Have You Had the Talk?

Have *you* talked to your Significant Other about climate change?

I read this article yesterday, and it sent me down a well-worn but infrequently travelled mental path. I saw "The Day After Tomorrow" when it came out in 2004 - I was 15 - and it left a profound although latent mark on me. At that time, I got an impulse to learn to knit - didn't go very well, I never learned how to start a new row. The impulse settled down and I moved on.

But the mark remained. I had seen humanity's ignorance and apathy drive the climate to deadly extremes. Spoiler: the movie ends with a big question mark - with only the warmer areas of the planet still habitable, now flooded with homeless white people from the Global North, what would happen? (I believe that an old roleplay on TUL had a similar background premise.)

And I knew full well that of all the apocalyptic science fiction movie possibilities, the climate roaring down to destroy the world As We Know It is one of the few that might actually happen.
And as I've gotten older, I've heard mounting evidence that it's rapidly leaving the realm of fiction and rushing towards the realm of cold, hard, globally-warmed reality. The afore-linked article just gave more solid numbers to what I've known for years.

Among them: 16 years. 16 years, if we keep burning through hydrocarbons at our current rate of increase, before we will have set the stage for the planet to warm by 2 degrees Celcius: the "okay, fine, you win - the planet is too hot, we admit that global warming exists" number. According to that article, we're already only .2 degrees C away from most of Africa becoming uninhabitable.

Oh. Here's another one, about Greenland experiencing a one-per-every-150-years melting event.

So how old will I be in 16 years? I'm turning 23 soon, so that would make me 39. It's the year 2012 now, so 16 years would make it 2028. At 39, I hope to have been teaching elementary school for years, and have three or four kids, four cats, a dog, a ball python, a car that will need replacing soon, and a house with a garden and a few years already paid off the mortgage. I hope to be living somewhere green enough to keep me sane, yet close enough to other people that I'll have a job and won't have to drive an hour just to buy food.

If the price of gas is already climbing ten cents or more a year, and if it was already as hot as summer in early May this season, how realistic is this dream? The life that P and I have been planning out for years now?

I really don't know. It's not a happy thought, and as I read the article out loud I found myself just as happy to become distracted by another adorable kitten picture online, helping cut the seriousness of the message. I don't want it to be serious. I don't want to have to sit down and say, "Love, what are we going to do when there's no more gasoline except for rich people?" And there's no more tropical fruit at the grocery store because it's too expensive to ship. And nothing's made of plastic anymore because the oil is too valuable as fuel. Will cars be running on electricity and ethanol, or will the highways be deserted? Will we all be at war over the last few oilfields? Will the US annex Alberta so it doesn't have to pay for our thrice-damned tar sand? I wish I knew. I've read my history, and I know that humanity tends to happily wallow in the ruins of its former greatness rather than exert itself to maintain anything properly.

I even didn't want to finish this post, because to send it out into the aether is to admit it. To take a stand and say: I acknowledge that climate change is going to screw all my future plans. I acknowledge that planning ahead for a time when nothing is as it is now, when I can no longer conveniently hop on my laptop with a glass of grape juice, is more practical than paranoid. I admit that all our little energy-saving efforts smack of OCD rituals: if I turn off the monitor, if I install compact fluorescent lighting, if I walk to the store, I will stave off the apocalypse and acid rain will not kill my family... and these little rituals are not enough. They will not stave it off, and nothing you or I or we can do while still living an even slightly mainstream lifestyle will be enough to stave it off.

Either we all start putting up a shitload of windmills and force our societies to STOP BURNING OIL AND COAL (and other hydrocarbons - even burning wood wouldn't really be any better), or we get ready for things to change.

Warm places will become hot. This includes most of the Global North - that's us, folks.
Hot places will become uninhabitable. Those droughts in the Horn of Africa last year? Yeah.
Cool places will become more comfortable. I suspect that areas like Siberia, Canada's Northwest Territories, Alaska, and Scandinavia will become more popular (and populous) over time. Actually: populous, yes - when the hot places, full of billions of people, get hotter, they're not going to lay down and die (and I wouldn't wish them to). They're going to emigrate, they're going to flee, and eventually we're probably going to flee them and go farther north. That's if we haven't already fled the rising temperatures in our own homelands.

