And Now a Word from the Oracle
I have been spending much of this week trapped in a lounge chair in front of the television. What I have seen isn’t pretty. First this woman says something is missing from her life, and it turns out to be a bigger butt. So she heads off to Dr 90210 for implants. Then Oprah says she does not consider herself lucky at all, that she's earned her success and exemplifies the American Dream. I kept thinking they were both being ironic, waiting for them to crack up at the ridiculousness of their statements, but neither one of them did. They were dead serious.
What's it like to live in a culture so spiritually dead that someone could consider butt implants the key to happiness? What's it like to live in a culture so obsessed with individuality that someone could consider herself entitled to billions of dollars just by being a talking head? These questions feel particularly resonant to me as I have just returned from my sojourn to Peru. One more time I was reminded that history is filled with different cultures, different peoples, whose values were not--are not-- those of my home. There's simply not a universal human nature, though certainly we've all shared the longing for connection that I see people striving so compulsively for in the United States.
My cousin said in his Christmas letter this year that when he returned home from years abroad in Namibia he found his country filled with huge people and huge cars. He said these seemed to be signs of an internal problem. Well put. Our collective body is sick, and the symptoms of distress can be seen all over the world. As I stood in a bank line in Iquitos, a city of 500,000 cut out of the jungle and in many ways cut off from the rest of civilization, I saw an anorexic woman. The sight was shocking. Here in this place unreachable even by automobile, our modern Western "values" had managed to penetrate, to cause someone to starve herself in a land filled with starving children.
Why do I care about this? I've always wanted to make things better. Even as a child I had a sense that I could find out the answers to the meaning of life. And the fact that I was constantly failing to do so never completely deterred me from my quest, though middle class life in the suburban United States offered all kinds of panaceas in the form of drugs, food, shopping, etc. Like many of us, I used substances and behaviors to dull the nagging feeling that something was missing. I learned to make myself beautiful, to acquire the right stuff, to "hate the right people," as the brilliant Audre Lorde phrased it.
And I was empty.
Yet when I watched that woman on Dr 90210 express her desire for a more rounded posterior, adamant in her belief that this would provide that missing link to fulfillment, I knew exactly what she was talking about. I too have been offered that little out of life. I too found such low expectations for myself when I went out into the world.
Is this really what "America" means? Commodified bodies to go with commodified religion, everything marketed, marketable, even our bodies and our souls? It's so obviously out of whack that I cannot believe I even need to comment on this, but every time I do I am reminded that voices like mine don't hold center stage. Why? Because I've got nothing to sell except the insistence that we need to stop buying. There’s no advertising revenue in that, is there Oprah? Guess I won’t be a billionaire like you.
When one of my students asked me what I do on Christian holidays now that I reject my natal religion, I said "anything I want to." This year I wanted to be in Peru, far from the phony sentiments and the orgy of greed. So on Christmas Day I was standing atop Machu Picchu. There's nowhere else I would rather have been. I have long ago freed myself from the tyranny of Christmas, no longer a Christian, no longer a believer in the "buy-stuff-and-that-means-you-love-us" lie, perhaps more embarrassed by the faux connection between the birth of someone's "lord" and shopping at Wal-Mart for yet more shit nobody needs than are believing Christians. So standing at the nerve center of an ancient peoples’ religion far far from home suited me just fine.
Of course they celebrate Christmas in Peru. Big city Lima even seemed to be featuring the materialistic version so familiar to me as an American, though the five-year-old girl standing on the sidewalk outside the café for hours far too timid to hawk the candy she was gripping didn't seem to be anticipating any visit from Santa. We all passed her by, as we passed by the thousands of little kids selling things on the streets with no apparent adult to watch over them.
Lima was such a mix of elite and impoverished. But in Cusco, 11,000 feet up in the Andes, there wasn't any apparent mall hopping or jet setting. Instead there was a marketplace set up in the main square where the mountain folks came into town to sell the greenery used by each family to construct their Christmas nativity. As our guide explained, "we make everything here."
I imagined family gathered together, building their crèche, sorting through the fantastically colorful herbs and shrubs, only to do it all over again next year instead of reusing the plastic one they bought at Wal-Mart. It reminded me of my latina friends who gather together at this time of year to make tamales together, young and old, no one with any money or showy stuff, just hours of laughter and teasing, great smells and great tastes--and lots of hard work.
On Christmas Day as our train lugubriously skated back and forth on its switchbacks to traverse the hills outside of town, I watched out the window as we passed hundreds of tiny homes, many with no electricity or running water. In one I saw a couple dancing. They seemed to be doing a kind of a swing step, radiating glee as they celebrated the holiday at a small gathering. Where I come from this kind of scene takes place in Von’s ads, in Albertson’s ads, in Target ads, exhorting you to have every “thing” in place to show off how “happy” you are. Who would invite people over to a hovel? And then dare to have a good time? Dancing in the slums. I was humbled.
LIke a magpie, I gathered up these images as I traveled throughout Peru, listening, looking, for other ways of being, for other ways of making meaning, for other ways of believing. The Incas were believers, of course, in the power of the universe, in the majestry of the sun and moon, in the gifts of rainfall and rock. I responded to their systemic connections to the earth and sky, something deep within me also wanting to acknowledge my dependence, my insignificance, my connection to the earth. Notably, Incan cosmology always represents the twinning of male and female, not as does our western binary in which the feminine represents degradation, but in the recognition of the awful power of generation, a power flowing from the mother earth and through the bodies of women.
As I stood at the altar on top of the mountain kingdom, clouds and mist billowing through our group, I was awed by this veneration of the female, so different than the way woman is represented in my own world, an airbrushed, pornographic object to be used and discarded by callow men. And all at once I heard a voice instructing me to honor women, to honor in myself and others that timeless connection to female power, to the female body. I was amazed at this message, for one more time I had been finding fault with my body, thinking of altering it, thinking perhaps if I only were surgically enhanced then I would be worthy of the attention the handsome young professional athlete had been showering me with lately.
No, the oracle told me, you cannot change your breasts, for you cannot both change them and show the world how to be a woman, wise, powerful, ageing, and ageless. This latter is your calling. Accept and love yourself exactly as you are. And do it for the sake of the whole world.
Whew. What a Christmas present! I wasn't even looking for an answer to a question I didn’t even know I was asking, unless you count committing myself every single morning to walking a spiritual path as opening myself up to spiritual guidance. And as usual, when I get these shots from the goddess, they are humbling, awful, and impossible to ignore. So nope, no breast implants for me, in spite of--because of?--all of the hateful things men have said to me about my body after finding photos of me on the web. I forgive you brothers. I honor your path. I wish you peace. I bring you love.
And it turns out that handsome young hunk loves me for my soul anyway. How cool is that?