Blossom and Roar

Well, it’s been an interesting weekend!

Order out of chaos work (Read that moving closets and drapes!) going on in the house. Also, painting. Lots of painting! Mostly art. Only a tiny bit of touch up on walls.

After my ortho doc assured me, provided I rested a bunch in the meantime, that doing the Abundance Workshop I have coming up next weekend wasn’t going to make what hurts worse, my current Muse painting, who insists on going along, has been in quite the rush to get things done.

It’s the resting part that has presented a bit of a challenge.

I can paint sitting down, which pretty much counts but, in order to get my legs up, I need the magic chair. No problem with the chair.

The problem, instead, is with the TV and internet. There hasn’t been any!!!

Now, I realize that, in the face of hurricanes and wars and crushing poverty and a huge lack of health care and major challenges with our educational system and tragic mass shootings and overwhelming questions about human rights, this is not actually a big deal.

I, however, am a pattern learner.

You know how, if you happen to have a front lawn, and you head out your door every day and walk to the mailbox by the exact same route, pretty soon you’ll have an actual path worn in your lawn? You know… grass mashed down, then worn away, then soil compacted until there is, essentially, a very obvious groove in your otherwise lovely lawn.

Well, our brains work the same way. Doing the same thing, the same way, over and over again, actually creates neuro-pathways, or grooves, in our brains and then we tend to “stay in the grooves,” as it were, and keep doing things the same way.

Loathe as I am to admit this, after all the years of knee surgeries, one of my grooves is put feet up… turn on TV. Lots and lots of Food Network and Cooking Channel. Lots of HGTV. (Well, less these days. I mean, even I can only stand just so much house flipping!)

Then there’s the wonder of ROKU and Netflix. The West Wing, whenever I want it. Tony Bourdain.

And, just between us, it took me a while to wear a new groove in my brain to juggle two remotes and figure out which buttons to push and when. I am not a techie person. (At least, historically, I haven’t been!)

This weekend, since somebody put a huge roadblock in my path, and Bill was off communing with tens of thousands of techie/geeky folks at Dragon Con, and the thing called a router, which may be part of the problem, lives in the basement where I can’t get right now, doing some new things was called for.

Here’s what I’ve learned…

YouTube TV doesn’t work on a laptop though they don’t mention that until you’ve already signed up for the free trial.

You can get a whole season of Next Iron Chef in your I-tunes library. (Probably more!)

There are a couple of music mixes on YouTube that actually work for me and I can knit while I listen. Next task… figuring out how to get rid of the ads!!!

And, I can watch Netflix on my laptop! Who knew???

(Feel free to laugh!)

All of these miracles, and this blog post, are possible because my dear neighbor shared her internet access with me. Apparently their signal works at our house, too!

Here’s the cool part… I’ve downloaded apps and figured out how to find them again. I’ve found some stuff that works for me and some other stuff that doesn’t. I’ve had some new experiences to learn from. Which is, just as my old friend Steve Glenn promised, empowering. And the Muses all agree!

One of the songs from that music mix on YouTube keeps running through my head. Here it is… just in case you’d like for it to run around in your head, too….

http://https://youtu.be/EkaKwXddT_I

Are you ready for an adventure?

We’re going time traveling! (Never mind, for a moment, notions of physics and philosophy which suggest that past, present, and future are all present now and now is what there is.)

We’ll begin with a quote from a book that is an old friend of mine:

A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman, and her existence is entirely absorbed in that of her husband. He is civilly responsible for her acts, she lives under his protection or cover, and her condition is called coverture.

A woman’s body belongs to her husband; she is in his custody, and he can enforce his right by a writ of habeas corpus.

What was her personal property before marriage, such as money in hand, money at the bank, jewels, household goods, clothes, etc., becomes absolutely her husband’s, and he may assign or dispose of them at his pleasure whether he and his wife live together or not.

A wife’s chattels real (i.e., estates) become her husband’s.

Neither the Courts of Common law nor Equity have any direct power to oblige a man to support his wife…

The legal custody of children belongs to the father. During the life-time of a sane father, the mother has no rights over her children, except limited power over infants, and the father may take them from her and dispose of them as he sees fit.

A married woman cannot sue or be sued for contracts — nor can she enter into contracts except as an agent of her husband; that is to say, her word alone is not binding in law…

A husband and wife cannot be found guilty of conspiracy, as that offence cannot be committed unless there are two persons.

Which, depending on where you are and how you got there, may explain a lot!

Now, a couple of questions.

What did you notice as you read? What did you wonder?

I’m betting that one of the things you’re wondering about is the source of this quote. I learned it from Carolyn Heilbrun’s magnificent book, Writing A Woman’s Life. The quote itself is from a pamphlet, Married Women and the Law by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon in the USA, 1854.

It’s true that many of us are in a different place, today.

But, just in case you think we haven’t quite made it to the world we’d like our granddaughters to grow up in… or our grandsons, for that matter… what, then, do we do?

According to Professor Heilbrun, we need to “write” new stories about women’s lives.

Thus, we’re traveling toward the Future which is, in language and people I’m only beginning to know, already possible.

In fact, I have a flock of new friends working together on moving toward what our fearless leader, Julie Steelman, refers to as Financial Sovereignty. And, yes, I’m in a new class! It’s called Blossom and Roar.

We’ve only just begun and yet the connections and ironies are firing in my head a mile a minute.

I’m learning to ask different questions about money than the ones history has deposited deep within the consciousness of many women, even women of privilege, who grew up in families who lived in the days when Bodichon was painting a word picture of life in the USA.

I’m learning new definitions for corporate financial buzz words that never really worked for me.

And, I’m stunned, in light of recent media attention on child sexual abuse and trafficking, by the materialization of the movie, Pretty Woman, somewhere in my cable TV universe last night, while I was busy pondering these words. Suddenly, a film I’ve appreciated for years, mostly for the journey and also for the final line, feels profoundly more important in the sense of things that need to be conscious.

So why all this today?

Well, because I have two granddaughters growing up in this world. Because it matters. And because the way to change things is to gather together and talk about them and allow them to be conscious. And to set aside any notions we might be harboring that it’s just too hard or we don’t get it.

And to vote. (Painting helps, too!)

I’ll admit that these thoughts are a bit babbly and not fully processed at the moment, rather like the glimpse of my CODEX painting, above, but thanks for being here anyway! And, for this moment, a slightly edited reminder from my hypnosis training:

Take a deep breath. Wiggle your fingers and toes. Shake off the journeys, keeping only what’s helpful. Come back to where you are and be with you!

Tag: Blossom and Roar

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Time Travel… Past & Future!