Wandering Stars

Tonight before bedtime, my 10 and 6 year old daughters were sharing secret giggles and conversation in my eldest's bedroom. There was a secret brewing, something clandestine and powerful.

In her towel, naked from washing up, L., the eldest, says: "Mom, tonight P. told me something strange."

Busy, and wishing they would just get ready for bed after a long time of playing and procrastinating, I say "Go get dressed for bed and then tell me," without even looking at her. No mom points for me.

Dutifully she runs upstairs, youngest running behind. They talk some more and I wait.

Full of the power of announcement, they descend the stairs while L. finds a place to sit by me. L. says, "Mom, tonight P. told me something strange. She said.... She said I was starting to get breasts." They both look at me expectantly, I smile and say nothing for a second.

In that second, universes explode. Stars collide, shattering and bending matter beyond mere human comprehension. Breath is held. Eyes blink, stop, stare ahead. Look. Watch. Hope.

P. denies seeing anything. L. denies developing. Right there I drop the ball and ignore the elephant in the room: Do you want to develop breasts? I wonder what it will be like? Are you nervous?

This leads to a conversation about girls we know who have already started these changes, and about how every girl starts at a different time, how we are individuals and that's interesting. We all agree, without any mention at all of the giant elephant.

It is bed time, after all.

Right before bed, I get a giant hug from L., and I am feeling her girl body full of love, enjoying this moment that starts the transition, the wonder of a future imagined and full. I love her up, smell her, be her mom. It is my moment, and I am full of my own feelings. I start to forgive myself.

Then youngest runs over and hugs L. from behind, making her squish into me hard so I have to rebalance. It's noisy and rough and full of laughter. P. backs off momentarily and I say "P, please stop hugging L. right now." She laughs even harder, and runs into L. again, hugging us both even harder. She is balanced, holding on tight, enjoying the ruckus. L. is yelling in my ear, laughing, and I am Upset. Mad at this moment of loss, mad that I ignored the elephant in the room, mad at myself for being both of my girls and wanting only to be Mom. There is loss and it is small and hard and painful. "P!" I yell. "Stop hugging L. while she is hugging me!"

Negative Mom points.

She withdraws, quiet, head hanging. I kiss L., and get kisses while P stands alone. L. happily runs off to bed. P. starts crying. "It's the yelling," she quietly sobs. "I hate the yelling."

We are both now ignoring the elephant in the room. In one swoop, I hug her and pick her up, tell her I am sorry, and admit to acting rashly and apologize. I explain that it is hard for me to balance, that I was only hugging L., that I asked her once to stop and even after she heard me she did it again, and that I was angry. We go to her room for bedtime, and she is sullen, there is no way to undo the yelling. She looks at me, we exchange nighttime chat, and then we're quiet. She turns away from me. I lay down for a couple of minutes and see if I can step into that damage or if it is too late this time. Sleep offers convenient silence.

I was angry.

Elephants, rampaging.

My daughters make room for permanent teeth and share their bodies' secrets.

I am lucky to see the stars as they explode around me, gaining mass through distance and time.

Winter, Seeds and Homes

Today marks three weeks since my mother died. The evening of the funeral was tense and sad, and ended with a dramatic family blowout. We all survived that to endure a night full of major thunderstorms with golf ball-sized hail and tornadoes in the next county as a massive cold front moved in. 40 degrees colder, the next morning we left for home, driving into snow.

Yesterday was a big, strange, sad day for me. I found my own deep sadness creeping up on me every time I tried to think or work. My inability to quietly and easily meet other people's real needs was maddening and confusing. I was not able to partition them off until later; they were there, now, and yet I still had to parent and make dinner, still had to somehow talk politely to my children while they yelled at each other all. day. long.

In bed, late, alone, I talked to my mom. I told her all my little sadnesses. I apologized for things I wasn't really responsible for. I cried when my hands remembered carefully lifting her body as I picked her up to help her onto the toilet. I cried when I still smelled her skin.

I wear her winter coat.

This morning I cried, grieving the kind of family affection I didn't know was possible until I created it with Chris. I didn't know, and I wished I could have known. An idealized fantasy of involved grandparents, still physically able to baby sit and take children on trips to the theater, or help build a shed. I cried for all the things my children missed, and that I won't be able to give them.

