On Divinity (A Vignette)

On Divinity

Write about the closest you’ve ever felt to God.

Damn this exercise! It’s been in nearly every book on writing that I’ve read in the last 15 years or so, and I’ve read many. I never even tried to do it, stiffening against the impossibility of it all, or maybe the audacity of anyone even suggesting that it can be done outright. I mean, isn’t that what I’m doing anyway as a writer? How does one - anyone! - write about the Divine?

    So no, I won’t write about God.

    I have nothing against the guy, but perhaps that’s the issue after all, for me: God the Father. And let’s not even go to that place of defensiveness, that place where somebody says, “Oh, well really God doesn’t have a gender so… He’s neither. Or, errr, He’s both. (Both? Or neither?) Well, yeah. God just IS.”

    Okay, alright. Whatever. C’mon, we all know it’s true - God’s the Dad. And it’s great. He’s, like, the Universe’s greatest little league coach. We need him dearly. We’re a gendered race, so of course we ascribe gender to the Divine. I love the idea of leaning into a big Dad God, His work-worn hands (after all, most of the world agrees that He did create everything) holding me, strong and sure, when I can’t hold myself upright. In this business of being a human, we need Dad God.

    It’s the rest that gets tricky. The words I need to say, the part of my heart that am offering you, isn’t really welcomed; the moment your eyes read “Goddess” or “female Divine,” some part of you laughs at me, assumptively snickering to yourself about my straw-grasping attempts at bringing my feminist hocus-pocus into your faith.

    So go ahead. Laugh, or sigh, or whatever you need to do. Get it out. I’m so very used to it and you won’t hurt my feelings.

Done? Nope, not yet, I can tell.

Now? Alright.

    So this is why it’s tricky. We’re weird about this whole thing. We like our God male, or at least non-gendered, especially in public. And like I’ve already mentioned, I love Dad God. He taught me how to ride without training wheels. And it’s that love for Him that makes me wonder: in all of our gratitude and reverence and awe, why have we relegated Him to single Fatherhood?

    If we can recognize that we perceive the Divine as a whole as non-gendered, and who we call “God” as Dad, then it’s not hard to see that we’ve been unfair. The Divine has given us power, and I’m not talking free will, here: I’m talking free thought. All that we’ve used to conceptualize the Divine employs free thought. The Divine is the Divine - and our renderings, our mental images, our practices and rituals and dialogue can never change the essence of Divinity no matter how we shape or shift these things.

We conceptualize the Divine for one reason and one only: we need and crave that special, personal, unique and attainable connection. What’s most curious is how complacently we accept the pre-formed qualities of Dad God, imagined or felt by people so long gone, and yet we deny ourselves the opportunity to commune with the Divine on a new plane with renewed clarity. We do this by ruling Her out.

So who is this Mother? Well, that’s the beauty. She is anything and everything we need her to be. She can heal the mothering wounds within us, or She can serve to deepen our relationship with the Divine through a strong human bond that we already feel (for our mothers, or as mothers). This is part of the gift of free thought - we get to conceptualize Her from scratch.

She doesn’t even need a name yet. We’re funny like that, and it’s alright. She doesn’t mind, and He certainly doesn’t either. Whatever They call One Another is none of our business.

Instead, my instinct is to consider giving Her qualities. What might She be to you? Sure, we’ve got the Goddesses: Buddhist, Hindi, Greco-Roman, Celtic, Norse; we’ve got Native American variations of Mother Earth and the neo-Pagan renderings; there’s Mary and the canonized female saints; heck, we’ve even got Mrs. Clause, Tinkerbell, and the tooth fairy to look to. But these come pre-formed. We have inner associations with them which, if we carry them for too long, serve only to remove us from the relationship with Her that we may need.

So take a moment. What do you need Her to be? Is She fierce, destructive? Or is She soft and nurturing? Perhaps, much like Him, She is both, and much more, exactly when the time is right.

Does She scold your wrong-doings by blocking your way, or sweep the path behind you clean when you’ve led yourself astray? Does She come to you in dreams? And if She does, does He come to? Or does She replace Him in your mind?

If you feel a sort of panic at that potential - that partnering Dad God will actually displace Him - recognize that it stems from conceptions of theism. The greatest gift we can give ourselves is the Truth. If we try to parse the Truth from what has been said by others, before, in a time that does not translate to this one, we may find the essence of this widespread reluctance to open ourselves to an even more palpable communion with the Divine.

