The Original Mega-Bite
Making Women the Original Sin
It was Eve’s curiosity and willingness to disobey the order of patriarchy (male God) that led her to eat the forbidden apple of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden and expand human knowledge of ourselves. Eve like all entrepreneurs is the one who led humans out of the same old, same old, and into the explosion of passion and pleasure that has led humans to create the new and important ever since.
Photo: From 2017 Women’s March, Boston
What if Eve Hadn’t Been Condemned as First Sinner?
What if Eve had been lauded for her curiosity about new things and not condemned for it as the first sinner? What if she and all the women who came after her were valued for their ideas and ability to create new things?
Would We See E-ve as E-ntrepreneur in an E-World?
Would we be celebrating the innovations of Stephanie Jobs today?
Apples Are Everywhere!
The apple in various guises has been in our zeitgeist as a logo for years. Could this omnipresent symbol flashing before us daily be shouting “Women, go back to the original rotten apple story of the Garden of Eden. You need to reclaim the power taken from you for being curious and sexual.”
From film Romance on the High Seas (1948)
Directed by Michael Curtiz and Busby Berkeley
Peter Virgil: Who said you can’t live with them, and you can’t
live without them?…To think we gave up a perfectly good rib for them.
Oscar Farrar: And not like they appreciate it.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, suffragist and humanitarian fought for the vote for women but much more.
Long before I ever set to thinking about the harmful effects of the Bible and religion on humanity—and women in particular, and on my own life, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in the nineteenth century:
“The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.”
Most people remember Elizabeth Cady Stanton as a suffragist who worked for the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote (100 years ago this month); however, she strove to advance women’s rights and equality between men and women in more areas than voting: in the household, in parenting, in custody, in the workplace, in divorce, and in the right not to be a member of any religion. She also felt women should take more part in government and that we would have fewer wars and less violence if women and not just men were part of that decision-making.
Sadly Elizabeth died in 1902 long before the passage of the 19th Amendment was passed on August 18, 1920.
Much more radical than other suffragettes, many of her contemporaries considered her views too extreme and wanted to concentrate just on voting rights. In particular, they thought Elizabeth placed too much weight on the influence of religion on the lives of women.
“The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.”
“No one reads the Bible anymore,”they would say to her.” Stanton recalls an incident when a woman she knew placed a Bible on a chair to make a seat higher for a child. Stanton gasped, feeling it a sacrilege even though in her mind she no longer gave the Bible any weight at all. The stories we hear in our youth that we believed stay with us on some primal level long after our intellect has relegated them to the dustbin, and that is why she felt stories from the Bible are so undermining—especially for women.
That’s what I feel is still happening to women. Intellectually, many of us have dismissed the Adam and Eve story; however, the negative message of woman as the sinner, the evil one who was tempted by the snake and then tempted Adam. Eve, the woman who was created second, to be man’s helpmate, not created to be independent in her own right—these Biblical messages reinforced in jokes and popular culture ever since are harder to erase.
An early 20th century Pennsylvania German tradition claims that
if a woman is the first one to visit you on New Years, you will have bad luck the rest of the year,
but if a man is the first to visit you, you will have good luck.
In Genesis, first woman Eve was created after first man Adam, and women have been trying not to take up too much space in his world ever since.
Consider this story: Taking a flight recently, a woman friend of mine in her sixties was seated near the window of a two-seat section of the plane. To her right, was a man in his mid-forties. His right elbow was sticking out into the aisle, and the stewardess had to remind him to draw it in. Sprawled in his seat, legs wide apart, his left foot stretched into my friend’s footwell—my friend found herself trying to scrunch more and more against the window side of her seat. His left arm dangled over the armrest and practically touched her body. Finally she thought, “Why am I doing this?” She turned and asked him politely to take his foot out of her footwell, and he said, “Sure,” but he didn’t apologize or show any sign that he realized he had been inconsiderate.
