Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Ashrai Yoshvey Beitecha, Od yehalelucha selah. Ashrai haam shechecha lo, ashrei haam sheadonay elohav: Tehila le-david, aromemcha elohay hamelech, ve-avarcha shimcha leolam vaed. Bechol yom avarchecha, veahalela shimcha leolam vaed. Gadol Adonay vmhoolal meod, ulegdulato ein cheker: dor ledor yishabach maasecha, ugvoorotecha yagidu:

Our soldier came home. He came home alive. Israel, my people, are celebrating. For many of them it is a miracle. But there are people that are very upset and angry at the trade-off.  They feel betrayed by the government because some of the prisoners who were released had murdered their own family. They do not want these people to be back into their terrorists attacks and murders of other people.

I can understand their pain and their anger and their dread. i think that they are also trying to protect  the people, to not become euphoric, to not forget the other side of the story.

He looked like a deeply spiritual and traumatized human being. I think that because his soul is pure he survived. Could it be that once they caught him they no longer wanted to kill him? Could they see that he was gentle and harmless? I saw my boy and I felt that we have so much in common. And for a moment i felt jealous that he was going to get so much support. And then I felt guilty for thinking that. Torture.

When I came to America I finally felt  that I was being listened to. It was scary meeting so many doctors who looked at me and just had no idea what was happening in my body. And basically I was beginning to believe that I was going crazy, that I could not take it anymore, that I was for the first time in my life confronting the possibility that I might have to take my own life. It was a terrifying thought and I thought it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and ove and over and ovetrredghghdgywJHHHHHHHHJWSJHWUTYDWTYTTTHGJGHHHGHJKJHKJ BUT I was going crazy, acting strange, not being responsible, maybe a bit dramatic, maybe borderline personality disorder Cuz (and this is a funny one) every night i would tell the nurse that I want to be euthanized and that i am upset that i cannot get euthanized in my state and that euthanasia should be legal because people that are in deep suffering have a right to die. I was certain that I was not the first and would not be the last person who would be taken to a psychiatric hospital. So, I made sure to tell the psychiatrist that i want to be euthanized. I was in a severe state of anxiety, the depression had hit the end of the road and i had to talk about how devastating Pudendal Neuralgia is.  So I had to remain strong.  And my brother spoke to him on the phone and the psychiatrist told him that it is possible that i have border-line personality disorder. And that was very sad for me because once again I was not being seen or heard. They were reading me from their diagnostic text-books and i fit perfectly. i was constantly threatening suicide, i had a lot of attacks of rage in the beginning because i felt that my family were not helping me enough. I felt that my brother was slow in reading about it or researching about it. They said that they were confused by all the different diagnosis that i thought that i had. 1st , endometriosis and then interstitial cystitis.
My family are very good at avoiding the inevitable. When i told my mom today that I am very tired., she pounced on me and said "no, don't say that". she barked at me that i should have gone to the meeting i had scheduled with a pain theraipst. I have felt so insulted by some of the "professionals" who i met with. And I guess  that I am just generally exhausted. Today was a generally very very very exhausting day. I have been too active. While I gardened I started fighting with the roots of the huge tree in front of our house. Fighting as though to see who would win this time, the pain or the pain?
