It’s the one hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day today, and because I have been procrastinating writing so long, I’m going to use the day to motivate myself. And because I have been procrastinating writing so long, this is very long!

Tonight, there is an event on Hornby I’d love to be at, and if I still lived there, I’d be all over it. But instead, I am here, home alone (I did receive an invitation to read today at an event on Mount Washington, but my car isn’t mountain-worthy and I was unable to hook up with anybody else going, not knowing any of them and all.

I miss my island! I miss my community. That’s the truth. Still, I feel so many exciting openings beckoning in this community, I don’t imagine I will be lacking for opportunities. But. It’s not Hornby.

So, ain’t I a woman? On this day of days, let me speak for me and for all the women, as I have not for so long. I go dormant sometimes. It seems to be a necessary part of my creative (ie, life) process that certain inner spaces shut down for maintenance while others are focused on, then re-open sometimes months or years later richer and fuller and more productive than other.

I suffer from a surfeit of creativity. That’s a problem when you don’t have enough outlets through which to express, as has been my lifelong issue. I created this blog (in its original form) to give my writing / poet / activist / teacher / storyteller voice an outlet, but it’s expanded to become the place I exhibit my art and music as well.

So yes, here is my blah blah place, and I have held back because I don’t want to look too weird in case potential clients and listeners come shopping to see what I have to offer.

What I have to offer is me, and this is the place I let me hang it all out.

Well okay. One of the places. There’s Facebook too, and Flckr, and Tribe, and Twitter (though I don’t bother much there, which would change if I had followers, and yes, that’s a hint for ya) because it happens I have a lot to hang out.

I’m done being ashamed of that. I was the kid who tried to hide my ‘too-many-A’s’ report card from my parents. It wasn’t okay to be ‘smart’ or play the game of school too well. But I couldn’t help it. I suppose I was ‘smart’ in that kind of way, though virtually oblivious in others.

I have a lot to say and a lot of ways to say it, and that’s the way it is. That’s just how I roll, as the whippersnappers say these days.

It’s scary to say something like that and to realize that I’m old enough to. That it might not actually be a joke to somebody who thinks I am my number. Actually I’m pretty much a whippersnapper myself.

I’m having too much fun rolling with the times and keeping up with who I am now to be old, you see. How could I be old? How could anybody? I still feel as far away from old as I ever have.

It’s true, I’m doing that ‘men’ thing that my mother hates for me to talk about. (Menopause! There! I said it!)

But does that make me old? What is old, for a woman? It seems to be tied into our reproductive capacity. I am no longer in a position to conceive a child, and this in the collective belief system indicates that I’m past my sell-by date. It’s all downhill from here, they say. Whoever ‘they’ are.

I didn’t get heavily influenced by ‘them’ in childhood, which makes it easier to unplug now. I am from the North. I grew up without electricity, a television or a particular community to define myself by (though we always returned to Fraser Lake).

We always lived on the wrong side of the tracks, and I was always the new weird kid. I was the new weird kid in Fraser Lake several times, in fact, because we kept moving away, then coming back a few years later.

I’m once again the new weird kid. I liked this position because it meant I was outside the social hierarchy, though it terrified me too, because of what happened to Melody.

Melody was a beautiful blond girl who moved to the town I moved to at the same time Imoved there. She was stunningly gorgeous, I mean it hurt to look at this girl. Nobody had ever seen a girl that beautiful.

I was very pretty (at the time I believed I was hideous), but I was not in Melody’s league. The boys went mad for Melody. Even the ones with girlfriends. And one day, I saw a circle of girls, with Melody in the middle, and the girls were throwing rocks at Melody and yelling at her to get the hell out of their town.

And Melody went. Her family moved away shortly after. I don’t know how badly Melody was hurt, but they obviously took it seriously. And that was the power of women, to me. The circle of girls made up the social hierarchy at every school I went to, but because I was always new, I never belonged to it.

The circle of women in my family was my social net, one that followed us from town to town, as there was always a relative nearby, an aunt, an uncle, cousins. The men swapped hunting and fishing stories while the women gathered in the kitchen, and that’s where the life was. The laughter, the wit, the magnetic centre of life was with the women.

Men had their own magnetism, for they were the ones who played the music at parties, which drew me equally strongly (not to mention the other thing), and so I perched on the thread that connected the men to the women in my world. Neither one nor the other, I have always felt like the outsider no matter where I was.

The weird new kid, in other words. Which can be fun some of the time.

The world of people outside my family circle was a chaotic swirl of strange events, for everything was changing, my context kept shifting, it was like living in a kaleidoscope. Moving that often was profoundly disorienting to a child of my disposition. I often had fugues where I didn’t know where or who I was. I imagine I could have benefited from counseling, but alas. It was the North.

And so, to age. It’s taken me this long to begin to feel myself poking my eyes outside the inner coils of my own mystery. The feeling is one of youngness, of unfolding potential. I know I have only begun to become who I am, and I expect to live a good long time. I am living as if I will live a good long time. Longer than most people would imagine possible.

I challenge the beliefs of my time, for I know just how malleable reality is and how temporary most laws, even the apparently immutable physical ones (like the law that humans couldn’t fly) turn out to be.

I believe I can alter my life expectancy by altering how I live, what I believe, what I eat, what I do and how I relate to myself, the earth, the ones I love and the ones I am coming to know. Astrology opens the door to learning how to live better, in order to live longer, but not for the sake of being old for a longer time.

