My Karma is Better than Your Karma

My Karma is Better than Your Karma
In past lives I must have done amazing things, earning an abundance of spiritual brownie points. Perhaps I was an Egyptian high priestess – that seems to be popular one, according to many who access the akasha, and I have numerous friends convinced they lived lives in Egypt as caretakers of esoteric knowledge. I could also have been a Native American shaman. Many of my peers were Native American medicine men or women. I’m sure I must have been some type of royalty, or at least, in many lives, a member of the upper classes. It seems very likely I’ve been a martyr – one of the women burned as a witch for being a midwife who used mysterious herbs or something, and while I burned, I remained true to my cause and died with a saintly expression on my face. And, as one past-life reader mentioned, my soul did originate from Venus, the planet of love, beauty, and art appreciation. And, of course, I am here to be a spiritual teacher, a light worker in the wilderness of maya (the illusion that matter is real and all that).
I’m certain I was never a washer- woman from northern England whose husband worked as an iron molder coming home soot covered, coughing phlegm, bone tired, with three kids whose teeth were becoming rotten and bellies were often empty. That is what my ancestors on my mother’s side did, molded iron in Rotheram, England for several generations. Of course, I discovered that on Ancesters.com, not from my brother who always gives the impression we are from a line of blue blood, starting its course in England, and making its way to Plymouth where our grandfather was an international trader. According to Ancester.com, my father’s father, John Damon (originally Daemon), who lived in Plymouth, was a bookkeeper, and his wife, Fanny Mae Stevenson came from Rotheram where her mother was a housekeeper in Scotland. There is a lot of steel in our history - steel molding, blacksmithing, filthy lower class work that gave my ancestors backs of steel. It would be nice if that translated to a genetic predisposition to buns of steel. Of course, my brother never talked much about the Gatenby’s, or my mother’s father, Grandpa Gatenby, who came from England in the late 1800’s whose father molded steel. Grandpa Gatenby worked as a steam-engineering in the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota.
That is the region where whites stole the land from the Lakota Indians after discovering gold in the Black Hills. Philip always spoke of the Gatenby’s with a somewhat dismissive air as if our mother’s family were not a part of us, as if we were Damons, and being a Damon from Plymouth is how we defined ourselves. And I grew up feeling like a Damon, feeling the privilege in my blood that gave me an air of confidence even though I was an orphan and floated unanchored through life moving into land mines that kept exploding my existence into incoherent pieces. Even though I now realized some of the families I would land in were actually a step up from trailer trash by the standards of any self-respecting blue blood. Still I was gifted with that false sense of one-upmanship that lives just under the skin, that sense of entitlement that privileged Anglos have over everyone else – perhaps earned by good karma generated from past lives, I would later rationalize this sense of privilege, as I tried to put these disparate influences into perspective. Now, I am hip to the fact that all of this is an illusion, of course, so we really cannot quantify good karma, versus bad in that simplistic and formulaic way designed to stack the cards in our favor, making us believe our history is a pristine slate of good deeds spotted with periods of politically correct martyrdom and grandiose roles that compare to Russell Crow in the Gladiator.
That being said, and ego aside, the very fact that I am hip to the perils of karmic grandstanding puts me in the category of someone who must have learned some pretty heavy lessons in past lives, and most likely done something right or I certainly would not be able to discern the complexity of cause and effect, bringing me back full circle to “in my past lives I must have done some good things being as spiritually savy as I am in this one.”

Mt Lipstick is Bleeding

My Lipstick is Bleeding


It is not as if my lips are on fire or anything extraordinary is happening. It’s not as if I need to be rushed to some emergency room for immediate lip surgery because some collagen injection caused an extreme allergic reaction threatening to blow off my face. It is not as if I’ve had an injection of botox that has frozen my lips making it impossible to display any kind of emotion. It is simply that now when I apply lip color, there is a spot where a trace of rose bleeds outside my lip line. This is not a tragedy, yet considering I need glasses to see the details of any make-up application, it can be aggravating. When I put on my reading glasses, the kind I only needed after forty, I see small hairs under my brows that need to be tweezed and the small line at the top of my lip where the rose bleeds. I see other things I chose not to report that remind me of inevitable and unforgiving time. My outsides have changed and my insides, too.
One thing I notice is that when a certain man calls me to have lunch, I cringe. I decline, saying I have other plans even though I may not. I don’t feel like making small talk with someone new. I don’t feel like trying to look a certain way. I don’t want to be forced to look down at my midriff and regret the scones I have consumed on days when I was convinced I would never have to look down at my midriff and consider a guy looking at the roll that shows under my tee shirt. In other words, I don’t have the energy to market myself. The hormones that once drove me like some completely mad, mindless woman have diminished. I once did sit ups so my midriff would be taught under a tee shirt, and thought a great deal about what I looked like first in the morning.
I believed lip gloss should look like I had not actually put anything on my lips, when in actuality, I had spent quite a bit of time choosing a gloss that would look like I had not spent any time at all on making my lips look pale peach. The goal was to appear not to have spent much time on making myself look attractive. The reality was, like many women, my life was filled with such enhancements as: perms to achieve that naturally wavy look, blush and face powder to make my face appear naturally smooth and glowing, and trips to the tanning booth to achieve a naturally, sun-kissed glow. I considered undergarments very carefully, and embarked on a program of daily Jane Fonda exercises.
The question is, at fifty seven, has laziness made me overweight and am I simply making excuses for not caring so much, or have I reached some exulted state of wisdom, where I have transcended superficiality and the trivial concerns of youth? Or could I be rapidly vacillating between the two states at the speed of light and thus, am caught between laziness and enlightenment. Am I declining lunch because of disinterest, or because of fear the man will notice my midriff? When I encountered a man the other day with whom I had had a brief romance ten years ago, I noticed he looked old. He had a belly and his hair had lots of gray. The skin on his face looked looser. I turned to him and said, “A blast from the past,” and we talked and I remembered how slim I was and how fit he was when we lay together on my bed, not actually making love but kissing until six in the morning. As we stood in the art gallery, we talked as if we didn’t notice each other’s changes. It happens to them, too, I thought.
When a woman my age and her husband enter I restaurant where I am having lunch with a friend, and she is thin and in great shape, and her husband looks happy and they are smiling, am I being cynical concluding that she swallows. I imagine she lives for him the way I could never live for the men I believed I loved. She smiles, serves, and swallows as naturally as she breathes; she doesn’t mind that he always gets the channel changer. I wonder, is she naturally a good listener who finds her man genuinely interesting, perhaps more interesting than she finds herself?