Swam Outside in the Rain this Morning

Allergies 365 Days a Year

Safe in the City

I prefer city streets with streetlights and sidewalks to parks and wilderness. I was molested as a child in rural areas. I feel safe in the city. I want people to hear me if I scream for help.

Rape Culture, Victim Blaming, And The Facts

What is Rape Culture?

Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety.

Examples of Rape Culture

• Blaming the victim (“She asked for it!”)
• Trivializing sexual assault (“Boys will be boys!”)
• Sexually explicit jokes
• Tolerance of sexual harassment
• Inflating false rape report statistics
• Publicly scrutinizing a victim’s dress, mental state, motives, and history
• Gratuitous gendered violence in movies and television
• Defining “manhood” as dominant and sexually aggressive
• Defining “womanhood” as submissive and sexually passive
• Pressure on men to “score”
• Pressure on women to not appear “cold”
• Assuming only promiscuous women get raped
• Assuming that men don’t get raped or that only “weak” men get raped
• Refusing to take rape accusations seriously
• Teaching women to avoid getting raped

Victim Blaming

One reason people blame a victim is to distance themselves from an unpleasant occurrence and thereby confirm their own invulnerability to the risk. By labeling or accusing the victim, others can see the victim as different from themselves. People reassure themselves by thinking, "Because I am not like her, because I do not do that, this would never happen to me." We need to help people understand that this is not a helpful reaction.

Why is it Dangerous?

Victim-blaming attitudes marginalize the victim/survivor and make it harder to come forward and report the abuse. If the survivor knows that you or society blames her for the abuse, s/he will not feel safe or comfortable coming forward and talking to you.

Victim-blaming attitudes also reinforce what the abuser has been saying all along; that it is the victim’s fault this is happening. It is NOT the victim’s fault or responsibility to fix the situation; it is the abuser’s choice. By engaging in victim-blaming attitudes, society allows the abuser to perpetrate relationship abuse or sexual assault while avoiding accountability for his/her actions.

What Does Victim-Blaming Look Like?

Example of Victim-Blaming Attitude: “She must have provoked him into being abusive. They both need to change.”

Reality: This statement assumes that the victim is equally to blame for the abuse, when in reality, abuse is a conscious choice made by the abuser. Abusers have a choice in how they react to their partner’s actions. Options besides abuse include: walking away, talking in the moment, respectfully explaining why an action is frustrating, breaking up, etc. Additionally, abuse is not about individual actions that incite the abuser to hurt his partner, but rather about the abuser’s feelings of entitlement to do whatever he wants to his partner.

When friends and family remain neutral about the abuse and say that both people need to change, they are colluding with and supporting the abusive partner and making it less likely that the survivor will seek support.

How Can Men and Women Combat Rape Culture and Victim Blaming?

• Avoid using language that objectifies or degrades women
• Speak out if you hear someone else making an offensive joke or trivializing rape
• If a friend says they have been raped, take your friend seriously and be supportive
• Think critically about the media’s messages about women, men, relationships, and violence
• Be respectful of others’ physical space even in casual situations
• Let survivors know that it is not their fault
• Hold abusers accountable for their actions: do not let them make excuses like blaming the victim, alcohol, or drugs for their behavior
• Always communicate with sexual partners and do not assume consent
• Define your own manhood or womanhood. Do not let stereotypes shape your actions.
• Be an Active Bystander!

Adapted from Marshall University and Center for Relationship Abuse Awareness

Dating and Domestic Violence Facts

FACT: Regardless of their actions, no one deserves to be physically, verbally or sexually abused. In fact, putting the blame for the violence on the victim is a way to manipulate the victim and other people. Batterers will tell the victim, "You made me mad," or, "You made me jealous," or will try to shift the burden by saying, "Everyone acts like that." Most victims try to placate and please their abusive partners in order to de-escalate the violence. The batterer chooses to abuse, and bears full responsibility for the violence.

FACT: Many victims love their partners despite the abuse, blame themselves, or feel as if they have no support system or resources outside of the relationship and so they feel as if they can’t leave. Furthermore, the period immediately after leaving an abusive relationship is extremely dangerous.

