Shameless Nepotism

My brother has an art blog. It features his whimsical, highly imaginative and surprising doodlies. And since I think his stuff is awesome, I hope you will all check it out:  Will 5:00 Never Come?

Shameless Nepotism

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On leaving the Poultry Yard

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about The Ugly Duckling and how I still struggle to see myself as a swan. Infidel753 suggested that perhaps part of the problem is that I haven't really left the poultry yard. That really struck me.

Even before I considered splitting from my husband, staying in Fargo for good was never part of the plan. So leaving is not a question of if, just when/where/how. It's not a bad place, but my major complaints are that it's too small, too flat and way too damn cold.

Winter alone would be sufficient reason for moving, but I'm noticing more and more a predominant small-town mentality here. Even though Fargo itself isn't that small, it's largely populated with people who moved from rural areas. Some of them are lovely, but many of them are not anyone I'd care to associate with. Call me a snob if you will, but they remind me too much of the non-summer-book-readers of yesteryear. I've been going to school, so most of my associations have been in academia. Now that I'm done, I've been venturing out into the broader community here and have discovered that the university environment is much more urbane than most of the rest of the town.

I went to a bar a few months ago, trying to get out of my comfort zone and be social (second time in my life I'd ever been to a bar, by the way). Music was awful. No one was dancing. A Rick Astley song came on and I was just about to leave when a guy invited me to hang out with him and his buddies. Yeah, sure, why the hell not? They were alright, nice people, but not really anything in common to talk about. I gave one of them a ride to a different bar later that night. My car radio is almost always tuned to Classical Minnesota Public Radio (I don't have anything against popular music; there just don't happen to be any stations in Fargo that play the good kind). So we get in the car and the radio comes on and he asks, "What's that?" "NPR," I say. "What's NPR?" Seriously? So we get to the bar where he wants to go next and as he's getting out of the car he asks for my number. "Oh, no, I'm just not ready to date right now," I say, when what I'm really thinking is, Buddy, you seem like a nice guy, but if you haven't heard of NPR, you don't get my phone number!

So, yeah, not planning to set down roots here, but moving is complicated. I'm still unemployed. My children's father lives here and he's a good father. I don't want to take the kids away from him. He's said that he doesn't want to live here forever either, but neither of us yet has concrete plans for when or where to move. I miss mountains and I would love to live near the ocean, and more diverse (and educated) neighbors would be nice. I think I'd fit well in either the Northwest of the Northeast. Winter hit hard and fast this year, motivating me to think harder about when and where to go.

It's hard to beat Fargo for cost of living. I've made some good friends here. There are nice things about this place, but I'm feeling more acutely that this is not where I belong.

On leaving the Poultry Yard

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Defining Spirituality

A few months ago, I changed the tag line of my blog to reflect that I consider myself on a journey to reclaim spirituality. I’ve been meaning to explain how I define spirituality, and Paul Sunstone specifically requested such a definition in his comment on my post about why I still like religion, so here goes.

I don’t believe in spirits, be it the Holy Spirit or any others, but there’s an experience which as a Mormon I knew as “feeling the Spirit.” Words are tricky for describing it. Sometimes it was deep contentment. Sometimes it felt like a truth I already knew at my core was being brought to the level of conscious thought. Sometimes it was peaceful, an assurance that come what may, everything would be alright. Love, a feeling that I had tapped into a source of love that was beyond myself yet in myself, older than anything, and yet ever new. It felt like I was glimpsing another realm. Does this realm actually exist outside of human imagination? My personal opinion is, probably not, but I don’t think that diminishes the significance of those experiences. Calling those experiences an encounter with Divinity makes as much sense to me as any other description I’ve heard. A longing for more of those “feeling the Spirit” experiences is a major driving force in my pursuit of spirituality.

But I see spirituality as more than just sitting around feeling holy. It is both a state of mind and a way of life. Some of the key elements are love, compassion, happiness and peace. 

Compassion is a hard one for me. Caring about other people does not come naturally to me. I am not often intentionally mean, but my default tendency is pretty self-centered and mostly indifferent to the rest of the world. (All you regular readers, how often do I write about something that isn’t directly related to me?) That’s not the kind of person I want to be. I would like to be more caring. I would like to really see people more, to appreciate and honor them as individuals. I think everyone in this world just wants to be loved, and I would like to be the kind of person who could be a source of love for others. 

A desire to cultivate love and compassion in my own life is one of the main reasons I am engaging with religion. I need reminders to curtail my selfish tendencies and the rituals, stories and symbols of religion provide that for me. Yes, humanism is compassionate and you absolutely can be compassionate as a completely non-religious person, but I have not found a secular equivalent that works as well for cultivating love and compassion for me personally. Secularism obviously works better for others. I’ve known people who were kind and loving and people who were mean and rotten and whether or not they were religious didn’t seem to have anything to do with it.  

Now happiness. This is also a tough one for me. I have a history of depression. I am much better than I was in my teens and early twenties, but because that groove is so well-worn and familiar, it is easy to fall back into during times of stress, and the last several months have been stressful for me. I’ve noticed those dark thoughts and feelings creeping up on me again. One of my coping strategies is gratitude, to focus on what’s going right. I’ve started praying again as a means to direct that. I’m not at all convinced that I’m doing anything more than talking to myself, but it helps. (I want to write a more detailed post about this, though my life is too chaotic right now to commit to any timeframe of when I might do so.)