This anecdote is a perfect example of how certain men still feel entitled to take up more space in the world than women do. I can hear men saying, “Well women on airplanes can be inconsiderate too.” This is true, but women have not been pushing men to the side for their own comfort for eons. Also, it’s possible a woman would have apologized since women apologize much more than men in general. This man didn’t seem to have a clue. Airplane seats are horribly small, and he just wanted to stretch himself out to get the most comfort and space he could. If a woman sat like that with her legs wide open—even if she were wearing jeans—she’d be considered a slut.
This simple story is rich in important ways. Men don’t see how women are continually making themselves smaller to accommodate them. Women need to continually remind themselves that their pleasure, comfort, and well-being are as important as a man’s. It’s true that this woman was in my generation. Perhaps a millennial woman might have mentioned his inconsiderateness earlier?
Outlier and Out-liar
Unlike Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I have never been comfortable being the iconoclast, the outlier in the group. I have been more the woman crouching in the corner of that plane trying to make my voice smaller and smaller, afraid to fully speak up. Now, I realize that time of silence is over for me.
Another trope in the zeitgeist these last four Trump years has been truth versus lies.
Christopher Weyant Copyright 2017 Cagle Cartoons
Journalists have been fact checking, outing Trump’s lies, and counting the number of lies he has told. From his first day in office, it was clear that the biggest casualty of the election was going to be truth itself. It is understandable that a very popular news organization would want to remind Americans that facts matter.
Remember this ad?
Yes, it is true that in the most common Garden of Eden story, Eve gave Adam an apple to eat, not a banana.
But is using a story touting the biggest lie of all
the way to show truth matters?
Call Me an Out-Liar for Outing the Mother of All Lies—
(one that is much bigger than how many people attended Trump’s inauguration)!
What is that Lie?
Here it is: Women are to blame for the Original Sin. That is the Original Lie. Religions have used this story for years to make women the scapegoat and one to blame for getting mankind tossed out of paradise, for being the seductress who seduces men into sex, which in itself is wrong except for making babies. Woman by her very nature is evil because she causes men to lust after her and for that sin, women shall bear children in pain, and men must now work by the sweat of their brow. Women should be subservient to men—meaning only men should run things—and, by the way, women can’t possibly hold the top job in the country.
Joseph Campbell says that the Adam and Eve story is a story of man against nature, man against the natural world—but also a battle of men and women against their own natures—that to give in to one’s own nature and natural instincts is wrong. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, man is set apart from nature and is to dominate it, but this attitude, thankfully, is changing more recently from dominating nature to stewardship of nature. We can see the reflection of this war against nature in the destructive attitudes toward the environment that sadly have been the offspring of this story.
First God cursed the snake and then the woman Eve!
As much as we, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, might wish to erase this story from our minds, it, like misogyny itself, is so interwoven in our cultural fabric that that’s not really possible. However, we can reinterpret it. A better way to look at the Adam and Eve story is as a metaphor. Eve was intelligent and curious. She followed her curiosity and in doing so allowed mankind to become fully human—to break out of the bubble of the Garden of Paradise where everything was the same with no inner or outer conflict. Eve brought us the world of opposites where men and women must strive to remain human and compassionate in the face of good and evil, fairness and unfairness, love and heartbreak, life and death. Women need to reverse the curse: see Eve not as first sinner but as first Innovator—first thinker outside the box!
In 1989 during my last visit with my Aunt Edith who was dying from lung cancer, she told me about the origin of this family curse against the women in the family that went back to her grandmother—my great grandmother Savina.
Until I wrote this post, though, I never connected the curse of the Adam and Eve story, my interest in the Red Sox curse, and the curse on my mother’s side of the family.
