The Universe Hands Out Gold Stars

Lately, the Almighty has been blessing me with messages of encouragement.

Last Sunday at the Farmers Market, we had folks nearly turning themselves inside out to tell us how good our food was.  Honestly, it nearly brought me to tears.  All I could think was that in five years of running the restaurant, I don’t think I heard as much positive feedback as I got in four hours in Lincoln City on a Sunday afternoon. 

And it made me do a quick re-evaluation of exactly why it was that I was doing what I was doing. 

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m sure I have entertained the notion that I resurrected the concession business as my only viable choice after crashing and burning as a restaurant owner.  I haven’t felt any real excitement about it.  It was my fallback position.  Something to keep me busy, something I could do with one hand tied behind my back.  Something to make me at least LOOK like I was vital and productive.

NOT a good attitude to have, as a business owner.  It’s not reasonable to expect success, or even satisfaction, with something if you can’t stir up at least a minimum of enthusiasm for it, let alone passion.

So the Universe blessed me with a Day of Remembrance.  A day of reminding me just how good and successful my little pocket sandwiches are, and hinting at how far they could take me if I started really believing in them again.  Message received.  And appreciated.

Also last week, while we were camped up in the hills without cell service or internet, I nevertheless managed to tote my iPad along on the few occasions we did trek back into civilization to shop.  So I was able to check my email a couple of times during the week.  And lo and behold, I got a notice that someone had read and commented on one of last year’s “November marathon” posts.  November marathon?  Yes…last November, I made a commitment to post every day on one of my blogs…only to be met with the deafening silence of a disbanded community.  It was a depressing experience.  And probably a big reason why I have posted a total of 26 entries so far this entire year.  But like Cyrano de Bergerac, I fight on… 

Anyway, someone posted a comment on one of my anti-poor-bashing posts, thanking me for standing up for the less fortunate among us.  Funny…that particular post was not even one of my best of the month.  But still…it was nice to know that the message got out there, somehow…to some anonymous someone.  And while I was checking out the comment, I went back and read the rest of the essays I had posted that month, and some of them were still damned good.

Which may be a big reason why I have now posted two entries within a couple of days of each other…because maybe I’ve been reminded that I still have something worthwhile to say.  And that I can say it in a way that resonates with someone…if only myself.   

Seems like the Universe habitually throws me a rope and pulls me out of these quagmires of self-doubt in which I am prone to wallow.  Never a moment too soon. 

But then again, never a moment too late. 

         

Polishing the Image

So I had my nails done today.  This was a “holiday” luxury I enjoyed for several years pre-café.  It was even an indulgence I continued to allow myself during the café years, in an attempt to make me feel like something more than the slave-labor sweat-hog that I actually was.

But I haven’t had nails since the restaurant closed.  I’ve had many excuses—that nails were too expensive and I didn’t have the money…that I didn’t want to spend the holidays as an “acrylic nail cripple”…that  my life consisted mainly of yard work, kitchen work and craft work, none of which was made easier by the complications of acrylic nails.  And all of these things were (are) true.  But I don’t think they were the REAL reason for foregoing my favorite winter-time indulgence.

The real reason?  Penance.  Punishment.  Self-flagellation. 

Somewhere in my exhausted and wounded mind, I believed I was no longer worthy.  I had failed, utterly and spectacularly, at the one thing I had believed was going to turn me into the grown-up businesswoman I had aspired to be since I was scarcely more than a little girl.  It had taken thirty years to bring the dream to fruition, and I went down in flames.  Yes, America, I do STILL see myself as a failure.  Though it may not have been—decidedly was NOT, in fact—entirely my fault, I nevertheless did fail.  It’s still a big, fat “1” in the loss column that will never go away.

And I have continued to fail, since.  Failed to “recover” as quickly as I thought I should (whatever that means…)  Failed to find a job, or even find any enthusiasm for a job-search.  Failed to climb back on the horse and become a contributing, tax-paying member of society again.  Failed to have faith in my writing, and just go for it (though I’m not really sure what that means, in this age of self-publication and blogs by every Tom, Dick and Mary…)  Failed, even, to honor my spiritual quest by taking it to a deeper level (and I’m not sure what THAT means, either.)

