Ten Things I Love – The Revenge!
July 26th, 2010

from the World Spirit Tarot

I’m pleased to report that my absence from the blog has been due to finally, finally finishing my second novel, ShadowFlame, which will be out…eh, probably next Fall.  The first book in the series, Queen of Shadows, will hit shelves at the tail-end of August, and is of course available for pre-order from Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Borders, Powell’s, and points west.  Rest assured I’ll have plenty more to say about it as the publication date gets closer.

Since finishing the book I’ve been going through a brief but intense period of hermitlike behavior – for several weeks now I haven’t been anywhere or done anything but come home after work and camp out on the couch in my jammies.  I consider this a well-earned break from productivity, and also, an escape from the hellish Texas Summer.  I’m hibernating until the mercury dips back below 90, thank you very much.

To get back into the swing of blogging, I thought I’d resurrect an old favorite: the Ten Things I Love List.

1 ~ I loved Inception. I loved how it built itself layer by layer just as the characters built dreams, and a story that could have fallen apart at any moment fit together and drew me in until, by the end, I was left breathless and questioning my own reality.  How many action films can say they make people think? How often do you leave a movie that you are unable to stop discussing afterward?  Take a lesson from Chris Nolan, Hollywood.  It is possible to make movies that are both exciting and intelligent.

2 ~ I love Castle. It’s my most recent TV show obsession, and while normally procedural-type cop shows bore me to tears, anything with Nathan Fillion has got to be Double Rainbow All the Way.  His character, a bestselling mystery writer, is a lovable jackass – you want to slap the crap out of him, but he also has the capacity to be genuinely kind and charming. The supporting players are even better, specifically his mother and daughter.  I won’t say it’s a masterpiece or anything, but it’s engaging and fun and hilarious, and come on, it’s Nathan Fillion. The awesome is baked right in.  Castle is quickly replacing Bones in my affections, since the fifth season of Bones made me so freaking angry with its sloppy writing, ham-fisted product placement (count the number of times the characters talk about their Toyotas), and gimmicky plotlines (midget wrestling?  REALLY?) I’m not sure I can stand to see season 6.

3 ~ I love Summer storms. In fact, they’re the only thing about Summer I don’t hate.  I don’t like sunshine, heat, insects, sunburn, beaches, swimming, or thongs; I don’t really like barbecues or pool parties.  But a good Summer storm where the lightning streaks over the sky and leaves the air feeling scoured clean is a wonderful thing.

4 ~ Actually, there’s one more thing I like about Summer:  it’s the time of year that my oldest friend Laurie comes to visit from Europe.  We only get a few days together each year.  We’ve known each other since fifth grade, and she’s a genuinely great person. There shall be Margaritas, Indian food, and long hours of laughing…yay!

5 ~ I love Pama pomegranate liqueur, especially in Fresca. If you’re a fan of Italian sodas you should try it; the Fresca gives a clean and fresh citrus taste, and the Pama adds a bit of bite and a little more sweetness. Much yum.

6 ~ I love the book Health at Every Size. It takes on the diet industry, food politics, advertising, OMG OBESITY EPIDEMIC!!! scare-mongering, body image, and nutrition, and presents a thoughtful alternative to the thin-or-die mentality that is choking the self-love out of people every day. I highly recommend it regardless of your size.

7 ~ I love my silly Skechers slip-ons. I’m really not into shoes (the idea of spending $200 on a pair of heels that will make my feet hurt just baffles me), but I decided one day that I wanted some completely frivolous (yet comfortable, non-leather) shoes that said more about my personality than a pair of plain black sandals. They’re basically adult-sized kids’ shoes, and they even have sparkles on the toes. Yes, I own something that sparkles. They make me smile every time I look down and see them on my feet.

8 ~I love my apartment. I’ve lived here for almost six years, and while occasionally the urge to move strikes me, I love coming home to the cool quiet and curling up with a book and my kitties, with incense burning and music playing. After I finished redecorating my bedroom, the place just felt…complete. It’s my little haven, an external expression of the calm and beauty I try to cultivate internally.  (I’m better at decorating outside than inside, but a girl’s gotta start somewhere.)

