Archive for ‘amdirect’

So many times, standing on the street corner, I would experience someone walking up to me saying hey girl! I love you! I hate men too! High fives!!!” I would smile a wan smile and i would be rendered speechless. While I knew many of my songs spoke about love, awakening, responsibility-taking and man adoring, I also knew answering but I don’t!” would have been somewhat of a lie. I had allowed my subconscious rage toward men to be written and sung about around the planet in a way that I knew I would be asked to comment on and stand behind in my day to day life. I knew that the singing of these songs had helped validate and comfort many people who had been in the same place I had been. And yet there I was, being repeatedly and directly asked about something that was still too painful and confusing for me to have come up with any answer other than, well, not really”. The person would often awkardly say oh. Well I love you girl!”
It is only lately that I’ve begun to truly understand the journey of my rage and pain with regards to men into the gratitude and deep respect that I’ve now begun to feel.

Having been born at the beginning of the post-feminist era, it was hard for me not to feel the effects and strain of patriarchy everywhere I turned. Whether it was on a volleyball court, in an improv class, in a studio, in the streets in different countries, in the pages of magazines I read or in the brilliantly written but decidedly woman-hating episodes I watched on television or on the silver screen….there were three perceived messages I received that were most pervasive:

1) women are inherently less important than men
2) women’s power and value lie in how they look, and how much sex appeal they have
3) there is no room for vulnerable emotionality in this world

At the time the only way I knew how to deal with this affront to my life force, as I saw it, was to blame someone, and that someone was the entire existence of men. I didn’t know then what I know now, and I felt I had no other way to channel this pain than to attack the very gender that I believed was the source of all this oppression I felt. When I am very quiet and I think about being a female in my youth, I am touched with a deep sadness about the disempowerment, helplessness and anger I felt. The thought of taking on a planet that demeaned women in the way it seemed to felt overwhelming to me.
The one thing that kept me baffled and stuck was how deeply I LOVED men, and how I knew on a spiritual level that I was part of them, that we were one. There was nothing more confusing that my continuing to fall in love with the enemy”. I read countless psychology books while holed up in my hotel rooms and on airplanes, to understand why god would create a world where women seemed undervalued, overlooked, objectified and invisible and for them to then fall in love with the very people they deemed responsible! A cruel hormonal joke! A terrifying existential imperative! A subconscious tendency fueled by the desire to self-annihilate! Get me to the nunnery!

I remember my father telling me as I grew up that my masculinity was a little overboard” and that he wondered where my femininity had gone”. I imagine that what he was seeing was my compensation and adaptation to a society that only heralded stereotypically masculine qualities as valuable and powerful, and that my femininity, as such, had taken a backseat in order to survive. I also see that I was challenging roles from the past in both my house and in the world at large. my generation and i were growing toward a more androgynous and integrated state of being, and the apple cart of defined roles was being upset at best, altogether flipped over at worst, in the eyes of my father. where does this leave men?” was his question when we talked about this years ago. if women are growing into such power, what of the men? What is left of their role?” my response then is something I still feel today, which is that as women evolve into the fullness of their being, so too are men invited to, alongside. And that my goal (and I think the goal of most women I’ve spoken to) is not to have the pendulum swing to the other side toward matriarchy, in order to punish men, but to have the pendulum dangle somewhere in the middle. Where both genders grow toward wholeness by embracing parts of themselves that their sexual counterpart embodies (both the qualities we hate AND love in them!) that the goal, in today’s supposed enlightened age, is to move toward wholeness, rather than goodness and righteous imbalance.
That the very act of life providing two genders to begin with is a call to both genders to become whole ny moving toward their counterpart (and that this applies to same sex couples as well, with the opportunity to claim both their masculine and feminine qualities equally available).

I see the many gifts of my having had such struggles and pain as a young girl in a perceived man’s world. To compensate and survive in that world I grew into all my stereotypically masculine qualities (my assertion, my leadership, my self-reliance, my ability to solve problems in a heartbeat etc). The very same qualities that my father had said I’d gone overboard in were the same qualities that have helped me live my life purpose and survive in the world. And it has become my goal now to get back to a place of balance and choicefulness with regards to which of my masculine or feminine parts I access in any given moment. I am free in this choice now.