I recently wrote a piece in which a character looked back at his life from the age of 56. I was shocked, frightened even, to think through all the scenarios I had thrown him into over the years and weave them into one logical timeline: it's here. An odd but dealable life came under attack from a tyrannical government, and he ended up hiding in a cabin in the woods for a decade. He almost lost his wife and child in the end. At the point of his retrospection, he was dealing with the aftermath of that government's overthrow, in which most of the trappings of civilization were pretty much gone.

I looked at what I wrote and thought: What?? How did this happen? I'd kinda figured that he would go into a usually boring but stable job doing some kind of computer work, and life would continue on in at least approximately the same pattern in which it had started for him: family, house, traffic, supermarkets, internet access.

This character is no Mary Sue, but his problems and struggles have tended to mirror mine over the years more than any other's. Will his, in turn, become mine? Will I find myself, as I reach my silver years, fighting harder than ever just to survive - rather than getting to relax and enjoy time with my grandkids?

I hope I'm just fear-mongering. I hope that more countries start going in the direction Germany has chosen (they get a full half of their electricity from wind power), and that it happens fast enough to make a difference. I hope the US smartens up and changes its slogan: "We need to end our dependence on foreign oil." I hope that ethanol farmers smarten up and start fermenting the talks, not the goddamn corn itself. I hope that electric cars stop being a novelty, that we change our building habits here in North America so we don't need a car to exist - and that other places in the world stop emulating our bad habits!

I hope. But I'm also going to learn to make a fire by hand, can fruit, and sew...

Focusing

So maybe having a safe space to cry out does help. Regardless, it's a bit better today.
Lack of focus lead to boredom and frustration, which lead to P and I snapping at each other about things that normally aren't problems at all, or that we don't perceive as problems. So sometime after I'd written my little silent shout here, she'd said something and I'd said something and she climbed right off the futon and sat down on the floor... Which didn't seem like a good sign, until I realized that she was just doing the stretches that the massage therapist had given her on Friday.

I'm proud of her for taking a night that seemed wasted and useless, a night that we were both going to want back, and making it productive. I helped her with situps and did my own Tai Chi stretches that I'm trying to get into regularly, and we got to bed at a reasonable time. We went to bed happy with each other and with that healthy flush that comes from good exercise - especially good considering that I had seen the night turning out long, cold and angry.

Today I'm up at seven again, this time to get to a dentist appointment and deal with silly bits of paper at my university. Instead of dragging Phina along with the promise of seeing my parents' kittens again, I'm letting her stay home and sleep. She didn't really want to go and knew she wouldn't really be up to going; and I'm doing ever better at recognizing that when people say 'no', even to piddly little things like going out for the afternoon, you can convince them to stop arguing but you can never convince them to be happy about it. It's better for everyone if I let it go and stop trying to force everything to work out according to how I planned.

Focus

I'm losing it. I'm spending hours refreshing TUL, Facebook, and my email accounts again, as if something is going to change. I had a day or two of heyday activity, handing two or three or four online conversations and threads at once, and now that it's back to normal (dead) I'm haunting the forsaken channels of communication like I have no other choice.
I have half a post written about climate change. I haven't touched it since... Wednesday?
Help me. Please.

Life Update

The college situation I mentioned in 'Power' has been resolved

successfully. The professor had asked if I could drop off P's marked papers

on Friday (which I did); on Tuesday or Wednesday, she emailed to say that

it looked like a 'pass' to her, and there wasn't anything we needed to

worry about. The professor is going to note that those three areas ought to

see some improvement during P's next placement term, but she's letting her

go.

Yay.

I'm relieved, and I feel vindicated (on P's behalf), but I can understand

why she said she just feels kinda weird about it all. It's not much of a

fist-pumping situation to have the world shout "YOU SUUUUUCK" and have it

go "Whoops, sorry, didn't mean that, carry on" a few weeks later. Are we

supposed to cheer? Why did this have to happen in the first place? Our

entwined futures were still riding on someone else's decision, and the

situation working out for P in the end doesn't make the whole situation

suddenly have been okay. She still spent several weeks stewing over the

possibility that one of the few employable talents she has appeared to have

been shat all over. Those feelings aren't going to just disappear.

What is nice, at least, is that yesterday two letters came in the mail

informing her that she made the college's Honour Roll in both her fall and

winter terms. I don't know how much the letters were exaggerating, but

according to them, this is actually quite a distinction. It should look

good on a resume, if nothing else... We'll ask about it sometime. I made

the Dean's List at my university, too, meaning that I maintained an average

of 80% or above (I managed an 83%) for the year.


