Power in the Dark

Hurricane Isaac and the Concept of Power: Warning! Hippie Shit

Not that long ago, Hurricane Isaac surprised us all in southern Louisiana. It wasn't supposed to be as impacting as it was. Aside from outrageous and devastating flooding in Plaquemines, LaPlace, and Slidell, perhaps the most annoying obstacle New Orleanians and surrounding area inhabitants faced collectively was the ongoing power outage. Some of us found other places to stay, others stayed put on our porches drinking beers and numbing the discomfort. For city dwellers, even in the small city of New Orleans, falling asleep in the darkness nearest to pitch black can prove difficult; I had the prickling fear that maybe zombies really do exist and would moan and scurry like rats up our street, searching for the nearest scent of human blood. I left my home a few days in when my dog started to overheat. His usually firm and athletic pit bull muscles turn to jelly when he begins to overheat. He flops on the floor, barely moving, like a mass of goo. At that moment, I realized that we had to leave. A few days later, the electricity popped back on; a neighbor sent me an ecstatic text message at 11:30 on a Saturday night, thrilled that we were no longer in the dark. We could use our peripheral vision again! We could SEE!

The following Monday, at a yoga class, my yoga instructor, Sean Johnson, invited us to meditate on the concept of "power." He voiced how strange it is that we use the term "power" as a synonym for "electricity." Since that night, I have thought of power and what it means to me and how it will differ from person to person. 

There are those who feel powerful by controlling others, yet those very people seem to have the most miniscule self control. There are those who feel powerless and that unwelcome occurrences merely happen to them. I suspect there is an epidemic in our culture where many associate power with control. In some situations, this may be accurate - helping a friend deal with loss, one can feel powerless to change the friend's situation. In ways, I have found power in knowledge; to be aware of myself and others in the world - openly aware - brings with it burdens of injustices seen but also the freedom of knowing that change can happen and that each of us plays a role in that change even in our daily interactions. Mostly, though, I have found power involves surrendering: surrendering to ourselves that, in turn, allows us to surrender to others. Accepting our needs and wants and demands, giving ourselves permission to accept. To accept, to welcome, to love. What happens next is that we are then able to exercise self control; the very act of letting go frees us to find power in our contentment. And there the chase for this illusive power ends. 

After Isaac passed and my yoga class ended, I wrote a short meditation on power. Here it is: 

Power. To define it may be the biggest challenge of all.
Is power control? No, that is merely illusory power.
Is power having the most of? No, having much causes weakness.
Is power illuminating? Close.
Power is the freedom of openness, a thing that does not come naturally.
Power is the human interconnection with the radiating shock of Mother Earth

that melts into a chocolaty river,

the feeling of the wide open sky sending down beams

of sunlight, or fiery lightning and hallucinatory winds.

Power is the humbling mimicry of nature:

our hurricane outrage,

our thunderstorm tears,

our sunlight smiles with the willow tree shadows

showing our multiple dimensions.

Power is exercising an open chest with which to absorb,

to be electrified by surroundings,

to harbor a piece of energy inside the heart

with which to refuel the body, mind, and soul. 

The power found in acceptance - acknowledging our differences but accepting based on them - can lead to a progression of growth. Will people ever stop trying to control one another, to create little ineffective armies of themselves? To appreciate differences, to surrender to who we are: there we will find power.

After a long unintended hiatus, I have decided to post a poem I wrote. I have never attempted to write about my experience of being vegan in a very non-vegan-friendly culture down here in the Deep South, but after the past few months, which have had the recurrent bashing of veganism in American movies and online among friends of friends, I decided to give it a go, for such a build-up must come out in some way. Creative writing continues, even if I am shamefully bad about posting it here:

How alienating it can be
To feel more aligned with those deemed lesser
Than with my fellow humans
How stagnating it can be to see
Blood dripping from their hands and lips
Yet they still laugh at me
As though my choice in kindness
Is alien, to be feared
How sour becomes my ability to
Digest the hypocrisies flung about
And clinging like mold spores on the air
Like a fungus destroying the base
Of our safety, perfectly crumbled
Perfectly obliterated

To claim a love of those lesser
Yet to assist in murdering
So you, the wiser, can eat
What you want
That's killing you anyway
To claim a passion for saving
Pulling bones from the river
Yet setting aside the blood-soaked dirt
As a bed for your next victim

I choose to love you anyway
Despite your flesh-eating disease of
Claiming care for this kind
But consuming that kind
I choose to embrace you anyway
Soaking up your tears of loss and sadness
When your river rat has returned to earth
I choose to empathize with you anyway
Even though I allow you to grind a knife in my gut
Every time it's convenient for you to close your eyes

Inappropriate

“You’re gross.” He chuckles, his smile hidden by a fluffy beard. “You are. You’re gross,” I say, but I’m laughing regardless of the grossness.

