An Opinion on the Matter of Opinion; Freedom on, in, and out of Marriage

WOMEN’S HISTORY: AN OPINION ON THE MATTER OF OPINION

Freedom on Marriage, Freedom in Marriage, Freedom out of Marriage

 

 

 

Right now in our lifetime this debate about who has the right to force another body sexually and how, or what one can do with one’s own body in the privacy of their own space and who they can do it with; This IS a matter of many opinions, but sometime in the near future this will not be so. It will be more than opinions and in another way, maybe less.  In fact, these types of things are not just a matter of opinion in the end.

 

Just like at one time it was a matter of opinion of whether the world was round or flat, some things that are opinion actually end up being fact. And Just like It was a matter of opinion as to whether women could competently drive a car, did have a soul, be a citizen, sign a contract or play sports, It was only a matter of opinion until opportunities provided the freedom to see and perceive women indeed capable of thinking rationally enough to drive a car for themselves (with no more accidents than men) or gain muscular strength and actually win at competitive sports with men.

 

Just like It was a matter of opinion whether masturbation caused death or mental illness (even among the greatest medical and religious leaders), it became inevitable that such was not true.  Whether masturbation was spiritual depravity became a non-political issue, many such things become, in the end, a non-political issue. And At one time it was a matter of opinion, great religious wars and causes of many murders whether an infant should be baptized, or a child at age 4 or 5. Then it was opinion for some that baptism should be a decision for a person to make when they are of age to make that decision for oneself. In that manner, it was an opinion of spiritual choice and belief.

 

The many decisions we face today about marriage could not even be possible without our history of freedoms laid down. They are a direct result of the entirety of freedoms already established as America’s foundation and built over America’s 200 year history, beginning with the freedom of sons from the Fathers when a document stated that all men were created equal.  Most of us can’t even fathom what it was like before the Independence of America. I mean who was the independence from, really? We need to reminded how this time is just one step after so many others that went before.

 

It is still the opinion of some that one should not intermarry with any other religion, class or race. Once totally forbidden, now for only some people, Jews should not marry catholics, or protestants not marry muslims. Rural folk can not marry agreeably with city folk. It is believed at times.   It is still the opinion of some that divorce should be illegal-or never allowed. That women should not work outside the home or use birth control. These are all issues related to freedom of marriage. It is still the opinion of some that women should submit entirely to their husband for all decisions and if disobedient, then brutal force and punishment, even murder called a passion killing,  is the entitlement of the husband. Few people even recognize that the incremental decisions that allowed men and women to socialize and be in the same public spaces has changed the dynamics of gender relationships. Sex segregation is slowly vanishing and it seems the bedroom or one’s own private home is just as hotly debated as any other past social disagreements. How about the freedom the car produced and it’s impact on marriage?

 

Eventually all these things become clear on facts and clear on choices.

 

And in America we have a long tradition of such things;  born from European refugees that have asked organized religious institutions, religious communities and governments to give people freedom to BELIEVE and CHOOSE for themselves how they want to live their lives. In that tradition, I say this in the spirit of wanting a world in harmony and love. And in that tradition, I ask all of us to consider what we ask of each other with much more respect as that is the most imperative need and foundation.

 

WOMEN’S HISTORY: Women Artists, Myself

When people in my life do not know the tradition or have not had a public education of women artists, they also fail to see my life in the context of that tradition of women artists. None of this is an accident. There is a systematic design built on the idea that what women did wasn’t important. I, too, spent half my life not even aware there was something missing.

I think Judy Chicago, as an artist, spoke most to my heart. She wrote a number of books that just filled my heart as an artist and helped me understand me as a female artist in this world. When I would naturally paint what was important or valuable in my life – like my work or the home and children, people would ask ‘Why would you draw ‘laundry’ and why would you paint a pile of drying dishes?  And I KNEW that clean clothes and clean dishes were vitally important to our lives and it was as honorable and as worthy of a painting that things like a naked woman or many things that the tradition of men thought worthy. This piece was part of the video installation that was exhibited in Beijing, China in 1995 at the United Nations Fourth World Conference for Women. It also had a touring version and has been on the internet all these years. I painted this in honor of all the work that never gets counted as part of the GNP and the work that has given us all the basics of what makes a well person.

http://wwol.inre.asu.edu/henninger.html

The World’s Women On-Line!

wwol.inre.asu.edu

Exit to Women’s Symbolism

 

 

 

So…Are ‘We’ all Pregnant when ‘She’ is?

