Ear to the Ground

Okay, some serious theological musings now, without pop culture at all. Next in the Pagan Values Month blogging.

Value systems evolve in environments.

This is both more and less complicated than modern ecopaganism (the ancients, as I have noted many times, really stank at environmentalism); rather than a straightforward concern about preserving the health of systems with a modern understanding of how they work, those values are derived from those systems, grow up as a part of them.

I am going to paint a landscape for you now.

Start with the river, a pulsing, throbbing artery that cuts through the land. Everything here focuses around the river, not just in the way that its banks are bathed in seasonally refreshed fertile land, but the way it divides the world into halves: east and west, upstream and downstream. Imagine it clogged with boats, little reed things most of them, with the occasional hefty barge made mostly from imported wood. The current flows north; the wind blows south; the great highway of the river is made to connect the place its feet are sunk in cataracts with its mouth. It is full of fish and fowl, yes, and also dangerous animals, whether predator or simply huge by human scale. The banks are covered with flowers and useful plants. The river is a living, essential entity; its god is painted in blues and greens, with pendulous fertile breasts and a great well-fed belly, and His crown is made of reeds like those that the people pluck from His banks.

Expand out, now, from this view of the river, and look at the land, its stark divisions. The fertile strip runs along the fat blue god's sides, covered in fields, fruit trees, gardens, sliced through with canals, all feeding grain and flax and vegetables. The range of floral scents is amazing; travellers from foreign lands come here in search of perfumes. And beyond that rich wealth of fertility, there is the stark desert, punctuated with monuments and tombs and graves, reaching to the horizon under the cloudless sky. Out here there is wealth, for those who brave the starkness, of a different kind: wealth of metal and gemstone and quarried rock. The two lands, it is called, the red land of the hostile and protective desert; the black land of rich life.

Sky and earth are similarly starkly divided, for the horizon is painfully sharp in the desert, and for all the rich wet central heart around the river, this is a desert land. Day and night are sharp and clear.

Let time pass. Watch the red land swell and grow and swallow up the fields in its time, the river dwindle. Watch the river swell again, in a great surge that devours the encroaching desert, bringing with it not just the new year's rich earth but malaria and other plague, a dual-edged sword of life and death. Watch the river secede, now, and the people clear their fields and once again plant flax, wheat, barley, cabbages, onions.

This is the land of the Nile, in ancient days.

What are the values of this land?

Look at it, see how it is divided into pairs: east and west, north and south, riverland and desert, earth and sky, fertility and starkness, life and death, all in the same packages. See how these pairs dance with each other, sometimes one ascendant, sometimes the other, all in intense, dynamic balance. This is not a land that lends itself to easy absolutes, not in a place where the river's rising brings disease that may kill your children or might swallow the foundation of your house and wash it away, nor a place where the terrifying and dangerous desert both holds wealth and forms a barrier that foreign raiders so rarely dare to cross. It is a place where twinned forces, equal and opposite, dance with each other in perfect balance, and the greatest value is that balance. All cosmic energies have ambivalent natures, even the ones that seem most friendly, and are dangerous out of their proper place.

It is a precarious land, balanced entirely on the grace of that androgynous reed-crowned god, and yet its wealth is amazing. In a good year, and most years are good, it can produce more food than it needs to feed itself, even while supporting the presence of many craftsmen, priests, scholars, artisans. That precariousness is aligned so perfectly, though, that it reveals an obvious divine order; why else would the wind blow so consistently southward, letting travellers reach the inner cities of Egypt by raising sails, and return to the Great Green simply by letting the current carry them? And thus it is apparent that so long as that divine order is preserved, maintained, encouraged, there will be wealth almost beyond imagining, and people will lead happy lives. The price for falling out of balance is harsh and generally immediate; the bounty of right action is equally dramatic.

And so this is what their land taught that set of ancients: that the world was made of synergistically opposing forces, in the center of which is the perfect balance of utter abundance. That even the most benevolent power might have a bitter edge, and even the most dangerous have worthy and valuable secrets. That preserving the order laid forth in these monumental terms was a delicate line to walk, and that falling from order was ruinous. That all these powers were necessary, a part of the intricate design that made for the land of Egypt, Gift of the Nile.

And thus we find, when we dig further, that the concept of order, also of justice, rightness, right action, truth, is represented as a feather: a delicate thing, light and balanced. And we find that in the end, people's hearts are laid in the scales to see if they have lived in the center of balance, held all the interconnected forces with appropriate love and appropriate fear, and thus was abundant rather than scarce.

