Modesty Is For Suckers

*Don’t be naughty! Cheeky monkey.

This is supposed to be Virginia Beach Dollbaby Week, seven days of ocean music and cake, laughter and writing. There is no beach this year, no beach house, no hugs, but we’ve not let that keep us completely apart. Like most of the world, we’re making due with Zoom. Cyber Dollbaby Week isn’t the same, but it’s enough.

Tuesday night was Medicine Card night. My card was Beaver.

The gist of it was, stay the course. Finish the project. Bring the dream to fruition. This, of course, I attributed to Death and the Mason Jar. But…

I’m working diligently. Every day. 10:00-3:00. It’s taking me longer than past manuscripts, but it’s such a conglomeration of all my skills, all my experiences, all my past writing, that it’s taking more out of me, and more out of my brain. Yet Beaver spoke to that part of me feeling like it’s taking way too long, fearing doors closing before this story gets a chance to walk through. But…

I look for connections. Everywhere. I usually notice when they come up, these coincidences that don’t feel like coincidences. As it happens, last week, Frank and I took a drive up Route 7, past the old house on the river, up and up, all the way to Massachusetts. I was amazed by the number of beaver dams I saw along the way. Granted, in the still-wintry landscape, they stood out more, but I noticed them. I pointed them out to Frank, who hadn’t.

Then this week, before Medicine Card night, a sister Dollbaby put up a hilarious video of a woman reading, Barbara’s Beaver Needs a Barber.** And then, a couple of hours later, I pulled Beaver out of all 48 cards in that deck.

I could have let it go there, as an odd but whatever experience. That’s not me. If there’s a connection, what purpose is there in not thinking it through, right? I take Beaver’s point about staying the course, finishing the project, but that was too simple to leave at that. So I did a little more digging, and found a few more messages from Beaver:

• Seek alternatives to challenges in life.
•  Refuse to be cornered, trapped, or caught off guard.
•  Work together. A team effort. Appreciate that the coming together of minds creates a unification that is far more effective than individual efforts.
•  Family
•  Strengthen the foundation on which you stand, or build a new one. To continue on old foundations could mean opportunities missed.
• Beaver is a symbol of never giving up, even going to far as to change its environment to suit its needs, the needs of its family.

Not everything is about my writing, or Chris, even if those are the two places my brain automatically go. While I will finish my project and be true to my dreams for it, I feel like the message here is one I’ve been mulling over since the world changed.

We are in strange times, and it didn’t begin with the pandemic. It won’t end with it either. As Semisonic sang: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” When 2020 rolled in, I had the overwhelming feeling that this was going to be a big year. One of profound changes. Then wildfires blazed in Australia, Impeachment proceedings began, a Democratic lineup more diverse than any we had ever seen before (even if it did boil down to two, older white men, and then one) came about.

And COVID19.

The pandemic has changed the whole world in a very universal way. It’s not something happening to someone else, or somewhere far off in the world. It’s our every day. It’s scary and frustrating. We miss our families, our social lives, our freedom. It’s worse for some than for others, but that’s nothing new. Despite all the ineptitude, the selfish deciding there is an expendable category of humanity, the waste of resources and hoarding and fear, I can’t help feeling this tremendous sense of hope.

Humanity may have screeched to a standstill, but the world hasn’t. She spins. She grows. She fights. And maybe this is what Beaver was trying to get me to see, to act upon. To seek alternatives, strengthen foundations or build new ones. Not just me, but humanity at large. Nature is warning us to knock it the hell off. We need to change this current environment to suit ALL our needs, her included. Every animal, plant, bacteria is connected in ways most never even consider. We are family. Every one of us.  Our planet included.

We can make this change happen, now. We’ve proven we can make the adjustments, see through this lens. We can adapt. Slow down. Do without. There are those rallying to keep everything “normal,” to keep others down, to diminish and dismiss anything not in their ken, but they’re nothing new. They’ve been rallying since the dawn of humanity, through every culture, every era. There have been times those rallying were able to do horrible wrong. Let this not be one of those times. Let it be, finally, the time we come together, really together. Compromise and compassion. Creation and assistance. We must respect and support one another in every way we can. Refuse hate and greed in all its forms, whether it be politically, socially, or environmentally.

We are the many. The loving, the compassionate, the respectful, the giving. I truly believe that. I’ve seen it, over and over, even from those who don’t believe the way I do, in the things I believe in. The fools fighting hardest against reason are loud, but I don’t believe they are the majority. They’re puffer fish, peacocks, cobras spreading their hoods to make us think so. It has worked often enough to make us believe in their power over our own. It’s time we stopped letting that trick work.

