June.25 - James Hollis, Earth's Children series, sleepytime reading, astrology vs. tarot

Not a lot of site updating to report

I haven't been doing much on the site, instead I've been busy with school. I'm trying to finish my BA before my kids finish their Bachelor's degrees. The oldest, Miles, is nearly a Senior and the youngest, Jupiter, is now a Junior, while their Ma has - count them - FIVE CLASSES LEFT. That's it! FIVE. I'm gonna win! It's doubly fun because my husband left high school and went to college early and then left college when he joined a very awesome software company, which means he has neither a high school diploma nor a college degree. If I finish my degree first, I'll technically be the first high school AND college graduate in my family.

For the next session (starting this coming Monday) I have decided to double up and take two classes at once, which will definitely put a crimp in my website updating schedule. But will hopefully lead to good things, like the triumph of crushing my beloved family in pointless competition. [FIST PUMP]

I did find and post some old trip photos from Mont Saint Michel in 2001, when I had a quarter life crisis and went to Ireland and France to sort myself out (as you do). At the time I had made a little self-contained photo album, which turned out to be pretty cool years later, when I was able to just lift those files up and drop them into this site and everything worked. It reaffirmed my feelings about this site, and what I want to do here. I did have to do a little Find & Replace search with an old domain name, but that was easy to fix.

James Hollis has an impressive vocabulary

I started reading James Hollis's What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life. Just the preface has some great thoughts:

I have no vested interest in our becoming saner, or mentally balanced, or even useful to society. If you, the reader, find a neurosis that works for you, and gifts others as a bonus, then ride it for all it’s worth. We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves. We, too, must enjoy amazement at what unfolds from within us while our multiplicitous selves continue to incarnate in the world, contribute, and confound.

How great is that? I love "the great mosaic of being". And "clunky and chunky" is my middle name.

And then you have paragraphs like this toothy beast:

When the world was still charged with the grandeur of the archaic gods, or when the institutional powers of mace and miter were still efficacious, one did not need to reflect. One lived the myth. When one experiences linkage to the numinous, one swims in it and serves it spontaneously. When we feel disconnected from the numinous, we either try anxiously to revivify the old linkage, drift off into the blandishments and distractions of popular culture, or suffer a crisis of meaning and are driven inward—whether to neurosis or privately encountered meaning remains to be seen.

I love the way Jungians manage to make every small thing that pulls on the emotional threads of existing in daily life into something magical and mystical. Everything goes back to some deep unconscious root that is probably your soul and probably linked directly to God or Source but at any rate is definitely here to connect you to something and make you whole, and at the same time, nothing really matters and you're probably okay, so cheer up, you little piece of stardust.

I've always loved mysticism. Put it everywhere. It enhances everything. Like spiritual truffle salt.

Anyway, I'm enjoying this so far. It gives me something to chew on when I'm trying to avoid my homework.

At night I'm reading The Mammoth Hunters

Jean M. Auel's Earth Children Series (which has a thorough synopsis on Wikipedia), came out when I was a little kid. By the time I was 10 or 11, every adult woman I knew had a copy of these books stashed around, and yet I, a young bookworm who inhaled every book in site, wasn't allowed to read them and no one would tell me why (the answer turned out to be: women-centered, explicit sex scenes).

As a kid I loved the outdoors and was obsessed with any story that involved a young person questing in nature, and there weren't a lot of those that involved girls. So when I found out that Clan of the Cave Bear was about a young girl getting found by a bunch of cave people, and learning to become one of them, well, I did what any young person would do in that situation. I found a copy and read it in secret.

There isn't a lot of boinking in Clan of the Cave Bear, but the adventure this girl has is epic, learning how to live among this group of Neanderthals. The whole thing is basically a fiction writer's love letter to anthropology and archeology and earth-centered spirituality. She learns herbalism, she learns a kind of sign language, two topics I'd later love, and she learns how to survive in the harsh but beautiful environment of Paleolithic Europe. And that's what really reeled me in, this world that was all outdoors, all the time. No indoors, no houses. Yeah, okay, they had caves, and they were tucked in at night in a generally warm and safe space, but the whole world existed outside of any familiar sort of civilization, and little me loved that.

Thanks to eBook readers being so light and nimble, I read myself to sleep every night, literally falling asleep holding my Kobo. For my "sleep reads", the books that send me off to dreamland, I like things that are comforting and familiar. Tolkien is a frequent choice, or Pride and Prejudice, but a few weeks ago I found myself remembering the Earth's Children books. I hadn't read them in over thirty years and I never got past the third book (and maybe never will considering it's twelve million pages long and at the slow rate of sleep reading, will probably last me into my 60's). I started Clan of the Cave Bear to see if it was as good as I remembered, and it was, and I just kept going.

I literally read these books for their descriptions of the outdoors

Because of my chronic illness issues, I can't get outside much in the way that I'd like. I can't go backpacking or really leave, I'm always near some level of civilization, and I say that with very mixed emotions, because part of me has been so frightened over the years by what my body does that now I often want that proximity to "safety", which cycles back into more mixed feelings, because another part of me wants nothing more than to get away. To get out of all this and just hear the trees and the water for awhile.

In short: it's a lot of internal conflict. Because chronic illness seems to shred every sense you have of yourself and then leave you with the ribbons, trying to sew it back together. But reading Auel's extremely well-researched and highly-detailed story takes me back to this place I remember loving as a kid, centered on a young woman who spends most of her time wishing she fit in and the rest of the time wanting to just go outside and hang out with her animals and leave other humans to their own devices. And that is an extremely relatable state of mind for me. At all times of my life. But especially right now.

