Hell

1.12.06

I bought the ingredients to make chili today, Hanah's reward for cooperating in the mornings in getting out of the house and I suddenly realized that this is the only incentive that works for her. I take away her toys and her TV privileges and she doesn't seem to care, but remove the possibility of cooking chili, or having a lemonade stand or her "girls band" and she wakes up, steps to the plate and comes through with her responsibilities. It's not the stuff she wants, or the zoning out that TV offers, it's the opportunity to engage in the world in the way she wants to, cooking, commercing, dancing, singing, playing. It's being alive and all that she is that is of most value to her. Therein lies her little heaven.

When I think of loss, pain, suffering, malaise, my own and this culture's, I see Hanah everywhere, people striving to fulfil their species being, yet being thwarted by bad food, sedentary lifestyles, aliented relationships, inner demons, lack of meaningful work or endeavours, spiritual paucity. I see people with large eyes made small, squinting in the glare of our media satuation, Madison avenue driven desires, the voices in their heads which fill them with the fear of living. But I also see the vibrant smiling Yoga teacher who beams at me every day, the large bodied parking attendant who suffers my Spanish with a toothy grin as I check in, the women in my group struggling with their own personal hells, tissues flying, yet always finding a laugh in there somewhere. I see art in the pepper berries fallen on the ground and hear music in the palm trees. I am given the gift of connecting and helping others find their truths and in turn finding my own.

In class the other day, my largest client's (519 pounds trapping a beautiful boy child face) cell phone's ring tone went off "Fuck you mother fucker!" We all laughed, slighly aghast, and he was mortified. I was pissed and appalled yet took notice. What does it mean that you choose to put this message as your ring tone? Was it personalized for a buddy? Where are we in the time that people lovingly called each other bitch and muthafucka? Are we so angry that we just want to go around giving each other the finger, the clenched fist, the proverbial smack upside the head? Are my clients so dispossed of their true feelings from having stuffed them so long that only their phones can speak their truths?

Hell is not being allowed to be who you are. It is in the prisons with jail cells and the prisons of our limited imaginations, our fundamentalisms, our rac-,gender-homo-phobo-politico-isms. Hell is the house where the parent slaps down a child's innate being. Hell is the relationship that shackles. Hell is the workplace that demeans. Hell is the restaurant that does not nourish. Hell is the place we inhabit when we do not speak our truths and greet each day with, "what now, my friend?"