Here's another news article

Referencing Women and IT the lack of female participation reasons for this.
Article

Reading the previous post it has me thinking that perhaps it is relevant to realize that wanting things for your children also means influencing society to see your point of view..

In Memory

On this Memorial Day, I remember my Croney grandmothers, who in this photo from the 1940s are about the same age I am now. Read the whole post here.

The Queen!

I adore the Queen and I just can’t help it.
Perhaps this is due to the excellence of the Royal vocal cords. They produce a sound so pure that even phrases such as ‘Annus Horribulus’, that would sound smutty uttered by anyone else, issue from the Royal mouth untainted. Or, perhaps I hold Elizabeth Regina in such lofty esteem because I mistook her for a relative for the first six years of my life. I thought Aunt Liz to be the most lovely scion of my family tree and kept a picture of her in a cream straw hat set with beige trim. I knew no-one calm enough to team cream with beige and I was rather smitten with her restraint.
Why do I really adore Her Most Excellent Majesty? I have been affording the matter of my affection thought on the eve of her birthday weekend. First, it must be said, she has effortlessly done many odd things. These include introducing an original, if unpopular, breed of dog known as the Dorgi. (N.B. The Dorgi’s origins were possibly unplanned and unfortunate. Although there are eight known Dorgis in the world, the breed was reportedly started when one of ER’s corgis had its way with a dachshund named Pipkin that belonged to Princess Margaret). Further, she has owned a bull elephant named Jumbo AND she is a trained mechanic who worked on heavy machinery during World War II. What a gal.
Perhaps it is Liz’s shopping refinement that causes me to love her so. As a shallow person, I am easily impressed by those who acquire and, moreover, know how to acquire Lovely Things. And HM knows, perhaps better than any living being, how and where to shop. There are those satisfied many who join the queues at hypermarkets with 500 grams of beef in basket. Then there’s Liz who has, somehow, known all her life that if Spag Bol is on the menu, the ONLY place to acquire the requisite premium hamburger is Cobb of Knightsbridge. Similarly, she knows where to go to get the best spectacles ( Dispensing Opticians Dollond & Aitchison), stationery (Frank Smythson) and Bagpipes (Hardie R G & Co, naturally).
Naturally, Maj knows where to purchase a quality handbag. And perhaps at last the good craftspeople of Launer S & Co (London) Ltd begin to provide a clue as to the Great Lady’s appeal. Please, allow One to explain.
According to Buck House press guff, the most frequently asked question of Her Majesty by her subjects is: What DO You Keep In Your Handbag? The official answer always is: HM, who leaves all money matters to the Privy Purse, carries only spectacles for reading her speeches in the ever-present bag.
A lie! The Queen is a woman. Ipso facto she has crap in her handbag. Her consistent denial of female clutter underscores the mystery essential to her role.
Always present at the monarch’s elbow is this reminder that she is Woman enough to need a bag full of used bandaids, kleenex and lipsticks past their best-before date. Yet she is Monarch enough never to divulge these contents.
I most admire the lady who has had the same mints in her purse since her silver jubilee but has never publicly chewed on one. A woman who can refrain from fiddling about in her handbag for that long has earned the title Defender of the Faith and a place in my heart. I am down with the Maj.

Catholic Heartbreak

The Roman Catholic Church giveth, then taketh away. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis was all set to honor religious-education coordinator Kathy Itzin -- until these workers of God found out that she is a lesbian.

Now I know why I don't wear much jewelry

Because, to put it simply, shopping for jewelry is a more frustrating hell than trying to find a bathing suit that doesn't make me feel like a trainee blue whale.

I spent two hours searching the mall for a pendant for my grandmother. I saw many things I liked, but most of them were too "funky" looking for my Granny, oddly twisted hearts and some lovely middle-eastern influenced scrollwork and tassled necklaces that my Mum would adore. Plain, simple, understated pendants involving yellow gold and perhaps some pelasant-coloured semi-precious stones? Nope. Not on your nelly. I waded through every department store, two jeweller's and one costume jewelry store where the clerk tried to convince me that my grandmother would just love to own a chunky silver chain with starfish hanging off it. There are very few ways to politely say "no thank you, that's much too gaudy for her" and "can we keep it under $150 please?" and I ran out of tact somewhere between Nordstrom's and Robinson's May.

Eventually I returned to Ben Bridge [>] and went with a little filligree heart in white gold, even though I know she wears yellow gold. It was the only thing that remotely said Granny to me. I was also encouraged by it being half the approximate amount my Mum told me to expect to pay.

Then I managed to pull out the wrong card to pay for it, and didn't realise until it had already been rung up, so I had to get her to viod the first transaction and start over. The second card took an inexplicably long time to clear, thus wasting an additional 15 minutes or so.

By this point I was ready for a nap, my eyes were aching from staring at so many sparkly things under bright lights, trying to search for the invisible understated pieces amongst the carbuncles, and I was well overdue for a boost to my blood sugar. I got straight on the freeway and headed home. Matt already had dinner ready, bless him.