In every monotheistic faith on earth there is a child of God, a prophet, a messenger. We accept this comfortably, turning to the word of God through these human conduits. Does this split the Divine, or threaten God: the fact that we sometimes need a conduit through which to reach Him? In our constant preoccupation with our unique human condition, we can forget the grace that we possess as creations of the Divine. Essentially, yes, we are humans, we are fallible. But anything that comes from something else claims the original matrix as part of its own. If the Divine created you, then you are Divine. When we forget this simplicity, we look to those whose grace, we believe, has been unmarred: spiritual leaders, the writers of holy books, and those in power within spiritual institutions.

Communion with the Divine in this way is once removed, and we are frequently grateful even for that; we do not wish to feel alone in these skins. This is one of the oldest monotheistic strategies: we hear Let me tell you what God has said and we are comforted. So why feel awkward or shameful in giving ourselves the opportunity to hear the Divine directly as perhaps we’ve never tried - through a Mother’s voice?

If we allow that Mama Goddess comfort as we’ve so easily allowed Dad God’s, we may find that it is She who cleans the puke of our souls off Her nightgown at one a.m. without getting annoyed for a second, and that it is She who tucks $20 bills in the pockets of our jeans before they go in the wash. We may learn it is She who pops crocus buds through the snow just as we lose our trust in spring’s return, and She who leaves shells at low tide for our delight.

We may recognize that She has loved us so deeply that She gave us the life we needed to learn what only we can learn, to be who only we can be to the world, and that Her commitment to us is so strong that She even loved us through our rebellious years when we hardly said a word to Her at all.

Heck, maybe we’ll learn that we encounter the same writing exercise over and over for a reason, all thanks to Her.

Poems to whisper, Poems to SCREAM (Teen Poetry)

Poems to whisper, Poems to SCREAM 

by Jessica Marsico

*********************************

These 10 poems are from a collection of poetry written between 1994 and 1999, when I was in high school. Some of them were published in zines (both online and print), some of them have since been published in college writing collections, and some have never seen the light of day.
They were inspired by the dichotomy between being a teen with lots of pain and an already difficult past and living amidst breathtaking apple orchards and rolling hills in the farming community of Marlboro, NY.
Re-use with permission only, please: xwildmountainhoneyx@gmail.com

*** 

Opening

I want you

 to (with either skeptical trepidation or full steam ahead)

test these words

for any sense of familiarity

for that welcome home, comfort feeling

and for that realization that you are not

  alone

I want you

 to (with neither apathy nor empathy)

take these words

for what they are, or need to be

for devastating melancholy and unrelenting joy

and sink into the soil of affect

  alone

I want you

 (in any form you've come)

And offer myself

 (however I may be seen)

Read on, comrades in separation -

Read on

***
Now Is the Time, As Always

We are hanging on by a thread, us all,

 except the ones who've chosen metal chords

   and guns, and strategies, and revenge…

     and war.

I feel spread in thousands of directions

 but tied down to imaginary stakes

   running so high and so deep…

     denying freedom and the joy it creates.

Thankfully, in the morning time, babies are born

We breathe in and out

The sun rises, birds sing – in some places this remains everything

Eventually the day grows weary,

Shadows lie on orchard hills

Elders die smiling, cats nap on windowsills

 The sun sets and the moon does rise

And stars shine bright and high

But some people have forgotten this,

 the holiness of sunrise and of dew's gentle kiss

   and the truth that this is all that matters

     if matter is important to us

          at all.

***
Clouds and Foxes

Today the clouds were shifty and loony,

Sneaky and brilliant as a fox

Thin and luminous

 but for the inky, shadowy blending

           right through.

Thick as cotton, moving gently steadily strong

  with the growing wind.

The cold came in today,

 with those devious, cunning clouds

Simultaneously casting shine and shadow

 Along the mountainous valley.

***

Safety

I ride this coast of inability to speak

  Mute-iny

As if there isn't enough sunshine to brighten my shadows

   I pull away, weepy,

Still unable to express what lies beneath

I need a disappearing act,

Want to steal those years from Pain

   and float them in liquid Love

J'ai voudrais voler, seulement

       free

               from

                          fear

Want to sleep forever in blissful dreams

Want to float as a leaf down crystal streams

Save me, oh sweet self

   Safe me.