Maternalization Composite

PET PEEVE EXPOSED and WHY: I have an emotional reaction to when I hear someone saying “WE” are pregnant. Why? I am a writer. I am a stickler for using the appropriate words. It matters. Does this bother or not bother anyone else?

I once heard Desi Arnaz say that when filming I love Lucy, they couldn’t SAY the word Pregnant. Lucy was pregnant was not proper Television material. He had to say the word ‘expecting’ or as Desi said it ‘specting’. If you know the history here and lived in that time period, you understand that there was virtually NO discussion about women’s bodies and reproductive abilities on television. In some cases, it was considered obscene. Our obscenity laws reflect this type of functioning. Rape or kill a woman, fine and not obscene, but show or talk about her actual body – Obscene. Well, actually television was completely run by men at that time and they were very selective overall about what they allowed to present as women. In fact, they seemed to favor their own fictionalized versions which were compounded by the same actions in other social institutions. But that’s just some background here. Not my pet peeve.

SO……back to my writing issue. If ‘we’ now say ‘we’ are pregnant, then that CHANGES the meaning of the word pregnant. It’s not just a nice cute thing to do to share ‘love and a wonderful event’ with a father. I’m glad fathers are doing more to be involved and I’m glad when people want to express themselves in new ways. However, pregnancy is defined as the thing that a woman’s BODY does that a man’s body does not do. And while those who are saying this KNOW that because they inherited that definition and it is widespread and don’t MEAN to change the definition of what pregnancy is to include men in a confusing way, the young children born to this world DO not. They are inheriting something different now. If they hear ‘we’ are pregnant, they will get an understanding that pregnancy is more than what a woman’s body does if it includes the word We. It’s like what happened when He meant he and she but She could never mean He and still doesn’t. She actually disappeared. So I’m a little concerned about some of these traditional communication patterns and the disappearing of women again but again it’s not even that as much as the loss of reality for children as language continues to move away from anything related to physicality. However, I’m always open to change. Will ‘we’ being pregnant also include siblings then?  The whole family? I’m a grandmother. Can I say “we’ are pregnant when it’s my daughter in law giving birth? Maybe people already say this. I don’t know.

Okay.  So setting many other considerations aside for the moment, let’s say this is fine and no big deal… which is what society is doing by no one paying attention, no protest, no immediate shut down to end it or even discussion about it. And If we then create more language to clarify the difference between the actual physical workings of a woman’s body that doesn’t include the ‘other’ things that men do in creating an environment for a new baby that isn’t biological, we’ve solved part of the problem that will arise when we want to talk about what a woman’s body does alone. Or maybe it’s better to create a new word for the social reality that men are now included in the process, words specifically for what fathers-to-be do, or what ‘we’ meaning more than one person do together.  How about we are expecting? LOL. We are going to have a baby. I don’t know.

Maybe some people are modest and prefer no attention on their bodies. It’s like a secretary who does the background work and the boss goes out and makes the public presentation and it looks like he’s done it all and he gets the credit – and the pay. Some people prefer background but I’m not sure about the low pay and devaluation that goes with that sometimes.

I don’t know what others should or should not do because I believe in freedom of adults and not having some social policing in how others speak. To each his own and this expression is MY own. Enough said. I won’t be asking… So how is your pregnancy coming along to any soon-to-be father in my lifetime. I might just simply say so how is the experience of preparing to be a father coming along.

Not So Simple; The Equality of the Opposite Sexes

Being equal to a man is a concept that has removed some of the marginalization of women in social spaces and has allowed women to enter territory previously specified only for man. Of course, there has been resistance to those changes while those changes have marginally enhanced women’s relationship to men’s dominance over her.

Even so, There is a whole movement that developed for women to be ‘equal’ to men within our society.

It’s popular in its own way in some social places and unpopular in others. That movement thrived in the patriarchy, nonetheless. Huh? Rewind.

While the term Man is interchangeable with Human, the term Woman is not a universal term for Human. She is subcategory of human.

When the ‘standard’ of Human is Man within opposite sex theory, a woman has to BE MAN – the same as – to be the standard human that is, Man. However, She is not – she is categorically subhuman as woman. Woman as subhuman remains. As long as we have categorized a human by sexual body part as ‘woman’, she can not be Man, for if she is, then she is not Woman. It’s contradictory, confusing and unresolved. Her existence based on a body part still becomes annihilated. That IS her oppression – a heavy burden from society. Her existence as woman invisible. How can she explain she is being oppressed when she is being treated as a man? How can she not be burdened when society double talks about being human? No categorized man has had the experience of categorized woman (save transexuals) and no categorized woman has had the experience of categorized man based in opposite sex conditions. When this patriarchal society says to a woman that she is being treated the same as a man, that society may continue to assume that woman had the life of a man since man is the standard to go by and the life of a woman still is unknown to man. This is piggyback oppression – one on top of the other.  In man’s domination of woman, man does not know the experience of woman so it can not be known if a woman is being treated the same as a man. To treat a woman the same as a man within this context is a fallacy. She is being treated the same as a man which becomes her oppression as a woman as to make her nonexistent.