This is what that land taught.

I do not live in that land. I live in the land where the Three Sisters teach the lesson of balance and synergy, not where those lessons are writ to the scale of giants. My bones are New England granite, and my land teaches me endurance, stability, order, ritual, and pattern in its own language. My bones are New England granite, and my heart is full of the dance of loving brothers in constant opposition.

And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.

I have no coherent response to this abomination presented by the current administration and its homophobic lackeys on the 42nd anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia, at least not one that does not require that I explore whole new realms of expletive. (This link, being from an actual lawyer, rather than AmericaBlog, may be more palatable to some; it points out that, among other things, the executive is obligated to defend extant laws if they are legally defensible, though it is not obligated to be an asshole doing it.) (Another link: Pam's House Blend. There are a lot of links around; I'm going to stop snagging them. There are difficulties with the arguments in some of them ('cousin marriage' is not the same as 'incest', for example) but that does not make the whole thing less disgusting.)

I have had a simple response, one that I intend to supplement by actual writing of a paper letter to the White House, but it is a simple and elegant enough response that I would like to suggest it to the broader world.

I went to the White House contact form and sent them this quotation, with my own supplemental commentary:

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about. --Mildred Loving

Shame on you.

On this day of all days.

I would like to suggest to all my thirty-three and a third readers who care about the administration's reprehensible defense of DOMA that they, at minimum, pop over to the White House contact form and quote Mildred Loving.

Embracing the Shadow

This was not the post I was expecting to write next for the Pagan Values Month blogging thing, but the post I will be linking to is just too beautiful to let slip away.

Both of the religions that I follow have, in places, an aesthetic of duality. There are repeated myths of the siblings or pairs, exact opposites, exact equals; their conflicts, their parallelisms, the fundamental creative tension between the self and the shadow, however one defines the self, however one defines the shadow. The thing that comes closest to expressing this in common consciousness is the yin-yang symbol: the two shapes curling around each other, each having a spot of the other at its core, the essentiality of both of them.

What does it mean to be in a world in which one's opposite is one's beloved brother, in which love and conflict build the glorious?

Hold that thought.

I will now take a turn into the ridiculous and talk about this past season of American Idol. And in the end, when this thought embraces its shadow, it will achieve the sublime.

I'm not much of a reality TV person - I'm not much of a TV person at all, let alone specific manifestations thereof - but my family wound up watching much of the end of this season of American Idol. There is a whole cultural thing tangled up around this, but our household attachment to the drama orbited around the three figures who were the final three contestants left standing. We talked about musical skill, we talked about impressions, we talked about what we liked and did not like about the voices of the performers, and we talked about the nature of the contest, the way the judges attempted to skew results to get particular performers to pass to the next week or off the show.

And we were cheered every week one Kris Allen managed to beat expectations, beat the harsh criticisms of the judges, stay on the show despite having someone we felt had an inferior voice and a far inferior attitude consistently pimped as a superior singer. Adam Lambert's progress was almost a given, so his continued victories were simply a sign that the world was functioning as it ought, but Kris Allen's progress was another story, one with actual dramatic tension, pitting him primarily against Danny Gokey, the other 'Christian contestant' and obvious judge favorite.

And the narrative in some circles was not the music, it was the package the music came in. Here's the big story: the flamboyant, theatrical gothling who was, in a phrase I saw recently, born fabulous, but whose unmistakable vocal brilliance and skills overcame whatever reticence some might have about his outrageousness; the down-to-earth Christian performer with a traditional relationship background. But which one of the latter?

In the end, it was Kris Allen.

And now I direct you to An Unapproved Road and a post titled We Get To Carry Each Other, from which I will quote (found via The Moderate Voice):

I know next to nothing about Kris Allen’s non-musical life, except that he’s married, he calls himself Christian and he’s done missionary work across the world. I heard about the exchanges among the other contestants that made reference to what is supposedly “godly” and right in relationships, but Kris’s name wasn’t part of that. I don’t know what kind of Christianity he practises, or how he envisions his God. I do know this: he declares himself Christian to the television audience – i.e. to the world; and he freely, publicly, verbally, and especially non-verbally, loves Adam Lambert like a brother.

and

In an interview the day after the finale, Adam departed from the usual breezy soundbytes required of him to emphasize what he felt was most important about the competition -- that the friendship and respect between himself and Kris might be an example for others in transcending difference, for the reward of becoming enriched by it.