So I gave in, and went outside to share my grief with the trees and snow. I found seeds and homes:  the things we all become and make, together.

New Year's Wishes

With the new year, a new post. I've been holding off on writing a new year's message for many reasons, not the least of which is because this blog's been on the back burner for so long. Besides the lethargy of posting history, though, I haven't really been feeling the love and hope and optimism I see people around me struggling to maintain and enjoy. But the ice is melting, even as the snow blows and falls. I am remembering how to write and speak from my heart; I am enjoying sitting at the table with my honey at night, thinking and talking without purpose or deadline. I am slowing down, hearing the hearts of my children through rage and anger and frustration, holding the door open for them while they storm through the wall, senseless. I am trying.

For all of my people out there, may 2012 be the year your heart opens wide and your arms wider.
May all the food you eat fill you and make you grow.
May all the money you exchange in the world for services and needs and warmth leave room in your pockets for cold hands or spare change.
May we all learn to listen better, love critically, and fight harder.
May everything you touch bring you joy.
May all your suffering, which I know is a lot right now, lighten your load even as it fills to overflowing.
May all your risks embolden you, and reward you with the pleasure of true intimacy.
The world is sacred, and we are all divine. Dance with me, and if you're lucky, we'll sing.

What will feed the hungry frac sand mines?

So here's the thought that's keeping me awake right now:

With all the new and proposed frac sand mines and processing plants planned in northwest Wisconsin, will the next step be a new nuclear power plant to feed this insatiable beast? This industry sucks a lot of energy to get oil out of the ground - will this be our next fight?

Nothing is planned, and I'll do whatever is in front of me when it's there, but this is an important piece of the continuing, desperate End of Empire.

Cesium is not Iodine, and it's still not safe to eat

This is a decent informative article from NaturalNews.com about radioactive cesium vs. iodine. While the tone is a little alarmist, the information is accurate.

When you hear about "radiation levels" at Fukushima, you're mostly hearing only about radioactive iodine, which decays much, much faster (i.e., days rather than years) than all the other radioactive isotopes one could measure there today. Cesium takes 30 years to decay by half. A tiny bit of radioactive cesium eaten in the body of a contaminated fish caught from the Pacific Ocean - or seaweed grown there - is infinitely more dangerous to you than a particle floating around the atmosphere.  

An illustrative example, from the link:

"A speck of radioactive dust that's one meter away from you, for example, is twice as dangerous as that same speck four meters away. But if you eat that radioactive speck (because it's part of a fishyou're consuming, for example), then suddenly it'sinside your body. So now it might only be a millimeter away from your internal tissues, meaning you've decreased the distance between you and the radiation source byone thousand times. Because if the law of the inverse square of the distance, you have now magnified the radiation intensity byone million times(because one million is the square of one thousand)."

This is the real danger of cesium and other radioactive isotopes - once you eat them, they emit radiation from inside your body, in your muscle tissue or bones or heart or wherever. 

"[Y]ou quickly become a walking radioactive dirty bombfrom the inside."

Rare Earth Minerals, Murder by Technology

The continuing tidal wave of ripping stuff out of the earth keeps on rolling. This time, under the Pacific Ocean. Rare earth minerals, tons of them, have been "discovered" by Japanese "explorers". 

"Rare earth metals have emerged as one of the most sought after resources in [the] commodities boom. Minerals present in the mud include gadolinium, lutetium, terbium and dysprosium." Some of these are used in the manufacture of those eco-friendly hybrid cars. Here is a handy image with notes about which minerals are used in the Prius, created by Lee Allison, state geologist and Director of the Arizona Geological Survey. Gadolinium is used in x-ray systems, CDs, and nuclear medicine.

The "commodities boom." Does that include frac sand? The excitement and anticipation of profits by scooping tons of mud off the ocean floor makes me sick. To what lengths will we continue our pillaging of the very body that bears us and makes us human? We are all complicit, here in the privileged West. I am sick to death of new solutions and technologies that are really assassination attempts. While we consume the death of the oceans and the forests and the ecological systems that continue to get in the way of our lifestyles, we lose more and more of our humanity.

It all seems part of the end of Empire and it's a long way down yet.