So I let my hair grow out.  Since menopause hit, my hair looks horrible if it gets any longer than chin length, but I told myself, too bad, you can’t afford a short haircut that needs to be trimmed every six weeks to the tune of thirty or forty dollars a shot, and you SURE can’t afford an $80 color job…EVER.  And I couldn’t possibly justify the expense of acrylic nails.  Or a pedicure.  Or anything that would make me feel prettier or sexier in this aging body that feels more like someone else’s body (can’t possibly be MINE) every day.

All I have to say now is—F**K that crap. 

Slowly, I’ve been “allowing” myself to indulge again.  Last spring, I started getting my hair cut and colored.  OMG, it looks SO much better short…I’m NEVER going back to trying to let it grow out.  In July, right before our gigantic Festival week, I got myself a pedicure.  Monday, I went clothes shopping at somewhere besides Goodwill for the first time in at least a year.  And today…TODAY I got nails. 

I’m SO done punishing myself.  SO done letting myself look like “less than” because I believed I WAS “less than.”  It’s a surefire recipe for depression:  self-inflicted and self-perpetuating.  And it doesn’t do anybody any good. 

Go me!

  

On Ray and Janay Rice

Let me first say that I have never been beaten up by a husband or boyfriend, nor even been verbally abused by one.  I’m not claiming this as a badge of honor, merely stating a fact that has more to do with my lily-white suburban upbringing combined with my personal cussedness, than with any feminist “don’t tread on me” philosophy.  Had I grown up in a different culture, even a different town or neighborhood, I might be different.

So I won't set myself up as judge and jury over women who DO become involved with abusers.  Though I don’t understand it or have any personal experience with it, I know the psychology of battered women is complicated.  I know the abuse can escalate so subtly that even women who swore they would never be in abusive relationships suddenly find themselves trapped, with nowhere to go and nowhere to hide.  Many women are attracted to men who project a strong physical image…perhaps they are looking for a protector.  Unfortunately, there’s a fine line between a man who uses his physical prowess to protect, and one who uses it to control.  In his mind, they might be one and the same. 

The Ray Rice case has fostered a public debate about domestic violence and society’s role in preventing it.  Sadly, if you listen to the press releases and tweets purportedly put out by Janay Rice, this whole episode is none of anyone’s business but hers and her now-husband’s. 

…No one knows the pain that the media and unwanted [opinions] from the public has cause my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing. …THIS IS OUR LIFE! What don’t you all get. If your intentions were to hurt us, embarrass us, make us feel alone, take all happiness away, you succeeded on so many levels. Just know we will continue to grow and show the world what real love is!

To a certain extent, she’s right.  The intimate details of their relationship SHOULD be between herself and her husband.  And they would be, if this couple were John and Jane Doe who lived down the street.  But there are two complicating factors here:  1.)  she and her then-fiancé played out their drama in front of cameras in a public place; and 2.)  her husband’s line of work basically amounts to accepting a ridiculous amount of money to be on constant public display. 

Ray Rice doesn’t (didn’t) get paid a king’s ransom to play football.  He got rich so people could watch him play football.  And watch him do everything else he does that isn’t behind firmly closed doors with no cameras present.  Someone needs to make it clear to these young men, and their spouses, that they are selling not only their athletic skills but their rights to any kind of anonymity or autonomy when they are in public. 

And so it should be.  Because even though it’s been more than twenty years since Charles Barkley famously claimed that “I am not a role model,” the brutal fact is that there are and always will be fans out there who will idolize and emulate these famous athletes.  In our present twisted pop culture, in fact, it seems that the worse the behavior of any given sports star, the more popular, mimicked and rich he becomes.

