Happy Halloween

May this day of public ritual — one of the last we have — be magical for you.

As you put on your mask, may it free that which you ususally hold deep inside, allowing it to shine.

May others see that beauty, and may you learn to trust a little more that coming from the places you can’t control allows a bit more of the magic inside of you to make the world better, more intense, more blissful.

May you step out of yourself a bit, find affirmation, and become a little bigger, a little more confident, and a little more trusting of the creativity, imagination and power you keep hidden under your street clothes.

May the rituals of Halloween be a blessing to you, and to the ones around you, the ones you reach out to affirm, and the ones who reach out to affirm you.

This we ask in her name. 

Amen.

Stigma

The New York Times says that thin experts, concerned with the health implications of obesity, have started a campaign to put pressure on the obsese by keeping up a stream of reasons why obsesity is bad and shouldn’t be tolerated.

In other words, they have decided to stigmatize obesity, by blaming it for bad things, apparently assuming that since they would be ashamed to be fat, if they can just make fat people ashamed, they will start trying not to be fat.

Reseachers at Chamaign Urbana decided to see if this would work, and asked 3000 overweight people about “their experiences of stigmatization and discrimination and how they responded.”

“Almost everyone said they ate more,” reports the Times.

You can’t change someone who is buried by sigmatization and discrimination by more stigmatization and discrimination.  We just get pushed farther away, more beyond the pale.

And we hurt more, too.

Thin Skin

Halloween is a time when the veil between this world and the under world is thinnest, at least according to the old stories.

I know that it is a time when my skin is at it’s thinnest.

I was going down the aisle in the dollar store today, between a woman looking at the shelves to my right, her back to me, and a tower of boxes displaying merchandise.

I squeezed behind her, but as I passed, she chose to back up without looking, brushing into me.

It was not pleasant, and I whipped my right arm behind my back and moved on, thinking it was no big deal.  It happens in cities all the time, even if rarely in this Republican suburbia.

Apparently she was angered though, because her older mother asked what happened.

“That person bumped right into me and didn’t even apologize!  How rude!” she exclaimed.

I heard.  She backed into me without looking, and I am to blame?

I came back to explain my view. 

She admitted that she couldn’t see me, but said it was my fault, because I should have said “Excuse me” before passing her by.

Do we really have to say excuse me when we pass next to anyone in the aisle?  Is it our responsibility to make everyone aware even when they are in their own world?  Isn’t that a problem in its own way?

Her mother wanted to tell me that it was not a big deal, implying I was making the big deal out of it.  I was the one who treated it as no big deal — it was her daughter who wanted to blame and castigate me for my incredible rudeness.

I was upset as I left, telling the mother that “I don’t like being blamed.”

Of course, it was no big deal, just something that should be sloughed off by latent inhibition. 

To me, though, on a day where I feel the tightness and pain, especially when I see the woman in the black mini, heeled boots and Halloween tights I should be wearing, it was just another example of how people want to assign blame and responsibility to others, want to be indignant for events caused by their own blindness.

My skin is thin, everything on the surface.

Boo!

And now, time to figure out how to make the casserole I just learned I have to make for my parents to take to my sister-in-law’s house, and wait while my mother decides not to go out, and then cover while they leave, and spend Halloween locked, lost and skinned.