9 ~I love Jane Austen’s Fight Club. Just go watch it.  Trust me.

10 ~ I love the pyrography from Greenwood Creations on Etsy. Look at this extraordinary Art Nouveau Lotus Pentacle.  Gorgeous!

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Posted in Lists, Queen of Shadows, Ten Things |
a passing thought…
June 18th, 2010

There is a place within you that has never been broken. No matter what fractures and cracks, no matter what seismic blows have battered your heart year after year after wearying year, within you there is something that grows strong, that stands.  It has never been laid low by storm, never drowned in flood, never frozen and cracked.  It has never burned to the ground, never faded away.  It is that still point in your turning world, it is that deepest part of the heart that makes you the whole and complete child of God, Her perfect beloved daughter or son, and in that place, that place within you that is whole and sound…when you touch that place, you know what God has brought you here, born of this great Mama Earth to do for Her, and for all of us.  Somewhere in that beating, swirling, DNA-dancing core of your being, your ground, your center, your great big silver belt buckle of shining badassery, if you can touch that place, for even a moment, you will remember for just a second, maybe even a minute, maybe someday even forever, what it is like to be whole, and completed, even as you embrace those cracks and call them your ground of being, for you will have touched that within you that is immortal, and powerful, and beautiful, and in that moment, God Himself will lead a standing ovation that here, right here and right now, this person, this soul touching soul, GETS IT.

For a minute, anyway.

But it’s a start, right?

Forget the broken places. Forget dragging those bags of dust around with you.  The broken places had their shot. Do you want them in charge forever? Aren’t you bored with those “not good enough” messages? Aren’t you done being the broken girl?

Go to the source.  Find that still place unbroken in your being and let it speak.

It’s time for your wholeness to speak.

So shut
up
and
listen.

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Posted in Spiritual Living |
The Sinner’s Prayer
June 10th, 2010

Galveston Island, where I got my first 2nd-degree sunburn.

I feel that I should have something profound to say about the horror that is unfurling in the Gulf of Mexico.  I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast, an hour from Houston, close enough that we had access to fresh-from-the-ocean shrimp and oysters and close enough that family members still spend most Saturday mornings salt-water fishing.  I’ve never been all that fond of beaches, and having grown up in what amounts to a giant swamp plagued with hurricanes and mosquitoes (not sure which is worse), I was thankful to move further inland.

I’ve seen the images of oil-drenched birds and balls of tar, and I’ve watched BP’s continued failure to really give a damn about anything but the bottom line; I’ve watched the same people who resist government regulation of big business bitch about how the President should Do Something Already; I’ve seen the same maps of the spill and projections of its impact as everyone else.  But really, what can I say about all of that?  What outrage can I articulate that hasn’t been written already?  What sorrow can I wax poetic on that doesn’t already have every adjective in English draped over it?

There’s nothing I can say, and really not much I can do.  I’ve sent money to animal rescue organizations, but it’s not as if I can sell my car and buy a hybrid, or even walk or take a bus to work given where I live.  I can’t leave my job to go clean muck off pelicans.  I can send small amounts of money, and that’s really it.

The idea of sending “healing energy” toward something as vast as this almost seems like an insult to its magnitude.  Happy thoughts aren’t going to fix this…and my usual position that every little bit helps just doesn’t feel honest in the face of what our society’s insatiable greed has done to the ocean, to its life, and in turn to ourselves.  That’s not to say that these small efforts don’t help; it’s just that I feel like all that talk of healing energy does more to assuage our own feelings of guilt than it does to help the Gulf.

I don’t agree with people making their living dragging hundreds of tons of living creatures from the ocean so that Red Lobster can offer its two-for-one Shrimp Fest special, but I certainly understand how many livelihoods have been devastated by this, and I mourn that as well.

Seeing the sadness and conflict on people’s faces when they talk about the birds drowning in muck reminds me very strongly of how I felt when I first saw footage of the kill floor of a slaughterhouse.  That overwhelming sense of guilt and disgust, that anger at the injustice of it all, that need to do something—anything—to help, even if it’s just to remove ourselves from the system, turns people vegan every day.  I can only hope that instead of putting their blinders back on, as so many people do once exposed to cruelty toward animals, those who are outraged and saddened over the disaster in the Gulf will take that energy and do something besides rant on blogs and point fingers.

