Jack

conte crayon on newsprint

resting in the sun

Time to rest

I’ve been feeling guilty and ashamed of being in pain and needing time to heal from my surgeries. Somehow, I’d come to believe that it was my secret laziness at fault for my suffering, or a lack of gumption that makes me take so long to heal, and that I don’t deserve any extra time or rest. I’m allowing other people to take care of me and that feels shameful.

Charlie tells me that there is no shame in the body, sick or well. He says that I should give myself as much pleasure as I can because pleasure is healing.

He says I should eat foods that are comforting and nurturing and drink lots of water. He says I have to move, however gently, and I have to give myself the time I need to heal — and it may be a long time, so I’ll need patience as well as perseverance.

Charlie tells me not to be ashamed to ask for help, not to be afraid to depend on others. He reassures me that my husband’s love will give him the strength and desire to help me and that he won’t be brought low, but lifted up on his acts of kindness.

Charlie tells me never to give up. He says that life is a struggle, sure it is, but that the struggle and the pleasure will never end, and I shouldn’t wish them away, that it would be best to embrace them both in balance. He tells me to rest and pamper myself.

Movement and rest, nutritious food and water, love and kindness and trust are all means to heal our bodies when they’re sick and strengthen them when they’re well. There’s a whole lotta power in the healing things which can’t be bought.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m damned grateful for medical science, and I’d say that we’re blessed to have the scientific technologies, laboratory medicines, and university-trained surgeons to help us when we’re sick, but there are other technologies, medicines, and healers as well. Why not use them all? Do we think that those which can’t be bought for money have no value?

And why are so many of us taught to be ashamed of our weaknesses? Why do we feel like outcasts when we’re sick?

May love heal you,
Lilly

A Judgment Day Quiz

The god you worship may not be the same god I worship. Take this little quiz to find out if our gods have values in common. Answer each question as if the god in the quiz was the god you worship, then compare answers below.

It is Judgment Day and the Mighty Creator of the universe is judging each of us before the throne. The petitioners come before the Creator in groups of three. For each group of three, circle the one whom your god would embrace on Judgment Day and call “good and faithful servant.”

Group One: the Nations
1) a mighty nation that is wealthy, free and proud
2) a religious nation that harshly punishes sexual sinners
3) a humble nation that feeds the hungry and clothes the poor

Group Two: the Career Women
1) a wealthy and powerful politician who dined with kings
2) a wealthy and beautiful movie star who married a wealthy and handsome movie star
3) an impoverished and meek nobody who swept the school floors when the kids went home

Group Three: the Religious Men
1) a religious man who never drank or used illegal drugs, hated his wife but would never divorce her, had absolute faith in his god’s salvation, worked hard, and never gave away a cent
2) a religious man who never drank or used illegal drugs, had a ranch, and hated fags and blacks and Japs and anybody who didn’t believe in the same god he believed in, and never gave away a cent
3) a religious man who was a pot-smoker and a bourbon drinker, who struggled with his faith, who felt romantic affection for both men and women, and who gave away everything he had to the poor so he could follow his god

Group Four: the Voters
1) a voter who chose the anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-war, pro-death penalty candidate
2) a voter who chose the candidate who would eliminate social welfare and give more money to the rich
3) a voter who chose the candidate who would feed the hungry, cloth the naked, and offer healing to the sick for free

Group Five: those with Enemies
1) a person who would kill his enemies so he did not have to live in fear of them
2) a person who would kill his enemies so he could take their oil or other resources
3) a person who would feed his enemies and pray for them without fear

Well, I could go on, but you get the picture. In every case my god would have embraced petitioner number three, but in every case, my god would forgive us all and every soul would be saved. I wonder what your god would do?

If so many of us worship a god

• who commanded us to love one another
• who told us to pray for our enemies
• who wants us to feed the hungry and heal the sick in his name
• who asked the rich man to give away all he had to the poor
• and who is forgiving and merciful without end,

then why do we honor the wealthy and powerful? Why do we aspire to beauty and possessions? Why do we vote for war and against the social welfare?

If we believe in a loving god, then we should live a loving life.
Then we may stand before our Creator on Judgment Day, humble, but unashamed.

