Simply Occult

I was talking with my good friend Joy the other day about the wisdom of stay-at-home parents. She sent me this excerpt from a Wendell Berry Essay:

"Later in her book, Davis speaks of the wisdom of the 'valorous woman' of Proverbs 31 as a 'kind of intelligence bred through generations of work done in particular places, with particular materials, in response to concrete and immediate problems.' This articulate, humble, practical local intelligence is antithetical to imperial rule, and it is the only effective way of resistance:

The logic of empire is the centralization of information and social control; its essential processes are acculturation of local populations and appropriation of goods. Local knowledge, however, is difficult to control, since it is by definition dispersed and relatively autonomous. Nor can it be appropriated from without; [it] can be learned only from inside the community."

What really grabbed me, and I think my friend, was the truth that women, who have traditionally stayed at home and been kept at bay from academia and the wisdom of the professional world, held within them all this time a 'practical and local intelligence'. While society has deemed this state of home-bound living a pitiable weakness and vulnerability, we have the opportunity to reclaim its value, not within the bounds of empire, but as a counter imperium of autonomous rule!

In our ambitions of forming an intentional community, many of our friends have exchanged formal education and master's degrees for hours of personal study trying to reclaim that knowledge that responds to concrete and immediate needs: food, water, shelter, and health. That journey has led many of us to greater intimacy with the world, the seasons, the streams, the plants and predators and prey, new-found brothers and sisters of equal worth and countless wisdom. We seek out the wild places. We study plants and herbs for their healing and nutritional properties. And that's when it hit me: the image of Joy chanting in a tiny little home in the middle of nowhere, or Luke talking to himself or performing ceremonies alone in the woods, or Kate throwing different plants into a pot brewing up some cure for aches and pains...suddenly I saw my group of friends as a coven of witches!

While in the past I have dismissed witches as satanic and scary, I am now drawn to them as symbols of anti-empirical knowledge and feminine power. I am not talking about the religious movement Wicca, though I would not dismiss its aspects of Pantheism. I am talking about a story I have been told since I was a little girl. Look at the definitions of a witch in dictionaries: someone with supernatural powers; an ugly old woman; a seductive young woman; an herbalist. I am talking about a campaign against the greatest threat to the empire: local knowledge. This campaign slanders feminine/local power and wisdom. I am talking about the occult, or knowledge of the 'hidden', as opposed to knowledge of the measurable, or science. I am talking about that which society condemns. It's weird to live in the middle of no where. It's weird to throw plants into a pot and make your own potions. It's weird to join with nature in ceremony. It's weird to live independently of the empire.

And I like it.

Through whose eyes?

“I wish you could see yourself through my eyes”, my husband assures me as I berate my body, compare my cup size, and generally degrade, offend, slur, and affront every conceivable part of my physical being. His wording makes me wonder whose eyes I do see myself through in these embarrassingly unflattering moments. I’d prefer to blame it on advertising, which survives on the psychology of creating insecurity. I did watch television yesterday for the first time in a modern-world eternity. I would also be happy to place the blame on men. My identity as a sexual being is nothing I can closet walking on Third Street after dark, where an astounding number of guys, strangers, find it appropriate to use the endlessly offensive word “cunt” to refer to me as a woman. Or even my best male friends, who do not talk about meeting women, but about meeting “pretty girls”, as if it were perfectly natural for them to dictate that standard. Though, another plausible source of this verbal mutilation I subject myself to all too often may be any other woman I have ever met. I am not sure I know a woman who has not commented on her weight or hair or teeth or toes with disapproval. It has led me to the conclusion that this is what we women do, and where we place our worth. None of us are good enough. If Suzy thinks she’s fat, then I must be a whale! And if Joan finds herself unattractive with those lips, then I must be the blandest person in the world! It becomes this balancing act; this way of finding my place in a delusional but still very hellish pecking order. So, of course, it is my own eyes that too willingly see the beauty in the many women of my life, but use it only to evaluate myself. How do I stop this? I can, at least, stop degrading myself in front of other women, in hopes that I play no part in spurring on this dialogue in their head. Can I stop putting emphasis on my physical attributes once and for all? I don’t think so. Not alone, at least.

Sometimes Shrek almost gets it...

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?