Buona Pasqua! Easter in Italia part 1

--> As he jostled the key into the lock on the slick, green painted, wood of our doorway Josepy said "Don't miss the Luminaire procession tomorrow night in honor of Good Friday. "It was Good Friday, the streets were open and empty." The lyrics of a Coco Rosie song mumble through my head. Luminaire, the words spark memories of hand crafted lanterns in the shape of fish and other animals lit from within and marched down the walk ways of young, Olympia streets to ultimately surround the small lake over looking the capital. I was giddy with the news. What would a luminaire procession be like in Italy? How lucky we were to find ourselves in a pretty seaside small town on this momentous night.

Half way through dinner at a small fish restaurant I heard the whispers of chanting on the wind. It was pouring rain, we asked the waiter if the luminaire would still happen in the rain? He assured us it would. The owner of the eatery kept coming in and out as excited as a puppy waiting for the sun to go down and the procession to start. Finally we heard the clang of a bell. We wiped our plates clean and headed out down this village's one main street. We were greeted by the shiny backs of Italian villagers, huddled under raincoats and umbrellas in small groupings all with their eyes locked on the thin pathway through the middle of the road. It was dark, wet and magic. Suddenly the man next to us broke out into a choral song in thick Italian, five women surrounding him joined in, we mumbled along as if we knew the song. As we hummed a small procession could be seen at the top of the hill. A ghostly looking gathering of white paper covered candles held by most of the town’s people slowly processing down the hill singing along in the strong and beautiful Catholic hymnal music. They would move forward a few steps then stop and sing, a new verse each time. Then stop and repeat. It seemed that the verses corresponded to Jesus journey to the cross or being taken back to the cave where he had his ultimate resurrection.

As the procession got closer we could see village boys dressed in white hoods and robes, I saw them as symbolizing the Holy Ghost. They walked in front of a small entourage of young girls dressed in white carrying a casket holding a crucifix. Jesus’s body was exposed to the chill and rain of the night. Looking down at his body in the rain stirred a sad emotion within me. To be present with the pain he experienced was eye opening and sorrowful.

We made our way to their tiny church right on the water. Compared to the Gothic Renaissance churches of the rest of Italy, it was simple and almost barren. Being rebuilt from a terrible storm a few years earlier they had only been able to rebuild the pews and alter in front. We gathered into the damp and frankincense scented church and sat on the hard, familiar, wooden pews. The service was short, consisting of many calls and response we could not translate but hum along with as we had in the street. We sang a little and then it was time to go.

 The town folks gathered in a line down the middle to give their blessings to the recently processed crucifix of their church. I walked with them, making my way to Jesus. I did not know what to expect, just that it made sense to give my blessings to this holy man on this day. When it was my turn I went up with an older women. She put her hands on his head, she cradled him like a newborn baby, kissing his forehead and holding his hand. Watching her comfortable and sentimental gestures with this statue made my heart melt. I put my hand in his thin, glossy, statue hand and stroked his cheek like I would my daughter. Tears welled in my eyes, I remembered how much I had once loved Jesus, and I forgave him in that moment. I forgave a hard childhood, my anger at the Catholic Church, the concept of original sin. I forgave all the shit people put on him and do in his name. I just filled my heart with love. I kissed his cheek and left that church feeling more alive, like I had turned a leaf in my adult life. Making peace with Jesus.

A Glimpse of Italia

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I made this book in honor of my dearest friend Melissa. Melissa has seen me through all my biggest adult life journeys. She has been there for the birth of my daughter, maid of honor at my wedding and adventure explorer on multiple trips. She has seen me through all kinds of phases including living with me in a one room artist loft, taking me to my first drag show, supporting me in my decision to date a man and go to college. Two things I did not see in the cards in my early 20's. She is solid as a rock in my ever changing life and I feel so lucky to have her. This is for you Honeybee, may we be this close forever.

And Sometimes Mama Gets A Break

I am dusting off my back pack, shouting so long to the old USA and diving into the thrilling sport of adventure and travel with my dear friend Honeybee. We leave next week for the olive groves, red tiled roofs and picturesque piazzas of Italy. Landing in the romantic city of Venice. This trip has been six months in the planning yet I still can't believe I will be boarding a plane alone next week to have 10 days of kid free time. I feel like I am getting away with something I should not be. Like once you become a mom that is your identity something you can't peel off like a satin dress. its like a pair of plaid pajamas you will wear for the rest of your life. The freedom of my early 20's was washed away. I now get my thrills from the domestic existence of mostly full time parenting and being in a partnership.

