AGEISM.

The world loves numbers. The world loves measurements of all kinds. With numbers, you have a corresponding piece of knowledge, will helps people make decisions of who they are, what they’re worth, how to speak to them, what their life experiences have likely been.

Age is a wonderful example of people’s erroneous tendencies to treat people like shit.

Children are fools.
Teens are uncontrollable.
20-somethings are self-indulgent and unreliable in the workforce.
30s are the new 21s.
40s are just beginning, but still wishing they were in their 20s.
50s should know better.
60s and up are disregarded, especially by the government.

I once was asked to NOT sit in the emergency exit aisle on a place. Why? I asked.

“Well,” the flight attendant condescendingly looked me up and down, “you have to be at least fifteen.”
That was only five years ago. I was 22.

I’m a full time, salaried with insurance and dental at a university. Can I even tell you how many times my ideas have been tossed aside, only to be echoed at a later meeting with a response, “Brilliant! We should do that!” because it came from someone older than me?

Get to know people. Quit making assumptions.

So I am taking a writing class. So I am also taking a women’s studies class. The potential of what might come out in my writing is monstrous. Can you see the volcano erupting by Thanksgiving? It’s a definite possibility.

In this women-only (there are mixed gender classes available, too) course, there is a lot of emphasis on symbolism, ritual, practice, and respect. Everyone’s thoughts and words are read aloud and held in a circle of curiosity, humor, patience, and silence. It’s absolutely counter-culture.

I pride myself that this is not the first time I have been a part of circles like this. The whole Jesuit thing, JVC, XU, BC, Women’s Centers, the Sacred Feminine…if you know any of those terms or acronyms, you know this to be true: for survival, it is essential to your own livelihood to be heard and feel validated. Fragments, whole, pieces, shards. It matters not what size or in/completed-ness, what matters is that you write. You write the world away. You write about dogs, lists, magic, jealousy, injustice, art, Blockbuster lines, and gas prices. You write what you live. I live deeply, so I write deeply.

We had the option of giving our name, or giving a name we would like to be called. For whatever reason, I regretted saying my real name. I wanted to be called Flora. I wanted to be called Flower.

http://womenwriting.org

Today I went to the dentist.

As she dug for gold in the back of my mouth, I tried to remember that this is a blessing. It is. This whole experience of a bleeding mouth and watery eyes. Some parts of the world never receive this service. That was my mantra.

“Not a hint of a cavity, Lisa! Just keep up on that flossing.”

On my way out, muttering a thanks to the secretary, I passed a sign that read:
AS ADVERTISED IN PEOPLE MAGAZINE. Do you eat too fast? Do you eat too much? Buy this small artificial mouth filler that will decrease the size of your mouth cavity, forcing you to take smaller bites and eat less food, and giving your brain enough time to signal that you are full!

Looooooorrrrrrrrrrd. I just got back from a starving nation, where bellies are hardened with parasites. Here at home, we’re stuffing plastic in our mouths to control proportions. I couldn’t help but think one thought, Americans are out of control…in every possible way. I tasted blood in the back of my mouth and reminded myself several times that access to dentistry is a blessing.

It’s difficult to describe things that matter, what carries heroic-sized significance. It is difficult to explain what most do not experience or even care to know. After all, it’s a description, an explanation. Nothing more.

To describe an experience like Nicaragua, not just as a country, but an experience is large scaled agreement to gently disgrace oneself and one’s excessive lifestyle. There is no way to return home and describe poverty, joy, simplicity in terms that most citizens in the States would understand. We have difficulty with the most basic interferences of difference, how much more to describe a culture that survives on faith and hand-me-downs? Analyzing the Nicaraguan culture, lifestyle, and demographics means painful gazes at the core of global distribution, hierarchal ranking of human worth, and most of all, self-behavior.

This was my third trip to Central America. People ask, “How was it?” In my mind I respond, “I don’t have the right vocabulary to express and you don’t have the vocabulary to understand. We don’t have the right vocabulary.”

And we don’t. Not just for expressing what is different, but also for defining what beauty and rightness can be found in other countries outside developed or “first world” countries.

It is more than just denouncing the ritualistic consumerism that squeezes North Americans at their throats. It is so much more than that, more than any person wants to realize. How does one explain the difference between needs and created needs? You need shoes. You do not need 15 pairs of shoes. Why do we insist on communicating in only one language? What is behind that arrogance? What is behind our narcissistic confidence that reveals more shallow ends than oceans?