Being different than and being the same as man can both be oppressive based on circumstances and conditions and how those concepts are used. Being different than and being the same as man can also be liberating based on different circumstances and conditions. Sigh. Yes, life simply isn’t as simple as we think.

At the present time in our society there is a new version established of the same old of what has already been done to woman historically while a new description of this condition of what is actually happening is voided out by the current perceptions of ‘being equal’. And in fact, woman’s oppression is always done through the wiping out of her existence through dominance of Man and, within the present social context, this is profoundly done to her when she is perceived as equal to or being treated the same as Man – being the same as Man and therefore Man, not woman – which she can never be.

Her oppression is also present in existing conditions described as being different than man. In fact, we have a society that the reality about being human becomes complete confusion in more ways than one based on the persistence of categorizing and fragmenting by description humans based on different sexual body parts. What remains unchanged is a division of hierarchal social ranking, a specific relationship and who humans are still based on having different sexual body parts – even if she is President of the United States. She remains identified as woman and not man. While she has successfully moved to a different social location, she is still a woman in relationship to men; men that dominate her not based on work but based on her body parts in relation to how they perceive themselves based on their sexual body part.

Catherine McKinnon in her book, Feminism Unmodified, explains how what needs to be addressed is the Hierarchy of the Sexes. I believe, while confusing, removing the hierarchy of the sexes involves much more than equality of the sexes. Rearranging different aspects of the sexes does not eliminate the hierarchy that causes woman’s oppression. There has been great work to eliminate the historical oppression of women but let us not become ignorant nor deny how the current arrangement of oppression is still harmful, can even be extremely harmful and deadly – and more insidious than ever when presented as the equality of the sexes.

The Mature Tree: Ageism, Mature Adults, and Cognitive Abilities

My Comments of Observation of Ageism, Mature Adults and Cognitive Abilities

Note the Study titled Distraction can reduce Age-Related Forgetting. It’s actually informative and worthy study. I have no issue with it.

The article is online at:

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/02/20/0956797612457386.full

To me in the larger view of our social relationships, what is missing in understanding here and what is happening is crazy, crazy stuff. We have a prejudice against, stereotyping and discrimination against mature adults. We focus on their ‘faults’ that are not necessarily faults – Forgetting. We perceive it as Fault based on a context of relationships.

There is a whole health focus over their cognitive decline.

Yes, some people have cognitive problems. So do some young people but there is no major social organization on the matter in the same way. Sometimes what we think is a problem we Make a problem.

This study partly explains how the issue is not what we think it is. Bingo.
They are on the right track.

Here’s my thinking.

Everything is relative. In order to be considered forgetting, you have to have some environmental factor that demands you are to be remembering something that at the moment you are not.

Without the demand to remember, you don’t have the problem of forgetting, right? So, what mature adults are demanded to remember is relative to the structure of their lives and to see the problem clearly you have to see the
structure of their lives in relationship to the structure of other less mature adults. There are also cumulative factors to consider in aging and differing relationship with our bodies.

I add that if you COUNT the fact that younger people have a much more Narrow view of the world. The older you get the more you see – the view is broader – you actually TAKE IN more information because of your longer life experience. If you are in a valley, you don’t see as much as if you are on a mountain top. Viewpoint is different.

So we could be crediting older adults for the way they take in and actually have accumulated information that has grown exponentially – but that gets ignored. Also older folks grow in abundance of both intake and output but we don’t see it based on environmental conditions. It’s like they are trees that get pruned of all their wonderful branches and leaves. The cutting off causes disconnections. The life of a person may be seen as growing like a tree. Think about it. An older person is a mature, fully developed tree that has more leaves and branches than a young tree. A young tree might have more focus and less forgetting because they are only working on a structure with a few limbs. But we have a distortion on their lives because we emphasize the schooling but that schooling is like the fertilizer in the ground that grows the tree. It’s not the branches themselves. We therefore perceive younger people as intaking vasts amounts of knowledge while mature adults don’t. But the comparison is faulty.

