I misread “the homophobic british press” as “the homomorphic british press”…
One time Esther and I were making fun of alt-right jargon (”cucks” etc.) and she said the word “libshits,” which I misheard as “Lipschitz,” and then I was like “oh god have they made that a political thing now”
Esther: I’m a strong, independent woman who can pour her own almond beverage
Tagging @jaiwithani because this post is about Solstice (eventually).
So, I’ve announced to everyone that I proposed to Rob at Solstice, and that he said yes. That was, obviously, the highlight of the event. But Solstice was pretty great, even before that happened. Here’s a really long-winded and personal explanation of why.
There is no heaven. Yet. Growth mindset.
Much of the time I was Catholic, I believed in heaven but by the time I reached my late teens I was pretty convinced that was not where I was going when I died. Eternal torture was waiting for my disgusting soul. But sometimes, I knew hope, and that hope was a wonderful thing.
Since I was a little girl, once a year my family (and hundreds of other local Catholics) would get up at 5am to take a 150-mile coach trip to a tiny village in Norfolk where, about 900 years ago, a woman claimed to have seen visions of the Virgin Mary, who instructed her to build a shrine. We would arrive at the slipper chapel about a mile outside the village (so called because pilgrims who had walked to Walsingham would walk the last mile barefoot and leave their shoes behind.) We did not typically leave our shoes behind (although I did, a couple of times) but we would walk into the village as a crowd, singing hymns. We would pack out the little gift shops buying statues and rosaries and holy water, we would light candles for long lists of sick relatives, we would have Mass and sometimes we would adore the Blessed Sacrament in the ruins of the old priory which was destroyed under Henry VIII.
I was so happy there. I’ve written a lot about the ways Catholicism harmed me. I feel like there should be thought interactions websites the way there are drug interactions websites, and when you type in “Catholicism” (or any religion with a concept of eternal Hell) and “anxiety disorder” there should be big red flashing lights and sirens. But I never felt anxious in Walsingham, ever. Sometimes we would recite the Fatima prayer as we walked into the village and I really felt like Jesus would “lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of your mercy.” I felt like everyone in the procession would one day be marching into heaven. I’ve written so many words before on tumblr about how Hell felt real to me, and how crushing that was (I don’t think I will ever fully convey the extent of the fear.) But in Walsingham, my mother Mary was smiling down at me, drawing down God’s mercy, and heaven felt real, too.
I felt too, a sense of solidarity. With my fellow pilgrims, but also with all the Catholics in the world, all the people who had ever visited that site and every other pilgrimage site, all the people who had ever held a rosary or knelt before the blessed sacrament. And I felt a joyous, enthusiastic solidarity with the rest of humanity. This was different from all the times I would sit on a bus or train and worry about whether my fellow-passengers were going to Hell. This was different from the despairing feeling that I had to somehow drag them away from their condoms and divorce lawyers and pride marches and spending money on a holiday instead of giving it to Aid To The Church In Need. This was a light, wonderful feeling: march into heaven with us! It’s a hard road, but you can come along, and we have each other to help, and Mary is up there putting a good word in for us with God. There is hope!
But most of the time, I was afraid. Most of the time, God was likethis sermon. And I was constantly required to believe in things which just do not make sense. Unlike (Catholic and atheist caricatures of) evangelical Protestants, I was not told to quiet my reason and Just Have Faith. I was told that I could not possibly be smarter than Augustine and Aquinas, and that I needed to understand more and more epicycles. And I tried, but there were so many epicycles. And meanwhile I was “fasting” to control sinful thoughts, and then binging and guiltily purging when my willpower broke too hard for fasting. And I was afraid, all the time. (I still have nightmares about Hell, sometimes. It’s a lot less often these days.) And I left, and I was better and stronger and happier for it in a bunch of ways I have written about at tedious length already, and you are probably all sick of hearing it.
And I was happy. I stopped making myself throw up. I kissed girls and kissed boys. I bought a floral-patterned fedora. I took the Giving What We Can Pledge and learned to be good without God. I worshipped Satan, albeit in a metaphorical way. I felt free.
But I missed Walsingham, and I pretended really hard that I didn’t.
The thing about making new rituals, new traditions, is that they don’t have the connections in time that old things do. You cannot reach back into the generations who did this thing before you, because a bunch of your mates made this thing up a couple of years ago. Nor can you look forward to the generations who will do this after you. A Catholic can say “My church is two thousand years old, a billion strong and living on every continent. Even if you don’t accept my premise that it is divinely founded and sustained, you surely must concede that it’s a strong institution and it has a decent probability of being here in another two thousand years.” But something new and small has a very small (albeit non-zero) probability of continuing for centuries.
But the connection in time is not about the tradition. The tradition is a tool for reaching that connection. It’s a good tool that works, which is why people keep making them. But there are more ways to reach across time than by doing the same thing, or going to the same place, or saying the same words.
At Solstice, there were a lot of stirring speeches. They were about the generations upon generations of humans who went before us. They had lives and customs so different from ours that they can be hard to imagine, or see as people. We sang songs about how life crawled up from the oceans, thinking about the even more unimaginable experiences of non-human animals. And we talked, frankly and depressingly, about the war and fear and hunger and suffering that has been and still is so much of human experience. We talked about freezing or starving or thirsting to death. We talked about disease.