One afternoon, I sat for an hour and watched the silver rain fall from the milk sky in silence. I had to fight the question if I was “doing something” productive and meaningful. If not, I should get up and do it. “It” is never clarified itself. The semi-urgent voice to constantly move, endlessly keep going is strong. Three hundred fifty million ants crawling over themselves, never stopping is an American trademark. We sell. Merchandise. Trade and teach and counsel and market and theorize and build and find and wish and crave and govern and decide that we need to get up in the morning and do it all over again. Somewhere in those 52 weeks of living, we take 2 to do something else and call it vacation.

Is that living? Are you living?

For ten days I helped build homes, dig latrines, filled dirt holes with sand, cement, and soil. I passed out used glasses and bifocals. I assisted a pharmacist in a traveling medical clinic give out medication to isolated villages living in such poverty that I rarely spoke aloud. I was in such deep thought. Mentally disabled children bound to poles with flies crawling into their mouths bled into my heart. I stroked the hair of a young girl who lay on the ground and stared at something I could not see, moaning softly when I sang to her.

A peanut butter and jelly sandwich greeted my mouth everyday at noon with warm water chasing it down my dry throat. A plastic bed that captured the heat of my body and reflected it back to my skin held my overheated body each night, the metal bars of the bed frame sticking in my back. I had a fan an inch from my face until my throat grew sore from breathing in its wind each night.

Rats and mice tore through clothes and hidden granola bars. Lizards ran over my bedroom walls. Earth’s soil and dirt stained my face and washcloths until their colors ran grey and black. Near naked children stroked my hair and asked my name and grabbed me in giddiness. I took their pictures for three days before my camera was stolen in the village I was working.

Under the relentless sun that crisped my body, I searched for my camera, my vice and artistic companion. The moment my hands searched frantically in my bag, I knew it was gone for good. This camera was my second replacement. I had a similar one stolen one year ago at a party. Wondering if I was cursed, I walked the village, eyeing the horses, pigs, cattle and people. A depressed sadness began to rise in me.

I talked to G*d in my head and asked for strength; to demonstrate strength in releasing my grip, not in keeping my hands clenched. To not hold plastic so dear to my heart and understand that, should there have been another toss of dice, I would likely be a quick thief, liar, or opening my body for price. I sent warmth to the person who stole what was so clearly mine and hoped that it went to feed a starving family, a sick person’s medication, or provide a need that otherwise would go unattended.

The world we live in is so ridiculously unfair and narrowly trained that we cannot find adequate solutions to distribute the Earth’s natural bounty. So many lives are destroyed through pure greed and we lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel better. We do. We lie and say that taking more than what we need is alright. We lie and convince ourselves that we really cannot help the systematic injustices of the world and its corruptness is too large, too significant and we, in turn, are insignificant. But not too insignificant to spend our lives pursuing money and power in our own communities and circles of life.

Anger is the color of blood and it has long been running in my veins. I’ve heard that anger is the realization that something is going against what you know to be Truth. For me, now, anger is a state of life. A realization that we all are guilty of narrow lives; of keeping ourselves sick with ignorance and then pretending we have the answers with religion, political plans, and charity. We fail our own glory by not experiencing the world, its people, and difference. How many people do you encounter that are truly different from you? Blast through proverbial “difference” like neighborhoods, states, schooling, and class and think harder. Think of someone who you may not even understand linguistically or culturally and ask what you may offer one another to live more vibrant, more alive lives. If you can do that and find someone who will have this conversation, you will find your glory.

Hola mis amigos,
Para su informacion:

Adonis and I will be chaperoning a mission trip to Chinandega, Nicaragua for ten days. I, understandably, will not have computer/internet access and will lapse in my blogging until I return. Somehow, someway, you will have to go about your days without me. I can only offer my promise to return with more enthusiastic sarcasm, senseless humor, and rhetorical questions as solace for your grief.

Adonis and I will be chaperoning 10 highschool senior males. This shall be interesting.

Fe! Lucha! Justicia!
Hasta pronto, con amor siempre.

My Adonis.

He reads everywhere we go, absorbing all the knowledge he can into his brain. He then shares with me, so I figure I am twice as smart as anyone else.