Author Archives: Tsiwoni

Having My Say: intro to Political Realities 100

Here’s the thing, people: I am three days younger than snow, and I understand how this system works. I’ve studied it from multiple angles, in and out of college and graduate school, and I am quite clear about it and where I am within it. In my entire life, I’ve had the pleasure only once of voting for a candidate I wholeheartedly supported. The rest has been voting in the best interests of me, my class, and my people. I don’t have to love the candidates, but I vote for the one most likey to support an agenda that doesn’t set us back in terms of environment wellbeing, race, class, gender, and community well being/prosperity. If they actually move us forward, praise be!
Should it be that way? NO! But I don’t live in a world of “shoulds” and dreams. I live in a proto-capitalist society that is veering from an intended-to-have-been democratic republic towards a theocratically tinged, racist, misogynist oligarchy. So hell yeah, I’m going to vote against that, despite any qualms I have about the candidate or party for which I’ll vote, because as much as I dislike neoliberalism and all that goes with it, it still beats the hell out of any possibility of being completely disenfranchised and having my rights as a woman descended from enslaved Africans and other people of Captive Nations revoked or seeing my children and loved ones threatened.

As of yet, I see no genuine and long lasting plans for a real revolution, or for what happens afterwards. If half of the current citizens don’t know how their system works and why it was set up as it was, do you really think you can garner a large enough base to have a people’s government that wouldn’t be prone to fascism? That other greedy and interested groups/countries would just sit and watch? Most Americans don’t know what socialism is, but they’re a’gin it, and we remain the only “First World” country with corporate healthcare that bankrupts families on a daily basis. So understanding communalism or other non-Eurocentric forms of government and types of societies isn’t even possible.

Bottom line: I do know much, and I know enough to know that people who speak and act against people who look like me should not be given power over me. My mother “didn’t raise no fools” and I am sick to death of people who “don’t have the sense that they were born with” writing about the short comings of the most viable candidates. Do some of you really think that redistricting, setting back voter’s rights, defunding and otherwise sabotaging our postal and educational systems is accidental and that they would do all of this if your vote didn’t matter? That union busting isn’t an act of war against the working class?

It’s a flawed system, but X marks the spot, baby: you are here and unless you’re independently wealthy (own corporations, resources, means of production, etc.) your ass is a worker- white collared, blue collared, or without a shirt- and you need to understand that you have more in common with the single mothers, Black, Latino, Appalachian, sex-workers, migrant workers in the fields than you do with people who make what you do in multiple years, every single second. You need to understand that you’re not going to become one of them, question the sick desire to accumulate more than is needed in ten thousand lifetimes, and grasp the reality that voting in the interests of a class to which you might aspire is voting against yourself and helps keep you where you are or worse.

So that’s it. Few people will read this and fewer will pay heed. There’s nothing I can do about that beyond having had my say and hoping that they didn’t drop you on your heads and there’s still some good sense in those big heads your necks support.

I wish us all peace, a safe place to live, enough to eat, good health, and the joy and solidarity of community and love. And I hope that you can separate ego and illusion in order to serve yourself, the actual Constitution and its Amendments (14th is important!) and do what’s in service to the generations of us all.

“Goodnight and good luck.”

Gastropoda Gold

How did I not know that people are using snail mucin on their skin?
I have SO many questions, from extraction methods to who on this garden grub green earth thought of this? Seriously, I want to know who looked at a cute little snail, plodding along, minding its business, and said, “OMG, would you look at that glowing complexion! I say there, Snail, your complexion is flawless, what’s your secret?”

I might imagine some famished ancestor noticing a bird chowing down on a snail and saying, “Move over, Bub!”and grabbing anything that didn’t kill the animal. Hunger can make otherwise unappealing comestibles seem doable. Go forward a millennia, add butter and garlic, and you’ve got a desirable protein, not merely something pragmatic.

So maybe someone noticed that cooks who prepared escargot had particularly lovely hands that looked youthful. In busy kitchens among cooks whose hands are subject to abrasions, nicks, and burns: that would be noticeable. But I’m just creating a scene born of my need to know how such an inconceivable item is now promoted as the beauty product of the year.

