My Daughter Reminds Me That Women Are People, Too

My daughter, Miela, being not quite three years old, does not always get her words right. One place this shows up a lot is in her use of pronouns, in particular with regards to gender.

Most of the time, Miela chooses to use "she" instead of "he," even in places where that's clearly incorrect, like in reference to her brother (who will quickly let her know she is wrong).

That doesn't seem that unusual, given her age, and since she is a girl, she probably has heard she more than he.

But where it gets interesting for me, is when I notice my own unconscious tendencies to correct her.

Certain people or animals or characters are clearly supposed to be he and him, not she and her. Her brother, her dad, my mother's dog, the prince in Cinderella, Kai-lan's wise Grandpa YeYe. I think it's pretty safe to assume all of these are appropriately referred to as "he." So Miela may refer to one of them as her, but I will refer to them as him.

But a plastic elephant? A fuzzy orange monster? An unfamiliar dog across the street? Why the hell do I find myself wanting to refer to these as him? Even after she's just said she about the elephant, sometimes it still feels hard to go along with her choice and stick with she.

This little thing says so much about my ingrained view of the world, and I know I'm not alone in it.

For something to be female, it has to be "special" somehow. It has to be pink, or have a bow or eyelashes. Look at the generic symbols on public restrooms. The men's room shows a person. The women's room shows a person wearing a skirt.

(And let me just put an aside in here that I'm not even going to attempt to make a specific comment about the whole two gender view of the world. I know this doesn't work for a lot of people, and I support that view, and it's related to what I'm talking about, but I don't have clear enough thoughts on that to really say anything, nor do I really feel qualified.)

As has often been noted, it's built into language. It's hard to escape.

I have a very clear memory of being in 4th grade Spanish class and learning the word for boys is "niños" and girls is "niñas" but children, or rather boys and girls together, is "niños." The girls in the class argued about this with the teacher at length. She was sympathetic, but emphasized it was just the way it was. The boys mostly smirked and chuckled.

I remember thinking that there was an entire language where if boys are around, suddenly I don't count.

I'm not trying to pick on Spanish, there are lots of examples in lots of languages. My point is just that we're pretty surrounded by this worldview: males are the norm, females are different.

So here's a genuinely radical idea: stop assuming everything and everyone is male. Male is not normal. Neither is female. We're all basically just people. Or animals. Or cartoon characters or whatever. And actually, none of us are "normal."

And I am completely serious in calling this radical. I believe all big change starts small. And shifting cultural views is freaking ginormous. Be a part of it.

Our First Family Road Trip!

We just got back home yesterday from our first road trip as a family. In other words, this was the first time my husband and I, as well as our two kids, took an extended trip together, that involved a fair amount of driving. My husband and I finally decided it was time to try it.

See, he and I love road trips and driving. LOVE THEM. We once put most of our stuff in storage and lived mostly out of our van for about 5 months. We drove all over about half the country. It was awesome.

So this is something we've been dying to share with our kids, but, well, we weren't sure we were actually up for doing such a thing with our kids.

Our kids are awesome, but they can also be a bit much. Our son, Jago, age 6, is without a doubt a Spirited Child and has super high energy. His sister Miela, almost 3, is not as spirited as her brother but still pretty darn spunky.

But we finally felt like we were at a place with both kids where they could be ok in the car for longer distances. And they do well enough most of the time with following directions about behavior in public. And most of all, we felt like we could do these things and have more fun times than stressful times.

So we planned out a trip around Central and West Texas, which never took us terribly far from our home in Austin, but gave us a wide variety of stuff to see and do, as well as took us into the desert a little bit, something Jago had been expressing interest in.

We intended to do mostly camping with a couple nights at a hotel, but last minute circumstances caused us to change that slightly, as tends to happen on a road trip.

We planned to never drive more than about 4 hours in a day, and most days were less, and never more than about an hour and a half at a stretch. There are so many good places to stop and do things, even in spacious West Texas, and it's good to remember with young kids that even simple things can become fun and interesting.

Ahead of time I searched online for some music and stories I could download, and I'd like to share my two favorites I found. Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child is a great radio program I found. It bills itself as "indie music for indie kids" and "for kids and their grownups." Their theme song is by They Might Be Giants. You can download the show as podcasts on iTunes for free!

I found a great site for stories at StoryNory. They have a lovely assortment of stories, but we've mostly listened to fairy tales and myths from around the world. Jago positively loves these stories. He wanted to listen to them almost constantly! And they can all be downloaded for free from their website!