I see the fear in both genders and in myself of having to navigate in this new climate of integration, a context in which there are no predetermined, easily defined roles. I see us all as cross-country ski-ers moving into virgin snow with no trail map. I myself prefer the unfamiliar and terrifying promise of wholeness to the familiar and safe fragmentation that is required to continue to play out these rigid and confining roles on this planet.
In no small part due to the love I feel for the most amazing men in my life, I am slowly growing into a feeling of deep gratitude for men and the patriarchal society that compulsively and rebelliously drove me to become all that I am today (although at times, I twitch from the ptsd of it all).
I am grateful for the choicefulness that has come of my journey into the wholeness of claiming both my masculine and feminine qualities. (All of us, doing this in the face of biological and historical predispositions to remaining half the being we were born to be! Kudos to us!) And I am growing into the awareness that my true peace comes from working alongside men as we all journey this unfamiliar terrain. That partnership speaks the real truth about how this all works. And that power struggle and us-vs-them speaks the ultimate lie about how life really works. I know that the feminist movement may have given us a (false?) sense of power. But it did not give us peace. I now see that joining hands with them makes this journey less terrifying, less arduous, and less lonely. And ultimately, a choiceful one, that leads directly to this peace.

-alanis morissette

In the shower the other day I was washing every part of my body and I thought about how this was the first time in my life that I actually just loved and accepted every part without having to force myself to.
It felt so natural that it almost took me off guard. I was lathering up and thanking every part for doing its’ individual thing and miraculously collaborating with all the other parts. I was filled with gratitude and didn’t have the other voices (for once!) fighting to be heard. this must be one of the many undeniable charms of getting older” I thought to myself.

thanks legs, for helping me run all over the place…whether It’s on a stage, or around my house, for helping me play sports or walk through an airport to baggage claim, or for buckling when I want to sob on the kitchen floor after a break up.”

thanks feet for holding my whole body up every time I am standing up painting…eating at my kitchen counter…watching a concert, waiting in line, running at the beach…how many times and how many hours I have stood or walked around or put all this pressure on my sweet little feet…running the streets of new york or in markets in far off lands.” I realized what a co-conspirator my feet had been up until this point in helping me live my life’s purpose.

And I did this for as many parts of my body as I could visualize.
All of this in the face of the years I’d spent comparing myself to random standards that were held up, particularly in western cultures, as the ideal” body. An ideal that left no room for the celebration of the millions of individual and different body sizes there are on this planet.

Even with all of this past comparing and objectifying and the tendency to have a lack of acceptance of cellulite or stretch marks or weight above average” (whatever that means) or acne or anything else wonderfully human…still, there I was, in my shower, loving my body for It’s vehicle and instrument-like qualities.

I was almost shocked by how far I had come in the acceptance of my body, knowing that I had once been in the throes of full blown eating disorders and had been fighting the voices that fuel those disorders up until the moment before I stepped into the shower. to celebrate this experience I purposefully walked naked and sopping wet right past the mirror in my bathroom, ignoring it, reflecting on how far I had come and victoriously smiling.

(I’ll need a few more thousand showers like that to get the voices completely eradicated…but I am glad to have started this blessed ritual!)

From as far back as I can remember there were two things that I had had hammered into my brain:
1) you are nothing unless you are being productive
2) you are nothing unless you are viewed as successful and proactive in the eyes of the world.

Looking back on my life thus far, I see the great gifts that buying into these two random and tyrannical beliefs has provided me. This work-or-you’re-useless regime did, however, require the overlooking of certain luxuries: the luxury of recreation. The luxury of peace. The luxury of following my nose. The luxury of surfing and the luxury of daydreaming without the voice of what have you DONE lately” coming in like malevolent muzak on an elevator speeding down to a workaholics anonymous meeting in the basement of my brain.