Having lived in a shell-less cave, I’ve been snail mucinless this entire lifetime and I am hurt to realized that not only have I been deprived, but people who I thought of as friends were withholding vital information that could have preserved my youthful glow. Instead, I’m another victim of physics- a shriveled hag, encased in a wrinkly skin bag. And why? Not because it is a side effect of the natural passage of time, but because no one cared enough to tell me that inside that shell-house that they carry on their backs, snails have wee, tiny labs where they’re turning what we previously thought of as their yukky secretions, into pure gold, extracted from desperate consumers under the spell of the multi-billion dollar marketing of an aesthetic illusion.

I can only hope that the snails have lawyered up and are being rewarded. That unlike others, they won’t become victims of their innate talents, exploited and discarded by another heartless human industry.

Perhaps slime really is ultimately the perfect product and metaphor for our age.

Update: “Stressed snails produce slime, however sometimes machines are designed to be kind of like a spa for snails, using a secret spray to pleasure them which also triggers them to secrete more slime. Then they are left in a dark room on top of mesh so that as they scoot around the slime drips through the mesh and can be collected in a tray below them.”

Thanks to Flaky Biscuits Press for the above information.
I’m glad to learn that they’re not killed for it, and if they’re being pleasured in the process, so much the better. I don’t want any stress or depression slime on my wrinkles😉 (Not sure that ejaculation slime is any less dubious, but it’s better, LOL.)

Anjana’s Guide to a Better Life and Society (in no particular order)


Everybody should have to serve and work the line in a restaurant; teach a class; baby sit; work the register (old school, requiring basic arithmetic skills); write a formal letter; clean a kitchen & bathroom (baseboards
included); create something useable/beautiful from scratch; repair/mend something; work in a human or animal shelter/soup kitchen/hospital; spend time with people of a different generation, speak with (not only “to”) a person/people they perceive as “less than” themselves and would otherwise never approach; dance/sing/play for 15 minutes each day; spend time in the natural world without unnecessary equipment or noise; be kind to someone every day; actively defend the rights of the poor, disenfranchised, minorities, women, elderly, children, animals, nature; enjoy and take care of your body and senses; occasionally (knees permitting) jump rope; witness/assist in a birth and a death; vote or change the system through creation, not destruction; skip (while holding hands when possible); learn a new language or skill outside of your comfort zone; drive a cab in NYC; swim; spend 48 hrs incarcerated or in a senior care facility, or in a mental health facility; grow food and flowers; consider your connection to the living world every day; have your social & political life in alignment; reduce/eliminate waste. Be kind.

By Anjana Mebane-Cruz, PhD

July 7, 2015

Half a Day in the Life

Thrilled to have been able to write several pages of the book this morning for the first time in a couple of months, so I was absolutely thrilled. Until said pages completely disappeared from Word, my computer, and the known universe, including copies I’d sent to my writing group.
Just spent almost two hours using every suggested recovery process, por nada.
Finally found an in-between first and last draft, so I saved, saved as, copied, uploaded, downloaded and printed it to everywhere, including sending copies to all my emails.
Immediately after that, the original that I’d emailed showed up.
And this is why writers (in movies) go postal. In real life we bitch about it, get headaches, have insomnia, IBS, and a variety of anxiety related twitches, but ultimately get back to the work at hand.

So cheers, my dear Word Wranglers! May your vocabulary be mighty, the words flow, your pages stay safe, and your critics give praise.

Anole Tales Continued

Green anole basking in a light summer rain

Enjoying a late breakfast, watching an anole hanging out on the BBQ shelf when a smaller insect scurried by and Anole jumped like lightening, devouring the bug in one big bite.

First time seeing an anole hunt and it was surprising: little dudes are fast, and those wee jaws open like a crocodile’s! No struggle, no pain: bug was just disappeared in a flash.

Condolences to the unknown bug’s relations.

Respect, Brown Anole lizard! Glad you’re wee and tiny compared to me.

Dawn and Dawning: the waking dream

The little creek behind the house is almost dry this morning.

I don’t remember it being so these past two summers. I worry.

The creek is dry and sounds from the farm that was behind us

are sounds of heavy equipment, not the sounds of tractors, threshers, or such.

In my mind these are sounds of Death.

Death to trees and all who dwell within and around,

Death to rivers, streams, and creeks. 

I’ll listen tonight for tree frogs and hope that their din is undiminished

That no more housing’s being built for what seems mostly to be the worst of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio…

We have good neighbors, but so many are the ones we hoped to leave behind,

reincarnations of the Confederacy: racist, sexist, and cannot cook.