Everything that has enough of a mind to feel things has been searching for heaven since life began. Everything, everyone, has been afraid and has wanted to stop being afraid. Everything that lives has wanted a life without pain, without hinger, without disease. Everything that has enough of a mind to want things has wanted a world where it will be satisfied, even if it is a tiny creature that has no way to articulate that want.
We stretched our minds backward and forward, through time and space, and we shared that longing. There is very little that unites all humans; there is even less that unites all life on earth, but longing is the thing we share. And we have got better at satisfying some of our longings, though it comes with heavy costs. We wept for the departed hungry strangers who froze to death with no memorial millennia ago. We cannot feed them. One of the organisers read out a deeply personal piece about the multiple bereavements she experienced as a child, and we wept with her and we longed for a world without that pain. We did not need to imagine there’s no heaven; we know.
I don’t know the probability that humans will make a world that does not spin in pain. But it is not zero. The Republic of Heaven will only be real if we make it. But the love and solidarity I felt at Solstice helped my system one realise what my system two had already assented to: everybody deserves to go to heaven. Anything that has enough of a mind to want things belongs in heaven, and I want to do what I can to get all of us there. And if we cannot get there, I want, at least, a more bearable earth.
Wanting to do something is not the same as doing it. The solidarity and love I felt as a Catholic did not bear fruit in real life. I left Walsingham, and I went back to my life as a broken, useless thing. I was not all flaws: I have memories of doing decent things. But I honestly believe that any kindness, any courage, any honesty, any wisdom my Catholic self had was not a product of her Catholicism (and in some cases was in fact in spite of it.) Walsingham was made of hope, but however many bottles of holy water I purchased, they didn’t transport the hope back with me.
I do not know what fruit, if any, will come from the solidarity and love I experienced at Secular Solstice. It gave me determination to do what I can to light the darkness of this world, but I know I am not an especially impressive individual. I am not, and do not have the capacity to become, Norman Borlaug. I will (fortunately) never be in the position to be Stanislav Petrov. Reality, unlike Christianity, does not give marks for effort. You can’t be a great saint by doing little things with great love. You have to actually, y’know, make things better. The effect I have on this world will be small. But it will not be nothing.
I proposed to Rob at Solstice, because he is my favourite human and I love him. He makes me life better and I believe in my capacity to do the same for him. I don’t want to let anything hurt him.
If I could make my mind big enough, I would love everything with enough of a mind to want things as much as I love my Rob. I would see every hungry person as an emergency as dire as if my Rob was starving. I would fight every sickness as hard as I would fight a human being who came at my Rob with a knife. I would be as desperate to shelter every homeless person as I would be to keep my Rob warm if he was shivering. I would not let any human being sleep in mosquito-riddled places without a net to protect them. I would not tolerate a single one of us stuffed into a cell simply for choosing to put a substance, however dangerous, in their own goddamn body. All suffering would be an emergency to me, and it would not stop with human beings. I would love, individually, each single one of the ten thousand crows that lands each night on the University of Seattle’s Bothell Campus. I would know and value and appreciate each of their little crow personalities, and I would want them to get the things they want. I would love every crow in the world, and I would protect them. And every mouse and every zebra fish and every robin and every gecko. And especially every chicken; I would not have them stuffed into cages and crushed by one another and I would fight anyone who tried to do that to them, just like I would fight anyone who put my Rob in a cage. If it has enough of a mind to want things, I would love it absolutely, and I would fight for it. If I could make my mind big enough, I would find a way to protect them all, all the things I love. I would do this, not out of shame or fear or self-hatred, but because it would make me happy. I would be so happy, if I could protect everything that deserves protection.
If I could truly feel that, however, it would shatter me. The world is vast and spins in pain. But I have renewed my resolve to do what I can.
And so, I call the relative I had not called in months. I apply for a better job. I stop eating eggs. I move grains of sand, when we need an avalanche, and hope that enough people follow my footsteps.
There is so much darkness. Fewer are hungry, but hundreds of millions still are. We have destroyed some diseases; most can still get us. The people who walked in darkness have seen sparks, and we can imagine from those sparks what the sun might look like. We have seen smallpox die and we can imagine a world where every disease follows it. We have seen hunger shrink and we can imagine its disappearance. We have seen happiness and we can imagine a world without depression.
The people who walked in darkness have not seen a great light. Yet. Growth mindset.
Esther and I have been watching a lot of Monster Factory and were inspired to make our own beautiful long hipster boy
Esther: I’m going to go downstairs and get a bagel for my fiance, and then I’m gonna watch Steven Universe with my fiance
Rob: That’s just the kind of well-thought out plan I expect from my fiancee
Me (reading aloud from this interesting article): “And look at the beauty of this beastly snot fest …”
Esther: That’s often what I think when I look at you
help, my wife is napping and i miss her but she deserves her rest
If you replace “wife” with “fiancee,” and “napping” with “sleeping after going to bed early,” this is me rn
(via nostalgebraist)
got engaged at seattle secular solstice lads
Tell us what happened lad
i got engaged at seattle secular solstice
Ye but why?
because i proposed to rob and he said yes
at seattle secular solstice?
yeah it was at seattle secular solstice
(via ursaeinsilviscacant-blog)
I liked it so I put a ring on it