FACT: Jealousy and possessiveness are signs that the person sees you as a possession. They are one of the most common early warning sign of abuse

FACT: Abuse can come in many forms, such as sexual, physical, verbal, and emotional. When a person in a relationship repeatedly scares, hurts, or puts down the other person, it is abuse. Harassment, intimidation, forced or coerced isolation from friends and family and having an independent social life, humiliation, threats of harm to you or your family or pets, threats of suicide if you leave, violating your privacy, limiting your independence and personal choices are all examples of abuse.

FACT: While the majority of victims of domestic violence are women, men may also be victims of relationship violence. Men face many of the same barriers as women that prevent them from reporting abuse, but also face a different kind of stigma since many do not believe that men can be victims of dating/domestic violence.

FACT: The majority of men and young men in our community are not violent. The use of violence is a choice. Men who use violence in their relationships choose where and when they are violent. The large majority of offenders who assault their partners control their violence with others, such as friends or work colleagues, where there is no perceived right to dominate and control.

Stating that 'All men are violent' places the blame for the violence elsewhere and prevents the perpetrator from being responsible for his violence. The majority of men and women want and can be allies to help in the fight against this kind of violence.

FACT: As many as one-third of all high school and college-age young people experience violence in an intimate or dating relationship. Physical abuse is as common among high school and college-age couples as married couples.

Sexual Assault Facts

FACT: Men, women and children of all ages, races, religions, and economic classes can be and have been victims of sexual assault. Sexual assault occurs in rural areas, small towns and larger cities. It is estimated that one in three girls and one six boys will be sexually assaulted by the age of eighteen. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, a rape or attempted rape occurs every 5 minutes in the United States.

FACT: Sexual assault is NEVER the victim’s fault. Sexual assault is a violent attack on an individual, not a spontaneous crime of sexual passion. For a victim, it is a humiliating and degrading act. No one “asks” for or deserves this type of attack.

FACT: Most sexual assaults are committed by someone the victim knows. Studies show that approximately 80%-90% of women reporting sexual assaults knew their assailant.

FACT: A sexual assault can happen anywhere and at any time. The majority of assaults occur in places ordinarily thought to be safe, such as homes, cars and offices.

FACT: Reported sexual assaults are true, with very few exceptions. According to CONNSACS, only 2% of reported rapes are false. This is the same rate of false reporting as other major crime reports.

FACT: Men can be, and are, sexually assaulted. Current statistics indicate that one in six men are sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Sexual assault of men is thought to be greatly under-reported.

FACT: Almost all sexual assaults occur between members of the same race. Interracial rape is not common, but it does occur.

FACT: Sexual assault is motivated by hostility, power and control. Sexual assaults are not motivated by sexual desire. Unlike animals, humans are capable of controlling how they choose to act on or express sexual urges.

FACT: Sexual offenders come from all educational, occupational, racial and cultural backgrounds. They are “ordinary” and “normal” individuals who sexually assault victims to assert power and control over them and inflict violence, humiliation and degradation.

FACT: Anytime someone is forced to have sex against their will, they have been sexually assaulted, regardless of whether or not they fought back or said "no". There are many reasons why a victim might not physically fight their attacker including shock, fear, threats or the size and strength of the attacker.

FACT: Survivors exhibit a spectrum of emotional responses to assault: calm, hysteria, laughter, anger, apathy, shock. Each survivor copes with the trauma of the assault in a different way.

Adapted from Connecticut Sexual Assault Crisis Services (CONNSACS)

 

Basil and Mint

The groundhog ate my herbs last year. So this year I have 2 pots of basil high up off the ground and So far the mint is perennial, thriving after a snowy winter.

I chop fresh basil and mint onto everything and instantly my meal becomes exotic. Eggs, chili, potato salad, rice and veggies, all things are better with basil and mint.

I would love to add Rosemary Oregano and Dill and Thyme but I would need to put the pots on my 2nd floor porch. 

 

a poem by Joyce Sutphen.

The Idea of Living

 

It has its attractions,

chiefly visual: all those

 

shapes and lines, hunks

of color and light (the way

 

the gold light falls across

the lawn in early summer,

 

the iridescent blue floating

on the lake at sunset),

 

and being alive seems

to be a necessity if you want

 

to sit in the sun or rub your

toes in the sand at the beach.

