Mel Kadel Women Overcoming Obstacles

Some of the most painful choices are braver and more profound to me than getting married or having a baby. I can think of a thousand stories where a celebration or ritual is needed but our culture doesn't know how to meet what is happening. I would love if a person who leaves an abusive relationship could run through a tunnel of arms stretched out and sparklers in the air. If, when a mother and father put their feet on the cold floor and stand up in the morning, when they have lost a child, they could somehow be met with a circle of tears. Could there be such a thing as a cap and gown for a woman who has finally decided her voice has more weight than the beat of a wing? Might we shower a man with gifts when he can allow himself to cry?  In my work with survivors of abuse, I am surrounded by mostly women, women surviving, women carrying the burden of each other, women picking up the pieces that capitalist patriarchy throws behind its shoulder in its pursuit of wealth for a few. 

Someone said to me that there is no gender pay gap in my work because all the employees are female, but that is just the point. Men see themselves as above all that nurturing, heavy lifting work of holding people's hearts together that are broken, and finding whatever scraps of resources can be found among the giving of donors who see what is going on. "Women's work" requires stamina, courage, fierce determination in the face of a culture that devalues them everyday with a big middle finger to equity in pay.  There is not a day that goes by where I don't have to make some kind of choice that avoids harassment from men, whether it be walking to my car with a bag of groceries, or just plain getting dressed in the morning. I do not enjoy the company of churchgoers very much these days, only a few religious friends from my past have really stayed with me as I have made choices that are true to what I have experienced.  I do not trust most religious communities to give a flying fuck about women, but I will say the times that I was free to fall apart when I was trying to walk their line was only ever in the shadows.  In back rooms, surrounded of course by other women, who encircled me like musk oxen protecting their young from predators. But there are words not in the English language that describe perseverance in the face of suffering.  And I think those moments of resilience are a thing to be recognized. Rituals for the poor or abused would not be beautiful for me if they culminated in the blessing of a pastor, a bishop, or a priest. The patriarchy needs to wash its hands of itself, men need to fucking listen to women and allow them to share in leadership if they are to have the honor touching such stories. One cannot protect abusers in the name of mercy while turning a blind eye to the ones the abusers have shattered on the floor.  If our communities were a safe place to fall apart, as this beautiful post on OnBeing, suggests, I would say we would be a lot more human, less violent, softer.  God damnit our communities would be a hell of a lot more feminine, and males would not be afraid to look themselves in the eye and see their own frailty, and just how much their selfishness hurts. Benevolent sexism hurts more than blatant misogyny because it is offered with such moral syrup, it is coated in lies. Over and over, it makes women apologize for their very existence. Might an orchestra in the pitch black desert night of mourning sound just as radiant, and more mysterious than some violin on a wedding day? Might we celebrate something more complex and real, less oppressive than the image of a bride dressed in virgin white, met by some priestly fellow at the end of an aisle?  I am still trying to name what I am picturing, still trying to find the words but it is much more communal, circular. Not looking for the highest point on the mountain so much, just the wonder of all that grows in its whole. What kind of celebration would it be for two people who love each other to look one another in the eye and be two equals, able to be broken and strong equally, free from the tug of war that our culture of binary gender hierarchy creates, free from the pretentions of a middle-priesthood between ourselves and all that we don't know. There would be dancing, that much I can say. 


If Community Were a Safe Place To Fall Apart

Telling Stories and Lies

"What makes a good story? Now, there’s two different concepts. There’s good story talking. We’re all trained to talk story and to talk story engagingly, but good story on the page has to have a really confident, engaging voice and that is nowhere near as simple as people would like to imagine. I work with a lot of baby writers. I believe in baby writers and I encourage the hell out of them, but getting them to relax enough to have a fairly engaging voice in the story is the hard part. It’s very, very difficult. Writers will take me on journeys I absolutely do not want to go on, but the voice catches me and pulls me behind them. That’s a lot of what I try to work with when I’m working with young baby writers. I don’t teach as much as I used to, but that’s the core of it.


Frankly, there are a lot of fantasies about all us Southerners who were given stories by our grandmothers on the porch. My grandmother lied, and one of the things I think that makes a good writer is that you figure out they’ve been lying all along and then you start sorting out what are the true stories and then you figure out that true changes all the time. There are stories I’m willing to tell now — now that I’m older than dirt — that I would never have been capable of telling you when I was 25."




-Dorothy Allison, Living up to the Legend: Dorothy Allison on Storytelling, Cussing, and Family Secrets ,  interview from deepsouthmag.org

Do yourself a favor and follow weirdmormonshit on instagram. This image is such a fabulous collage over the artwork of Arcade Fire's Neon Bible. The artist is a former mormon who pulls weird shit out of the Mormon archives and also creates images that portray a distorted reality. He shows how the underlying anxieties of mormonism dwell in the subconscious, whether you stay or leave.

When I lived in Boston for a time, I dropped out after a semester of theological study and discovered I was living in a place whose history and contemporary literature had much of the stew wherein Joseph Smith's early thoughts were born. I read a lot of 19th century history, literature, and when I was buried deep I remember feeling like the prophet's brain had a gravitational pull, much like hypnosis.  I really like the reflections of Jacob Bender's  blog on how an implicit Mormonism can be found in many of Arcade Fire's songs. Win Butler was raised Mormon, and I wonder how conscious he was of the dystopic nod to the mormon tabernacle organ on the record.

