What is Abundance?
No flower crowns here (yet), but I did learn how to make bread.
Litha is the start of summer. Welcome to summer!
Well, it was June 20th when we celebrated the Summer Solstice and today it’s July 6th.
It takes longer than I’d like to work on these posts, so I take the liberty of calling this stretch of writing time, “whatever sabbat I’m focusing on - season.”
I’m currently sitting in my sunny little backyard and a large crow just came by, stood on a pole and cawed for a while, while facing me.
I’m desperately trying to develop some kind of wild animal friendship, like the kind you occasionally see online, where a crow decides to leave trinkets on a little girl’s windowsill in exchange for food or something- In this effort, I’ve made an area above our newly built, caged vegetable garden, where I can keep a water bowl and scraps for her and her partner, who recently decided to use what was a bird bath for small birds, as a place to drink and soak bits of scavenged bread and dead bugs. And yes, I have made a sign for them that reads, "Crow Cafe Menu- Water, Scraps and Bug Soup.”
SO, ASIDE FROM BECOMING A CRAZY CROW LADY, WHAT IS LITHA TO ME? AND WHAT IS THE SUMMER SOLSTICE ALL ABOUT?
Think of “Midsummer”- flower crowns and leaping over fire, perhaps? Perhaps celebrating abundance, if we are so lucky to find that in our lives.
You read a lot about abundance when it comes to Litha, and considering that in this northern hemisphere, our gardens should be ripe with growth. If we were in charge of creating our own food supply, we should enjoy the current bounty and consider the cold weather and lack of growth that’s on the way. It makes sense.
Maybe the point now though, with all of life’s conveniences, is to find abundance in any situation. To recognize it. That’s probably what these sort of “religious” moments are for. I’m more of a fan than an expert, but I’m trying-
Okay, yes. Hmmm. Abundance. Let’s dive into the idea of abundance, shall we?
THE SKITTERS
I just finished John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath which has put into my mind thoughts of what people still do to live. To simply live. I guess I should know better by now that there is no such thing as a simple life.
In his tale, migrants were dismissively called “Oakies,” and like migrant workers now, the ways they were able to work to provide themselves and their loved ones with the things they needed to survive and possibly enjoy their existence, were twisted and brutal- all knowing (or finding out after following false dreams for a better life) that the capitalistic systems of corporations and big businesses ruled everything and, most notably, the lives of those who needed work to survive. Waste was (and is) all around. There was (and is) plenty for everyone, if greed were kept in check. This isn’t new news, but it’s easy to keep blinders on amidst our own tales of survival, throughout history and still, today.
Maybe it’s a good thing that things feel so horrifically obvious at this current moment. Trump and the corrupt political systems allow us to see just what greed is doing- (of course it’s not a good thing).
My fellow teachers, many of whom have Masters Degrees and PhDs, and I, we sit together during our lunch breaks and talk occasionally about living paycheck-to-paycheck, paying off our student loan debt for the rest of our lives, the corruption in that specific payback system, etc…
One afternoon I shared a story about my partner, who, while preparing to deejay an exclusive gig in Singapore, was in the presence of an oligarch along with a few other people who happened to be a part of the evening’s events; most of them drinking from a shared bottle of wine, priced at $35,000 US dollars.
They, including my partner, were discussing politics as the wine settled into them. The man with the most material wealth at the table, who chose and would pay for the aforementioned wine, interrupted my partner and the others by stating, “You don’t know anything about how the world really works so you should just stop talking.”
I shared this with my pals at work, as a way to express something I gleaned from his story, that this was a truth, coming straight from the oligarch; that we are mere pawns being lured by proverbial carrots strung on sticks that are strapped to our backs. We don’t know, and we are controlled, so that we never have the ability/bandwidth/time…to figure things out.
(The part of the story I didn’t mention was that the oligarch didn’t like the wine, once it was opened, which is why the “plebeians” around him were able to drink his rejected bottle, priced the same as an economy car, sold in the US.)
I believed him, this rich man who owns corporations that sell luxury products I would have to save a month or more’s worth of paychecks in order to purchase their smallest offering.
But my friend said something that afternoon in the lunchroom that struck me. She said, “Of course he said that. That’s what they want you to think. He has no idea what it’s like to live paycheck-to-paycheck and never will.”
I realized the truth in her reaction. It was a second way to understand my partner’s experience with the oligarch.
Ever since I heard his story (this was around 2015 or so, and he called me immediately after it happened) I accepted the bleakest outlook; a surrender to the power system, which I guess we, as the 99% have no choice but to do-
But to consider that there is another side of the proverbial coin, where there is another kind of value to perceive in the life of a person, like me, who lives a life, “paycheck-to-paycheck.”
