breakingsod.com

…if I continue to behave like this,
and I will suffer pains and bondage,
wounds and laceration in the lower realms.’

There is a repeating pattern to our behaviour that we somehow seem to miss. When we ‘re challenged, our habitual reactions are especially predictable: we strike out or withdraw, scream or weep, become arrogant or feel inadequate. These strategies for seeking security and avoiding discomfort only increase our uneasiness. But alas, they seem addictive; even though the results are unsatisfactory, we use them again and again.
Attentiveness functions like a guardian who protects us from repeating the same mistakes and strengthening the same patterns. We can catch ourselves getting hooked and avoid being swept away by shenpa.”

‘No Time to Lose’, Pema Chodron

Pema Chodron, an American buddhist nun, is one of my dearest authors. She is amazing, in her truth-telling, in her commitment and in her capacity for clarity and gentleness. When I am distraught, raging, ready to give up on my fellow humans, myself and the whole damn world, I read her and somehow, I’m good to go again.

‘No Time to Lose’ is her commentary on ‘The Way of the Bodhisattva’, a famous buddhist text by the eighth century sage Shantideva. She breaks it down verse by verse and gives us the gold in terms we can understand.

Precious.

“If you loan someone money and you never see them again, its money well spent.”

Isabelle Allende, “City of the Beast”

On mindcontrol, growing up in a cult and taking charge of your life.

You can listen to the interviews on her website, Firewalker. I recommend the second one.

Go sis, go!

I will kick your fucking ass.

Cunt, p. 177

Have I mentioned that I love this book?

How could I not love a writer who uses words like ’stentorian-assed’?

I’ve only just begun to read, but I know a serious feast when I find one. I’ve spent a lot of time recently thunking about how words shape people, for better or worse. Words are powerful things and when uttered over and over again by parents and caregivers and teachers and TV’s and magazines, they can gradually constrict, restrict, demean, disempower, sanitize, atrophy, shame and cripple.

Inga Muscio put it deftly into words for me:

‘Words outlive people, institutions, civilizations. Words spur images, associations, memories, inspirations and synapse pulsations. Words send off physical resonations of thought into the nethersphere. Words hurt, soothe, inspire, demean, demand, incite, pacify, teach, romance, pervert, unite, divide.
Words be powerful.
Grownups and children are not readily encouraged to unearth the power of words. Adults are repeatedly assured a picture is worth a thousand of them, while the playground response to almost any verbal taunt is “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
I don’t beg, so much as command to differ.’

She commands our attention and…

She delivers cunt to us, liberated from the filthy ordure of centuries, like a miraculous gem.

Cunt, in her hands and by her lights, is a dangerous treasure, a beautiful word-a thunderstorm, a monster truck, a powerful force that all women hold between their soft thighs and in their wild hearts.

‘Since everybody already knows that the diabolization of “cunt” is an absolute reality of our language, nobody has to waste time and energy defending it’s honor.
A cunt by any other name is still a cunt.
“Cunt” is a highly satisfying word to utter on a regular basis.
Every girl and lady who is strong and fighting and powerful, who thrives in this world in a way that serves her, is a rockin’, cuntlovin’ babe doing her part to goad the post-patriarchal age into fruition.
“Cunt is the crusty, disgusting bottle in the city dump pile that is bejewelled underneath and has a beautiful genie inside.’

I certainly enjoyed walking into Third Place Books and asking the woman behind the counter for Cunt.

It’s a shockingly good word and an excellent book. Go buy it, read it, give it to everyone you know-spread it throughout this mad world like honey, like butter, like sanity.

the joy of the feminine has been denigrated as mere frivolity; her joyful lust demeaned as whorishness, or sentimentalized and maternalized; her vitality bound into duty and obedience. This devaluation produced ungrounded daughters of the patriarchy, their feminine strength and passion split off, their dreams and ideals in the unobtainable heavens, maintained grandly with a spirit false to the instinctual pattern symbolised by the queen of heaven and earth. It also produced frustrated furies.’

Sylvia B Perera, ‘Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women’