They join the “Redneck Brigades” of the Carolinas, but reshape it into their controlling and manicured images.

They hate the Spanish moss that hangs from live oaks, bring plants foreign to this soil, then rant about increasing pollen. 

Prefer the foods from supermarkets or artisan shops created by trust fund babies to our local Mom and Pop fish markets, BBQ, chicken shacks, and joints, and they denigrate the very cultures whose charms attracted them here to start with.

I see this across the country, but mostly in the South, where so few people have power to fight the Powers that conspire to let this happen. They take the kickbacks, retire where they can live like kings, expanding the cycle further and far, cluck about the shame of it all, keeping folks hating “damn Northerners” while never seeing who’s selling the land and heritage. 

I wonder what happens when no workers can afford to live and work nearby? Will you complete your dreams of feudal lordships with servants all around, dependent on your land and charity, no church left to regulate usury or the thickness of the sticks with which you beat your human chattel?

I hear all this in these early morning sounds and want to scream out to people,

Rise up, revolt, remember who you are, not who they tell you to be!

But I’m just another Cassandra, like every other wife whose husbands appeared to listen, but continued on towards Doom.

Every Fannie Lou, every Che, every Malcolm, Patrice, and Grace; every Angela, Stokely, and Miriam; Lolita, Ramon and Segundo, and every Dennis, Clyde, and Russell: listened to, but not fully heard, because actions are too few, when any.

The young ones seem so conscious: of Earth Mother, and others who labor round the world,

Of animals and water, clean air, and joy.

I pray each day, afraid it might be too late, but knowing that we cannot, must not, will not give in to despair. I worry as I hear them buying into ideas of generation gaps and lumping elders all together, rejecting the allies with experience and love. Perhaps the chain of Community is irrevocably broken, because they’ve never known a world without 24-7 ads of propaganda,

Never seen groups working across differences for the good of all.

They’ve never known Yangtze River dolphins, nor white rhinos, or golden toads beyond some stories or photos,

Just loss and overstimulation, and rhetoric that makes them think that the workers who bought into American Dreams had Power instead of seeing them as deluded peers to be wakened from their strivers’ dreams.

My hopes are few, yet violently strong:

I wish to wake every sleeping mindset,

shake every single body into wakefulness and agreement on these very few, deathly crucial things.

I’ve prayed to be the Avenging Angel of Justice since seven, and pray now to smite each greedy leader who sacrifices our Earth and Her living souls for their short sighted gains and power.

I wish to fly like lightning, swooping down to save and avenge the planet I love and everything that is part of the natural world.

But I wish to understand what makes such creatures tick before I smite, that my justice is right and righteous. To have it explained, ‘cause their lack of humanity spells death not only for me and mine, but also the children they purport to love, and to whom they’ll bequest their soul forsaken world. I wonder how such creatures exist or think and how they cannot get the basic facts of life and physics: we are all connected through Life. That the illusion of separation is strong, but it is the ultimate joke towards understanding the Universe and how it works: we recognize or die. Unity or Destruction: there is no middle way.

I wonder, as my father instructed, and try not to worry, as it’s ultimately counter productive to action, and action is what I need and want and what might (maybe?) save our world.

But mostly I want to see this world restored to full beauty. To have the children grow with grace and awe, and elders grow wise and kind. To see the animals thrive and plants renew, for arts and healing and generational concern to be our leaders. 

For rain to once again taste sweet and not acidic. I want the babies safe and nurtured and loved, be they two legged, four legged, winged, crawling, or fanged. I want Life.

And being the crazy old lady I am, I dare to dream this dream awake:

I dare to dream of the Peace the comes from Balance, from a sensitive, affirming rendering of Justice. The Peace that’s born from a universal and eternally wise Love. The Peace that meets the heart’s desire in harmony with the cosmic song.

I want to see everything false fall to dust and get blown away to Source, perhaps to be reformed into something useful and good. Like Victor’s father in Smoke Signals, I want to wave my hand and restore all that is good. My waking dream.

6/17/24

A Mothers’ Day

My mother wanted only one child and I was number five. Despite that issue and her many struggles to keep a large and sometimes difficult household running smoothly and efficiently, my mother cared for a problematic mother in law, didn’t hesitate to add an elderly relative with no other home, or to take in a local kid who had a particularly difficult family life.

