In the spirit of yesterday’s post about forgiveness, I offer you a poem about letting go of past hurts. I wrote this one most of a decade ago, and it remains one of my favorites. Sadly, the Poetry Generator that spurred the unusual images is long gone, but the poem it inspired remains.
Enjoy!
~♥ Dawn
In the Attic of Enmity
In the attic of enmity, the peacock’s milk
spills variegated across the detritus of past quarrels.
Memories of wrongs long discarded
of slights unused, and disregarded
lie quiescent in shards of dusty, pallid daylight
which peep through narrow cracks in the confining walls of our history.
What use, this milk of human pain?
What purpose does it serve?
Cataloging our misery,
each agony protected against the softening effects of time?
Should we not allow instead the rough edges to be worn away,
the sharp corners blunted,
till they become some unrecognizable mass
unremarkable, unremembered, and of use no more?
Come, let us descend the creaking stairs
our arms full of unknown and anonymous hurts,
their meaning long since rendered indecipherable by time.
Throw them all, unlamented
in the dustbin of our lives,
no longer to burden our attic of memory
with the bitter milk of human unkindness.
Free at last we emerge,
blinking, into the sunlight of love
so long obscured by our hoarded pains.
Light of step, light of heart
we fly now to the forest of surrender
where the fruits of human kindness lurk
succulent and tempting
trembling in anticipation of our touch.
That’s the thought I finally came to, at the end of my journey of processing the request made of me a few weeks ago, that in order to stay in an online course, I agree to never mention my niche or the word polyamory. I was honestly shocked to get this request; shocked and traumatized, all of my worst fears about being ‘out’ about poly come to life. Here I’d signed on to this course to become more confident in bringing my skills and talents to the world, and to help people understand the joys and challenges of polyamory and other “outside the box” forms of relating (at least as I’ve experienced them and learned over 15 years of intensive study) — and merely mentioning my niche brought down censure on my head. Was she (the course leader) right, that polyamory is “not G-rated” and inherently “squirmy”? Was I the one out of line, to think it would be ok to talk openly about polyamory?
We here in the Uncharted waters have had many a discussion (on lists, in discussion groups, on the web…) about whether sex is an inherent part of the definition of polyamory. I generally don’t think it’s required, though of course I think it’s by far the most common case that polyamory includes sex. In my definition, polyamory most often includes sex, in the exact same way that monogamy most often includes sex, but can be experienced without it; they’re both relationship styles after all. But just as it’s possible to have a celibate or sex-free monogamous relationship, it’s quite possible that someone might identify as polyamorous but not be having sex or in a sexual relationship. The presence or absence of sex is not like a light switch after all. Otherwise, we’d all walk around changing our status whenever we had a sexual encounter (or didn’t): Now polyamorous, now celibate, momentarily monogamous, polyamorous again ….
Yes, of course, that’s a very extreme and somewhat silly example… but is it any more extreme and silly than presuming that because my context is “polyamorous people,” that when I talk about communication tools, they are necessarily about communicating about sex? What exactly makes polyamory “not G-rated”? For that matter, is sex itself automatically R-rated, never mentionable to anyone under 17? And if so, why do they teach about it in middle school?? I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t my mind making polyamory into a 24/7 lurid group-sex encounter. Though I will admit to amusement when viewing this old ad that was going around on Facebook a couple of weeks ago:
Good clean fun at the beach?
No, it seems pretty clear to me that the issue with polyamory being an unfit topic for polite dinner-table conversation was in the mind of that beholder … and unfortunately in a lot of other as-yet uneducated-about-poly minds out there. When she thought about polyamory, she felt “squirmy,” aka uncomfortable, aka shame. One of the pernicious characteristics of shame is that it is “contagious”–it spreads from person to person, often below the level of consciousness. Her shame triggered my shame. It took me days and a lot of processing to get through it. And that’s AFTER working on this stuff for years. Shame is pretty powerful stuff.