Well, I love my plaid pajamas, especially the sweetest M family, but sometimes it is just right to get back into that satin dress, dawn some fresh lipstick and step out sans child roaming the world the way I used too. Sure I am scared, scared I will miss Sweetpea so much, that she will miss me, that something will go terribly wrong when I am gone and I will be too far away to do anything. Scared daddy will be resentful of my full freedom, that at work, my students will forget me and we will have to re-invent the wheel when I return after getting to such a good place. Will all this fear stop me? No way. Thanks to the advent of Skype I will get to see her sometimes. She gets to be with her loving grandmother while I am gone and be with her adoring daddy. I will also get the chance to hit the refresh button on our relationship. Parenting a toddler requires a lot of refresh.

We start in Venice staying right off the grand canal. We move on to Cinque Terra and stay in the town of Vernazza. After this we head to Florence to rent a car in Tuscany for Easter weekend. I have never ridden a car in a foreign country I am scared and excited. After this we cross our fingers that the Uffizi Gallery in Florence will be open Easter Monday, if not we will see the Duomo and enjoy the renaissance architecture. We then take a train south to Sorrento in search of sun and beach on the Amalfi coast. We will end in Rome, a city I have been to most recently while filming Travel Queeries.

This trip marks a friend anniversary. 11 years ago two travelers in back packs with train passes and a hint of whimsey transversed most of Italy in 2 weeks. Now 11 years later with roller luggage we take on a  smaller chunk of the country hitting the highlights. A focus on good food and relaxation. As I grow older and see how easy it is to value my family life over my friend life I am happy to make this exception to the rule.

Toddler Tantrum

--> We are in the midst of a painfully hard growth period. Sweet pea is asserting her power and will and her just as stubborn mom is not cowing to all her desires. It is exhausting to have power struggle after power struggle. The inner voice says there must be some amazing life changing advise. If I was just doing this method or that she would listen better, I would have the upper hand, parenting a 2 1/2 year old would be easy and delightful. Instead I am fraught with anxiety about what’s around the next bend, what hump are we crossing now, how to get us both out of deep water without drowning.

Her daddy's approach is to avoid power struggle. He coaches me on distraction techniques, offering choices, giving her as much say in the thing without doing all of it. Example, letting her hold the candy that she wants to eat instead of just giving it to her so she has control of it but does not eat it. His method does seem to work some but doesn't always sit well with me. It goes along with giving her a lot more sugar and watching tv then I would like. It also looks like avoiding and distracting away the feelings that I know will bubble up no matter what we do.


I consulted friends and family via facebook about it one morning. I got a lot of good tips including foot massage after a tantrum to ground us both, following a stricter schedule so she knows what to expect, offering her choices and new objects to fiddle with as we go through a transition. Also just setting the party line and dealing with the volcanic eruptions of having a boundary placed on her. They were all good ideas and I will probably use a mix match of those ideas when confronting tantrums but it all seems to come down to what will uniquely work for my kiddo.


I have had to face my own feelings when she tantrums. Embarrassment: Luckily I have let go of a lot of feelings of embarrassment but still some linger when she throws an on the floor fit in the grocery store. Jealousy: My kid can wail, and damn, it feels good to wail. To show how freakin' hard it feels. Why does she get to take up that much space and I don't? I am not saying I want to throw a fit in the middle of the grocery store but at the end of a particularly hard work day I have been known to roll down the windows, blast the music and scream while driving to pick her up from pre school. I think she gets it honest. Fear/Sadness: Seeing my baby struggle like that is hard, it brings up fears that I am raising her wrong. Why did I decide to bring another life into this heavy harsh world? What values am I sending her when I lose it while she is losing it? How can I teach her empathy? That not just her desires matter? 


Facing all of this is difficult and complex and I am still figuring out how to work out these emotions in a healthy way and separate them from when she is having her big feelings. Still sometimes we both end up on the side of the road crying as I explain to her through sobs she can't scream the entire time while mommy is driving.


For now what I have figured out for my dear sweetpea is a lot of one on one and family time, this seems to lesson the desire to act out for attentions sake. Also when going to an overwhelming place like the grocery store letting her fill the cart with what she wants then at check out separate out the stuff and tell the cashier we don't need those things. It’s an extra step for the awesome grocery store employees but seems to make all the difference. Hopefully this will be a temporary need. I also let her pick out varieties of things for us like fruit and veggies. Getting a lot of emotional support and making sure I am getting down time and alone time. I am always ready to take on her big feelings after a good sleep or artist date by myself. We also do a lot of talking out the situation and offering something exciting at the end. Like explaining if she puts her shoes on now we can then skip over to the big tree and climb it together. 

