Shoulders to the Wheel, Holiday Hugs All Around

 Out of My Shoes: a Memoir by Meredith Stout and Book of Itzolin: Life and Works of Itzolin Valdemar García, collected and edited by his Mother, Mia Kirsi Stageberg, are models for women putting thour shoulders to the wheel of change.

The ingrained, habitual sufferings of women, mothers, girls and thour children are degrading, destructive and murderous. Creation spirituality theologian Matthew Fox calls thour destruction of Mother Earth “matricide,” and poet Jane Hirshfield calls it something like “biospheric suicide.” The effects on thourselves, thour children and societies continues to be onerous, in spite of some scientific, mechanical progress that has “made our lives ‘easier.’” But at what cost?

I asked a woman neighbor of mine “So what happens when we sit in our apartments feeling sorry for ourselves?”

She replied, “I don’t know.” So I said,

“Nothing!”

Nothing happens. Nothing changes at all, and we just habituate the misogyny and destruction all around us into thourselves.

 

Stout, publishing through Driftword Press, tells the story of her life from her 1950s sheltered childhood in Altadena, where her brother got to go to an expensive college prep school, but she and her sister went to public schools. Their Mom said, “Aren’t you glad you got to have horses instead?” The girls agreed dutifully. Until they didn’t. Through her Berkeley faculty wifehood, she nodded and agreed, drank and gave dinner parties, but then picked herself up, took a job, moved out and tells a gripping and powerful story of friendship, self-examination and finding her true callings.

Stageberg’s collection of her son’s poetry, novella and other writings, Book of Itzolin: Life and Works of Itzolin Valdemar Garcia, with photographs and artwork published by Tarsal Press, is difficult for me to integrate, a little too “close to home.” Two of my four children are “not yet past their Saturn Returns,” depression, alcohol and drug abuse run in thour families. 

They are all gifted creators and passionate activists, just like Itzolin was. Itzolin took his own life in his late 20s, but left a moving and expressive body of artistic and literary work showcased in this volume.

As “womenwivesandmothers,” we’ve been conditioned to use thour excess “lovebeautyandjoy neuropeptides” in service to others, as well as thour bodies and minds. This would be OK if everybody in modern society valued, uplifted and emulated that, but we don’t.

Thour skills in caregiving, nurturing the young, empathy, sensuality and communication are often manipulated for marketing profits and others’ power, relegated to essential but disrespected low-paying employments and “greenwashed” into exhausting, burnout-ridden volunteer work. Thour families, communities and world are diminished and damaged.

It’s taking a long time to transform thour way out of it.

I’m persisting in using my invented personal plural pronoun thour because I think verbalizing the lack of divisions is one of the ways to “transform thour way out of it.” If we keep on therapizing “my Mother made me a homosexual,” “my brother made me a perpetual victim” et cetera, we’re just sitting in our rooms “feeling sorry for ourselves.”

That’s why I chose an email address nohkauznohgunz. No cows, no guns: the stereotypes of passive women and violent men, Warring and Whoring, we’ve been stuck with all of these years. Noh Theater is a ritual acting out embedded in the culture, and I think we need to act differently and practice different behaviors if we’re going to evolve, survive and change. Let’s hug thourselves, hug our kids, friends, community, Earth and elders for the Holidays.