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Mar. 29th, 2009 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikI started writing this... oh, a couple of weeks ago, I think. On the edge of posting or tossing, but I guess I'll just post and cut.
So some of these thoughts started up with reading Palimpsest - which is an absolutely gorgeous book, and I'll do it no justice here, especially since that's not really what I'm writing about.
What Palimpsest, and maybe more some people's reactions to Palimpsest reminded me of is all the tropes in speculative fiction about getting away, leaving this world, and finding one's own place and one's own people. Now, it did so in ways that were delightful and original, so I almost wince from the comparison, because much more frequently these things are done badly. But it was strange for me to read this book, and to read about my friends reading the book, and to feel a little like I've stepped outside of something that used to be a common frame of reference.
Do you remember all those stories you read as a child, about the kids who go to some other world and have marvelous adventures... and in most cases, especially in the older books, how at the end they end up making a set of choices that are usually presented as mature, but are also a bit depressing, or even worse having those choices pushed on them? Magic isn't supposed to be real, or it's supposed to be ending real soon now. (Blame Tolkien.) But mostly and most often how ever much better and more fitting the world they find themselves in may be, at the end they decide to go back to their old lives. Was this some kind of publishing requirement for children's fantasy, the way that for years you could write about lesbians, but they had to come to bad ends? Darn it, if I were ever so lucky as to find my own place and my own people, I wasn't going to chuck in favor of growing up and becoming just like everyone else.
I was a child of the seventies and eighties, so I got both all the conditioning about how all the wonder and magic of childhood is something that generally gets washed or beaten out of you as you grow up and also all the hanging on the edge of an apocalypse, the end of civilization is nigh and you might want to know a bit how to survive under questionable circumstances. Why yes, I do know quite a bit about wild edible and medicinal plants, and how to build shelters from found materials, and... well, y'all know me. I like to think I would have picked up a lot of it without the whole seventies back to nature and eighties the end of the world is nigh bit, because a lot of it is just cool, but there you are.
What I noticed though, especially in some of the discussions around Palimpsest was that really, I'm pretty happy with this world. And I have been for a long time.
Does this mean I wouldn't want to visit? Heavens no. I like travelling and exploring, and how fabulous. Especially if I could have one life while I was awake and another while I was asleep - bonus! (I have such a weird relationship with sleep anyway, where I spend a lot of time courting it... but darn, it takes up so much time, and I always want more time. But especially the way I train, if I don't sleep well, everything else kind of sucks too, and quickly. But I don't have a categorical sense that I would prefer to be somewhere else.
Part of it is that I've found my place, and my people. Several times. When my mom finally let me transfer into the gifted program. When I met humilitas and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jaunthie. When I went to EEP. When I started going to cons, and joined the SCA, and started spending time in the pagan community. And darn, at the time, those were the best things ever. Yay! I can haz friends, and family.
Of course, once you get your friends and family, and get past the starry eyed wonder of finding them, well, we all are people. You can put a lot of energy into trying to preserve the illusion that this is all mystical and perfect... or you can deal with the fact that there will be tarnish and disappointments, and maybe you'll decide that friends and family are great, but not, in the end, enough. It's an individual thing - I'm a lot less tied up in my community than some of my nearest and dearest, and yet a lot more so than some others. (I'm still kind of amazed that so many people are willing to be my community, considering how sporadic my participation is.) And really, most of my nearest and dearest seem to think I'm a bit of a freak, too. I've made my peace with that.
Somewhere, though, my focus shifted. Maybe it's because I got through my head that somewhere else wouldn't make me someone else... so I'd better be who I wanted to be. Maybe it's because I've walked away from communities that I thought meant everything to me... and it was okay. Painful, but in the end even worth it. Maybe because one of the better aspects of my unplanned retirement from microsoft via spine injury was that it got really clear to me that I'd passed the "trying to keep myself fed" point long ago. No excuses, what really mattered to me? - because it sure as hell wasn't earning professional gold stars or money for its own sake. Maybe it's partly that I've long been in love with this world. Really, overwhelmingly heartstoppingly distracted and moved to tears in love with this world. I'm not saying it's pretty and nice. It's beautiful and terrible and I will crash against it like a wave against the rocks.
I haven't been to a con in years - longer than the last SCA even, I think, though not much longer. Like the pagan community, it's a big part of the social context, but not how I spend my time. This isn't disdain, it's a huge deficit of time, and that a lot of other things come first.