At the Open-SF conference in June, the excellent Charlie Glickman presented a wonderful workshop entitled “Love, Sex, and Shame.” In it he talked about the manifestations of shame (e.g., closed posture, averted eyes/face, mumbling or silence, “shifty”/”squirmy”, energetic disconnection), vs. the manifestations of love (e.g., open posture, direct gaze, easy communication, groundedness/ease, energetic connection, etc). Pretty much, actively experiencing love is diametrically opposed to actively experiencing shame. It’s hard to experience both at the same time. Isn’t that interesting?
Unfortunately, much of our culture holds that sex is inherently shameful. By extension, anything that leads to sex (with the possible exception of procreative sex between male and female spouses) is by extension inherently shameful. I think that viewpoint is de facto harmful. Certainly it was harmful to me to hear as a young person that my normal feelings and thoughts were somehow bad and wrong… that *I* was bad and wrong. It’s hard to feel love, and to express it in a healthy way, if at the core you believe yourself to be broken. It took me many years, and a lot of heartache (not to mention a lot of money spent on therapists…), to finally move beyond that toxic frame into the freedom and joy in both love and sex that I now believe to be my birthright (and that of every human being.)
For me, the path of healing wound its way through many places, starting with making a choice to find my own spirituality, and winding up most recently with me refusing to be shamed and silenced for who and how many I love. Each step has involved me finding a bit that has been shamed, and being willing to entertain the notion that it wasn’t ME who was bad and wrong… but instead the unnecessary shame that had been forced on me for no other reason than that who and what I was didn’t fit into the particular box that was on offer at the time.
Understand that I believe that not all boxes are wrong, either. Sometimes boxes (or containers, or marriages–use the word that fits for you…) are places of safety. They’re where we keep our most prized memories. They provide support and boundaries. Sometimes they’re very beautiful; sometimes strong; sometimes fragile. But not all things (nor all creatures, nor all people) fit inside of every box. You know how there’s often that one package at the holidays that just refuses to fit inside the standard boxes, so you end up wrapping a small box with a note in it, or giving them a card, or sticking a million bows on it and hiding it in the back hallway instead? There’s nothing wrong with the gift for not fitting in that box — in fact, it might be THE best gift of them all because of the very thing that makes it not fit in the box! And there’s nothing wrong with the box either, just because that gift didn’t fit inside. It’s just a bad fit between that box, and that gift.
Well, that’s how I feel about polyamory, and about love. Polyamory is a great gift that doesn’t happen to fit the box that we got issued at the Universal Post Office. Polyamory is so chock full of LOVE that it spills out the sides and cannot be contained in the “usual” ways. (And lest you think I’m all sappy and Pollyanna (ha!) about poly, I also think that polyamory is sometimes the gift that proclaims “some assembly required” and for which the directions seem to be written in a foreign language.) Polyamory is bold and beautiful and complicated and drama-filled and a damn AFGO (“Another F-ing Growth Opportunity!”), and the worst thing and the best thing that I’ve ever done, all at once. (No, I take that back. The best thing I’ve ever done is to birth my amazing daughter. But poly is a close second.) When you get right down to it, polyamory is just a whole lotta LOVE all squished into one package (some assembly required).
And love, my friends, is nothing to be ashamed of.
s tomorrow approaches — and therefore, the airing of the National Geographic Taboo segment on polyamory (which profiles some of my “tribe,” and in which I appear in a cameo role) — I find myself in need of humor to break the nervous anticipation. So given that it’s easier to laugh and not take things too personally when one is laughing at oneself (or at least that’s true when I am laughing at MYself… LOL), I give you the following video:
I know I’ve personally said or heard pretty much every one of these things (allowing for appropriate changes of gender and orientation), and yes, I really did Laugh Out Loud.
On a more serious note, given that slut-shaming will certainly be a part of the fallout from this video, here’s another amazing YouTube clip, this one by an exceedingly wise 13-year-old girl.
