Be careful what you wish for! I now have a new definition for downtime called: walk out the door into the snow in high-heeled leather boots.

Can you spell s-t-u-p-i-d?

Lying on the icy walkway after slipping, falling, and fracturing my left wrist there were several voices in my head that said, um, many things. Not one of them mentioned there might be an upside to the situation.

The drugs were a good start though. Breaking a bone is excruciating, both physically and emotionally. When the doctors handed me a prescription for narcotics I originally had every intention of refusing to fill it.  Hey, I know what those things do to your liver. But my friends chauffeuring me home from the medical clinic insisted.

Six hours later, boy, was I grateful!

It’s amazing the things you can’t do with your left arm in an over-the-elbow cast… like zip your pants, floss your teeth (with regular non-plasticized floss thingeys that don’t add to the Sargosso Sea of plastic in the Pacific ocean), open a wine bottle, or scrape the scrambled eggs out of a steel skillet onto a plate. Of course with enough pain meds in you, you really don’t care.

I even had to ask a strange woman in the local food co-op to pull my pants up for me and retie them! But hey, what price humility?

But there is, after all, an upside to gimping around one-handed.

Washing dishes. Forget it. Ain’t happenin’. Do a weak rinse and shove things in the dishwasher.  Or let them pile up! You can do it! You have an excuse! Make your coffee in a (gasp) unrinsed Bodum with some of the old grounds still clinging to the rim. Leave things on the counter. Who cares? It’s guaranteed that (girl) friends who come visit will wash up for you.

Cleaning the floors. It’s manageable with a dustpan and a whisk broom.  And if you’ve got carpet fine. Vacuuming’s no problem. But cleaning wood floors? Linoleum? Oh, I suppose I could get on my hands and knees with a sponge and bucket and crawl around like a three-legged dog. But here’s where being wounded really counts: I actually got to watch my ex scrub my floors for me one day. Imagine the satisfaction…

Making the bed. There’s a deliciousness that comes with an unmade bed. A total sense of laziness and sloth. Mine has been unmade for 18 days except for when my friends haul the sheets out of the dryer and make it for me.

Dusting. It’s no problem, but with the dishes piled up, an unmade bed and dirty floors, who cares? Let it add to the general ambience.

So what to do with all the new spare time? I’m not sure. I haven’t had time to think about it. I’m too busy catching up on all the “West Wings” I never  had time to see.

Her name was Jyoti Singh Pandey and her name was withheld until after her death following brutal multiple rapes on a Delhi bus in December because “rape is a crime of shame,” and according to Ranjana Kumari, director of India’s Centre for Social Research, “It’s not easy to survive social shame in India.”

If you live to get that far.

Nation-wide protests and global outrage about this rape in particular and the treatment of women in India in general have galvanized the Delhi court system. As a result, the five men so far accused of raping Jyoti potentially face tougher laws, including chemical castration and the death penalty.

Activists believe Jyoti’s savage death could mark a turning point for women’s rights in India, and the government is considering fast-tracking wide-scale reforms in the criminal justice system’s handling of sexual assaults. 

Never mind in the past five years, political parties across India have nominated 260 candidates currently awaiting trial on charges of crimes against women.

But it’s not just India. Rape is epidemic in the West. And gang rape? Well, how about that Steubenville high school football team?

The problem of rape goes farther than national boundaries. It goes deeper than “let’s castrate the bastards.” It goes deeper than the understandable outcry for justice. It boils all the way down to the basement level and how we view ourselves as human beings.

In our increasingly material world there is little attention paid to the spiritual component of life. And I’m not talking religion here. I’m not even talking about God. I’m talking about that unseen aspect of us called the soul and spirit. Reduced to body parts and body functions the human race has spurned higher ideals and come to worship material consumerism above all else. We call it being “modern.”

In the process we’ve learned to objectify and degrade even the human body—especially women’s bodies, which are commercialized and sold in magazines, in porn shops, online, in the sex trade and on the streets. Video games like RapeLay, Custer’s Revenge and Battle Raper make rape a reward for the player.