I'm not going to be able to write a post at all some days, let alone a

long, deep introspective one, but I'm trying. Living life comes first -

documenting it is secondary.

A Practical Note

Whatever my practice ends up being, I'm going to have to include Murphy in my worship... After all, there's belief - and then there's knowing that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Perhaps I should light a candle every morning (which will always be going out for no good reason) to Murphy... Then again, I think that my simple acceptance that things will go wrong on a regular basis - at the most inconvenient times - may be worship enough.

I can't be an atheist. I believe in too many things that happen outside of science.

A Leg to Stand On

A Leg to Stand On

There's a problem we have in Canada sometimes. We're from all over the place, rarely full-blooded anything - and being 'Canadian' is pretty well meaningless. We have an incredibly weak national identity; we mostly describe ourselves in terms of what we aren't (starting with American and going from there). We take a perverse pride in our cold winters and black flies, drink strong beer, watch hockey, and apologize a lot. Or something like that. We enjoy our status as non-threatening peacekeepers who just want everybody to get along.

That's... pretty much it, folks. No wonder recent immigrants don't want to assimilate (into what?). Dig any deeper, and you've got an ugly story of the French and English duking it out over beaver pelts and lumber for hundreds of years, both royally abusing (i.e. diseasing, poisoning, raping and killing) the indigenous population while somehow pretending to be their allies against the *other* European colonists.

We have a huge cultural divide built into the country in the form of Quebec - it's like a tree split into two at the base. But even then - unless you're French-Canadian and really identify with that side of yourself, the bigger issue is that we are lacking traditions and a purpose. Being almost exclusively immigrants and the children of colonists, we have in our heritages only what came along on boats and ships. We can't dig down to our ancestral roots more than a generation or two, frequently, before we hit 'where we're really from' - England, Scotland, France, the USA, China, Russia, or anywhere else but here. Being Canadian quickly becomes an eclectic patchwork of other cultures.

I wouldn't generalize this to anyone but myself except that 'the question of Canadian identity' is one under constant discussion by sociologists and politicians alike. Somebody even recently suggested we change our national animal to something more imposing than a beaver. We're all hunting for a leg to stand on - a solid foundation from which to grow.

It's even harder to do if you're not white (or don't fully identify as white), Christian, a sports fan, and mildly alcoholic. As soon as you don't like hockey and you don't drink beer (oh, and I don't like poutine, either!), you don't go to church and you don't feel like celebrating the takeover of the country by arrogant Europeans on Canada Day, you just killed 97% of your already scanty national identity.

Personally: I am as mixed of a mutt as one can be while still being mostly European. I have English, French, German, Sicilian, Irish (which was actually Welsh), possibly Dutch, and who knows how many other ancestries. And, knowing my history, I know that 'English' actually means 'Gallic Celtic Germanic Viking', as does 'French'; Sicilian is 'Greek Phoenician Roman Norman [Viking] Arabic'. I'm then seasoned lightly with Cherokee - my great-great-grandmother on my mother's side. I have potential links to many cultures, but almost no knowledge of any.


When I was younger, my family would celebrate more. We did the usual North American run of Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Halloween, and others, combined with the eight Wiccan Sabbats. In fact I have a mischevious memory of having happily written about my three 'Christmases' in my first-grade journal - one at my (Christian) grandmother's house, one at home, and one other at home celebrating the re-birth of the Sun God! (The moral here is that for a child, there are never too many parties.) Mom would do a Circle in the living room before trick-or-treaters started coming to the door on October 31, and we'd offer a few pieces of my candy haul at the end of the night as part of the Samhain ritual. At the same time, I felt no issue belting out Christmas carols about the three kings coming to give the baby Jesus gifts. All was incorporated in one big, happy, strangely unconflicting family of gods, goddesses and divine babies. Either baby Jesus was just a more modern aspect of baby Horus, or they both played together; when I was ten, it didn't really matter either way. I read my Greek myths and my Judeo-Christian myths with equal enjoyment (likely to the consternation of both grandmothers).

For a number of reasons, this all started to taper off as I got older. Now that I've been moved out for several years, I've realized that I'm going to have to choose, or make, my own traditions. I had thought that they travel with you firmly attached, but no; Christmas becomes suddenly hard to celebrate when you're living in a tiny basement, you have no money for gifts, your mother-in-law has left for Venezuela for the whole of December, and you and your partner sit and stare at each other and realize that you're both pagan anyway, so why Christmas exactly? But without a deep enough grounding in what to do for the Winter Solstice, or any other Sabbat or moon cycle or anything at all, we've ended up doing jack sh*t (pardon my language) - nothing whatsoever.

