For the last few days, Lake Superior has served up cool east winds, dense fog and rain, not conducive to city-wide or neighborhood fireworks on the Fourth. The former have been postponed, the latter still went off in a half-hearted kind of way. I am sure I have said it before; I dislike fireworks. They sound like war, and I cannot understand how that signifies celebration (except in constructs, of course, that venerate war...) The colorful displays would be great with no accompanying booms.
So on Monday, I didn't exactly celebrate "My Freedom" (see my previous post). It was a dark, interior kind of day. I guess the emotion that came up more strongly was a sense of wonder. I still cannot believe, some days, that I have survived a life at such an arm's length from our masculine-dominated/conflict-driven/profit-driven culture. I've recently accepted that this became an active choice on my part. I could feel the vibration of the life song I was "singing", knew it was completely at odds with the "song" our institutions were singing, and knew that I couldn't adjust my song enough to harmonize with them. As terrifying as it was, I knew that it left me virtually without a safety net. All of this may have been less about men, and more about not being able to function in settings not focused on beauty and love. I would sacrifice all the freedom I've had to have had a genuinely loving family, to have been warmly embraced in the field I loved, to have made an easy transition into the home place that I loved and found beautiful, and to have experienced some sense of being nurtured, valued, and honored for exactly how strong, creative and independent I am! "Freedom", in those conditions, isn't such a high priority, is it?
At the end of the day Monday, I guess I wasn't terribly surprised at news reports of yet more mass shootings. The line between the sounds/energies of fireworks and gunfire is just too blurred. And this morning, reports are that human sights have turned to ownership of the moon. I need to write more about the concept of ownership...but on this half moon day, my hunch is that the last thing the moon wants is to be "owned".
