Preparing a Future for You to Harvest

Preparing a Future for You to Harvest

While some grandmothers choose to rock and knit, others stand boldly on the broad shoulders of ancestors who left powerful legacies and embrace them forthrightly.  Not cut from a singular cloth, millions of grandmothers, abuelas, jaddats and nanas in the 21^st century are building legacies reflective of the truths and powers in which we now stand.  And, we’re continuing the practice of turning the world on the axis of affirmation and empowerment, driven by visions of the kind of safer and saner world we really want to leave our grandchildren.   

It’s not about attempting to leave perfection.  For so many of us this has been about preparing a future for our grandchildren to harvest in a world that reflected how much we cherish Mother Earth and their future.  The sounds of laughter, smells of things freshly harvested from the garden; the time and support to grow you into and through the completion of your childhood; and just more of the tastes of the sweetness of life are what millions of us work tirelessly for you to inherit:  Not bombs and bullets whizzing through urban enclaves or  thousand-year old villages; genetically modified food depleted of the nutrients needed to grow your minds and bodies strongly; nor turning multiple generations into the streets to flail and fend for themselves.

 There are those who spend time creating halcyon memories with our grandchildren taking them on vacation, teaching them to read (while they teach us to program our phones and computers) and providing them with fantasy driven, overly corporatized, birthday parties.  There are millions of others, well into their 70s, who continue to work and scrape together funds for college tuitions, housing and support for the most horrific and unimaginable medical crisis.  Then there are those who were attacked by dogs, beaten, tear gassed and jailed while peacefully seeking to secure rights for you and your future.

 Almost to a grandmother, we each have a vision or ideas for a world we took to the streets, founded companies and advocated to local, national and global legislative bodies on behalf of your futures.  We come to this table, complete with our well seasoned and sometimes wisdom-filled minds and spirits, as activists, teachers, healers, artists, writers and presidents of countries.  Some of us even rock the mic as poets, singers and comediennes.   From war torn villages in Somalia where we rock you through the sounds of gunfire to fields in Sri Lanka where we pick tea to multi-generational family compounds in Suriname (where ancestral stories about the Djukas and Amerindians are shared) and classrooms in Kenya, the United States and Cuba from which we teach physics, literatures of the Diaspora, languages on the verge of extinction or labs where we conduct cutting-edge research, we remain mindful of the perils plaguing the world.

We continue to work earnestly to share the awe, wonders and treasures of living the human experience, for where ever we stand (or sit) in the world, billions of grandmothers carry their grandchildren purposefully in their hearts and spirits each step of the day.

Daphne Muse is a writer, social commentator and poet.  Her commentaries have aired on NPR and been published at Portside, the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle.  You can read her commentaries at www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com or email her at msmusewriter@gmail.com.

It’s way past time to cancel the 24/7 Tits, Abs, Ass and Dick Show

I love the human body, what it can do and how it represents in so many physical variations. I’m also enamored with its diversity, from black locks and curls that coil, spring and bounce, to people with midnight skin and blue eyes, and raging redheads with aquiline noses.  Museums, art galleries and iconography from across centuries of cultures are filled with representations and celebrations of the human form.  But from women with boobs (nipples erect) spilling out of their dresses, to butt crack glaring back at you in restaurants and “projectile overfunction” in public arenas, I’m just outraged by the inescapable “24/7 Tits, Abs, Ass and Dick Show (TAADS).” 

The beauty and eroticism of our bodies continue to be defiled and dehumanized through deeply disturbing pornography, subversive advertising, raw hoochie momma on steroids and bling-a-rama, hyper-sexploitation.  As the ubiquitous sex tapes, “who hit it first” songs rampage up the charts, no holds barred discussions in the workplace and graphic Facebook boastings of what should be private moments soar, it’s all too blatantly raw.  Oh, and please spare us from that senior citizen booty call sex tape about to drop courtesy of Viagra.  May it incinerate from the volition of some mysterious, unknown force.

The art of seduction and romance also have become sensationalized by reality TV.  If your body isn’t comparable to the tits, abs, ass and dicks flaunted across film and social media, then the message is you don’t qualify and won’t get what they got.  There are indeed those who have had exemplary erotic encounters with sexual intimacy and pleasure that have nothing to do with any of this and everything to do with sharing breath-taking moments, the divinity of love-making, and creating a life-line of passion-driven pleasure me, treasure me memories.

