The Furious Spinner

Ran outside. The grass felt green and cool on my feet. Yes, green. Fresh and new green. Deep dark green, sucking on cinnamon-colored dirt. Does it taste like pie? The soles of my feet went “ahhhhhh” and the rest of me followed.

Earlier in the day Mario and I went to Falling Creek. Winter cold. I wore five layers above my waist, not so much below. We stepped into the dark woods. No sunlight but bright green dominated. The vine maples had leafed out. The fiddle heads had come undone and flattened out into ferns, like fancy fans snapped open during a stuffy opera. Spots of whites mixed with the green: the dogwood blossoms seemed suspended within the forest, reminding me of lotus blossoms. If I squinted I could see their creamy green insides—or was that a bodhisattva I saw sitting serenely at the center of each one?

The deer’s head orchids were almost all gone. We stopped to gaze at each one we saw. What would it be like to cradle this tiny slipper-shaped flower in my hand and drink the drop or two of water inside? Would I suddenly know the answers to all of life’s riddles? Would I suddenly be healed? Of course, I would never pluck one to test this enchantment. It is enough to imagine it.

The white anemones folded their petals toward their center, until each one looked like a tiny soccer ball suspended on thread over three green leaves. The sound of water cascaded all around us, filling the forest with a restful white noise.

I put my hand on the cuntree as we passed by it (see below). She reminds me of Sheila na Gig, the ancient goddess of Ireland whose likeness grinned and bared it (by pulling her vagina open with both hands) for those entering church. Touch me for good luck.



At the falls, three women asked us to take a photo of them, so I held two of their cameras, Mario one, and we snapped their pictures in front of the white falling water that looked like stilled cotton through their view finders.

As Mario and I walked back, a strange thing happen. Mario and I talked about something unpleasant: disease, destruction, the horrors of the world. After a few minutes, we stopped talking, and Mario walked ahead of me. I kept thinking about our discussion and how horrible things were in the world—until I told myself I had to stop thinking about these depressing subjects or I was going to go nuts.

I kept walking, and suddenly my legs felt like they were on fire. Sometimes my legs will itch a little when I’ve been hiking on a cold day. But this seemed different. Soon both my legs were itching so much I could barely walk. If I stayed still, the itching subsided, but I had to get back to the car. All I could focus on was how terrible I felt.

Then I thought, “This is very strange.” Why was it happening? I had been walking along having my depressing thoughts when I told myself to stop. Then my legs had started itching. What if I finished my thought now? I remembered where I had been in my thought process, so I kept on topic until my depressing thought died out on its own.

My legs stopped itching. What did this mean? Did my thoughts each have their own lifespan, so to speak? I had wanted to stop thinking, but the thought had to go somewhere. Had it slipped into my legs, making me itch like crazy: which was exactly how I was feeling?

It could be the thought had a natural progression. I interrupted that progression: I did not stop it. Like the water in the creek we walked beside, my thoughts had to stream somewhere. So they streamed into my legs. A dam was not a tunnel.

I told Mario what happened. “Does this mean I have to keep thinking every awful thing I’m thinking or else I’ll have more body symptoms? You know how my mind works. I can think of a lot of terrible things. Who wants to live like that?”

“Don’t the Buddhists talk about accepting?” Mario asked. “You accept that things are going wrong in the world, and you accept you have these thoughts.”

And then after a while the thoughts have no power?

“That doesn’t mean you don’t live in this world,” he said. “It means you accept what’s happening and move on.”

I thought of a letter a Furious Spinner reader had written me last week. She had asked what do we do in the face of the desecration of that which many of us hold sacred: the Earth, Nature. How do we keep going on when it seems as though we can not hold back the tide (the tsunami) of destruction? When I concentrated on the misery of my itching legs, the itching only got worse, I was missing out on the beauty all around me, and I was not seeing the bigger picture. Once I stepped out of my misery for a moment, I was able to say, “Wait a minute. What is going on here?” Then I came up with a solution.

This isn’t to stay that our global, local, and personal problems will disappear as easily as my itching did. Perhaps all I’m saying is that we need to see the truth, feel our despair, and not get mired in the despair and depression. We can’t act from depression. We can act from the righteous anger that kicks our butt and says, “do something” or righteous compassion that whispers, “do nothing,” depending upon what is going on in our lives at the time.

In Joanna Macy’s book Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (as I’ve mentioned before) she suggests that we acknowledge our pain for the world, validate it as a “wholesome response to the present crisis,” and let ourselves experience the pain. We need to express it to others and recognize that many people feel the same way. We are not crazy, she adds, but what we feel “springs from our caring and connectedness.”

Recognizing the truth doesn’t stop what’s happening this day, like the woods getting chopped down across from your house, for instance. It does not stop George Bush from getting elected and acting in ways that seem sacrilegious to those of us who love the Earth. Once when I was in despair over not believing I was doing any good in the world, Mario reminded me that we have no idea what we do in our lives that may touch someone else and change their lives for the better in the future. He’s right. (If someone lets me in in traffic I’m happy all day.) If we act “as if,” we live in a culture that believes the Earth that is sacred, in a world where we worship the ground we walk upon, in a place where all people are honored and war is unthinkable, we are constructing that world with our actions.

Every time we behave in a peaceful way (that does NOT mean making nicey-nice so that we never make waves), we are constructing that world. Every time we go into the woods with our children (I don’t mean just the ones we’ve birthed) and help them connect with the wild—show them what we believe is sacred—we are constructing that world we envision, that world we want to live in. And we are deconstructing the world where money and power over and war is all that matters.

Those who do not see the beauty and holiness (wholeness) of the world live in the sacred, too, despite their blindness. We live in the real (holy) world, but so do they. Our constructions must be more beautiful, more soul- and body-satisfying than theirs so that everyone will participate in deconstructing the old world and building the new. To paraphrase a Buddhist text, we must subdue the demons with splendor.

We can’t complain about how “they” are screwing up our beautiful world if we are living exactly the way they do. I hate to quote that old cliché but sometimes there’s a reason a cliché stays around: if we want change, we’ve got to be the change.

Each of us has to decide what “being the change” means. Some days for me I live in the sacred on a path created from small personal acts. (And small is not a bad thing. I think of the goddess Trivia every time I do something that many people in the mainstream culture would think is “trivial.” That just means it is goddess-like.) When I do the laundry, I say, ‘Thank you for the water, thank you for the heat, thank you for the electricity,” as I dump my clothes in. I talk to the spirit and bodies of the food I cook and eat. I kiss on my husband and let him know I am so glad he was born and is sharing his life with me. I hug my friends and let them know the same.

Other days I am out in my community working on a project I believe in. Many days it does not feel like enough. But I remember what Mario’s mother, Agica, told me. Every night before she goes to bed she asks herself if she did her best that day. That’s a pretty good standard. Did I do the best I could?

Mostly we do the best we can. Some days the best we can do is sit on the couch and stare blankly into nothingness. Splendor is sometimes a simple thing! And sometimes the demons we have to subdue are our own. Feed them your own sweet self and see how they transform!

Now the poppies seem to be calling me outdoors, the little strumpets. Sunlight streaks the forested sides of the gorge across the Columbia River. Clouds rise out of the gorge, like lover’s whispers too long held in. I think I shall go out and bask in the splendor. I leave my words here for you, as a gift. Enjoy them.

Blessed be.

(Photograph of Cuntree by Kim Antieau.)

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.