Other Realities

Letter To My Body

BlogHer started this thing called A Letter To My Body.  I've been thinking about writing one, a letter, and linking it to the others on BlogHer from this site.  I haven't done it already as I've been heavily into constructive change for the last couple months.   The couple months before that I was numb.  The months before that I was working in a job that took all my physical and emotional energy so that I wouldn't think about the previous six months when I cared for my mother in her home,  1893 miles from my  home and family,  as she passed from this life, and then lived in her house as we cleared almost 70 years of accumulated memories from the house after her death.

For those of us who have abused and watched our bodies be abused, well at least for me, writing a letter to that part of myself is beyond difficult if we do it honestly and with the real intention of communicating something to ourselves and all our parts.   

My dear faithful physical self, I love you, never doubt that, ever again, and please hear me as I say, I am sorry for all things I've done to you and all the things I have allowed to happen to you.   I've been learning to make peace with the past for the last couple of years... it started two years ago on my birthday when I called Donald Rumsfeld a liar and was escorted from the Senate meeting room.  At that point I knew that I was strong that you were strong and that we had arrived.  Finally we were whole, we were together, and everything was alright.   You were so calm and steady.  I was so proud of you.

I still want to officially apologize for trauma you've suffered when I starved myself, when I gorged myself, when I would scratch you until you bled, when I smoked and drank and did everything I could to hurt you, when I stayed in relationships that brought you no pleasure out of fear, when I was not aware enough to warn you to get up an leave before an assault happened, when I stayed vigilant for years at a time and worked our adrenal glands to exhaustion, when I allowed young foolish vanity to tempt fate and got us into a situation where rape occurred, when you had to suffer through needless surgery and countless tests, x-rays, injections, medications, scans, and years of inactivity when I played sick to please a mother who wanted me to be sick because of her own sickness.    I am so sorry you experienced all these things.  But you know what?  It wasn't your fault, and it wasn't my fault.   We were young, practically babies when the brutalization began and we learned to think that self-sacrifice, in a literal sense, was the norm and what we had to do and what we should do. 

I want to thank you for being so resilient,  for all the pleasures you have allowed me to experience.   Thank you for the perfect timing of the ovulation that allowed me to become mother to the most wonderful baby in the world now grown to most wonderful young woman in the world.  Thank you for becoming strong enough for me to lift my mother during her last days as I cared for her, that ability allowed me  to have the time with her to truly understand forgiveness and experience love for and from her. 

Thank you for coordinating fingers and developing neural paths that allow me to blog and write for hours on end without strain or tiring.   Thank you for naturally guiding me away from wanting to eat things that have faces. Thank you for enjoying it when I work out.  Thank you for hating being directly in the sun.   Thank you for giving me that great white streak in my dark hair while I got used to graying. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you.   I will continue to take better care of you with each passing day in these second fifty years.   

Namaste my dear old friend.   Namaste.

Nancy

Why do this?

I'm at a major turning point in my life.   My mother died this past June.   My daughter graduated from High School a year early in July.   I turned 50 last May.  I am starting into the official (officious?) work force again.   By the time I turn 51 I will have a company formed, an LLC under who's rubric I can jam all the things I do.  This LLC will sort of be like this blog/site. 

This blog site has been created as a place to collect, expand, and continue on from all the online writings I've done in the last 10 years be it about Late-Boomers or CODEPINK.  It will also connect to if not house thoughts and musings and even some of the writings themselves per books I have begun the process of pulling out of myself.  One is a biography of Gene Stratton-Porter I have been working on for years as time permitted.  The other is my  recollections and research about a disorder or syndrome from which I believe my mother suffered and through which as a consequence I was also hurt, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. 

I also have joys and new experiences I want to crow about.   I have always loved the technology behind visual communication.  While I've never been a good photographer, I've played in the graphic and written arenas of communication for decades.  I loved my first typewriter that I bought instead of a car when I turned 16.   I've been having an affair with one or another of a myriad Apple & Macintosh computers and products since the early 1980s.  These dalliances provided the base from which I could jump into what is now termed, "Social Networking" platforms as they developed in the '90s and on into this decade. 

Email lists  seem so primitive now, but... they were so high tech when I started using, posting to, and forming them.   Bulletin Boards, Websites, Publishing Networks, MuDDs, MMRPGs, Blogs and Wikis are other types of online communication tools I have played with and that have lead up to a point where I personally feel the first really integrated attempt at the creation of a real virtual (LOL) reality has been achieved with Second Life®.  It too will be soon be passe unless it evolves into the next mash up.   

All of these things have lead me here to creating a TypePad site and I will wax philosophic about many of the picnic spots upon that path as I fill out all the information I have to exchange with others (probably women) who can stand the stream of consciousness writing I use when I am at my most creative and connected.   

I so often quote Whitman, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself.  I am large.  I contain multitudes."  I suspect he was talking about the American character but, I also think the term was biographical.   It is in that sense that I borrow the phrase to describe myself and in a larger sense the 21st Century Woman.  I speak of the time period in between the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, and the Iraq Occupation.  It hasn't been all that friendly to complex people who refused to jam themselves into boxes so as to facilitate the cultural conveyor belts of the Industrial Revolution.

I was fortunate enough to study with a woman at Purdue University who was and is a seminal thinker.   Myrdene Anderson.     Both she and her mind alive colleagues and friends that she shared with her students and unsuspecting passers by knew by the 1970s that the next real paradigm shift had already happened .   Lots of folks are just catching on now that  this has happened.   It is exactly like Al Gore's knowing about massive change in our bio- and geo-climatic systems, per An Inconvenient Truth,  but not being able to really get through to others until recently.     We are seeing the evidence of a shift to processual, inter-connected, and personal understanding and away from linear, Cartesian,  and impersonal logic.   

This is what I write about, this is what I consult in, and that is how and why I write.