All this goes on in the name of making a buck and, oh yeah, defending the free speech clause of the First Amendment of the American Constitution.

Right. I’m sure that’s what Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had in mind at the time.

Respect for women and girls starts with respect for life. All life. I know it’s not the same in some people’s minds, but in a society where animals are factory farmed, caged in their own excrement and beaten; where piglets are used as soccer balls by Tyson Farm employees; where school children skin animals alive and torch puppies just for “fun,” where legislation is proposed to make it legal for doctors performing abortions to be killed, is it any surprise we have young university women raped for hours on a bus, brutalized with a pipe and left naked in a ditch?

No. It’s not a surprise.

It’s time to redefine life values as something more than a political issue used to get votes. It’s time for education and legislation that honors and protects people, not banks and corporations that demand we sell our souls as well as our bodies for survival. It’s time to initiate and support common sense education and legislation that honors all life as valuable, precious and beautiful.

Until we do, demanding harsher legislation and punishment — as satisfying and justifiable as it might be — is just rearranging the deck chairs on the ship called RAPE. 

“Many men have no difficulty in performing the act of ritual praise, interest, affirmation, and affection, which many women so greatly desire! “ he wrote. “These men do it with a religious zeal, genuine hypocrisy, and such consummate cunning and skill.”

Was I honestly supporting women in their need for verbal reassurances? And was I honestly chastising more honorable, yet silent, men for their reticence?

“Actually, I was trying to provide encouragement for greater verbal connection between the sexes,” I replied. Plus, don’t you know, the (no longer quite so silent) men would be the first to reap a bountiful harvest of affection from their women in return for being more forthcoming?

Which is, of course, why the snakes and other predatory reptiles are so swift to pay compliments and utter the “I love you” words so important to almost every woman in the first place. Unless the words come too quickly to be believable (say in under two hours or so) it’s an efficient ploy as ancient as, well, probably sex itself. The fact that it continues to be so successful after thousands of years of predictable repetition is indeed a matter for much head scratching.

Are women really so stupid that we’ll accept words any actor can utter as truth? Accept caresses any gigolo can provide as testimony to lasting affections?

Um … sometimes?

Insecurity, a socially ingrained chronic need for a man, and lack of discernment lead the huge list of reasons for this. Then there’s childhood sexual abuse and low self-esteem, general permissiveness and even boredom. A far more interesting question than why we are this way is, I think, if words and sex can’t be trusted as indicators of love, what can?

The only answer I can come up with is so staggeringly old-fashioned I almost hesitate to voice it, but here goes: Consistent actions over the course of time.

I can hear the groans now. What kind of actions? And over how much time? I’m not sure what actions indicate true affection. It varies for each individual. But things like respect, being there when needed, and taking the other person’s sensibilities into account when making decisions that affect that person are a fair start.

And the time frame?

Well, everybody’s into instant gratification nowadays. First date dialogue is swiftly followed by steamy sex scenes in movies and on TV. But does hopping in the hay first thing (with or without smarmy compliments), making life decisions based on sexual chemistry really work?

The staggering number of divorces, single moms and abandoned children in the West indicate a resounding “no!” But surely all this can’t be blamed on shallow, self-serving relationships and a lack of strong silent John Wayne types espousing honor, respect and responsibility at all costs … can it?

Surely not! Odd, though, that those kinds of guys went out of vogue just as all the other problems surged to the fore, isn’t it? Hm. Maybe I’ll dial up Netflix and see what The Quiet Man has to say.

Say you’re dating … isn’t it enough that the guy is attentive? Respectful? Shows up on time for your dates? Hangs with your kids and really enjoys them? Appreciates your abilities, your sense of humor, your cooking? Isn’t it enough that he makes love to you with passion and tenderness?