Treasured and pleasured, I love the joys of mutually appreciated and consensual sex, engaging in interestingly flirtatious moments while looking back at a man with a serious case of the “fines,” or seeing a woman who exudes sensuality navigating the whirlwind of it without being coarse, crass or base.  The allure of discretion can be so magical, sensual and seductive.  But the word discretion has all but disappeared from our lexicon.  With the imagination constantly being desensitized and sexuality corporatized, it seems ever more challenging for people to experience the awe and magic of sexual pleasure and intimacy.  

But one really never knows when someone deemed by others as a physically “ordinary” person carries the experience of a sexually extraordinary being, or when a partner likes exploring a fleshy body over bone on bone sex. Throughout the twenty-seven year friendship and marriage I had with a wonderful man who was a high functioning quadriplegic, I got to wear the passion and intimacy of our relationship on a face that still smiles with the sensuality of the awe and wonder we shared.  The most intimate details were shared in the pages of my journals or sometimes giggled with a trusted friend who also honored and practiced discretion.

There is tremendous irony in the fact that sex education programs across the country have been eviscerated, relegating them to the evangelical cauldrons of oblivion.  Despite sexual crassness continuing to be advertised, blasted and blinged everywhere, it really is possible to live sexually exciting lives without succumbing to the 24/7 tits, dicks and abs, ass shows booming and blazing like rockets into the stratosphere or crotches splayed across screens into vaginal spills. Dialing back the 24/7 TDAA shows and magically navigating the erotic paths to pleasure and intimacy can bring surprising revelations about what’s housed within the fountain that pours into sensual valleys from within your own soul.

Daphne Muse is a writer, poet and social commentator.  You can read her blogs at www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com.

©Daphne Muse, Oakland, California 2013

Preparing a Future for You to Harvest

Preparing a Future for You to Harvest

While some grandmothers choose to rock and knit, others stand boldly on the broad shoulders of ancestors who left powerful legacies and embrace them forthrightly.  Not cut from a singular cloth, millions of grandmothers, abuelas, jaddat and nanas in the 21^st century are building legacies reflective of the truths and powers in which we now stand.  And, we’re continuing the practice of turning the world on the axis of affirmation and empowerment, driven by visions of the kind of a safer and saner world we really want to leave our grandchildren.   

It’s not about attempting to leave perfection.  For so many of us this has been about preparing a future for our grandchildren to harvest in a world that reflected how much we cherish Mother Earth and their future.  The sounds of laughter, smells of things freshly harvested from the garden; the time and support to grow you into and through the completion of your childhood; and just more of the tastes of the sweetness of life are what millions of us work tirelessly for you to inherit:  Not bombs and bullets whizzing through urban enclaves or  thousand-year old villages; genetically modified food depleted of the nutrients needed to grow your minds and bodies strongly; nor turning multiple generations into the streets to flail and fend for themselves.

 There are those who spend time creating halcyon memories with our grandchildren taking them on vacation, teaching them to read (while they teach us to program our phones and computers) and providing them with fantasy driven, overly corporatized, birthday parties.  There are millions of others, well into their 70s, who continue to work and scrape together funds for college tuitions, housing and support for the most horrific and unimaginable medical crisis.  Then there are those who were attacked by dogs, beaten, tear gassed and jailed while peacefully seeking to secure rights for you and your future.

 Almost to a grandmother, we each have a vision or ideas for a world we took to the streets, founded companies and advocated to local, national and global legislative bodies on behalf of your futures.  We come to this table, complete with our well seasoned and sometimes wisdom-filled minds and spirits, as activists, teachers, healers, artists, writers and presidents of countries.  Some of us even rock the mic as poets, singers and comediennes.   From war torn villages in Somalia where we rock you through the sounds of gunfire to fields in Sri Lanka where we pick tea to multi-generational family compounds in Suriname (where ancestral stories about the Djukas and Amerindians are shared) and classrooms in Kenya, the United States and Cuba from which we teach physics, literatures of the Diaspora, languages on the verge of extinction or labs where we conduct cutting-edge research, we remain mindful of the perils plaguing the world.

We continue to work earnestly to share the awe, wonders and treasures of living the human experience, for where ever we stand (or sit) in the world, billions of grandmothers carry their grandchildren purposefully in their hearts and spirits each step of the day.

Daphne Muse is a writer, social commentator and poet.  Her commentaries have aired on NPR and been published at Portside, the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle.  You can read her commentaries at www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com or email her at msmusewriter@gmail.com.