The Violet End

Author: Pamela

  • My Yin and Yang (Or, Can People Have Two Souls?)

    In my previous piece, I mused about whether one soul, or a more fluid equivalent that I called a “spiritual essence,” could experience the temporal world through more than one window, i.e. biological body, at the same time.

    At times I wonder if the inverse is true: can two souls experience the temporal realm through the same body?

    I do have a yin and a yang, and my yin is nothing like my yang.

    How is it possible that the same person can be the author of such different websites? I also author Pam’s Old-Fashioned Kitchen, where I revel in 1950s cooking and 1950s table manners. I also swoon with sentimentality about the times when married women were formally addressed as “Mrs. Husband’s-Name Smith.”

    Two Very Different Selves

    To the feminist me, the cringe! All the while, my yang waxes nostalgic when an old 1950s home economics film touted college degrees in Home Ec to “prepare her for her very important job of being Mrs. Johnson.”

    Cringe! Yet, Home Ec degrees did allow women of the 1950s to break through the mortarboard ceiling, bringing women onto college campuses — a realm that had previously been an almost exclusively male domain.

    Today, women outnumber men two to one on many college campuses. Scheme intended to domesticate women: backfired.

    The Traditionalist Self Emerges

    During springtime of 2012, I wrote the following at a newspaper blog:

    It’s nothing much; just something light, airy, a little secret and a little silly – and perhaps a voice from a long departed mom left behind in the brainstem of a rebel female thinker.

    While the feminist me who grew up in the mid-morning of the women’s movement rejoices in the successes to which she and her sisters cling tenaciously, a deeply traditional side whispers with dampness in her eyes, “don’t forget me.”

    I never did.

    In the jungle of liberty that knows no ceiling, no floor, and no walls, I find myself occasionally enchanted by a curiously wistful memory of that which we liberated women writhed and shook so furiously to divest ourselves: a simple cage, a life whose worry is limited by its own confinement, to close my eyes and know that the world rests upon someone else’s shoulders.

    There still exist small remnants of the country where women are often addressed in formal settings by our husband’s first names – a dissolution of one’s public personal identity that, indeed, this feminist could not long tolerate.

    Yet my inner Betty Crocker cannot resist being distantly allured by the world left behind by the departing penumbra of a world that I lived in but, as a child, not quite of. The men of the house earned the bread while we, a.k.a. “the ladies,” got together and worked on a quilt for a while while the hostess enjoyed the honor of serving afternoon tea, and got back home in time to bake a hamburger and corn casserole to palliate our husbands’ hard day’s work.

    Donning my apron, I’d dive in.

    Then I’d throw a baby shower for the latest of the expectants, remembering always that the soup is to be passed from the left to the right. With intermittent melancholy, I’d remember how I, Mrs. John Smith (good heavens), concealing yet not denying the wanderlust of a race Hemi in my heart, declined my turn under the shower head.

    I truly could visit that world for a week, to vacation in its prepared simplicity. But I could not stay; it’s the freedom to choose and to taste that piques my curiosity in the first place. Without that freedom I would suffer, ponder, lament, and incubate discontent; I would peer beyond the bars and initiate the women’s movement all over again.

    It’s a beautifully simple world, and I share the beauty in it that women who freely choose that life see for themselves. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the cliche goes, and it ever edifies me to strive to behold.

    But before long I could come back home – to my home – but not without packing my doffed apron, my Joy of Cooking handbook, and a boxful of the scent of the chicken liver lyonnaise dinner that I had fried for my husband of a different reality.

    I’d remember; I’d smile; and yet I’d be grateful to be back home, and to be me, once again.

    I would love to blame it on menopause, because that whirlwind of nostalgia coincided with it. But my old-fashioned yang soon took up long term residency in my soul, tempering but never seeking dominance over my feminist soul. The soul of a tradwife lives alongside the soul of a feminist in the same body, and somehow we manage to get along.

    I enjoy how it enables me to easily befriend and find common values with people who are ideologically my opposites. To see beauty through the eyes of others allows me to see more beauty. The warm smile that I give when someone extols the virtues of traditional gender roles is genuine and authentic.

    Meanwhile, the other me covers her eyes and plugs her ears.

    Seasons change

    But seasons are changing in my soul, again. The restive feminist me is back in the driver’s seat.

    The Driver’s Seat

    As I concluded in my little piece from 2012, I am back home, and me, once again.

    The elements, ingredients, conditions, and societal dissatisfaction with the direction of our civilization are coming together for a fertile environment for a new liberation movement — not just for women, but for everyone.