My great-grandmother Savina passed down her story of being cursed to her daughter, my grandmother Giovanina, who bequeathed it to her daughters, my mother Yolanda and my Aunt Edith, who passed it on to me. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton says about the Adam and Eve tale, the stories we are told as children and believe stay with us. Edith believed all the women in the family were cursed. Edith would swing between feeling God cursed all of them because they must have committed some terrible sin—to saying she didn’t even believe in God.
For myself, having gone through the deep mourning of two late-term miscarriages in my late thirties with no further ability to conceive followed by being nearly an invalid for nine years because of a mysterious knee problems that medical science and surgery saw no help for, at times it was difficult for me not to succumb to Edith’s belief that indeed I, like the other women, in the family was indeed cursed.
Luckily, the fact that I didn’t hear about this family curse until I was an adult and that I was seeing a great Jungian therapist probably saved me from being permanently cursed and turning bitter from the curse. My therapist told me that believing you are cursed is a kind of grandiosity. You are assuming you are so important that God is going take his time to point his finger directly at you and curse you. This information helped me cut through the power of the “why-bother you-are-cursed” feelings.
I did, however, understand the pain of loss that can make you want to blame someone or something for your loss. The desire to blame someone or something (and often a woman) for misfortune begins with Adam and Eve. The same motivating force inducing the patriarchy to write a story blaming a woman for committing a sin that seemingly forfeited paradise and cursed mankind for eons was probably behind my great grandmother’s impetus to prefer to feel cursed by God for some imaginary sin than to feel everything is up to chance. In this way, the macro creation story underpins my micro familial story.
Wanting to pin blame on women for misfortune is the chief motivator in many stories: movies, novels, and plays. In 1965, I played 72-year-old Rebecca Nurse in a college production of Arthur Miller’s, The Crucible.
At one point in the play, with the village on the precipice of witchcraft hysteria, Rebecca Nurse, one of the Godliest women in Salem, is called to see to Ruth Putnam, a sick child who won’t wake up. The village is afraid that this sickness is the work of the devil and that some witch or witches are behind it. Rebecca cautions against such thinking.
Long before I could fathom what it would be like to have lost all but one child like Goody Putnam and want someone to blame, I rubbed latex makeup on my smooth 21-year-old face and made all sorts of grimaces to create the requisite wrinkles (that I have now in abundance at 76), and played a scene that only much later would truly make sense to me.
Rebecca: I think she’ll wake in time…I have eleven children, and I
am twenty-six times a grandma, and I have seen them
all through their silly seasons, and when it come on the
they will run the Devil bowlegged keeping up with their
mischief…
Mrs. Putnam: This is no silly season, Rebecca. My Ruth is
bewildered, Rebecca; she cannot eat…
Rebecca: I think we ought to rely on the doctor, now and good
prayer.
Mrs. Putnam: Rebecca, the doctor’s baffled!
Rebecca: If so he is, then let us go to God for the cause of it. There is
prodigious danger in the seeking of loose spirits. I fear it, I
fear it. Let us rather blame ourselves and—
Putnam: How may we blame ourselves? I am one of nine sons; the
Putnam seed have peopled this province. And yet I have but
one child left of eight—and now she shrivels!
Rebecca: l cannot fathom that.
Mrs. Putnam, with a growing edge of sarcasm: But I must! You think it’s
God’s work you should never lose a child, nor a
grandchild either, and I bury all but one? There are
wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within
fires!
Later in the play, it is the child Ruth Putnam, falling into a fit in the courtroom, who will point to Rebecca as her evil attacker. The village’s conclusion: Rebecca must be in league with the devil and the other girls who have been seen dancing naked in the woods. Here again, the devil is aligned with nature, the sin of nakedness and implied sexuality, and young females—all converging as the scapegoats for any misfortune.