If we are to increase life expectancy, we must increase the proportion of our lives that we spend growing. As long as I am growing, I don’t have to be dying. I prefer the feeling of growing to dying.

Growing does not have to occupy more physical space. I don’t need to live in a mansion or have a big footprint on the land. I am growing in my creative potential. Yet I don’t need to produce anything until I am ready, and the longer I wait to become ready, the better. I don’t believe I will die anytime soon, and I see no reason to behave as if I am on the decline in any way.

I expect to be dancing in my nineties. I expect to be reading slam poetry and speaking the word and singing and following my faerie path into greater and greater life right up until the day I die (assuming that happens, which I refuse to do).

What have I got to lose?

So that’s the current status of me. I’m turning fifty-three in a month, and I used to think that was old. The wrinkles in my face do show that I’ve been around a while, but I can’t really see those lines as being about anything except how I look right now. I can see beauty in those lines. I feel I’ve earned them. And I care less and less about my packaging. It’s what’s inside that counts, and the world is going to find out more, when the time is right.

I am officially coming out of denial about my personal confidence and power. I watch myself on video and I radiate a confidence, an angry power that has very difficult for me to own. My mother is a very nice lady. She is sweet as all get out, in a self-effacing, kindly way. You’d like her.

I am nothing like my mother, but not because I haven’t tried to be. Most of my life I believed that I was. Just like her, I mean. I’m not, though, and that’s the way it needs to be. Because this is who I am; I am an Aries, as she is a Cancer. We’re very different people. I have six planets in the fire element, and two fire planets on angles. That adds up to a lot of life force.

If anybody can do this, I can. And my body self has always been confident and self possessed, even when my emotional, mental and spiritual selves have been insane.

Oh yes, didn’t I mention that? I have journeyed through that dim mirrored halls of insanity; you might say it runs in my family.

I have learned how to be sane, and that is to align myself with my body. My body is the part that knows what is best for me. My body is the wisest part of my being. My body is my most loving self.

My emotional self, when aligned with my body, has no pride, is all puppyish desire for petting.

My mind and spirit, on the other hand, have been holding back from this shameful pleasure, for aren’t we here to work and struggle and pay the debt incurred by Adam and Eve who were evicted from that play place? Weren’t we all born in sin, and all that blah blah? This kind of religious guilt feels positively genetic, for even though I was raised an atheist, I come from a long line of religious fanatics.

Um, I mean ‘good Christians.’

Well, what if the debt has been paid already, a thousand times over? What if God has forgiven the debt as He has realized what a fucked up thing that was to do to His children, what if He’s much smarter now, what if He’s learned a thing or two?

Or what if that story is just something somebody made up in order to justify their own bone-deep fear of pleasure? What if our path to consciousness from our prior existence as bipedal animals took us into some kind of a profound species neurosis that has grown to plague the planet?

Or! Or what if we are doing exactly and precisely the right thing to express what the Earth herself is feeling? What if?

Oh such a question is this. I can only answer from my own perspective, and because the title of my blog is ‘Spreading the Gaia Word,’ I will presume on my mandate as translator here.

My body is a part of the Earth, in fact, is made of Earth’s stuff. So in listening to my wisest self, I can also hear the voice of the living planet.

Earth is an entity. She is a woman, to be precise. She is a fat, wrinkled, ancient child-woman, and everything we are doing is Herself doing it. If we suffer from a plague as a species, it is one of hubris, which is a sin (or sickness) of believing ourselves to be separate from our context.

We think that people are the cause of what we see around us, when the truth is, what we see around us, and we ourselves, are simply what is happening now. We cannot, as individuals, control what we do as a species.

Regardless of our political system, we always end up ruled by the few, and these few make up the patriarchy. The patriarchal system and its relationship to the Earth reflects on Earths own crisis of evolution. It’s a crisis. We’re in trouble all right, but it’s the trouble of a changing organism. Earth is in upheaval. She is becoming conscious now.

This craziness can’t last; change is coming, but who knows when? She’s got her own timetable, and we don’t have input, no matter how important we want to think we are.

How do I know this? I just do. I am her, in a way, I think her thoughts. This is a bold claim, but really, I don’t think I am alone in this. I believe many think her thoughts, but most people don’t know that is what they are thinking.

Here is my theory: Earth is still very young, and she is just learning to think coherently. We as a species, along with our inventions (which are really Her inventions), create the structure through which her thoughts flow, as our own synaptic systems form the structure through which our own thoughts flow. We are infinitesimal holographic models of Earth, but we are at best tiny parts of an unimaginably vast whole, and our brilliance is beggared by her potential.

But she’s young. She’s still growing. She’s confused and in a crisis. And we can help her by learning to think ourselves. By harmonizing with our bodies, with our feminine selves. Everyone, men and women alike, is half feminine. We all got half of our chromosomes from our mothers. Half of what we are is her essence.

We can help the earth by helping ourselves. By pulling out of the insanity of the patriarchy, which is going to go down just as the dinosaurs did, and for the same reasons: they were not sustainable–their behavior did not honour the balances of nature. So they had to go.

That’s what I think. And ain’t I a woman? It’s my day, you know.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Gaia words, about me, truth and strangeness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.