Women. Horse. Mountain.
Monica J. Casper
"Cloud Horse"
A lapsed Lutheran, I often fail to put much stock in the divine (sorry, Pastor Uecker; you tried). And yet the universe—call it God, Goddess, Allah, Mother Nature, or simply The Stars—works some pretty spectacular magic.
Fate. Kismet. Destiny. Providence. Fortune. Serendipity. Karma.
She has many names.
We sometimes say, “Not a coincidence.”
We sometimes say, “Meant to be.”
We sometimes say, “Such is life.”
I pick up the phone to call my sister, Tanya, and she’s already on the line, calling me.
I float in the pool and think about my dad, gone now for more than a year, and an orange dragonfly floats across my vision. Tips his wing to me, then flies away.
I feel anxious, and my geriatric Australian Shepherd, who can barely hear and has pain in her hips, finds me and nuzzles my hand.
Suffering from working mom syndrome, my body is a drain field for cortisol. But then a hummingbird flits outside my window, and I can breathe again.
Life, seemingly random, is an exquisite dance of space, time, bodies, actions, humans, nonhumans, matter, and antimatter. Does it matter if we don’t know who or what the choreographer is? Or if it’s all improvised?
At TRIVIA, these moments of correspondence seem to happen with beautiful frequency. LVL and I crafted the “Death” issue—its very architecture—around my father’s death and her mother’s death and the unfortunate pair of snakes that drowned in my pool, settling to the bottom like stone cursive.
With our last issue, “(Pre)Occupation,” we found ourselves…preoccupied. Preoccupied with life, work, mothering, partnering, not partnering, children, animal companions, money, literature, and the ongoing, often vicious assault on women’s bodies and lives. Preoccupied with questions of feminism, politics, beauty, and truth.
This time around, our “animal instincts” were activated by fierce pack love for each other, for the bigger vision of Feminism, for the need to read women’s stories, to hear women’s voices. Julie, LVL, and I met in Tucson. We drank tea and talked about invisible feminist labor, the unrecognized work that goes into producing “feminism” for a broader public, for each other, for ourselves.
While my daughter’s adolescent boy dog, Beaumont, careened through the house eviscerating stuffed animals, we shared our fears about extinction: financial loss, emotional ruin, intellectual decay. And speaking of decay, we talked about aging. And our bodies. And the wages of being women of a certain age in a world that hates our crinkled skin and mid-century breasts and refusal to “improve” and augment.
We commiserated—and cackled—about the men who “borrow” our words and ideas for plays and essays, turning us into natural resources. The feminist writer as endangered species?
We talked of elephants and their tragic demise through poaching for ivory, and the biopolitics of love and survival among Earth’s matriarchal giants. And the ways that humans make many things so much worse. We are in what has been called the anthropocene age, and the elephants are dying along with the Black rhinos, the narwhals, the polar bears, the wolves, and too many other species.
Because of us. Because we are human.
So we ate chocolate. And a whole chicken. (Poor extinct chicken.) And we drank more tea. Something was shifting, for all of us.
I was recovering from shingles—a surprising emergence of a virus that had clandestinely inhabited my body since childhood chicken pox. It was painful and distressing; especially the realization that my means of survival—for decades—of putting one foot in front of the other and making things happen just isn’t sustainable. Shingles is linked to stress, and more women than men get it. And I’m not good at self-care, or saying no, or refusing to take on more, and more, and more.
Julie similarly stitches her family together: a playwright husband, children, aged and ailing parents including a father whose various healthcare apparatuses continually fall out of his body, a hectic (non-tenured) teaching career at an institution that could be the poster child for neoliberalism. Something was shifting in her life, too; a demand that her very self, Julie, be heard. A demand to make her needs present to herself.
LVL was confronting a different set of issues, no less uncomfortable or subversive. They were issues of Self. She wanted to stay an extra day in Tucson—we weren’t done with “Animal Instincts," and what it had brought forth was deep and delicious. What it brought forth for her was Truth. Plus, we were talking, laughing, supporting each other; moving in new ways. Swimming in the pool and in Feminism. But an over-developed sense of responsibility was calling her back to LA. At such moments, which voices do we listen to? What does the Self need, and when?
So predictably, there were tears. And intensely felt shifts in our bodies as our Selves pushed to the surface, from the domestic to the wild.
And then I opened the patio door to let the dogs out and gasped. "Oh my god, there’s a horse on the mountain!”
Julie saw it from the window in the other room and LVL rushed in and I took a picture and we gazed in wonder at the large, dark cloud-horse galloping across the Catalinas—until it dashed out of sight.
So here is the image I snapped with my new phone. For us. For you. For feminism.
When Julie returned home and showed the picture to her 10-year old daughter, Elise insisted that it wasn’t an ordinary horse but a unicorn. She’s the next generation of feminists.
Animal Instincts.
The Universe.
Feminism.
Fate. Kismet. Destiny. Providence. Fortune. Serendipity. Karma.
She has many names.
We sometimes say, “Not a coincidence.”
We sometimes say, “Meant to be.”
We sometimes say, “Such is life.”
I pick up the phone to call my sister, Tanya, and she’s already on the line, calling me.
