Yesterday – presidential election day. My stomach was sour – ate very little. My lower back has been hurting all week. Walking and yoga did not help, so finally gave into it – lots of lying on the floor with heating pad on. Fear. Clearly fear.
Four years ago, I watched a presidential election debate between Trump and Hilary Clinton with my parents. My skin – legs, torso, arms, face, front and back - started to feel strange. “Oh,” I thought, “This is what it means when people say their skin is ‘crawling.’” That’s is exactly what it felt like. My skin was crawling as if its cells were a colony of active spiders. My mother had dementia, she probably didn’t remember that she was a moderate Republican who always voted for that party’s presidential candidates, but she was so disturbed by Trump’s unrespectful treatment of Hilary that she exclaimed that she could not vote for him. As the debate started Dad sat slumped in his rocking chair saying that he didn’t think much of Trump, but he slowly straightened his spine during the debate. When Trump sounded just like my Dad does when he bitterly whines about the good old days, my father started to listen. My father was very bitter when he retired three decades before. During most of his career as a pediatrician he had been treated like a god with many worshippers.
Near the end, some people started to question all doctors’ exceptional entitlement to the assumption that they were omniscient, one family even tried to sue him for malpractice. In the end they did not win, but he no longer had the motivation to work. I could see Dad emotionally resonate to Trump’s anger at the loss of American white male exceptionalism. By the end of the debate he was a supporter. There was no reason involved in my father’s political conversion, my mother’s disgust at Trump’s disrespect for women, or my crawling skin. I have spent the last four years avoiding hearing or seeing the President of the United States. He plugs me in to all the times I have been physically threatened, controlled, manipulated, harassed, hit and raped by men. His record is not solely of someone who supports systematic patriarchal polices that uphold the entitlement of privileged men. He acts like he is a misogynist as defined by philosopher Kate Manne – someone who hates, has contempt for or prejudice against women or girls. Hate – contempt – these are emotional words.
So yesterday I was afraid. When I went to bed the race was close. Before I woke, I had a dream. I was a snake and had to go even deeper into the earth. During meditation I remembered the story that this dream referred to in Coyote Healing by Lewis Mehl-Madrona. Mehl-Madrona creates healing stories based on Native American traditions for people. The story I remembered was created for someone who needed support dealing with exceedingly difficult and scary situations. In the story as I remember it, fear has come over the land causing people to kill each other. Nakia, half snake, half human is born to a woman and her snake husband. His mother’s parents raise him, but only after they have banished their daughter and her snake family to the underground. As he grows up, his grandparents learn to overcome their fear of snake, but the rest of the land is still overcome with fear.
Grandfather decides that something must be done – he sends Nakia deep into the earth to reconcile the generations of people and snake people. With help of spider and mole he follows the smell of fear deeper into the earth. He fails twice to conquer fear, but on the third time he enters fear itself in the deepest part of the earth. He cuts himself out, and by doing so fear is conquered.
So today, I made my way deeper into the underground following the smell of fear. I have gone down before, and I trust I will have to go deeper still. The race is still close. Much of the fear I hold from being a woman in a violent patriarchal society lead by misogynists still waits for me to fully enter so that I can cut myself out. I know that I do not go on this sheroes journey alone. I am grateful to all of you snakes, humans, moles and spiders who work together to conquer the fear and violence that overcomes us.