Moments before, my work partner and I had walked through the double doors at one end of the long hall, and 100 feet away at the other end, in her Catholic school girl skirt, shirt dangling messily over her waist on one side, tennis shoes on her feet, she was smiling, engaged in a conversation with another student. My work partner had said something about the student, something sexual, possibly even a mere noise, and the exchange that followed between us was not abnormal. The student to whom he was attracted was cute, naturally tan skin, moon eyes when she smiled and always smiling, but my coworker’s attraction still discomforted me, although just momentarily. I have met so many people, only men in my life, that have a school girl fetish, and my old pal was one of them. My old pal and I had a gross history of our own; when I was a bright-eyed, cocky freshman in high school, and he a 19-year-old senior, we kissed. He drove an old Jaguar, and he lived uptown; I was enamored until I found out he had a girlfriend named Claire. Then, I thought him pathetic and strange for withholding the truth from me. I hadn’t seen him since I was 15 until ten years later when we both ended up working in the same, all-girl high school; after working together for a while, our history came up, and one of our mutually favorite students thought the situation hysterical, particularly that we couldn’t agree on his having a girlfriend at the time. To this present moment, he was my favorite friend with whom to work. We shared so many laughs, crude comments, and shrimp po-boys.

Not long after the hallway scene, I chaperoned a school trip to Mexico where we lived at an orphanage for ten days, working the farm, feeding the kids, doing laundry; the girls at the high school where I worked adored me, and the other two chaperones used that as an excuse to kick me out of the room with the fan. “The girls would love it if you slept in their room,” they said with whispered enthusiasm. So, I slept in there on a top bunk with my face as close to the open window as possible, imagining there was a cool breeze, and I had a dream about one of the students, a volleyball player, who slept on the bunk directly across from me. Smart, talented, passionate, she was one of my favorite students, so dreaming about her – in any way – was not strange. I dreamed that I was walking along the breezeway at the orphanage, and this student suddenly opened one of the doors I was passing and forced me into the room and on the ground. She straddled me and then started kissing me. I woke up the next morning and terrified, strained my eyes to the side to see if she was awake across the room. She wasn’t, but my slight panic followed me throughout the whole trip, especially two days later when she was dancing around the 110-degree room in a thong. Somehow, I thought she’d known about the dream, that she had somehow invaded my dream space, causing me to have this semi-erotic dream about her. I suppose that was what the me from the hallway scene would have called “gross,” too.

At one time, I adored and craved the innocence of those younger than me; I absorbed the experience I had working in a high school for one year – the untouchable energy, enthusiasm, ripeness. My own adolescent experience was pungent with aching, longing, and self-destruction; if anyone could relate to a troubled teen, I felt I could. But, I left that environment of self-knowledge, growth, and thrill to return to the university. There’s a different energy in academia, an energy of superiority, of uselessness and theories but no practice, of the obtaining of knowledge for oneself and only oneself. Generally, I have found that college students lack the desire of adolescents, because they think they have already found whatever they sought. I have never had semi-erotic dreams about any of my college students; their certainty about life dampens my common fervor. However, regardless of what I perceive as a lack of heart in academia, my friend and coworker had no deficiency of desire for the incoming students. Full of comments and desirous noises, her lust permeated the air before her bejeweled blue eyeglasses and dark hair mussed from her bike ride into work.

If any of us had actually taken these feelings or dreams as symptomatic enablers and justifications, then more than a few would have muttered stronger words than “You’re gross.” Something along the lines of “repulsive” and a lawsuit would have fit the bill.