Yeah, so i am happy that our soldier has been freed. He is a sweet boy. A sweet Jewish boy like the boys from the ghetto, the boy that we jews all know of. There is a famous picture of a little Jewish boy with an angels face boy with his hands up. Crazy, six million of us slaughtered, mothers, fathers, sisters brothers...there are stories that tell that there were those that forced fathers to sleep with their daughters. Or mothers that were ordered to choose which twin she will send to the gas chamber and which one she will keep with her. I have so many questions and I am starting to get answers. Some women are interested in writing. It is something. And there are women who even painted and did art-work for me. Truly , that is how i feel that they did it for me. And i really appreciate that. And they seem to appreciate that. So, we have started communicating with each other, women who have been deeply and horribly traumatized by damage done to the Pudendal Nerve that lies within our pelvis.
I have been in pain for the last two weeks or maybe it is two and a half years already. We are all different and we all have had our nerves damaged from different things. One women suffered nerve damage from having a hysterectomy done. Isn't that what they used to do to us. If we were too hysterical they took out wombs. Do you know that in Tibet that is what the Chinese do to the Tibetan women. They take out their uteruses so that they will not be able to have children. I feel a little sick as I write this and the pain in everywhere is sharpened and the scalpel takes care of those women.
And in Africa, the female circumcisions, sorry, the female mutilations, that mothers do to their own daughters. What the fuck? And the daughters scream and cry and some of them are left with permanent nerve damage.
And in Rwanda, where men who had Aids organized themselves to rape the Tutsie women so that they would get aids. And they were raped by so many men at once, for hours and days on end. That they also were left with nerve damage.
Women have suffered from damage to the nerve that enervates our vagina since the beginning of when eve was sent out of the garden cuz she was a sinner, a manipulative sinner. And in India, women are raped and it is so shameful to be raped. And once a women is raped (again, my stomach is turning and i can feel the pain sharpen.) she is considered public property so men have a right to rape her again. She is worthless as a woman, no man will ever marry her, shel is better of dead. There are a lot of suicides in India. Some of them were called Holy. Holy suicides where the woman who is left a widow burns herself so as to be with her husband. People watch this and admire this great act of courage and self-sacrifice that a woman is doing for her man. In India many women suffer from burn-wounds where the mother-in-law is trying to kill her because she wants more dowry. Really sick stuff is going on and i don't understand how things like this happen. And my heart is broken for all of these women.
And I also feel for us. For the women who were told that they were crazy. For the women who were left by their husbands. To the couples who are deeply in love with each other and are profoundly supportive.
How do we survive such physical torture? What keeps us sane? And how scary it must have been to live at a time when our physical pain was called frigidity or hysteria? How many woman have been asked if they were raped, if they had suffered sexual assault? One very sweet obstetrics nurse asked me if maybe i missed my boyfriend and that is why i was in pain down there. i can go on and on and on. But in the end I chose to live. I chose to accept that this was what happened. And my mom helped me a lot. She fought really hard for me. Sometimes she also botched up, but we have forgiven each other and today i feel like she is my sister and she guards me and protects me. But sometimes she gets mad at me still like she did in the beginning. She doesn't understand that I should not be working in the garden. I planted the tulips for her. I bought them for me and for her. I guess that we both wanted to believe that I was getting better. But i knew that I wasn't when i started tugging on roots and fighting to pull them out of the ground. And i get hurt cuz i think that she should have told me to stop gardening.  And that today i am exhausted cuz i have my period and the pain is much more intense.
I think that me and our soldier, Gilad Shalit (he reminded me of the Dali Lama. Gentle and pure. I even thought of writing him a letter and inviting him to come stay with us here if he wants a vacation from israel. But truthfully my family is all deeply traumatized by these last two and a half years. I forgave them for not getting it. It took me a long time to untie all the knots that got so mangled...
And I wish that we could all help each other.

