windinthemaples

As I'm sure most of you reading this know, my dear friends mermaiden and willow_cabin are working feverishly to raise the money necessary to put on their wedding next month. If you'd like to help them or just treat yourself to something lovely, you can buy something from one of their cottage industries: Glamourkin book-based jewelry, Garden of Antheia fabric flower adornments, or Sarah's e-book and print publications.

Also, if you're a fan of foodie perfume oils, our mutual friend rubymulligan is selling a limited edition perfume on her Etsy shop with all profits going towards Sarah & Jenn's wedding fund. It's very nom. :)

~*~

So, in the interest of having the best shopping day ever helping these ladies out, I went on a bit of a spree solemn philanthropic mission the other day. I bought a bunch of Glamourkin pendants, some hair flowers, *and* a second bottle of the Sweetest Day perfume. My Glamourkins arrived and I'm just so in love with them! :) I bought some as gifts and some for myself--but these are mine.

I know some of you bought your own the last few weeks--I'd love to see what you got and hear what it was about that one that called to you. :)


I love this Beauty and the Beast illustration, I connect with images of redheads as heroines, and I believe, absolutely, that love is not only the oldest but the most powerful magic.


Strangely, two weeks in a row now, we've had the same reading in our Unitarian Universalist church service. It so moved me, I wrote part of it into the margins of the service program. It reads, in part, We need one another when we are in despair, in temptation, and need to be recalled to our best selves again.....All our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us. I love that image of community calling us to our best selves, of need calling us to our best selves, and so this pendant was absolutely perfect to crystallize and remember that teaching forever.

We had a leisurely, wonderful four day weekend together here at home. We played board games, watched Graeme splash in park fountains, spent nap times watching movies (Batman Dark Night and Hot Tub Time Machine), and stuck wholeheartedly to our diets. On Saturday, we spent the day cruising around Evanston, looking at some of the neighborhoods with rental homes. We're in love with that town--it'll be so nice to get out of Chicago proper and finally have things like guest rooms and outdoor space! (Or, you know, a room for Graeme to call his own.)

In the last five weeks, I've lost 13 pounds. (Daniel's lost 20.) I started keeping track of my calorie consumption and, in a Black Month kinda way, it revealed all the ways I was deceiving myself or quietly sabotaging my health. I'd attributed my weight gain, lack of energy, and aches and pains as evidence of aging. What a farce! I just needed to eat less, move from processed foods and carb-loading to raw fruits and veggies, and become aware of my relationship with food and the consequences of my choices. Yes, I can eat that slice of bread--but four carrots would fill me up better for the same number of calories. I can indulge in a cupcake, but that means I may have to go hungry for hours before my next (small) meal. By having a budget that I stick to, every choice I make has a natural, predictable consequence. I can choose x but that means I can't later have y. I find all this so related to other consumptions/appetites of mine. If I go off-diet, eat something regrettable, it becomes a snowball of eating more. (Nothing makes me hungrier than eating something high-calorie--I just want more and more and more.) Likewise, when I don't shop, don't consume, I don't miss it. If I slip and buy something, though, it naturally leads to more and more and more. In the case of my food diet, I am knowing when to get 'away from the food', going places where I'm not tempted to eat. In my shopping, my affluenza, I need to stay away from the places where I am tempted to spend money on extraneous things I don't need for my survival. They are connected for me--so I'm finding it doubly worthwhile to work on it and acknowledge the reality of my consumption habits.

I started the month with an idea for an experiment wherein I bought nothing but food and other necessary consumables. I'd noticed, as I looked around me, that I am addicted to acquisition. I go shopping with no real needs in mind and collect more and more possessions as I age, collecting like a giant out-of-control snowball flying down the slopes and picking up skiers, trees, discarded cups of hot cocoa along the way. All this stuff then gets bagged up throughout the year and lugged to a charity shop. How many items have I given away that were never used? How many thousands and thousands of dollars a year do I spend on things that do not add to my happiness? How much of the crap I'm obligated to haul around with me on the circus train of my life is actually only existing as a burden to me and the environment?

I was watching a trailer for a documentary, Dive, about dumpster diving in America. A voiceover said something like, "People who throw this much away are demonstrating their complete lack of respect for the resources of the Earth." That pegged me right through the gut. When I mindlessly consume in the hunt for some temporary rush, I'm acting in about as contrary-to-my-religious-beliefs way as is possible to do. I'm ignoring the very real, very finite resources that were ripped from Gaia to shape that battery-powered dancing hampster. When I buy more than I need, I'm greedily taking from the ability of other people who have nothing in other parts of the world to meet their own needs. I'm acting like the spoiled child who wants what I want at the expense of my hard-working Mother, struggling to keep up with my ever escalating needs.