This slip into a no-day-is-holy lifestyle has been wearing and depressing. If no day is special, then you have nothing to look forward to; with nothing to look forward to, why live the boring existence of daily life? That slips towards 'why not suicide?' waaaay too easily - a theme you're going to see over and over in my writing here, unfortunately. I think too hard, and reality doesn't actually stand up to that very well. Anyway...

So I've been out looking for traditions. I've been over that list of nationalities before, trying to decide what it makes me. The trouble is, the ones which ought to have more of a hold on me based on percentage (1/4 Irish/Welsh and 1/4 Sicilian beat out the others quite a bit) are not necessarily the ones that appeal to me as a person. I used to have more interest in Celtic traditions - one way to get around the strong Catholic influence on Irish culture - but I've been shocked in the last few weeks to realize that that interest is nearly gone. I still found myself properly furious when I recently discovered that the 'Irish Potato Famine' was a myth propagated by England at the time to excuse the wholesale sack of Ireland's food supplies to feed British cities... but most of the rest of my old fascination is just a faded memory.

This is actually really serious, since a great deal of my Pagan ideals had been based on what I knew of Celtic and Druidic traditions. I had made myself a Bridgit's Cross a few years ago, did a Maypole dance with the remnants of the pagan community in Niagara, and at that point had generally felt that Herne was the best aspect of the God for me. Where did it go?? At the very point that I've started to search for a culture to finally sink roots into, the one I'd thought I'd grow *from* has turned out to be naught but loose soil.

More to come.

Power

I don't got it. You don't got it. They have all of it.

My partner and I just finished watching the last season of 'Angel' (the spinoff show from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'). The whole series (though fun and campy on the surface) deals with big issues like free will, destiny, the soul, and whether the best efforts of the little guys like us have the slightest effect on the world. The main characters' world is repeatedly turned upside down by revelations that this or that incredibly powerful being or organization has been pulling strings behind the scenes, rendering everything they've done for the last - say - four years pretty much meaningless. There is a powerful scene at the end of one season in which the protagonist Angel makes a seemingly last-ditch effort to destroy the 'Senior Partners' of one particular evil organization... only to find that the Senior Partners are merely the personification of the evil that dwells within the hearts of humankind. To destroy them would require the complete purification of humans (how likely is that?) or the destruction of humankind (which is what many of the demons in the show are trying for anyway). Angel, having thought he was travelling down to Hell to combat the Senior Partners, finds himself back on the mortal plane - the implication being that this IS Hell. He slowly walks away down the street of L.A. as sirens wail and children scream...

Whatever the actual background music to this scene is, I always picture it with Mad World playing. I have to be very careful with this song, because it sums up all the little midnight whispers in my head and hands me a knife with a sad smile. But I think I can post it here.



Yesterday, I (almost) went to go see one of the professors at my partner's college, on her behalf. My partner had been reassured throughout a six-week child care mentoring semester that her performance was just fine and that she would pass - but when her grades came back, they have come back less-than-completely-perfect (which, in the grading system they have set up, is a fail). The stated results in the student booklet she got at the beginning of the year would be her being expelled from the entire program for a full year - having to start over in September 2013 if she even bothered to come back.

Excuse me, no.

She is rightly and understandably upset about this - to the point where she is positive she will not be able to carry on a conversation about it with the professor in charge of coordinating the mentoring placements. I offered - offered freely, mind you - to take this charge on myself. I view it not as a burden, not as something that my partner should handle by her damn self and why should I have to do it - no, rather as a task undertaken out of love and as her champion. I'm frightened by the prospect of arguing with an authority figure in their place of power, where they can cite rules and wave bits of paper and sit there with a sad but sympathetic face and tell me that there's nothing they can do. I'm terrified of confrontation, and the two times this week I've tried psyching myself up to go talk, I felt like I was having a heart attack - full physical panic. But I would do it anyway, because I don't want my partner to experience this. I would do this for her, and save her the distress.

