Artistic Courage on Bali

Yesterday, I was walking along the main road, in the town of Ubud, on the island of Bali, in Indonesia, when I stumbled on Bali Tirta Art Gallery. What drew me in was a colorful painting of a child sleeping on a bed of newspapers in front of a pile of boxes. As I slowly walked around the one-room gallery, I noticed a dozen or so paintings of the traditional landscape/beautiful women/ market scene genres. But what captured my attention were the large, brightly-colored acrylic paintings which, like the one of the sleeping boy, explored the underside of paradise. Tightly-cropped like a photo, with simple compositions and minimal but telling detail, these paintings were completely different from anything else I saw on the island.

A woman’s hands outstretched to receive a single 100,000 Indonesian rupiah note (worth about $11) from a man towering above her. A young boy with a cell phone looks down at the image on the screen of a man and woman having sexual intercourse. Two men standing next to each other, one of whom is picking the other’s pocket. A young child intently looking at a magazine, on the back cover of which a woman is posing suggestively. A girl sprawled on the ground, her eyes closed, face and arms lacerated, a teddy bear and torn bag nearby.

Mesmerized, I took a couple of photos to jog my memory, and called the number on the shop sign. A young woman offered to meet me the next morning at the gallery. When I arrived, she was already there with her husband and small son. The paintings were the work of her 21-year-old brother, Tirtayasa, who is still a student at the art institute in the island’s capital, Denpassar. The brother-in-law mentioned that the gallery would only be open for a few more months as the rent was so high.

The piece I was most drawn to was called “Girl with Pepsi,” which subtly comments on the changes global capitalism has had on the traditional way of life. A woman in Balinese dress holds a flower-filled offering basket made of coconut fronds and a Pepsi bottle, which is labeled with the words “holy water” in Balinese.

As a lover of beauty, I appreciate the talents of those who create traditional scenes of life on the Island of the Gods for visitors to take home. But it takes not only talent, but also courage and vision for an artist to depict those aspects of life which are less than idyllic and far from picturesque, especially when there is little or no financial incentive, and perhaps substantial financial risk, in doing so. And yet, this is what we expect of artists: an individual interpretation, an authentic expression of the larger truths that affect us all.

I hope that Tirtayasa and other artists like him receive the support they need to continue.

Dancing to Ecstasy

We were on the Stanford campus, in a small room that used to be a nursery school classroom. Most of the people standing around were friends of the band or friends of friends. The female lead singer sang in Turkish but even if I understood Turkish, I doubt I could have made out the lyrics over the boy band’s driving rock beat. From the first chords, my body was in motion. After all, what else is live music, especially live rock and roll, for but to dance to? I looked around at the other people in the room, most of them a decade or two younger than me, as they stood, some swaying to the beat, others stock still. A few took pictures. It was as though they were watching a symphony concert or a televised event.

I had a sense of déjà vu to the Death Cab for Cutie concert I had attended a couple of summers earlier at the outdoor Greek Theatre in Berkeley. There, the number of people over 40 totaled about six, and I was perhaps the only one who wasn’t escorting a gaggle of teenaged children. The crowd was enthusiastic, cheering wildly after each song, singing along with some, but they seemed locked in their heads, or locked out of their bodies. I simply couldn’t fathom how they could just stand there so passively, with only the slightest movement. Were they all so afraid of being noticed? Of doing something other than what the rest of their peers were doing?

It reminded me of another concert I’d gone to a decade earlier in Boston. Roxette, a Swedish rock band, was performing in a small downtown theatre. Most of the audience, including my then-husband and I, were sitting in our seats, tapping our feet or moving our shoulders. Finally, the female singer, Marie Fredericksson, her voice admitting a tiniest bit of frustration, called out to the audience, “Do you wanna dance?” “Yes,” they responded. “Well then you have to stand up and move,” she said, giving us permission to stand in the narrow aisle and dance.

One definite advantage of being older is that I, for one, no longer care what the anonymous “they” think about me. If I want to dance, then I’m going to dance. I’ve always loved dancing, but when I was younger I was too self-conscious, too afraid of other people’s opinions to move to the music, especially without a partner. My husband was even more self-conscious, so for years, I sat on the sidelines, tapping my feet, wishing that I could move body and soul to the beat.