    The momentum is developing. Let’s get ahead of it and do this right.

  • Identical Twin, Different Generation

    I had already primed myself for uncontrollable gushes of happy tears when I learned about the 1970s lesbian hippie commune magazine Country Women.

    Reading its stories, which often doubled as its members’ daily diaries, sent me into the kind of wistful whirlwind that lingers for days after I see pictures of Woodstock — leaving me a hair-triggered mess that starts crying at the smallest reminders of the happiest times of my youth.

    When you’re pushing 70 like I am, the depth of first-hand historical experience that age gives a person endows the bearer with the ability to explain across three generations what made things the way that they are today. It also burdens the bearer with the sadness of bereavement over the beautiful things of the past that appear to have passed away.

    But nothing prepared me to meet my identical twin.

    A Looking Glass That Transcends Time

    Pictured on page 25 of Issue 7 is a member of the commune who looks exactly like me. Exactly. Right down to the unequal lengths of the long hair that drape from each side of my shell-shocked head, a distinctively individual quirk that I keep on purpose for the purpose of proclaiming to the world, “I am unique.”

    Left: My twin. Right: Me at age 68, being peacekeeper at a No Kings march.

    Look at my picture on this site. We look exactly alike. Same build. Everything.

    Her story begins, “I was working naked in the garden.” I loved to work naked in the garden. Hell, I did my entire rear landscaping nude, right down to installing the sprinkler system, and I was approximately her age when I did it.

    There she is. My identical twin. From a different generation.

    Metaphysical and Paranormal Ramifications

    While she was an adult living the most perfect existence imaginable to humankind, I was a child who dreamed and longed to live a utopian existence exactly like hers.

    Can the same person exist in two places at once, spanning different times? The field of the paranormal opens into a vast meadow of unbounded speculation and conjecture.

    Classical reincarnation postulates that an individual’s nonphysical being experiences rebirth as a new being or in a new body after biological death. But nothing prohibits reincarnation from taking place within overlapping time frames of temporal existence.

    My own view of reincarnation is less confined by the concept of discrete souls that can occupy only one body at a time. I envision reincarnation that permits a spiritual essence to experience the temporal realm through more than one window, i.e. biological body, at a time. One essence, more than one body at the same time.

    Or, perhaps, it’s just one incredible coincidence. But it’s a coincidence that breathes into me new life.

    Transformation, Again

    It is said that having goals and purpose in life is a key to living long. I hope that is true, because I now feel an impossible longing to experience everything that can make me into a broader person than I was before. “Everything” is an awful lot of lived experience to be had, and experiencing it is going to require an awful lot of time.

    I want this. I want this hippie commune experience so intensely. If I can’t experience everything that is exciting and broadening, I at least want this.

    I am feeling the longing drive of my mid-20s. Again.

  • A Lesson From 8th Grade Social Studies

    When a political movement attaches itself to a man, and erects monuments to him, that movement is always the author of the darkest chapters of human history.

  • The Transformative Power of the Counterculture

    Perhaps the Most Beautiful Ideal in Human History.

    I can’t find the video now, but YouTuber Parkrose Permaculture recently mentioned visiting a historic hippie commune and expressed how transformative the experience was.

    You bet it was. The Counterculture was perhaps the most beautiful ideal, vision, and dream ever conceived by humanity. When John Lennon’s song Imagine can bring the audience of a VFW post to tears — and it did — you get an idea of just how powerfully a truly beautiful idea can seize your soul and never let go.

    I cannot even look at photos of Woodstock without being sent into a week-long, wistful yearning to see such beauty again someday. It is that beautiful.

    I can testify firsthand, because I was radically transformed by the same wondrous vision nearly twenty years later. It caused me to face my “mid-life crisis” at 28 years of age.

    It completely revolutionized, dare I say replaced my entire value system. And I never went back.

    What lit the fuse in my soul

    Upon stumbling across the movie Atoll Life in Kiribati on PBS in my 20s, I had to record it on my Sony Betamax. And I watched it. Again, and again. I couldn’t stop dreaming of how badly I wanted that way of life.

    The simple, some would say primitive, way of life is something that I longed for even as a child: a closer-to-nature world with a more intimate community and a way of life that depended only on one’s own hands rather than requiring money as if money were a fourth basic biological need.

    And then I found the Counterculture

    Driven by the now inextinguishable yearning for a Kiribati life, a place much more attainable began catching my eye.

    I and two coworkers who lived in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley began carpooling to work in Torrance. Every now and then, we would take Topanga Canyon rather than the stressful, crawling 405 freeway.