Now do you see why I started out talking theology and then started babbling about American Idol?

(Go read that post, by the way. I mean it. It's gorgeous. Read at least some of the comments, too. Like this one.)

Look at the glorious nature of the duality. Look at the one young man, pianist and guitarist and singer-songwriter sort of voice, skilled musician, dedicated Christian; look at the other young man, whose coming out as gay in Rolling Stone isn't so much a revelation as an incidental footnote that he throws out on his way to 'Let me talk about my music.' Look at some of the narratives about the heartland vs. the coasts, culture and counterculture, down home vs. the clubbing scene, modest and self-effacing vs. charisma that can smack ya like a club, all the ways these two young men were supposed to be at each other's throats. One could imagine introducing them, telling each, "This is your Shadow. This is the Other. This is Not Like You."

And we are so readily taught that when there is that division between the two, that they are enemies, that there is hostility: this is the story of heaven and hell. This is not that; that is not this; they are locked in an eternal combat, jaws locked on each other's throats. This is everywhere, in politics (an us-and-them display if ever there was one, these days), in social things, all over the place, this antagonism between Self and Shadow.

But Self and Shadow are reflections off the same divide; that which is other to me is my negative space, the shape of the world that embraces. It can conflict, yes, but it can also twine and reveal the most amazing things, things like the friendship of two young musicians who recognised across that line that their exact differences made them, in the end, exactly alike.

In the tension between Self and Shadow, the world sings.

Frameworks and Fireworks

I want to start off by linking this post, which I think is overall excellent.

Unfortunately, I read all the comments, so I can't just enthuse about it. Damnit. I wanted to just point and say this is cool, go read it.


But there's an argument thread in there that wants to talk about things like "all men are potential rapists", which isn't what the post is about at all; and while that's not as bad as the more extreme form, it's still ... not a thing that is protective of me, not something that helps me come to terms with my experience as a survivor.

This isn't a warning about the universe. No; this is a scalpel sliding blame and responsibility under the flesh to make sure the scarification stays sharp. If "all men are potential rapists", then if I want to be safe from rape, perhaps I should consider not associating with any men. Need to be a good little penis policeman, after all.

Except, you know, all people are potential rapists. Gendering it creates a heirarchy of survivors, makes some victims more real than others. Rape is not just sexist. Rape is racist. Rape is transphobic. Rape is homophobic. Rape is anti-sex-worker. Rape is ablist. Rape is a thing that sprawls across all kinds of intersectional social differentials, including some I haven't mentioned here, including ones that don't have tidy words for them. (What's the ism for the socially awkward nerdy guy who was raped and expected to be grateful for it? Not a hypothetical; I know at least one.) And not all the enforcers who use rape are men.

And I can read comment threads where people talk about having their bisexuality slide closer and closer to lesbian the more they think about this, and I wind up alienated and tearful, because I know maleness doesn't cause this thing. It's a social defect that winds up in people, and while it may be overwhelmingly more common in men because of privilege and the nature of the crime, that doesn't make it not a people thing.

I read that post right after reading a post in which a friend commented that her mother keeps patting her ass whenever she bends over and giggling about the discomfort it causes. I don't know about how you conduct things back on Earth, but here on Gehenna that's a sexually-tinged assault at best, made all the more creepy and fucked up by being something a parent is inflicting on their child and deriving some sort of perverse gratification from. Tell me this isn't contributing to rape culture. I want to see you say it and keep a straight face.

And if you can say it to me -- go say it to the young autistic woman who is trying to figure out what "normal" behaviour is, who has only just realised that maybe being randomly groped might actually be beyond the pale.

And, y'know, the power - and responsibility - to say "What the hell is wrong with you?" for attempting sexual assault and rape is not something that rests solely on men. It's a people thing, because if there's a 'rape culture', it's not just guys who are stuck in it.

So with Cereta, I'm gonna call on us all to be That Guy. Because there aren't enough stories of people getting other people to can the rape-promoting bullshit, and to stop people who want to perpetuate rape culture before rapes happen.

Some Basic Historical Pagan Values From Various Places

This is the first of a set of posts that I'm going to be making for International Pagan Values Blogging Month, because I think this is important stuff to be going at, for one, and also because I've been too much of a ranty bitch here and I'd rather talk religion and theology for a while.