 

You need to be breathing

in order to eat paella and

 

drink sangria, and making love

is quite impossible without

 

a body, unless you are one

of those, given—like gold—

to spin in airy thinness forever.

__________

“The Idea of Living” by JOYCE SUTPHEN from Modern Love & Other Myths, Red Dragonfly Press, 2015.

Kalamata Olive Tapenade

I buy the gigantic jar of Kalamata Olives at OCEAN STATE JOBLOT and reuse the jar as a coffee canister. All I do is pit them and pulse them. It lasts forever in the fridge. I spread it on my homemade sourdough rye bread.

If you want to get fancy there are recipes here.

https://thegreekfoodie.com/kalamata-olive-tapenade/

Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

GRAHAM GREENE

Psychoanalysts in France, structuralists in the United States and France, conservative, liberal and left-wing thinkers in contemporary schools of linguistic philosophy agree about one thing; man became man not by the tool but by the Word. It is not walking upright and using a stick to dig for food or strike a blow that makes a human being, it is speech. And neither intelligent apes nor dolphins whispering marvels in the ocean share with us the ability to transform this direct communication into the written word, which sets up an endless chain of communication and commune between peoples and generations who will never meet.

NADINE GORDIMER

 

In Praise of the Potato

by David Williams

Potato, sojourner north, first sprung from the flanks of volcanoes, plainspoken kin   to bright chili and deadly nightshade, sleek eggplant and hairy tobacco,   we could live on you alone if we had to, and scorched-earth marauders never bothered you much.   I love you because your body’s a stem, your eyes sprout, and you’re not in the Bible,   and if we did not eat your strength, you’d drive it up, into a flower.

__________

From Traveling Mercies, Alice James Books, 1993.

 

Sunday Night in Santa Rosa

by Dana Gioia

The carnival is over. The high tents, the palaces of light, are folded flat and trucked away. A three-time loser yanks the Wheel of Fortune off the wall. Mice pick through the garbage by the popcorn stand. A drunken giant falls asleep beside the juggler, and the Dog-Faced Boy sneaks off to join the Serpent Lady for the night. Wind sweeps ticket stubs along the walk. The Dead Man loads his coffin on a truck. Off in a trailer by the parking lot the radio predicts tomorrow’s weather while a clown stares in a dressing mirror, takes out a box, and peels away his face.

__________

From Daily Horoscope, Graywolf Press, 1986, by DANA GIOIA.

 

Mom in Milwaukee

by Matt Cook

My mother doesn’t understand why we live in Milwaukee. Every time she visits, it’s always the grayest, ugliest day outside.   People who look like deformed potatoes are urinating in public; Disturbed war veterans are combing the lawns of the county park system With those metal detector things.   Motorists at stoplights next to you Are altogether unapologetic About littering Chicken McNugget dipping sauce containers Out passenger-side windows.   You’ll see a car for sale in a vacant lot— A tree growing through its engine. You’ll see the ruins of a dead snowman, or something.   Then Mother leaves town— At once the sunbeams break through the clouds, Passersby look beautiful and sophisticated. Garbage men have top hats and cigarette cases— The ranch houses have simian gargoyles. Independent rock-and-roll bands are tolerably harmonious And the Mexican food is suddenly better than New Mexico.

__________

From In the Small of My Backyard, Manic D Press, 2002, by MATT COOK.

Hard Hat

They gave out yellow hard hats at my college graduation. But I never attended knowing my family would not make the 90 minute drive so I stayed home and they mailed me my diploma. Last week on my walk I saw a gray hard hat abandoned on my neighbor Robin's stone wall. There were worker gloves tucked inside. I knew they would be thrown out. So I rescued them. I carried them home under my arm while walking my dogs. The scent of manly cologne was strong. I placed the hat in my foyer and I breathe in the cologne daily.

Fat Boy at the Beach

 For years he would send me pictures of his feet in the sand on vacation in Mexico or Martha's Vineyard

Snapshots of a cheese shop in France, Carpets in Italy, Antiques in Guatemala 

Now he sends me photos of his face 

and his dog's birthday prty 

I guess this is progress 

but I don't really believe it.

Time is running out

 he is still a little boy

 abused and abandoned 

by his evil parents. 

