Fiesta Muerto

Needing a tonsillectomy procedure has got me thinking about my mortality.  Granted that statistically there is only about a 1 in 1,000 chance I would die, someone has to be that 1 and everyone has to die of something.  

If I were to die I would want everyone to throw me a giant party.  Celebrate life and not morn and mope around about death.  I would want people to go out and enjoy nature if they want to remember me.  If you want me memorialized, don't do it with a headstone.  Go out and plant a tree.  

Take my ashes and do whatever you want with them.  They are not me any more, they are bits of carbon that I borrowed that came from stars.  

Don't give a stuffy eulogy, where you feel forced to say nice things and are afraid to speak ill of the dead.  Say how you really feel.  If you are glad I'm gone, feel free to say that.  Feel free to say, wow she was one crazy bitch!!  Then go set off some fireworks and watch them blaze bright in the sky and then fade away.  Drink some margaritas and watch shooting stars, carry on the torch of life and don't look back. 

Mom's unsolicited advice and opinions, part 1 : Life's Leaps

I wanted to leave my kids a series of writings on my life, my thoughts, and opinions in the raw.  They may or may not care, but I think there are lots of things I may never say to them.  Life flies by fast and it's hard to say everything, much less those things that are close to your heart.  Hopefully with a series of poorly edited and rambling writings on this writing blog, they will someday stumble across it and my hope is  that they waste at least an entire afternoon reading it.

I moved to Utah in 2006 after meeting Dan on Yahoo Personals.  We dated long distance for about 6 months.  Dan flew to Alabama twice to go camping with me and meet my family.  I originally put up my dating profile in Utah after giving up on dating in Alabama, too much redneck, too much football.  Also, I had always wanted to live in Utah.  I was born in Salt Lake City but when my parents divorced, I never got the chance to grow up in Utah.  Instead, I visited my Dad a few weeks a year and fell in love with Utah.

I expressly stated that I wanted to date someone Non-Mormon on my dating profile and Dan was my first match and first contact.  He had also requested to date someone Non-Mormon.  He had put up a dating profile because living in Spanish Fork, Utah it's hard to find someone to date who isn't Mormon.  Dan is x-Mormon or X-Mo. He grew up in Hawaii and was raised Mormon but his parents divorced and he moved in with his Dad to Wisconsin when he was 15.  As he tells the story, he came across a book called Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and the story really spoke to him.  Mainly in that he realized he had been living in a sheltered mindset (growing up Mormon) and there was a much larger world to explore out there, complete with lots of other ideas and philosophies.

After my first marriage crashed and burned, it was really important to me to not date someone religious or of a conservative mindset.  Although you would like to hope that you could love someone who had vastly different world views from yourself, in a perfect world that would be smooth sailing.  However I found it to be a very big challenge.  Not to mention  if you were to throw kids into the mix.

My x (who was Catholic and a Rush Limbaugh poster child) and I used to have the same revolving door argument, one of many many arguments, about raising kids and religion.  He would always say that you have to teach kids about God when they are young so that they grow up believing.  The second point he would follow that with was that kids must go to church to learn morals.  No matter what I said to him he would always say that,  like a robot or canned response.  I felt like kids could be raised by example and good parents and being a good person does not require belief in things unseen.  Being a good person is real, it's today, and the results and feedback are immediate, not dependent on a far off celestial kingdom that may or may not exist.   That marriage was just never going to work, we were exact opposites and thankfully we walked away and did not have kids.


Fast forward to 2006 again.  I decided to quit a really good job at a Pharmaceutical company in Bama to move to Utah and live with my then boyfriend of 6 months that I met on the internet.  All my co-workers, friends, and family told me I was insane and they were probably right, I didn't try to argue it.  I was just ready for a change and ready to walk away from the residual pain in B'ham from my failed marriage.  It seemed like a scary thing to do that might help me forget the past and start a new future, it was totally a leap.  Dan seemed like a great person, I liked him quite a lot, and I was very hopeful that things would work out for us.  Even if the relationship failed, I didn't think I'd be left any worse off than I was.

 That might be my first bit of advice to my kids, take leaps, even if they are scary, don't be afraid of change.  Not every time, but more often than not, life rewards you when you do hard things that are outside of your comfort zone.  Also, if you happen to try something scary and fail, don't let that deter you from taking another leap in the future.  If you don't try, you might never know how good life could be.

