This strange place.
I sat waiting in the dim corner, scholarly armchair and books abound, wondering what an odd place to await for my doctor. He came in through the side door, found me there, and confused, he asked what was I waiting for. Dr. Osborne, I said. 'Oh, well then, that might be me.' And he grabs his white coat and asks if I have anywhere to be. No, just here. Then come, help me feed the birds. So, we stood outside, and I watched him fill the feeder, seed falling everywhere, and I noticed the birds nearby, as if they had just been waiting to see him. To think, this was the man that would be my new gyno. I fed birds with him. Was questioned on why I'm not on birth control. I have ill side effects, it makes me disinterested. His eyes bearing low at me, "Funny, studies usually show it increases drive. Know why? Because there's no fear of pregnancy!" And I just laugh and brush it off, I know my body sir, read all the damn studies you want. Silly man, but I like him. If he wasn't a skewed soul, I'd think him dull. And for good measure, I was prescribed nothing but his sound advice, 'Call if you need anything, and lose some weight.' Yes, I know...working on it...in a roundabout way.
And lately, I've been ruminating on Creativity. This bitch muse I can't seem to grasp. At times I feel it fall upon me, accidental in its meeting with my mind. I thought of the evolution of me over the years. As a child, I sketched often, houses, people, hands, eyes. I was fond of drawing multiple faces on a page, aging the person over the years. My maternal grandmother is a painter, and my father has quite the unused artistic hand. But somewhere along the way, my penciled lines became words, letters falling onto the page. Poems, short stories, the eventual and painstaking novella. How I love words. How I hate words. My tongue feeling on the tip of profound, but the feeling, the nature of a moment, seemed cheated in translation. I am always angry when I can't find the right words, and I think stupid girl, if you only knew more than maybe you'd have them. A good story is like a well woven blanket, each thread serving purpose and strengthening the whole, just like each word serves to point in the direction of the tale. But writing is my true passion, my true pain. It hurts when I write, but it hurts when I refrain. Fighting it too much makes me restless, prone to insomnia, and the ideas haunt me like hungry ghosts, how they die in my mind when I refuse the call to take the pen to paper.
But then my distraction came in an unexpected form. Photography. How it was so subtle in its presence before. And my pen fell so that I could grasp the lens. Half a year in and I think is this where I belong. The writer in me is clawing at my innards, as if I cheated her, finding another lover. And my pictures have felt absent of sorts. A link missing I'm not sure I've unearthed. But on the brink of sleep, late one night last week, it came to me. Words...go back to the words. And if I could find no photo in life current, then I can create from the conjured word. If soul is lacking, bring it the only way I know how, start with the logos, let it lead me to the birth of an image. And the muse has come forth, hidden all this time.
And so it begins with the word...but I still wonder if this is where I truly belong...
How am I to react when I hear co-workers lament about California's decision to permit gay marriage? How they use terms like "disgusted" at viewing a lesbian couple kiss on television. I want to scream from my cubicle, lash out, and yell "Is that love?! What would your Jesus say about your hate?"
Or the chain e-mails. Yes, I've touched on this in previous entries, but they just keep coming. Subject: Mocking God. Gives a list of people around the world who publicly "mocked" god, and then soon thereafter died through mysterious means or were murdered. Point? Are you saying these people deserved to die and the means in which they did so is justified? Are you saying that god is such an ego maniac that out of everything going on in the UNIVERSE that god is fretting over a person's words? Are you implying that some metaphysical force manipulated the lives of these people to bring death? Because that would be the same force that ushers in the "miracles" I hear often spoken about. Are you saying god is more inclined to intervene in a situation where s/he is questioned or mocked rather than intervening in a situation where one is suffering? Is there an implication that god would rather bring death upon a person who mocks his/her presence/intention rather than bestow a revelation or unconditional love? I'm confused. What is the purpose of your god again?
Outside of work, I read about the pope's continuation of forbidding the ordination of women. This suddenly stirred an image in my mind of Jesus standing at a Catholic altar, and as his mother Mary approaches, he raises a hand, stops her in mid step, and says to his beloved parent, "You are profane. Your body is impure. This is no place for you." I mean, IMAGINE, Jesus saying to the woman who carried him in her womb, raised a son meant to change religious history, cared for him, knelt at his feet as he was crucified...to say to her YOU ARE PROFANE. I may no longer be a practitioner of Christianity, but I do not doubt that Jesus would do no such thing, not to his mother, not to any woman imbued with such a spiritual plight. So what gives a man, an institution, the right to determine what is given divine right to serve people spiritually, to be a leader within the community through their religion?
