Unsex me here

I am fascinated by this article which I read the other morning. From reading it I learned that it is extremely common in Afghanistan for parents to dress their little girls as boys. They do this for any number of reasons - to increase social status, to have another family member who can work, to have help running errands. It is extremely interesting, educational, and comes with pictures! Everybody should read it.

In Afghanistan it is shameful and neighbors pity you if you have only daughters. It is also thought that women can control what gender their baby is going to be - thus putting the mothers in danger of abuse after giving birth to girls. It seems also that the women who have a history of dressing as boys in their youth are the women who are able to make large career steps. For instance, a female member of Parliament dressed as a boy until it was time for her to marry. She and her husband had their third daughter do the same. They asked her, "Do you want to bicycle and swim and do all the things boys do? Do you want to be like Daddy?" The little girl did not hesitate to say "Yes!"

I feel like I should be outright disgusted and outraged by the cross-dressing phenomen which seems to have swept Afghanistan, but I find it amazing. The origin of the tradition makes complete sense to me, but it is so far outside my world experience that I would never even think of it happening. My impression of women cross-dressing out of desperation is that it happens in fictional stories which deal with how "backwards" things were a long time ago. Think Mulan or the Shakespearean heroines Viola in The Twelfth Night or Rosalind in As You Like It. It would never occur to me that a woman today would have to dress as a man to acheive anything...gender is not something I consider when I contemplate my own successes or failures.

"Gratitude is the memory of the heart"

I love reading the news and knowing what is going on in the big wide world, but a lot of the time I find myself being very grateful that I'm me and not the people in whatever article I'm reading (however condescending that may sound). I'm not sure how to reconcile the joy of the world with all of the terrible tragedy that befalls some of us. There are so many victims of hatred: those abused by church figures, war victims, citizens wrongly imprisoned. Yogic philosophy would remind me that the light cannot exist without the darkness and that truly it is all one in the same anyway, but my undeveloped mind can't quite wrap itself around that just yet.

Today I find myself being extremely grateful for several things. Namely:

-Having had a happy childhood free of abuse, knowledge of war, hunger, and lonliness
-Having never been accused of a crime I did not commit (on a large or small scale)
-Having a life which allows me to be educated, joyous, and (relatively) calm
-Having a healthy body

Because their words had forked no lightning...

Dear Blog,

I must apologize for having neglected you the past couple weeks. Sometimes my thoughts get all jumbled up together and I have a hard time paying attention to any of them long enough to make sense of them. I then go into "survival mode" and just try and get through the operations of each day the best I can, without any energy or will to decompress at the end of it all.

Lyall is gone, it's always hard when he goes and it always kind of zaps a little energy from my soul and takes a bit of time to recover. Getting over that little bit of heartbreak kept me from you as well dear blog.

My mind has been blown by a lot of new philosophy lately, and its still marinating for the time being. A lot of it has to do with acceptance, judgment, and freedom.

I have recently begun babysitting one of my favorite human beings, Lucy Frances DesRochers (who at the tiny age of 2 already has her own blog chronicling her adventures and her artwork). She is a fantastic and unique child, but she has the very common childhood habit of abhorring the idea of taking a nap. The poor child screamed like someone was murdering her for 3 minutes before falling asleep the other day. I couldn't help but think, "If someone were begging me to go to sleep, I would have absolutely NO problem with it." And then I thought about it and realized, though the wailing is rather traumatizing to listen to, there is something so wonderful about the railing against missing a single second of consciousness, the need to rage rage against the dying of the light.

And what a powerful message that is. I know the poem by Dylan Thomas refers to death, but if we view every moment of life as its own being, the meaning of light changes. With every moment of consciousness we have the ability to sink into darkness, to allow our light to dwindle or extinguish. Do we actually get more tired with age, or do we just accept darkness more readily?

Choose light, choose life, choose consciousness. It's so simple, yet so hard to actually achieve. I guess the point is that we try though, right?

At any rate, Blog, I promise to not neglect you anymore. Seems like in the next few months I will have lots to think about and write about and I think you're worth sharing it with.

Yours,
April