***
Pleasure's Rise and Fall

August and September were my

pinnacles of pleasure

But as October crept nearer

  she only gave to me

The End.

***

Summer into Winter

 Welcome!  

September

               (then October...

                                    then November...)

and so I welcome Autumn into Winter.

   

She creeps in stealthily

           unseen, out of sight

spreading her chilly pale fingers over the night

If I sound a bit bitter

  (which I'm rarely known to be)

Please see that to me it's

                   Summer into Winter

not Summer into Autumn, as I wish I could see.

***
Snow Enlightenment

Something woke me so early this day!                              

A light crept through the glass                                                              

As a mouse creeping through the grass                              

And I pricked my feline ears to sense it                                        

From my second story sleeping

My view was simply branches                                        

Laden heavily with heavenly snow                              

This white – nothing so pure as this white                                    

Nothing else can remind me so vividly                              

         Of being womb-ed

***
(Another Winter Poem)

I've been feeling rather out of breath

     like an anxiousness still building

        from winters upon winters

                 of introversion

Introspectively, the part that plays

     simply wishes for months' hibernation

         relief from winters upon winters

                 of solitude

Choice is a rather funny word now

     with the glittering snow imprisoning

         like winters upon winters

                of compensation

                  for the grey

***
Ember

Charred blocks of wood, blue-greying and pale

Dripping their essence

To the embers below

Admitting mortality, radiating heat

Moving with a rhythm all their own –

A lesson to us all

Throbbing and beating, pulsatingly delicious

Dripping still

Like tangerine juice down my summertime chin

I admire the wildness, the untameability

Blue Flame, Red Ember

***
Sunset Driving South

My breath is lost then blissfully found

in the early evening, before the Moon takes over

and the Sun scatters His light across hills

 creates shadows between

the orchards of brown dormancy,

before the sparkle of snows

and in the meantime stains cotton clouds

with berry juice

 wild purples, brilliant reds

A final show before He acquiesces power

  to the Night.

She begins gently, bare black trees against

 most Royal blue

       a stillness stirs

in the way only a Goddess can do

and Stars dance so high!

 Slowly She rises... shape-shifter Moon,

  singing our song

perfectly in tune

And I somehow know

     nothing will ever be the same

As we are partners with Her change.

Words You Should Know: Apposite

apposite (adj): strikingly appropriate; relevant

Cheetah print was an apposite clothing pattern choice today because it suits my fiery mood.

Words You Should Know: Epeolatry

epeolatry (n): the worship of words

All my life the most benevolent deity seemed to be the lexicon of the world, of all languages; my epeolatry developed early, in the library of my youth.

On Writing: Teaser from Book-in-Progress

"I know, though, that if I don't write I will die; I will shrink down into nothingness and disappear, and the only originating place I can imagine for this, my desperation to write, is the inability of my female ancestors to do so. They were readers, thinkers, wanters of much more than their motherhood relegation. The intense power of my need to write pumps through my veins as if, from the spirit world, each of those women cries out a call to rise, speaking to the replications of their own cells that now live in my body."

-Jessica Marsico

Son Piccolina: A Sardinian Poem

Son piccolina, 
nulla so fare.
Vado in cucine
cerco da mangiare.

Bella non sono,
brutta ne meno.
Gli occhi mi brillano,
il cuore mi fa:
tic e tic e ta.

- I was taught this poem by my Nonna, Lina Carta of Sardinia, Italy. I had it memorized by the age of 3 and am reported to have recited it in frilly velvet dresses while standing on her dining room table.
It wasn't until a few years ago that I really translated it beyond the bit I already knew.
I'm curious to hear translations from native Italians, particularly Sardinians in the Sassari region.

 My best translation:

I'm a little girl,
there's not much I can do.
I go to the kitchen
to find something to eat.

I'm not beautiful,
but I'm not ugly either.
My eyes, they sparkle,
my heart, it says:
tick-y-tick-y-ta.

The Truth About Italian American Women

I woke up this morning with a vehemency boiling and rumbling down inside me, like a dragon had taken up residency in my soul. Why this morning, I don't know, but I've suddenly realized:

America doesn't know who I am, who any of us are.