    Each time that I passed an inconspicuous sign that read Elysium Fields, the curiosity about the nudist resort began to mount until the inevitable happened.

    My first visit

    When I finally entered and took their membership orientation, I realized that I had wandered into a full 1960s hippie counterculture environment. Even the music in the orientation video sent happy tears pouring down my cheeks.

    My devotion to Elysium was instantaneous. I was now possessed by the unending compulsion to begin changing my way of life so that I could spend as much time there as possible.

    It became me — and transformed me

    Almost immediately I went from short-tempered to calm, from intense to gentle, able to inject an air of calm into almost any situation and defuse it.

    The Ankh room. I gave Swedish and Esalen massage in that room for a decade.

    In an instant, I recognized the value of time in our lives. I realized that time is irreplaceable; the timespan of our lives is finite, and lost or wasted time is gone forever. It was then that I coined my personal motto: “You can always make more money, but you can never make more time.”

    A permanent part of me

    The world has changed. Elysium, sadly, has been gone for 25 years, and nude recreation today is a shadow of its Counterculture heyday. The political Left since 1992 has been in a race with the political Right to see who can be the most Puritanical, and today nearly every square inch of uncovered human skin has been sexualized.

    But nothing can undo the transformation of my soul and my values. Only the yearning and dissatisfaction resulting from American culture’s drift further and further from that idea has returned.

    Today my purpose in life is 1) to prevent and resist further erosion of our culture’s valuation of freedom of choice, and 2) by so doing, preserve and enhance the possibility that a renaissance of the Counterculture’s love of freedom and tension-free intimacy and self-expression can return someday.

    I have a feeling in my soul that I may see that someday arrive, in the years that I have left. Our soil is fertile.

  • From Ancient Remnants, A Revived Path

    Thoughts on Samhain for Any Time of Year

    Forgotten but not gone, we see them; unbeknownst to us, we walk past them. Unaware of their etymology, we even utter them: remnants of faded meaning and erstwhile traditions that, while nearly obscured by centuries of cultural overgrowth, still exist to be found and enjoyed once you learn how and where to look for them.

    In the fourteenth century, the word “spring” was a verb meaning “to leaf out.” Over the next hundreds of years, the season in which bushes and trees would spring would come to be known as “spring” or “springtime.”

    The remnants of early Paganism today

    Few realize that when we observe Groundhog Day, today a rather silly “holiday” that remains nonetheless on our calendars, we are observing an ancient remnant of Imbolc, the Pagan holiday tied to divination of the weather. Groundhog Day and Imbolc both fall on February 2. The May Pole and May Day, likewise, have their distant roots in Beltane, May 1 or April 30.

    Better known and much more conspicuous are the Pagan roots of Easter, or Ostara. Associated with Easter eggs and bunnies and other symbolism that has nothing to do with the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, some Christians now prefer the alternative name Resurrection Day in Christian contexts.

    Yet even Resurrection Day is still tied to the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox – a schedule set by pure Pagan tradition. Which brings us to Samhain.

    “Ancestors’ Nights” often have Pagan origins

    Is it coincidental that Dia de los Muertos and the Catholic All Saint’s Day fall so close to Samhain? These, too, are ancient remnants of Pagan spirituality that continue to brightly color our culture.

    Wiccans sometimes call Samhain Ancestor’s Night, because in the most literal traditional sense, the veil that separates this world from the next is most thin, making Samhain the easiest time to contact the spirits of departed loved ones. For those who reify their Pagan symbolism a little less than this, Samhain is a traditional time of remembrance.

    It is also considered the beginning of the new year by many, marking the end of the harvest and a time of planning for the winter and for new beginnings come next spring.

    This aspect of Samhain can be put to good use by anyone. People who are not spiritually inclined, or choose not to adopt the beliefs and symbolism of Witchcraft, can still, if they choose, use Samhain as a starting point to renew or reinvent themselves.

    Whether it’s these examples, or Halloween, or Yule (Christmas), so many modern traditional observations and celebrations still have not wandered far from the faded Pagan holidays to which they moored.

    From rediscovered remnants to a shared beauty

    This is not, however, meant to imply that “we Pagans were here first, so it belongs to us.”

    No, the Pagan roots of these traditions, and many others, belong to the Earth, which in turn exists and turns and springs equally for each of us – or ultimately to the glory of the Creator of the universe if you subscribe to a classical monotheistic faith.

    We Pagans, of course, associate with the Earth and Her cycles a particular form of spirituality – a spirituality that comes intuitively to us which we in turn use to supply meaning to the cycles of the Earth, the turning of the Wheel of the Year.