Yet we favor younger people and position their abilities as superior, older people as inferior instead of a holistic view in which at different times of our lives, we are all terrific and have different attributes. The standard of the superior human that is actually generic doesn’t exist. We need to rid ourselves of this idealic, fictional human we all have been given with all the right attributes of being human that causes all of us to feel faulty when we can’t live up to something that isn’t real anyway and is dehumanizing for all of us.

Even young babies have ways of beings that go uncounted because of our favored emphasis on age and behaviors. I’m waiting for the day I see movies and shows where babies are represented as more than a crying object to heighten the drama. I am waiting for the day where babies actually play a part in the world they inhabit because they are capable of more than just crying. Where they aren’t just an object to focus on how to care for them, but where, as little people, we adults can BE with them and not feel we’ve ‘lowered’ ourselves to an inferior level of being. Babies are not inferior. Neither are the elderly. Let’s knock it off. A mature adult male is not the superior human.

People actually believe that babies only cry, have no other developed feelings, no awareness, abilities and no intelligence until they can talk and begin to do what older people do. This demands our connections be strongly based on our language communication. No accident with our society’s infatuation with image and text technology. Well, imagine those who are now communicating through texting as a primary form of relating…what is being lost with this technology is built on a historical pattern of other losses from previous technologies. We can’t know what we don’t know if we never had it. We have to move to experience beyond ‘normal’. It’s all an interesting myriad of possibilities of how we relate to each other – and it’s as if we’ve been given a very narrow clip of life’s possibilities.

We are so whacked in our ideas of our humanity. Maybe the word is clueless.

In some ways, we have a world that revolves around the needs of 20-30 somethings in violation of other age groups and yes, they do the work of making the world go round with demands that young children and older people simply get out of the way. The accommodations for younger children and mature adults are neglectful in many ways and in some cases, abusive and deadly.

The idea of mature people forgetting is like the idea that was once believed that women aren’t rational, don’t think and are incapable of being like a man so they should only be in the home. Yes, women were also seen as getting in the way of a world run by men. That idea is now history. We need some other inaccurate ideas to be history, too.

We got both ideas of difference and sameness about humans all mixed up, IMO. A mistake. A big one. We are in error about who we are and what are problems are because the missing link is environmental and social. Too much emphasis has been put on what happens in an individual as ‘wrong’ which causes false distortions and not enough emphasis in knowing the relationships Between people in our collective society and not identifying the source of whose ideas we actually have been living.

Some of it stems from ideas of independence. No one is fully independent but our ideas of independence are based on a favoritism on a certain model of what we claim is the only one and superior independence.

There is only interdependence when it comes to people. No one is entirely independent. And we deny the dependency and interdependency of what we claim as the independent people. We see older people as extremely dependent and deny the other half of the relationship – the dependency of our society on the elderly.

So here they are saying that Distraction helps older people not forget things. To me that totally makes sense, because what they are calling distraction is what I would call the ‘stuff’ of a broader view. It’s those extra branches that are needed be pruned to begin with. The social demand on mature adults is that people have a narrow view like young people which is a denial of the age and it’s qualities, such as the quite respectable elderly quality of a rich and broader view based on life experience. It’s not so easy to explain, but ageism needs to be explained. It’s prejudice and stereotyping that is problematic and needs to stop.

WALKING THE PATH TO LOVE; on a CELEBRATION of LOVE.

I’ve always liked Valentine’s Day. It’s only a few days away from the President’s Holidays. I use to always have a day off for my birthday because of that. So it always felt like a special week to me. It was. It is. I enjoy a less demanding holiday this time of year, too – after Christmas in the middle of winter. It’s part of a tease knowing spring is soon here. I like a celebration about love. It doesn’t have to be romantic or even on one day for me.

This year I spent the day with my grandson. That’s a good day of loving and plenty of it. Sharing old experiences as a totally new experience with someone saying Happy Valentine’s Day for the first time. Heaven. Being married doesn’t necessarily give you the ingredients for a good valentine’s day, although I’m sure, for some, it’s great and couldn’t be better – exactly as it is. To each their own, I believe.

Someday I’ll write my complete story of hearts, but it’s still too unexplainable to me so I can’t write it and it has no sense of an ending yet. The short version I want to share right now is that after I separated back in 1989 I started seeing hearts everywhere I went. I mean, strange places I’d never noticed. I wasn’t looking. They appeared to me and literally came to my attention. Not sure of the cause. Hearts of stone. Real stone. Leaves. A Red Autumn Leaf. Puddles of water on the sidewalk. Snow. Yes, all in the shape of a heart! And much more. Rubber bands randomly laying on my desk. A paper clip with a heart on it. A corn flake. The slab of ground beef I tossed into a frying pan only to do a double take once I went to crumble it for cooking. A teeny, tiny piece of CLEAN toilet paper on the floor someone left behind in perfect shape. I wondered the meaning of this development in my life. I never had any particular interest in the heart symbol -ever- nor did I pay much attention but something happened with the divorce – and it was good.