So we set out a week ago for a 6-night road trip, the four of us in our mini-van, to do some exploring and see some new stuff and get out of our regular space. And it was truly a wonderful trip. Completely successful, really. Certainly we learned a couple things, and there were plenty of times I thought the kids were going to drive me nuts (what's new, right?), but mostly it was just lots of fun.

The main thing we learned is that we want to do more! We'll probably do some weekend camping trips to local state parks, but we're also hoping to do more road trips, venturing out farther, perhaps. We did decide we think we'd like to get some kind of camper trailer, so that we don't have to set up and take down our whole deal every single day. That was a bit tiring.

I enjoyed the trip so much, got so much out of it, and took so many pictures (over 700!), I've decided I want to write up every day of our trip with the places we visited. Also I want to encourage other people to go visit and support those awesome places we went. And, I think the Grandmas will love it, too.

So more coming soon!

100 Things That I Like

Long ago I came across a wonderful website: Learning To Love You More

Somewhere on there I found this wonderful prompt:

List 100 things that you like.

Make a list of 100 things you like in no particular order. Avoid the obvious (significant other, cake...) and be completely honest with yourself. If you try to think of things that you are curious about and inspired by, you'll end up discovering a lot about yourself and in doing so developing a sort of bank of your interests and ideas.

In March 2005, I came up with my own list, which I just found.

I totally love it. I'm going to work on another list. But for now, here's that old list.

1. the word "emerge"
2. crazy yarn
3. dystopic future science fiction
4. moonshadows
5. windchimes
6. the dark areas underneath freeways
7. glam rock
8. women wearing lots of jewelry
9. driving alongside trains
10. the words "liminal" and "threshold"
11. unaccompanied cello
12. men playing guitar and singing
13. driving at night through dark winding roads with the windows down
14. wind
15. stuffed animal bunnies
16. Fiji Natural Artesian Water
17. sending birthday cards in the mail
18. playa dust in my hair
19. moon calendars
20. cutting my own hair
21. brushing people's hair
22. white pitchers
23. anything silvery or glittery
24. crazy shower curtains
25. the sensation of tears running down my cheeks
26. fancy soap
27. singing with people
28. makeup color names
29. visionary art
30. insanity
31. dancing by myself in my living room
32. spirals and swirly lines
33. colored lights
34. touching people's faces
35. sitting on a porch swing during a thunderstorm
36. scissors
37. stabbing things with paring knives
38. red shoes
39. listening to stories
40. neat and organized address books
41. weddings, especially the ceremony
42. arranging music for voice only
43. books arranged by color
44. song covers
45. emails that make me cry
46. the internet
47. tv shows on dvd
48. girls dressed like boys
49. swing music
50. magical realism
51. snuggling
52. kissing
53. world religions
54. monastic life
55. books about regular people living regular lives
56. lists
57. etymology
58. made-up words
59. spooning
60. intuition
61. video/dvd stores
62. bathrooms that have art in them
63. mosaics
64. remembering dreams when I wake up
65. exploring grocery stores
66. kundalini yoga
67. two tone nail polish
68. late night phone conversations
69. random handmade gifts
70. analyzing and discussing movies
71. Pollyanna-type stories
72. hands
73. the window seat on airplanes
74. driving for hours at a time
75. unexpected and sincere compliments
76. spirals
77. turkey vultures
78. walking along busy gray urban streets
79. ferns
80. flower arranging
81. interpreting life like it's a dream
82. wisteria
83. books about crazy fantasy worlds
84. feeling inspired to write
85. monologues in plays
86. curtain calls
87. temporal art
88. photography
89. purses
90. the word "mystery"
91. metaphors involving butterflies
92. walking to the grocery store
93. naivete
94. sacred spaces
95. feeling understood
96. empathy
97. grammar
98. surprising people
99. loungey spaces
100. stars

Make your own list and share it with me!

I'm Doing It My Way

The first time I ever heard "My Way" by Frank Sinatra was in Houston at the fantastic laundromat in the old brick building with the high ceilings.

The best thing about this laundromat was that instead of the usual Tejano and/or pop music that played too loudly at other laundromats, a radio station that featured easy listening and big band music was always on. Hence, I heard a lot of Sinatra while I did my laundry in my early 20's.

But back to "My Way." That first time I heard it, much like every subsequent time it's been my pleasure to listen to it, it made me pause and pay attention, it hit me somewhere deep in my chest and made me kind of misty.

If you are somehow unfamiliar with this song (or even if you're not), I insist you take a listen right now: http://youtu.be/egY8rUpxqcE

The performance is outstanding, but the lyrics alone are pretty powerful stuff.

In recent months I've been thinking a lot about the way I do things, the "how," as a good friend put it.