By stepping out of the consumer mouse wheel for a few weeks, I feel like I've sobered up, finally awake to the world around me. I'm seeing the bombardment I was under, the myriad ways I've been manipulated through my life to mold me into the perfect, thoughtless consumer. I'd been taught that the answer to all problems lay in products I could choose to purchase. If I wanted to be more eco-conscious, I could buy bamboo chopping boards, unbleached cotton yoga clothes, reusable bags with cute slogans and winking cartoon trees. If I wanted to control the avalanche of purchases taking over my home, I could buy a larger home, a convenient neighborhood storage space, or lay out hundreds of dollars for color-coordinated hangers and sock drawer dividers at some big box organizational store. Wouldn't the true answer be to not buy differently but to not buy at all? That was my tentative plan for the month...to experiment with the novelty of not acquiring anything.

I knew it would be better for the environment and better for my over-stuffed dwelling, but what I didn't anticipate is how much happier I am without stuff and shopping. I've spent more time with my son playing with the board games and toys he already owns. We've spent hours each day seeking out new neighborhood parks. We discovered the sheer joy of loading up on library books and DVDs and exchanging those piles for new ones every few days. We've delighted in being outside, taking photographs, drawing in the dirt with sticks and pinecones. We've rediscovered treasures I already had in the house--dishes and clothes and solutions-to-problems of all stripes. My junk food consumption has dropped, too, telling me perhaps that the carb-sugar-processed wheel may be directly related to that of the advertiser's buy-buy-buy making. I feel prettier, more powerful, healthier. The constant yearning that shopping attempted to abate has lessened. The addiction's claws aren't as deeply embedded as they were a month ago. I am content in my own skin. I am at peace with stillness.

I knew, before I left for Diana's Grove, that this was a change that needed to continue for more than a month's lark. I knew that the more I learned about issues of resource consumption, garbage, pollution and true need that it would require my circle of compassion to continually expand, for my actions to continually change towards doing the most-good as I could could. It was terrifying, that no-going-back mentality. If you take away shopping and stuff and collections and the effect of 31 years of advertising pitches, what recognizable piece of me will be left? Who will I be if I'm not defined by the things I have, the things I collect, the things I like to buy?

Leaving Diana's Grove, I'm still scared. I liken the sensation to being in the door of an airplane, terrified to jump out. The plane's on fire, though, and while I don't know what the view is going to be like in this radically different lifestyle, I know that I don't want to be in a box of someone else's making any longer. I want my life to amount to more than what I can purchase, to the material items I can pack like insulation around me. I want my life to be lived. I can see a way out and all it'll take is a leap of faith.

That good(s) life that you are trying to sell me on, Big Business? I'm done buying it. I've woken up.

Graeme and I spent the last two days up at Disney World, exhausting the last bit of my annual pass and enjoying a few days of Mother and Baby bonding and adventure. I'm in the midst of a series of epiphanies about the nature of Earth (as an Element, as a planet, and as Gaia Herself) and my time there has only furthered my thoughts about it. Like all epiphanies, I find it almost impossible to articulate and yet, I must. It'll have to come through piecemeal and patchwork and I hope it makes some sense.

I am an acquisitive person by nature. Maybe it was because I was born with the Moon in Taurus or perhaps it was my mother's influence as I was raised in shopping malls around the country or maybe something else entirely, but I seek comfort and stability and peace in material items. I have a collector's mindset. I love the good humor and humanitarian spirit of The Muppets, for example, and have held decades-long the desire to dedicate an entire room in my home to Muppets memorabilia. I can't help but want and when I get, I want more. It is an insatiable hunger, my desire to accumulate. I love crystals and when I'm in a crystal store or that mining museum in Arizona, I don't want one or two. Ideally, I want them all. I could buy a crystal every day of my life and never reach a point of satiation. Same too with vinyl art toys in blind boxes or sparkly stationary or art materials or seashells. It is never enough. I collect shells when I visit beaches around the world and those shells have poured above and out of every container I designate for them. I can't stop myself from scanning for more to take. I want sky-high alphabetized libraries of my own and endless color-coordinated closets, whole museums of stuff immortalizing my existence on earth. I could have scrapbooks and photographs and statues and picnic tables and gold-plated athames and the entire collection of Fraggle Rock DVDs and I would *still* never reach a point where I said. "I have bought all that I want." That point will never be reached on this path I'm on, because the stuff doesn't actually bring me fulfillment. I'm searching for contentment, an end to the yearning, and accumulating a lot of stuff I don't need in the process.

The Earth suffers because I take more than I need. I've read the works of Thomas L. Friedman and I'm aware that our American standard of consumption is unsustainable for our planet. I know that the undeveloped population of the world cannot aspire to the dizzying lifestyle we demand for ourselves in the Western World. Something has to give in this resource-exploitation arms race and I'd really rather it not be our planet's viability. I want our government to step in and start acting like this was a life and death matter, for all of us, and yet what am I doing myself? I acquire reusable shopping bags the way I seem to collect everything else...I have more than I'd ever need. I was raised this way, in a society where advertising executives revolutionized the way we live and convinced everyone that Kleenex were superior to the handy, reuseable, buy once hankerchief and that what we need for our own lasting happiness lies in the next product release or upgrade. I'm being tricked into taking more than my share, more than I need.

(You can probably begin to identify my epiphany as, well, pretty much Buddhism.)

