A justification for passion

A friend asked me the other day why I like being a social worker and, in typical Renee fashion, I have been mulling over my response for a week now. My initial reply, taken a little aback, was that I like people. After those three words, my answer became awkwardly scripted. Perhaps it’s all the job interviews. I felt like I was giving an answer to my mother, fitting my passions into her expectations. I began to define what I do by success. True, I don’t think there is any field that yields such practical and life changing results as social work. Medicine, sure, they save lives, I guess. But I have created families. I have ended domestic violence. Of course that’s bullshit. But playing any small part in these outcomes fills me with pride. I like people. I remember everyone I have worked with (in my young and very short career). But to justify myself, I talk about what I have done for people. Even though I was talking to my friend, who was putting none of this on me, I was addressing my parents and my culture. I would rather be true to my passions than justify them.

“Success is an ugly thing. (People) are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.”

― Victor Hugo

Not cynical, just very amused!

The interview process is a strange thing to consider. The power dynamics alone are bewildering. In my experience, it creates a situation wherein college educated, highly trained, perpetually lied to individuals compete for coveted positions of power whereby they can puppeteer the next round of employment-pleading peons. It works this way: You take a standard 9’’x14’’ sheet of (digital) paper, on which you showcase your most useful assets, things like $100,000 social clubs (pick any 4-year college) and an ability to generate, consolidate, appraise, or any other conglomeration of buzz-word-soup. You know...things that really highlight your value as a human being. You send this off to some unknown face, glowing blue in the light of their own computer-lit cubical. You hope that, by some act of the gods, you chose some word or reference that catches their attention, because it is in these empty details that choices seem to be made. I have been invited to interviews for such impressive reasons as my husband babysat a board members sons or I professed a certain denomination in a past life or, my favorite, the administrative assistant is also named Renee Smith. So you throw on an over priced business suit that makes you feel like Don Quixote in its impracticality to the needs you aim to meet as a social worker, and spout the most obsequious bullshit that comes to mind, sounding like a copious asshole. After you leave, you spend the next week or month (depending on the employer's sense of urgency or decency) re-living every detail of the experience, since your head is a proverbial clown car of self-doubts. Again and again you ask yourself, "Did I really try to fist bump the executive director?", but in reality, you are more concerned that you wont be considered for the position because you had the audacity to voice your concern that in every act of charity agencies like this 'commit', there lies the potential to undercut real social change. But not only are you 'ok' with this entire process, you thrive under it, because it judges you according to society's standards, which you have been raised to recognize and embrace. It beats the alternative of watching all you've worked for die away, even if that death is your only hope at real life.

I miss direction most

I remember being traumatized by images of WWII’s concentration camps in elementary school. I literally felt my innocence burning away as my face would tingle with discomfort and rage. I’ve lost that physical reaction against human cruelty and have, in some ways, grown accustomed to the existence of hunger, violence, and overt injustice. Imbalance. I wish I still felt that utter horror at the concept, but I do not. All I have is some intellectual or spiritual aversion to the current reality. Maybe that’s enough. Rather than slowly watch that flutter away as well, maybe I can choose to engage.

I have started applying for jobs again. I am restless. Maybe it’s discontentment. Is it healthy?

Children endure horrific abuse daily. I have seen the rows upon rows of filing cabinets documenting the discovered cases of abuse. I have also seen children taken from the care of their families because the definition of neglect is nearly inseparable from the definition of poverty. People in my city are hungry. I have seen the anger of people who show up to food lines and leave unsatisfied. It’s real, and it’s close, and it only seems to get worse. (Cue Music)

Sometimes I think social work holds no answers to these problems. And as a social worker, I have felt myself becoming cynical trying to create change amidst competition, manipulation, aggression and other coping mechanisms that originated in people, communities, and organizations from some line of injustice or imbalance that seems to me inescapably cyclical. Which might be why I cannot see my friend community’s desire to farm land and live relatively isolated from the world as anything but escapism. I want that. I want to walk away from the cities and the islands of rural towns and find a place to hide. I want to tend to the land and my own spirit; the things I can more easily control.