Hopefully tomorrow’s segment will be at least as enlightening as both of these videos–and no more embarrassing!
I’m having a hard time writing right now, in part because what I need to write about isn’t so much related to polyamory (except inasmuch as I am polyamorous, of course). So while I wait to see if I can find the time and energy to write about my experiences getting healthcare for someone close to me who is underinsured, I thought I’d give you a poem I wrote last week.
Enjoy.
~♥ Dawn
Hands -- a sculpture by Nathan Sawaya
Building Blocks
It seems I’ve lost myself
again.
It’s not the first time.
I’m forever losing parts of myself
like lost LEGOs
secreted under the dusty furniture
with my missing spoons or hidden in my dirty laundry.
I wonder what I’d make
if I could ever get myself together?
Would I make a house a home?
make change? make a difference to this one?
make space?
make peace?
or make the world a better place?
Imagine:
Bits of me, reunited
rising from the floor
towering gloriously
A cantilevered structure reaching toward the light
layer upon layer, piece by piece
riotous colors and random blocks
all fitted together to make…
what?
…haphazard
chaotic
jarring
unbalanced
stuck
(especially those two flat pieces
that you can never again pry apart
no matter how many fingernails you break)
meandering
unattractive
overlarge
useless.
Oh,
well.
One thing
about building blocks
is you can always
tear them down
knock them over
yank them apart
and start over.
Maybe this time
I’ll have a plan
get organized
sort things out
start on a firm foundation
get my bricks in a row
build bridges
have more defined boundaries
and make something of myself.
The original version of this was posted in my personal journal. I think the concept applies very much to polyamory and other forms of “Uncharted Love.” How do we use technology to draw us together? When does technology push us further apart? I’d love to hear what you have to say!
“Does it draw us together, or tear us apart?” Somewhere in my personal journal (and at the moment I do not have time to continue looking), I have at least one entry where I referenced a fascinating article about how the Amish determine if a technology is a good one for them to embrace. Apparently, there is some cell phone use that is allowable, because it passes this test–it draws the community together, and allows them to, for instance, reach someone in a far off field in an emergency. It makes sense to me, as a way of determining what is “good” and what is not. [Here is an archived version of the original article by Howard Rheingold in Wired Magazine.]
I’ve been thinking about this concept again over the past few days, and there have been a couple of things that have crossed my virtual desk that seem like excellent examples of this, to me.
For instance, the Internet is a fascinating place. There are so many things one can use it for. These days, I haven’t the bandwidth (to use a particularly internet-associated word for “energy”) to get involved in some of the passionate discussions I would have in the past. In some ways, that’s good. I was too invested in places that didn’t serve me. In others, it’s a comment on how useless I think it is to even HAVE some of these discussions. I’m a bit jaded, in other words, as compared to a decade ago when I first leapt into this gigantic livingroom/soapbox we call LiveJournal.
But for right now, I’m going to go a bit out on a limb (hey, I’m a squirrel, leaping!) and say that this is an example of a use of the Internet that tears us apart: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=question&id=10150213073290126&qa_ref=ns
I’m so tempted to go in there swinging, and telling these so-and-so’s exactly what I think of their ridiculous jockeying for position over an Internet straw poll. I mean, seriously. Is it really worth telling all my friends and getting everyone all worked up over whether or not the “pro-lifers” or the “libtards” have more votes in this poll? No, not really. It might be worth telling everyone, but only insofar as it’s a means to getting people into action in some more effective manner. And besides which, getting drawn into this discussion will just drive me crazy, trying to talk “sense” [from my perspective!] into people that sound just like my mother (*shudder*).
“I’m speaking up for those who feel lost and alone, and who’ve been rejected by others for core pieces of their being, whether that’s paganism, poly, their bodies, kink, or whatever. I’m here to say “you are not alone,” and “you are fine, just the way you are,” and hand you some tools and roadmaps.”
What do YOU need to be heard about?
unchartedlove@gmail.com or 510-686-3386.
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