No wonder I felt as though I’d come home the very first time I attended a 5Rhythms class three years ago. I didn’t have to wait for someone to ask me to dance, didn't have to dance with anyone, although I could if we both wanted to. It was just me and the music, but it was also me moving in community. A community of like-minded souls. Finally, I had found my tribe, the dance tribe. Whenever I join a 5 Rhythms class, whether my weekly local or a workshop or a class in another city, in fact, whenever I attend any kind of free-form ecstatic dance class, be it contact improvisation or Soul Motion or Biodanza, I have that sense of connecting with my tribe, that sense of coming home.

But the practice of ecstatic dance was brought me far more than community. It has helped me to know myself on a deeper level, to connect with my emotions and let them flow through me with the movement and the music. Not only have I experienced deep connection with one person and with a whole roomful of people, I have healed deep pain, released deep grief and rage, and expressed deep joy. I have found a level of energy, vitality and stamina that belie my age, that I simply didn’t possess when I was young. And so tonight, when the band started playing, I dropped into my center, let go of any self-consciousness or fears of being judged, and moved to the music, blissfully riding the waves of sound to ecstasy.

Travels to Another Planet

Two weeks into my sojourn in northern New Mexico, I was having an over-priced plate of blue cornmeal calamari and a prickly pear margarita at the Anaconda Bar, while listening to live country music and watching couples do the two-step. In my all-black garb, sitting alone with my travel notebook, a overwhelming sense of being an outsider washed over me. I felt like a foreign correspondent just off the plane from, say, London or San Francisco, or maybe another planet, assigned to report on local color.

The next morning, when I mentioned my culture shock to friends at my favorite café, Dave the owner piped up with, “You are on another planet. Welcome to New Mexico.”

At the time, I attributed my feeling of alienation to having been snowed in at a friend’s place in Santa Fe one night, followed by being snowed out of the place I was staying in Nambé the next, caught without a change of clothing, but fortunately with my pug dog and laptop in tow.

But now that I’ve returned to “Californicate,” as they call it, I feel torn between a desire to return to the enchanted vistas of New Mexico, where I was incredibly productive, and the sense that I’ve woken up from a dream into my real life.

In the three weeks I spent in New Mexico, I felt like I connected with more than half a dozen people on a more than superficial level. I signed my first gallery contract for 10 pieces of art that I produced during that visit. I got more writing down than in any other equivalent period of time. I even had that strange but flattering feeling when locals assume that you are one of them, And perhaps because I was not a local, a window opened for me into another world, or should I say worlds.

Taos is country town, where everyone has a truck to deal with the rutted dirt roads, a town where poverty is apparent in the multitude of trailer homes, and wealth in the plethora of art galleries. A town full of singles at the base of ski destination Taos mountain, a heart chakra mountain of whom people say, Move to Taos, lose a spouse A place that is said to be a karmic accelerator, where the newcomer quickly sees both the up and the down sides of small town living, where people’s characters are quickly revealed, both their weaknesses and their strengths. A town where the Anglos are the newcomers, the Hispanics the landed gentry, and the Native Americans have been living for 1200 years in the oldest continually-inhabited settlement in the United States. A town that is home to healers, artists, ski bums, vets, tourists and outlaws.

Maybe it was just dumb luck that I found a café with free wireless to work in, potential friends to socialize with, good food to eat, art supplies that inspired me, a gallery owner who was moved by my work, and three offers of places to stay when I return. Maybe I could not keep up that level of output, or find that level of support and inspiration if I had the distractions of my everyday life to deal with. Maybe the small town gossiping, the country-western music, the dramatic weather, or the mountain herself would push me away if I tried to stay longer.

One of my last days in Taos, I had my tarot cards read. The reading was entirely positive, filled with abundance, not only of money but also of love, all kinds, including a dharma mate to share my life’s purpose with. When I specifically asked if I should move to Taos, the psychic replied, enigmatically, “There is an opening for you here, but you have free will.”