Although I admit the idea I saw on Facebook to plug the hole with Sarah Palin does have its charm.

What should we do?  What am I going to do?  I wish I knew.  All I can really think of at this point is to contribute as much as I can toward the cleanup and rescue efforts…and to lean my head against the Earth Mama and beg her forgiveness on behalf of my entire species.

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Posted in Current Events |
Playlist: Cover Me
June 9th, 2010

The fun thing about making mix CDs and playlists is that you can go for a theme like this one:  an entire CD made up of cover songs.

Covers can be hit or miss–on the one hand you don’t want the covering artist to change the original song too much, but on the other, if it’s just the same exact song spouted in a different voice, why bother?  The best covers infuse an old favorite with new energy.  In some cases they’re even better than the original (or at least make a great song by someone with a grating voice more accessible, which is how I feel about several of the songs listed below).

These are my favorites, listed by covering artist – song title – original artist.

  • Caroline Lavelle – A Case of You – Joni Mitchell
  • Anberlin – Enjoy the Silence – Depeche Mode
  • Sarah McLachlan – Bring on the Wonder – Susan Enan (will be released June 15)
  • Alanis Morissette – Crazy – Seal
  • Tori Amos – Like a Prayer – Madonna
  • Concrete Blonde – The Ship Song – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
  • India Arie  – The Heart of the Matter – Don Henley
  • Lizz Wright – Stop – Madonna (cover of “Don’t Tell Me”)
  • Marie Digby – Umbrella – Rihanna
  • Darren Hayes – In Your Eyes – Peter Gabriel
  • Brandi Carlile – Hallelujah – Leonard Cohen
  • Indigo Girls – All Along the Watchtower – Bob Dylan
  • Dixie Chicks – Landslide – Fleetwood Mac
  • Cowboy Junkies – Sweet Jane – Velvet Underground
  • Ryan Adams – Wonderwall – Oasis
  • Adam Lambert – Mad World – Tears for Fears
  • Sixpence None the Richer – Don’t Dream it’s Over – Crowded House
  • Anberlin – True Faith – New Order
  • Melissa Etheridge – Refugee – Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
  • E Muzeki – The Kiss – Randy Edelman (from the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack)
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Posted in Playlists |
Body Sacred: In Which the Author’s World Shifts
June 3rd, 2010

Once upon a time, I wrote a book about Pagans and body image, in which I discussed why we should love our bodies regardless of what size or shape they are.  And once upon a time, I really believed that.

I’m not sure what happened.  The culture we live in is so determined to sell us a perfect body (for just $29.99 plus shipping/handling!) and the alleged perfect life that comes with it (because there’s no such thing as miserable or unhealthy “beautiful” people), that learning to love your body not only takes years, it takes constant effort.  It’s a practice like meditation or yoga, a muscle you have to build up and then maintain or it atrophies.  Somewhere along the way, I stopped using my self-esteem muscles, and they went limp faster than an insecure ex-boyfriend.

Like so many people, I decided that my life would be magically better, and I would be magically different, if I lost weight.  To that end I joined Weight Watchers and, over the course of six months, lost about 40 pounds.  During that period I became even more neurotic about food, constantly comparing Points values in my head and thinking about nothing but the next meal, the next workout, and whether I’d get that little gold star for my bookmark this week.

Needless to say as soon as I realized how miserable I was, I gained it all back plus about thirty friends.  That was two years ago, and since then I’ve been in a spiral of self-loathing that whirled faster and faster the fatter I became.  My continued failures to lose weight became a reflection of my quality as a human being – I was a failure, a screwup, a lazy tub of lard, and so forth.

I made the mistake that those poor bastards on The Biggest Loser are basically abused into making:  believing that losing weight would give me self-esteem, and that my self-esteem would survive if the weight loss didn’t, which, statistically speaking, it won’t.  I’d feel elated when I lost, and then the minute the scale crept back up, I’d plummet, because that happiness was fixed on something external instead of arising from the cultivation of joy and love within.