After that marriage, I was on a quest to understand what went wrong and not make the same mistakes again. No, was only going to make those mistakes once. And I did that – completely and wholeheartedly. I learned from my mistakes. Eventually, after quite a few years, I found all my answers, comprehensively, that I was looking for – For me. And I knew what I didn’t know before. But I started out clueless as to what happened and how my life became what it was. I first began by asking my dad a question – my closest teacher of love – why did you get married? He said. “I don’t know. That’s a funny question. I didn’t think about it. It’s just what you did.”

So I thought that’s a part of the problem here for me. If you are going to do something that works, you can’t just not think about it or know not even know why you are doing something or what you are doing… and be on automaton. Not in this world. Why get married became the question for me. Why do people do what they do within their relationships? And looking into the world, I knew the inheritance wasn’t good by experience but I didn’t know by fact. I had to learn and I spent years doing it in many ways exploring socially, being nerdy, including graduating from two universities, with 2 degrees and 2 minors that you’d never believe have anything to my goal of understanding love – but did. The evidence of my exploration exists in my collection of books and my changed viewpoint on everything that surrounds love and creates it – our world.

But up until I was divorcing I had followed in my parent’s and society’s footsteps -unquestioned. I didn’t question. I didn’t see hearts. I thought marriage was only an individual choice or failure. I didn’t see marriage as the social institution it is that involves social agreements at a larger level that make it a social problem and that social problem actually had much to do with my individual choices. For one, the demands on how I was to be a mother and wife and what I was NOT suppose to do were changed from my mothers and fathers. Those social changes impact relationships and marriages in unseen ways. Still, I just did what everyone was doing and took for granted that normal living as I thought I was doing was just what you did which included having some fantasy, not concrete facts, that somehow it would all just work out and commitment and all those individual things you do would be the determining and most important factor. I’d be the exception. I’d love and do more than all those failures in marriage. Sound familiar? What other thing in our world do we do this with? I mean, it doesn’t work. Look around. Think. I thought I knew what I was doing all the while I didn’t know how to deal with the problems in my relationships and what I was doing wasn’t working. I thought two people who needed love badly could create love for each other. Instead, I learned hurting people hurt people. If someone is hurting, you better know solutions to end the hurt. I felt I was being destroyed and it was mystical. I didn’t understand what was happening. Not loved cropped up too and my ability to love was being attacked. And I was married to someone whose family’s drinking habits had brought me to a position I rarely get to which is ‘this is all I could stands and I can’t stands no more’. I wasn’t Popeye.

If someone gives you peas every day all the time and every where you go there are peas, you soon say enough. I don’t want to see peas ever again. That’s what happened. Well for me, it was beer and beer bottles. I had had enough. I didn’t want to be around anyone that drank alcohol for a long time after and I did that. Drunkeness is fun as a teenager and it is fun on occasion, but for me, it was no fun for a lifestyle. I also learned how to love people that had those particular problems and to not let their problems and lifestyles Hurt me – too late, of course -and not with the person who was the catalyst for that learning. I was hurting badly from that marriage.

I also learned that even if you stay with a person loving them in the ways I had learned to love, and you don’t actively address the harm and problems honestly, they don’t go away by love alone anymore than a flat tire and an oil leak in your car would go away. You eventually need sedation or escape or fantasy to cope. Love can bring you to solutions through people and how people act but life works if you maintain it properly. A car runs so much better if properly maintained with air in the tires and oil in the engine, not to mention gas in the gas tank. But we are taught so wrong, relationship conditions are like that – a car incapable of functioning with no maintenance. I now can see clearly, and in contrast to my past, the relationships that are like cars that aren’t going anywhere and haven’t in years. Some people just sit in them and pretend they are working like small children do with big cars they can’t drive and two kids like this can do much with imagination and pretending – AND for adults doing this that is their way of having love. Some people die only knowing love in a shell version of a love way learning how to have it working and functioning properly. And However much of a shell of love they lived against the vast, larger possibilities of love. There is absolute reason for this and it is social. If we as a society can figure out how to go to Mars we can expand and increase our lifestyles to bring forth love. We can move Valentine’s Day to a season. And most importantly – I learned and knew I couldn’t do the shell version of love. I live for expanding the possibilities of love in this world and I only see that as infinite.