Right now, I don't feel like I can stand up and really say, "I did it my way." I think I've spent a lot of energy in my life focused on how others are perceiving me. I've spent a lot of time and effort trying to figure out the "right" way to do things. I've tried hard to make myself do things the "right" way. I feel mostly this has resulted in me not doing much.

And you know what? I'm done with that.

My way often feels really different from other people's ways. But I get it now, that it's mine. It's what's right for me. And focusing on it might be the most important thing I can do right now.

I've recently been inspired by The Happiness Project and in particular her personal First Commandment to "Be Gretchen." That's really doing it her way.

One of the places I've really gotten bogged down in doing something the "right"way is this blog that I haven't posted to in a year.

I had this notion that this blog needed to have a theme, and I started with the idea of posting about Big Things [tm]. But then I'd feel like I wanted to write about my kids or write a movie review or some other non-Big Thing topic. But that didn't fit in with my original idea, and isn't your blog supposed to have a theme or something?

Well, obviously that resulted in me just posting nothing, so forget it. Forget the supposed to. I'm doing it my way.

So in the future here, I might have more pondering of Big Things, but also look for those kid stories and movie reviews. And you're also likely to see book recommendations, feng shui observations, personal reflections, and ramblings about Jane Austen and Doctor Who. This is my own kind of playground here.

So I'm declaring that I am Emerald, and I'm going to BE Emerald.

And that's what you'll see in this blog.

And just to bring it all around, this whole thing flashed in my mind when "My Way" came up in my ipod recently.

Thanks for the reminder, Frankie.

Anything Is Possible

One time a friend of a friend asked me to sum up my beliefs. He had one very succinct sentence for the core of what he believed about the universe.  It was "Energy changes."  (He was into some kind of chaos magic.)  He was trying to understand my worldview and spiritual beliefs, and so he was wanting me to give him a similar kind of summary.

I was very reluctant to do so, because there's kind of nothing at the core of my beliefs.  What I finally came up with was this:

Anything is possible.

But of course, for this sentence to be true, it must contain the possibility that it's false.

So that's what I said, "I believe anything is possible, but that means it's also possible that I'm wrong."

I still like this statement as an attempt to summarize my beliefs about everything.

(Just as an aside, he did not like this statement, nor have most of the people I have shared it with.)

I do not believe in any kind of objective reality.

Everything humans know about the universe is filtered through our little bodies and minds, which have so much going on in them, it seems to me there is no possibility for objectivity.

If perhaps there is some kind of Divinity with a consciousness, then perhaps it could have an objective view of reality.  But that seems like such a narrow kind of Divinity to me.

I kind of believe that people's beliefs is what makes things true for them.  I don't believe in Truth.  (That is, Capitalized Truth.)  But then that can get pretty complicated.  It's hard to really break it down.

I believe that anything anyone believes has some kind of validity, simply because they believe it.  Now I also believe that we are in a vaguely shared reality on this planet that makes certain beliefs inappropriate, but I absolutely do not think that "reality" is certain or objective.  There's no way to truly say what is so.  I can not absolutely know anything.

I believe this shared reality we are in tends to value love a great deal, something I value as well.  I also value respect and tolerance a whole lot, too.

So whatever you believe, whether you believe in Jesus, Shiva, Diana, God, gods, goddesses, the Tao, Spirit, lifeforce, science, nothing at all, and/or something else entirely, it's all fine with me so long as you strive to be respectful, tolerant, and loving, as well.  

And sometimes I feel sorry for the people who are disrespectful, intolerant, and unloving, that they don't have a place to exist where those things are valued.  I certainly don't think there's anything objectively wrong with those things (because nothing is objectively wrong) but they are anti-social qualities, for the most part.

I think generally we look for objectivity as a way to explain and understand things.  I don't think the universe makes sense.  I don't think it needs to make sense. I take delight in it not making sense.

Now I don't go through my daily life questioning every single thing, in some kind of "Hey nothing is real!" fit.  That's just not really practical.

I do actually have some more specific personal spiritual beliefs, which perhaps I'll attempt to go into in another post, but I say "attempt" because they're not super clear and they can change a lot.

This is all rather difficult for me to write about, because it is slippery and strange.  But I embrace the contradictions and confusion of my own beliefs and of the whole world!  Anything is possible!

A Milkshake and Pizza Epiphany

So there's this awesome book called Women Food and God.  It's by this awesome woman Geneen Roth, who's written a ton of books on food and eating, most famously When Food Is Love, which I believe is about eating disorders and is considered an important work on the subject.

Her basic stance on eating is that to be healthy and your proper weight etc, you should eat exactly what your body wants.  BUT there are "guidelines" for eating, which boil down to being extremely mindful while you are eating.