Lyrics from Ready to Start for example make you wonder:

"All the kids have always known
That the emperor wears no clothes
But they bow down to him anyway
'Cause it's better than being alone"

I remember being raised with a great fear of "anti-mormons."  I see that now as a tactic to isolate and scare me away from anyone that might make me question the story as the church tells it.  Weirdmormon shit understands that discovering reality is a trip. Living in the present and building a life grounded in real life is a gift, one that would never have been possible without the weird questions I had to ask to find my way out. Freedom is worth the ride, I will say, and whatever they may tell you, there is hope on the other side.  


"There are no events but thoughts and the hearts hard turning/
The hearts slow learning where to love and whom."
-Annie Dillard

"Religion has everything on it's side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence... and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas."

-Irvin Yalom The Schopenhauer Cure




-

Refuge

Almost four years ago I encountered Terry Tempest Williams' writing in a memoir about her mother's death: When Women Were Birds, Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. When I put the book down, I wrote to her and thanked her.  I also told her my story of leaving the LDS church. Her meditations on being a woman in that world, on birds, on wildlife, on family, was a turning point I will always be thankful for.

This fall I visited the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which she wrote about in her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. A marsh in a desert, around a great inland sea.  A great expanse of sky along the granite folds and ridges of the Wasatch range.   How do you ever forget such a landscape?  I never have.

I have learned that part of healing from trauma is reconnecting with your body.  Part of reconnecting for me has meant allowing my body to be in the place where everything once fell apart. Hearing the voices and seeing the deep blue eyes of my family members that lived through the trauma with me, and have put together the pieces in their own lives as much as they could.  I am convinced that trying to forget about pain is a form of disconnection with oneself, like a pipe break that spills beneath the soil and prevents anything from growing. I am not saying that dwelling on the past is advisable, but that there is a healthy kind of remembering, the kind that walks on an old trail and is willing and able to look around in a way that invites all that has changed to coexist with the pain. A meditation of sorts.

I once moved to Utah, bright eyed and hopeful in a story of eternity that glowed like the temple in the night sky out my window.  I dreamt of temple marriage, of being filled with god's pure love, and of waking up without shame.  I believed in heaven and angels and in visions and personal revelation.  And while I believed all these things I learned what poison tasted like, and my body learned how it took over, and I learned that my spiritual home was neither safe, nor were the men who watched all the doors. I learned my voice would never be mine in the world I inherited, and when I left I was gasping for air more than I was having any great revelations. I had to leave.

If you ever wonder if you are free in a relationship or within your religion, try to leave.  See what they do, listen to what they say or do not say. I have read volumes in the space of their silence.  My voice has grown in the hollows of the church's eyes.  I have learned what love is in exile, when the only one left to love me was myself.  I have learned to take their grimy teachings off my body, and to to find refuge in spaces they cannot see or control.

The mormon church is led by men with more power than they should have, who are corrupt and weak, and do not know the Jesus of whom they speak.  They believe they are filled with prophecy and benevolence, and their words are hollowed out by hatred and fear.  They cannot imagine a world where women are brave, powerful, and loud.  They haven't seen the visions I have, all the women they have made invisible.  I hear their wings, I see them soaring everywhere.

In Solidarity

Hard to put into words how beautiful it is to watch Tyler Glenn look the God of the LDS church in the eye and say he feels betrayed.  His new album, Excommunication, is worth listening to from beginning to end.  It brings up so many shared experiences for me and I imagine, many others.

Last lines of a great poem

...

Where then will I find the country
where women never wrong women
where we will sit knee to knee
finally listening
to the whole
naked truth
of our lives?

— Dorothy Allison,
The Women Who Hate ME. Poetry 1980-1990, Ithaca, NY, Firebrand, 1991

Ijeoma Umebinyguo

Linda Sillitoe

When I read Linda Sillitoe, I realize, I am not the first one to see the bigotry, the need for control, the fear of true feminine power in the words and actions of the mormon prophets, in the patriarchy, in their sky high and sacred temples where members are taught to whisper and be pure.  Bird shit is white on the outside but in the middle it is greasy and grimy like crude oil, and I believe the winged creatures have perfect aim, like so many leaders at the top, evading responsibility. I am among the few who know what the fall is like from their tower, and also to look up to realize the shattering of my worldview was actually a gift. 

The following poem was Linda Sillitoe's, written to her friend Lavina Fielding Anderson, who was fired from the staff of a famous and widely read church magazine, Ensign.  She had the audacity to provide the manuscript of a talk that had been stricken from that year's general conference, to another publication. If you are unfamiliar with mormon culture, it is important to understand that the dissemination of information must be done through the proper channels, through priesthood authority, not some woman who just wants to write it as it is. I have learned from the experience of feeling exiled, that on the outside, the landscapes become endless, your mind learns to shape shift as it slowly begins to recognize that reality was there all the time, and that no one can ever really silence you, no matter how hard they try.  

One by one
they throw us from the tower. 
And we spread our wings 
and fly. 

Rebecca Solnit

“The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.”

Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

Riverbed where ash and gas flowed in May of 1980, Mt. St. Helens

“If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.

My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.
I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.”

 

-Alice Hoffman, from Incantation

The Moment

by Margaret Atwood

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round. 

Burning Oneself Out

by Adrienne Rich

 

We can look into the stove tonight
as into a mirror, yes,

the serrated log, the yellow-blue gaseous core

the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes.
I know inside my eyelids
and underneath my skin

Time takes hold of us like a draft
upward, drawing at the heats
in the belly, in the brain

You told me of setting your hand
into the print of a long-dead Indian
and for a moment, I knew that hand,

that print, that rock,
the sun producing powerful dreams
A word can do this

or, as tonight, the mirror of the fire
of my mind, burning as if it could go on
burning itself, burning down

feeding on everything
till there is nothing in life
that has not fed that fire