And yes the explicit stuff does take off a bit in The Valley of Horses, and when I was reading about this series on Wiki and on a couple other sites, they went on and on about how often this series got banned for all the sex. Oh no, the sex! Which is WILD, because while yeah, it can get kind of silly with the language (there are only so many ways to describe things), I read these when I was a pre-teen and the education it gave me was that hey, everyone involved in the boinking ought to be having fun, and if they aren't, that should be addressed. This was a far cry from the male-centered boink scenes of every TV show and movie that saturated the culture in the 80's. Auel's depictions of intimacy were centered on women's pleasure in the FREAKING EIGHTIES, no wonder every woman I knew had a copy on their coffee table.

My favorite part about this blog...

...is that it's all handmade and my posts are way too long and there are no comments - on purpose - and I'm pretty sure hardly anyone reads to the end. Or at all, lol! It's kinda freeing.

Oh, speaking of mysticism and other spiritual things

My youngest is home from college and the two of us have delved back into tarot. We are each others touchstones with this stuff, because we share the struggle of being people who are into science (Jupes is majoring in Physics) and support things like, oh I don't know, GERM THEORY (pointedly looks toward certain asshats running things), but also have this "hippy dippy mystical side" of ourselves, and love things like tarot.

Yesterday we had a great discussion about the sticky moments that come with having this side of our identity. For me, someone in a lot of chronic illness support circles, it gets tricky being "out" about it, because these groups are already rife with pseudoscience that preys on the pain and confusion of being ill, and a lot of people are really into that. If I mention I'm reading about mysticism, they start telling me about their astrological signs or their favorite homeopathic treatment. These two topics are not my jam and get me real twitchy.

Jupes is less grumpy about astrology than I am. I grew up in the late 70's and 80's when it was wildly popular (yes, even more so than now), and everyone told me about how I was a Leo and this meant that I was a whole bunch of things that I was emphatically not. It was exhausting.

When I got married, I heard it too, "Oh, you're both Leos! Be careful, you'll be fighting all the time!" Greg and I average about one serious disagreement a year, and say "I love you" about seventeen times a day, and my favorite thing in life is making him laugh. When our sonbeam was born, we heard it all again. "OH MY GOD, THREE LEOS IN ONE HOUSE TOGETHER!" Yeah, three introverted nerds who sit around with their books and video games, cracking jokes at each other. And then a a fourth nerd arrived, an Aquarius. Who also sits around with their books, cracking jokes. Just like the first three. Seriously. There is nothing to astrology. There. I said it. It makes no rational sense.

Tarot, on the other hand...

Haha yes, I know. We talked about this too. Why does the concept of zodiac signs grate the cheese that is my very soul but tarot cards are fun and enlightening? I sat for a long time thinking about this before I answered. The chronic illness recovery work I've done, while not bonkers effective at eliminating my symptoms, has helped my psyche a lot.

Central to this has been understanding how much I repress feelings of fear and anxiety - this is super common with folks who have Complex PTSD, and common for people who as kids were told that certain emotions were not only totally unacceptable but perilous to their safety (shout out to kids with a parent who displayed a lot of narcissistic traits). But it's also common for humans in general, because the last thing humans want is to be uncomfortable in any way (a whole religion was created around systematically acknowledging this noble truth; you may have heard of Buddhism).

What I like about tarot is that it asks you consider whether something might be true for a situation. In so doing, you have to try a lot of things on to see if they fit. This is good for emotional repression, it helps things lift up and out and be free to be felt.

I'm not a "believer" in the literal sense. I don't ask the cards to predict the future, because I don't think they can do that, and I think skilling up our own faculties of reason and risk assessment and knowledge of history for a lot of those types of questions benefits us far better than attempts at divination - which, let's face it, science has not found to be all that effective. That's why we do math to figure out the width of the shielding on a space shuttle. We don't hold a pendulum over two different weights of metal and pick the one that it swings to.

But tarot really helps me cope with anxiety and fear. I do readings not just about situations, but about feelings, or sometimes the sense that I'm having feelings but can't feel them, because some tender-hearted warrior part of myself doesn't think I can handle those feelings and so bottles them up, like emotionally dangerous kombucha.

So a lot of readings will be me just asking about this glob of....something....and pulling a card, or a few cards, and then asking if the story fits. Every card has multiple interpretations, there are always many ways to read a situation, just like in life. In describing to myself how the cards do or don't fit, I'm discovering how I really feel, and I'm also claiming those feelings, and I often get new insights because I've had to turn things over a lot to see what matches, and I'll find new angles.

All this helps me create a narrative for myself, which is so healthy and so freeing and lets my psyche feel at peace and let difficult emotions go. Using symbolism this way helps me know myself better, it frees, rather than limits. I think a lot of symbolism does this. Old stories, art, it can shake us loose in the best way. That's why it moves us. That's the awe.

Not being attached to the divination part of it is really important. If you're attached to that, then you devolve into forcing the situation to fit the card(s), and that's no good. Now you're back at astrology, where "You're a Leo, you're locked into this list of possibly personality traits, if it doesn't fit you, you're probably lying to yourself". I loathe personality tests - is it obvious yet? Little boxes - we were never meant to be inside little boxes. That isn't how we work. You lose all the mystery that way, and this is all nothing if not a beautiful mystery!

This goes back to why I love mysticism. "We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves." My entire self isn't limited to the hour or day of my birth. It unfolds, daily. I discover more wonderful pieces, the older I get.

The year is 1990, and my friend Paul is standing against the wall, and I am - yes, wearing his actual clothes - upside down next to him. I can't remember why we were doing this other than I used to love doing handstands and would do them against different walls. For fun. Because why not. But why was I wearing his clothes? Some mysteries are lost to time.