Carolyn’s Journal August 9, 2020
This morning I had a real breakthrough. I had been writing about the connections between the Adam and Eve, God cursing women for a sin she really didn't commit and connecting that idea to my Aunt Edith telling me the tragic story about my great-grandmother Savina, which led my aunt and my grandmother to believe the women in the family were cursed. Somehow I connected all that to the Red Sox sign, Reverse the Curse, the curse of the Bambino, which was the Red Sox trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1918 and then not winning a World Series again until 2004. And then how that connects to the story, Arthur Miller's play, the Crucible, and the scene where Rebecca Nurse is going to see Goody Putnam's child, Ruth, who is sick. And then Goody Putnam practically accuses Rebecca of being a witch for how is it that Rebecca's 11 children and 26 grandchildren have never died, and Goody Putnam has lost seven children and only has one left. She feels like that's the devil's work.
And then, this morning when I was typing the words curse of the Bambino and wondering where that expression came from, I googled it. Babe Ruth it seems had so many Italian American supporters, they called him bambino, which means babe or child in Italian. Then I had my slap-up-the-head moment where I said, “My God, the curse in my family was the repeated loss of a children through generations.” The Red Sox lost their Babe and supposedly they were cursed 86 years; my great grandmother lost her four children, my grandmother her two daughters, my Aunt Edith her only son after many miscarriages, and I had two late-term miscarriages and some shorter ones and no children. All the losses in my family were connected to children. I was making and writing about the separate parts of these connections before I really saw how any of these ideas connected at all.
I started writing about bits and pieces of these connections for the last 20 years and, specifically in the last six years, when I started doing these PowerPoints—mostly for fun. I have PowerPoints about Adam and Eve, my great grandmother's story, playing Rebecca Nurse in Arthur Miller's, The Crucible, even a slide with the “Reverse the Curse sign.” And then this morning, somehow it all came together in a flash. It's so exhilarating and so amazing to me. And I'm so grateful that I've had this insight. It’s very life affirming because I have been following clues for so many years and now I can see how they have led me to something much bigger than my own story of loss and of losing babies. I did not pass on that story of a curse to my daughter. because I don’t have one. I did not pass on the story of a curse because I finally realized as D. H. Lawrence said, “That she bear children is not a woman's significance. But that she bear herself, that is her supreme and risky fate.”
Maybe that’s how I broke the curse—by sometimes feeling how easy it would be to slip into feeling cursed and turning bitter, but instead not continuing to keep trying to have a child, but to follow my own course, listening to my own heart, slowly, slowly realizing I am an artist and I have been having babies in a different way. I want to pass on that permission to not have children to other women. There is still such pressure on married women to have children. It’s not for every woman. What does the woman inside her really want?
My question: How can a woman know her own truth when her creation story—that she was created to help men and fulfill his desires is such a lie?
Little girls should grow up to have babies! In how many ways do we still reinforce this idea?
Even now in a PC-improved world where girls have more than dolls to play with as children, we still find the culture and media linking little girls with babies in ways that are almost invisible.
Take this popular and very entertaining kids PBS show—an animated outgrowth of Fred Rogers’ Neighborhood called Daniel Tigers Neighborhood. In an episode I saw today, called “Playing Library,” Daniel Tiger invites us to go to the O’s library in the tree where the Owl lives, and Daniel asks along a little female cat Katerina. When they arrive at the library, O shows them the various sections of books and asks what kind of book they are looking for.
Katerina says, “I want a book about baby animals!”
O finds a book, and Daniel and Katerina leaf through the pages identifying animals as they go. Next, they look out the window through a telescope where they proceed to see squirrels and bunnies. Katerina’s mom shows up and says it’s time to go, but Katerina stamps a paw and says, “I want to look at more baby animals!” Her mother says she can choose one more to look at. Katerina says, “I want to look at baby birds,” and looking through the telescope soon finds them in the foliage.“Oh, they are so cute!” Mom takes a peek and agrees. When they leave, Daniel Tiger’s father shows up and says they too have to leave. Daniel Tiger asks to see one more thing before they go. He chooses some kind of sea creatures and wants to go for a swim.