Maybe it was all a dream. And yet, after having my karma accelerated and my heart opened, I’m now back in Silicon Valley, which seems more banal and plastic, in a social environment where my connections feel more tenuous and shallow than I remember—and I’m no longer sure that this is home.

So, the question for this big city girl, who thrives on the diversity of the Bay Area and having friends who are brilliant, who loves redwoods and fancy restaurants, who wants to be a fulltime artist but also would like to someday own her own home, is whether moving to Taos is a good bet or just a fantasy, a really bad idea or only one of many possibilities? For now, I’m waiting for the answer and living with the question.

Not Ready for Prime Time

My trepidation about visiting China began when I went to the consulate in San Francisco to apply for a visa.

I hadn’t planned to go to China at all this spring; in fact, the only reason that China came up as a possibility was that Air China is a Star Alliance partner with United Airlines and I was using my accumulated United miles to get to my main destination, the island of Bali, in Indonesia. When the United agent suggested routing my journey through Beijing, with a layover on the way home, I thought, Why not?

I drove up to the consulate on a rainy Wednesday in early February, only to find it closed for Chinese New Year. The following Tuesday, I drove up again and this time found the Consulate open for business. I walked past the handful of people protesting the government’s treatment of the Falun Gong group, stepped inside, took a number and an application and sat down to wait. When my number was called, shortly before the office closed for lunch, I headed to the appropriate window and slid my application over the transom.

“Do you have a letter from your employer?” the clerk asked, to my surprise. I had given my occupation as writer/teacher.
“No, I’m not employed right now. I work as a contract teacher, but I’m on sabbatical now,” I explained.
“What kind of writing do you do?”
“I write about travel and food,” I replied, and wrote the address of my website on the margin of the application.
The clerk called a supervisor over.
“Do you write about politics?” the other woman asked.
“No, nothing political,” I answered. She hadn’t defined what she meant by political and I decided that my pieces on the environment didn’t fall into the same sensitive category as, say, human rights or Tibet.
“There was a woman who said she wrote cookbooks, but she was arrested,” the supervisor said, giving the impression that the woman had lied. “You’re welcome to visit China as a guest but nothing political.”
By this time, I was wondering why I hadn’t given my occupation as artist or English teacher, which would also have been true, rather than writer. I came back the next day and picked up my visa, which the clerk affixed to my passport with no further adieu. Ironically, I had had no intention of writing anything political about China, or even of writing anything at all about China, but with the supervisor’s grilling and veiled threat, I had essentially been handed something to write about.

It was March 26 when I arrived at the newly opened Terminal 3 in Beijing for a three-hour layover on my way to Bali. I followed the signs for transit passengers and stopped at the immigration desk, behind which was a young woman. I was her only customer, but she looked around for help, as though she didn’t know what to do. Finally, she examined my passport and visa, stamped the visa and waved me through.
The airport terminal was enormous, obviously expensive, and virtually empty. There were a few shops selling handicrafts, or Olympic souvenirs, or the usual multinational duty-free perfume/cigarettes/alcohol. I found a restaurant serving Italian food; to my surprise, the banana split arrived before the pasta. There were gaggles of young, uniformed Chinese employees, but not nearly enough customers to keep them busy. Their command of English was minimal, like that of the Air China flight attendants. For example, on the flight, the two attendants in my vicinity were able to ask if I would like fruits with cheese, but neither could understand nor answer an expected follow-up question, “What kind of fruits?” ) I wondered if this was deliberate; it certainly would prevent the Chinese from answering any question the government might deem political.

Fast forward nearly three weeks. I was nervous about my return trip through Beijing. So nervous that I only booked the hotel a couple of nights before and had made no plans of what to do or see during my 40 hours there, beyond a tour of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. I chose the hotel based on a description in a magazine, DestinAsian, which I found on Bali. The Emperor was described as a newly-opened boutique hotel whose rooftop bar offered a view of the Forbidden City (and indeed, this was one of the highlights of the hotel.) I had had mixed experiences at boutique hotels in the past, most recently in Cairo, but I’m a sucker for cool design (witness my loyalty to Apple Computers). My room at the Emperor was on the turquoise floor and the room was done entirely in white and turquoise, which happens to be my favorite color. Unfortunately the service was not quite up to the same level as the interior design. For example, when I arrived at the hotel at 1 in the morning, it took 30 minutes to check in, despite the fact that there were two clerks and I was their only arriving guest. Leading me to my room, one of the young clerks said, somewhat dejectedly, “I guess you don’t want to play the game.” Instead of room numbers, the hotel uses names of emperors and arriving guests apparently can make a game of finding the room whose name matches that on their key card. “No, I’m too tired to play a game,” I muttered.