And it's all about meaning. Over the years I've heard so many complaints from people about the horrible interpersonal politics in these groups. My experience has been that one usually can avoid the politics, though there's certainly some truth to the complaint. But it does stand out in my eye that a lot of the squabbling seems to come from people for whom this is one of the major meaningful things in their lives. And you know? As far as the social interactions go, anyway, it's just not, for me. (This is in part why after I'd stopped being involved with the public pagan stuff I started running a hiking club with a mission to gently help people get out into the woods. I am a social creature, and being in the woods is a lot more important to me than ritual per se. I was trying to give something to the community.)
Meaning is, I think, incredibly personal. It is my suspicion that some amount of the interpersonal angst one sees in a great many groups is spurred on not so much by how much meaning people find in them, but because people want to find more meaning in them than they in fact do, and they get pissy about it. If you've made something the center of your life, you're putting a hell of a lot of expectations on it. (If you've made some person the center of your life... uh, best not to go there.)
I hope I haven't gotten all pragmatic, or less crazy, or normative. I hope I haven't lost my ability to dream. (Okay, not really worried there.) I'm certainly not making some kind of statement that... I dunno, science is real and spirituality is false. (One might notice I hvae not had my spirituality excised. Come to think of it, there are some things that are pretty false to me, in both science and spirituality, but that latter, at least, strikes me as personal. The former might be public if I can demonstrate them effectively enough.) I can't really what kind of metric one would use to compare some hours of martial arts every day to participating in the SCA... But I did find some things that mean a lot to me, and decide to go after them. I don't know I'll succeed. Sometimes that's pretty scary. There was a time, though, when I thought I was losing everything that mattered to me, which helped clear my head about what mattered... and y'know, I've fallen on my face before. I can do that. Living a life that is safe and successful but not that I want? Well, I can do that too (demonstrably) but I doan wanna.
What a bunch of rambling.
Does this mean that if I found a door into someplace else I'd turn around and walk back here again? No, not really. If I found myself someplace else, it would have to be real to me to. It would depend on what I found there. I don't need my life to go in just one direction. I certainly don't need it to stay like it is now. (Ack. And I like my life, but... Ack. No, change is good.) But there is so much wonder and mystery here, all around me, everywhere, more in any piece of it than I'll have a chance to explore in my whole life. I'm pretty content to take it as I find it.
So some of these thoughts started up with reading Palimpsest - which is an absolutely gorgeous book, and I'll do it no justice here, especially since that's not really what I'm writing about.
What Palimpsest, and maybe more some people's reactions to Palimpsest reminded me of is all the tropes in speculative fiction about getting away, leaving this world, and finding one's own place and one's own people. Now, it did so in ways that were delightful and original, so I almost wince from the comparison, because much more frequently these things are done badly. But it was strange for me to read this book, and to read about my friends reading the book, and to feel a little like I've stepped outside of something that used to be a common frame of reference.
Do you remember all those stories you read as a child, about the kids who go to some other world and have marvelous adventures... and in most cases, especially in the older books, how at the end they end up making a set of choices that are usually presented as mature, but are also a bit depressing, or even worse having those choices pushed on them? Magic isn't supposed to be real, or it's supposed to be ending real soon now. (Blame Tolkien.) But mostly and most often how ever much better and more fitting the world they find themselves in may be, at the end they decide to go back to their old lives. Was this some kind of publishing requirement for children's fantasy, the way that for years you could write about lesbians, but they had to come to bad ends? Darn it, if I were ever so lucky as to find my own place and my own people, I wasn't going to chuck in favor of growing up and becoming just like everyone else.
I was a child of the seventies and eighties, so I got both all the conditioning about how all the wonder and magic of childhood is something that generally gets washed or beaten out of you as you grow up and also all the hanging on the edge of an apocalypse, the end of civilization is nigh and you might want to know a bit how to survive under questionable circumstances. Why yes, I do know quite a bit about wild edible and medicinal plants, and how to build shelters from found materials, and... well, y'all know me. I like to think I would have picked up a lot of it without the whole seventies back to nature and eighties the end of the world is nigh bit, because a lot of it is just cool, but there you are.
What I noticed though, especially in some of the discussions around Palimpsest was that really, I'm pretty happy with this world. And I have been for a long time.
