Archive for March, 2012

The milk of human kindness

Posted by on March 28, 2012

So I’m walking over to a friend’s house and it’s about 50 degrees and threatening rain, and this woman up the block has her lawnmower out, clipping the (mostly invisible) green growth in front of her house.

Yippee! I think. Spring is here!

Happily I watch as she pushes the mower along the tiny strip of grass between sidewalk and street. Then, with maybe another 10 feet of grass to go, she turns around and heads back the other way.

What the … ?

And then it hits me: she just reached the boundary of her neighbor’s yard.

Sure enough, as I get closer I see that her turn-around point on the verge precisely parallels the invisible line of demarcation where her lawn abuts her neighbor’s grass.

And my joy at seeing this most mundane and noisy sign of spring’s return evaporates. I think, there’s something just not right about this. Read more…

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The gift of stopping

Posted by on March 23, 2012

Ever feel over-stuffed?

Over stuffed with food? With thoughts? Worries? Things to do, places to go, people to see and promises to keep?

Yeah, me too.

It’s the food that finally put me over the edge. I suddenly realized that it didn’t matter how great the meal, how fine the ingredients, or how good the wine— I wasn’t really tasting any of it.

I was eating on automatic.

And if my stomach was on automatic, the rest of me probably was too. So, I decided to go on a juice fast. For 10 days.

I’ll skip the gruesome details because I don’t want to scare anybody off doing a juice fast if they’re actually considering doing one. Honest, it’s more than just a ”misery loves company” move on my part. It’s a healthy thing to stop consuming every once in awhile. Read more…

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Feminism is about men too

Posted by on March 15, 2012

I started to write about International Women’s Day 2012, but the topic left me cold.

Frankly I hadn’t even known there was an international day celebrating women—and the invisibility of the event surprised me. I mean, here I’d just gone and outted myself as a feminist and I didn’t even know about this? Talk about the media burying social issues!

Then, cruising the web, looking for some sort of interesting image to use, I stumbled upon the above photo of a man living—or trying to live—down in the Gulf near New Orleans.

Talk about invisible social issues, indeed.

At least we women have a natural platform from which to shout and wave cool signs and write blogs about the “softer” values of love, peace, community, sustainability, healthy minds and bodies and a healthy Earth. As the downtrodden and the marginalized we’re expected to lobby for these human rights so completely ignored by the Powers That Be. Read more…

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Confession time!

Posted by on March 7, 2012

Hear ye, hear ye!

In case no one has noticed it yet, this is a feminist blog … kinda sorta.  Oh, hell. It’s a feminist blog. There, I admitted it.

Too late to back peddle now!

It’s taken me a year to muster up the guts to make that statement—a fact that doesn’t please me too much. But then I really didn’t understand feminism up until now. So how could I lay claim to the title?

I got sidetracked early in life by the dozens of ugly labels spewed at feminists and feminism. What shy young girl desiring popularity wants to get tarred with the ball-busting, bra-burning, man-hating bitch brush? I surely didn’t!

Over the years, saying I wasn’t a feminist got to be a habit. Besides, I was already liberated. Right? Read more…

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