Does he have to text you instantly upon receiving a message from you? Does he have to drop everything to call you back if you phone? Is your relationship world incomplete if he doesn’t constantly (or even occasionally) say things … like “Gee, cool shoes,” or “Wow, you look hot!” or “I really like being with you.”

Are you uncertain about his feelings unless he trots out the three little words we all yearn to hear?

Yeah, welcome to the club.

It’s hard trying to pry verbal caresses out of a man you’re seeing. It’s like there’s this unspoken bachelor dating mindset that says, “Hey, I’m seeing you all the time and taking you out and spending my hard-earned money on you. You should know I love you without my saying it.”

Right.

If you’re married you’re in even worse shape ‘cause here there’s even less potential for commentary. The silent assumption that we women should know they love us because of what they do goes into hyperdrive and becomes: “What? I married you for heaven’s sake. Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that tell you I love you? Do I have to keep saying it all the time?”

“Yes!” we unanimously cry. “Yes, you do!”

Sure, women have been scientifically proven to exceed men in verbal orientation, both written and spoken. We are far more empathic and concerned with creating bonding opportunities. And we seem to be wired in our brains to need reassurances of sameness as a measure of security. So when it comes to the place we’re least likely to be secure—assessing a man’s feelings for us—if we love them, we need to hear that they love us too.

So here’s how to get what you need: tell your guy all this and ask for it.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s not very satisfying doing it this way. It doesn’t seem like, really real, if we have to tell them to tell us. We want men to automatically, without prompting, know to give us the verbal sustenance we crave. Unfortunately, if we wait on them, most likely we’ll starve to death.  Either that or turn into some kind of ravening Tyrannosaurus Need Beast.

“Words are a pretext,” wrote the poet Rumi. “It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”

Yes, yes, so true. But when it comes to enlightenment between the genders, honest communication is the key.

It doesn’t matter if it’s my weight, my hair, a check, a page on the Internet or the bus—waiting for what I want to show up is just plain irritating. And for one reason:

I’m not where I want to be.

At any given moment I’m five miles down the road in my mind and the freaking light in front of me just won’t turn green. I find the perfect blouse but it only comes in sizes under 10 and I’m two months away from my goal weight. After much $$ spent on clothes that will fit “soon” I’ve learned over the years not to bite at tempting but too tight morsels of cloth. But I still look in the mirror and sigh because …

I’m not where I want to be.

Right now I’m waiting on a publishing deal for my first solo book – The Quiet Revolution: a memoir.  It’s about my journey learning the nuances of the feminine nature. It’s about my burgeoning acquaintance with the art of flow, not GO! It’s about knowing rather than thinking and the appropriateness of sometimes accepting what is instead of always pushing the boulder uphill. It’s about intuition, not second-guessing and analysis. It’s about the pay-off of patience.

It’s about all the things I’m not doing very well at lately.

It used to amaze me to hear about some religious leader eschewing sin being caught fornicating behind the Revival Tent; or some teacher writing books about temperance dying of alcoholism and general dissipation.

But now I understand.

Knowing something doesn’t mean you actually consistently practice whatever it is you know. It just means you actually finally know something because you’ve experienced it. Total integration comes later.

Apparently integrating deeply feminine traits and softer values into my adopted-for-survival 20th century macho persona is something else I must wait for.

In the meantime I’m grateful I’ve learned there’s something more to life that trying to be one of the guys obsessed with the competitive success game. I’m grateful I’m taking time to tune in to my feelings and gut sense. I’m grateful for the times I don’t automatically shove what appear to be blocks in my path out of the way and instead allow them to speak to me of unseen things I need to know about myself and others.

I’m grateful I’m being honest about my feelings, even when they make me vulnerable. I’m grateful I don’t worry as much and can hear the small voice inside that tells me everything will be okay, even when the old “show me” parts don’t believe it.

I’m grateful I’m a woman and have such sweet depths to plumb and such love to share. And I impatiently await the day when all women can stand forth proudly in their womanhood to share their amazing gifts with an accepting world.