Does this mean I wouldn't want to visit? Heavens no. I like travelling and exploring, and how fabulous. Especially if I could have one life while I was awake and another while I was asleep - bonus! (I have such a weird relationship with sleep anyway, where I spend a lot of time courting it... but darn, it takes up so much time, and I always want more time. But especially the way I train, if I don't sleep well, everything else kind of sucks too, and quickly. But I don't have a categorical sense that I would prefer to be somewhere else.
Part of it is that I've found my place, and my people. Several times. When my mom finally let me transfer into the gifted program. When I met humilitas and
jaunthie. When I went to EEP. When I started going to cons, and joined the SCA, and started spending time in the pagan community. And darn, at the time, those were the best things ever. Yay! I can haz friends, and family.Of course, once you get your friends and family, and get past the starry eyed wonder of finding them, well, we all are people. You can put a lot of energy into trying to preserve the illusion that this is all mystical and perfect... or you can deal with the fact that there will be tarnish and disappointments, and maybe you'll decide that friends and family are great, but not, in the end, enough. It's an individual thing - I'm a lot less tied up in my community than some of my nearest and dearest, and yet a lot more so than some others. (I'm still kind of amazed that so many people are willing to be my community, considering how sporadic my participation is.) And really, most of my nearest and dearest seem to think I'm a bit of a freak, too. I've made my peace with that.
Somewhere, though, my focus shifted. Maybe it's because I got through my head that somewhere else wouldn't make me someone else... so I'd better be who I wanted to be. Maybe it's because I've walked away from communities that I thought meant everything to me... and it was okay. Painful, but in the end even worth it. Maybe because one of the better aspects of my unplanned retirement from microsoft via spine injury was that it got really clear to me that I'd passed the "trying to keep myself fed" point long ago. No excuses, what really mattered to me? - because it sure as hell wasn't earning professional gold stars or money for its own sake. Maybe it's partly that I've long been in love with this world. Really, overwhelmingly heartstoppingly distracted and moved to tears in love with this world. I'm not saying it's pretty and nice. It's beautiful and terrible and I will crash against it like a wave against the rocks.
I haven't been to a con in years - longer than the last SCA even, I think, though not much longer. Like the pagan community, it's a big part of the social context, but not how I spend my time. This isn't disdain, it's a huge deficit of time, and that a lot of other things come first.
And it's all about meaning. Over the years I've heard so many complaints from people about the horrible interpersonal politics in these groups. My experience has been that one usually can avoid the politics, though there's certainly some truth to the complaint. But it does stand out in my eye that a lot of the squabbling seems to come from people for whom this is one of the major meaningful things in their lives. And you know? As far as the social interactions go, anyway, it's just not, for me. (This is in part why after I'd stopped being involved with the public pagan stuff I started running a hiking club with a mission to gently help people get out into the woods. I am a social creature, and being in the woods is a lot more important to me than ritual per se. I was trying to give something to the community.)
Meaning is, I think, incredibly personal. It is my suspicion that some amount of the interpersonal angst one sees in a great many groups is spurred on not so much by how much meaning people find in them, but because people want to find more meaning in them than they in fact do, and they get pissy about it. If you've made something the center of your life, you're putting a hell of a lot of expectations on it. (If you've made some person the center of your life... uh, best not to go there.)
I hope I haven't gotten all pragmatic, or less crazy, or normative. I hope I haven't lost my ability to dream. (Okay, not really worried there.) I'm certainly not making some kind of statement that... I dunno, science is real and spirituality is false. (One might notice I hvae not had my spirituality excised. Come to think of it, there are some things that are pretty false to me, in both science and spirituality, but that latter, at least, strikes me as personal. The former might be public if I can demonstrate them effectively enough.) I can't really what kind of metric one would use to compare some hours of martial arts every day to participating in the SCA... But I did find some things that mean a lot to me, and decide to go after them. I don't know I'll succeed. Sometimes that's pretty scary. There was a time, though, when I thought I was losing everything that mattered to me, which helped clear my head about what mattered... and y'know, I've fallen on my face before. I can do that. Living a life that is safe and successful but not that I want? Well, I can do that too (demonstrably) but I doan wanna.
What a bunch of rambling.
Does this mean that if I found a door into someplace else I'd turn around and walk back here again? No, not really. If I found myself someplace else, it would have to be real to me to. It would depend on what I found there. I don't need my life to go in just one direction. I certainly don't need it to stay like it is now. (Ack. And I like my life, but... Ack. No, change is good.) But there is so much wonder and mystery here, all around me, everywhere, more in any piece of it than I'll have a chance to explore in my whole life. I'm pretty content to take it as I find it.
