First we need to understand how change occurs in our human history, how it manifests and how it becomes integrated into our psyches – how it becomes ingrained in our group soul. How did gardens change from food into decoration? How did healers turn into doctors and get a sex change in the process? How did the mid twenties become extended childhood and how did we change the meaning of child bearing age? How did a tan become enviable, while fat became sloth and a disease?
Some of what seems new is actually ancient, for example in Greece, soft flesh was considered womanly, so it was considered manly to be slim, muscular and athletic. A fat man was a womanly man, thus softness and fatness became associated with the abject, the lowly and the despised. So the question is not why is fat now despised, but when did it become necessary for women to reject their own bodies? And why?
And while people discuss teenage pregnancy as if it is a modern scourge, a century ago, women routinely began having their children at equivalent ages. When did the age a girl became a mother become such a moral issue?
We need to realize that some of the norms we are trying to change may in fact hearken back to sources we are unaware of like the prejudices of ancient Greece or even ecological necessities of a wandering tribe with a high mortality rate.
We need, it seems, to have not only a larger view of change but a longer view as well. We need to understand the mythic level of some of the changes we are proposing as well as ones we are resisting.
And we also need to grasp that even as we work hard to bring about change, we may actually resist the same change in our every day lives.
I roll my eyes with everyone else when the right blames feminists for somehow making it harder on women to have children and stay home to raise them. But how many of us decided to not have children because it was too hard or had children and find ourselves facing seemingly constant pressure to choose between their needs and our own. The real issue is why is it so hard to raise children in this culture?
I know of so many women, feminist to the core, waiting for mister right to come along. I myself keep falling madly in love with any man who will carry my heavy bags, or fix items in my home. And I have met more than a few men who although working with incredibly talented women all day still find it surprising and a little unnerving when a woman he is dating earns more than he does. Why is it so hard to break habits born out of mores none of us actively embrace?
No, we are not collectively wishing for a return to the fifties, what we are doing is being human and wrestling at a personal level to integrate a cultural change that happened on our watch. And the right, to their credit, is trying to capitalize on that discomfort to turn back the clocks.
Because the changes we seem to be still fighting for have happened at the political level, but they are not yet fully integrated at the personal and at the mythic levels. And it is at those levels that the right is making in-roads and we are starting to lose ground. They are using mythic language to invoke the symbols and images of our unconscious fear, apprehension and resistance to cultural change. And we are affected by these symbols even as they outwardly appall us. We are like deer in the headlights responding to these mythic messages.
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Wish I could be there. Very well spoken.
Katrina,
I wish you all the blessings and power you need on your journey. Thank you for these words. It is good to remember that returning to work (and thus returning to grace) bring a chance for us all to rest and have joy.
Wishing you joy in the Work.
David
Dear Katrina- Thorn reposted your blog and happy am I. Your passion, always so immense, comes blowing out in these words. So akin to my own heart and soul that it makes me have a bittersweet smile.
The Storm is only now coming to the edges of our universe and yet it will sweep and consume all that is. In the end, our beautiful universe will be so much...more? Different? Complete? Who knows?
All I do know is my soul came here to witness and be part in this period. I cannot shrink from the work. I am here with you, fae sister!
Thought-provoking piece, Katrina. Thanks.
I don't know what to call myself either. In Pagandom, I've taken to referring to myself as a Witch at Large. In the interfaith world where I'm active, I call myself a Pagan. Sometimes I call myself an uppity woman or a Second Wave Feminist. I've never really thought to publicly identify myself by my sexuality, het woman, which is very "white bread" and old-fashioned. Not only het, but serially monogamous for the most part. It seems almost a liability these days to say you're het, but I am proudly and happily so. I tend towards intellectualism but only have a BA, which doesn't carry much weight, at least in public and professional worlds, no matter how much you've studied, trained, and can articulate, even teach.
My biological heritage is Irish, Dutch, French Huguenot, Euro-mongrel. My social heritage is Roman Catholic on one side and conservative Methodist, temperance-crusading, women's rights and education on the other, with distinct East Coast sensibilities, now mellowed by more than half a century living on the Left Coast. My maternal political heritage is conservative Republican (altho what my relatives might think of current trends in the GOP I cannot imagine, since they did have brains and they did think and they did have a social conscience), yet I am much farther left in my outlook than any elected official I know. My paternal political heritage is blue collar Democratic, except that my dad broke with his family on politics and allied with my mother's family's conservatism.
I'm a former hippie, a home-birth advocate, a home death and green burial advocate, an opponent of capital punishment and resorting to warfare to resolve humankind's differences. I support the right to conscious self-deliverance. I rejoice in any and all consensual expressions of love and eros. I'm a lover and a mom.
I have never missed voting in an election and I disrespect those who don't avail themselves of this hard-won right. (I have ancestors who fought the Brits in the American Revolution.) I support workers' rights. I recognize our interdependence on this planet, so could be called a greenie. I'm a committed environmentalist in my day-to-day life (in terms of eating locally grown food, expanding public transit, recycling, preserving open space and wildlife, opposing exploitation of natural resources [strip mining, oil-drilling, nuclear facilities, agribusiness, monocultures, clear-cutting timber, overuse of pesticides, genetic modification, etc.]) I want to make the city streets "safe for dancing," as my old friend Tony Serra said when he ran for mayor of SF on the Platypus Party ticket.
Well, you got me going there, my friend. Thought-provoking read, as I said. ;-)
xo,
Macha
Lovely azaleas!
[cough][gag][snort][sneeze]
Just lovely...
I know what you mean.
I feel you. There is too much bs- particularly when people decide that their temperament is tantamount to truthful and ignore everyone else.
I get irked by immature extroverts or closet introverts who ignore you REPEATEDLY and then pretend you're out of line for being upset by the time they can't pretend you didn't say anything anymore. I find that the same people will ignore you if you blow up right away, too, and that it's because they just don't think that honoring what you value is important to maintaining a relationship, or even worse: that you don't know what you value at all and that it's all a mind game for their pleasure or annoyance. Then they call you passive-aggressive, aggressive, moody, touchy and temperamental. I call them "not listening".