The next morning, the staff apologized for the check-in delay. After a prodigious breakfast that included sliced fruits served on a mirror, I asked about getting a taxi to the Great Wall. “You don’t have enough time to see the wall today, I think. They’re repairing the causeway and it will take you more than one hour, maybe more than two hours, to get there. I think you should see the Forbidden City today. You will have to come back to see the Great Wall. Two days is not enough time to see all of the things to see in Beijing,” the young employee insisted. I acquiesced to his suggestion, but now I wish I had braved the traffic to see the Great Wall, even if it took two hours to get there, which, after all, is considerably shorter than the amount of time I spent flying to get to Beijing in the first place.

So off I went to the Forbidden City. As soon as I crossed the threshold of the North Gate, a young woman came up to me, offering a tour in English. She was a Beijing native and had a wealth of information at her fingertips. When I expressed an interest in learning more about the Empress Cixi, she tailored the tour, pointing out the places where Cixi had lived and ruled. At the end of a couple of hours, she introduced me to a friend of hers, a rickshaw driver, for a tour of the Hutongs, a nearby area of old, one-story houses built around courtyards.

Interestingly, these rickshaw drivers were far more willing to transport a foreigner than the taxi drivers who either wouldn’t stop at all or who had trouble following the bilingual map on the hotel’s business card. Indeed, whenever I stopped a local and asked for help with my bilingual map, at least half the time I could expect the person to wave their hand, dismissing me. Was their reaction because I was a foreigner or because they didn’t want to deal with the language barrier? Recalling the days, not that long ago, when Chinese who spoke to foreigners would be interrogated by the police, I wondered how the government could expect its cautious citizenry to suddenly be open and friendly to the foreign tourists in their midst. Maybe during the actual days of the Olympics, the situation will be different, but I was left with the feeling that Beijing, and her people, are not yet ready for prime time.

Descent into the Underworld

“ On a scale of one to five, where one is little or no anxiety, how are you feeling about the cave journey tomorrow,” Megan, our fearless leader, asked. “One.” “One and a half.” “Zero,” came the responses from the other women in the room, who had gathered on Crete to explore the island’s ancient Goddess culture. “Five,” I said, my voice cracking with shame. Actually, if I had known then how difficult it would be for me, I would have said, “nine.” I was terrified of falling and worried that the torn meniscus in my knee would act up, but I also knew that I needed to go on this cave journey. I could not have explained why this journey was so important, but I was determined to push through my fears.

From the other side of the circle, a voice piped up, “I’d like to volunteer to be at the back of the line so I can help Judith.” It was Sue, a mother of two boys from Minneapolis. “I have lots of experience leading treks and I’m not at all nervous about this one. I’m convinced that I was a mountain goat in a previous lifetime,” she said with a laugh.

Without Sue’s kindness, I would never have been able to complete the cave journey. I could not know then that descending into the cave and climbing back up would be a symbol of the healing journey I was about to make into the depths of my own psyche. I did not know that the prayers I uttered in the darkness of the cold rock womb would be answered in the brilliant sunlight of an ancient temple, or that months of hard work would pass before I could really integrate the whispered message of hope.

The central myth of Crete is the story of the Minotaur. As Megan told the story, the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, had sent Minos, the king of the island, a magnificent white bull. Instead of sacrificing the bull to the god, the greedy king kept the bull for himself. Poseidon’s revenge was to make Minos’s queen, Pasiphae, fall in love with the bull; from their union was born the Minotaur, half man, half bull, a living reminder of the king’s sacrilege. Minos commanded the royal architect to build a labyrinth under the palace to keep the monster out of sight. To appease the Minotaur, the powerful king demanded that his vassal states render an annual tribute of noble young men and women. The youths were trained to perform the Cretan art of bull-leaping, before being led to the labyrinth, never to return.

