52 Days ago I started a process of listening to my heart with an ... open heart. It has been amazing and I will continue this, ideally for 7 more cycles, to complete a full year. I am also 52 years old and on my birthday quipped that I'm now officially "a full deck" (and I love to play cards). This post is a tribute to the abundant love that is everywhere we seek it.
I want to heal my intensity so that the love I have for life, for myself, for others, shines through and becomes contagious. Mental - literal brain/head pressure - overheats my body-mind-spirit like the planet, and if I want to do my part to get that to slow down, to reverse global warming, I need to truly chill, deconstruct, unpack, and reverse the programming that keeps me spinning. I am slowly facing my complicity.
My point is this: for better or worse, middle-aged women, the "sandwich" generation caring for their children and their aging parents, while juggling careers and performing as the "you can have it all" epitome of the American Dream on the shoulders of gazillions of feminists who have come before us, are the foundation of society and the seismic quake to crack that foundation wide open is underway. Do we care? Do we have any collective capacity to care?
What do we know and think about security? How just is access to work and what are our notions of "good" work? What are notions?
We know that a clear and succinct form of feedback one gets when making love is orgasm, hence the natural pursuits and attentions we give it. Imagine if we had that clear of a response with each conversation--there would be either no minor or catastrophic mistakes ever made, or an awful lot of faked "orgasms"!
Emotional transparency is not easy for most people--especially those who have been in and out of the school of hard knocks or have had their egos bruised throughout their personal lives or careers. If you are becoming keenly aware that trust and fear of change are issues you need to tackle, and you don't want to "air your laundry" in front of anyone, journaling is a safe and effective practice for exploring the roots of your pain points.
What’s interesting is the fact that two of the four portraits by area artists featured on the cover of the Arts & Culture section of my local paper are of white women with a hand over her mouth. What are the odds? Finally, it seems, we are all standing together on the threshold of being able to name out loud what has been churning in our bellies for centuries! This is the first story I write, after dozens of drafts over the years, that has substance one can sink their figurative teeth into. It’s a story of stories that can get really ugly and hard to hear. It’s a story of the end of self recrimination, the beginning of the end of a cognitive dissonance so foggy that one forgets they had once been in search of clarity.
The battle between Wisps and Chains. Sounds intriguing. When I muse about the notion of volition–one’s calling or journey–and how the path one walks can twist or turn (or not), I think about spirituality and economics and the subtle or raging battles between the two.
The idea of dynamic stability and not wasting (anything) is extremely inspiring to me. And, with the truths of my heart chords strummed awake by Robin Wall Kimmerer's messages of "raise a garden, raise a ruckus" and "give the Branson prize to the trees", and "the generous resilience of the plants show us how to get back up and keep going", I am ready to feel more humbly aware of the gifts our Mother Earth gives us and, like a petulant child coming to her senses, more carefully attend to my responsibility to her.
Artificial Intelligence. Why do we down play the first word and up play (or worship) the second? In Biographies of Hegemony: The Culture of Smartness and the Recruitment and Construction of Investment Bankers, Karen Zouwen Ho writes: “The ‘culture of smartness’ is central to understanding Wall Street’s financial agency, how investment bankers are personally and institutionally empowered to enact their worldviews, export their practices, and serve as models for far-reaching socioeconomic change. On Wall Street, ‘smartness’ means much more than individual intelligence; it conveys a naturalized and generic sense of ‘impressiveness,’ of elite, pinnacle status and expertise, which is used to signify, even prove, investment bankers’ worthiness as advisors to corporate America and leaders of the global financial markets. To be considered ‘smart’ on Wall Street is to be implicated in a web of situated practices and ideologies, co produced through the interactions of multiple institutions, processes, and American culture at large, which confer authority and legitimacy on high finance and contribute to the sector’s vast influence. The culture of smartness is not simply a quality of Wall Street, but a currency, a driving force productive of both profit accumulation and global prowess.”
