whatever happened to breathing?

Tomes of opinions, analyses and rants have been written about women’s clothing and its ultimate intent to attract. Yes, men have a place in the fashion industry, but let’s admit it -- the designer’s aim is to wrap the female in something so seductive, so irresistible that they emerge as objects of male arousal and female envy (admittedly, sometimes mine). But whatever happened to practical? Case in point, the vice-squeeze fashion -- you know -- that look where the blouse or dress or jacket is designed to cup the breasts to give that voluptuous look, with the button placed just at the tip of the breastbone, pulling the breasts together, giving the illusion that they’re just so ample and eager for attention we’re fighting a battle with those rascals just to contain them. Then there’s the spandex micro skirt that in earlier years was called the bottom half of a two-piece Jantzen bathing suit. Downright naughty.

Have we waived all rights to a good gulp of air? Are we sell-outs on practical? Who benefits?

Years ago, before Steven Colbert and Sarah Palin began inventing words, I coined one of my own: “Garma.” A combination of garment and karma. Meaning the art of conveying the soul’s expression by the choice of clothing we wear. Yeah, hokey, I agree, but think about it. What would the soul be trying to express if the very essence of all that’s spiritual -- deep breathing -- were bound, crammed, packed, buttoned, squeezed, pinched and plain old prohibited?

Isadora Duncan had it right. To truly dance the dance of life -- and if the body must be covered -- then let it be unrestricted, flowing , mysterious. Everyone loves a good mystery.

Gotta go -- dryer stopped, and my favorite caftan calls me.

LaMadre

Who Is The Real “Decider?”

On any given day, the hundreds of tasks that we perform will have been decided to have a correct approach as to how that task should be carried out. Who bestows that privilege -- or burden -- upon these individuals? Is there a training camp or a school where they get some kind of unspoken degree on distinguishing between the correct/incorrect method? Honestly, is there really a “right” way to hold a cup and saucer? To put on our clothes? To hold a cell phone?

Two anecdotes:

1) Newly married. Both of us working at Cape Canaveral at the peak of the aerospace program, he for IBM, I for Bechtel Corporation (considering their current high profile in Iraq, I now wince at this fact). It was great fun being able to share stories about our workdays and the excitement of being part of something so out there. When a Bechtel bowling team was formed, we jumped on it, ready to be part of the ‘in’ crowd. Neither of us knew diddley about bowling. But then, zap! We fell in love with the game and found ourselves racking up trophy after trophy!

One evening at the lanes, I asked him, after observing some other bowlers, to show me how he held the bowling ball. Yep, just the same as I was doing: Thumb in the thumb hole, forefinger and middle finger in the two finger holes. But this was not the way the other bowlers were doing it. They were using the middle finger and ring finger. Eager to be correct, we changed our style -- painfully so -- and our bowling stats plummeted to the gutter. Pun intended.

2) When I recently enrolled in a watercolor art class in Portland, Oregon, our teacher informed us that no black or white tube paints were allowed; if we needed black or white for a tiny accent, we would mix our primary colors to achieve this. I’ve been dabbling with watercolors for years, with no formal training, just painting what feels right; and everything I’ve done to date contains black and white to some degree. Alas! What was I to do? Black and white are two of my favorite colors to brush across a paper! I can’t imagine painting without them. So, I did what any self-respecting authority-defyer would do, I googled watercolors. Found out that I’ve been painting “gouaches” all these years, not true watercolors.

Clumsy bowling-ball finger placement or the use of black and white paints on watercolor paper do not warrant ex-communication from the world of excitement that’s been filled with child-like energy and promises of new personal gratification. But once the Decider’s instructions inhibit us into doing the thing the correct way, all our giddy pride of accomplishment is in danger of being flushed down the toilet -- the efficiency of which was decided long ago by some guru of clean who was no doubt obsessed with sanitizing the exonerated poetry of the human transit system.


LaMadre

The Sleep-Death Riddle

How is it that we fear death but not sleep? We know no more about sleep than we do death. Even science has not figured out what causes our need for sleep, where we go when we do sleep, and how our dreams manifest themselves.

We -- most of us -- go to bed each night for the purpose of inviting sleep. Not only do we not fear it, we welcome it, albeit we don’t know where we’re going, once we lose that last bit of conscious thinking, drifting off to another plane -- in our minds? -- in our bodies? -- in our souls? There’s no guarantee that we will awaken in the morning. And yet, despite the fact that explanation of sleep eludes us, we invite sleep with great expectations, repeating this cycle over and over, and sometimes resorting to sleep inducers if we feel it may not visit us.

Deprived of sleep, we become foggy, cranky and out of sync. We lament that we didn’t sleep well the night before, or that we got only 4 hours of sleep, and on and on. We’ve been cheated out of our trip to that deep, dark secretive place for 8 hours, that neverland that is almost never the same as the night before, except that sometimes it’s pleasant, sometimes not. Yet, imagine the complaint of having lived for 80 years and not yet died! The lament might be something like this: “I feel awful. I’ve been around here for 80 years, and because of all the busy-ness and happiness in my life, I haven’t been able to catch up on dying!“

Hold on. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz

La Madre