She was strong and tired, impatient and incredibly kind, frugal yet generous, and although she didn’t approve of some of my choices, I knew that my mother loved me beyond the general care that she showed to everyone under her roof: that her softness was always there when I was most fragile, and that she would enlist an army to fight for me and my siblings if we were in the right and failing to muster our own forces.

She was fearless in defense of her children and others, and it was known that she would spank every kid on the block if they were misbehaving beyond the normal kiddy antics. Kids also knew that if she was baking (and she often did) they would get a treat, same as we did. She never blamed children for their short comings or bad behavior, and had an uncanny eye for the kids who needed extra care.

It was she who grew angry when I mentioned that a kid in class missed days and came in several times with black eyes and a broken arm. Our teacher said he was “accident prone” and made light of it, but Mommy bristled in anger saying, “That boy’s being abused! Somebody’s beating on that child.” I was shocked and freaked out that she’d drawn such a different conclusion, but although she said no more to me, I found out later that she quietly spoke to my teacher and the school authorities, and “Danny” had no more “accidents” that year.

As I got older, I realized how many people she helped in various ways and how big her heart was, despite her often strict demeanor. That so much of that strictness was born of her understanding of how cruel and mean the world can be and her fear for all the innocents and the vulnerable people of the world. That her empathy was hard to bear when she had so few resources to offer. That she understood that her mission and need was to guarantee that we’d survive without her.

She maybe worried most for me, her dreamy eyed, romantic, and artistic daughter- completely unprepared emotionally for the realities I would face. But I knew I had her in my corner. That I could call on, and conjure up a line of women who had gone through more with far fewer resources, and “lived to tell the story.” That I would see my way through and never be the weak link in that chain of women, from my mother and all the way back to “Mitochondrial Eve.” That somewhere within me, I was my mother’s daughter and that if I tapped into that, I would be alright, no matter what.

My mother continues to comfort me and be my resolve when I need it. I feel her presence at times, as though she’s with me, not just remembered, and it gives me heart. It reminds me that I have been and will be loved.

She is always and ever, my Mom.

Cultural Linguistics vs “Love” (but not really.)

Ok, I’m breaking my recent vow to post no more than 7 things per day on that other site (not counting meme dumps) because despite the many responses to this ^ (above) random post that I noticed on someone’s page, to my horror, not one response I read questioned how “love” was being defined! I’ve often heard people with all good intentions say things like “We all just want to be loved” and it hits my buttons and raises red flags each time, because what we mean by “love” varies by temperament, gender, culture, age, and time. It’s not a simple given that we all want it or if we do, what that would look like and be for us as individuals or a corporate group.

Love isn’t merely “attraction” or “shared interests” or “class” as many seem to have been taught. It also doesn’t exist without “respect,” a word many submitted, but didn’t think to clarify.
To me, this was yet another example of how people not only misunderstand each other and skim the surface of “meaning,” but also an example of cultural socialization that doesn’t serve our relationships, or help us to understand the systems in which we reside.
Interestingly, it’s another one of those things I always tried to explore in my classes, and it was generally the first time students had ever considered not only the legal, familial, religious, and professional significances of marriage, but the aesthetic and sexual connections to how we understand “love” and “marriage.”

Wittgenstein said “Love is not an emotion. Love is put to the test.” It certainly evokes great amounts of emotion, but it is in fact, a set of relationships and interactions, both personal and communal. And its presentation and reception reflects and confronts the standards, both implicit and explicit, of the particular culture/society. And so do the terms we employ, which means that if we’re not in agreement about how we’re using these terms and we’re relying solely on our own feelings, or political/familial/religious traditions, or other individual contexts, we’re not only in different conversations, we’re weakening relational bonds.

Everyone “misspeaks” at times (notice the original post’s mistake) but if we have an extended relationship with that person we may know their intent or linguistic patterns well enough to fill in the missing or correct word. In those cases we may show grace and it may even become the source of an on-going joke between friends with shared histories.

But what about when you don’t know the speaker? What if they’re in a position of authority/power? Context matters, words matter. I’m not the Grand Poobah of Love, nor do I claim more than personal expertise on that particular subject, (although the song running through my head right now is the first line in the 1962 Exciters song, Tell Him.) I do however, have a good understanding of what words do and how they work in language, as well as the effect of words and word choices on our audience, intended and not.

