Technology Found Me

It finally happened. I went out and bought my first computer of my own volition. I set it up and tinkered with the applications. Then I placed my first call on it to Ben.

The new computer is an iphone. Ben, my honey who brazenly told an acquaintance that he didn't need anything more than his iphone and his girlfriend, finally tempted me into the flock. The recent "upgrade" of the iphone left last years model obsolete, so I rushed out to buy one for less than $100.

I justified it as a homeschooling expense, and it appears to be working. We moved our campus to the coast Friday and Saturday. I had my handy cell (i) phone in case of emergencies. When we arrived and unpacked, Trinidad went straight to the creek to hunt crayfish. Sam and I played cards at creekside, and I turned the iphone onto a recording of Billie Holiday's "Night and Day" that I am learning to sing for Market next month. Over and over, my tiny "transistor radio" played a soft accompaniment to Sam and I giggling and stealing each other's cards. Then Trinidad turned up with crayfish and freshwater clams. "Are these clams edible, Mom? Why don't you Google it?" he asked.

Trinidad knows that I use the internet extensively as a resource. If I want to know which part of the herb to harvest and when, how to kill a chicken humanely (paradoxical phrasing, hm?), or whether to be concerned about the leakage of peach juice in the canning process, I fire up the web.

Now I have it creekside. After procuring reassurance that he had, in fact, caught dinner, we took some pictures (iphone) of the critters as Sam grappled with them fearlessly. We could have emailed the photos to my mom, but I don't have the account set up for it yet. We downloaded (for free) an application that shows us what the constellations are in our night sky by the iphone's location, and if I forget which direction is north (how embarrassing), there is a compass application, too. In the morning, we checked the weather and tides online, then headed to the beach to tidepool. If I need a gas station, there is an application that tells me where I can find one within three miles and the directions to get there. Not that I typically do need gas (my bike is decked out and well-worn), but even hanging close to home is going to be easier with internet support.

Dude. I can even place a call on it.

The only thing I have to hang up is my pride in roughing it.

Where's the hook?

Survival Giving

What is a gift?

I give my heart, my hands, my thought to the comfort and well-being of my family, my community. I take joy in cooking, creating, cleaning, and organizing for myself and others. I most love to give from the place of abundance, not looking behind me at any cost or consequence in the giving.

There have been consequences.

I did not learn to give from abundance. I learned to give from fear. Raised in a family that struggled with domestic violence, I did what I was told. Daily from the age of seven, I completed long lists of chores with bitter determination. I learned the trade of homemaking well, and I am grateful for the efficiency it offers me as a mother.

I am also grateful that I saw early on that giving is a skill in itself. I saw that people welcomed my company because they saw me as "a giver." I have been told I am angelic, kind, and generous in my adulthood. The skill of offering my efforts to others were born in a home where my father threatened and chided me for laziness if I missed a corner in the vacuuming. They are only skills.

I learned to give because it met a need for power. I'm sure I wished to contribute, too, but in all honesty, the need for power resonates just now. I needed power desperately at a time when my voice and my needs were silenced. I clung to power as I watched helplessly while my father pushed and swung at my mother. This power shined so brightly that I could see myself in the dark when no one else could see me.

Giving was a strategy, a means to an end for safety, acceptance, and love. It served me well.

I remember hearing about school shootings when I was a young teenager. As the people around me shook their heads in horror, I could understand why the man in question pulled the trigger. I could understand the disjointed fear and helplessness, and most of all the power behind that cold piece of steel. I felt confused; didn't everyone else know what it was like to be in that place?

I didn't dare say it. I couldn't tell them how I could feel what I imagined he felt, that it made perfect sense to me why and how he could see his action as all-powerful and still meaningless, ultimately inconsequential. So fragile and so loud.

Giving, running, hiding, striking out, and striking back --all can come from such exquisite pain. And now I see that it is not the giving that had its consequences. Any resentment I now harbor is not from having given too much, or even from seeing myself as "forced" to give. My giving is ultimately inconsequential; there has been nothing taken from me or anyone else in its offering. In this sense, giving was a gentle strategy to have settled on.

What is left when I reconsider my history of giving is only the pain that birthed the strategy that I trusted to keep me alive. What is left is looking back and into the constancy of fear I was raised with, the eruptions and undercurrents of crisis from within.

Perhaps holding this pain will truly free me to give from my heart.

I am humbled, again, to witness the gift of compassion, no matter how terrifying or cold, that my childhood bestowed upon me.