The thing I am the most proud of is we always talk about it after the tempers have settled. Even when I lose my cool and shove her into the car seat, or pull the thing out of her hand without coaxing it away, Sweetpea has an emotional language. We talk out how she was feeling and how I was feeling. We can identify the emotions together and hug afterword. This kind of intimacy and communication makes me believe we can make it through any hardship together.

The Dawn Of A New Era

Dearest Reader,

Below is a post I started to write on January 1st. For the month of January I have been working outside the home! I am a teaching artist for an awesome organization called Creative Action http://creativeaction.org/
Sorry for the long neglect, a lot has happened and my blog has been very spotty with the updates. I now have found time during the super bowl to sneak away to a cafe and write about this exciting life of mine. Enjoy!

So here we are the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the end of the Mayan Calendar. In my early 20s when I was big into the activism scene this date really scared me. I really thought this would be the end of the world or a shift to things getting much worse. As I got older and closer to the actual time of 2012 I started thinking differently. Maybe the fear I had running for so much of my youth dissolved a little, maybe I just had more perspective living as an adult in our crazy society, a shift occurred from within. I started seeing this time as a chance for our country to get better. For my generation to pick up the slack, for an ancient way of thinking to come back into fashion where people are more connected to their actions and feel fulfilled by being connected to each other and nature.  

I want to live my life in a sustainable way, I want to have my family more connected to the food chain through growing our own food, building our home and treading more lightly on the earth then we currently do. We talk about a shift from urban to rural. It would be challenging, exciting and scary. We want to live near a city so we can use the resources of it. Both our careers are city reliant and I imagine it will stay that way for a while. All my life I have known how to observe nature through the lens of a city dweller. Other then brief stints farming for a few months, I have lived in a city context and found my sacred space in city parks, down alleyways and on the frequent hikes just outside of the places I live. 

 Having a yard is one of the key ways I have stayed connected to nature. I follow a Cardinal family as they play in the pecan tree outside our bedroom. I stare at the intricate patterns of the elm leaves as I swing in our hammock. As I walk Sweetpea to the park I stare at the grackle impressions, deep black on immense blue sky. I get my hands dirty in our small, freshly built veggie bed and pick caterpillars off our cabbages.

This meditation with the wild things that live near me helps keep me focused and guides my thoughts to the beauty of this universe, to the interconnected web of life, to my version of deity. I am teaching k-1st graders about local ecology and art. We are getting to know animals that live around us, plants that grow in back of the school and trees that line our neighborhoods. Passing on this information is key to our survival as a species; it’s that ancient wisdom that is rarely shared. 

I see the spark of connection in Sweetpea. She delights in plants, picking carrots and petting flowers. I look forward to the days she has several acres to run around on and claim as her own, mud forts, streams and hollow logs. Daddy and I are close to making this vision come true; we are also far from it. For now we have our home for another year, another year of tending plants, listening to birds and bonding with our neighbors.

This morning our UU reverend led a sermon on female deity and God as a huntress. This was the first time I had really thought of a female deity as something other then a mother. I loved it! I love the mother Goddess archetype too, but somehow being able to imagine a higher power as a huntress got my creative juices flowing. The Age of Aquarius is a turning, a looking back and looking forward. This time is about highlighting female power in our society. I am ready to dive in.

 

For The Love, A Birthers Tale

I have been thinking about the love I experience as a parent for my child. I spend a lot of time on this blog dissecting the identity of being a parent, sharing my trials and adventures. Sometimes I forget to share just how wonderful it is to be a parent to a little one.

I feel so blessed that I get to be with Sweetpea. The second she opened her voice to me with the most adoring squeal I thought, my God, this is my little person. This is her voice! My heart was filled with a warm overflowing cup of love that washes down my back every time I think of it.

Painting by Lenny Dinar Dothan

I knew I was going to have Sweetpea. She decided when, but I knew. The ocean told me. (Forewarning, wooo moment.) I was at The Earth Activist Training and we had one afternoon off. At the training we were learning permaculture. We were doing earth magic and learning how to interpret birds and track animals. We were also designing sustainable buildings and doing water rituals. It was a beautiful and unique training that left me on that day off in a little bit of an ethereal mood and a calm open place. 