The ironic thing is that this shame, which the media would like you to believe is necessary to make fat people “do something about it,” had the opposite effect on me.  I hated myself, and that drove me to make unhealthy decisions about food and exercise because I didn’t believe I deserved better than ill health and early death from diabetes/heart disease/whatever.  That made me gain even more weight, which made me hate myself more.

Perhaps it’s because my meds are finally working, or perhaps it’s because I finally looked at my life and the people around me and realized how absurd my obsession with fat had become, but recently my brain kind of turned itself inside out and I realized:  I can’t do this anymore.

The realization came when I was considering what I wanted to blog about next:  the idea that if you want to make positive changes in your health, you should only take up habits that you can see yourself keeping for the rest of your life.  Anything else is going to either make you crazy and send you into a shame cycle or simply fail, because an unsustainable life eventually collapses.  As I was considering this, I realized that the reason all my attempts at improved health have failed is because they were coming from a place of self-loathing that is as unsustainable as Big Oil.

I have a disordered relationship with food.  That much I’ve known for years.  But it wasn’t until I started actively trying to lose weight that that relationship became genuinely abusive.  Ever since then things have gotten worse.  All I think about is how much I hate being fat.  How many calories I’ve eaten.  How impossible the idea of being healthy is because of how fat I am.  I’m constantly surrounded with diet talk and fat shame and food guilt, just by virtue of living in America, but I chose at some point to internalize all of it…and it’s killing me.

Funnily enough, as my weight has increased, the actual indicators of health for my body have stayed blissfully fine.  If being obese was such a death sentence for me, then over the years as my weight has crept up, so should have numbers like blood pressure, blood sugar, liver/kidney function, cholesterol, et cetera.  This has not happened – not even a little bit in fourteen years.  What has happened is that I’ve become totally pathological about eating and exercise, am constantly stressed about my body, and have let the size of my ass dictate how happy I believe life could be.

Yes, I’m fat.  Obese.  Okay, fine.  Yes, my body weight has increased the pull on my bones and joints and causes me pain.  Yes, I have a hard time moving and getting around compared to how I used to.  There’s no guarantee that losing 150 pounds would magically make me healthy – when I was 40 pounds lighter I was eating absolute crap, just fewer calories of it, and my stress levels were through the roof – but I acknowledge that I passed the comfortable range of how fat I could be at my current level of strength a while ago.  I have always believed, and continue to insist, that each person has a range of size that is healthy for that individual, and that range has nothing to do with antiquated height/weight charts or BMI, but has everything to do with that person treating her body well and eating, moving, and breathing in ways that promote wellness for that person.  That’s why there are thin people who are terribly unhealthy, and fat people who are active and vital – it’s about balance and mindfulness, and one size does not fit all.

I have to get off the Fat Hate Train.  It’s speeding toward a cliff.

I am a bit embarrassed that it took me this long to realize it given my history as an author.  But it just goes to show you that anyone can fall into a body image trap.  I said in The Body Sacred that I wasn’t an expert and I wasn’t “over it,” because, as I said, self-love in this world is a continual practice, not a one-time epiphany.  At the time I knew this to be true, but now, I understand it in a way I didn’t before.

I’m tired of being ashamed and feeling guilty for what I eat (ice cream) or don’t eat (leafy greens).  If I’m going to live healthfully in my body and enjoy my life I have to relearn how to act based on the desire to feel better and encourage joy, not to force myself to shrink until my problems disappear.  Weight loss may be a result of self-acceptance and a turn toward wellness, but I can’t live my life under the tyranny of the scale.  It’s made me unhappier and, ironically, smaller as a person even though my physical size has increased.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on letting go – another thing I have a very problematic relationship with – and I understand now that I have to let go of the expectation that taking care of my body will lead to thinness which will lead to happiness.  I have to seek out happiness here, now, in this body.  Wearing smaller-sized jeans won’t do me the least bit of good if I hate myself.  It’ll just give me something else about myself to hate if I eat pie and gain a pound.  Life is too fucking short to live that way.

It’s also too short not to eat pie.

More to come.

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Posted in Body Sacred |
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