His jowly face obscures his jawline

His brown eyes are holding back a dam of rage. 

 I would not recognize him!

But

We had the same parents. 

Mary Oliver poem

 

Broken, Unbroken

The lonely stand in the dark corners of their hearts.

I have seen them in cities, and in my own neighborhood,

nor could I touch them with the magic that they crave

to be unbroken. Then, I myself, lonely,

said hello to good fortune. Someone

came along and lingered and little by little

became everything that makes the difference.

Oh, I wish such good luck

to everyone. How beautiful it is to be unbroken.

 

Mary Oliver

 The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began, 

though the voices around you 

kept shouting 

their bad advice— 

though the whole house 

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

 "Mend my life!" 

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop. 

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried 

with its stiff fingers 

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible. 

It was already late 

enough, and a wild night, 

and the road full of fallen 

branches and stones. 

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind, 

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice 

which you slowly 

recognized as your own,

that kept you company 

as you strode deeper and deeper 

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do—

determined to save

the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver’s Escape

 Mary Oliver’s Escape

PUBLISHED 1/31/2019 by Chivas Sandage

Mary Oliver’s Upstream. Feature image via Charlotte Olivia on the official Mary Oliver Facebook page.

“I don’t like buildings,” she said matter-of-factly to Krista Tippett in a rare 2015 interview.

As a girl, Mary Oliver often wandered alone in the woods with a copy of Whitman’s poetry in her backpack, a small notebook and a pencil. Of her habit, she said: “I think it saved my life. To this day, I don’t care for the enclosure of buildings.”

Photo: Vivian Felten

Oliver’s repetition of the word “buildings,” such a clunky noun, might seem an awkward generalization coming from this great American poet, our bestselling poet, a woman who made a life of selecting words with care and precision.

And who doesn’t like “buildings” categorically? On average, Americans spend 93 percent of their lives passing from one building to another, day after day, decade after decade. Here is a woman who, throughout her adult life, usually woke around 5 a.m. and spent entire mornings “scribbling” on hours-long walks. Is this partly because she never felt fully comfortable indoors—not even her own home?

In 2011, Oliver told Maria Shriver in an interview that her father had sexually assaulted her as a child. With Tippett, she spoke briefly of her “very bad childhood” and the “very dark and broken house” into which she was born. In her poem “Rage,” she wrote what she described as “perfect biography, unfortunately—or autobiography.”

She added: “I couldn’t handle that material except in the three or four poems that I’ve done—just couldn’t.”

The narrator speaks of a father:

stumbling through the house
to the child’s bed,
to the damp rose of her body,
leaving your bitter taste.
And forever those nights snarl
the delicate machinery of the days.
When the child’s mother smiles
you see on her cheekbones
a truth you will never confess;
and you see how the child grows–
timidly, crouching in corners.

The speaker’s reference to an unconfessed truth foreshadows a damning end: “in your dreams you have sullied and murdered, / and dreams do not lie.”

“Yeah, well, he never got any love out of me—or deserved it,” Oliver says of her father when Tippet inquires further. “But mostly what makes you angry is the loss of the years of your life, because it does leave damage. But there you are. You do what you can do.”

The image of “crouching in corners” suggests bent, elbow-like corners of rooms holding a huddled human figure. Oliver’s words echo in my head: “To this day, I don’t care for the enclosure of buildings.” The word “enclosure” means “to close in,” “to surround,” “to fence off for individual use,” “to hold in” and “confine.”

This claustrophobic take on “buildings” reminds me of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s take on doors. I recall the research psychologist saying she had a second front door. Who has a second front door installed in their home?

In her testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Blasey Ford remembered a counseling session with her husband. “In explaining why I wanted to have a second front door,” she said, “I described the assault in detail.”

I envision the narrow stairwell and the upstairs bedroom in which she recalls a young, drunk Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulting her in front of his male friend. Then only 15, she escaped and locked herself in a bathroom.

What happened within Ford in that small room? She knew she was still not safe, that she had to exit. She had to go down the stairwell on which she’d just heard Kavanaugh and his friend drunkenly bumping against the walls like ping pong balls. She heard their voices combine with others downstairs. She knew she had to pass them to get out the front door—the only front door.