After some years of this, the Athenian prince, Theseus, decided to take matters into his own hand and slay the beast. He volunteered for the yearly tribute. On the way to Crete, he worked with his fellow captives, so that by the time of the bull-leaping performance, they were a tightly-disciplined team. His performance and comeliness caught the attention of Pasiphae and Minos’s daughter, Ariadne, a priestess of the Snake Goddess, who danced in the temple rites. The night before Theseus was to be sent into the maze, Ariadne gave her lover a red thread, that he could use to find his way back out, and a labyris, the bronze double-headed ax sacred to the Goddess, with which to slay the Minotaur.

The night before the cave journey, the 13 women on our tour gathered in the common room of the retreat center for a grief ritual to clear our hearts. A large low table was set up as the altar, adorned with scarves and objects sacred to each of us: a crystal wand, a statue of the snake mother goddess of Crete, a deck of tarot cards in a velvet pouch, an embossed silver portrait of Jesus. We stood in a circle, singing the simple chant that Megan had earlier taught us while she drummed on and on. Whenever the spirit moved one or more of us, we sat or knelt in front of the altar and prayed/cried/keened our grief while the others witnessed, supporting us with their voices and their presence. I cried for my lost marriage, for my lost childhood, for lost love. As everyone’s individual waves of grief rose and fell and ebbed around me, I prayed to the Goddess to help me let go, to help me heal, to help me move on. Gradually, the pain eased as this particular round of grieving came to an end. We went outside for a late-night snack of chocolate and tea, then climbed the stairs to our rooms, opening the verandah doors to the cool, dry air.

After an early breakfast of Greek yogurt, honey, ripe fruit and biscotti-like cookies, we piled into several rental cars and headed for the next village. Our destination, the Cave of the 99 Holy Fathers, might seem an odd choice for a group of women who had gathered to discover the Great Goddess. Or perhaps one should say that it was odd for a cave, which represents the womb of the goddess, to be a place where a group of Christian priests sought refuge from persecution. In any case, this cave was near our retreat center on the south coast and had far fewer visitors than the island’s more famous sacred caverns.

We drove past the village on a single-track dirt road leading up the side of a low scrubby mountain. Thankfully, it was early enough that there were no vehicles coming the other direction. I blanched when I got out of the car and saw the path leading up to the top of the mountain. “It’s just a 10-minute walk from the parking lot,” was all Megan had said about the trail.

The first few minutes were less difficult than I expected; the trail was rocky but wide, with no precipitous drops to either side. As we neared the cave, the rocks became boulders. At the mouth of the cave, we pulled out the pants and sweaters from our backpacks and turned on the lamps we each wore around our heads. I waited as the other women moved past me, then joined the end of the single-file line walking alongside the cave wall, with Sue falling in just behind me. The plan was that we would all meet at the first chamber, then continue up to the second chamber. Hopefully, we would get there before any other tourists so that we could hold a silent meditation in total darkness.

Before we even got to the first set of ladders, Sue said, “Why don’t you give me your backpack.”
“I can carry it,” I answered stoically.
“It will be easier if I’ve got it. Don’t worry, I can manage it.”
“Okay,” I said, sheepishly.

When we got to the first metal ladder, Sue went down first, then instructed me on how to turn around and grab the handrail while stepping onto the first rung. What if I fall, I thought. But Sue kept encouraging me and I took the chance of trusting her.