Except I can't. The professor called ahead to get an idea of what the situation actually was, and said that she cannot see me about Phina without Phina present in the room. The rest of the conversation went well, and I'm hoping that I've now prepped the professor with our side of things so that she will be in the mindset of "That's strange, why shouldn't she pass?" rather than "Well, that's what the bit of paper says, so I guess you're screwed.". And there is a certain rightness to my partner at least being there: say I screw something up myself - she should have the chance to jump in, or contradict me, supply more detail, make decisions, whatever. I suppose a champion's battle ought to be watched by the one being contested for. We'll set up a meeting time sometime next week, where all three of us can get together and hammer it out. But it still emphasizes our powerlessness.


I'm taking Sociology at university, as well as Psychology. Most of what I learned in Sociology makes me want to grab the nearest wall and beat my head against it until the pain stops. Joss Whedon (creator of Angel) was right in many ways when he had one of his characters say: Look around. This is the Apocalypse. Read the paper recently? Evil started this race a long freaking time ago, and the tricky thing is that they never actually fired the starting pistol...
There are so many horrible people out there in positions of power. But that's not the really frightening thing. The nauseating part is that there are amorphous, Protean organizations out there that constantly raise new people into thinking that evil and greed are good, or natural, or patriotic, or moral, or unavoidable. What's the quote from 1984?

"WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"

It makes me rage. I hear about a transnational corporation that bullies small countries into creating tax free zones for its factories, so that it can enslave the population to churn out unregulated sh*t to sell at a 90% profit in North America. I hear about a pharmaceutical company buying the FDA so that it can invent a reason to tell its bought doctors to prescribe Oxycontin to children under twelve. I hear that I can try to buy quality alternative brands, but as soon as anything gets popular it gets bought out by PepsiCo, Coca-Cola or Johnson&Johnson. I hear that some untested plastic that's in everything and everyone is a probable cause of some of the spike in autism. I hear another preacher somehow blame gay people for the war in Iraq. I hear that slaves made my shoes. It makes me want to burn everything I've ever purchased and go hide in a hut and raise my own sheep for wool and food. It makes me want to find the SOURCE of all of this sh*t and do some one-time violent act to make it all stop.

The problem is...
How do you kill an organization?
If you kill the people, new people could just flood in to take their places. Besides, most of the people are actually innocent - just following orders, like in Milgram's experiment on obedience.
If you disband the organization, the people could just flee and start new organizations under different names, like metastasizing cancer cells.

If you just try to avoid the organization, it will continue corrupting your government and poisoning your air and water and soil. You can go build your Iron Age village co-op in the north of Saskatchewan and live there happily for twenty years, only to have co-ops banned in year 21 because someone has decided you're a threat to the System.


This post has no answers. Perhaps the next one will have some ideas on what I can do, or at least a listing of the ideas I've gathered.

Memory Walking

This is now my third attempt to get this specific post done. I suppose this will happen frequently, whenever I try to explain a concept that has roots and tendrils everywhere in my psyche. If I could explain it simply, I wouldn't have to include it here.

I left off last night with the idea of growing my hair out, intertwined with the seedling idea of adopting a mostly new piece of self-identification. I say mostly; I'd toyed with it before, and I'd introduced myself at the Brock Aboriginal Students' Organization fairly soon in the school year. I borrowed the book "Changing Ones" out of their library - and returned it three weeks later, almost untouched. I couldn't study this from a book first; I needed people. Go ahead and tell me that a tradition originally passed along around campfires by word of mouth can properly be transmitted in print - I'll laugh, or maybe cry. (I'm not trying to put down the book in the slighest, by the way! It is an excellent text, and I do intend to read it later.)

I needed people, real people, telling stories one at a time. And eventually I found them - in the form of a Facebook group, of all things. Dancing Moccassins is a group formed to share any and all fragments or whole pieces of Native culture that its members and staff have access to. It also frequently shares along information about Two-Spirits in general or in particular tribes; for example, this note about the legend of Turquoise Boy, the first Two-Spirit among the Navajo. This group was exactly what I was looking for, and with it as a starting point, I've started branching out and finding articles like Shaking Our Shells (about and for Cherokee male-bodied Two-Spirits, but not exlusive of others), and this list of other places I could look for information.

And then, about two weeks ago, I had a dream. Now, I dream frequently enough that every one could not possibly be significant, but this night was different. I dreamed that I had searched the internet and finally found a Cherokee elder (on Facebook, of all places - FB, get out of my dreams!) who was willing to tell me whatever I wanted to know. In my dream, I fired off a bunch of questions, and was so excited by the answers I received that I essentially ran off to go process it all - forgetting to continue the interaction. I came back some time later, my head now full of all the new questions raised by the answers I'd gotten, and fired them off too.