I pulled out the package to show Matt what I'd wasted two hours looking for, opened the cardboard gift box, then the jewelery box...and proudly displayed to him an empty cream velvet interior.

NYAAAAAARGGGH!

That's right, I walked out of there with a gift box. But no pendant.

Cross posted at Painfully Fluffy [>] .

The Return of the Pig

I can't help but think that perhaps the glorification of chauvinism, violence, and sex is a backlash against the de facto political correctness that has permeated the public conscience. It is a no-win situation for feminists precisely because of political correctness. Being PC is one of the pillars of feminism. Neo-chauvinism hides behind this by saying that its very existence is multiculturalism and irony rolled into one. And feminists dare not attack it for fear of undermining their own pillar.

The core of the matter, though, is not chauvinism versus feminism but the clash of beliefs. How is one able to allow the existence of ideologies that are in direct opposition to one's own? The easy way out is to not care about what anyone else does--but that route, unfortunately, leads to anarchy. Attempting to instill everyone with respect for their fellow human being is going to be pointless if a particular group's ideology disregards respect for personal gain.

This is a difficult topic because it is easy to get trapped in circular reasoning. Humans are still animals no matter how "above it" we think we are. It is admirable that we have gotten this far, but even in the most altruistic, there is a small part that is completely instinctual and involved in self-pleasure.

Whatever the case, no one thinks the same way. People who like violent rap, laddie mags, and denigrating others have no right to call others who have different tastes elitists. The media may make it seem like this is mainstream, but exactly how many people want to attend rowdy parties 24/7? Probably no more than the segment of the population who even has a preference for classical music. Maxim connoisseurs are just as elite and obnoxious as beatnik poets.

Cross-posted at Syaffolee.

When a rose is so much more than a rose.

Self-described “nerd” and Blog Sister Betsy Devine has fun with the rose and all its scientific glories. Her piece got me thinking about the rich mythic history of that ancient pentacled flower. And so I had my own kind of fun.

A Mother's Day Rant

More meming with links to Riane Eisler and Elaine Morgan and quotes on why women need to act/up before age blindsides us.

The first Mother's Day was a call for peace.

From Sojourners website:

Did you know that Mother's Day was suggested as a day of peace in the United States by Julia Ward Howe who protested the carnage of war in her bold proclamation of 1870? Decades later in 1907, the first Mother's Day observance was held at a church service honoring the memory of Anna Reese Jarvis in Grafton, West Virginia. Jarvis, an Appalachian homemaker, organized women during the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.

Mother's Day Proclamation
-- Julia Ward Howe, 1870

Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says "Disarm, disarm! The Sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

International No Diet Day

Today is International No Diet Day. The first INDD was in 1992 after Mary Evans Young saw a television show on which women were having their stomachs stapled. One woman had split the staples and was in for her third operation. And then there was a young girl of 15 who committed suicide because 'she couldn't cope with being fat.' She was size 12. Ms. Young got angry. She came up with the idea for INDD.
The stories that Ms Young heard are like bookends. There are the fat people trying to get thin at any cost and the not really fat people dieing because they are so afraid. On my blog today I write about fat lives and the negative impact of dieting. I don’t know as much about eating disorders. I do know young women (and increasingly young men) die from them.
I was at a hearing to create a task force on childhood obesity in San Francisco recently. I heard a therapist say that she had one client who was close to 500 pounds when she hospitalized but the client had all the signs of malnutrition because she’d been starving herself in an attempt to lose weight. And the therapist had another client who was hospitalized at under 100 pounds but she had been eating over 5000 calories a day. And then throwing it all it up.
INDD is not about going out and having pizza and a banana split. It’s about understanding the cost of fat-phobia. It’s about understanding that there’s a difference between having a healthy relationship with food and monitoring your appetite in a hyper-vigilant manner.
So I am wishing you all a healthy AND pleasurable day with your body and your appetite.

Further illumination on the demon thing.

I don't want to take up space here, but I've posted a poem that sort of wrote itself after doing some intuitive work with my shamanic therapist -- years, years ago, during my more (ahem) sexually active era. It's based on one of my "vision quests" and was published in an anthology called Which Lilith: Feminist Writers Recreate the World's First Woman, so it can't be all that bad. I share it to illustrate the benefits of dancing with my demons in the way that I do. Lilith is an archetype that loomed large in my therapeutic work, and if you're at all interested in why, you can read Frank Paynter's old interview with me.

Is an Exorcism in Order?

I posted this in a comment over on Elaine's place, but am posting here as well, in a post since I can't get the darn comments to work.

I take issue with what Elaine says about Laurie, Meegan and Chris, and the way with which she wields shamanism and deamons as some metaphorically exciting healing dance that is by no stretch of the imagination new age.