And I wonder about the intentions of such queries when they go beyond personal amusement. Like it or not, we’re all engaged in a social experiment and research on the social media in our lives. The fact that in theory we can “reach” millions of people around the world in an instant places an increased responsibility to know more and accept “difference” without imposing our parochial views and opinions. It requires us to understand that if we’re going to communicate effectively and negotiate the myriad relationships we might develop through education, business, travel, hobbies, etc. we must first sit down and hash out our a priori beliefs and understandings within the contextual framework we share. It means that the words we use can be fraught with meaning and we must know that as we enter unfamiliar spaces or renegotiate older relationships.

The requirement has always been there, but we have generally ignored it in judging people within our societies, particularly those perceived to be of lower status.

And that’s maybe what “love” might have to do with it, but maybe it’s just the easiest way to establish any relationship and to build communities that serve the greatest number within that society.

Grief: no negotiations, no pardons.

Poem By Gwen Flowers

Phew! It’s an unwanted colonizer that takes over and sets up house inside you, follows you everywhere, seeming to sometimes relent but always returning, unbidden and often surprisingly.
A deep and ugly scar that never stops throbbing, and won’t be ignored. You live with it: the phantom limb of loss. You talk your way through the daily tasks because the body goes on, seemingly soulless, rudderless, all purpose and desires gone. The things that anchored your life vanish, leaving you not merely adrift, but blood-soaked chum in shark infested waters.
Is this still “life”? More a Purgatory that you cannot pray or repent your way out of. And some days, it is just pure Hell.

You try to keep it to yourself, but also know that there’s something entirely wrong with a society that doesn’t mourn deeply and skirts around feelings. Where many relationships are investments: all form, no substance.

I want a Greek or African type period of wailing: rending of clothes, ashes on my forehead, women keening all around me. Full throttled acknowledgement of the loss of the Beloved, who deserves and rates the stopping of clocks and covering of mirrors, all the actions of loss that spill outside the lines of daily life and boil over in messy clumps of grief not readily wiped away. I feel a bond with all those who have loved deeply and lost, no matter what the relationship. We are veterans of a horrid war, trapped in post trauma, clutching at bits of life and not knowing why.

Grief is a true connection to our humanity and the only surety that comes with birth. It is the terrible and murderous price of love, and perhaps the reason society denies all depths and pain, refuses to allow shared grief in full, and waxes prettily about ways of “moving on/going forward, and worst of all, “getting over it.” Love becomes another disposable item, replaced with people or things, but never plumbed, never allowed to annihilate our “was” to see what’s left or might emerge on its own like a tiny green shoot after a forest fire. Never risking the real, searing pain and suffering that comes from the loss of a life completely entwined with someone who is quite simply you. We are instead zombified: spent debris hoping to be up-cycled, perhaps practical, but never again achieving the singular and fluorescent beauty that being loved produced.

1,085 days I’ve cried out in pain, sometimes softly, often loudly, as though my cries might move some nonexistent being to divinely intervene, send my love back to me, make these years a terrible dream that alters our lives, forever chastened and appreciative. I want a story with an ending I can live with: the hero’s journey completed and survived, now coming home to a hard won and deeply felt peace.

I wake up confused every single day, not understanding how I continue to exist without him, how we can possibly exist on different planes, how he can have ceased to be. It makes no sense, and every single day, my mind and body reject any reality in which we are not together, squabbling, laughing, dancing, making food and music, and loving each other with a complete trust that surprised and confused me for thirty seven years. That I could love someone as deeply as my own blood and bone was amazing to me as has been three years of anguished grief. I never thought I could feel so much except for my child, nor did I understand that love grows deeper, wider, stronger, beyond every boundary of the mind or senses, beyond the pretty words in any song or poetry, a powerful thing that alters your being in every possible way and lifts what you didn’t even know wasn’t there. You felt complete, but love grows an entirely new you that cannot have existed without such love. A seed? A song unwritten? A depth of self undiveable without the oxygen of Love.

And feeling such a well and wealth of love, how is it possible that we can be separated? How horrible and great the force required to separate two such magnets, united in passion and love. How evil and cruel that force must be. It cannot possibly be neutral and wreak such damage: we can only hope that reincarnation exists and that the crime committed in some other life can be absolved and balance restored. But three years later, despair wrangles with acceptance, science, and intellect, none convincing to my heart.

Bereft, bothered, and bewildered, I grieve.