A Lot of Crossings

There seems to be a lot of death going around. So far in my community, two teachers, two mothers, one uncle, and one father have died in the last 2 months or so. And those are just the human deaths. It adds up to a lot, especially for those who were close to more than one of these folks.

I will say that some I had met, some I had not met, and I was not close to any of them personally. I have sent love and energy and prayers as appropriate, and stayed out of the way where also appropriate. I really feel for my friends and community members as they deal with their grief, and am supportive of them as they process.

That said, I am not bothered by the dying. People die, and thank God'dess for it, otherwise we would be stuck with all the consequences of every choice in this lifetime. The fact that given a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone (especially me!) drops to zero is comforting. No matter how good it gets or how terrible, it will end. Most of those who have died were in ill health and suffering. They have moved on to the Summerlands, where they no longer need be in pain.

I also have the sense of tremendous things moving on a very broad earthly scale. Energetically, things are shifting, and it makes sense to me that there are many who will choose to cross over rather than try to shift as they are now. It is a cleansing, a changing, a shapeshifting, a melting down and recasting some of the cogs of reality. If it is not appropriate to slip the gears you have in this life, it makes sense to leave and come back better equipped.

Again, I have great compassion for those in my circle who are grieving the passing of their loved ones, even as I rejoice in the no-pain and open possibilities now available to those who have crossed.

Where's My Butter?

One thought that I come back to over and over again in my weaker moments involves how many experiments I have run in my life, especially in the last 2 years, and how very many of them failed. I declared 2008 the Year of the Failure. In 2009, I upgraded to the Year of the Fiasco. My frustration levels have had a tendency to run rather high.

But then I just read a bit from Rob Brezsney that included the phrase "turning up our curiosity full blast" [Facebook link] and was struck by the thought that maybe I should reframe my failures as indulgences of my curiosity. Isn't that what an experiment is? A curious thought, and then action to satisfy that curiosity? I often think of myself as "constantly churning" as a way to describe my restless urges to try new things and see if they can be successful. (There are powerful connections between "churning" and the "mouse that fell into a bucket of cream", btw.) Perhaps I should also see my "churning" action as a measure of the blast of my curiosity, that it is so close to "full blast" that I end up "churning."

It makes for a nice shift in language. Being curious has all kinds of positive connotations, excepting what happened to that poor cat, whereas failed experiments and the continuous monotonous motion of churning come off rather poorly.

The only problem with shifting to a curious-based frame from an experimental or churning frame is results. Satisfying curiosity doesn't tend to imply any kind of result other than a bit of knowledge gained, whereas experiments create tangible results and churning makes for either butter or very frothy oceans and/or hurricanes.

So then really the full blast curiosity is what I have been exercising, gaining bits of knowledge and experience as I go. I can't say that I have butter or a hurricane yet, though. Would like them, but I haven't managed to produce them yet. I guess I will just keep sticking my whiskered nose into interesting new places and see if I find the secret passage to the Underbed (unfamiliar with the mystical magical realm of Underbed? Ask your cat.) or at least the magical formula for seeding hurricanes lost under the couch.

I Love the Smell of Gender Parity in the Morning

I just read this NY Times article, Now, Dad Feels as Stressed as Mom, by Tara Parker-Pope. It says that men are reporting more conflict over their work-family balance, specifically that they are moving more into a nurturing father role from a solely providing father role, and so are more active in childcare and homemaking. This is bumping up against the classic workforce dynamic that does not expect men to have childcare and family-life demands that affect their availability as workers, or as the article puts it, assumes that men will be "largely unaffected by children."

One of my favorite bits of info from the article says that men are less likely to take advantage of flexible schedules and family leave, and more likely to take care of their family obligations in "stealth" mode. It conjures images of men sneaking out of the office to a Mission Impossible theme song, slinking along the row of cars in the corporate parking garage to their own carseat-laden vehicle. If the boss calls while they are at the doctor's office with the little tyke, he pretends he is out to drinks with an important potential client. "Hem, hum, yeah, I, uh, need to get back to this. Don't want to blow this deal," he mutters and hangs up the phone before his kid starts the usual post-vaccination wail.

Amusing mental images aside, I am encouraged to see more recognition of the shifting gender roles and the upswing of acknowledgment that more and more men are tapping into their nurturing natures and taking on more responsibility around the house to become more equal partners. I am bothered by the tone of the article overall, though. It starts on a campy note with the title, and goes on to cite facts about men and imply accusations about their women partners who doubt they are really contributing as much as they think they are. It comes across to me as a bit self-congratulatory on the part of the men, and seems to perpetuate some war-of-the-sexes thinking.

Instead, I would have preferred if the article took a more philosophical view of the shift: Look, these things are changing. Gender roles are shifting. Here is evidence that some men are making some of the shifts into the home that will balance some of the shifts out of the home and into the workforce that women began 50 years ago. No one has figured this all out yet, but isn't it cool that some of the hard work of social parity between (among) the genders is cooking along?

So I will file it away into my "hopeful signs badly interpreted by mainstream press" folder and move on, encouraged.