I had just walked through a grove of redwoods with some friends. We decided to head for the coast for some ocean gazing. The California coast is inconceivably beautiful. Particularly the Northern California coast is very dreamlike. I love the all encompassing rambunctiousness and power of the ocean. I also marvel at how it is always lapping at our coast line, water is always moving, putting on its majestic show weather we are watching or not. The ocean was wild that day. There were huge swells of waves battering the beach and sucking up whatever got in the way.  I stood right at the edge of the white foam staring into the abyss. The waves were thumping me like a drum. I unfocused my eyes and my mind and stared right into a wall of towering water. A voice within me said, you will have a baby. She will be a girl. You are going to be a mom. When I opened my eyes again one of the huge waves clapped and gobbled up my exposed legs in its wake. I was dripping with salt water, I laughed and cried. I knew the ocean was right. It was so perfect.

2 1/2 years later I was in a hospital in Tacoma Washington fighting with all my might to bring this baby into the world. My fight was long and good and bittersweet. Sweetpea and I were ready for the fight. She still fights in a similar way when she is upset. She presses her body into mine struggling to wriggle free. She cries and wants me to hold her tight while she squirms. I love being able to see her struggle and come out the winner! The fight for life is an amazing struggle. It is something I felt I missed out on. In my birth story my mother had a planned cesarean. The doctor did not think she would be able to have me the natural way because both my brothers were also cesarean. There are a lot of enforcers in society to make it hard for me to fight, being raised female, the only girl and the youngest of two older brothers, just to name a few. This first fight I missed out on though is something I knew I wanted to be different for my kid. It was different. In the end I also had to have a cesarean. After a long hard battle Sweetpea needed the extra nudge to get out. She got stuck and her heart rate went way down. I see this as a metaphor for me in parenting her. When she gets stuck she will need helpers to guide her into the direction that is flowing. Fortunately, as an adult I have set up a community of folks to help me with this as well.

Now, 2 years later I have my amazing toddler to explore with. I have a kid that challenges and enlightens me daily. I have this person in my life forever. I like forever.

A little song I learned and sang for my sweetpea just after she was born rings in my ears. It is the song our family sings at each death and each birth in our lives.

"When you were born you cried
  and the world rejoiced
  live your life so
  that when you die
  The world cries and you rejoice"

All Hallows Eve

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It is Sweetpea's first real Halloween. She has been celebrating this holiday sense soon after being born but this is the first time she has become aware of candy, costumes and getting into trick or treating. As a parent I am conflicted by Halloween. I love the holiday, the DIY qualities of meeting your neighbors, the art installations on front lawns, the costumes and yes, even the gathering of candy. I love that this pagan holiday addressing death in this season still is celebrated in a mainstream way with the lighting of candles and carving of jack o lanterns. 

My main issue with Halloween, besides all the corn syrup, is the idea of witches. Medicine women, healers, herbalists, are the people we call witches. These women were put on trial and often burned at the stake during the dark ages. The villainizing of these medicine women lives on today in our green skinned, crooked nosed, caricatures of women people call witches. She rides around on her broom scooping up children and eating them. It’s a terrible and scary image. Girls dress up like witches today reenacting these “evil” women. Yes there have been some exceptions to this, good witches, Samantha on the show "Bewitched" and more recently Hermione Granger, but most of the time the old, ugly, hag is what I see being the most played out. There has been a lot of reclaiming of the word witch in the pagan community. Now folks wear the pointed hat with pride. What I see in the main stream culture though is a complete lack of understanding of who witches really are. They are different from the other made up ghouls of Halloween.  

 I try to be relaxed about what is enacted on Halloween, every society has a shadow side and this is the place young and old alike get to try things out.  At the same time, the thought in the back of my head is, “really, we are still dragging this old concept of women healers as villains out of the closet again?” I remember being so scared of witches as a young person, It would have been nice to have a broader perspective of these misunderstood women healers. It looks a little like the way folks wear other cultures dress during Halloween and think its ok to pretend to be that person for the night. I think most folks are coming from a place of play with this but I have seen how hurtful it can be to my friends from the cultures that get the most Halloween attention, like Arab and Indian people.

 My family celebrates Samhain, the pagan holiday that honors our ancestors and this season of dying. This morning we watched the sunrise and lit our jack o lanterns welcoming our ancestors into our home for the day. Sweetpea and I decorated our family alter with pictures and memorabilia of family members and pets that have passed from our lives; she decorated with candy and some marigolds. We will make a pumpkin pie to feast on this afternoon and think about all our beloved dead and all the folks that recently lost their lives from the intense hurricane Sandy. After pie and candles we will get dressed in costumes and join the hordes of children and care givers on the street tonight playing in the community game that is Halloween. I hope to give Sweetpea this balance growing up, understanding who witches really are, taking a moment to notice all the amazing people and animals that pass into and out of our lives and the sweetness of family, community fun.