Girl Crushes

Recently, I watched the entire series of The L Word. I watched all five-and-a-half seasons within a sickeningly short period of time: three weeks. Some would deem this obsessive behavior, but due to my own steep pride, I’m going to call it therapeutic. The first couple seasons were both entertaining and pretty well written, but the series untangled from there. However, once I had invested 24 hours of watching woman-centered relationships and sex within five or so days, I couldn’t stop, so I had to finish the series in what may be record time.

Watching The L Word wakened some feelings and thoughts that had grown dormant in me over the past four or five years. The close-knit strength of female friends, the sheer sexiness of women and how much more invigorating and lush a woman’s sexuality has always been to me than a man’s. I began yearning for my female friends. A, whose friendship has always been there, and who I have lost somewhere in the quick bustle of conventional adult life; L, who lives across the continent but who will always be like my own blood; and all those ladies from college. I also found myself enlivened by the curiosity of romantic relationships that never happened.

In high school, I had two lesbian disappointments, although for the second, I was the one who disappointed her, unquestionably. For the first, other than my regular female spit-swapping pals, J was a shy, awkward gal who worked in a coffee shop. She always wore tight-fitting knit caps, no matter the time of year, and slightly baggie pants with tight t-shirts. I met her, because she worked with a boy I was quite fond of and wanted to know better. As luck would have it, I ended up spending a lot of time with J while the boy worked in the kitchen at the coffee shop. We grew to be good friends; she was caring, attentive, and so very funny. When I let her know of my romantic feelings for her, she informed me that we couldn’t be together because of some situation with one of her female friends and one of my male friends. Whereas I felt that our friends’ problems shouldn’t dictate us, I also respected her love and respect for her friend and chose to free my romantic feelings and continue with our friendship.

Later in high school, when I had emerged from a difficult time of a school acquaintance’s suicide, sexual assault, and drugs, L came into my life. I don’t even recall where we met but we had a mutual friend, and we both frequented punk shows at some of the classic punk venues in New Orleans at the time - The Ark, State Palace, and Movie Pitchers. I knew L had such a crush on me and one that I shared, and this showered me with new possibilities. Particularly when one evening, she kissed me, not just an adolescent kiss that happens when kids just want to make out. This was a real kiss, kind yet passionate. I had the smallest twin bed pressed underneath a big window, and L was sleeping over for the first time on blankets on the floor. The lights were out, and suddenly, her hands were gripping my side. After being stunned since I’d never been in such a strangely innocent and sexual moment with another girl, I turned toward her. She climbed into bed with me, her hands lightly on my belly, and we kissed. Nothing more happened, save for sharing the moment, silent, still, and together. The next day felt awkward for me, and when I found out L was telling people I was her girlfriend, I must have panicked. I didn’t know what I wanted, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have really known what to do about it. I’m sure L sensed my confusion, and over time, the crush unraveled, and we were just two marvelously close friends.

In college, after dating a few guys, I developed a monstrous crush on a female classmate in my Writing Gender class. The class itself was exciting, and to accompany the gender-bending theories we were reading was my first girl crush in a long time. Strong, intelligent, and gorgeous, I couldn’t help but be drawn to M. Our circles started overlapping, and it came to the point when we had to discuss her situation, which was quite fragile. She had been seeing a woman who had never been with a woman before, and this woman needed stability – she needed M’s commitment. So, M gave it to her, albeit at the expense of anything between us. Shortly thereafter, I found B – strong, focused, and everything that my past failed relationships were not and everything that I wanted – and my heterosexual monogamy began again.

Communication as Weapon

A thin, blurred line stretches between open, honest, good-willed communication and igniting the wicks of explosives in the name of communication. The phrase “looking for a fight” unquestionably applies to the latter.

Why do people want to start fights? Discontentment, anger ultimately at oneself but more easily taken out on surroundings in flesh or form. It’s always easiest to have a culprit other than oneself. Taking the blame requires a strong sense of self, a grounded self esteem, and a knowledge and contentment of one’s identity – something that seems to become more skewed as the world becomes busier and more object-centered.