So, yeah…I got more from Beaver than, “Finish the damn book.”

Your mileage may vary.

**While this one is hilarious, there is at least one other in the series that crosses the line into bigotry, and I can’t in any conscious recommend them because of that.

When I was a kid, a girl was either pretty but stupid, or smart but not-so-attractive. While there is absolutely no truth in that, it was believed by the masses and thus, “true.” I was undeniably pretty; so, by such standards, undeniably stupid. I didn’t feel stupid. Not all at once. But the truth of the masses, perpetuated by the practices of elementary and middle school*, wore me down. By high school, I was a bonafide ditz. Or so I thought.

*Rarely called on in class or praised for right answers, encouraged to take classes like steno and typing rather than science or math. Etc. Those of you in my age-range will know the drill.

It took a huge amount of work to get past all the crap ingrained in me from the day I was born–and this is not a dig against my parents, but society at large. Women of a certain age and older, maybe a little younger, will understand. Some will never get away from the whole “girls aren’t as smart as boys” thing, and all the other stuff girls were or weren’t. I worked hard, and I did it, but it left scars. One of them is being a huge skeptic.

There. I said it. I’m a skeptic. I realize I present as the sort of whimsical being who believes in fairies and ghosts and magic and all kinds of psychic/superhero powers.

I don’t.

But I do.

Because I am a whimsical being. There is magic/ghosts in everything I write. Tooth fairies lived in my rose garden. All the neighborhood kids knew that. We left bread and butter out for the fae folk at key points in the year, read the story of Persephone, Demeter and Hades every autumnal equinox, decorated the trees for the animals at the winter solstice. The kids were taught to never step inside a fairy ring. I made herbal “potions” everyone swore by, and spoke charms while I crafted them. The kids and I made dream pillows every autumn (something I still do, though more sporadically, with my grandkids.)

But I also knew it was the crows eating the bread and butter (the crows in the neighborhood loved me. It’s true! I fed them daily, and ours was the ONLY garbage can on the block that never got torn apart.) I don’t believe in Gods, or Goddesses. I do believe there are some plusses to herbal healing, but the spoken charms were fun wishes akin to those made on birthday candles. And the tooth fairies? Well, I confess now to all those children who left notes for their fairies in my rose garden, I was the one answering them; tooth fairies did not, in fact, live in my garden.

But I don’t NOT believe in any of it, either. Because…who knows?

Round and round she goes. The skeptic comes from never-ever-ever again wanting to feel or appear stupid. I spent too many years negating my own talents, thoughts, and aspirations. Skeptic has a place in my brainspace, because there’s believing in everything with blind faith and utter devotion, and there’s, “Now wait just a minute there, Janet.”

There is a whole lot about our world, our universe we just don’t know; modesty may be for suckers, but no one can ever accuse me of hubris. I discount nothing, not even fairies. I just need proof before I’ll truly believe they’re real. I know where my skeptic was born, and as much as I understand she’s yet another aspect of the scarring done to my little psyche, (and my not-so-little one) her place is to be respected.

I can be whimsically skeptical, or skeptically whimsical. I can take part in a cleansing, burning ritual on the beach and feel the beauty, the bonding without the need of specific oils and herbs. I can watch my words go up in smoke, and know it’s speaking them aloud that eased the burden, not burning them.  I love to read cards (I have several decks) because of how it makes me think, it creates connections I might not otherwise have noticed. I enjoy listening to a psychic tell me all about auras and chakras and speaking to the dead while picking out the holes in her reasoning. I can dream of my son and feel it was more like visit; feel it, but not know it, because what happens after we die is a mystery no one, not even those who’ve died and come back, knows for sure. And I’m okay with that. I like how those dream visits sit in my heart, in my brain. That’s enough. I like imagining it’s fairies eating the bread and butter, even if I know it’s the crows. I like paying attention. To everything.

What I believe or don’t believe doesn’t matter even slightly where the actual truth is concerned. I believed I was stupid. Society saw my pretty and believed the same. But you know what? My mom saved my report cards, and she gave them to me a few years ago. I was mostly an A/B student all through high school. I spoke four languages. It was confidence I lacked, not intelligence. Though, I do admit math was never my strong suit; I was also never encouraged to it, so…yeah. I get a pass.

There you have it. I’m a skeptic who writes about ghosts but doesn’t necessarily believe in an afterlife. Now, pardon me while I go write my story about how Death collects souls in a mason jar. In my pajamas. Where’d I put that tiara? I guess the fairies must have run off with it. They do that, sometimes.

A fairy ring