Love, Critically

Recently I was having a little vacation with old friends, some of whom had never met my partner and husband, C. When asked to describe him I was kind of dumbfounded; we've been together for almost twenty years, where the heck do I begin? I tried by saying he's kind of tall, a little geeky, interesting... and then it just all seemed inadequate. That conversation mercifully didn't go anywhere, but it left me feeling kind of dumb.

What I meant to say was this:
That C. has heart. That everything he does is important, and with his whole self. That he is funny and attentive and loving and tolerant and flexible when I need him to be, inflexible when it's important. That he is an amazing parent, and I love how he loves me. His heart is as big as our world needs right now, and I'm glad I share it with him. He's persuasive when he wants to be, and a great person to have around when you're trying to reframe something important. He lets you remember the things that are essential and sacred, including my own peace and spiritual connection. He's not intimidated or afraid of gay or anything else. Thank god. That he's a radical thinker, a devoted partner, and an inspiring lover. That I am a better person in his shadow, and that he casts no shadow under my Sun. We are, as someone said long ago, a matching pair. I'll never be bored.

That should cover it.

1000 Acres

According to a reliable source, there are plans for 140 frac sand mines in northwest Wisconsin right now, with some as large as 1000 acres.


1,000 acres.


These are plans to strip the land of its hills full of sand, add chemicals and water, and leave the wreckage of our water and air to all of us who have to live here, with untold and unchecked profit for a few. I am astonished and very, very pissed.  A banker wrote in an open letter recently: "Eventually the sand mine will return to farmland, and, 50 years from now, no one will remember that there had once been a hill where the flat, fertile farm now lies." It's all nostalgia to him; progress is the real value, and all of us emotional environmentalists are out to harm the community with our misplaced and unpatriotic outrage.


So what do we care about those unprofitable hills anyway? We're just a bunch of emotional wackos who don't want to buck up and provide the country with this valuable and necessary resource. 


Unless of course, we are just people who have educated ourselves about frac sand, mining, and processing plants and the permanent divisions they create in community and safety, and sincerely want to protect our children and all our descendants from this latest end-of-empire devastation. Not any of us stand to make any money from frac sand and all it entails, and none of us think any profit should be made off of the suffering of others. 


Duh.


This is a good time to remind you check the Hay River Frac Watch for updates.

Vaccines, another look

There are a lot of articles and opinion pieces out there questioning the safety of vaccinations. Most of them go right for the aborted fetus/genetically modified/population control conspiracy stuff right at the get go. But this article rocks my world by managing to avoid all conspiracy theories and focus on the science. The author doesn't provide alternatives to vaccination, but the thorough description and analogy of what vaccines do in the body to the immune system is really good. It's a bit long, but worth the read - especially if you've never considered the whole spectrum of vaccination's effects in the body.

Vaccines as "Cluster Bombs"

The Cost of Information

Tonight the owner of the sale and lease of land being negotiated with the mining corporation will be hosting an informational meeting to discuss local ramifications and who knows what else. Isn't it interesting that the owner - not the mining company - is being so helpful to the corporation? What a sweet gesture of compliance and sharing she has shown to the Company. What a helper! What a community member!

I may be pissed, but it's true; the mining companies don't need to do PR when the locals will take - and generate - all the heat for them.

In 5 years, when the landowner has been screwed by they mining company (a very common thing, evidently), I wonder what kind of regrets won't be discussed in an informational meeting. When the wells dry up, and the air is filled with carcinogenic particulate that gives my children and the children attending school in town asthma and increased risk for lung cancer, what kind of info meeting will she be hosting? When the trucks have wrecked the county roads and cracked the foundations of old farmhouses and killed dogs and cats and many other mammals haplessly crossing roads that used to be deserted, what kind of info meeting will we attend then? When the relatively toxic farming practices used to monocrop GM corn and soy are exchanged for hundreds of known carcinogens leaching into the groundwater after the sand processing plant is finished, and we are all drinking unknown and untested chemicals in our water, what kind of info meeting will be hosted then? And when all the farming families and folks I know don't move because we can't afford to, and we have to work outside in a toxic stew to grow our food, what kind of info meeting will I be attending?

The cost of civilization and colonization is not information. It is destruction and risk and suffering. Only human-scale community will endure because only we can ask the questions that remind everyone else of our shared humanity and the connections to our individual webs of life and living. I'm rooting for life, but in the mean time I'm fighting as best I can against destruction.