Ode to Repeated Patterns We Identify in Hindsight
Real progress would be learning from our mistakes and moving on
The introductory post to The Happy Half.
It’s mid-week of the last week of the mid-month of the year, and I have some random threads to honor and weave. My heart is too heavy for essays.
This is a list of things on my mind this day, this week, this month, this year. It’s also a spiral, a stream-of-consciousness, an ode.
The universe is speaking in repetitive circles, underscoring ground it’s covered before. Emphasizing lessons we could’ve learned the first time around. To look ahead feels like looking back, looping and then looping again.
Blaming a reporter for the news that’s reported is called deflection.
Where there is deflection, there’s defensiveness.
Where there is defensiveness, there is no accountability.
Where there is no accountability, harmful cycles form patterns.
Patterns reveal nature.
Nature reveals deflection.
Trump said he broke with Epstein because Epstein stole staff from him.
The staff member was sixteen years old.
Her name was Virginia Giuffre.
A reporter asked, “What did you think he was stealing her for?”
In 2014, there was a conflict in Gaza.
The U.N. called for a ceasefire, but neither Israel nor Hamas would agree.
In 2014, pro-Russian separatists fought in Ukraine.
Obama was president, mid-way through a new term.
The scandal that summer was Obama’s tan suit.
The scandal this summer is a buffet.
Trump said, “He started it,” and we could fill in the blank.
A blank, vacant expression followed by an awkward silence is called the Gen Z stare.
I thought that was dissociation.
Sidney’s good jeans and starving babies in the same feed.
There’s a scene in a book I once endorsed.
I stopped recommending this book last year.
In the scene, there is a woman, 21.
A young boy, 17.
A pastor, gruff and controlling, is the bad guy.
The scene is written as an explanation of a controlling man who harmed her.
He forbade a relationship between the woman and the boy.
How did we all look past this?
Just because she presented her experience this way?
Why didn’t we notice the boy?
To notice reality, I touch grass and breathe.
Long, slow breaths in; long, slow breaths out.
Look up from the screen.
There’s a cat in the window, a flower on my desk.
Deflection points fingers to manipulate and control.
Deflection blames the person who confronted them.
Reflection is a mirror; a gaze to identify shapes in the afternoon sun.
This week, there has been an earthquake, a tsunami, and a heatwave.
Patterns reveal nature.
Nature reveals me.
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This reads like a divination spread pulled straight from America’s subconscious. Every card a contradiction. Every pattern a mirror.
We keep trying to learn history like it’s linear—when really, it’s a Mobius strip held together with zip ties and trauma.
Thank you for naming the boy in the story. For touching the grass. For letting breath interrupt the algorithm. That is sacred work. That’s the liturgy beneath the litany.
Because while deflection builds altars to ego, reflection builds compost for change.
And darling, we need better soil.
There's something going on in the universe. Circular.
I just read a murder mystery novel written in 1995 and it could have been written today. Kate Wilhelm's The Best Defense.
Women's shelters have begun popping up across North America. One is burned to the ground in Oregon killing a child who had been inside. The MOTHER is charged with her murder when it is discovered that the child had died because of blunt force trauma.
I kept reading and thinking that nothing has changed. Wome are abused and told it's their fault. Women leave and are told they are breaking up the family.
The mother is branded a "baby killer" by a right-wing fundamentalist paper which associates women's shelters with abortionists.
The public has already sentenced her before the trial. They hurl their vitriol in protest in the courthouse steps. These are christians who threaten and then become violent against those who support her and cry foul when their own are questioned about their testimony of what transpired that day.
Deny Abuse, Reverse Victim and Offender - DARVO
This is the playbook.
This is the cycle of trauma.
30 years between this novel and today.
There have been positive changes. We now have words to describe what's happening. Our children are becoming more emotionally intelligent.
Last week I attended a land blessing ceremony in my hometown for a second stage housing complex for women who have gone through our local women's shelter. A local Indigenous elder and young women from his community participated along with a pastor from a local congregation - a woman.
It started out 4 years ago as an idea tossed around a table of 4 women. One a social worker who has a passion for affordable housing, one a mental health worker who was working with residents who would otherwise have barriers to stable housing, me and the Executive Director of the women's shelter.
Women don't leave one time. They most often always go back after a stay at the shelter. People who blame the victim wonder what is wrong with these women. When you stop blaming the victim, you can ask what's going on in these women's lives that causes them to decide to return. When you understand that "choices" are always constrained you understand that choices aren't really choices at all but merely a bad option or another bad option.
The question that blames the victim that's asked "why did you go back?" Becomes a question of what are the circumstances that are stopping you from being able to permanently leave?
The list is long. And one daunting circumstance stacked on top of each other ...
One of the biggest challenges is affordable long term housing. It's well known that for the majority of women who leave a relationship regardless of the circumstances, will be much less financially well off than their male counterparts. This second stage housing complex will help alleviate that.
Another challenge is support from a community. Women who leave their partners often lose their community - their church, their family. It is hoped that this space can become that community.
Emotional healing, addictions treatment - aka understanding the mechanisms of self-medicating - these things all take time. A short stay in a shelter can't address years of trauma. Another reason women go back to the abusive relationship - mandated maximum number of weeks in shelter. It just isn't long enough to get your 'shirt' together.
Long term Second Stage Housing will knock that barrier down too.
There will be resistance. There will be backlash. The shelter has endured it for the last 30+ years.
This is the circular cycle. This is the truest meaning of Dante's Inferno - we spiral down, down, past each layer of hell, each layer of lies, pain and suffering. It seems to be the only way for love, the deepest most real expression of the universe to be revealed. This process, this path is the only one that has ever existed. "Heaven" cannot be reached without going through "hell." Hell are the lies that keep people trapped, keep people from fully expressing themselves, keep them in the chains of guilt and shame, keep them harming each other on the small scale between each other and on the grand scale of nations and corporations. Every time their is revelation, uncovering, of the systems, the ways violence is perpetuated, we spiral down through another layer of hell. Down, through, is the only way up and out. That's what birth is. Continually being reborn.
Linearity is a construct of hierarchy, colonialism and patriarchy.