So anyway, this is a piece of my heart story.

One day before I signed the final papers for ending a love, delivered to me beyond my control or my commitment to marriage, a friend and I were taking a leisurely walk and randomly sharing thoughts, and some of those thoughts were about my relationships. And we were walking on this dirt road, and as often happens, I came upon a beer bottle. Not a usual one, of course. This beer bottle WAS unusual. It had a heart cut out in the middle of it. I picked it up and was astounded. I found a heart in the middle of a beer bottle in the middle of a divorce from beer bottles. I took it home. Now isn’t that funny. I have ONE beer bottle in my house for a few decades now. What would you make of that event?

For years after that, I lived single and I was committed to love – single or married. I learned about love in all kinds of relationships and, like that beer bottle I wasn’t looking for, I’d find hearts on things, in things around things. The symbol of the heart became a symbol for me to seek, to be open, and to learn – a new way; a larger way of loving. And that was the love approach I took to the people around me – open to learn about them. It’s richness and importance grew. If I couldn’t do that and believe I can’t often – be open to learn who they are even if I didn’t like what I was learning – then maybe I should not be around that person because I wasn’t loving.

The Valentine’s Day stuff – the unexamined, shallow script of events and behaviors, externalized ‘do as others do’ which is highly influenced by decaying institutions or profitable expanding ones, about what ‘true love’ and relationships were suppose to be or are suppose to be; those stories that wind up with heartache, broken hearts and romance taking a nose dive, often fantasies of love, all those thoughts on that template for the ‘right’ kind of Valentine’s Days that I had had years earlier; all of this was a thing of the past. I no longer longed for love and those things. I lived it. I had it. I lived it not by advertisings and longing for rings, dinners and flowers; but in the creative expression of my being instead. In how I felt when I did things. The feelings I needed for life were not to be lived through another person’s being.

I created it. I created love and the feelings I wanted in me so I had it. So I had it to give. And I created a much broader meaning in my life for love and I lived it. It began with me and ended with me way before I brought someone into my dancing with life and love. The holiday and my life was mine to enjoy. It was as a child and it is now.

Don’t get me wrong. I had a lousy Valentine’s Day now and then. When I was married, it was mostly neglected because life was just busy with what had to be done and any expression was somewhat routine script and there was always the no money for luxuries issue. I had one devastating Valentine’s season about 10 years ago when a special man in my life had his own idea of what he wanted to do for Valentine’s Day. His idea was taking a trip to Florida with some girl with whom he was having that intense, new relationship energy. It touched on my own dreams to travel and I cried my heart out for a little while as I sat in Pa with the cold and snow and then I got angry. Not really exclusively with him. I believed love was letting others love freely and live as they choose. He wasn’t committed to me or obligated to me so he was free and he was loving – someone else. He was thoughtless and uncaring towards me during that time, though. I got angry mostly because I wasn’t having my special week. I let that kind of situation ruin my special week! My anger cut short when I told myself, No. NO. This is a special week for me. I’m turning this around quickly and I’m not letting this happen or continue now or in the future. I will celebrate love and Valentine’s season and if others can’t love me, or fulfill my needs and wants than I understand that as a lack or difference on their ability which doesn’t deserve my lashing of the tongue or purging of emotions. All of this is not what I was taught. It is not some kind of punishment or torturous life controllably wielding at me as a story of Romeo and Juliet subchapter of the loved and unloved situations and people that forces the grief into a stance of I don’t understand and then the rhetorical question asking Why me? Waiting for the next person to come change it for you. No. I know why and it’s not me nor does it involve waiting for anyone. The love I needed was only the beginning of the ideas of Valentine’s Day magnified and increased exponentially for every day of my life. Believe me. No one was going to come along and increase my love or do a give and take in it as I needed. It was on me to create and recreate from the past mistakes. And Believe me, it’s not just me. or You. Or all those other people too who have grief or hate or feel slighted on Valentine’s Day if they don’t have their life exactly according to the scripted plan or the mental arrangement in their heads of what life should be or what they want. It’s also okay with me if Valentine’s Day is forgotten. I’ve moved to let life be life and embrace it and that is where I found love incrementally in each breath and moment.