It is easiest to unload one’s naturally occurring darkness on loved ones – they are closest, they are most forgiving and understanding. Growing up, my dad would sometimes come in from a long day of hard work, and I remember thinking, “He’s looking for a fight.” Paired with my mother’s sensitivity to constant fights with my dad (initiated by either, but usually over something rather important), there usually was a fight. I question, was my father appeased? Did my mother fulfill her self-prophesied curse of stasis? Now, I look back and think of how difficult it must have been for them, pregnant so young, married so young, with no tools or guidance on how to tend to their relationship. When I was an adolescent and into my college-years, the next person “closest to home” who stuck her fingers as deep into a person’s tissue – this time, my own – as she could manage, was my sister. My sister tucked away her feelings and forfeited or maybe never really understood her right to free speech within our family until she was in her twenties. Going through a masters program in counseling helped her to precisely define her problem with clear communication and how important it was and is to relationships, and so was born her focus on being assertive. As she worked through many issues that has lain buried and covered in the thickest moldiest dirt, she would toss her messes at me, at our parents, in the name of “assertiveness.” Painful does not begin to describe what we all felt. But, would she have been able to move beyond the years of repressed emotions and thoughts without unloading? Probably not. Could she have participated in intensive therapy and worked through those issues there instead of throwing her inner hurt at those she loved? Probably so. But, loved ones forgive and can hopefully overcome their own pride to help. And happy emotions are only a small portion of many.

Then, there are those people who thrive off of conflict. One such person is a woman with whom I work. Currently recounting the details in my head reveal the laughable idiocy of both the situation and the woman whom I shall call “Ms. Me.” B was asked to participate in a faculty candidate lunch at work. At one of the lunches, this coworker of ours monopolized the conversation, as she is wont to do, and after about ten minutes of her monologue on a new yogurt shop on Magazine Street, B pulled out his phone to check his e-mail. After the lunch, the order of events occurred as follows: Ms. Me complained to the leader of the search about B’s unprofessionalism and sullenness throughout the whole lunch, and the search leader complained to B’s direct supervisor, who then talked to B. Two words for this affair: Bullshit Bureaucracy. Or maybe there are many words: failed communication, narcissism, disease, cannibalism, black magic. Strong, melodramatic words, yes. Where the communication becomes rather grimy and with what I began this post – igniting the wicks of explosives in the name of communication – was when Ms. Me approached me in my office the following day.

“I heard you were really upset about what happened yesterday,” she said.
“Yes, I was. There are a lot of things in this building that upset me at the moment. That was one of them,” I replied.
“Well, B was being totally unprofessional and sullen the whole lunch.” I felt the fingers of tension forcefully run up the back of my head, and started asking myself, “Why is she discussing this with me? This has nothing to do with me, except that B is my partner.”
And so what did I do? I participated in the conversation, saying things and giving answers in the attempt to get her to leave as quickly as possible, and then, I did what I always do: I psychoanalyzed her.
Unprofessional? Ah, I see what’s happening: projection. She’s talking about herself. What I really wanted to tell Ms. Me is how ridiculous she is and how I don’t care about what shoes she wears (her favorite topic) or where she shops. Many of us, albeit no one else in my place of work save a few, have lives outside of our jobs and shopping – fulfilling, creative, successful lives. And our jobs are just that: jobs (income). This is something I have to work on, because I become too emotionally involved, but I still know it, regardless of whether I practice it or not: a job is a job. But, I held my tongue and realized that Ms. Me was not being nice and attempting to smooth things over; she was really trying to scoot me into a compromised, uncomfortable position, yes, somewhat successfully, and delicately sticking needles into my skin poisoned with her own unhappiness and fear. That’s when my tension headache slipped away.

The strength and force of negativity overpopulates the world, and so many times, it doesn’t even take a verbal exchange to reveal the destruction. More often than not, I respond to such darkness by becoming angry or sad. Translating those feelings into positivity and health is difficult, taking much practice, but with the accompaniment of a happy sigh, it’s not impossible.

Songs

Recently, I played my first "real" show, opening for Kimya Dawson, whose claim to fame was the Juno soundtrack (but who has, however, been around for much longer). We played at the Big Top Art Gallery on Clio Street. I had delayed getting my father to tune the piano, so it was a bit out of tune, which is much more noticeable in the recording than I expected! Several of my darling friends and listeners have asked me about the song lyrics, so I decided to post them here along with the link to the recording. I have very little experience with microphones, so singing into one so that everyone could decipher the lyrics was challenging and not fully successful! Here are the recording and lyrics, and maybe one day, I'll get around to actually naming my songs.