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t just step into this “oligarch-dismissed” kind of life. I worked to get here.
My version of living this way, at this moment, is far better than the situations I found myself in, in my past, where at first there was no consistent sense of security.
As I grew older, I figured I’d lose myself, on purpose, in the lives of those who had more than I ever did, as a way to feel that sense of security I was born lacking.
My naiveté, my youth, beauty and all that comes with these things, were my currency.
Not that I was fully aware that I was using them to try and improve my place in life- This awareness has come in time- a “cringe-worthy” gift unwrapped by age and experience.
In “witch-talk” we call these the times of the maiden and the crone, the latter being where I am now. Thankfully.
During my middle “mother” phase (I chose not to have children, but that’s the name for what comes between maiden and crone), I was in the midst of a lot of learning to be the (relatively new) crone I am now. I am lucky. Not as lucky as people who learn their lessons earlier than I did, but all things considered… I’d rather be “this,” than someone who exists for the sake of earthly power and the construct of value systems that are completely disconnected from the strange experience of being here on this planet, and not knowing what we exactly are-
Anyway…
My friend’s comment, where she seemed to point out the value in living lives like ours, led me thinking of the (New Age or ancient?) notion where perhaps we created and agreed upon some sort of “contract” before arriving on this plane of existence.
The idea that the path we are on, is just what we need. I mean, we could throw karma into that, as well. (I’m obviously not a theologist, but I’m sure there are so many other names for this concept.)
But then, when I type that, I feel like it can seem like some sort of sad self-consolation, until I take a look around and consider this moment and all that led to it.
Yeah, I’m lucky, and like it or not, there are some things we are simply born into.
Oh, and “the skitters” is a term I learned from The Grapes of Wrath. It means diarrhea and I can’t help but think it’s a much nicer term for the condition.
My Cousin Maria Schneider
Immediately after finishing my latest Steinbeck novel, I listened to this book by Vanessa Schneider. A relatively short “read,” translated by Molly Ringwald. She also narrates the English audio version.
I had learned about it a while ago, when it was published, but wasn’t super-motivated to dive into the life of this actress, who I heard about the way most of us have- the whole Last Tango in Paris horror and her subsequent troubles with addiction and a death that came sooner than it should have.
As well, I’ve just read Jeff Hiller’s charming autobiography, An Actress of a Certain Age, where he writes about his life via the “lens” of his love of the autobiography; titling each chapter after the titles of autobiographies that meant something to him.
I too, enjoy stories about the lives of people. I don’t think I’d be so attracted to the “newsletter/blog” format I’m using here, if I didn’t.
The first biography I can remember being taken in by was And I Don’t Want to Live this Life, by Deborah Spungeon, about her daughter, the infamous Nancy of “Sid and Nancy.” Or was the first one, I’m With the Band by the once-groupie, Pamela Des Barres?
Well, I read them both when I was about sixteen.
At the time, I just wanted to learn about the lives of people that connected to things I knew and were bigger than me. With Des Barres, it was the world of Hollywood and music, from the perspective of a fan, as I was. How might I have handled that life? And how shocking were the choices of her and her friends at the time! So salacious to an inexperienced girl of my age, hungry for life adventures.
With Nancy Spungeon, I got the book soon after I had seen the film, Sid and Nancy, which I did with my friend and her new friends, who were wealthy boarding school girls.
We saw the movie in Carmel, at the one-screen cinema tucked inside of the fairytale-like village. It was a place that I grew up perceiving as being “fancier” than anything I was meant for in life. (Look how I’m bringing things back to the topic at hand!)
My friend attended the boarding school as a day-student and she got there by way of a scholarship I had no idea she was working toward when we were busy being best friends in middle school.
Her new friends seemed to me to be wild in a way I wasn’t used to. The kind of wild that happens to youth who take risks (and I’m not anti-risk), knowing deep down that they will be safe and secure when they are done being dumb.
After the film, we all went to what I considered a posh outdoor shopping center, after all the shops had closed- these kids who did not attend their school via scholarship, were doing things like pulling decorative annuals out of planters and saying things like “I wish I were stoned or dead” while not really giving off the energy of someone who truly wished those things-
My friend’s mom worked as a housekeeper in one of the hotels in Carmel, and my mom was a janitor at a grocery store shopping center, but we didn’t share this information. Our mothers cleaned up after kids like this.
That was the night I had my first cappuccino. At that point I had a hard time with the watery coffee my parents like to drink at the local donut shop that came served in styrofoam cups. I thought the general taste of the “mood-altering, but legal” drink was bitter. That night in Carmel, I pretended to love it, even when I was shocked to discover that the froth on top was not sweetened whipped cream.