I’m not picking on PBS: they are not intentionally linking little girl animals with baby animals to influence the choices of girls later in life. No, rather, the writers (at least one of whom was a woman) are just continuing time honored tropes about what little girls will like—"babies” and what will interest little boys—"sea creatures and a movement activity like swimming.” Next, in a live-action video, a real little girl goes to the zoo with her grandfather. As he leads her around, one of the first things she says is, “This elephant has a baby with her!”
“Well, it ain’t the dame that worries me. They’re a dime a dozen.”
Next, Brian and I watched the film State’s Attorney (1932) with John Barrymore. Early on, a gangster says, “Well, it ain’t the dame that worries me. They’re a dime a dozen.” Few watching this film when it was released would have even noticed his demeaning of women by calling them dames. Characters in Hollywood films of the 1930s and beyond—especially gangsters—frequently denigrated women with disparaging names and in their physical treatment of them.
Culturally, we are at that not-noticing place around the messages we give little girls about their reproductive rights. Unbelievably, the right to an abortion and whether or not we will uphold a woman’s right to choose is still threatened. Right now, the strongest arguments defend a woman’s right to choose on the grounds that many women can’t financially or emotionally afford to have “more children.” But reproductive rights for women are larger: they include not only whether or not she will have an additional baby, but any babies at all.
Yet, we continue to give little girls the message that they “naturally” love babies when in reality loving to look at babies—human or animal—has not much to do with whether or not a particular woman really wants to or is cut out to raise one.
Carolyn’s Dream, July 26, 2020
Carolyn’s Dream July 26, 2020
I see J., a friend, walking by, and he says, “I’m glad you told me long ago that you were sorry you terminated your first pregnancy.” I am completely shocked about what he says because I never told him that. Later, I say to his girlfriend or some woman he is with, “Should I tell him that I am not sorry?” It is as if J. is a very good Catholic and against abortion. But in the reality outside my dream, J. is not Catholic and would never be judgmental about my choice.
Then Brian and I are in Harvard Square and we have to get somewhere, and a bus comes by. It is filled with young people like from a school or something. They pick us up and tell us they are going to somewhere like Baltimore, Maryland. They are all very nice and sweet, and it seems a miracle we have found them. When we arrive after a long journey, we want to give them money for taking us, but we forget until later, and then we give them something.
On the bus, I realize he and I have to take a test, or we will be thrown out of college and we haven’t studied. So we start to study on the bus using these books. There are all sorts of categories—like parts of shoes and kinds of fashions and dresses, cars, all sorts of things. We need to memorize all these parts so fast. It seems impossible.
Then we get to where we have to take the test and there is a woman there who is administering the test. She sees Brian and I lying next to one another holding the books we were studying from. She tells us she can tell us we are serious because of the way we are clasping the books. Then we are up on the floor doing movements instead of taking a written test. At one point, I am kneeling on the floor clasping my lower belly as if I am very pregnant. I am swaying back and forth, but I am crying. There is another woman there who is very pregnant doing the same thing, swaying back and forth holding her lower belly, but she is not crying. Afterward, everyone is complimenting this pregnant woman and wishing her well. I have the feeling that everyone is judging me, that they think I was trying to imitate her because they know I’m not pregnant with a real child. Afterward, I go up to the woman giving the test, and I tell her what happened to me—how I had to terminate the pregnancy at five and a half months because of severe birth defects and how I miscarried a second pregnancy at five and a half months. Now I am sobbing. She comforts me and says, “But you are going to write so much, create so much,” and I see all these articles and films and stories and artwork that she is describing. She seems to fully understand me, and she says we don’t have to take the test. That’s all I remember of the dream, except someone in the dream thinks we were a little wild to have taken a ride in a bus full of strangers we didn’t know.