“There’s a rung missing here, so make the next step down a big one, okay?” Sue called up to me.
As I climbed down the ladder, I could feel the panic rising, pulling my consciousness out of my body and into my head, out of the safety of the present moment and into my fear of future disaster. I wanted to freeze, but I couldn’t let the group down. I realized that the only way I could get through this experience without panicking was to stay in the moment.
We reached the bottom of the first ladder. “Breathe. Take a deep breath,” Sue told me.
Scrabbling down the rocky path between the first and second ladders, she held my hand.
“Don’t look to your right. Look at the wall on your left.”
Then onto the next ladder.
My heart clenched as I cleared another missing rung.
“Good job. You’re doing fine.”
At the bottom of the second ladder, Sue offered me individually-wrapped hard candies. “The yellow ones are lemon. Take two. I have more,” she added.
Near the bottom of the third metal ladder, she said, “I’m going to lift you over this rung, okay?” In one sure movement, Sue grasped my waist with one arm and lifted me down to the next rung. I was too surprised to be impressed by her strength.
Suddenly, we were in the first chamber of the cave. To the right, a small altar with an icon had been built in the wall. “You’re doing great,” Sue enthused.
We started up the first wooden ladder. Unlike the metal ladders, which had been bolted into the rock wall, these were just leaning against the rock walls. I struggled to not imagine falling backwards.
“Breathe. You need to take a deep breath,” Sue instructed.
I pushed the thought of an earthquake out of my mind.

Just before we started up the second ladder, she kissed my forehead. At the top of the ladder, she took my hand, hoisting me up and into the second chamber. Everyone else in the group was already there, looking for a place to sit for the meditation or for rocks to take home. I picked up three small stones from the cave floor and sat away from the opening. The light from our headlights flickered on the walls, enlarging our shadows so that we appeared to be giantesses.
And then there were noises coming from nearby. Other tourists were arriving. We had arrived too late. And it was all my fault. I started to cry.

Megan got up and went over to the two young men and one young woman, then came back. “They’ve agreed that we can have five minutes.”

Sitting in a circle on the cold floor of the earth mother, we turned off our headlamps. For a moment, one tea light shone bright and then with a breath, it was out. We were in total darkness, holding hands. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, it no longer seemed as pitch black as it had when the candle went out. I realized that I am not afraid of the dark. Eyes wide open, I cried for the wounded boy, for the wounded girl, for the solace they had sought in each other, for the pain of all their losses. And in the silence, I fervently prayed, “Make me whole.”

The climb down the wooden ladders was tough, but as I continued, with Sue’s help and the group’s encouragement, past the first chamber, over the rocks, up the three metal ladders, towards the opening of the cave, I began to feel lighter. A wave of relief came over me as we cleared the entrance and stopped for a group photo against the rocks.

Hiking back to the cars, Sue stopped to take my picture. In the photo, I am laughing. “You look reborn,” she said.
If I was reborn, then Sue was the midwife. I thanked her effusively, insisting that I could not have done the journey without her.
She demurred, saying, “It was an honor to witness your courage, cave sister. “

A week later, the group pile out of taxis at the palace of Knossos, the central palace-temple complex where the Goddess had been worshipped for some 1,500 years. They quickly walked to the far side of the archaeological site, down the steps to a courtyard known as Ariadne’s dance floor. Our leader, Megan, had been told that the guards would break up any attempt at a group ritual on the site, so we each went our own way to individually meditate. I took off my flip-flops and danced barefoot on the warm rock tiles, where the priestesses had danced 4,000 years ago. I sat at the edge of the courtyard, underneath an olive tree, and opened my heart. A voice whispered, “You are already whole.”

Was it the voice of the Goddess or the yearnings of my deepest unconscious? Does it really matter? It was the answer to my prayer in darkness of the cave, the red thread that would lead me out of the darkness of my own past, the truth that my therapist would echo in the ensuing months of intense and deep psychic healing. Not only for me but also for those I have loved, for all who believe that violation left us irreparably broken, it was a message of hope.

No Gels, No Questions

Other people wax rhapsodic about riding Hawaii’s great waves; I could go on and on about the pleasures of eating warm popovers with sweet whipped butter and poha berry jam at the Orchids restaurant in Waikiki. For me, the poha berry jam is what makes this an island breakfast. Also known as cape gooseberries, poha berries came to Hawaii before 1825 and can be found on all of the islands. They have a sweet tartness and orange color similar to the cloudberry, another rare fruit that I’m rather fond of. One could say that tpoha berry jam is my version of Proust’s madeleine, a symbol of an earlier chapter in my life, when I came to Hawaii with my children and their father and his mother rather than alone.