Women have been suffering from so many different forms of genital and pelvic pain. You want to tell me that we are ashamed of our own private parts? Nope, I will tell you that we aren't. And that maybe finally the world is ready to hear our suffering. But then, all of us have felt abandoned or betrayed by friends or family. God Bless All Of Us; may those that are in pain unite and begin to tell our stories. At least we are not alone anymore. We are beginning to reach out  to each other. We can hear each other and we care for each other. We can  help each other heal cuz we can understand each other's souls.
And there are beautiful men among us as well who are also fighting hard to resist the call to suicide and who are expressing such levels of care and compassion that it truly is beautiful. We still feel very misunderstood but what is important is that we are beginning to understand each other. Friendships are a big part of surviving. If our friends can really travel the way with us. I have one friend who just glided along with me. So we have a lot of work in terms of educating. How do you begin to educate. How do we create awareness.
One thing I learnt from Wangari Maathai, an African woman who fought a beautiful fight is that we are much stronger when we are united and that we can help each other. That is a lot. I wish that I had known about this group earlier. Can we support each other so that we won't give up hope? In order to survive we have to be united. Maybe that way, someday we will also have a flag, a beautiful flag all our own. Wangari Maathai fought with so much love in her heart and there were people that were sure that she was crazy.

Anyway, I really recommend reading her book. It is called Wangari Maathai, Unbowed, One Woman's Story.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

I was going over a bit of my blog, trying to clean up a bit in honor of the guests who will read and hopefully share with me in which pieces they found meaning (which pieces should be put in an arts pamphlet made by women suffering from PN and Vulvodynia) . And I read back to the post about the red wires and the stakes. So, i thought that i should put in an update. My older brother threw all the red wires in the garbage. They have all been taken away and so there will be no red wires wrapped around me and no stakes... in some ways this is a relief because I don't want to go back there. I don't want it, not now and maybe not ever. Maybe the words will do for now. It took me a long time to be able to write about it. For now I will stay here. I feel safe here. Though I do not feel that anything I write here can describe what I lived through. I am trying to write again but I still feel like I am bending wire that is not flexible and pliable any longer. In jewelry class every time I want to make a new imprint on the metal I have to anneal the metal again. I like annealing, I like the flame and I like the way the metal softens up again. I like that I can play over and over again with the same piece of metal. The metals are strong that way and I like discovering the way to work with them. I am learning how to weed beauty out of them and I like that fire is part of the process.
I guess that after twenty years away from writing and from the English language I have to practice and practice and practice. Maybe with time I will appreciate the progress that I made. So here I am. There is no principal inviting me to her office. The essay itself is tucked away somewhere in the basement. Israel and my life there were once again snatched away from me. Twenty-seven years later I am doing what I did as a ten year old; trying to put together the shattered pieces of my life with words. And along with the words I am soldering and annealing and engraving my grandmother's name into the rings that I make. Being far away from her today makes just as little sense to me as it did twenty-seven years ago.

Friday, October 14, 2011




My last post gave a very romantic and upbeat description of my day of gardening. My pudendal nerve shares a different side of the story. It is not particularly happy with me. I hope that my pain will settle down and that my nerve will settle down. I was just starting to enjoy the stability that going back up to 200mg of Lyrica was giving me.

I have a request to whoever reads my blog. I have to choose a few pieces of poetry or prose to put into a genital pain pamphlet that I will be putting together. Please share with me the pieces that you feel have a collective voice or a voice that touched you more deeply.

Thank You,
Atara

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Tulip bulbs in my garden!!!!








It is way past my bed-time. I promised myself that I would be in bed with the lights out no later then 12:00. I have gotten carried away.

I have to share today cuz today was a beautiful day. It was even a wonderful day. Today I sat on the cool scented earth with my bare legs folded and flat beneath me. I dug into mother earth with my little spade, caring about the earthworms that wiggled their way, fighting with rocks and roots and finally tunneling a hole deep enough for my treasured daffodil and tulip bulbs. Oh, and i dreamt of all the colors that would come to fill my senses in the Spring that would surely come. And I dreamt of my mother's appreciation when she saw the tulips blossom from her bed-room window. And from her kitchen window. Beauty, beauty, beauty surrounded and protected my mind and I swear that I did not feel a sensation that I could name pain. No, even with all the tugging and the bending and the earth/legs/squat my body was able and eager.

Oh, I say a prayer there, my legs deep in earth, I say a prayer of gratitude for the day, for the Lyrica and the Cymbalta and the earth and for my love of gardens and for the gardens of my love.

The gardens of my love are tucked away, tucked away to survive the cold of our winters, tucked away and hopefully safe from squirrels. Until spring, until spring tickles them and teases them and finally convinces them that it is time for them to share their glory with the world.

Oh, wonder of wonder, Oh, miracle of miracles, Thank you for keeping my heart healthy with love, thank you for giving my body the ability to partake, to help create this miracle, this blessing come true.

Amen.

And Goodnight, way past my bed-time.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

My brother told me to keep on writing poetry.
When I was a kid I was taken to the principal's office.

I had no idea what I had done wrong.

I could not imagine what was about to be told to me.

Maybe I had lice?

I had just returned from two years in Israel and I was in deep longing for the life that I had left there, for my friends and the outdoors and the boys that seemed to like me.
I was in 5th grade now, back to being a foreigner just after having nearly stopped feeling like one in Israel. Now I was one, once again, in America.
I was not happy.

The principal showed me a short paper that I had written for English class. She asked me if I had written it. I looked up at her, not quite understanding her question. My name was on it. Who else could have written it? And why was she holding my paper? What was wrong with my paper? Were there too many spelling mistakes? Had I written the letters backwards as I used to in the beginning when I had just moved to Israel?