We have been trivialized, turned into caricatures of our real Selves. I'm no guidette, no Carmela Soprano. We're not all Sophia Lorens, nor are we the lady in the Ragu commercial. Maybe we're a bit like Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny. OK, we're definitely like her, at least sometimes (and right now we're all saying it in our heads: "Oh, yeah, you blend.").

But I think of the women I know, the women I love: my mother's cousins; my father's sister, and their cousins; my neighbor's sister-in-law; my little sister; my best friend from high school. And no matter how adorable Marisa Tomei is on screen, you, America, still have no clue who we are.

We are irreverent.
Nothing - besides food - is too sacred for a joke, not even Mother Mary. (Damn did she pull a fast one: "I swear, Joseph, it was the Holy Spirit!"). We make fun of each other, of our families, of ourselves. It toughens us up to the world outside, the world that would make guidettes of us all.

We are Catholics to the core.
Even those of us in Catholic "recovery" who, finding ourselves in a church for a funeral or wedding, feel a bit awkward at first, appreciate the ritual of it: we genuflect at the alter, know every word to the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and make the triple sign of the cross with our thumb before the reading of the Gospel, reverently saying, "Glory to You O Lord." We save mass cards, have some memory of a particular nun, can tell you the reason we picked our Confirmation names (and tell you the story of that saint), and still remember what it was like walking around with ashes on our forehead all day on Ash Wednesday.

We are intensely proud.
Those of us who are still 100% Italian by blood carry it as an honor. We shake our heads internally when we hear a laundry list of ethnicities that some people can claim, and nod in comfort (and a bit in disapproval) when an Italian tells the story of maybe being 1/8th or 1/16th something else. There's something in the purity of it, the purity of our Selves, that makes us feel safe.

Yes: We are great cooks.
Cook for 70 people in two hours? No problem! Even if there's no time to go to the store? No problem!
We learned somewhere, from someone, before we even left middle school, how to make a feast out of a limp vegetable, a box of pasta, a cup of flour, 3 soft tomatoes, a bag of dried beans, and two frozen chicken legs. Oh - and it'll be, hands-down, one of the best meals you've ever eaten.
Maybe it's a cultural inheritance of kitchen creativity but I think it's more a cultural obsession with having certain things at all times in the pantry: garlic, dried basil, olive oil, at least 2 kinds of vinegar, bread crumbs, dried pasta, canned tomatoes, onions.

Further: We're obsessed with food.
We know what we're making for dinner at least by morning if not several days or a week before. Even in the most rushed of evenings, making dinner is comforting, and everyone knows not to bother us with sibling squabbles, loud voices, or irrelevant bull while we're cooking.
Food shopping is a special event all its own; for those of us who don't go to church, food shopping is church. We touch things, taste things, ask at the deli counter for "a pick, a taste," talk to ourselves with either delight or disgust about freshness or price, and have taught our children how to properly choose produce before they turn 4.
At every holiday meal, every birthday gathering, every football game or chorus concert, our conversations with the rest of the family revolve around what we're cooking for the next holiday meal, birthday gathering, or get-together after the next football game or chorus concert.

We judge your pronunciation of our foods.
That soft cheese stored in water? "Moo-tza-deh-la" or, if you're short on time, "Mootz." That other soft cheese, the one that hasn't been pressed and is in a container? "R(ROLL IT!)-ee-goh-ta" or, if you're feeling extra fancy, "R(ROLL IT!)-ee-goh-t." That bread you see in big boxes at Christmas-time, with raisins and citrus peels? "Pah-nah-tone-ay."
Just get it right, okay?

We are deeply attracted to quality.
It doesn't matter how much money we have (or don't have) or how much money we grew up with (or didn't grow up with): we know and love quality, especially when it's subdued, classy.
The only bag we love at Marshall's, the one we can't stop touching, is 100% Italian leather and costs $625. Even if we can't buy it, we'll carry it around the store for awhile, stroking it and even smelling it.
The gold hoops we admire, with delicately hammered filigree that you'd never see behind our hair but that we'd love just in knowing such high levels of craft went into them, cost more than we make in a month. Even if we don't buy them, we'll judge every pair of earrings we ever look at again against them.
For many of us, this knack for immediately spotting quality is immensely frustrating, because we'll likely never own any of it.