On a recent vacation there, I indulged in poha berry jam with popovers for breakfast not once but two successive mornings in a row. On my last full day on Oahu, I bought a jar of poha berry jam to take home. Packing that night, I put the jam in the middle of my bag, and my tiny jars of macadamia blossom honey into the zip-locked plastic bag with the other liquids like face creams and mascara. I got to the airport an hour ahead of schedule, picked up my boarding pass and headed for the security line. The noise of people talking and bags rolling was punctuated by the frequent announcements that the airport was experiencing an orange-level alert (one step down from red alert and two down from the black alert of a terrorist attack, according to one sign) and that any suspicious person or bag should be reported immediately. When the security agent asked to examine my bag after it passed through the X-ray machine, I wondered if they were concerned about my hair clip with a pointed end. But no, it was my jar of poha berry jam. It had never occurred to me that the prohibition on gels included edible jams and jellies. My other two jars of jam were tiny and fit into the requisite plastic bag, but the poha berry jam was more than 3 ounces. The agent also wanted to take my jar of sea salt because it was more than 3 ounces, but relented when I pointed out that salt, was neither liquid nor a gel. Although she apologized about the poha berry jam, saying, “I know it’s good stuff,” I still burst into tears a few minutes after the ordeal.

If I had been less upset by the implication that I was threatening national security, I could have gone back to the check-in area and put my carry-on bag through to San Francisco with the jam in the bottom of the hold. But losing this one souvenir, which, at least in that moment, symbolized my own lost past, of children at home and an intact marriage, apparently overwhelmed me. With the plane due to take off in less than half an hour, I felt I had little choice but to let go.

Of course, I was welcome to carry aboard any tropical jams, jellies, body lotions or bottles of water that I purchased on the other side of security. After all, we can’t let security concerns interfere with the big businesses that run the airport concessions. How many million dollars would be lost in a single day if no gels or liquids (cosmetics, perfumes, alcohol, coffee) could be sold past the security zone? Isn’t it ironic that we can trust these businesses, and all of the airport personnel to not threaten national security, but we can’t trust ordinary citizens not to pack explosives in their hair gel?

Air travel is the frontier of Homeland security, the place where we are most willing to sacrifice personal freedom in exchange for nebulous promises of safety. After all, if restrictions on water bottles and jars of jam keep the airplane that I’m on, or my daughter, or son, or brother are on from exploding in mid-air, then, like any sane person, I will acquiesce to the restrictions. If the goal were to prevent terrorist attacks, why not just install scanners at every airport that can detect plastic explosives? Or why not ban all gels and liquids of any size from being carried on board or even sold at the airport? Maybe we could have an exception for glasses of water and ceramic cups of coffee which could be purchased to drink at the airport; think of the reduction in wasted paper and plastics.

But instead, the current tactic seems to be to instill fear and anxiety in the nation’s flying public---who are primarily members of the educated, middle to upper middle classes—with, for example, constant reminders that we’re in a state of orange alert (which never seems to go down, even momentarily, to yellow, green, or blue). This state of alert, in turn, is used as a justification for insisting on absolute obedience to a series of annoying restrictions and rules——remove your shoes, the sweater tied around your waist, your laptop, don’t let your 10-year-old crack a joke about a bomb at the airport, which gradually become more numerous and more invasive, no water bottles over 3 ounces, put your toothpaste and contraceptive gel in a transparent plastic bag, remove your belt buckle, let security personnel run a metal detector wand over your breasts if your underwire bra triggers the metal detector, don’t dare to question those in charge for fear of arrest. What if the real goal is not to stop another 9/11, not even to make us feel safer, but to accustom those of us in the middle and professional classes, those of us with the education, money and time to actually question authority, those of us who think our American citizenship gives us the right to do so, and especially those of us who think our race will give us immunity, to living in a police state?

Breasts: Toxins :: Personal: Political

One morning, a few months ago, I was awakened by a sharp pain in my right breast, radiating from the nipple. My monkey mind immediately jumped to the obvious, catastrophic conclusion: terminal cancer. My rational mind thought, no, the dog must have stepped on it.