Conversation with a friend, August 15, 2020
Feast of the Assumption: Women Rising
Speaking to M. yesterday was enlightening and expanding. I called her to ask for support that I not stop writing my blog because I was frightened at the backlash. She had sent a story the day before about a guy who was threatened on the highway with a gun possibly for having a bumper sticker that read: Black Lives Matter. That story made me afraid to write about women having the right to not have children, the right to abortion, and the right to live for themselves and not for men. M. said, “Don’t Stop! Don’t Stop! If you stop, we are lost.”
Speaking with her about whether or not women today still feel pressured to have children and to feel shame if they don’t, she said young women she knew didn’t care what your gender was, your sexual preference, your marital status, or your child-free choice. My friend lives in Metro Boston and perhaps in this bastion of liberalism and feminism her young friends are leading the way. But I suspected women worldwide and even in the US are not truly completely free to choose not to have a child; so, I googled articles about remaining child free.
What I found is that overall, it is true that younger women are marrying later (if at all), and also postponing having children if they have them at all; however, though they do feel more permission to remain child free and less shame for doing so, that pressure and shame have not completely disappeared.
As Samhita Mukhopadhyay writes in the Atlantic, “Childless people have long been chastised for being selfish or for not fulfilling a role their body seemingly bound them to. These expectations may have grown less explicit, but the pressures remain. The timid ways my child-free friends are currently having this discussion contrasted to the sharpness of the debates online suggest that, on some level, we haven’t been able to move beyond this impasse. In her 2015 anthology, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed, Meghan Daum wrote that the complexities that make people decide to have or not have children are endless. She was frustrated that the conversation “so often pits parents against non-parents and assumes that the former are self-sacrificing and mature and the latter are overgrown teenagers living large on piles of disposable income.” That divide isn’t as obvious today, but it hasn’t entirely gone away.”
And, from the same article, “As Rebecca Solnit writes in The Mother of All Questions, her book of essays on the barriers to embracing a life without children, ’… we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower—and wither—all around us.’” One legacy of the pandemic may be less judgment of the child-free. The life we can all build together after that is yet to be imagined.”
—From: Culture “One Legacy of the Pandemic May Be Less Judgment of the Child-Free:The coronavirus could change lingering cultural assumptions about what makes for a full and happy life.” by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Atlantic, August 5, 2020
“The news media periodically trot out articles about how parents are unhappier than their childless counter parts. The debatable postulation is often traced back to an influential 2004 study in which working mothers ranked child care the second-most-negative activity on a list of 16 (rated less negatively were commuting and housework).”
–From Style: “No Kids for Me, Thanks” by Teddy Wayne, The New York Times, April 3, 2015 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/style/no-kids-for-me-thanks.html
Worldwide, the pressure women feel to have children remains. The Catholic Church has not changed its position on birth control or abortion. That fact does not make it easier for Catholic women to choose or not choose to have children freely. Consider, that Pope Frances in his general audience in St. Peter’s Square as recently as 2015 said that not having children is a “selfish” act.
—From “Pope Francis: not having children is selfish,” The Guardian, Feb. 11, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/11/pope-francis-the-choice-to-not-have-children-is-selfish
How many people worldwide are influenced by the Pope?
According to the “Annuario Pontificio 2020,” the Vatican yearbook, “there are about 1.33 billion Catholics worldwide or 18% of the total population.” That is almost one in five people. Even if only 50% of these Catholics agree with the Pope that to not have children is selfish, that’s 650 million people.
—From “Vatican statistics show…” by Junno Arocho Esteves, Mar 26, 2020, Catholic News Service https://cruxnow.com/author/junno-arocho-esteves/
Muslim women are still under pressure to have children too. According to a study in 2015, Islam has 1.8 billion adherents, making up about 24.1% of the world population. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country
In 2016, Armani Marie Hamad wrote a piece “Why you should stop telling Muslim women to have kids” https://muslimgirl.com/stop-telling-muslim-women-kids/#MuslimGirlProblems April 12, 2016. so clearly Muslim women are under this pressure too.