I'm writing this from a generic perspective before digging into things from my own traditions; these aren't going to be true for all pagan religions, or anything, but they're sort of first-order true historically (requiring back of the envelope calculations to correct). As someone with a reconstructionist sensibility who is also kind of amorphous and blurry, I find this sort of thing a useful place to start out from.

I've started a 'pagan values month' tag in case some of these don't get hooked up into the blogfest correctly or something. The ancients were great believers in backups and all.

So. A few points of general historical interest, possibly a little whimsical in presentation.

1. Our ancestors knew what they were doing. They are also, due to being our ancestors, our closest allies in the spirit world, and, being in the spirit world, probably have a better handle on all this numinous shit than we do. Keeping on their good side is smart, as they're the best allies we've got when the weird goes down.
   
   For a more modern perspective: Most reconstructionist paganisms include some level of ancestor veneration. Further, the entire concept of reconstructionism is based on a form of "our ancestors knew what they were doing", the idea that these old religions actually had some stuff sorted out and we can start working from that basis. Even non-reconstruction pagan religions often have forms of inherited lore and tradition, as well as some level of ancestor veneration. This is all, of course, rendered much more complicated by shifts in the nature of tribal identity in the West, having known specific ancestors who were real jackasses, or having people who feel like ancestral figures without any particular blood tie. People muddle through, in the end.



2. The gods don't care whether you believe in Them any more than the rocks care if you believe in them, the panther in the forest cares if you believe in it, or your cousin Sam cares for that matter. What they care about is whether or not you treat Them properly and do what They want, much like the rocks and your cousin Sam (the panther is well-aware that you're unlikely to do what it wants, especially if you have a spear on you, but remains hopeful that you won't). Your community cares, too, because they can see whether or not you do the right stuff, and the gods occasionally have a blast radius.
   
   For a more modern perspective: Most pagan religions are orthopraxic. Some are militantly orthopraxic, knee-jerk responding to a culture that puts an unbalanced amount of weight on belief by refusing to consider systematisations of thought as relevant. Even in a community that has a healthier balance, it is entirely likely that there will be a number of different beliefs within that community, much as the ancient world had people who had philosophical perspectives on the nature of the gods living alongside people who had belief in the gods as entities and various other shades of meaning. For many of the religions with a strong basis in historical cultures, there is a sense of shared community practice; while people will have their own personal practices and devotions, religion is a matter of public ritual as well. This is one of the things that is actively different for a lot of modern pagans, due to the diasporic and convert-based nature of the religions in question.



3. It is blatantly obvious that different people deal with different gods. Why, if everyone had the same gods, it'd be much harder to tell our tribe from their tribe, and that Just Wouldn't Do. (Besides, these gods are our oldest ancestors/creators/etc., and they didn't beget/make/etc. them.) And there's no point in making other people worship our gods, really, because that would be like adopting them into the family, and we don't actually like them all that much and we don't want them over here thinking like they're as good as the rest of us. Let 'em have their second-rate gods, and let 'em have them over there.
   
   For a more modern perspective: most pagans are not big fans of proselytisation. I suspect that in all honesty this has a lot more to do with feeling harassed by a dominant culture of pimped conversion than anything with historical basis; however, the closest thing we have to a conversion culture in the Western pagan world is the Romans, who tended to declare various local gods equivalent to various of their gods, say, "Do these rituals this way or we'll stomp you some more", and go away. At least in theory, pagans are not threatened by people with different gods, beliefs, and practices; in practice, well ... the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference.



4. Sometimes those foreigners from the tribe over there actually have a cool god. (They probably stole it from us back before we remember.) Well, cool gods are cool; we can worship that too. We may even come up with a story of how that god relates to our gods if we feel like it.
   
   For a more modern perspective: For all that many modern pagans rant and rail about god-borrowing and similar practices, they are ancient. Even without getting into the major things like the aforementioned Romans or Graeco-Egyptian syncretism or anything else, people nicked gods from their neighbors all the time. And with modern communication and the research of lost cultural traditions, just about everyone is everyone's neighbor these days. A historically-based practice will likely center on a particular cultural grouping of gods, yes, but a smattering of other gods is far from implausible.



5. Gods tend to live in particular areas. It's rude to not give the ones in the area one lives in proper respect when one travels.
   