So I'm living in this dream state where I'm completely insulated from the damage of my choices. If I choose to eat a slice of cheese pizza, I'm protected from having to witness the trauma of a dairy cow's existence. I don't have to explain my actions to the veal calf awaiting slaughter in his tiny plastic crate. If I buy a piece of jewelry, to join the collection of jewelry I already own, I don't have to see the laborers gouging into the heart of my Mother Earth to extract the metal to make it. I am so divorced from the reality of my resource consumption, I couldn't possibly tally what impact I make on the world with all my purchases. The pollution, the underpaid laborers, the environmental degradation, the resource competition, there are too many factors to figure out. What I am beginning to sense, though, is that I am part of the whole making this world so troubled. I am sitting at the communal table and taking more than my share. Though I cannot see all the other diners, there is no doubt that some/many/countless will be/are forced to do without because of my greed.

If it can't be grown, it must be mined. That's the mining industry slogan but it also pulls into sharp relief the reality that everything on this earth is natural. Everything I buy or accumulate or collect was grown upon or extracted from the earth. The sad thing is that once it is taken, it can almost never be returned. So I bought that stupid, useless metal pin at Disney World. I can't put that metal back, smooth over a disrupted ecosystem, and apologize for my mindless materialism. I can't restore hides to slaughtered animals, I can't rebuild the secret crystal cathedrals that were shattered apart by machinery for my tumbled rock collection. I cannot mold my junk mail back into living trees on an Alaskan hillside. I cannot return the resources that I have demanded for my sole use. It is too late for that.

At Disney World, I overheard a conversation between a father and his child. The child said, "This is boring." The father, with a tone of disbelief and fatigue, said, "We're spending five days at Disney World. I sold a kidney for this! You can't be bored." I'm that child. I turn to my mother, who has literally opened a vein (of petroleum, water, silver, gold, copper, platinum, quartz, etc) for me time and time and time and time again and I still take my purchases home and say, "I wish I had the pink one, too. Maybe tomorrow I can get that." It is a wonder how much She loves me, that I haven't been smited yet. My ever-suffering Mother.

I'm addicted to shopping. When I had not one cent to spare, I searched the ground under vending machines for overlooked coins. When I couldn't buy, I went browsing in dumpsters and gleefully dragging home what I claimed for myself and our household. I always wanted more. Now, I am blessed with abundance. I don't have as many natural restrictions on my ability to gather more and more material possessions. I can go to the thrift store with no needs and haul home bags and bags of things I didn't need. I can haul home books from the bookstore and ignore the library altogether. It is messed up. Okay, and admittedly I'm not actually addicted to shopping anymore than the rest of our society, but that's messed up enough. I am entertained by material items and I have the wealth to seek them out. I'd rather browse a thrift store aimlessly than do just about anything else. It is unnatural, it creates a chaos of clutter, and more than that--it is disrespectful. I do not value that everything I buy, everything I take into my home, is part of Gaia. Part of Her blood, Her body, Her very essence. If I owned one jacket, it would have importance. Instead, I have half a dozen and all of them treated as if they were unimportant, replaceable, devalued.

I both long for, and fear, the Little House life. Remember in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House book series, how she recounted tales from her childhood? Oh, the Christmas that a neighbor surprised them with a precious piece of candy when they were going to have to do without gifts. The one precious, tattered rag doll she called her toy. I can't tell you the number of holidays where I've had so much to open that none of it, ultimately, made any impact upon me. I've been asking my mother for years to write me a letter in lieu of a gift. I've yearned for that meaning, that message, that immaterial, precious sentiment. I tend to get makeup or a sweater, instead.

I own an old New England home-cooked style cookbook solely because of its Tasha Tudor illustrations. The "receipts" are organized into meals for all sorts of special occasions. For birthdays, there are special cakes for the children and the author's memory of her son's favorite meal. Wouldn't it be liberating to request a favorite food on my birthday, enjoy it with my family, and happily do without any unnecessary gifts?

All these romanticized visions share one siren call--the lure of 'less is more'. It sounds wonderful, it sounds healthy and necessary and yet to do that would be to fly in the face of all that our modern society is, all that I am. I'd have to become the weirdo that didn't give gifts at the holidays and I'd have to, even scarier, cut my ties to material goods. I'd have to learn to say, "I have all I need."

What would happen to the world if I did that?! My entire lifestyle, my day-to-day motivations are rooted in materialism. What would it take to shut down that programming and what would be left of life as I knew it?

It is terrifying. I'm contemplating giving my security blanket away. I don't want to.

Sarah asked, in passing, what the work of this past esbat was for me. Truthfully, it is this. I'm thinking of it as Mindful March. I have started to hear the voice and rock with the intense emotions of Gaia. I am catching glimpses of myself outside of the dream and awakening to find that I've been mindlessly consuming Her resources. I'm living out-of-balance and taking more than I need. I must learn to feel the sensation of "enough". I must make my decisions consciously. I've gotta get awake and stay awake and act accordingly. I certainly cannot serve Her living as I have been, a zombie shuffling ever-forward for more.