And so it is with this knowledge of all the tribulations and subsequent gifts that came of this single-minded approach to life, that I walk full steam ahead into early retirement. Ah. Even as I write it my sphincter loosens. Though I must qualify this by saying that what I’m describing is my sixth retirement. there have been others. The first one lasted only a few months before society’s tireless message of bigger-more-better-faster had its’ teeth in my calendar.

My first retirement was after the tour that followed the release of my record jagged little pill. I was spent and overwhelmed and in the middle of the most blessed crisis I can remember. I had always had pictures in my head of where I was moving toward, whether i was envisioning being in the studio, or being on tour, or writing, or traveling or serving in some way. These prophetic mental images guided me as a parent would a child across a crowded street and I came to rely on them. But at that time, following the swallowing of the truth of my no-longer-anonymous-to-the-extent-that-I-used-to-be-ness, the pictures disappeared. It went black. There were no visions of my future then. No photos of me in istanbul. No photos of me in the studio (a particularly scary vacancy in my mind’s eye as my inspiration to write was one thing I always returned to when shit hit certain fans). No photos of me with children or husbands or on adventures.
And the sound of my stopping was louder than any mix I’d had in my ears onstage.
I remember asking my friend at the time whether it might be an indication that it was time for me to die.
Cuz I thought no pictures=death.
I continued the quest in the only direction that was left: inward.
I questioned who god was to me, who I was, why I felt constantly driven to work a la fingers-to-the-bone. I knew that I was in for a whole new way of living -one that required me to jump off a cliff with no guarantee of a non-rock-to-the-skull landing. to my surprise I found it to be a fascinating fly-a-licious jump: filled with unknown and yet untasted adventures…
the more I focused on how liberating not knowing where I was going could be, the more I realized how fear-filled and faithless I had once been.

Deep into my first retirement I was introduced to this luxury of time. and what did I do with it? I stretched, conceptually and literally. I wrote a list of all the things I wanted to do to make up for lost time:
I learned how to snowboard.
I smoked a couple of joints and did mushrooms in the woods.
i read fiction (imagine!).
I read all the consciousness raising books I could get my hands on.
I met new people.
I nurtured friendships that were cobwebbed and forgotten.
I reintroduced myself to my family.
I broke up with my boyfriend.
I went to India.
I decorated my house.

I declared that I’d never write another song again. (my friend tim’s reaction to this statement was cool. let’s go eat lunch”. his reaction changed my life and I wrote a song that night, in accordance with the law of no-should”-means-maybe-in-this-freedom-you-just-might).

I volunteered in orphanages. and food banks and performed at benefits.(before my third retirement, which there is not enough time to write about, I realized that the tyrannical rule had simply gone from you’re not of any value unless you’re working” to you’re of no value unless you’re contributing”–same strap, different hand. More on this later.)

I’d begun mastering the art of following one’s stomach signals: whether it directed me to sit by the ocean or send someone who I’d been wanting to thank a big check or a love letter. I came to enjoy the freedom in falling and the bliss of the effect of saying no”. and I realized what time really is: a series of moments of now. all that living in the future, and all those thoughts of the past had been the real robbers of this luxury of time. my inability to see the flower on the way into my house (which now stops me dead in my tracks) or the dolphins that play just in front of my balcony was the real denier of joy.

I am now becoming what I had envisioned elderly people to be: someone who is charmed and touched by the gloriously mundane goings-on of a typical day. I realize now that retirement doesn’t mean the end of output, the end of expression, or the inertia of contribution, but rather the beginning of these same things, expressed from a place of inspiration rather than compulsion, lack and should”. I now see retirement as a state of mind, and my level of willingness to surrender into it has become my gauge for how faith-full I am.
a gauge of my faith in freedom and abundance.

and faith in a life led by the gut.YES! fuck me if I’m wrong but this is how I’d prefer to live. this is the place I’d prefer to make decisions from. this is a luxury that none other, in my opinion, can come close to. one that doesn’t require non-stop productivity, and only requires one thing: a genuine and ruthless commitment to truth and peace. and so it is on this note that i walk toward my 6th retirement, moving ever-forward to a time where my talk can be walked and where the continuum of being burnt out and procrastination stagnancy meets pointedly in the middle.