new south

here you grow cotton and
houses in straight rows

watered by chemicals, fertilizer and
lawns, tended by fleets of everlarger
Machinery

oh take me back to where i can be
more than this
already

A couple of days later, things have gotten much better for me. All of a sudden, over the span of about two days, things seem to have broken through, and I find myself getting work that I enjoy.

I’ve semi-officially been made part of a “grassroots development team” (which I think is an interesting choice of phrase) to help with prototyping and rich interface development, to which I’m dedicating up to 50% of my time. (I love being able to ignore what I’m “supposed” to be doing and do things that actually interest me AND contribute to real work at the same time.) So I think it was just a question of getting the information about my skills and interests to the right people.

I’m feeling so much happier now that I can actually use some of my skills in a beneficial way. Feeling competent and helpful is of high value to me, as I’ve been discovering the hard way lately.

And now I’m off to the Art Museum.

I generally read the Daily WTF just about every day… but never have I empathized with a story so much as I have with this post. (Not so much the ending bit… but the beginning, totally. And with all of those who chimed in with comments saying, “hey, me too!”)

I just can’t believe that it’s cost-effective to hire bright, motivated young college grads from good schools, all eager to contribute and to prove themselves, and pay them a competitive IT wage… and then let them (no, make them) sit around utterly bored with nothing to do. And yet I know way too many people in that situation right now.

It’s always tough for me to talk about my religion, as several incidents lately have reminded me.

There’s this wonderful interview with a professor of environmental studies and scholar of Paganism, Adrian Ivakhiv. I came across this today (linked from The Wild Hunt), and reading it threw several things into perspective for me. (I also recommend the interviewer’s blog entry on the topic.)

I would say that religion itself, as we understand it, has undergone a real series of changes, particularly with the Protestant Reformation. And, you know, over the last couple of hundred years, it’s become a matter of belief and a sense to a set of doctrines. ‘We believe that this and this happened historically, and therefore, this is what we’re supposed to do’ or ‘We’ll be saved by believing in Christ as our Savior’ or something like that. Whereas in the past, it was more rooted in a set of really, you know, cultural practices that were based in everyday life that were full of images and symbols and meanings.

I think this quote really gets at the heart of why I find my religion so hard to talk about with most people. I think that most people have a general set of expectations about any religion — even one that they’re not familiar with — that there will be certain things that define that particular religion and make it different from any other religion.

The first problem with that is that Paganism isn’t a specific religion so much as an umbrella term, so there’s always that tension between talking about my personal spirituality and worrying that people will (inaccurately) generalize to Paganism as a whole. Which makes it tough to speak without a lot of boring disclaimers.

Secondly, I feel like when people want an explanation of a religion, they expect a statement of belief: “I’m a Pagan, and that means that I worship so-and-so Deity and follow such-and-such holy text”. But my religion isn’t defined that way. My religion is more like the second thing he mentions; it’s about everyday life, it’s about experience. But how do I explain an experience? How do I explain a feeling of connection, of meaning? How do I convey the way a skyscraper, a city, a mural, a neighborhood, all of these mundane parts of life, can be sacred, can have Spirit? How do I explain immanence?

For me, the way to reconcile that one level of reality, where people talk about [mystical experiences] and maybe experience that, and the other level, which is sort of the material world that we can measure and know what’s going on in, is just to acknowledge that, as human beings, we have this fabulous capacity to imagine things, but it’s not just a one-way kind of imagination from scratch. It’s a way of putting order or putting a face to our experiences.

The gods are made-up. And They are also real. We create Them, and They create us. How do I explain that something can be true without being literal? How do I tackle the necessity of paradox?

And as long as there are going to be mysteries, you know, everybody’s going to make an effort to put a face to those mysteries, to kind of draw on whatever stories and tales and narratives and images that have been circulating in order to make sense of those gaps.

So what do I believe?

I believe that the Sacred is everywhere, in everything — in people, in animals, in trees and skyscrapers. And also in books, in computers, in forks, in dishwashers. Everything all taken together makes up god — singular. So my beliefs are pantheistic in that way.