I had learned that love came from freedom and safety and nothing else was more important for creating an environment of love. Scripted plans were a problem for the safety and freedom needed for love’s existence. If one isn’t safe from harm and free to end harm, harm destroys love, and love enslaved by harm makes no sense. It’s killing. And killing love. But this is where I came from. Well, we all did given the history of marriage in this society. When one is enslaved, one can, of course, still love but that love is stifled, thwarted, distorted and manipulated and the potentials for love expanding is significantly blocked. Or in George Harrison’s accurate words….Love diverted, Perverted and inverted while the Guitar Gently Weeps. So Diverted, Blocked and Manipulated love in the midst of harm is not the best of love there is or is even possible for You. Our foreparents had enslavement in their duties of love and marriage….. and women intheir love in the mothering and roles of wives,(as husbands didn’t have that duty as much as financial provider), however gracious and huge, was also in conditions of the wars with emotions as the most often used weapons that are the result of enslavement but you can’t ACT. You can’t move with enslavement.

Worse yet, both women and men, weren’t allowed to acknowledge their enslavement and their children were never told or taught to see it. Many still romanticize and believe in that enslavement as the missing links for a lasting marriage. Some truth there – cause they couldn’t Leave. There was no choice to leave.

LIke Dad, he’d have believed it was his choice to enter even if he ‘never thought’ about it. Instead a reality being known of social conditions and choices, it is always ignored and talked about and taken as individual choices. And I’m not even talking about the Gay thing. I’m talking about heterosexual marital arrangements – that even the LGQT groups still believe in.

What I came to understand is those Emotions and words at times of conflict actually were flung at each other like bullets – and issues on marriage, like today, were not just private choices and private verbal conflicts. There was public debate. Public taboos. Public bullets. There were public humiliations to avoid that kept marriage in a state of secrecy and hiding of truth. There were social groups pushing of their version of how to define our bodies, our behaviors and specific rules and laws about marriage. There were religions trying to dominate and control the newest marriages. Sound familiar? There was advertising using marriage to sell products for one’s lifetime and lifestyle. And there were laws.

For example, Marital rape was legal until 1994 and duty of wives to husbands carved and defined that rape as a woman’s failure or lack of her fulfilling her obligations. It was all her fault. He wouldn’t rape if she just…..

Such Lack of sexual freedom and safety thwarts and mystifies the love ideas. The damage created in times of conflicts of our collective and individual pasts were often extensive and long lasting, not surprisingly used in the next battle and like the bullets and enslavements were denied – the damage was on the children and their ability to have an environment for love which was also extremely misunderstood and degraded. And the family harm established actually built more harm on top of harm and attempted solutions to bring about our public conflicts on marriage today.

The good news? I learned a family – a domestic global family, too – didn’t have to function that way. I’m talking about the only way that makes for good entertainment on television and in the movies and even on talk shows from Jerry Springer to Fox News. It’s not just media that degraded to manipulation with an agenda here. It’s media that is a reflection of our sorry state of our human relationships that are publicly acceptable and eroding – both in and outside the home – in marriages and our children’s friendships. So I learned I didn’t have to function in those ways in any of my relationships because it only destroyed love. Emotions and words could not be bullets I shot at others with the speed of an AK-57 or AK-47. I don’t know guns, but you get the point.

I learned I could have safety and freedom and the emotions I wanted as a sustainable lifestyle but I also had to be willing to give that to the people around me. That included safety and freedom from my emotional irresponsibility tied with my wants, needs, desires and my life’s plan as the framework for another person’s life. I instead opened up to taking responsibility for what I didn’t know and I became committed to increasing my ability to love. I’m still on the path. And it has no finite place of ending.

At first, I didn’t take pictures of hearts, but eventually I started collecting snapshots of those hearts I’d been seeing.

So I still find hearts and I still learn about loving. There are more stories about hearts and photographs and drawings of hearts to share like this one. I’ll be posting more of my found hearts shortly and over the long term sharing more of mine. Join me here or at karendee57.wordpress.com to see and read more.

Reflections on History of Writing And a Book

As a writer, the history of writing is something on my mind a lot since it was part of my university education, and I just got to say that the idea of having a sacred ‘book’ for a religion now strikes me as really an odd thing sometimes, yet, of course, normal as we have it. I know it’s not odd to everyone I know nor was it to me because it is a normal thing to us who are born and raised with it, but just imagine for a minute a few generations from now, the society has a sacred computer with sacred writings. It’s bound to happen. What will emerge from the billions of written texts and tweets? Will the next generation tweet the bible? Who will make the decisions?

It’s about the same thing with the history of the book and writing tools. Writing was honored as a new invention with writing tools and newly created paper, leaving stone behind, in the same way we moved to chemical film processes to digital now. There was Awe and with it came the idea it was a gift from God. Some of us don’t see the computer as a gift from god but as invention from man. And then imagine sacred writing says God is the digital and the digital is God as the bible says God is the Word and the Word is God when the Word was literally a new invention. I can just imagine those elderly illiterates scoffing and saying, yeah, right. LOL. God isn’t a book and words. God is the sun, the moon and stars with no word and language – might have been the argument from the ancients.