   For a more modern perspective: most modern pagans no longer consider major gods to be strictly bound to particular locations. (Gods of locations are a different story, of course. They tend not to move much.) Nonetheless, They have places They are strong in, whether the homes of individual people, houses of worship, etc. Unfortunately, the value of giving care and attention to local powerful gods is not one that has really carried over into modern paganism, perhaps because it would obviously, in many cases, require being polite to Christians.



6. Gods are embodied. Not simply, the way people are, but in a complex interlacing of forms and appearances. The sun is not the sun-god, but if you can't perceive the sun-god by observing the sun, that's not a terribly effective sun-god, is it? (But at the same time, that same sun-god may be embodied in an icon, a sacred animal, and so on; learning to see the gods in all their forms is an important mental thing.
   
   For a more modern perspective: The word that gets thrown around a lot is "immanent", in opposition to "transcendent". God is in us, and in the environment, and all this. Now, the ancients kind of sucked at environmentalism in general, but their basic attitude was in many places that all kinds of things (animals, plants, and natural phenomena) might happen to be the current form of a god going about godly business, and thus worthy of respect and cautious treatment. Many also crafted icons to house gods when gods wanted to drop in in humanish ways; these were later degraded as "idols" by people who figured that a god in a body was limited.



7. Gods are not omniscient. Nor are They omnipotent. (Though They may approach these things within their particular domains of interest.) They are certainly not omnibenevolent. They have Their own agendas, and those agendas are Their primary concern. They may offer help to people if that forwards Their agendas, or if those people are perceived as useful; it's just as common for people to wind up caught between a major divine personality conflict, or just haphazardly hurt by an agenda. In short, gods are a lot like people. Just, y'know, really big ones.
   
   For a more modern perspective: the gods aren't going to fix you, make everything all better, or otherwise cuddle you through your problems. Sometimes you have to deal with shit under your own power. This is a big deal for people who are raised in a culture in which the Problem of Evil is a major underlying philosophical concern: where is an all-powerful, all-good deity when you really need one? "Jesus with tits" paganism is ahistorical, in other words, and frequently abuses the names of gods Who aren't inclined to agree. Like other people, gods aren't perfectly reliable, and They don't have infinite patience either.



8. Worship is making a deal. God doesn't do what you want? Withhold the sacrifices. This is a contract, and there are rules and principles.
   
   For a more modern perspective: honestly, a lot of modern pagans are really uncomfortable with the sorts of compulsions that the ancients would put on the gods. But one of the standard sorts of prayers we have recorded (on shards and other things) goes something like, "If you do this thing for me, I'll sacrifice this for you" or some similar service. And a lot of other things are, "If you don't return things to the way they should be, the rituals will stop." The god-impersonation intrinsic to Egyptian theurgy makes a lot of people kind of squeamish.

Ngh, that's what I got for now. I'm probably missing a few, but what the hell, if I keep digging at this until I unearth everything in my head that might fit I'll never get anywhere.

Who Does This?

My mother invited herself up for a visit.

This isn't the funny part.

The information I had was "Sometime after Memorial Day" and "My roommate may need to be near there on June 1 if she takes that internship". To which my response was, okay then, I'll try to get my brain armorplated by that time.

So last Thursday I get an email from her saying, "Don't bother calling me, I'm heading out on Saturday to visit people!" Not a personal email, a mass mail to twenty or thirty people.

... okaaaay.

Time passes.

Monday afternoon, the phone rings, and my powerful psychic skills say, "That's my mother," and so I leave it to go to voicemail. And lo! It is my mother.

She wants to come up Wednesday and stay through Friday.

This isn't the funny part.

Wednesday: birth class. Thursday: preexisting commitment with friends.

I crack up. And explain this to my [legal] husband (I need a new title for him, this brackets thing is maddening, but I'm not going to just post treating him as my only husband dammit), and he says, "Well. That's piss-poor planning on her part."

He said that a lot Monday evening.

So I called her up Monday night. She is Very Enthusiastic and all. And then I point out the schedule issues, and she says, "... oh."

"Oh", like she's suddenly shocked into a realisation that, y'know, I have a life that exists outside the fringes of her peripheral vision.

Well, she's going to go up to Maine on the weekend to see her other brother, why not visit on the way back down?

Sure, Mom. But I'm out of the house all day Tuesday.

"Oh."

So she's driving down Sunday night, here for Monday, and going away Tuesday morning.

Oh.