Two of the world’s most populist religions—Islam and Catholicism together make up about 42 percent of the world’s population. That’s a lot of women being influenced by religions shaped mainly by the patriarchy.
However, whether or not a woman is pressured to have a child, all women are basically raised to be “mothers”—that is to care for others at the expense of their own desires. That is the universal training that shadows women long into the adulthood and can keep them from standing under their own sun.
“Every life stands beneath its own star.” –Hermann Hesse
There is also still pressure especially for college-educated women to know what they want to do right after college—even before college so they can choose a lucrative major.
There’s nothing wrong with making money. Most college grads have a lot of student loan to pay off and that wasn’t true for most of my generation. However, knowing what you want to do or need to do to make money or to pay off college debt is different than having that define your identity—who you really are and what is yours to give back from your time on earth.
Sometimes, as in my case, I couldn’t know when I graduated from college and went from job to job—each workplace—giving me another piece of my own puzzle—each giving me clues and tools to solve the mystery of “what I wanted to do.” Often I felt so guilty for not settling on one profession and making myself very successful at it professionally and financially. I felt I had let down my mother and father and my Aunt Edith who had lobbied so strongly that I should go to college that it was never a question.
Yet, in my case, my process has been my work, my creative art, what I have to give back. The acknowledgment that my art is multifaceted and involved a lot of healing from grief and emotional abandonment, a lot of letting go of preconceived ideas about what I should be doing, a lot of waiting—often for years and years—for me to make connections before I could share them.
Joseph Campbell famously said to follow your bliss. He knew very early in his life what his bliss was, and he was a man, so he didn’t have to think about how his bliss fit in with being someone’s wife (helpmate) or mother. Often following one’s bliss is a moment to moment affair—where the next step is just that—a next step that leads into the void. Somehow you may feel you are going in the right direction (or not), but you can’t see anything concrete that looks like a manifestation of your “new.” That’s how it has been for me. Until now.
Finding and copying down quotes that seem to meet a spiritual, emotional, or psychological need has been a continual practice for me. They have been my crumbs along the path as in fairy tales to lead me in the right direction. One of the quotes in the early 1970s that I found so helpful was the “Path with Heart” quote in Carlos Castaneda’s book. Whatever you may think about Don Juan Carlos’ shaman—whether he was real or fictional—some of what he said seemed to cut through my intellectualizing of everything and my need to please others, and this quote is a good example of one of those crumbs along the way that led me to slowly, slowly, invite and accept more pleasure into my life.
“Climb that mountain no matter no steep, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
–Bob Dylan
“Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.
Does this path have a heart?
This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.”
I find path with heart through pleasure.
Now, the path with heart identifies itself through pleasure for me. Is what I am doing now bringing me pleasure? Does it feel right? Do I feel this is where I belong? I can’t know what this blog will bring to others, or if it will bring them anything. What I do know is that writing these ideas down in this way sustains me the way food does.
I don’t mean that I feel pleasure at every moment of the day or night. That is not to be a human being. Sometimes I feel very trapped and angry caring for Brian 24/7 especially during COVID when I don’t feel comfortable having a friend come in very often to give me a break; however, when I sit down at this laptop and begin to write, I know the path I’m on is the right one for me. I don’t wish I were somewhere else able to write more hours a day. Deep in my bones, I feel that without being “trapped” in this house, I would not allow myself whatever short bits of time I have to write. Writing a bit every day gets me through the day. I am like a lover getting a taste of my beloved for a brief encounter. I cannot wait for the next meeting. I’m always ready. Words seem to flow out of me. When I finish a section, I feel renewed, more energy, more able to see to our daily needs.
“When your want becomes a must, nothing can stop you.”
–Uriah Hall from documentary film A Most Beautiful Thing about the first African American rowing team.
Sometimes at night I have doubts that any of what I am writing is worthwhile, yet I can’t stop putting these thoughts down. My want has become a must.