The Mushroom Apostle

He was sitting on a bench at Bell Park, reading a book about Padre Pio, with a backpack and a hand-lettered sign at his feet that said: Art for Food. I was caught up short, thinking that my son is also out in the world somewhere, making music on street corners and depending on the kindness of strangers, and suddenly, I had to take care of this young man, as if my caring for him would be caring for my son as well.

I went home and packed him a lunch and returned to the park and gave him my offering. Then we talked for a bit. He said his name was Demitri. I told him about Ben and the Jugtown Pirates. Then he told me he was 35 years old, and that for the past 15 years he had wandered the United States from coast to coast, just so he could tell the people he met that god was Love and god was real, just so he could live his belief, and live in absolute trust in god.

I was blessed to be in the presence of such faith. Demitri fired my own determination to speak about my god, and gave me renewed hope that there are, indeed, people who know the same god that I know, the god that loves before all else, that asks us to love one another, that provides in abundance for all, that has created in us a spirit of kindness and the desire to care for one another.

Perhaps, I thought, there are not only these two of us, sitting on a park bench. Perhaps there are others, hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of others, who hear the voice of Love, and reach out in love, and desire only kindness, and reject possessiveness and fear, and find security in friendship, and would gladly give up cheap sneakers and SUVs and the latest techno-toys so that we could have a world of peace and abundance for all.

Maybe we’re like mushrooms, I thought.

Did you know that mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of organisms that exist underground? Some species of mushroom can live for thousands of years and grow to the size of thousands of acres. Perhaps, under the ground of the dominator culture, deep beneath the marketplace and the religious institutions, in the quiet and the darkness, there lives and grows a community of loving humanity. Perhaps, someday soon, we will see the fruits rising to the surface and breaking through like mushrooms in a fairy ring. Like magic mushrooms, the society that eats of these fruits will be transformed—from violence to kindness, from fear to love.
Blessed be,
Lilly

Resist Apocalypse!

God will give us what we pray for,
so why pray for an apocalypse?
Why pray for a fiery and premature death for the human family?

Instead, please pray with me for peace.
Pray that people will treat one another with kindness.
Pray for the cooperation of all the nations.
Pray for the return of the garden.
Pray for ten thousand generations of abundance and joy.

What do you pray for?

Bonobos

Bonobos, also known as pygmy chimpanzees, are creatures very like us . . . except that they have developed a peaceful culture, based on sharing pleasure and food, and we have developed a self-destructive culture in spite of our human intelligence and ability to reason. And they have hairier butts.

I think that we humans can learn some things from our brother and sister Bonobos! Here are a few links where you can learn more.

Best wishes,
Lilly


Bonobos, Sex and Society
by Frans Wells. This is an article by the most renowned of the Bonobo researchers, first published in Scientific American in 1995.


Bonobos: The Left-Bank Chimp
by William Calvin. This website has lots of pix and links.


The Bonobo Way: Peace Through Pleasure
by the Block Bonobo Foundation
This website suggests that sharing pleasure could heal the world, that “you can’t fight a war while you’re having an orgasm.” I’m inclined to agree.

My work may stink, but I’m an artist never-the-less

August 4, 2006

I'm an artist. My work may stink, but I’m an artist nevertheless. I came to the visual arts only recently so I’m still struggling every day with developing my skills, managing various media, and learning the rules of perspective and form, and I’m fighting frustration because I can’t yet express my vision the way I want to express it.

But it’s not the ability to reproduce the visual world in two dimensions or carve it perfectly into stone that matters with art, anyway. It’s the vision that animates the work, and the most technically skilled work of art is not art if it does not express the artist’s vision.

What do I mean when I say the word “vision?” I believe that everyone experiences the world in a unique way, and so each of us lives inside of slightly different realities. Our realities include our sensory experiences and the content of our lives, as well as what we believe about human nature and the nature of life-on-earth, about the human condition, about our eating and washing, our lovemaking and war-making and childbearing and god-speaking and tool designing, and ten thousand other things. This reality is our vision.

