You Don't Own Me

Last night in the Lyft back home, my daughter and her girlfriend tried to convince me I was gay. They were a powerful team. I had given them plenty of ammunition earlier in the night when, looking at them, I’d said, “I want a girlfriend.”

What I meant was I wanted someone whose coat I tried to crawl into while they were still wearing it.

Earlier that night during dinner, we’d had a waitress who, in all the best ways, belonged in her job. She was welcoming and accommodating and funny and quick with the drink order. Her sleeves were pushed up and so it was easy to read her forearm tattoo that said, You Don’t Own Me.

I wanted to know the story, so I asked.

It turns out she’d had a boyfriend, and the story was about that—about eventually feeling trapped and then leaving and feeling free. The tattoo was to remind her of all the ways she might let herself feel owned in life, and to not head down that path again.

She was so cheerful as she told us her story. She looked…free. She looked like someone who fully owned herself, and in this ownership she looked stunning. She radiated joy.

The poet Jane Hirschfield said that the poem has an intelligence that the poet does not have. What if life is like that, too? What if our life has an intelligence that we don’t have, and when we trust life, when we surrender and keep doing the next right thing, whatever it is that our guts and not our bank account or our partner tells us to do, we do things that surprise and delight us?

In the book New Challenges for Data Design the author David Bihanic wrote, Buckminister Fuller, the famous designer and systems theorist said once, in essence, that he didn’t think about beauty when he started a design, engineering, or archetecualr project. He was just concerned about function—he wanted to find the right way to devise the product. But then, in the end, if the solution he came up with was not beautiful, he knew something was wrong. For Buckminister Fuller, in some sense, beauty was an indicator or functionality and of truth.

I feel like the idea of following your bliss is a deep call to an inner listening, a freedom, and, in this functional use of a life—one in which you show up as yourself—the end result is a beauty so sharp and deep it could be seen as dangerous.

In Baudelaire’s prose poem The Bad Glazier, an angry Frenchman throws a flower pot out the window and smashes the glassware of the man hawking his wares down on the street. “Make life beautifu!” the man yells from the window as the glass shatters down below.

I love the words mystery and wonder, but sometimes I forget just how important they are to me.

This post was a gentle reminder.

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Love is the Glue - by April Dinwoodie

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Lighting the House on Fire and Ambien or Slowing Down to Tell Your Story