I enjoy your magazine, but I find it to be mostly oriented towards the rich and upper middle classes.
In "The Five of Us," Lily Koppel writes beautifully of her childhood friends and examines the different paths they took as they grew up and away from each other geographically and spiritually, while staying bonded through love and memories. In the preamble, it states that the author "reconnects with her childhood circle to explore the spiritual quest of a generation."
One must be very careful when writing on behalf of an entire generation. I do not find my friends or loved ones represented whatsoever in any of the five types she presented to characterize a "generation."
The Rabbi, the Buddhist, the Business Woman, the Activist, and the Writer?
How about the Junky, the Single Mother Struggling to Feed Her Children After Her Baby Daddy left, the Sex-Worker, the Drug Dealer, the Incarcerated, the Suicides? These may sound like statistics to you, but I assure you each and every person branded with such a label is a person full of history, idiosyncrasies, loved ones, and memories. Unfortunately for poorer people, we are more likely to watch our friends struggle through difficult lives with very rough choices and traumas and sometimes they don't survive. Are we not apart of the same generation? Are our voices not important to your magazine? Are we not equally empty, equally endowed with Buddha Nature?
Give me a nice heart-warming story of girls born into privilege growing into women with so many paths to choose from they find it overwhelming and exhilarating, fine. Give me a story of women struggling to breath through traumas you wouldn't imagine while still managing to love each other and live compassionately, and there you will find true wisdom. We could call it "Pranayama for the Drowning."
Please start appreciating real difference in your magazine and try to be a little more inclusive of people who are creatively struggling through desperation instead of meditating on mountains or relishing in the so many options and paths their friends had the luxury to choose from.
Thank you,
Davka: Deer Girl Medicine
Thursday, December 31, 2009
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9 comments:
This is a great letter. This is why I stopped reading these sorts of magazines years ago. Until they come to terms with the broader range of human experience, they just come off as some bastion of privilege, with a hint of presdestination.
ugh! I know!
When I was in Australia I fucking HATED seeing all of these little bitches of privilege that were getting MONEY from their parents to go backpacking around a foreign country for a year! FUCK! They all acted so fucking enlightened and shit for having the privilege to be able to travel, where as I had saved up from STRIPPING for my plane ticket and I was over there to do more PORN!! Haha, I didn't see shit.
What sucks is that, I'm trying to do this trail this year, because if I don't I might just explode. But I honestly can't afford this and now I find myself thinking of ways I can fucking sell my panties and do webcam shows along the way.
Where the fuck is my privileged journey? When the fuck do I get some time off from this shit?
I think your words will fall on deaf ears. To write of your suggestions would eclipse the airy fairy white lighter "it's all good" image Shamballa wants to project.
For a someone to write of these people in those lives you suggest, said New Age writer would have to temporarily stop the uber yoga, pull head out of ass and hybrid themselves to the hood(s) and just see wuddup.
Yet that is second to not only acknowledging that the shit these people are going through is a product line of a sick society and not their "challenges" so they can learn their "lessons".
Besides, would you want to see it written by people like them? I doubt they would tell it like it is. How could they?
Still looking for a word for the previous post? How about "apasociocide". Not giving a fuck that you destroy or kill off anything good in people or society.
I channeled that.
Nicely done and so true.
Have a great New Year.
Amen!!!!! I've been wanting to articulate this without offending for so long, but the hell with it! It needs to be said!!!
hah!
yes.
Absolutely yes.
thank you for writing that.
J'adore.
*Curtsies*
A.
I love it! Thank you SO MUCH for writing this! Have you received a letter in response? Please share with us when you do!
Think Shaman Hawk is right on this, sadly: they don't give a fuck.
But that does not take away from the fact it's a wonderful letter.
To Sequoia...again, sadly...that's the increasing distance between the haves and have nots. Wish I had the dough to send you--and to D.Girl--but alas...I too am a have-not.
And I'm trying to take some pride in my humility...ha ha.
Sounds like a valid critique, and no doubt you could write a good essay on the topic! I can think of some essays that might be of interest from a book called "Blue Jean Buddha."
"A Small Step From The Lotus" by Meggan Waterson
"Halted Breath" by Amy Darling
"Caught in Indra's Net" by Hwansoo Kim
"My Mom's A Buddha" by V. Sharif Fennel
(among others!)
As well as a book by Thich Nhat Hanh called "Anger."
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