I would not say that Dan and I dating and living together was smooth sailing.  We had some amazingly fun times and some really bad times.  Dan had been a bachelor for 10 years and was nearing 30, as was I.  We each came with plenty of baggage.  We were two people set in our ways, him probably even more than me.  As a bachelor that had his own house and life, it was a challenge for him to integrate me into his life and for me to find a place where I fit in his life.  We struggled for 2 years to try and make it work.  In the mean time, we were having a blast traveling all over the West on Dan's Harley, hiking, biking, and camping.  It was truly the epitome of the best of times and the worst of times.

We found out we were pregnant with Sara almost 2 years into the relationship.  I had not planned on having kids and was unsure about the whole endeavor.  Dan on the other hand wanted kids very badly.  After lots of discussion we decided to get married, have a baby, and see where it led us.  It was another leap, something scary and unknown.  Because we are happy and have 2 awesome kids, I think I can safely say now that it was not the easy road but it was another case where life ultimately rewarded us for leaping into the unknown.

Ground zero of the soul

I guess I'm feeling a little dark this Sunday which caused me to pen the thoughts below.  I'm feeling overwhelmed by hypocrisy today.  Sometimes I find it really hard to live here in Mormonville where everyone tries to pretend that things are so sunny and perfect.  They go to church on Sunday and take a hit of God and start to feel very righteous indeed.  Religion is a drug that gives you a momentary high and as any drug would, prevents you from seeing reality clearly.

 We as humans, even the most holy of us, are still responsible for what Humans as a whole are doing and have done to the planet and to all the beings on it, past and present.  It is our legacy whether we want to wear that hat or not.

How do we know that we would even deserve a heaven, even if we have done vast measures good, could it possibly outweigh the pain and suffering that humans as a single organism have caused?  What is our legacy in what way have we tipped the scales?

  I don't believe in the stark divisions of a heaven or a hell.  If we are going somewhere, we are all in this together and it would likely be a place we all deserved to be.  I see humanity as a standing wave of influence, not separate pieces of good here and bad there.

Our legacy is as one and we must ask, what are we leaving in our wake?  Earth might just as well be that place, we are already here together in this sphere of influence, why assume that there is another or yet another? Maybe this is ground zero for our souls, the battleground of our species.  I think we are past the point of praying our way out of this and we had better start hoping for miracles.

Ground zero of the Soul

We are crucifying the planet with our gross nescience, wars, weapons, hate, and willful destruction of a our ecosystem.

How can we have the audacity to leave this smoldering ruin behind us and think that we will be rewarded  in exchange with a pristine heaven.  Could we be trusted not to leave that heaven in a similar state as well?

 Humanity has caused the suffering of untold numbers of beings in its wake, leaving a legacy of pain and destruction.  Love and peace are the minority in the anecdote of humans, small archipelagos of hope  drowning in a dauntless sea of our blight.  If there were a means to pray our way out of this turmoil, it would already be so.  Perhaps it is time to start courting miracles.

Joy

My friend Camilla and I challenged each other to write our thoughts on Joy.  Camilla was raised LDS and she was told what Joy was as a child.  It was something experienced outside of yourself that came from a higher being that imparted it to you.  She says it was implied that joy did not come from within and without this influence from a higher power, joy was non-existent. 

That led us into a fascinating discussion on what joy must be like without any religious connotations.  So I let my mind wander and ponder joy and came up with this short poem.

Joy is a cradle of arms supporting Earth and all its beings.

Joy is the first and the last breath of life.

Joy is the siren call of eternity.

Joy is loud and emancipating.

Joy is silent and selfless.

Joy is a relentless standing wave.

Joy is a flower.

Things they should know, Part I : Living in the Mormon Hood

I wanted to keep a list of all my strange spiritual experiences, as well as the commonplace, for my kids.  I will detail them further in future posts. Should they ever become lost, devoid, dispirited in the world, which can happen easily, they can maybe take some small measure of comfort from my blog.   Everyone should question, everyone feels lost at times, it's all in the range of normal. 

My kids are growing up in a heavily fundamentalist religious area, similar to the place I grew up.  I'm really trying not to relate any of my past experiences to them so that my past does not contaminate their future.  Just because I had some struggles being an Atheist in a heavily religious area, does not immediately mean they will have the same problem. 

The biggest thing I've experienced so far here in Utah is that I have a strong feeling or need to protect them from religion until I feel that they are old enough or they demonstrate they they are old enough to evaluate it for themselves.  I feel like I don't want to teach or have them taught things that we don't know for sure and that it's better to raise them to question and experience first as a template for their lives rather than to follow and believe primarily. If they find that there is a place for belief and a time, I just want it to be on their terms, not predetermined for them. 