This was just before the “the 90’s coffee house fascination” that I and most Gen-Xers in the US would fall deeply into. Despite my lack of knowledge surrounding the various ways to make and ingest caffeine, I felt there was something so exciting about ordering this drink (I had never heard of but everyone else seemed to drink every day) from what I perceived of as a fancy restaurant and sitting with a straight-up ceramic bowl, not a mug, on a patio covered by bougainvillea at night, with rebellious rich girls who revealed no sense of feeling that they could ever not belong anywhere.
I wanted that. And to this day, I felt and feel like my friend was offering this sort of perspective to me, as a kind of gift, although it was unspoken. Maybe I’m overthinking things, but she grew up in a big-enough-for-a-family ranch house (that I stayed over at several times a month) and I, in a mobile home and a closet-sized room to share with my half-brother who was eight years older than me.
Whether the friends I had (the aforementioned as well as those at my public school) at that time were conscious of it or not (I don’t think I was), they were my lifeline.
But again, I digress- Deborah Spungeon wrote her perspective as a mother, on what was otherwise sold to the world as a romantic-chaotic, “this is the rock and roll (or rather, punk) lifestyle and dying young is how legends are made” perspective.
Perhaps the book was a cash grab, but there was so much more there to learn about this person, Nancy, of “Sid and”-
Over the years I’ve learned more about her from people like Viv Albertine, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry and who knows who else, in their autobiographies that fill in even more of the gaps.
Despite my pop-culture interests, I wasn’t one who idealized Sid and Nancy- I realized what difficult and well, intolerable people she and Sid Vicious were, but I did feel something about the rebellion in the lives I learned about in the film, in conjunction with the “wealthy village” venue I saw the movie in, and the way my companions behaved after we left the theatre. It was rebellion that intrigued me because the rebels lacked a fear I had that was based in surrendering to being submissive because I was poor and didn’t feel I could risk being bad. Being a “good girl” was, in a way, my first currency- the trading of which would require submission to others.
VAMPIRES
The drugs in “sex, drugs and rock and roll” are no longer seen as charming to most of us, and if you have ever been sober and around someone high on heroin, you will know that a charming person, this drug does not make- It’s just sad. As well, I can connect the dots from Nancy S. to narcissistic people in my life, and those with issues like borderline personality disorder, whose conditions have unfortunately not being addressed in a healthy manner. I think we can all agree that romanticizing this kind of life seems a bit “off” in this day and age.
Which leads me back to Maria Schneider. Aside from the chemical imbalances and trauma she certainly found herself with at a very early age, what a bastard Bernardo Bertolucci was! And I loved his film, Stealing Beauty, which of course, centers around a seventeen-year-old actress not only finding out about her father, but also, losing her virginity. Ugh.
And all the adults in the film (Liv Tyler was playing a nineteen-year-old) find it horrifying that she should be so old and not yet had sex with anyone: be it an old man, a douchebag youth, a drunk tourist…
As I mentioned, the aforementioned actress, Maria Schneider, had problems stemming from before the Italian director and lead actor, Marlon Brando, decided to surprise her with a shocking and unscripted scene involving butter and anal rape by a man thirty years older than her, in the film she would be most known for. The book paints a story about this, from the perspective of Maria’s younger cousin, who is now a journalist and author.
Enamored by Maria as a child, she and her family were around to witness the actress’ troubled and sad childhood life, young, glamorous popularity, and eventual decline into addiction. They did their best to try and help her out, with no luck.
It was a partner who would do the trick. A woman who loved and stayed with Maria until the end of her life, and nursed her through cancer. In the end, the actress had friends coming to visit her at her deathbed where they brought her many bottles of champagne, which they all enjoyed. Before dying she stated that she had a good life.
OKAY BACK TO SUMMER
This summer has been zooming by and I’ve been working hard to keep a balance with the external and internal worlds. (Even I’m not sure what I mean by that, but I’ll leave it in, what the heck.)
I have a lot of art/crafty things to make by the end of August and not a lot of time to do so. That said, within the past several months, I created my first sourdough starter and now, I’m baking my own bread!
I know for sure that it’s all organic and from my own hands. I feel good about this, even though it takes time that I should be spending on the aforementioned art-making, but food is important.
As well, I’ve recently discovered Songs from the Bardo by Jesse Paris Smith, Tenzin Choegyal, Laurie Anderson. It’s based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and I find listening to it in its entirety to be a great meditation. Laurie Anderson’s speaking voice is one that has always felt like home and her repeated phrase, “Awakened one. Listen without distraction” is something I didn’t know I needed to hear. I think maybe I’ll end this newsletter post on that. Thank you for reading and I wish you well.
