camera or the window of an automobile without entering in is perhaps no different from the person who obtains sexual gratification from looking at the sexual play of others.

...[true, deep] eroticism, being in relation, calls the inner life into play. No longer numb, we feel the magnetic pull in our bodies toward something stronger, more vital than simply ourselves.

Looking at some tiny purple crocuses blooming in my front yard last Sunday I had a brief experience of this landscape of erotic bliss. Not experiencing the natural world as cut-flowers-in-a-vase, but as rooted and living, an integrated part of the natural world, the difference between looking at pictures of disembodied genitalia and actually making sweet, succulent love with one’s beloved.

Then last night, strolling up Bourbon Street and looking at the vacant-eyed, barely clad women beckoning from the doorways of nightclubs, I felt the stark difference. The hawkers promised sexual gratification, but I think while the voyeurism of watching live sex shows and “barely legal” strippers might lead to momentary satiation, it could never produce real satisfaction.

Williams quotes D.H. Lawrence: “There exist two great modes of life––the religious and the sexual.” And she says that “eroticism is the bridge” between these two modes. What would happen if we engaged with eros, that bold and juicy energy that suffuses everything with passion and power? It would be scary. And it might be the only thing that could span the chasm.