I meet an old beard ridden gent, eyes and a smile like Robin Williams, that causes my intuition to be suspicious. He's the kind of man that I could picture saying he needs to go to the back to find something, and then walks back out into the living room wearing nothing but faded underwear and his shin high socks, grinning that freaky Robin Williams smile. ::Shivers:: Anyway, he spoke of a niece who was in a relationship with a black man, had his child, and when his sister sent him a picture of the newborn, tore it up, and vowed never to speak to his sister again. He didn't believe in that sort of thing he said. I sat appalled.
The question I deal with is the act of tolerance. I feel people have a right to their beliefs, but I struggle to be tolerant of the intolerant. I often wonder if I should bite my tongue or let the potential debate ensue. I often choose to not confront a person. For one thing, I hate confrontation. It leaves my gut in shambles, I am sick, physically ill after a fight or intense debate. My pulse feels like I've been climbing a mountain, and on the worst occasions, I not only breakdown weeping, but find my hands uncontrollably shaking.
I also have to consider the place at hand. Typically, these situations occur at work. I make great efforts to not cause tension in the workplace. Thus, I avoid topics of religion and politics unless blatantly asked. Most know I am a liberal, but beyond that, I don't make a point to broach these topics and have only been in debates about both with my head boss. I believe he does so to purposely antagonize me. I think he enjoys the debate, seeing me get fired up, and in the end, he says I am just misguided youth. It irks me a bit just to think about it.
But I wonder if my efforts to be tolerant are actually counterproductive. I wonder if these people have ever given serious thought to why they believe what they do. Must they always believe the voice from the pulpit? I ponder if they have ever stepped back far enough to extend an empathetical mind, to wonder if put in a different position, how would they feel? Do they not realize the hate underlined in their comments and email forwards? How does their heart not ache when they read the same things I have been given by them? It boggles my mind. Does my silence further perpetuate their acts? Nothing is ever simple.
So, I vent in my writings. I discuss aloud with friends. And it is not something I alone struggle with, this fine line. But if my coworkers feel right in their speech and actions, not considering a counter view to even be present or vocal, then should I consider taking up the same mind frame to point out their lack of consideration for others? But then would that be intolerance? And would vocalizing my intolerance of these things make them more tolerant in the future?
I'm still unsure...this will require greater thought than just several paragraphs of rambling.
My faith is ambiguous. A topic I've never really broached publicly or much introspectively. My friends are often confused on where I stand, the foundation of my religious beliefs if there are any. Their assumptions I find at times hurtful or foolish, but what are they to formulate of me as a spiritual person when I consciously avoid the subject? I criticize all religions, the hermeneutical eye never resting. But my intellectual critiques often overshadow the beauty I see in them all.
I was never baptized into a tradition. As a foreign born babe my parents had decided to wait until returning stateside to have me dipped in holy water, but this would never happen. An unmarked soul, or rather, a free spirit to find its course. My father was raised Greek Orthodox. My mother had roots in Catholicism, but as I have learned from my grandmother, there was an openness to so much more. I know my grandmother dabbled outside her Catholic beliefs in the Unity Church, the Baptist denomination, even Rosicrucian literature, and undoubtedly, this must have influenced her children. Before my mother's death, she sang on high at a nondenominational church that I would later read had burned Harry Potter books in a large bonfire in Alamogordo. After the move to Charleston, I was never forced to go to church. So I hopped around, sampling the Christian denominations: Baptist, Presbyterian, Nondenominational, Seacoast (I believe it's developing into a unique creation), Pentecostal, and Catholic. If any ever truly resonated in me, it was the Pentecostal. Riding the wave of song, a unification of spiritual voices raised up, people falling to their knees, tongues unbound from their native language, oil spread upon brows, embodiments of the spirit that left some stricken unconscious. It was nothing short of an emotional revelation. It wouldn't be until years later that I wondered why my father refused the offer to join me. Tongues is a deal breaker for many Christian denominations.