Is it the fact that I’m still wearing my fuzzy PJ bottoms at 1 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon? Or that I work from home and take early afternoon bike rides in between work segments?

Nah. Those are just derivative benefits of one other thing: I’ve learned how to stop worrying. And not worrying takes one directly into flow.

Granted, it hasn’t been easy. I mean, my mother majored in worry. So did her parents. My first husband had an advanced degree. Growing up, worry was my constant companion. How to get through school (boring) without studying and still make it into each successive grade so my parents didn’t kill me?

And then after school, how the hell to make money with an English degree and avoid eating in soup kitchens?

Freelance writer sounded so exotic. Free and easy you know? No one told me my life would contract to one big, eternally nagging question: when’s the next check coming in?

Yeah, I know how to worry. But eventually I learned THE KEY to getting the Worry Monkey off my back: MEDITATION

I kid you not, taking a few minutes a day to completely chill changed my life. And I could meditate while remaining a good Christian—or an atheist for that matter—because meditation has nothing to do with religion.

What it does have to do with is ME. The real me. The real YOU.

Sitting alone in silence for a while each day, letting my frantic thoughts ebb and flow, opened the door to totally unexpected ways of looking at life. Without doing anything, my thoughts eventually settled down. And then one day they stopped. Or they seemed to stop.

What actually happened was suddenly all my usual worries about getting the oil changed in my car and did I pay the gas bill and when would I get the results of my pap smear … all these thoughts just kinda lined up, stood at attention and saluted what was really running the show … the invisible essence that is the breath of life itself supporting everything—including all my worries!

Did I then stop worrying over night? I wish!

Getting my head straight enough to stop identifying with my thoughts and reacting to them (which is what causes worry!) took 20 freaking years. But boy, has it been worth the journey.

It’s definitely against the normal flow of our crazy society, but try closing your bedroom door, unplugging the phone, the TV, the iPod, the iPad, and the TiVo and give your self 15 minutes a day to sit quietly and simply breathe and be.

Let your thoughts go where they will.

Let your stresses and worries go.

You can take longer if you want.

This time is a gift.

Don’t worry. Your worries will still be waiting for you when you unlock the door! But with any luck, by doing this, one day you’ll be so in the flow you just won’t need them anymore.

Erroneously thought to portray “Rosie the Riveter,” 40 years later this image became the iconic poster of the women’s liberation movement … and remains so to this day.

What I’d like to know is … why?

It’s not news anymore that women can more than adequately replace men at any job. So why are feminists still hung-up on an image of a woman rolling up her sleeve in an attitude of bicep flexing muscle power as the preferred picture of modern sexual equality?

Could it possibly be that in this day of digital 3-D movies and microwave popcorn we’re still hung up on the belief that muscle means power?

Hmmmm… let’s think.

Muscle still translates into control. The schoolyard bully who can beat up littler kids controls the schoolyard. The tyrant who can beat a nation’s citizens into submission has the control to declare himself dictator. The nation that can beat up other nations and display more firepower (muscle) is the most feared and thus has the most control over other nations.

But is this the kind of power women should aspire to? Is brute force the tool of parity we should desire? Haven’t we been on the receiving end long enough to eschew it for ourselves and for future generations?

Isn’t it possible that women (and enlightened men) are capable of shining a higher, different light on the word P-O-W-E-R? Certainly demonstrating love and concern for the wellbeing of others—something most women are very good at—constitutes a higher ideal of power than a bulging bicep attached to a fist any day.

Unfortunately how much more appealing are the recent images of butt-kicking babes toting Uzis and arrows and C-4 in the movies? Evelyn Salt, Trinity, Hannah, Ripley, Katniss  … these women are like powerful man. You know? Wouldn’t want to meet one of them in a dark alley.

But as appealing as it might be to see the gals kicking ass for a change, (hey I go see these movies too!) is this the best we can come up with as the new icon of femininity?