    It is these old, forgotten but not lost, symbols, markers and signposts that modern Pagans seek to restore for ourselves their former prominence and reverence.

    But we don’t own them; they shape our lives.

    One thing is for certain, though; the Christmas and Holiday season, so close to the calendar New Year, can mean new beginnings to all of us, just as it means the beginning of new rebirth to the Earth.

  • Defeating Hate 3: Live Your Freedom Exuberantly

    (Or, If It Feels Good, Do It)

    Hate and oppression depend on fear to inhibit and discourage communities from fully enjoying our liberties and living our lives to their self-fulling fullest. But we must bear in mind that being too afraid to take positive action will not eliminate the source of the fear. Allowing fear to prevent us from enjoying life only emboldens the agents of fear to oppress even more.

    In other words, there is more to be feared by allowing ourselves to be intimidated than in finding our courage in the face of evil.

    The insufficiency of advocating freedom in the abstract

    The United States has wallowed in ritualized, ceremonial proclamations of allegiance to freedom and liberty for an entire century. Every Fourth of July, we celebrate “liberty.” From coast to coast, our Pledge of Allegiance promises “liberty and justice for all” — even as the reality on the street is moving further and further away from these ideals.

    If repetitious proclamations of “liberty” actually made one damn bit of difference, our nation would not be on the verge of the total loss of its freedom and liberty at this very moment.

    Freedom must be practiced to be meaningful

    Freedoms tend to fade out of existence when they are never used. When a person, group, or society never exercises their freedoms, then no emotional attachment to those freedoms ever forms. When people or a society has no emotional investment in their liberties, there is little to no motivation to fight for them or preserve them.

    Gorgeous guy with long hair and nice muscles
    Gorgeous guy with long hair, individualistic look, and nice muscles (Creative Commons)

    Freedom benefits most when we practice it in view of others

    For freedom to really take off like wildfire, let the world see you living it! Courage is contagious, and the more people who dare to be themselves and “do their own thing” as we said during the Counterculture, the faster it will spread — and more importantly, the sooner it will be valued on a personal, emotional level.

  • Defeating Hate 2: Create and Spread Beauty

    Hate and oppression depend on fear to inhibit and deter communities away from taking positive, corrective, or constructive action. But we must bear in mind that being afraid to take positive action does not eliminate the source of the fear. Allowing ourselves to be intimidated only emboldens the agents of fear, resulting in even more fear.

    In other words, there is more to be feared by allowing ourselves to be intimidated than from finding our courage in the face of evil.

    Love can drive out hate. So can beauty.

    Have you ever noticed how hateful people try to destroy all things that are beautiful and uplifting? Hate movements would outlaw pleasant, sunny days if they could.

    So, start creating beauty. It can take the form of 1960s Flower Power art, Pride imagery, cheerful, uplifting, energizing movement music, or any other creation that lifts the spirits of those around it.

    Not creative? Then buy and gift beauty.

    One significant way that I spread beauty around my community and across the nation is to buy books for schools and classrooms here, there, and everywhere. I buy LGBTQ+ books for any teacher who requests them. I buy and gift Black History and Racial and Cultural Representation books, and I have funded LGBTQ+ Dances and Wellness Rooms for schools nationwide.

    Some of my book purchases for schools
    Racial and Cultural Representation books that I gifted to a local school

    Not only does this spread beauty in its more conventional guises, but it spreads beauty in a form that enrages hate movements the most:

    It spreads the beauty of human diversity far and wide, in a form that will have a lasting impact on the future: the eyes and minds of the next generation of adults who are today growing and learning about the diversity of the people around them in public schools everywhere.

    The beauty of human individuality can keep the garden of humanity healthy, well nourished and diversified.

    Supplies that I bought for a school's Pride club
    Supplies that I bought for a school’s Pride club

  • Defeating Hate 1: Proudly Normalize the Good

    Hate and oppression depend on fear to inhibit and deter communities away from taking positive, corrective, or constructive action. But we must bear in mind that shying away from positive action does not eliminate the source of the fear. Allowing ourselves to be intimidated only emboldens the agents of fear. Surrendering to fear will beget more fear.

    In other words, there is more to be feared by allowing ourselves to be intimidated than from finding our courage in the face of evil. The antidote is normalization of the good.

    Keep doing what the haters hate

    And do it proudly and openly. Remember that the vast majority of people in your community have not changed. Acceptance and tolerance has not disappeared from our society. The only thing that changed is that hate and intolerance has become emboldened and openly expressed.