So what would I say to Janay Rice?  That perhaps whatever “good” she thinks she is drawing from the relationship—be it emotional or fiscal—might not be worth living every day with the knowledge that this man you love could easily seriously hurt or kill you, and has demonstrated his apparent willingness to do so in full view of the public?  That “real love” does not, CAN not exist alongside the constant threat of physical harm?  What would be the point?  She obviously truly believes she loves this man, he loves her, that what they have is real love, and that the outside world, rather than her husband’s fist, is responsible for the pain in her life. 

What I would say to Mrs. Rice is this:

In a different world, what goes on between you and your husband would be private.  No one else would have to know, no one would be involved, until they wheeled you out of the front door of your home on a gurney, with a sheet over your face.  As a private citizen, you would have that right.  And there are many women—TOO many—who claim that right, and come to precisely that end. 

But you and your husband are not “private citizens.”  You accept a lot of money to BE public figures.  To conduct your lives in front of God and everybody.  You may not like being a “role model,” but as the family of a professional athlete, it’s not a title you can accept or reject purely on your own say-so.  It is what it is.  People will watch you.  People will emulate you.  And if one girl follows your example and marries the man who put her in the hospital in the name of “real love,” and ends up in a body bag, it’s one too many. 

YOU may be willing to take that risk.  The rest of us are not.  Which is why the press, the Baltimore Ravens, the commissioner of the NFL, and the public had to step in and inflict the consequences upon behavior that can not by any stretch of the imagination be labeled acceptable, in public or in private. 

Undoubtedly, Ray Rice will get a second chance to play football somewhere.  If we know one thing about professional sports, it’s that some avaricious team owner—one who knows the voyeuristic American public is pathologically interested in witnessing a train wreck and will part with big bucks to do so—is always willing to take on the “bad boys.”  (Michael Vick, anyone?)  So, don’t worry, Janay.  All you need to do is bide your time and try and stretch that $15 million signing bonus a little thinner.  In a year or two or five, Ray will be back at the top of the NFL food chain.

I hope you live that long. 

(Image from Salon.com)               

The Trouble with Long Goodbyes

This has been a hard year for us in the category of animal stewardship.  Last November, we lost Maudie the cat, and five months later, her companion spirit, our dog Lucy.  Maudie loved Lucy so much.  I think the Universe planned for her to walk on before Lucy did, because I honestly don’t think Maude could have borne a life without her dog. 

And now we are looking at the steady demise of another of our animal children.  Bart is seventeen years old.  Pretty old, for a cat.  And considering he has suffered from a chronic health issue for most of his life, he’s hung in way longer than I would have expected. 

Bart’s fade has presented me with many challenges and insights.  Coming about as it has almost directly on the heels of the veterinary/financial disaster that was Lucy’s final illness, I have looked at Bart’s travel toward the exit from a very different perspective than I have seen that same journey with past animal family members. 

Unfortunately, my insight has presented itself in the form of more questions—questions that never entered my mind before—than answers. 

Why do we fight so hard against death?  If we humans decide to fight that battle to the finish for ourselves and others of our kind, do we have the right to subject our companions of other species to that same grueling, desperate, often futile and frequently painful battle? That fight which always, always, ends in defeat?

I suspect that our first mistake is in framing the event in terms of battle:  Fight, win, lose, victory, defeat, surrender…  Life is good.  Life is wonderful.  Life is a gift.  But it is finite, and always has been.  I understand the instinct to survive…but have we taken that to a point it was never meant to reach?  Are we meant to cling so desperately to life, no matter what its quality?  Are we meant to extend our final hours or days on this earthly plane into weeks or months of pain, suffering, uncertainty and vain hope?  I don’t know.  I don’t think so.  We have that choice; we can choose that battle if we so desire.  But is it morally or ethically right to choose it for those gentle animal spirits who have been entrusted into our care?

In the past few years, veterinary medicine has followed the track that human medicine took a couple of decades ago.  There is no such thing, anymore, as taking your animal to the vet and having it treated.  Anything more involved than simple check-ups and vaccines is referred to a “specialist.”  We have Veterinary Oncologists, Veterinary Orthopedists, Veterinary Internists.  Your local vet takes your money for an initial (and often errant) evaluation, then refers you to the appropriate specialist, in whom you will invest even more money, pony up for sophisticated tests like CT scans and ultrasounds.   And then you are presented with a multi-thousand-dollar treatment plan framed in such a way that you would feel like the most uncaring, penny-pinching miser, unworthy of the sacred responsibility of pet ownership, should you “opt out”—whether or not the reasoning behind your refusal is purely financial.