Maybe I’m a tad paranoid here, but aren’t these new cinematic Power Babes just the logical, exponential, on-steroids, extrapolation of the Rosie the Riveter poster? Isn’t it possible that if we keep focusing on rolled up sleeves and biceps as our power ideal that we’ll eventually end up in some ghastly future where women run around with guns, tricked out in form-fitting black leather, duking it out with the guys in some desolate corporate-controlled Blade Runner future on a dying planet?

Perceptions are powerful things … powerful enough to shape destiny. Perhaps we should question the ones we cling to every once in awhile.

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.

When did we humans start drawing these invisible lines between each other? Between nations and states, between neighborhoods and boroughs, between school districts and counties, yards and lawns …  drawing invisible barriers between ourselves?

How has it come to pass that a neighbor won’t take five steps out of their way to finish mowing a tiny strip of lawn? It would take minuscule time and effort. Probably less time and effort than it took to calculate the precise turnaround point and then execute it.

I walk on, hastily drumming up excuses. Maybe she doesn’t know her neighbor? But then, I wonder, why should that matter? Has the milk of human kindness become so diluted and impoverished it doesn’t even qualify as skim milk anymore? Can we take no small effort for another?

And if we cannot be kind to our nearly faceless neighbors, what hope is their for real strangers?

The number of homeless on the streets has increased. Have you noticed? The number of panhandlers standing on the corners of our blocks and boulevards has proliferated. I cannot reach or help them all, even if I cut my $1 gift to a penny each. And so I have stopped giving even the occasional dollar to any of them. My own pocketbook is stretched, don’t you see?

Feeling I have nothing to give, I quickly learn to pay no attention to these people. In my guilt I turn a blind eye, erasing them from view as if they weren’t human—worse, I ignore them as if they aren’t even there.

But they are.

Have you ever milked a goat or a cow? Basically, the more you milk them the more milk they have to give. The less you milk, the less milk they produce until there is nothing left at all and all the teats (spigots!) run dry.

There are a lot of economic and political policy lessons to be learned from this simple fact of life. But for now I’ll just adopt it as an object lesson about milk and human kindness.

When I fire up the lawnmower this weekend, my neighbor is in for a small grassy teat, oops! I mean treat. It may not be much, but it’s a gesture in the right direction.

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.

Sure, Days 1-2 were a wrestling match with hunger, and Days 3-4 were spent surfing a tidal wave of negative emotions. By the 3^rd trip to the Co-op I was already tired of buying endless leafy green organic vegetables and I definitely wouldn’t be using any dangerous equipment—like a bandsaw—until it was over. 

But by Day 5 there was peace in my body and mind—a calmness I haven’t felt in a long time.

True, so far I’m not getting a lot “done” in terms of work. It’s Day 6 and this blog is 3 days late. But … LIFE has suddenly taken over as a priority.

Normal everyday tasks are, for the moment, not obscuring more important things. I’m not stuffing myself with STUFF—food, shopping, texting, movies, entertaining—confusing those things with quality of life.  I’m not spending every waking hour buried in appointments, worries, and deadlines.

Because I’m not filling my moments with stuff outside me there’s an expanding sense of what’s inside—who and what I am, and an increasing capacity to genuinely respond to life’s moment-to-moment requirements.

When a friend calls, instead of reading my emails while I’m on the phone with them, I’m really listening. Instead of frantically dashing into the next big work project, I’m tending to little things left undone, letting the creative juices simmer. Who knows? If I back off the pressure valve, maybe something marvelous and unexpected will have room to show up!

The project will be there next week. My friends will be too. And so will all my responsibilities. But I will be different for having taken time to STOP.

More “primitive” cultures employ the tactic well. They know to stop cutting trees so their ecology stays healthy. They know to not over-harvest, over-hunt and over-fish. They know to take care of their resources. They know to get quiet and go within to seek council from Spirit when things seem out of balance.

They don’t live life as busy consumers. They live as wise partners. But in the privileged modern West?

Hey, most of us don’t even know when to stop eating anymore.

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.