To me, this is one of the biggest gifts we can give them, freedom from doctrine.  That is the only reason I have felt threatened and protective of them, and even that causes me to question my own motives further and as my husband loves to point out to me, even that notion of mine is influencing them.  There's no getting around it I suppose.  If we don't teach them anything at all, then what will fill the void?  I feel bad every time it comes up with Dan's Mormon family. I wish that I just didn't care, but I feel mother hen-ish about it.  I'm glad that my family gave me the gift of deciding for myself.   I am no longer Atheist but rather Agnostic, I have determined that much for myself.

The Mormons have really been great to live among and if you had to live within any religious community, this would be in the top 10.  I have had a very positive experience here and am constantly amazed at those around me.  They aren't very "hell fire and damnation" or at least not openly, as some people in Bama can be at times.   The communities and families as a whole and in some respects are models of what life should be, not all, but in general.  The communities are friendly, people appear welcoming and concerned for others.  Or maybe it's just because I'm so much more positive on people than I used to be.  It does make me wonder, is it because they are a superior religious community or because I look upon them with less negativity than those in my past, maybe a mix of both, who knows?

As my kids approach school age, I hope that they are able to find their own ways with little conflict and I guess only time will be able to tell how their stories will really unfold.   In the mean time, you can never go wrong teaching them love and compassion and you never need religion to be a good person.  Today my oldest and I talked about the "Golden Rule" and I was pleased that she grasped it perfectly.  She even gave examples and made up hypothetical situations using her friends to let me know that she got it.  A rule so simple that it's crystal clear to even a child.

A thought blowing in the wind

Don't be afraid to humble yourself enough to every person you meet so as to be a servant.   Even the people you feel you are better than, and especially those you feel do not deserve it.  You have the most to gain by doing this, it is a reflection of you, not them.  Find out what it is that every person really needs most from you and give it to them.  Hint, it is never really money or things.  Love is always free and so is a kind smile. 

A word about my Atheistic Tendencies

I haven't blogged on Critical Mass in a while and that's sad to be sure. My life feels very non-spiritual when I'm going through pregnancy and have a young child, not sure why that is. I was totally unable to read any spiritual books while pregnant. I could not connect with any of the ideas.

I've only just started to pick up things again. However even though I have not done a lot of reading, I have still been able to do a lot of thinking over the last year. If anything I have become more sympathetic to Atheism for the logic involved in it. I feel very proud to be married to an Atheist and a thinker. His rationalizations for why he thinks God does not exist I think are sound and I can understand them. I don't totally agree but it make perfect sense to me. I think it makes more sense to be Atheist first and ask questions than it does to be religious primarily and not question.

I think living with Dan has made me more of an Atheist, and the constant questioning that I pose to him has made him more of an Agnostic, that maybe there's a squeak of a chance that life is not as it seems in black and white. It's a fun balance that we share and we've had lots of good discussions about it. It would take many paragraphs to really explain that and I'm not sure I have time for it right now. The main question that I've posed to Dan however is that isn't it just as wrong to say that you know for sure that god exists as to say that you know that you're sure that he doesn't. To me it's the same error when neither side can hold up the evidence and say here it is. It makes much more sense to be Agnostic.

To sum it up as simply as I can, I'm a totally religious-Atheist. I do not accept any religions as correct and I'm more certain of that than ever. Give me a religion that says simply, "Be a good person, you don't need to do anything else, you will know if you've achieved that by the way others respond to you", and I will subscribe to that.

I do hold open hope that there are spirits on the other side, angels, gods, etc however until I have a personal experience with one, I am not going to go out of my way to worship any. I have mentally asked that if there are those out there that they appear to me and set me straight. So far nothing has happened, however I remain vigilant for such an occurrence. Many people I have read about have had visitations, so if all those people can have visitations and someone who would like to believe asks for one, then certainly that should not be too much trouble. What else have they to do anyway, it's not like they have bodies.

I do believe in miracles and wondrous things that happen. These types of things have happened to me at strange times. People show up in my life just when I really need the most help and I feel that there is something spiritual about them, as if they are angels walking, but maybe they are just good people, very good people.

That is a main tenant of my belief, I do believe. That while you're here on Earth it isn't God that takes care of things, it's other people that help. It's people that show up in the flesh, and people are what matter while we are here. If you pray for help, it's people that show up to help, with their bare hands and good hearts. So far, God hasn't show up personally but if he ever should I stand ready to humbly apologize and follow any directions that he may have. Assuming that I think he seems like a good "person" to follow. Maybe there are many "gods" and some aren't that great, who knows. I will need some references and I'm going to ask a lot of questions regardless.