We live in a highly conforming culture. In the United States, a great deal of our experiences—realites—visions are the same. Homogenization (McDonaldization as some have called it) is flattening our world so that we tend to speak the same way, eat the same foods, and dress like everyone else. We are taught the same things in schools, model ourselves on the same TV shows, hear the same stories, do the same things for fun, and in every way come to resemble one another more and more.

There is tremendous pressure to conform. If we don’t match the group reality, we may be marginalized, pathologized, criminalized, or laughed or condescended back into line. A quick example is the energetic kid more interested in catching crayfish than “preparing for the standardized assessment tests” who is labeled ADHD and drugged into conformity. Eccentricity is no longer considered benign. There is no place for difference.

An artist is a person who rebels against conformity, who claims his or her vision and shouts it out loud.

Even if you are a highly conforming “ordinary” person, there is some piece of your world that is special to each of you, and your special piece is your unique vision. If you share that vision, you become an artist.

Some people may think that unless we all see alike, there will be no peace, but if we all see alike, we will no longer be fully human. I believe that peace will come when each of us shares our unique visions. We must each become artists, and discover what is special in us, and share that with others. Every vision is necessary to the whole, and in the coming together of the visions of every member of a community, the community forms its culture, its reality, its ways of being in the body, on the earth. Is your vision on the television set? Is your heaven talked about in church? Is your future of peace and abundance considered possible in this crazy dominator marketplace world? If not, then become an artist and share what you see.

This sharing, whatever form it make take, will be art. You can express it visually, in writing, with dance, music or theater, and even in the way you live and interact every day. A person who has a vision that fires him and drives her, and who works hard to express that vision in form, that person is an artist, whether technically skilled or not.

Best wishes,
Lilly

Integrity

August 3, 2006
This little blog has become a force that urges me to self-reveal . . . and that's not something I ordinarily do. In fact, it seems like I've been hiding all my life. Hiding my smart and funny and talented little girl self from a family that expected compliance and ordinariness. Hiding my slim and sexy grown-up self under bulky clothes. Hiding my eccentricity and spiritual passion from a (now-ex) husband and his conforming world. Hiding my journal in a drawer.

But it's not just the fear that others will disapprove of me that's made me hide—because I have also been hiding from myself! Jung believed that at mid-life the soul goes through a crisis of integrity. It must explode outward or be forever silenced. That crisis has passed and now, my cyberfriends, it's time to detonate!

Explode and play!
Lilly

The god I love is Love

August 1st, 2006

The god I serve is Love. I may follow Jesus’ radical agenda for the well-being of humanity, but I do not serve Jesus as a god. I serve the god that Jesus served.

Jesus taught that all commandments are to be subordinated to this one:

Love one another!

It is my duty to my god to love radically and without exception. No amount of wealth or possessions or power will please my god. No excuses for violence and war will satisfy him. Poverty and starvation witness against humanity in his eyes. He waits for abundance, kindness, and peace on earth.

You’ll notice that I say “my” god, and not “God.” Heck, I don’t claim to know the one and only true Divine Being. That Being is too big for me to know, and I believe that he will always remain a mystery to us puny humans. I only claim to hear the voice of a god whose name is Love.

I think there are many gods, and we can guess which god a person follows by looking at the fruits of his or her actions. Does a person generate great wealth for himself? Perhaps he is following the god Mammon. Does a person sacrifice herself for others? Perhaps she is following the god Jesus. Of course, there are plenty of American Christians who will support the plunder of our earthly home and eagerly await its destruction who also claim to follow Jesus as a god. Go figure! I am often confused by the gods of other people.

I believe that many of the gods are good. I’m not against your god. I just love my god, and I sing to him, “Who is like you among the gods, oh Love?”

There is no real separation between religion, politics, society, economics, education, and all the other institutions of human life and culture. Although they are all cast as fragmented shards in the marketplace society, life is a whole, all of a piece. If I follow Love as my god, then I love in my politics and I love in my economics and in my sex life and in raising my kids. I do the dishes with love and I do my gorcery shopping with love.

I sure do love my god. His ways are ways of pleasantness and peace. They lead away from apocalypse and home to Eden. Love is a fine choice of god for a humanity on the edge of disaster. Why not choose Love?