    If you’re LGBTQ+ like I am, flaunt your Pride merch. Regularly refer to “pronouns” as they apply to gender identity. If your social media account allows you to set your gender pronouns and display them publicly on your account profile, do so.

    Students playing the Rainbow Quest board game
    Students playing the Rainbow Quest board game

    And on social media, never hesitate to call out cruelty, violations of Constitutional rights or due process, just as you did before. Taking a stand for basic right and wrong doesn’t make you a leftist, not that there’s anything wrong with being a leftist.

    Calling out that kind of gross wrongdoing doesn’t make you a leftist. It simply makes you normal.

    And it’s the normal among us who need to be heard, in all of our majority’s numbers … once again.

  • Feminism and the Fountain of Youth

    Born in the late 1950s, I came of age in the mid-morning of the women’s movement. As a living, breathing, puzzling teenage conglomeration of old fashioned values, geekiness, and a passionate embrace of sexual liberation, I was alive to witness feminism’s rise to ascendancy during the assertively freedom-seeking energy of the 1970s.

    But one source of so many of my life regrets is my predilection for embracing a movement a decade or more after it had peaked. You see, I can also be reactionary; I have sometimes come to embrace movements only after years of balking at them, and feminism was one of them.

    My contradictory youth

    In the 1980s, while I eagerly embraced ’60s Counterculture sexual liberation and the expansion of women’s rights, I shortsightedly found the feminist movement‘s emphasis on abortion off-putting. Empathy being a strong, innate part of my being, I was driven to want to protect babies, both unborn and born. For several years, I was anti-abortion.

    You see, I was politically very clueless in my youth. I paid no attention to politics. Little did I know that I was about the only person who based her anti-abortion views on actual empathy for babies and not on misogynist religious dictates.

    I was a feminist at heart, but one who questioned some of the approaches of the movement. If that makes sense, right?

    Called to active duty for women’s rights

    Fast forward to today. After decades of American society believing that women’s rights were a done deal, never to be undone again, along came the 45th presidency, and two Supreme Court appointments later, the Constitutional protections that my generation (and Generation X) had counted on were suddenly dead and gone. Almost all of our basic rights now lay unprotected against malicious, malevolent legislative attack.

    Curled up in my bed with the current issue of Ms. magazine on my stalwartly pro-choice lap and a three year prepaid membership in the National Organization for Women under my garter, for perhaps the first time in my life I am entering a critical, relevant sociopolitical movement in its reinvigorated beginning rather than hitching my devotion to it after it had already run out of momentum.

    And it makes me feel young again. But this time, my new youth is powered by the wisdom of age.

  • Creeping Puritanism Paved the Way for Regression

    Those of us who came of age during the height of the Sexual Revolution, otherwise known as the Best Times in American History, Like Evah, looked upon the 1950s with disdain. The 1950s were scorned as puritanical, uptight, and repressed. Breastfeeding was frowned upon, open breastfeeding was unthinkable, and we spoke of menstrual periods in coded language like “a visit from Grandma.”

    The Sexual Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s rebelled against that with vigor, and rebel, did we ever. Pushing against sexual repression together with the rising feminist movement, we propelled the United States into a realm of liberty and free personal expression that it had never seen before.

    And then came the 1990s.

    What Happened?

    Concession by tiny concession, Democrats in legislative chambers began surrendering that newfound love of sexual and expressive liberty in a misguided effort to placate a nascent social conservative movement. In a shocking betrayal of the Sexual Revolution, President Bill Clinton fired the incomparable Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for merely stating a simple and obvious fact about masturbation. And American culture began to body-shame men who merely showed the amount of skin that the 1950s considered normal for males.

    Lloyd Bridges in Sea Hunt

    By the year 2000, any male who dared show as much skin as Lloyd Bridges in the 1960s TV series Sea Hunt suffered brutal ridicule and shaming that was heretofore never dreamed possible.

    The Fifties, only Worse

    But today, nearly all men wear long pants in the pool or at the beach, euphemistically called “board shorts,” and many wear shirts in the water as well. Any man wearing Lloyd Bridges’ trunks is safely assumed to be visiting from overseas. What in the hell happened to the body acceptance of the 1970s?

    Today, American culture has become so Puritanical that even the 1950s appear liberated in comparison. The only demographic today that seems to be keeping body acceptance alive is … wait for it … we in the Pride community.

    Liberty is like muscle; neglect it, take it for granted, and liberty will atrophy and fall into disuse. Over the course of a few decades liberty will not be valued anymore. Liberty becomes casually disposable.

    And that’s where we’re at.