And then she told me that my paper was a beautiful piece of writing. I didn't quite understand what she was telling me and why I had to be called to her office to be told this. In Israel invitations to the  principal's office were a sure sign that punishment was on its way. I nodded and smiled politely, wondering if she thought that I had not written it myself. That was an absurd thought considering that all my emotions were there flat as the sun that pounded into me the day of departure. Only that day the sun had a black hole in it and only I could see the hole. It was pressed into the shadow on the pavement. I sat atop our luggage thinking about my best friend that had sobbed the night before when we had hugged our last goodbye. She was wearing her pink pajamas and it was painfully hard to leave her crying like that. I saw the hole in the sun from there and it was as black as the sun was shining. Writing about how I longed for Israel and about everything that got left behind like my grandmother who was my sunshine was not going to bring me back there. I was ready to have this meeting over with.  I had a whole world tucked away in my soul, a world that flowered and blossomed, a world that was full of love and animals and outdoors, a world that my grandmother belonged to and I surely belonged by her side. And somehow I had to accept that that world was slipping behind me and that this world now was to become my life. I found that in my writing I could keep that world alive. And even when it began to recede into the outlines of my life, I knew full well that I would return to that world again.

Within six months my spelling was better then that of most of the class. I had fallen in love with English and would continue falling in love with my English teachers up until and through-out high-school.
I have been away from the English language for twenty years now. The first eighteen years away were in Israel. The last two years away were mostly curled up in the corner of my childhood room, here in America, my mind twisted and frenzied with pain. Now I am slowly reconnecting back to the words, slowly seeing if they will dance for me like they once did. They have been frozen in time, left behind with my childhood passions that could not move with me to Israel.
Like poetry clubs
And poetry readings
Like good-looking English teachers that left me lusting after them as opposed to my class-mates.
Like the toads that died out or hopped away. I wish that they hopped away. I believe that they died out.

There was not much that I loved about my childhood. But writing was one of my loves.
And though the words feel so stale, so imprecise, so rusted and callous, I am trying to refine them, I am working on learning their rhythm and their lust, their truth and their natural urge. I am working on trusting that they will still work for me, that they are still my loyal companions and that though I have abandoned them for so long, they have remained as loyal and as devoted to me as all the invisible friends of my past.

In my mind we all dance together, bringing the invisible into the visible, healing the hurt, and treating the pain, unlocking doors and releasing all that belongs to life.




Invisible people are real.

You may not see them.

But I do.

I always have.

It was one of my gifts.

I always saw them.

And I always gave them a hand.

I knew how hard it is to be invisible.

How hard it is to fall onto cement and to bleed blood that none can see.

But me. But me.

How hard it is to want to play.

Come play, I will play with you. I can see you.

Invisible people. There are so many of them.

Today I can tell you that every invisible hand that reached out to me was my 'self' searching to be seen. My invisible friends taught me the finest parts of who i was. They taught me compassion and love. They taught me patience and commitment. They taught me perseverance and humor. They taught me how profound creativity is. They were very generous, very kind teachers. They loved me just because I saw them. How strange to be appreciated for seeing something that is so clear and so full of truth and wisdom. My invisible friends were my greatest teachers. They taught me about my soul and my spirit.

But still, I was completely unprepared for becoming invisible myself. And I was completely unprepared for invisible knives and invisible forms of torture and for months of invisible persecution. And I was completely unprepared for what it felt like to be asking for help and for being invisible. And I was completely unprepared for pleading and crying for help and for being invisible. And I was completely unprepared for living a life of invisible knives and invisible torture and invisible visibility.

Oh no, I had the sight to see the invisible because I felt it all with my heart and with my soul. It was easy. But to be invisible myself was a completely different world. A world that began and ended nowhere. A world that added up to nothing. A world that split into invisible pieces held together by invisible glue that bore into me like bones and bricks and iron stakes. A world of no sense.
Sometimes at night
i write poems
they appear in my head
beginnings
threaded words
embroidered precisely, humble works of art
with no destiny
they disappear into the night
i swear to myself to remember
winding the words through my mind
the words travel the same routes

morning comes
and whatever routes those words traveled have faded




so, what?
if the words were so important
would i not have lazed out of sleep and into awakening?
are the small journys that my mind makes trying to anchor me in my story
are they irrelevant?
forgotten?
lost?
irretrievable?

as irretrievable as the life that was mine before all of this?
as irretrievable as the child that got lost on the merry-go-round that could not stop spinning?
where are the words?
what words can describe invisible knives that tear flesh into bits that stay whole and bloodless?
who would believe such fairy-tales anyway?

