Month: July 2021

When I first arrived there, it was the ocean that called to me. Montana de Oro, in certain coves, has undulating deep green waves, brimming with life’s energy – conveyed when back-lit by the sun.

In the early 90’s, this was a place for a new beginning.

Having come from the Central Valley and stints in the Bay Area, it was a place away from growing crime and competitive bustle – effects of “progress” once fruit-bearing orchards were bulldozed to make room for block-to-block repeat malls and technology’s “advancement.”

For a few brief years, there was a chance for reevaluation of one’s life, and space for one to invest in their future creatively while sustaining financially. I promoted my own businesses, advocated for community, raised my children, and we delighted in established and migratory nature.

But something happened when entering the mid-90’s that imposed shadows over light and was felt worldwide. It was as if the earth opened up and claimed the rivers – and many human souls in the process – leaving the survivors victim to a steadily encroaching desert where laughter became rare and real struggle began taking hold.

I held ground until 2018, and then fled what I’d considered my small Utopia, barely escaping the hell-bent drying pond now inhabited by too many fat catfish imported from the big cities who, in their greed for more, raised the housing prices so high my family could no longer compete to survive there.

Long before this, good families had observed housing prices rising and took advantage of this by “selling out,” embarking on their own quests to find where other families had gone eastward in their searches for better futures.

I was one of the caring stragglers, witnessing the beauty of an untamed land bled dry with aspects only preserved for “presentable” parody – reflections of a now empty shell – reminding me of times in a place that once held my heart, called Home.

When I offered housecleaning, I grew close with many clients. However, I could never fully join in as a playful participant in our interactions because I had to maintain the marketable veneer of professionalism.

When I offered massage therapy, I could not even greet clients I worked with openly in public, for need to adhere to strict client confidentiality. No matter depths of communication and natural bonding through enacted healing, I was forced to pretend we had no association and to shut off my own needs.

Now, as a creative writer, I must choose carefully which concepts I will present to you – not for fear you will run away or that I will be targeted, but because humans can only handle so much truth.

When the dreadlocked, hippied-out adult vagrant began hyper-intelligently ranting about the injustices of society’s turning a blind eye to humanity’s connective bonds after I “rejected” his demandingly-proferred, partially eaten Hershey’s (TM) chocolate bar (after he’d so “generously” made efforts to reassure he hadn’t touched the rest of it – but failed to also include whether or not he was carrying COVID), and professed concern that the chocolate was melting in the day’s heat – that “it would be wasted!” – I countered his logic by carrying his philosophy to next higher levels, adding to it my own insightful vexations, as I was ready and willing to engage with him further on the subject.

But, he turned quickly away – as if running. He did not want to hear anyone agreeing or disagreeing with him, and parted with an over-the-shoulder warning: “be careful about that!” implying I was ignoring connective potential, when in fact, he was the one refusing to Receive.

I guess the chocolate melting was more important.

I used to think that it made sense that, at least occasionally, a child would require a minimal “smack-to-the-bootie” for insolence or major indiscretion. 

However, having experienced within myself how past trauma now sometimes affects synaptic firing – and noting how said occasional and rare “spank” never built safety nor rapport between a child and me in that moment – I wonder if the act of having been spanked horrendously (and often, without due cause) in my own childhood somehow imbedded at least a smidgeon of false reasoning – and that perhaps, we ought to never “spank” developing human beings, at all. 

Granted (as still occasionally experienced in my youngest’s growth process), an unruly youth-unit can seem “over the top,” with there being (at least in my mind) a need to immediately STOP, if not “correct,” poor behaviors when they are happening and being projected “vociferously” onto me.

But again, maybe this idea (and “need”) is just the bad past programming influencing…

Is it true that without corporal punishment we’d be an out-of-control or extremely passive society? Or is this a place worthy of “applying logic” over heatedly debated emotion?

Certainly, this “militaristic method” can be outed as a need for asserting dominance and/or control over a situation that – quite frankly – can get anybody flustered.