I have finally realized that this is what I need to do.  And after a lifetime of not being especially mindful, it's much harder than I expected.

I've been letting myself eat "what I want" the last month (and attempting to do it without guilt), and yes, I've gained back a couple pounds.  I've been trying to keep in mind that an adjustment/learning period is normal, but I was starting to question if this did make sense for me.

Until this afternoon.

I decided for lunch I would have a milkshake and leftover pizza.  Not healthy, but it sounded delicious.

I ate through half of my milkshake quickly, enjoying it certainly, but not really focused on it.  And eating in that kind of way like this might be the last milkshake I'll ever get to have in my life.  Creating strict rules for yourself about what you're "allowed" to eat because otherwise you're a bad person will do that to you.

Then I stopped and looked at it.  I realized I could eat it a lot more slowly, and really pay attention to the experience of the milkshake.

And it was so difficult and foreign. Something about just the idea made me feel threatened.

I realized I have a concept in my head that "milkshake=delicious" and I was so caught up in that, that I didn't really know what I was experiencing.

So I ate a few more spoonfuls, slowly.  The consistency was oddly sticky gooey.  And it had a sickly sweet aftertaste that I was not enjoying but rather overcoming.  I poured the rest down the sink.

Then my pizza.  Even before I started eating, I got a kind of uh-oh feeling.

I don't think I actually liked that pizza much at all, and I know my belly didn't really like it.

And yet, somehow the very notion that maybe I don't actually like pizza was totally threatening to my whole way of life.

Like, dear god, if I don't like pizza, what else don't I actually like?  What else have I talked myself into?  What else have I made wonderful in my head, without really seeing the reality of it?

Somehow just focusing on my experience of pizza with my full attention made me realize that I really ought to be giving the same level of focus on everything in my life.  And I might find some surprising things.

Part of me was in such denial that this was even happening, I ate the whole piece.

In that awesome book I mentioned above, Geneen Roth says: "Our relationship to food is an exact microcosm of our relationship to life itself.  I believe we are walking, talking expressions of our deepest convictions; everything we believe about love, fear, transformation and God is revealed in how, when and what we eat."

I think she's right.

Here are her Eating Guidelines, which I intend to follow a lot more closely now.

1. Eat when you are hungry.
2. Eat sitting down in a calm environment.  This does not include the car.
3. Eat without distractions.  Distractions include radio, television, newspapers, books, intense or anxiety-producing conversations, or music.
4. Eat what your body wants.
5. Eat until you are satisfied.
6. Eat (with the intention of being) in full view of others.
7. Eat with enjoyment, gusto, and pleasure.

Here's to waking up.

Defining Spiritual

I spend a lot of time thinking about spiritual things.  I consider myself a very spiritual person.  I long for more time for Spirit work.

I am not religious.  I was not brought up with any religion.  I was only briefly ever part of a religion, for a couple years when I was in high school and college.  I attended a Unitarian Universalist church in Houston.

A lot of people like to describe themselves as, "spiritual, but not religious."  Myself included.

Recently I've been pondering those terms.  What do they actually mean?

Before I go look them up on dictionary.com, I want to attempt to write out my own personal definitions.

Defining "religious" seems easy to me.  Being religious means participating in a particular spiritual path and/or community, which includes certain common beliefs and practices.

But the concept of "spiritual" seems much more vague.  It's the word "spirit," I think.

I would say that being spiritual means having a relationship with Spirit or Divinity or God or The Universe or Whatever Word You Prefer To Capitalize.

And frankly, that could mean all kinds of things.  It's very personal and subjective.

And I think that's what at the heart of people wanting to distance themselves from the word "religion."  They don't want to follow any prescribed path.  They want to discover and create and follow their own path.

To go farther into defining the word spiritual, I'd have to further define that Capitalized Word.  And that's hard.  I mean, that's part of the point of a lot of those religions, right?

I think the most general definition I can come up with is that Capitalized Word is something greater than one's human self.

And from that perspective, even an atheist could be spiritual.  I think it depends on what exactly a person does and does not believe in.

(And as Joel Fleischmann (the main character on my favorite TV show, Northern Exposure) once said, "I've always kind of admired atheists.  I think it takes a lot of faith.")

So to sum up my definition, being spiritual means having a relationship with something greater than one's human self.

Out of curiosity, I checked dictionary.com just now.  "Religious" takes you to "religion," and it's pretty much what I expected.  "Spiritual" takes you to "spirit," and I find that to be a pretty delightful list of things.  What a very difficult concept to define.

Now, I haven't even begun talking about my personal definition of Spirit or Capitalized Etc.  Another post some time.