And I also believe that most of the time, we human beings have a really tough time grasping that notion of Everything. So I believe that we take certain aspects of that Everything, of God Singular, and personify. We give faces, and names, and human personalities, so that we can relate. So that we can understand. I believe that the gods exist for relationship, for connection, so that we can have that connection to the Everything. And so my beliefs are polytheistic, in that way.

I believe that no one knows what happens after death, and that it’s impossible to know, and I’m okay with that. (Unlike many Pagans, I don’t buy reincarnation, at least not literally.) And so my beliefs are agnostic, in that way.

I could even make arguments for both monotheism (in that Everything is a Unity, a One) and atheism (in that I acknowledge that the gods are human-created), although both are a bit more of a stretch.

So do you see why this becomes complicated yet? We haven’t even gotten past the Deity-and-afterlife bit, and already I’ve yammered on for far too long for our hypothetical lunchtable discussion. And we haven’t even gotten into ethics, traditions, holidays, prayer and meditation, “magic?”, or the usual disclaimers against Satan-worship, sacrificing goats, and suchlike.

Sometimes I think I should just become a Quaker. Life might be simpler, that way.

I saw something today that made me smile. Along Kelly Drive, there was a man rollerblading while playing a horn. (It looked like some sort of baritone.) Just by himself… skating along between the river and the road… playing on the baritone horn. Sure, why not?

Things like that remind me why I love living in the city, where eccentricity is so much more tolerated.

Apparently in some parts of the country, they prefer even the dead to Republicans.

camouflage

you look through my
business suit
and see the thrift store underneath.

will i ever learn to blend in, here?

Bad day today. Maybe it’s just the rain. October is exciting, but November is just dreary…

So, about this whole John Kerry thing.

(I know, I’m a little bit behind the curve on this one, but I just had to throw in my 2c. You won’t typically hear me dive into partisan politics on this blog, largely because I think a lot of it is distracting BS that stops people from getting anything real done. And I care a lot about politics as it affects the world and people’s lives, but I’m no huge fan of either major national party.)

I know a decent amount of people in the military — lots of kids from high school, or their husbands. And everyone I know who’s joined the military recently did it for economic reasons. Every single one of them. Because it was the best option they saw, or in some cases the only option, to make something of themselves. To get money for education. To support a family. Or just because there seemed to be no better way to support themselves.

Would these people do something else if they had the opportunity? Possibly. Do any of them really want to be “stuck in Iraq” right now? I highly doubt that. And I think this is what JK was trying to get at, with his now infamous comment.

Where he screwed up, though, is that the way he expressed that seemed to make fun of those people. By saying that getting “stuck in Iraq” was a consequence of not working hard, of not doing your bloody homework(!), he implied that those who are in Iraq are there because they’re dumb, or lazy. He, a Northeastern millionaire himself, said this as a just-between-us inside joke presented to a group of college students, by definition privileged, by definition unlikely to ever be in Iraq themselves. (And yes, I do acknowledge that I am now part of that group.) It comes off as a “thank God we’re not like them” – them being the largely lower-economic-class, lower-education-level people who make up most of the military. A bit of a nod and a wink between elites, as it were.

I can totally understand why people are offended and upset by that. I also believe that, as a whole, the Republicans are a lot less likely to do things that will really help people of that economic class and situation than the Democrats are. So I really wish that JK hadn’t made his stupid joke, if only because it could potentially be used to bolster that godawful image of the Democratic party as latte-sipping elites. Meanwhile real issues like paying a living wage, fixing our country’s effed-up educational system, increasing access to healthcare, prison reform, substance abuse and mental health issues – things that could actually make a big difference to a lot of the same people who are part of the new “military class” – get thrown by the wayside in all the bickering.

So I’ll end with this newsflash. The people who are in Iraq aren’t dumb, or lazy… well, maybe some of them are, but I doubt it’s a higher percentage than anywhere else in the population. People don’t get stuck in Iraq because they didn’t work hard or “do their homework”. They get stuck in Iraq, JK, because they’re poor.

And conflating poor with “lazy and stupid”… Why, JK, that’s downright Republican of you.

(End partisan squabbling. Now back to your regularly scheduled trees and skyscrapers.)