Breathing In 2010

by Ruby Sara

Well.  I’m worn out.  That, friends, was a hell of a week.

I know, Pagani, my last post makes it sound like all was margaritas and 60 degree nights filled with friends’ laughter and deep green leaves, smoky stars and birdcall.  And there was plenty of that, don’t get me wrong.  And I feel so blessed to have had the opportunity to touch that magic that I haven’t the words.

But the nature of these kinds of spiritually rich sojourns – the kind where you have, for the first time in a very long time, the opportunity to take a golden soul-nap, with the windows open and the light flooding the carpet and the mourning doves in the trees and the smell of chicken soup on the stove and the wind literally caressing your face and each cell alive and delicious and perfect and you can barely sleep for all the bliss – well, those kinds of moments tend to crack you open and pull you apart so much that it frankly makes you a bit vulnerable.  And by a bit, I mean…raw as noon.

So I haven’t been surprised by my emotionality this past week, but I admit, it hasn’t been entirely delightful.  The opportunity to spend a week in the landscape of my heart left me more vulnerable to storytelling for example…and it seems like a variety of catalysts for spiritual and emotional upheaval took advantage.  I saw the film Baraka this week, for what might be the fifth time.  A gorgeous film that never fails to move me, both to tears and to wonder.  And I re-read Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing for the umpteenth time, one of the absolute best that Pagan fiction has to offer and certainly one of my favorite pieces of utopian literature that I always find personally galvanizing.  I also found myself on the ride home reading Green Hermeticism for the first time, and it has been thoroughly rocking my world.

And…. I saw the film Avatar (you may have heard of it).

I frankly am not sure I’m up to the challenge of dissecting all my feelings about Avatar.  An exceptionally brief summation would be that I thought it was visually stunning, and wildly, crazily, overwhelmingly problematic.  The exoticizing of the Other, the “gone native” colonizer as messiah, who takes going native to, as Mark Morford so brilliantly points out, an intimate level of colonialist domination by inserting a colonizer’s mind into the indigenous body, etc (I’m not really commenting on the spirituality of the film because I found it to be pretty much a non-issue….a kind of generic monopantheism that is completely lacking in the complex depth and richness of authentic earth-based spiritualities…and frankly I find it more than a bit ridiculous how up in arms conservative theologians seem to be about it).  But what really angered me was the hypocrisy, extant in the creation of the film, its message, my viewing of it, my manipulated emotional reaction to it, and, I imagine, the emotional reaction of others watching it in the audience.  Here is a story of the exploitation and oppression of an indigenous culture and the ecosystem in which it thrives.  The audience knows who the bad guys are, and who the good guys are.  We know how it will end, and how it should end.  The story of justice is hardwired into us, culturally and possibly biologically.  Yet….what?  To be emotionally moved by the destruction of the Na’vi’s TreeHome in the middle of the film…what does this mean?  Does James Cameron intend to give the proceeds of the film to indigenous rights groups, environmentalist groups, ecospiritual groups?  Can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me that the making of this film was performed without the realtime compromising of our existing landbases on this planet?  James Cameron has made a film that is an obscenely opulent appropriation of a real struggle.  A caricature.  His thoughts about its “message,” when you can find them, are absolutely secondary to his desire to create a science fiction spectacle…critics who are pissed about the mythical “Hollywood pantheist agenda” might want to take a second look: this is Mammon in action here, not Gaia.  Proof?  How about: if McDonalds has a marketing deal with your film, any claim to some pro-Mama message is thoroughly and utterly forfeit.  The End.

So I got a little angry.

And well, the combination of all these experiences, these fierce hopes and despairs and rages, at a time when my heart muscle was at its most open and easily broken, well friends, together they all just thoroughly succeeding in breaking it.  Clean.  Open.  And so I find myself in a rather emotionally raw state, chewing on old questions, still caught in the brief bubble of expectancy for the new year, struggling.

This isn’t a new struggle for me, of course, and it’s not a unique struggle by any means.  But I admit that pressing on through the past year or two of deep emotional dysfunction left me more or less closed.  Depression and anxiety are evil for a multitude of reasons, not the least being that in my experience they deprive the body of experiencing the profound, authentic range of emotion that we are blessed to possess as human animals.   I am just now coming back to the place where I feel I can allow my heart to catch fire.

Whose side am I on?  What would I give?  What can I do?

I am, after all, a forever Sister in the Holy Order of Hystericals, and this week has been something of an exercise in renewing my vows.

Yet I also surprise myself too…by allowing myself hope, even though it seems unwarranted and unwise.  I am moved by the grace of winter branches and the promise of a busy spring.  My brain is overwhelmed and whirling with all the brilliant revolution in the world, all the messy, creative resistance, all the compassion, all the joy.  Paganism sails the anarchic sea, sometimes floundering, sometimes catching the wind and flying across the water.  What will it bring?  What will the year bring?  A year of holy anger, of tears and terror, yes.  A year of remarkable flight, of amazement, yes.  A year, a decade of change.  Grokking earth, making prayers.  Making art.  Speaking in the languages of god.  Friends!  Let’s do something.  Let us be vulnerable singers and dreamers.  Let us eat together and take risks.

This ridiculous, glorious thing, this extravagant experiment, this Gift.  This year.  I say bring it.  Tears and all.  This conspiracy of the Real.