Still technology trumps what is ancient, destroys it and moves on OR holds on to it as sacred. Imagine God tweets to come! Few people understand how religion moved from non-literate to literate religion, the changes and the development….and it’s not over. The bible has always been updated along with the technologies and social values and language changes. That’s why the strict fundamentalist view that it’s unchanged and is God’s word alone untouched by humans in any way is not only inaccurate but actually a reaction to the actual development and history of the social evolution of the Bible and writing in general and a resistant to some of the changes. There’s always been rejection and conflicts amongst different groups about the whole mixing religion and writing – and some nasty wars. Native americans had no book for their religion so they didn’t have wars over it. Everyone must have known their relationship to God in another way. Beyond a book. Maybe removing technologies can still do that. The next generation will not know an experience non-digital, they will only be taught from some historian what the world was like when the book was sacred.

Artistic Science, Scientific Art

Ways of Using Mind and Body; Science and Art

Raymond said this in a world I was born to. While this statement rings of clear explanation to me and describes what I live and know, I add that  beyond his explanation, the categories are manmade. I am not a man. As creative woman, art and science are not categories I fit in and out of neatly. They weren’t designed for me unless compliant to them. For me, being scientific and being artistic are ways of ‘being’ and each has a spectrum  of possibilities as well as a merging with each other under a larger umbrella human ways of being and thinking that makes the distinction irrelevant at certain points.  They are both simply different ways of using the body and mind and for the creative as myself, science and art come together as one and as infinite variety… when I am ‘both’…. and destroys both categories and all their assumptions. They also can have other separations and distinctions. Science and art coming together and separating has a long history.

Science when moved to belief becomes religion. Religion comes from story and it’s rituals.  So does Science. Story comes from art. And art becomes the science that observes and analyzes the story with image that we know as science that is a religion but is transformed by art….it is a cyclical. It is human process, not static rigid categories. It’s about being not necessarily always doing. It’s what one does with it that becomes infinite. It can be many things.

But of course, I’d say this because my creative process is fluid in ways influence by being woman and was I never gendered ‘man’ into rigid manhood structures nor creative like them – even if I wanted to be. I was left out and made different.  The worldview created by man and mass produced as the dominant one in the last 2 centuries is only one told to us as if it is THE one and only, eternal and historical, and at the same time the ‘right’ and ‘best’ one which is itself a contradiction. For either it is actually the one and only, or it is the right and best one compared to the others that do exist. Either way, creativity itself defies the idea of a ‘one’. The belief maintains a denial that others exist. It’s not ironic that this culture destroys the cultures it contacts or conquers. And there is no doubt they do. There are other ways to see and understand the world and our American world about creativity and possibilities for humans and also is in desperate need of these new ways, because it is in the weaknesses of our society that we are crippled in becoming more than what we are now and clinging to ways that simply have expired as useful.

The problem is something else.

You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

Block Cement Walls; Normal

With Cover for Power

with no network to Power

The following is An excerpt from my bookart titled Normal

that hasn’t made it into a full publication copy for manufacture yet.

Things, however, are evolving and progressing.

Let me preface this excerpt by saying that Historically, women have been and still are the majority of those who end up with a diagnosis of depression. The history matters because it is the foundation that all else rests on and is built from. A mistake is a mistake is a mistake no matter how old it is.

“The fact that the diagnosis of depression was created

by a particular group of men at a particular time

to categorize, name and define another group of people

is a fact that needs to not be overlooked or left unknown.

There is history here and with it oppressive factors.

The symptoms of depression certainly DO exist in a person’s reality

and I certainly don’t want to negate those realities.

However, our reality is perceived by what we know

and it is what we don’t know that is missing here.

The word depression is used extensively and is very popular,

almost epidemic, but in truth, many, many deeper truths exist underneath the term.

The right questions are not being asked.

The language is the barrier here.

Other words would better articulate each person’s experience.

Personally, I don’t believe the word, depression, serves (many of) us very well.

We don’t get to the root of the problems with it.

Like many things in our culture and particularly in the medical field,

we have ways to cure symptoms.

Depression, as popularly known, is a symptom, not the root problem.

The problem is something else.

Of course, it does help to handle the ‘symptom’…but it

is better if we get to the root of the problem and get rid of the symptoms entirely – once and for all.

You’d think so, wouldn’t you?