It wasn't until college that the veil of religion was lifted. A complex nexus and histories of traditions and spiritualities I had never been privy to know. Even the faith I had been haphazardly raised in became foreign to me. A history of atrocity that I could not ignore, could not continue to be a part of under preconditions that seemed required by most branches. And with each religion I discovered, so did I its faults. No place could my soul call home. No place did my instinct sigh with relief and say this is the one. Instead my studies fostered deep meditations, critiques, and a separation from faiths the further I delved. Believe me this, to consciously choose to sever a relationship with what has always been familiar is utterly painful.
Do not think I never mourned the death of my god.
Though I am impassioned about religion and its practitioners in all their forms, I have never been inclined to say I fit in a place. I choose the liminal. Never to belong. Painfully aware of my state of limbo. And I struggle with tolerance of beliefs, even when I see the hatred and fear of the other that remains an undercurrent of all faiths. Though I may openly question the existence of the divine, a metaphysical presence, I equally question the polar end, why must their be nothing? I fear the nihilism and hollowness I sense in my spirit when I think of atheism, but why must I find hope in an abstract being? I struggle with myself. My mind wondering if I should just dive into something, anything, because then I'd be granted a concrete identity, a place of being, my function and troubles in life would be easily answerable and prescribed in a religion's sacred texts. But even I rebel against myself. Turning away from these inclinations. I stop myself. Say aloud in my mind, "No! This is not you, Priscilla. You reach out in fear, not out of knowing. Press on." And so I do. Searching, studying, discovering. I have yet to determine the true intention beneath all this. Do I keep delving deeper into the glacier of religion, faith, and spirituality to nullify the existence of something? Or do I stay this course in hope that I will be proven wrong?
How did it come to be that June 15th would mark moments in my life not once, but twice? Separate years, but each the first step to experiences that would come to change me. The first being India. A summer twice gone, but I still think of Lord Shiva's mountains. Sometimes I cry thinking of that place. In the heart of paradox. The second, I will not speak of, not in this place. Too public for a wound so deep. The day that gave me cement shoes, how heavy my step became, a paralysis that lasted through winter. Even now I have days where I weep without reason, or how sudden this emotion rises through my chest, settling into the throat, choking me from the inside out. I remember that day, losing my ring from India. It had never misplaced itself before. I worried about where it had gone, searched the gravel ground outside, wondering how I could lose something so precious to me. How I earnestly needed to spin it, to lift the prayers in Tibetan gibberish to the gods, to watch over me, to protect me, to love me when he could not, to love me when I could not love myself. Days later, there it was, resting on the pavement, close to my front tire. And then months later, how odd I thought the next occurrence...
It was his last night stateside. And I wore the turtle necklace from Dharamsala like I often did. But when we went for dinner, in the drive, my necklace broke. The turtle and beads falling from the thread. Why was it that India didn't like you? First the ring, then the turtle. All with you.
A part of me thinks to speak, but my tongue is stubborn. Risky business in this place. My words have bore me trouble in the past, eyes watching, interpreting, thinking they know me so well. But this blog, this succinct mind vomit of speech, is nothing compared to what keeps in my mind. I speak not half of what is thought. The self narration, introspection...any normal person would want deafness from thy self, driving out the sound with distractions. But I have never managed to flee myself. My thoughts will awake me in the night for inquisition. No way to run. It is time to feel. You must.
Anxiety. Fear. Nihilism. Pain. Anger. Jade. Hope. Determination. Love. How does that emotive tonic feel? It cannot be described accurately. All I can say is it leaves me breathless, head down, arms covering me head. Hallow and shaking. Tears. A soundless mouth agape, the words are lost, a tongue paralyzed by emotion. There is no tongue of man that can articulate such a feeling. The words, the history, the story, held in a tear. A story only my sheets will ever hear.
It all began with India...who is this child you have bore?
I decided I want to do a photo series on the Elements. The first Element I'm taking on is Earth. I did some self-portraits to tweak my vision, and now am arranging for several people to embody Earth. I'm still fleshing out concepts for the other Elements; so this may be a work in progress for a bit.
I also plan to actually revert back to writing in my blog...at least long enough to discuss The Study of Esotericism conference (which rocked), and other epistemological clutter. But it'll have to wait as much of my free time is being spent finishing up an application...for what you may ask...oh that is yet to be revealed.
So, I've made an initial attempt at a photography website. Semi-Pro I go! Below is the link and a random slideshow I made that I couldn't get to work in the website itself, ha! And the song track is Living in Twilight by the Weepies.
http://www.prisca-photography.com