To take joy in one’s existence, to embrace the experience of life, to me that’s an essential part of a spiritual journey.

I know full well that atheism makes perfect logical sense, yet I can’t shake the sense of a deeper, sublime Something beyond the realm of ordinary existence. A few weeks ago I was at a thrift store and picked up Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume Two.I’ve been reading that at bedtime where I used to read scripture, and can’t help but smile at how the poetry of a lesbian seems to be at least as effective a gateway into that sublime realm as the Book of Mormon was. 

I’m trying to get into that realm more often. That’s where I find the peace that allows rest and renewal. That’s where I draw strength to be able to give to others. That’s where I learn more effective ways of living.

That is why I am spiritual.

Defining Spirituality

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In which I get sappy

My kid keeps picking out library books that make me cry. This week it was The Ugly Duckling. I’d never read the original Andersen version before. Of course I’d heard of the story since I was a kid myself and the way I always understood it was: Once upon a time there was this bird, and when he was little, he was ugly but once he grew out of his ugliness, then he was beautiful. And the moral of the story is: Swans are ugly when they're babies. The end.

No. That’s not actually what story’s about at all.

The bird was never ugly! That’s just how all the birds around him treated him because he wasn’t like them and they didn’t know what he was. They were simple minded poultry birds with no concept of the grace and sophistication of a swan.

I was so born in the wrong place. I grew up in this horrible, God-forsaken, smudge-on-the-map of a town on the Arizona Strip. I think I can best sum up what it was like living there by relating one experience. I was 16 years old and had taken my younger siblings to the pool. My little sister was playing in the baby pool and I was sitting on the bench watching her and reading To Kill a Mockingbird, when a boy I knew from school came up to me, gave me a dirty look and said, “Why are you reading a book? It’s summer.” It’s a place where 40-year-old men still wear their letterman’s jackets and all civic life revolves around the high school athletic teams. 

I hated it there, to put it mildly. I had no friends and there were no opportunities for the things I liked and was good at, like music or academics. I was the kid everyone picked on in elementary school. By the time I got to high school, no one was outright mean to me anymore, but I still didn’t really have friends.

It was a predominantly Mormon town and I didn’t fit in at church either, probably because I was a closeted liberal and feminist. I hated Young Women’s, all the pointless goal-setting programs, being forced to make crappy, tacky, knick-knacky “crafts” at the activities, being told we mustn’t date till we were 16, but it’s never too early to start preparing for motherhood. I was the unruly granola girl who wore hiking boots with her dress to church and couldn’t understand why we had to hate gays. (Before I get angry comments, yes, I realize that a requirement to hate gays is not an official Mormon doctrine and many individual Mormons are open-minded and accepting of gays, but this was not the mentality of the specific Mormons I grew up around.)

We moved shortly before my senior year of high school. I’ve driven through a few times since then, but really have no desire to have anything to do with the place. 

That degree of unbelonging during one’s formative years shapes a person. I internalized the belief, “People don’t like me,” and so even when I moved away from there, because I expected people not to like me, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. My former husband was my first real friend. Then excommunication severely damaged my sense of self. “Mormon” had been such a strong part of my identity, and now it had been taken away. I was in the awkward position of still believing in it but not being allowed to be a part of it. We lived in the East Valley of the Phoenix area during the first four years of our marriage, a significant Mormon population there. I was ashamed of being excommunicated and terrified of anyone finding out. I didn’t want it to come up that we’d moved from Utah, or that I had ten siblings, because the inevitable next question was, “Are you Mormon?” and I didn’t know how to answer. I avoided talking to people and didn’t go out.

It was about two and a half years after I was exed that I was re-baptized and about a year after that that I decided that I didn’t really want to be Mormon after all. Then I was able to start rebuilding an identity and in recent years, I’ve finally been able to make a few friends, but it’s still a struggle. I’m still not completely comfortable with myself and still feel awkward and self-conscious interacting with other people.

There were a couple of parts of The Ugly Duckling that made me cry. One was when the duckling first sees other swans as they’re flying south in the fall, after he’s been mistreated and misunderstood by everyone he’s ever met. He watches them go and feels very strange and sad. “He didn’t know what birds they were, he didn’t know where they were flying, but he loved them as he had never loved anyone before.” I’ve felt that same sad recognition when I come across people whom I admire, and who are similar to what I think I would have been had I grown up in different circumstances. Educated, capable, confident. Happy. I don’t yet quite dare to believe that that’s also what I am.

The other part was when the swans return in the summer and the duckling sees them and doesn’t feel worthy to approach them but goes to them anyway because he decides he’d rather be killed by them than suffer any more at the hands (beaks?) of the birds he’s been around. He bends his head and waits for them to peck his neck, and that’s when he sees his reflection in the water and discovers that he is a swan himself. “Being born in a poultry yard doesn’t matter if you hatch out of a swan’s egg!”

I’m still working on not letting my past determine my future, on not being afraid to be myself, on finding places to belong. I think I’m getting closer. Maybe someday in hopefully the not-too-distant future, I’ll really believe that I’m a swan.

I loved the story. It made my heart happy. I think I’m going to buy myself the book for Christmas.

In which I get sappy

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