Ford managed to leave that house quickly—and she has never stopped making sure she can leave, making sure there’s a second exit strategy.

Trauma affected both of these women to such a degree they changed their daily habits and/or environment to accommodate their suffering. For a young Oliver, the scene of the crime was “home,” and so the natural world became her escape. She left her father’s house the day after her high school graduation and spent the rest of her life leaving by wandering and writing about the woods, ponds, fields, estuaries, harbors and beaches into which she disappeared.

“And I escaped it, barely, with years of trouble. But I did find the entire world in looking for something,” she goes on to say. “I got saved by poetry. And I got saved by the beauty of the world.” Exiling herself from the man-made world, to whatever degree she could, Oliver’s daily ritual defined both her life and work.

As a young woman first reading Oliver, I loved the meditative, prayer-like power of her voice. But I was a city girl raised on Watergate and Vietnam, and wondered why Oliver seemed to ignore more urgent subjects like injustice, oppression and war. She wasn’t known for addressing racism, sexism or classism; nor did she focus much on environmental issues, a paradox I couldn’t figure out. The challenges of being gay and being out never seemed to make it into her poems. She often seemed to me a famous white woman living a rarified life, spending long mornings strolling and dreaming. Did she hire a housekeeper, I wondered? I tried to picture Oliver and her life partner, Mollie, vacuuming, much less scrubbing floors.

Sure, Oliver may have read Rumi every day, but what did she know of the 21st century? Her poems seemed like dispatches from paradise. I remember reading Oliver, loving Oliver, but wishing she’d walk around a major city, find a massive parking lot and write about the beauty of the world from that perspective. Write about people’s faces, graffiti, gleaming metal, litter, trees pushing up concrete—and buildings.

Mary Oliver seemed a stranger to the world I knew, but I learned to accept all she offered instead of asking her to speak a language foreign to her. I entered her poems and took what I could get. And they never stopped giving.

I also learned that before Oliver became one of America’s bestselling poets, she’d chosen a minimal life so that writing could be her day job. “Best selling” and “poet” are not words that know each other well. They are not usually found next to each other, and the first two rarely modify the latter. Remarkably, Oliver’s tendency to avoid the pursuit of money and objects had brought her unsought, unlikely commercial success. But along the way, on her long walks, she often gathered clams, mussels, mushrooms and berries. She searched the dump—an image incongruent with my ignorant assumptions. As a girl, she’d made a list of all the things she was prepared to never have if she became a writer.

“I had a $100 car I used to stop by hitting a brick wall,” she once told students at a college Q&A. “It was a wonderful life.”

After Mary Oliver died on January 17, I read her 2011 interview with Shriver for the first time. Near the end, she spoke of wanting to write about “personal material,” wanting to be “braver and more honest” about her life. In that moment she chose to reveal publicly her childhood sexual abuse for the first time.

When Shriver asked if age—she was 76 at the time—had made her braver, Oliver instead credited “the forerunners who have dared to tell.” Again, I thought of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, then America’s most recent “forerunner” who “dared to tell.” Of course, Oliver is technically a forerunner, but admitted having been surprised that she’d even written a handful of poems like “Rage.” She also described being “very moved by Eve Ensler’s courage.”

The next words out of Oliver’s mouth stunned me.

“I now know it is a subject or theme I will not be avoiding,” she declared. “There will always be birds, but I’m gonna broaden out a little bit, or maybe a lot.” She also claimed to have one new “brave” poem that needed to be typed.

The fact that this master poet, in the last decade of her life, felt inspired by other women writers to be “braver”—and worked to write those new poems—suggests that Mary Oliver finally exited the building that had once sucked all the air out of her body, and escaped that “broken house” of her childhood once and for all.

Chivas Sandage is a digital columnist at Ms., winner of the 2021 Claire Keyes Poetry Award, and author of Hidden Drive, a finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year Award in poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Texas Observer, The Rumpus, Salmagundi, Southern Humanities Review, and the print version of Ms. Magazine, among others. Her debut nonfiction book is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press. Ms. Muse, her column, features contemporary feminist poets and essays on the intersection of poetry, politics, and our lives. Follow her on Twitter: @ChivasSandage.