Who does this?

Tiller in the Seventh Month

I mentioned that I'd been affected by the Tiller assassination today to the shrink.

She said, "Yeah, I was wondering how you were reacting to that."

Just great. One of my therapist's thoughts about the news was how I was dealing with it, and on her own dime to boot.

It's obvious, of course, that it would. I'm seven months pregnant. I have anxiety issues. (Secondary effect of my depressive disorder.) My primary criterion for dealing with my pregnancy (both in terms of medical care and everything else) has been minimising stress and meddling, with a particular eye to things that I know I can degenerate into obsessive circles of increasingly frantic worry over; I know how to manage my brain when I'm off my meds, after all, I've been doing it that way for most of my life.

It is completely normal in the course of a pregnancy to have worries about the health of the baby, to have moments of 'what if', to fret about whether things are okay. The baby wants to hang out pretty much exclusively on my right side; does that mean the cord is tangled up and making my uterus into a trap? Etc. And my anxiety and I, we've got a little routine for this: I listen to the fretfulness, I acknowledge it, I point out that there's nothing we can do about it right now, I set it aside, and I go do something else.

Before Sunday.

On Sunday, as I'm sure you well know, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down in his church. A man who specialised in care and comfort for third-trimester women in tragic circumstances. Who conducted the abortions with sufficient skill and empathy to provide grieving parents with an intact body to mourn and bury. Who had followed in his father's footsteps in feeling that this care was essential for women in need (his father had had a patient die after refusing to perform an abortion, and thereafter changed his practice), who had been one of three people in the United States who did it at all. [Added:] Who was known to provide that care even to people who could not afford to pay for it.

There is often a foot wedged against my bottommost right rib, an uncomfortable pressure, sometimes accompanied by a sequence of thumps.

I think of the woman in my childbirth preparation class who has as her mantra, "If it's kicking, you know it's alive." She is pregnant after a miscarriage, after all.

After Sunday, I rock and pray that that is good enough. Kicking means alive, right?

I read, and see people talking about babies eaten up with terminal cancer, ancephaly, various other syndromes, deformities, failures to develop, and I try not to jump and startle with every kick, every vibration of the skin of my abdomen, try to stifle the exaggerated startles of my PTSD and just repeat, "If it's kicking, you know it's alive."

I have friends who have lost children to miscarriages; who learned that their desired baby was a blighted ovum and had to work through the whiplash from 'nurturing life' to 'harboring death'. One of my [legal] husband's coworkers had a baby recently, a baby who lived for two hours after birth.

I have been carrying this life for seven months. It's kicking, right?

But the fear is there, the overwhelming fear, from reading about, thinking about, the women who carried their lives for seven months, eight months, nearly nine, and then learned that no, what they had nurtured, invested in, prepared for, perhaps named, was going to die. Maybe killing them on the way too, bleeding out or rot or toxins poisoning the system or any of the other horrible malfunctions of flesh.

And people write about Tiller, write about the care he gave to these stricken families, and sometimes to do that, they have to write about why his job was necessary.

And I cradle my belly and want to howl with the terror of it.

I want to crawl into a hospital and demand tests, poking, prodding, knock me out and put a fucking closed circuit TV in my belly if you have to, let me know that it will be okay. Let me know that it's enough. Let me know that it will be all right. Even though I made all these careful, cautious, informed choices, avoiding the medicalisation of pregnancy, facing this natural process with calm and serenity and all that good stuff, I want to throw it all away and beg someone, anyone, somewhere, to give me reassurances.

Because a man who helped women face the worst when the worst had to be faced was murdered by a terrorist.

Who has certainly achieved a fine terrorist goal: one terrified woman. And with me, probably many others.

I talked about it so rationally, reasonably, with the shrink, noting in the abstract that it was setting off my anxiety, that I really ought to go to some effort to address that, remember my vitamins, all that good sane stuff.

I left her office, fractured, and my liege said that I looked completely exhausted. Yes.

And I had talked about it, which meant the walls around the roiling mass of terrified were breached, and the entire trip home I sniffled and fought back tears, trying to hold on a little longer without falling apart. Couldn't fall apart. Couldn't make a scene. Couldn't ... show ... fear.

I closed the kitchen door, a soft scrape into solitude, and when I was alone I howled like a terrified animal, howled and screamed and spat bile and let the tears roll down my cheeks. Only in solitude, because it was too much to show even my husbands.