I regret more than anything the choice we made for Lucy.  A five thousand dollar surgery on an old dog…what were we thinking?  But when they tell you that without the surgery she will surely die, and paint the treatment scenario in the most hopeful possible light, how can you say, “No”?  I so wish we had been counseled that one of our options would be to take her home with a vial of something that would put her into her final sleep when her pain became too great.  I so wish that she could have died at home, surrounded by the things and people that she loved, rather than lying on the floor of a kennel at the vet hospital, attached to tubes and machines, hemorrhaging internally from a surgery to which we should never have subjected her. 

I hope she forgives us.

And so now, as Bart makes his way toward the rainbow bridge, I am vexed by questions of how much to interfere in the process.  How much interference is palliative…how much is in his best interest?  And how much is bowing to that 21^st-century human imperative to extend life at any and all costs?

Beyond that, there are questions about that “final act of mercy.”  One thing I have learned about cats, having cohabitated with more than twenty feline souls in my years on this planet:  They are tough.  They don’t die easily.  The process often draws itself out for days or weeks.  I understand the desire to put an obviously dying cat “out of its misery.”  But is that what we are really doing when we euthanize a pet?  Or are we putting ourselves out of that misery?  Death is inconvenient.  Left to nature, like birth, it comes when it comes.  We have figured out a way to make birth happen in a way to conveniently fit our schedules.  Is euthanasia our way of fitting the deaths of our animal companions more neatly into our busy lives? 

And do we have the right to take away the final days or weeks of that soul’s earthly journey just because it will be easier for us?

There is a line, I know.  You don’t let an animal writhe in unbearable agony in the name of “letting nature take its course.”  But, neither, I think, do you stick a needle into the vein of an obviously still-viable animal because someone has given you the word that it only has days or weeks to live.  I think you let that soul inhabit that body until the body becomes too sick to support a bearable quality of life.  The trick is deciding, from the animal’s point of view, what measures should be taken to ease and prolong life.  And then recognizing the point at which that life becomes unbearable, and making the decision to help release the soul from a broken and useless body.

I don’t know exactly where that line is.  But I’m hoping to come closer to finding it this time around.  I think I owe it to Bartie, and to the rest of the animal spirits who have or will share their lives with us, until we ourselves leave broken, useless bodies behind and walk on.      

              

Hubris

It seems like lately I'm being pulled more and more into debates relating to God, religion, and atheism.  Articles, news videos, blog posts all seem to photo bomb my field of vision, waving their arms and hollering for attention.  

Last week, I visited a blog I had  never seriously read before, written by a young woman who claims to be "Overcoming a fundamentalist indoctrination."  Meaning, I guess, that she was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household, and has rejected that path to search for her own version of religiosity.  The post I read was actually a review of a book called Good God, Lousy World and Me.  The blogger asks in her post, "is the only reason why I’m still a Christian because I don’t want to face the bleak reality of a world without God in it?"  This line of thinking never fails to irritate me.  I can never understand why Christians, or former Christians, all seem to believe that there are only two choices concerning God:  either God is exactly who or what you have always believed God is, or there is no God.  No consideration is ever given to a third, and in my opinion, most likely option:  that there is a force, call it God, Allah, the Great Spirit, The Creator, the Almighty, or whatever, and it is so huge and multifaceted and complex that we are pitifully ignorant of its nature, and things we have made up about it over the history of humanity are bound to be...wrong.  Or maybe the thing we call "God" is comprised of bits and parts and glimpses of a truth with which our infinitesimal knowledge of the universe is not equipped to deal.  So I felt compelled to pen a response to this person I've never met and who is now no doubt wondering how her blog attracted the attention of some New Age spiritual mystic:  