But

I feel as though, at some point, despite the hurt and rage and nonsense of humanity, you have to be willing to say, “Ok, I’ll be part of this world”. Not only because it’s an illusion to assume you are not, but also because, in engaging, I have also seen the hope. I have seen strength and trust and empowerment and self-discovery and balance. It is much like the food line: I resonate with the feeling of being fed but unsatisfied. It's a frustration to hope. But watching the slow unraveling of a very complicated knot, you sometimes witness it break open in a burst of freedom. And it is freedom for us all.

"Although the world is full of suffering,

it is also full of the overcoming of it."

-Helen Keller

The Great Escape

I am drawn to Donald Kraybill’s concept of an upside down Kingdom, or Pema Chodron’s visual image of spiritual journeys taking us down rather than up mountains. I like the idea of becoming less. But I see one problem with that – I am a woman. And I have been raised to see my value in lessening myself. As I feel this desire to readjust my focus on power and success, I am painfully sensitive to the subtle coercion of a sexist society in this possibly-less-than-innate desire.

I have written before about how I feel torn. On the one hand, I want to nurture my professional talents and pursue political change as a social worker on a grand scale. On the other hand, I want to reconnect with the land and spend my days farming with an intentional community of friends. Why these two are at odds has been difficult to express, but having spent the summer out of school, I feel myself leaning heavily towards the latter.

Without graduate studies, I have found time to make a solar oven that, after a few adjustments, was able to cook rice and cookies (not together). I’ve started washing my clothes by plunger saving water and electricity, and building killer forearms. I garden. I cut grass with a push mower. I can peaches and salsa. I’m pretty much the coolest person there is by the standards of my social circles. Unemployed this summer (also popular amidst my social circles), I have found that these money and earth saving techniques are, in fact, a job in themselves. And I like the work. I enjoy sweating while mowing the grass, and then dipping my hands into a water bucket to wash clothes. I like my sun-slobbered skin more than freezing in an office in August. I like having dirt under my finger nails way better than paper cuts. And I feel good, saving the planet, saving money, being creative, being healthy, and reconnecting with my body and the earth.

As my friends bear children, this draw to ‘natural’ living is more intense. I still avoid child bearing like the plague, but suddenly I am drawn to the idea of being a stay at home mom, literally making a living with the every day tasks of frugality and preservation. Breast feeding – what an incredible concept! Not only are you bonding with your child, using your body to provide them with the sustenance they need, but it’s free to boot! I also enjoy the concept of cloth diapers. Use and reuse the same twenty diapers, day after day, child after child. No waste except, of course, what fills the diapers in the first place.

And yet I recognize that everything I have come to love about tending a home and raising children is a slap in the face to feminist advocates who have worked so hard to create ways to help women escape the bondage of work at home.

My resentment of authoritarian obstetricians is not new. They generate incredible lists of no-no’s for pregnant women. No cats, no caffeine, no aspirin, no alcohol, no fish, no raw milk, no fluid from hotdog packages, no bologna, no herbal teas, no pesto, no canned or prepackaged foods, no soft cheeses, no diet soda, no pineapple, no sesame seeds, and, of course, no stress. Some of us already avoid aspirin and caffeine as much as we avoid cat litter and the fluid from hotdog packages. But the underlying message that irritates me is that we suddenly acquire some value as the incubator for a child that might come out male; that every detail of our lives carries the responsibility of a child's health; that women hold the burden of blame, but very little power.

My understanding of feminism to this point has been reconnecting with the positives of femininity. Recognizing our connection to the earth in our cycles in a way that I do not think men are able. But another way to say that is 'embracing the inevitability of biology'. I am less comfortable with that definition. I felt a certain empowerment in the concept of breastfeeding, yet choosing to breastfeed would severely limit me in other roles and identities. Baby formula, disposable diapers, and tiny glass jars of mush bananas were a huge step in getting women out of the home and keeping them employed. Everything that has helped free women’s time for careers seems to run contrary to the environmental movement and earth-bound feminism I am swept up in.

I was glad to run across excerpts from Badinter’s “Le Conflit” which put words to my emotions. She says that “a movement dressed in the guise of a modern, moral cause that worships all things natural…drives independent and accomplished women out of the world and the workplace and into the house, where they will presumably squander their best, and most sexually interesting, years in unremitting slavery to their babies.” She goes on to say that, “They have been told to love those sacrifices as much as they may (or may not) love their babies, and to give themselves over to the jouissance – “orgasm” would be my translation – of intimacy with the little one who, in place of their husband or lover, will be sharing their bed for at least three years”.