Damn,
i order the words to come filing in
like soldiers lame and lost
they refuse to reclaim their place among the living

I yell to the words
Don't you understand that i need you?
That i need you now!
I don't care if you have no blood and no flesh
I will take whatever is left of you
Your skeleton is fine too

I don't care if you have no limbs to walk on and no will to grow limbs with
Yes, i remember now
One of the words was GROW
What was i growing? There in the dark, in the fire, suffocating...
I cannot remember, maybe GROW was not one of the words at all

Then what was that spark of genius that got lost in the night?
There was a thread and a lot of darkness and suffocation that suffocated and suffocated, suffocation that suffocated like breathing sand through your lungs,
darkness penetrating suffocating ripping through my flesh
leaving no trace of blood behind

Invisible

Growing invisible
Screaming with no voice
Sand pouring down into my legs
and into my lungs

the merry-go-round of glass and razor blades
spinning suffocating drinking sand
walking under air that presses into me
gravity pushes from above
the weights press compress from above
invisible
every step is timelessness encapsulated

Words, don't you understand? I need you now! Come out from under the bed. Get out of your hiding places. I have let you live on your own for two decades. Now I need you  back. I need you back.

Serve me as I have served you.
Putting you all together.
Making you spring and sing meaning.
As a child, you played in my notebooks, you jumped like the toads... whichever way you went, you went as well, with spring on your side and life in your blood.

Come back to me now. I  need you now. Serve me please, I beg you.

Please, open the gates so that I may enter, so that i may learn, so that i may weave and rekindle, and tell and ...

may i be worthy of your magic.

Toads, toads like the letters of my childhood no longer live here.

I have returned to tell of them, of how I loved them. Of how invisible people are real.

Monday, October 3, 2011








if what you want is life

then that is what you will fight for

if what you want is life

then that is what you will suffer for

if what you want is life

then that is what you will be granted

if what you want is life

then that is what you will restore

Hey, you, girl in Chicago, i danced like a wild-cat, i danced like a goddess, i danced with my heart and my soul and i swear i danced for everyone..... Hey, you, girl in Chicago, we dance the way we live...and we live the way we dance...

I can tell that you are fierce and strong.

Love,

Atara




Poetry
it happens sometimes

that what i want is to leak

to leak like a broken faucet
or like a toilet trained toddler

to leak
like a busted pipe
or a fire hydrant in mourning

to leak
to leak
poetry and words and letters that add up to words
to leak it all out
until i am covered in letters
that dance from my nipples to my chin and spin from arm-pit to knee

until i am drowning
ecstatically throwing letters around me
like confetti
like cupcakes

there is a poem that i remember
but this one has no memory
it only has an urge and a surge
and it leaks

no, it doesn't just leak
it explodes outwards

i used to be able to dance my poetry with my body
the boys loved to watch

i loved the warm sensation of their eyes on me
they were respectful and curious
and i was a woman sharing my life

nowadays its the words

i still miss the boys
i do miss the boys

but at least i have the words
i am teaching them to dance for me

but they are still leaking
not quite dancing

tonight
Out of exhaustion I create has
Out of tears I create tea
Out of fatigue I create fate
Out of insomnia I create as
Out of disability I create lit
Out of excruciating I create tin
Out of pain I create pan
Out of insanity I create sanity

I shuffle it all around

fate has sanity lit
tin pan has tea

as

i play life
sipping warm chai
warming spices in my grandmother's old tin pan
watching fate
play cards with me

winter comes from around the corner
the snow is only weeks away
the neighbor knocks covered in white flakes
Chai fills our nostrils with desire
And sanity is as simple as warm socks and a woolen scarf

Into the night we roam
Hand in hand
Into the unknown of a friendship we now know is ours

Into the winter
Our hands wrapped in gloves and in each other
The smell of our spiced breath frosting in the air

Our lips cold and warm

We make our destiny
We choose what to take
And what to leave behind

For now we have chosen each other.
We walk into winter together.




Blessings
I scatter
I scatter blessings

Flowers grow

Blessings I scatter
I scatter blessings
like feathers

Feathers float

Blessings
I scatter

Shells swim their way to the shore

Blessings
I sing

The notes scatter and shatter and splatter and fall

And I like a true artist
make and remake
every day anew

sending my love

to you
to you
and
to you