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Sent to you by moya via Google Reader:
1. nadia writes a much needed (to me) post on the iconoclast. oh, is that what you call it…or call me…i do feel like i wear 'controversy all over my body' when i am in social groups. im not trying to do so. but practicing radical honesty. seems to have etched itself onto my very skin.
Everyone in the community agrees except her. Everyone pledges allegiance and she doesn't. She doesn't go along with it. Society isolates the iconoclast. But tries to play a mind game with her, saying she is the one who isolates them. All she has to do is speak one word to make everyone in the vicinity uncomfortable. No one is ready for the repercussions of what she has said.
She doesn't even have to speak. Just being her. Looking that way. She wears controversy all over her body, everyone can see. Unable to think through the un-same-ness, normal people's minds just collapse. They don't want her around…
2. derrick jensen in his latest essay for orion quotes his friend…
As my artist and writer friend Stephanie McMillan wrote in her essay "Artists: Raise Your Weapons": "If we lived in a time of peace and harmony, then creating escapist, serotonin-boosting hits of mild amusement wouldn't be a crime. If all was well, such art might enhance our happy existence. There's nothing wrong with pleasure or decorative art. But in times like these, for an artist not to devote her/his talents and energies to creating cultural weapons of resistance is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable."
as i am finishing up the outlaw midwives zine, i needed to read this quote. i have dedicated the month of july to 'getting my shit done'. which basically means not over indulging in 'escapist, serotonin-boosting hits of mild amusement'. or as i say 'there is only so much i can take of the sparkly glittery parties. i have discovered, re-discovered, that i would honestly rather be sitting on the floor with glue, tape, pen, paper, scissors 'creating cultural weapons of resistance' than to performing witty with people whose names i barely remember the next morning.
in the meantime, go to thaura zine distro and order a copy of aaminah's new zine 'jewels for survival'. support cultures of resistance in this day and age.
3. more and more as i re-read lex's dissertation, i am struck by the world genocide. it seems to be the word du jour for me. and i connect it with the work that outlaw midwives do.
i know that a lot of people think that midwifery lives in this airy fairy hippie other world, apolitical, and removed from the struggles of politics, but that has never been how i perceived midwifery work. perhaps because i first began studying midwifery in virginia before it midwifery was legal, so every midwife i knew was an outlaw. and those women looked fierce, spoke emotionally honest, and lived edgy beautiful lives.
but now, i see it as an intervention of genocide. a refusal to submit to a culture that tells us daily that we are not meant to survive. a hands on means of saying over and over again, yes to life, and no to a culture that is eating itself –and everything else on this planet–alive.
4. i found this blog: awakening the buddha (i think through aaminah, but honestly im not sure) and i love it. as a non-buddhist who has learned so so so much from the wisdom of buddhism, this blog brings so many good words.
also, i am reading jack kornfield's the wise heart about buddhist psychology. such a good thick book.
5. right now i am exhausted, haven't slept enough this week, and waiting for a veggie panini, hoping the starch helps me to sleep. insomnia is a bitch sometimes. ;)
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