In the dream, the elder gracefully responded to the new set of questions, but also included a section of personal reflection. (He?) said, with a certain friendly amusement, that what I had done had suggested the name of "Memory Walker". My memory of the complex significances of the name slipped away like a fistful of water as I woke - which was immediately after 'reading' the elder's response - but I managed to capture my non-verbal impression of it, at least. The best I can describe it as is this:
Someone who walks in memory, both as in thoughts and as in the past. Someone who spends a great deal of time thinking, and thinking about what other people think (walking in others' memories). Someone who deals with information and thoughts and memories the way that other people deal with thread or leather or wood. Also, someone who can get so caught up in the world inside the mind that they forget about the world outside! This is Memory Walker.

And isn't that me, now?

I woke from the dream with a sense of immense significance, that this dream meant something. I shook my partner awake (or she woke herself as I woke) in the too-early morning, and told her the gist of the whole dream while it was still fresh in my mind. I repeated it to her in case I forgot, and I repeated it to myself a few times to try to avoid losing details - I knew I needed to go back to sleep, and I outright refused to let unconsciousness wash away how I had felt in that dream.

I immediately fell into a second, distinct dream. The details of this one are very hazy, but it involved someone finding the body of an animal that had died and somehow scattering its remains. The moral of the dream - and my dreams don't usually appear as fables like this, either - was "Don't scatter the bones of a creature - otherwise it is disrespectful to the spirit of the animal that died". I woke myself up from that one by accident, because as soon as it reached that point, I thought (while still asleep) 'omg! it's another significant dream! I have to remember this one too!'. As soon as I started trying to review the dream, I belatedly realized that I had actually stopped dreaming and woken up. Even still, it felt like exactly the kind of dream that, back in the day, I would've reported to the rest of my village, and everyone would have dutifully started obeying this new request from the Spirit World...

(Side note: okay, probably not new. It just seems like common sense to not scatter the remains of a creature hither and yon with no good reason; would you want some brickhead to come along and make merry with your corpse? I didn't think so.)

There was a third dream, but it is long gone in the mist. Still, all that in one night - within days of telling myself that yes, I was going to actively find out if there is a place for me in Cherokee culture as a female-bodied Two-Spirit individual - is simply too good to ignore.

There is another note I should make - I suck at coming up with names. I liberally abuse baby name sites and fantasy name generators whenever I need to name a character or a location. My X-Men character never got a codename at all. My first SCA name was just what my parents figured they'd call me at events when I was little, and my second one is just my mundane name with 'of Ravenglass' tacked on the end - which is itself also my parents' invention. Me dreaming a name, as clearly as I did, is like someone else dreaming the structure of the benzene molecule.

I sent out a tentative message or two to people I thought might have an education opinion on whether I was full of crap about this. I always worry about my 'significant' stuff being full of crap. The answer was: 'you may have just been named! Congrats.' Relief! Success! Dreams are significant in the very culture I am starting to investigate - and to be named in one so soon after beginning my search feels like both an honour and a welcome. It encourages me to continue looking.

And I like being Memory Walker, there's the thing. It's not just a variant of 'Walking Softly' or 'HikeQuietly' or any of the other variants I've used around the internet for the past couple of years. Those were (actually a misquote) from Theodore Roosevelt's phrase, "Speak softly, but carry a big stick" - something I found very clever around when I really, really needed to stop being Moonshadow, and when I was toying with the notion of trying to be hardcore. Memory Walker is very, very different in its significance. I thought of a half-dozen other ways that the name could work for me in the days following the dream. It would be an excellent name for a psychologist or a teacher, the two things that I'm interested in becoming; one guides people through their memories to help them heal, the other guides the young in forming their own memories.

I'm not going to go around starting to call myself Memory Walker everywhere online, or in person - or even tell very many people. It would stop being special, then. But I have it now, the first feather in my medicine pouch, and I will keep it safe.

Samson's Hair

I've spent the last two posts explaining different aspects of 'why this blog'. Shaking the Tree was originally meant to be itself plus this post rolled into one, but I realized halfway through that the idea of shaking myself clean was important enough to own itself. This will attempt to explain some backstory of 'why'.

To make a long story short (because I know that if I let myself get into the whole story, this post will be ten pages long): I am beginning to take an active interest in my (slight) Cherokee heritage, and how my gender identity can intertwine with it. Though it may seem strange, it started with needing a haircut.