So this is where I am stuck – do I aspire to the pressures of hard work at home without the pay, power, or prestige of male counterparts? Or do I aspire to the pressures of feeding a labor force and economy based on planned obsolescence? Or do I follow the path of many women and do both, stretching myself incredibly thin in dominating/submitting to both?

Graduation Day!

Today, I graduate with my Master's degree in social work!

I have aspired to a new level of cognitive functioning,

there's only one appropriate way to celebrate...

UFO's Abound

I awoke this morning from the static of a dozen unidentified flying objects outside my window.

Chirping and tweeting. Searching for love and, hopefully, picking tics out of my backyard.

I'm familiar with some birds.

The vultures that crash through the uppermost branches in the pine trees outside my front door are anything but inconspicuous.

I can spot a mallard.
If I weren't blogging, I'd call it a duck.
I heard one this afternoon in a water tunnel under a field, echoed not only by itself in the reverberating cavern, but by a brood of ducklings trying to keep up in the dark.

Seagulls.
Robins.
Blue things and red things.

Beyond that, these flutes of the air are a mystery to me.

To center myself, I have devised a plan to get to know these birds.

I choose a favorite call, and then look with all my might for the source. My first pick sounded, to me, like the Simpson's portrayal of an Irish leprechaun.

While tying up my peas this week, I finally spotted the culprit - a surprisingly recognizable finch:
The Cardinal.

I sense this longing among my peers to reclaim what's been lost in the last few generations.

A connection to the land.

An understanding of how things work.

A sustenance based on community.

Beauty in imperfection.

Simplicity and the work that comes with it.

An awakening to the voices around us; the birds and frogs and millionfold mysteries that make our world a living and functioning place.

A new amour propre, that values the self in relation to these things in the present. In the process.

Next on my list, a bird that switches from high, punctuated notes, to low fermatas.

I don't care to know it's name, but I hope to awaken to its presence.

It grounds me in my own.

Inter-Is

Last night I had a series of complex dreams in the style of Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible.

There was a family that lived in the hollow of a mountain. Water flowed through the hollow but pooled in front of their home. The home was simple at times, otherwise decrepit. It smelt like dust and burnt wood. There were four children. An angry oldest child (13) who was sometimes a 'bully' and sometimes a 'trouble-maker', two younger boys (10 and 8) and a girl (6). There was a thin mother in a worn cotton dress that came down to her mid-calf. And then there was the father, an abusive man who I mostly only saw from afar. He was normally working or drinking.

In this dream, my conscious took turns inhabiting different bodies. In most dreams I observe scenes like a puppeteer. Hovering. Meddling. In this dream, I literally saw through the eyes of the different people I embodied. For example, when I was the six year old girl, I was walking behind my mom on a hill and noticed the bruises on her legs as the dress lifted with each step. My imagination met my eye level. I remember thinking how pretty the shapes of the bruises were, but how I didn't like something about them. Maybe the color. My imagination met my age level.

Most of the dream were scenes with overly simplistic plot, but deep emotion. I remember being the "thirteen year old bully", and sitting on the porch with the dad while it was raining. I remember these mixed emotions of fear and joy. I was anxious to be that close to the man, but exuberantly happy that he allowed me that close. In that mix of emotions, I became overly anxious about the rain flooding the house, the splash back from the porch dampening my clothes, and the noises of my siblings inside and how each overheard word made my father shift in his seat. I wanted to run in and 'pound some sense' into my siblings. I remember so much detail. The smell of the rain. The fog over the water. The sound of the man's weight on the chair as he rocked back and forth on the rotting floor boards. How his uneven whiskers moved as he smoked his pipe.

In a more dramatic scene, I remember being the ten year old boy and hearing my six year old sister scream, so I ran to the water and saw that my older brother was motionless at the bottom, caught in some seaweed or trash or something. So I dove in to try and pull him up, but I was too scared, and began frantically swimming towards the top. I saw my mom running towards the water, and I felt shame at not having my brother with me. She came splashing into the water, and became hysterical. I was afraid she would drown, and so I tried to pull her to shore, but I was so small compared to her, and she was treading water, holding me tightly. Later I dreamt the same scene, except I was the mother, horrified that I had lost my son. I swam out and saw that there was a rope around his neck, and realized that my husband had done this. I transitioned from this fear that I had lost my son, to this even deeper fear that immobilized me, and I clung to my ten-year-old. The dream was so strange, because when I was the ten year old, I saw something around my brothers neck, but assumed it was accidental. Any guilt or blame was on me. When I was the mother, I put things together differently.

