holyshitme

Bio Blatherings – One  

I almost called this blog holyshitme.  I really wanted to. 

I like the idea that my excrement (Latin excrementum, from excernere ‘to sift out,’ excrete) – that which is left over from all the delicious and nutritious nutrients being absorbed, and is expelled from my body and my life, all smelly and foul, is still highly worthy. 

That putrid, disgusting stuff given so many names and used so commonly in swearing – can decompose and become a growing medium for other, different life. 

My shit can fertilize, make more fertile.  Create life.  Ashes to ashes, shit to soil. 

The shit comes out of me but it also comes at me.  Shit happens and keeps on happening – obstacles, interruptions, very bad surprises, rug pulls, road bumps (no – more like giant sinkholes!).  I have been writing around and around these, “Shit, not agains!” for some time. 

Pema Chodron teaches that my regard for and perception of these obstacles can change my experience of them.  I am new to this Buddhist-infused understanding and am very wobbly with it.  It might take the rest of my life to really learn this.  However, I keep on seeing some divine-sacred-holiness coming out of my altered responses to these never-ending obstacles – in spite of them, or because of them. 

I am full of shit that is holy.  And I can respond to shit storms coming at me in ways that can transform the world, or maybe just transform me.  Even as sinkholes continue to open up more and more as climate catastrophes accelerates, I respectfully borrow and adapt the title of Tomás Rivera’s award winning 1971 novel:  Y no se me tragó la tierra, (And the earth has not devoured me.)  I have yet to be swallowed up entirely and disappear, or be disappeared, from the face of the earth.  Despite sinkholes and landslides and floods and shit storms.

I am a Ph.D. dropout.  After having “earned” an M.A. in Spanish linguistics from the University of New Mexico, I completed the coursework (all but one class) toward a Ph.D. in Latin American literature.  That tortuous leg of my life’s journey came to a screeching halt after the several years of work, and I walked – no, ran away! – from those flaming, hoop-jumping comprehensive exams. I landed in a cozy little (demanding) prep school and did my best to teach Spanish to 7^th and 8^th grade people.  I regret not getting to write a dissertation.  Truly.  I SO do not regret spending nearly a decade with 13- and 14-year old people.  I still miss their frothy minds and zest.

Currently I shuffle back and forth between an urban apartment that hangs over an expressway in Chicagoland and a cabin-like home on a little lake in my hometown in downstate Illinois. I miss New Mexico.  But I thought I heard the Midwest calling me “home,” and I (perhaps foolishly) followed that call.  The verdict is still out. 

I have published nothing.  Yet.  But I type and write and I hope that somehow my wordiness might be an offering.

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eco~scribe

Bio Blatherings – Two         

About six years or so ago, I started attending conferences again, after a decade hiatus.  No longer for my official profession of Spanish language teacher.  Post job-I-got-paid-for, I had followed my passions into both writing and restorative or native gardening.  I wanted some sort of business-like card in the hopes that I would meet kindred spirits.  I called it my connection card, and aside from my name and contact info, the text read:   

eco~scribe
living as and writing about
being a land.air.water steward
alongside our non-human fellow inhabitants of Earth

I figured that those people who get too severe of a head tilt, or head scratch, upon reading that one version of me-defining-me would just toss the card. And so should they.  But maybe, just maybe, I was casting a net that would draw to me kindred spirits.

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unreformed

Bio Blatherings – Three       

I swear.  Magnificently.  Often.  With the most offensive word combinations.  (Not that I’m proud.)

The intense emotions that I so readily feel frequently spill over into a profuse and rapid-fire wordiness. (Verbose was the comment teachers often wrote on my school papers.)  It probably didn’t hurt that I had a dad who was amused by my swearing (oh yes, that indelible ink of those early family narratives).  Mix in more than a little real and righteous rage, and growing awakening of socio-political injustices, and those swear words are all lined up and waiting to jump out of the plane that is my mouth, no parachute donned. 

I have tried to stop.  Many times.  At one job I placed a cuss jar on my desk.  (Full disclosure:  I was a teacher of 7^th and 8^th graders – um, yeah, uh huh, great role model.)  But, and, in my (lame?) defense: research exists that exonerates big old cussers.  There is value in swearing, they say, and what it reveals about the intelligence of a person appeals to me.  I could defend this practice and lay out the possible harm of using swear words versus the actual Harm, the damage and destruction, of Non-Swearing Real Evils.  Shall I?

Off and on, over the years, I have tried to reform so as to not offend others in this way.  It seemed a small thing for me to retrain myself to not let those words come out of my mouth.  But my brain-to-mouth circuitry resists reform. 

I believe Maya spoke (yes, Angelou, who else!) about deciding to not swear in case she became somebody someday.  What she said about The Power of Words is compelling.  If anyone could have reformed me, Maya Angelou and her no swearing practice would have. To those who find swear words offensive, I genuinely apologize.  I hope you can look past them to the rest of what I say.   

Words from another powerhouse of a woman, Judi Dench:  “One of the benefits of being a mature well-educated woman is that you’re not afraid of expletives.  And you have no fear to put a fool in his place.  That’s the power of language and experience.  You can learn a lot from Shakespeare.”  A different perspective, due in part to age, as Judi duly credits her freedom of expression.  But I believe a great deal of the difference in perspective is due to the privilege that a white, British woman surely has had that an African American woman hasn’t. 

I admit to benefitting from unearned white privilege in addition to the possible benefit of being an aging woman.  Still, if my swearing offends, I hope that the content will make amends.    

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one edge

Bio Blatherings – Four   

I kept asking myself:  why write a blog when I could be out on the streets with Greta Thunberg or Jane Fonda?

Words are something I do. Something I am still able to do.  My body and health have been unreliable, undependable, for years now.  For decades.  But even on a Not So Good, or Very Bad Day, I can usually take hands to the keyboard or pencil to paper.

These are awful days we are living in.  We have passed the tipping point.  We’re at the edge of a chasm.  We can stare down into the abyss and be paralyzed, as I certainly can become or, we can throw ourselves off into the abyss, as I have considered more times than I should admit. 

Or we can Do Something Else.

It is the Something Else that I want to live in.  I want to navigate the currents and paths at the edges and channel my work for the thriving, sustainable existence of ALL.  ALL.  Not only humans.  All of creation.