The first year of university is generally understood as a period of self-discovery, and mine has been no exception (although being already 22, out, and partnered saved a lot of it!). I was awash in many modes of self-expression, and found my lack thereof to be becoming a problem. I should, I felt, find a way to wear my heart on my sleeve - finally pick a dressing and hairstyle, and dive into it headlong. The issue, however, I quickly found to be bound up intricately with my surprisingly fuzzy sense of self - especially my future self.

I'd thought I knew who I was and what I was going to do (well enough, anyway). It turned out that there are maybe about a dozen of me in here, all largely unexplored potential selves - and they all want to dress differently. No wonder I've been going around in t-shirts and the same two pairs of pants! In order to pick a style, I have to pick a life... and I wasn't sure, in October, that I was nearly ready to do that yet. So my hair just grew for a while.

But the question remained. Should I colour it and be hardcore - commit to the fringe? Should I lop it short and go back to where I'd been a year before - trying to live the straight male dream? Get a tidy cut and go straight to being a 35-year-old teacher? Should I grow it out - make it obvious that I'm trying to bend the rules? Or would I keep waffling, and grow up to be an indecisive welfare bum that never accomplishes anything?

I had to decide. My first bright idea was to check out what other people with my hair type have done. I'm partly Sicilian, so going back to the part of my heritage that seems to have produced my thick, dark, curly hair seemed pretty legit. So I looked up Italian, even Roman hairstyles - and guess what they've generally done? Lop it all off. There were a ridiculous number of barbers at the height of the Roman Empire. Somehow I felt that would be a cop-out. I mean, I liked some of the short haircuts I've gotten, but most of them were kind of.... underwhelming. Western culture's idea of men's hair is freaking boring for the most part. So... My hair continued unchecked.

It was around this point that another (largely) online friend of mine started posting about the 'two-spirit' tradition. This is not the time to discuss it in detail (this post is long enough already!) but basically, I found myself drawn more and more to what I was finding. The tradition is Native American, and in the process of looking deeper, I've found a whole... thing. A network of linkages. Many ideas that intrigue me, that all tie in with Cherokee culture. For the purpose of this post, it suddenly seemed like growing my hair out long in a Native American/First Nations style could both a) express my interest in and solidarity with the culture of my great-great-grandmother, and b) help me express my WHOLE gender identity (rather than re-caging myself as fully masculine).

I think I end here for the night. <3

Shaking the Tree

Welcome to part the second. Here I'll attempt to explain why I'm starting to journal in the first place.

At the beginning of June, a friend of mine (a good friend, I'd like to think) began a blog about her transition to Hellenismos, the reconstructionist worship of the deities of Ancient Greece. It's been fascinating, not just because of my long-time love of the gods and goddesses of the ancient world, but also because it seems to be providing a space for her to unpack a myriad of thoughts and feelings and beliefs. Many of the things she has written have struck chords with me so rich and deeply hidden that I felt I might break; that is, if I resisted the frequency and tried to force stillness upon myself. Or, I could let myself resonate, like the body of an instrument, by doing some unpacking of my own.

I think I had come to equate strong, sweeping emotions with immaturity and danger. Tempestuous feelings powerful enough to bowl me into next moon cycle have generally gone along with bad things. Like losing friends, embarrassment, shame, unrequited love. Things I probably should have deleted instead of sending out at 3:30 in the morning. If I feel the need to say or write something when feeling strongly these days, I usually bite my tongue and wait a few hours - take a nap, eat some food, or even try the next day. And by then, the mood has usually (always?) passed. I give a deep sigh of relief that I rode out the storm of my mood without throwing anybody or anything overboard, and continue on with my life.

The problem is that nothing has gone overboard for a while - and, though I hadn't realized it, this stuff piles up. If some of the stuff I'm linked to doesn't get dealt with soon, I'm going to sink from the weight alone. I can't see and I can't move for the mass of people and things and interests and projects and 'liked' pages, so I can't get anything done. To change metaphors, my backpack is stuffed with crap and it's getting too heavy to carry.

I've got to shake some of it off somehow. And that resonance, that inner vibration I've been feeling - it's a shaking. It is dangerous. I may lose things I find valuable. I've been terrified of that, especially since last August. But it needs to be set loose and allowed to do its work. What falls away is done with, and what remains will be what loves me enough to endure a little cleaning. I'd thought it was a good idea to pad out my life with fragile things, but I do not and should not need to surround myself with what will break if I ever test its strength.