What really struck me about this dream was that, every now and then, I was myself as a social worker, 'assessing' the family. After being several of the children, and after being the mother, suddenly I was coming to realizations like, "Mother is borderline MR...". Also, when I was the children, I felt scared, hungry, angry, cold, anxious, but never embarrassed. But suddenly when a child welfare worker was there, I remember being conscious that I was covered in dirt or poorly dressed. I remember feeling stupid, and worse, that my mom was stupid. And sometimes, depending on the child, I began to hate my mom.

I was the social worker, but not any more than I was the mom or the six year old. And yet, as the social worker, after having 'lived' as the mother and her children, I thought about how best to break up the sibling group in foster care placement. I was the social worker, not any more than I was the mom or the six year old, but as the social worker I detached and used the power inherent in my role, but without understanding those involved as I obviously had the ability to do. I was the social worker, not any more than I was the mom, but I didn't share my power. I had my own idea of what was best for the family, forgetting that I was the mom.

Dabbling in Determinism

After two set years in grad school, glued to one region of the world and one main task, it is strange to come upon another fork in the road. I think about all the people I might have been. This is a very real consideration to me. As I see it, the roads I have taken have lead me to a very specific identity (or, at least, some very specific roles). A career. A last name. Maybe I would have been "Mrs. Smith, MSW" regardless. If the nature of time is fixed, as we understand it to be in the past, then I'm willing to see the future in a similar fashion. But my perception is that I have a lot of choices coming up. I could work clinically, leading to an LCSW and growing a certain set of skills. Or I could work in the macro-level, collecting and analyzing data, influencing policy, and growing a completely different set of skills. Both are within me. Another split: I could return to Thailand or Guatemala and really solidify a second language, feel that constant challenge and self reflection offered by a cross-cultural vantage, and really begin to align myself with those fighting poverty and oppression. Not to mention, I might eventually be able to eat spicy food without crying through my nose. Or, following another path, I could live with nine close friends in the mountains of West Virginia, tending to my own physical, psychological, and social health, making a positive impact on the world by having intentional relationships with the land and people, and being perfectly content to smell like butter the rest of my life (as I am told those of us from the US do). I am discouraged to consider the inability to do both. I am relieved to remember that some choices are not mine. If my husband's contract is renewed, we probably wont go to Guatemala. If I don't get a macro-level job, I'll probably work clinically, and vice versa. And I balance my (un)controllables with those of a million other people, towards a collective future yet unseen.

I know this - what I do now, in this moment, to grow mindfulness or relationship or integrity or discipline or learning or self-acceptance or joy, will follow me in whatever role I fill, and whatever future (fated or yielding) I live.

Beginning

I'm not sure how to begin a blog. I suppose I will resort to quoting someone else. That's what we do, right? We learn through imitation. I think about the play therapy I've studied; about children sorting out their feelings through imitation in knee-high kitchen sets or with stiff-armed Barbie-moms holding stiff-necked Barbie-babies. Skinner and Vygotsky would agree. "Through others, we become ourselves". Chomsky would contest, soft-spokenly suggesting the innate. I am not sure if autonomous thought is a farce or the only real thing (or more probably, neither...or both), but in either case, I am not there yet. Not bold enough to share my mediocre thoughts so independently. Instead, I use my stiff-versed Barbie-Hugo as a proxy to help me sort out my fascination with social work and social networking. For that, I will even forgive him his masculine pronouns.

"Nothing is more terrifying than contemplation of (a person's conscience). Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul. To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all. Conscience is the labyrinth of illusion, desire, and pursuit of the furnace of dreams, the repository of thoughts of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophistry, the battlefield of passions. To peer at certain moments into the withdrawn face of a human being in the act of reflection, to see something of what lies beyond their outward silence is to discern struggle on a Homeric scale, conflicts of dragons and hydras, aerial hosts as in Milton, towering vistas as in Dante. The infinite space that each man caries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movements of his spirit with the acts of his life, is an overpowering thing."

~Victor Hugo, Les Miserables