“is the only reason why I’m still a Christian because I don’t want to face the bleak reality of a world without God in it?” I don’t understand why the choice has to be between Christianity or a world without God. Or between any religion and a world without God. We have put, or tried to put, the Almighty into this mold, this persona that jives with human understanding. Is it any wonder that the Creator of the Universe proves to be something consistently beyond our comprehension? It’s not necessary or even possible to reconcile the concept of a “good” god with the existence of human suffering. Perhaps human suffering is–has always been–humanity’s problem to recognize and alleviate. Perhaps, out of our impotence to do so, we have shirked that responsibility on to an all-powerful “god” with the power to heal all our ills…who does not do so. But if the Creator does not fit the definition we have ascribed to it, the blame does not lay upon the Creator. Just because “God” turns out not to be who or what we have believed it is, does not mean “God” does not exist.

Then, this morning, this article on Salon caught my attention:  the Truth About Science Versus Religion.  It's a rather haughty diatribe against folks who claim to believe in God and evolution.  (I was brought up Catholic, and I never learned that the two concepts were mutually exclusive.)  The author demonstrates real contempt for any person who would dare to embrace both science and spirituality.  And of course this sent me off on another tangent RE the "God vs No God" debate:

"I'm sorry, hon...but your article is bogus.  It is textbook evidence of traditional human hubris when it comes to the subject of God.  Humans tend to either create a"god" that they can understand--that ends up looking much like a human being, only with superpowers (we even go so far as to state unequivocally that humans were created in the image and likeness of God, when in fact what we've done is create a god in the image and likeness of human beings...); or we confidently proclaim that there is no God, because we don't understand how It works.  And then we take these two opinions and wield them like clubs against one another.  

Let me ask you this:  why should the resident (some may argue "dominant") life form on a planet that amounts to less than a speck of dust in the entire universe have anything approaching a context for understanding the entity responsible for creating that universe?  Who the hell do we think we are that we can make written-in-stone pronouncements about the existence or character of such a being?  In this article, the author has done nothing more that "lower" herself to the same level as the group of folks she seeks to discredit.

In my humble opinion, the Creator does not object to human beings seeking connection with it,  whether that connection takes the form of traditional religion or something else--as long as the religion manifests itself positively for the benefit of others and the planet.  And you are free to disbelieve if you so desire--I'm sure the Creator is not diminished in any way if specks of dust on a speck of dust do not believe It exists.  But, whatever you choose to believe, do so with the understanding that everyone is free to believe whatever, as long as it harms no one.  And--here's the key--even if a group of believers' goal is to "convert" as many as possible, that doesn't make it okay for unbelievers to band together to criticize or convert believers.  Turn-about is NOT fair play, in this instance.  It just makes you a hypocrite.

Why do we have to think we know?  Why do we have to act like betrayed children when we find out we don't?  When we discover the truth about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, we go on with the rest of our lives a little sadder...a little diminished, knowing that those benevolent figures do not exist.

But God is not Santa Claus.  We call God omnipotent, eternal, all-knowing, omnipresent...but obviously we don't have any real comprehension of those concepts.  "Omni" indicates "ALL"...not just all the stuff the human mind can understand.  A.L.L. The universe itself is so huge, it's beyond our comprehension.  So how can we believe that we understand "omnipotence" as it applies to powers that we have no idea exist?  We have, I think, ascribed the correct concepts to the Creator of the Universe, as our poor minds understand them.  But then when the Creator functions outside our understanding, we reject It.  We call it "God," but we won't let it BE GOD.  And if it isn't the God we want it to be, then it doesn't exist at all

I don't expect humanity to ever really accept the hugeness of a God it cannot comprehend.  But I think I can expect that, at some point, we allow each other the freedom to believe, or not believe, as we choose.  That we take the Creator out of the equation of whether you are like me or unlike me, tribe member or outsider, friend or enemy.  Truthfully, I don't believe a Force responsible for the creation of the Universe has any stake in man's petty arguments.  Except that, if we can't learn to get along, we're going to destroy ourselves and this infinitesimal part of the Universe that we call "home." 

And it won't be God's fault...