The problem is that I do not trust myself. I don't trust myself to be me - or rather the same me in different moods. The terror comes along sooner or later. What if that mood wasn't significant? What if I felt angry because I was hungry? Depressed because I was tired? Overworked because I had a headache? What if I destroy something that I'll want tomorrow? So I average myself out. Whenever I think I'll feel differently later, I pick the more positive or people-friendly thought pattern and make myself believe that the other one is insignificant.

The problem there is that I stagnate. Negative feelings can exist for a reason. I know full well that I tend towards depression and withdrawal as a semi-natural state, but if I'm feeling the same thing repeatedly over a period of time it's probably because I need to do something about it! But I've got nowhere to lay out how I *might* really feel, nowhere to experiment safely with being my whole self. I am too invested in everyone I know to risk exploding in their face...

And so this blog will partly serve as this testing area. Be warned, therefore, as I will be attempting honesty to the moment rather than to my idealized averaged self. I may say negative things - about people you care about, or things you care about, or even about you. But you are warned, now; and this is a fairly private space, though public. If you choose to come here, and read my words - and you are offended by what you read... then, though it pains me to say it, you are part of what I need to unpack and throw out. I need ONE PLACE where I can be all of me, including the nasty bits. I'll end up on medication for a bipolar disorder I don't have, if I don't.

I hope you'll be strong enough to stay.

Opening the Backpack

It's mid-August, and you're preparing for the beginning of the new school year. You've dug out some pens, gotten a new pair of shoes... And last, you need The Backpack.
You forgot to clean it out in June, and now it lurks, hidden behind your door. It's got things living in it by now - mold, bugs maybe. Worse yet, you know that you've left valuable things in there - papers, money... mementos of friendships gone, that phone number you never dug out and called. Someone, you now realize, has been vaguely pissed off at you for two months, and you didn't even know.

You can't do this all in a rush. You need to come at it one compartment at a time, maybe with gloves and a gas mask... Okay, now I'm exaggerating. But you must be prepared for what you find, and for the task ahead. You'll be overwhelmed sometimes with emotions you'd thought were long gone, for good or for ill.

But it's worth it.

Welcome to my August Backpack - full of hastily tucked-away thoughts, half-forgotten until now. They need to be aired; organized; sorted through; and weeded, like books, for those that no longer serve a purpose. If you wish to watch this slow process and lend me your moral support, I appreciate it. If you find yourself able to lend a hand by suggesting how things might better fold flat... even better. Be my guest, and comment.

I have no idea whether this first posting will also be my last, incidentally. I have tried keeping a paper journal - a journal on deviantART - a video blog of my transition, on YouTube - to no avail. I've posted long notes on Facebook, but that site inspires a supreme "tl:dr" attitude (even in me) and those postings never accomplish what they were supposed to. My introspection has tended to drop to what will fit conveniently in a status message... But perhaps every time I see another friend's blog, it will remind me to write; and eventually, perhaps mine will do the same for her when her willpower flags. All I can do is try, and hope.

August is also my birth month. Here, August is the peak of summer, rainier than July but hotter and full of thunderstorms. Paradoxically, the days are getting shorter, and you can feel the rush of life preparing to prepare for the fall even in the midst of summer's plenty. This is my month. It is happy, healthy, and warm, but always half-mindful of its imminent decline: its mortality.

'August', as an adjective, has a different emphasis, and means regal and magnificent. Or maybe well-renowned? Let's check that:

au·gust

 [aw-guhst]

adjective

1.

inspiring reverence or admiration; of supreme dignity or grandeur; majestic: an august performance of a religious drama.

2.

venerable; eminent: an august personage.

Origin:

1655–65;  < Latin augustus  sacred, grand

[stolen from Dictionary.com]

So... both. I don't think that much in here is going to be 'august', but I have always been interested by Augustus Caesar. My month is his month - his namesake. In many ways I think he was a horrible little man, but we'll leave that for another posting much later. (It'll probably be titled 'Lies to Children'.) His reign, and that of Julius Caesar before him, marked the glorious beginning of the end for Rome - still with expansion to go, but clearly a turning point. I think he chose the right month to name after himself.

Can you tell I'm going to ramble sometimes? Yet in others, I'm going to be baring my soul about things I may never have previously admitted - even to myself. I may spend hours avoiding writing some of this stuff, because I don't want to say it. I may change major parts of my life as a result of this journal.

Wish me luck, and enjoy the ride...