Link to recording

Song One
Some say I’ll never return to me
Have we all started swimming without any gills?
Paint me a box (I like espresso brown)
But I’ll take what I can get

They feed us honeycakes
Until we slow and obstruct
Until there’s not much more than moth-eaten cloth
See-through, breathe through
Blow it away

Fish lips cut off
Blood flow sucked dry
I’ve started building my own
Some say it’ll soon be gray

They inject air into us
Until we slow and obstruct
Until there’s not much more than inflation
Explosion
Bits and pieces blown by the wind

Pearls in my eyes
Salted tongue
Until it’s numb
Contaminated water
Surrounds, smothers
Fingers still twitching
But a twitch is a movement
The reach sticks close to me
But the grip around my throat
Has already imprinted
Yet the skin glitter fades away

Goldfish return to flesh
Doctor batters the pearls
And flicks the tongue
Until it moves
Look closely
See the breath

Song Two
On a boat ride
Mirror images
Across the sea
Shimmering like glass
I reach out
But you’re already vapor

Settling into my baby crib
Milk trickles down the walls
With the rock-rock motion
Spider hands reaching for me
Eyes shut
I wish, I wish, I wish
I was vapor, too

Bottom-dwelling I am
Scraping my fingers through
Wet dirt and crystals
Bones of ancient fish litter the ocean floor
Gray, green, black
I breathe through my gills
Shapeless, faceless
A mass of skin
I know I can find it
I know I can find it
Something shiny, something breathless
Shapeless, faceless
I begin to run
I search for you
Hiding, unborn

I know I will see
Golden fins when you, when I emerge
I know I will see
My fingers on your hands
I know I can find it
I know I can find it

Encircling into my arms
One and the same
I reach up to feel the form of my face

Song Three
They have red streaks
Ornamenting their faces
Around them glowing heaps
Of regenerating, recalculating bones
“Tip-toe” is the order
But we feel the taint
Seeping up through our toes
“Hold your nose” is the order
“Don’t look down” is the order
This is when childhood builds up inside
A scream: “Just look at my wings!”

Born Creator

This is Earth
Fed and full
Stains the color of bricks
Melt into the dirt
Stains the color of ivory
Hard and rigid
“Quick and quiet” is the order
“Swallow down good” is the order
As much as we cling to the edge of this cliff,
Our chests are brushing the ground

Born Digging

Hopeful projection of the fateful path
Holds removable thorns, petals in our mouths
An ongoing rumble that we can call celebration
But we hunch, we whisper
Eyes wide and upturned
The blazing reflection of others’ chosen future

Born Creator

Song Four
My skeleton is made of feathers
Easily dispersed
As the fires rattle and roar
Everyone else has their cages set high, untouched

And there are galaxies
Swirling about us
Waiting black eyes absorb the stars
Like vacuums, we are

The walls collapse around us
Cages suspended in the air
And the wind starts raging
But we still suck in all the worlds of endless impossibilities

Knives forced by invisible hands
Red ribbons of life force unraveling
Left floating and flying
Never dead

Serpent’s tongue
Lion’s roar
Slapping away with eagle’s wings
Then cradling you, my feathers in your teeth
As you claw for freedom
This is not the humanity you thought it’d be
Because this should have been the end

Song Five
Mine
Yet yours
My star
My steps to the heavens
My dream

All my weary traveling
Beaten, bruised
I cry out for you
By one

Mine
Yet yours
Sing me to sleep
My star

More on Balance

"Bright days leave me feeling depressed and alone, exposed; when the clouds are so close you can touch, though, heaven seems very near. How do people live in places where the sky never scowls? The pretty and the picturesque are fine indeed, but give me the sublime anyday: I prefer a landscape–a skyscape!–that expresses the entire gamut of human moods, both surly and sweet."

A new take on the weather. The quicksands of blowing black patterns have swallowed me to where I let a gray day affect my 24-hour mood, I let one negative comment wring me dry, and I stew. Observing, reflecting, and meditating all snooze in the back seat when I grumble; I finally gather enough aggravated creative energy that pours out of me in songs, in essays, in short unfinished ideas. If only I could draw in and expel each and every day. Oh, Balance, you really are the key to success.