Said dog, a 25 pound pug, is a bed-hog; he likes to sleep with his body pushed against my arm, immobilizing it, while he snores through the night. But as soon as I open my eyes in the morning, he jumps up, pushes his face close to mine, snorts, and starts trying to lick me. If I don’t immediately get up, he jumps from one side of me to the other, sometimes landing his weight on my torso if I haven’t rolled over onto my side fast enough. A couple of times, he has—ouch!—landed on a breast. So I took an Advil and held my breath, hoping the pain would disappear.

The next morning, I awoke to the same pain, called my MD and got an appointment for the following day. Then I googled breast pain and called a couple of close women friends for reassurance. I soon found that most of the women in my circle, aged 30something to 60something, had had a breast scare at one time or another. One friend offered to loan me the “breast shells” that she’d had on her altar when her mammogram came up negative. Another suggested that breast problems are related to mother issues.

Of course, the day of the doctor’s appointment, I woke up pain-free. My physician found no lumps, but she did discover a polyp. She told me to go off hormones, cut out caffeine, check the polyp every day for the next month until my mammogram appointment -- and added that I shouldn’t worry.

Meanwhile, another friend started sending me information about the dangers of mammography and suggested I check out thermography, which uses the infrared rather than the X-ray part of the spectrum to pick up soft tissue abnormalities.

This same environmentalist sent me information about the link between breast disease and environmental toxins. The more I read, the more shocked I was. Like so many of us, I had trusted that the government, in the form of the Food and Drug Administration, and even corporations to have my best interests at heart. I had assumed that body care products were subject to the same degree of scrutiny as other chemicals which could be absorbed through the skin, like nicotine patches or estrogen creams. I was dismayed to learn that in the U.S., body care products and cosmetics are barely regulated at all, that only a handful of toxic ingredients are prohibited, that products can be labeled organic even if they contain only a single organic ingredient. That a commonly-used class of preservatives called parabens, found in everything from eye shadow to shampoo, has also shown up in breast tumors. I was outraged to discover that while the European Union has adopted a precautionary approach, which requires chemicals used in cosmetics and personal care products to be proven safe, the U.S. employs a different standard, which only prevents a few known toxins from being sold. In other words, the EU takes a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach, while the U.S. has an innocent-until-proven-guilty standard for toxins, and the corporations that produce and sell them. The more I learned, the more I came to believe that, if I had contracted breast cancer, the reason would have far less to do with my mother and far more to do with corporate greed.

I had the mammogram, and then waited a week before the doctor called to tell me that I needed to come back for a more X-rays and an ultrasound to check out a possible anomaly. While waiting for the new appointment, I busied myself with researching cosmetic brands. I bought new shampoo, conditioner, eye shadow, lip gloss, sunscreen, and body oil, choosing only those brands that were paraben-free and as close to 100 percent organic as possible. Between the three health food emporiums in my town, doing so was easy, if expensive ($28 for a tube of intensive conditioner, for example). I emailed my adult children the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep website
(www.cosmeticsdatabase.com), which has detailed information on the safety of thousands of products, and offered to reimburse them if they switched to healthier choices. And although I am not yet ready to go grey, I made my next coloring appointment at a beauty salon that uses less toxic dyes.

The day of the second appointment, a friend met me at the radiology lab. I had two magnified views, then a third because one of the first two X-rays came out fuzzy. In the ultrasound room, I watched as the technician found and photographed a black spot. Was this a mark of death like the black spot in “Treasure Island”? I grabbed my friend from the waiting room and held her hand tightly when the technician came back a few minutes later with the signed diagnosis on a slip of blue paper. A cyst. Come back in one year for another mammogram. In the parking lot, I burst into tears of relief as the tension of the past month’s anxieties broke.

Although I do not seem to be in immediate danger of having my breast cut off, I am no longer capable of being reassured in the same way that I was before. This minor health crisis has left a lasting mark on my psyche, bursting my bubble of innocent trust. I am outraged that my body, my daughter’s body, my son’s body, my friends’ bodies, have been silently soaking up toxins along with moisturizers and sunscreens, blemish creams and shampoos, mascaras and lipsticks-- and that neither those who manufacture these products nor those entrusted to regulate them apparently give a damn.