Here's my comment:

Elaine, in this one paragraph, you make several damning assumptions. I think you'd be well advise to re-read:

"When I read what webloggers at slumberland. and notsosimple and even rageboy write about their struggles to find a way to live lives that feel satisfying and connected as well as challenging and stimulating, I want to tell them that there are other ways – ways that make the journey of self-discovery a real adventuresome and creative trip. And you don’t need drugs to do it."

You're assuming a whole hell of a lot:

1) that their lives don't feel satisfying or connected.
2) that their lives don't feel stimulating
3) that they are on some sort of magnificent journey.
4) that their particular journeys thus far are neither adventurous or creative
5) that you know what an adventurous and creative trip is
6) that they are on drugs

I think the real issues there for you have something to do with their relative youth and popularity.

In addition, in this post you imply that most new agers believe in God or some sort of spirit source, and that you're not a new ager because you don't believe in God. Those attracted to the fanatical fringes of new ageism (I would argue that most of it is fanatical) aren't there looking for God. They are there looking for them "selves" so to speak because they never developed one in the first place. Not their fault. But a magnet for the disordered.

Like I always say:

The people on meds are on them because the people who should be aren't.

AND, of course,

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a narcissist.

Dancing with your demons.

Back during the old-time 70s feminist days, there was a lot being written about women and depression, women and repressed anger (depression being anger turned inward). Lots of us opted to let our anger out – at men, at the “establishment” etc. etc. It didn’t change anything much, and it didn’t help us to understand what we really wanted and how to get it.

Being a poet, I tended to have an outlet for my anger, and I was lucky to cross paths with another poet who also is a therapist who works in a shamanic tradition – which means that he truly understands the power of personal metaphor and myth – of creating art and artifacts that seem to “magically” dissolve the blinders that the rational, literal, logical mind uses to keep out dangerous awarenesses. Being a word-person, I could talk and write reams of reasonably intelligent analyses of what was bothering me, how my past experiences contributed to my current discomfort. I could -- and did -- read all kinds of books that purported to explain the causes of my dysfunctions. But blaming the past and analyzing the present only takes you so far toward ridding yourself of those old paralyzing demons. Knowing that you want to change things about your life and actually making the changes are two very different things.

At first glance, shamanic therapy smacks too much of new age nonsense. For some, like me, who don’t believe in any personal Great Spirit, it might seem too traditionally spiritual. But I approached the whole experience as ritual theater, as symbolic expression, as an end-run around my rational, controlling brain – and, when you come right down to it, as damned good psychology. You don’t have to believe in a god or a soul or an afterlife; you just have to acknowledge that there is some part of your consciousness, your understanding, that keeps eluding you. We dream without control at night and sometimes in our daydreams. Shamanic therapy takes us into our dreamtime, where the complex metaphors and symbols of our conscious lives hide waiting to take forms that hold truths too powerful or painful for our literal minds to willingly embrace.

From: http://www.shamanism.org

Over tens of thousands of years, our ancient ancestors all over the world discovered how to maximize human abilities of mind and spirit for healing and problem-solving. The remarkable system of methods they developed is today known as "shamanism," a term that comes from a Siberian tribal word for its practitioners: "shaman" (pronounced SHAH-mahn). Shamans are a type of medicine man or woman especially distinguished by the use of journeys to hidden worlds otherwise mainly known through myth, dream, and near-death experiences.

One of the most enlightening experiences I had was taking a workshop with Eligio Stephen Gallegos, whose book Personal Totem Pole: Animal Imagery the Chakras and Psychotherapy explains the process. And that’s what we did – we went on guided imagery “vision quests” in search of our animal totems – visual metaphors for parts of ourselves that we needed to communicate with better. What my Osprey told me, what my miniature Dragon showed me, made more sense and gave me more sense of direction than hours of talk (or silence) in a traditional therapist’s office. So, when I blog about meeting a Skunk, it’s not just an attempt at cute story telling. There is something stirring in me that I need to pay attention to.

Expressive arts therapy works the same way, helping us to access our right brain smarts – the ones that are NOT linear and literal and rational, the ones that see right through those left-brain blinders.

When I read what webloggers at slumberland. and notsosimple and even rageboy write about their struggles to find a way to live lives that feel satisfying and connected as well as challenging and stimulating, I want to tell them that there are other ways – ways that make the journey of self-discovery [added after the fact for clarification] an even greater [delete 'a real'] adventuresome and creative trip. And you don’t [added after the fact for clarification] even need drugs to do it [added after the fact for clarifiction] the way that shamans use peyote other other psychedelic drugs to expand their consciousnesses so that they could take those enlightening inner journey trips.

But first you have to be willing to let your demons take form and meet you face to face in dreamtime. And, if you give them a chance, they'll even learn to dance with you.



Some other relevant info of interest on the web:

http://www.tranceform.org/ShamanicCure.html

http://www.ieata.org/home.htm

http://www.iue.edu/Departments/Social_Work/s300.htm

http://www.expressivetherapy.com/htmls/directory.html

(double posted)