We are loud.
Not all of us are loud all the time, though many of us are. But even those of us who lean toward the quiet end in public are easily riled up and out of that by any of the following: other Italian women; irreverent jokes (particularly about each other or Catholicism); food; or any mention of Italian ancestry.
Get us in a group, and good luck. I've had the inordinate fortune and blessing of knowing non-Italian women who can keep up with us, and they're quickly "adopted" as sisters, because it's no easy task. It's like Darwinian competition: only the loudest are heard, and being heard confers Alpha status - and if you didn't already know it, we are all born with an innate Alpha status. If we don't use it, we lose it!

And finally: We are the keepers of stories.
Within families, Italian women (and girls) are given the stories of generations. Sometimes the stories grow fewer and weaker as the immigrant generations move further into the past, but all of us carry some secrets that have never been doled out to men or those outside our bloodline.
Some of those stories and secrets are about family recipes, or maiden names, or what life was like in the old country, and they give us a sense of belonging, or twinges of nostalgia for places we'll never go, people we'll never know.
Some of those stories, though, truly are secret, and are meant to share the burden of pain. They go back farther than any one of us can remember and move forward in time, stretched taut like strands from one web to another. Eventually we notice that the webs of our lives are constructed from innumerable strands, over the span of centuries, seas and continents, and things like chronology, ownership, and external or social verifiability no longer matter. Those stories of loneliness and poverty, rape and beatings, abortion and estrangement, murder and intellectual oppression may as well be our own; we carry them for one another.
Because of this a sadness settles within us while we are very young, growing all the time, a sadness we never assume will be eased by any means other than the continual stretching of the gathered strands of the webs that are our ancestral lives to each generation of girls as they come to us. We are proud to be entrusted with the keeping of these stories, as if it denotes a trustworthiness of character; we are proud to be burdened by generations of sadness. Sometimes it seems that trading these stories is the only way we won't dissolve into oblivion, be forgotten, become nameless.
We are the keepers of stories, unique only because we are bound by silence.

Perhaps it is the silence inside the sadness that birthed my anger this morning; it's this silence that keeps us from being truly known. As for me, I am not only a keeper of stories: I am a storyteller, a writer all my life, and in loosening the bindings of silence I ease not only my own burden but the burden of us all. It is not about blabbing the specific secrets that we guard, not about divulging our Truths to the world...

It is about breaking the stereotypes that cast us as the shallow creatures that the media and its pop culture would have you believe we all fit into, breaking it by speaking to the depths within us that we might finally be known as something more.

I encourage you, Italian women in America, to do the same. Say it publicly if you like, right here or elsewhere; say it privately if you need, to me or someone else or even on a scrap of paper that you burn. Say something other than what's being said for you. The fear will pass in time - the guilt and the sadness and the anger too. 

Share this with everyone, with anyone, that we might become more of who we really are.

Matrilineacide: A Poem

“Words wreak havoc when they find a name

for what had, up to then,

been lived namelessly.” –Sartre

    My great grandmothers are lost to me; lost too are all the mothers who came before. Their last names have been taken, removed from the memory of centuries. Whole families disappear that way - truth and story and knowledge, too. This loss deserves a name, that I might speak my sorrow. And the grace of graces, one they were never shown: the choice to adopt it  (to keep or discard it) is yours and yours alone.

-Jessica Marsico

“Their [the descendents of Italian immigrants] italianità - where it has persisted at all - resides in the humble details of everyday life, not in the glories of any nation or its state.”

Donna Gabaccia, historian

Italian America and its Woeful Lack of Female Role Models

OK: forget role models. We definitely don't have those, but we also don't even have any pop culture icon or character or anything to identify with.

That being said, I've determined that Daniel Franzese is our most succinct, poignant, vivid point of reference.

Yes, it's funny. I know. But it's really not funny at all.

Within mainstream American culture, Italian American women do not feature prominently anywhere: literature, film, television, politics; the more you think on it, the more disturbing it really is.

So I suppose it's time for me to address us collectively: the over 10 million Italian American women in this country: we make up almost 6% of the population. With all the ethnicities represented, and the split in numbers because of gender, that's a much larger representation than it may seem. It's time for us to give one another something that America herself will not give.

As the saying goes, "You're Italian - do it right!"