I float in the pool and think about my dad, gone now for more than a year, and an orange dragonfly floats across my vision. Tips his wing to me, then flies away.
I feel anxious, and my geriatric Australian Shepherd, who can barely hear and has pain in her hips, finds me and nuzzles my hand.
Suffering from working mom syndrome, my body is a drain field for cortisol. But then a hummingbird flits outside my window, and I can breathe again.
Life, seemingly random, is an exquisite dance of space, time, bodies, actions, humans, nonhumans, matter, and antimatter. Does it matter if we don’t know who or what the choreographer is? Or if it’s all improvised?
At TRIVIA, these moments of correspondence seem to happen with beautiful frequency. LVL and I crafted the “Death” issue—its very architecture—around my father’s death and her mother’s death and the unfortunate pair of snakes that drowned in my pool, settling to the bottom like stone cursive.
With our last issue, “(Pre)Occupation,” we found ourselves…preoccupied. Preoccupied with life, work, mothering, partnering, not partnering, children, animal companions, money, literature, and the ongoing, often vicious assault on women’s bodies and lives. Preoccupied with questions of feminism, politics, beauty, and truth.
This time around, our “animal instincts” were activated by fierce pack love for each other, for the bigger vision of Feminism, for the need to read women’s stories, to hear women’s voices. Julie, LVL, and I met in Tucson. We drank tea and talked about invisible feminist labor, the unrecognized work that goes into producing “feminism” for a broader public, for each other, for ourselves.
While my daughter’s adolescent boy dog, Beaumont, careened through the house eviscerating stuffed animals, we shared our fears about extinction: financial loss, emotional ruin, intellectual decay. And speaking of decay, we talked about aging. And our bodies. And the wages of being women of a certain age in a world that hates our crinkled skin and mid-century breasts and refusal to “improve” and augment.
We commiserated—and cackled—about the men who “borrow” our words and ideas for plays and essays, turning us into natural resources. The feminist writer as endangered species?
We talked of elephants and their tragic demise through poaching for ivory, and the biopolitics of love and survival among Earth’s matriarchal giants. And the ways that humans make many things so much worse. We are in what has been called the anthropocene age, and the elephants are dying along with the Black rhinos, the narwhals, the polar bears, the wolves, and too many other species.
Because of us. Because we are human.
So we ate chocolate. And a whole chicken. (Poor extinct chicken.) And we drank more tea. Something was shifting, for all of us.
I was recovering from shingles—a surprising emergence of a virus that had clandestinely inhabited my body since childhood chicken pox. It was painful and distressing; especially the realization that my means of survival—for decades—of putting one foot in front of the other and making things happen just isn’t sustainable. Shingles is linked to stress, and more women than men get it. And I’m not good at self-care, or saying no, or refusing to take on more, and more, and more.
Julie similarly stitches her family together: a playwright husband, children, aged and ailing parents including a father whose various healthcare apparatuses continually fall out of his body, a hectic (non-tenured) teaching career at an institution that could be the poster child for neoliberalism. Something was shifting in her life, too; a demand that her very self, Julie, be heard. A demand to make her needs present to herself.
LVL was confronting a different set of issues, no less uncomfortable or subversive. They were issues of Self. She wanted to stay an extra day in Tucson—we weren’t done with “Animal Instincts," and what it had brought forth was deep and delicious. What it brought forth for her was Truth. Plus, we were talking, laughing, supporting each other; moving in new ways. Swimming in the pool and in Feminism. But an over-developed sense of responsibility was calling her back to LA. At such moments, which voices do we listen to? What does the Self need, and when?
So predictably, there were tears. And intensely felt shifts in our bodies as our Selves pushed to the surface, from the domestic to the wild.
And then I opened the patio door to let the dogs out and gasped. "Oh my god, there’s a horse on the mountain!”
Julie saw it from the window in the other room and LVL rushed in and I took a picture and we gazed in wonder at the large, dark cloud-horse galloping across the Catalinas—until it dashed out of sight.
So here is the image I snapped with my new phone. For us. For you. For feminism.
When Julie returned home and showed the picture to her 10-year old daughter, Elise insisted that it wasn’t an ordinary horse but a unicorn. She’s the next generation of feminists.
Animal Instincts.
The Universe.
Feminism.
About the author
Monica J. Casper, Head of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, has published several books, is co-editor and publisher of TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, and is a managing editor of The Feminist Wire. Her creative writing has appeared in Slow Trains, Vine Leaves, The Linnet’s Wings, and elsewhere. Born and raised in the Midwest, she currently resides in Tucson, Arizona with her partner, daughters, two canines, one dwarf hamster, and a fish. For more information, visit www.monicajcasper.com.
The photo to the left is obviously--or maybe less obviously--not Monica Casper; it is Cercopithecus Lomamiensis. Known as Lesula, the new species was "discovered" in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Lomami forest basin. Monica is very fond of Lesula.
The photo to the left is obviously--or maybe less obviously--not Monica Casper; it is Cercopithecus Lomamiensis. Known as Lesula, the new species was "discovered" in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Lomami forest basin. Monica is very fond of Lesula.