Mommie Dark

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Posts by Mommie Dark

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  33

  What would you say to Jesus?

  by YoYoMama in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  if at the end when jesus comes to make justice on earth and it turns out that jehovah's witnesses was the one true path, what would you say to him?.

  notice i said if...

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  Mommie Dark

  I would say 'dude you're one crappy pathmaker' and take off cross-country.
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  15

  Worth

  by joelbear in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  following up on my self esteem thread, i have been doing some thinking about worth and self worth and what makes people worth something.. how do you define worth?.

  everybody's worth can be defined monetarily by how many assets he/she owns but those are not the person's worth, they are they worth of what they own.. to the world in general, each individual is not worth much.

  i would say that the amount of worth is infinitesimal when put up against 6 billion humans (not counting the trillions of other living entities alive at any one point in time) and then also put up against all the humans that have ever lived.. its hard to compare your worth to einstein, newton, salk and a handful of others whose lives have actually shifted the human experience positively.

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  Mommie Dark

  Joel, I've been battling that feeling of worthlessness all my life. As a very small child I was convinced by JWdom that my every inclination was sinful, that my desire to nurture and use my talents was selfish, sinful, and entirely worthless. Since my ONLY gifts were in the arts, and I was taught that art is pointless except in service of the WT, I learned to feel ashamed of needing to sing, to write, of wanting to act and produce theatrically.

  It's been a lifelong process trying to undo those guilts and shames. I still can't let myself call writing 'work' although the process manifestly IS hard work; my gut still insists it's dilettantism at its worst and emotional gridlock sets in. I've learned not to try to force 'growth' on my scared inner child, hoping that someday it will get over those slaps and be happy to be itself.

  Lately I've begun to think you can't measure your worth by deeds. You can't measure your worth relative to that of others. Does a flower compare itself to the other blossoms? I was sitting in the schoolyard watching my son play; it was a gorgeous sunny day and the trees were clothed in shades of rosy gold. It was windy and showers of leaves swirled in every gust. They carpeted the playground with the scent of their sweet decay. I sat grooving on the leaves underfoot. Each one was a miniature marvel, delicately veined, tiny jewels of mixed color. Did one leaf compare itself to another? Did the brown-edged bug-nibbled ones sigh that they were not so fine as the perfect ones the little girls were excitedly collecting? Did the golden ones feel jealous of their scarlet companions? Did the small curled ones feel inferior to the broad flat ones? Did the ones already on the ground feel inferior to their stronger more determined brothers still in the branches?

  The leaves swirled in spiral vortices, carried by dust devils bouncing off the school walls. They made a glorious shouting clatter against the voice of the wind that carried them, heedless, across the lawns. Each little insignificant leaf was self-contained, beautiful in its own way, complete unto itself. Each leaf was necessary to the life of the tree from which it fell, and each was fulfilling its function by drying up and falling to the ground. In death serene, those leaves will decay into springy loam that cushions the heedless feet of playing children in future seasons, beneath yet more cycles of new leaves.

  As they lie rotting underfoot, do leaves worry about their relative place on the branch pecking order? Do the biggest leaves from the top branches get special dispensation from rot? Do the leaves that get pressed into books or ironed into wax paper tombs feel superior to the ones that make compost?

  We're the leaves on a very big tree Joel. As individuals, we're precious, unique, and no better or worse than any other leaf. We live, we fulfill our function as parts of the whole, and then we die, and rot, and thus nourish the tree of life. If we can just 'be' the unique individual we were born to be, we have fulfilled our function. Comparison is fruitless. Pointless. Meaningless.

  Hear that wind? It's the cycle of life, swirling all around you. We can't change where it blows us so we might as well enjoy the scenery while riding it to the common inevitability.
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  28

  Help me... please...

  by mindfield in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  it's funny how 2 hours can make you question the doubts you've had for months.

  just got home from the hall after speaking with an elder... had a friendly chat about my doubts... finally culminating in my admitting that i didn't believe the discreet slave really existed, and that all my jw beliefs were non-existent.

  2 hours.

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  Mommie Dark

  . http://quotes.jehovahswitnesses.com/default.htm

  this may give you some ammo.

  Good luck!

  Keep questioning their sacred cows, you're on the right track!
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  15

  Favourite Horror Movies

  by Commie Chris in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  in the spirit of halloween, list your all-time fave horror flicks.

  these are mine:.

  nosferatu.

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  Mommie Dark

  OMG Trilogy of Terror was a scream! Karen Black and that little toothy doll...

  one of my faves was The Return of Count Yorga for the same reasons. It was a genuine stinker end to end, brainless vampire gore, or as star Mariette Hartley affectionately called it 'a fang bang.'

  We used to do the all-nite horror shows at the drive-in; hilarious clunkers like Frogs and The Incredible Two-Headed Man (with Ray Milland and Roosevelt Grier LOL) and Night of the Living Dead.

  The first version of The Haunting was a genuinely scary film. The remake was special-effects neato but nowhere near as creepy.

  Most horror films are just gratuitous gore and crap. Of course this could be said of 90% of H'wood's products...
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  42

  Jehovah is sifting the organization

  by YoYoMama in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  jehovah keeps sifting and cleanning out the organization.

  this board is proof of that sifting work.

  congratulations on being cleansed out of jehovah's organization because of your inmoral and prideful lives.

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  Mommie Dark

  Jehovah is sifting his butt crust and a YoYo fell out. Too bad it had to fall in Simon's little wading pool.
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  156

  I'm Screwed Up, You're Screwed Up

  by Farkel in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i have not followed very many threads of late, so if someone has already made the same observations i'm about to make, i apologize for my redundancy.. .

  i admit it: i'm part of a highly secretive, highly elite group.

  (we have to drink two quarts of fresh yak blood and get a tattoo of a pentagram on our butts as part of of the initiation.

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  Mommie Dark

  "Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep, it starts when you're always afraid, step out of line, The Man come and take you away"

  the scent of fear is palpable in here. It could be amusing if it weren't so damn predictable.
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  15

  Halloween!! What do I dooooooooo!!!!!!

  by expatbrit in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  ok this will be my first year participating in halloween.

  i grew up a jw, so have never enjoyed it as a kid or as an adult.. so, i need some guidance!.

  what do i do when the little bastards come to the door?.

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  Mommie Dark

  It always cracks me up eavesdropping on the kids as they divvy up the loot. They really do tell each other who gives 'good' candy and who gives the cheap waxy taffy things nobody really ever eats. "Trade ya three o these fer that Jolly Rancher" "No way man!"

  I buy tootsie roll midgies and tootsie roll pops coz they arent very expensive and most kids like em. We get very few trick or treaters in our neighborhood. Parents drive over to the 'ritzy' section of town so the kids can get 'better' loot.

  A couple of the dorms at the local college organize trick or treat for the community too. They decorate all the student lounges and common rooms, make little haunted house mazes and fortune-telling booths, lots of them dress up, and the kids stream through the building up & down all the stairs collecting treats and having fun. This year one of the nursing homes is advertising safe trick or treat with them, too.

  My ten year old? Entirely uninterested in beggar's night this year. Has no plans to go out and shrugs when asked about the seasonal candylust. Mommie Hallowe'en maven is crushed. No playacting no dressup no ghoulish joie de vivre en famille.

  The moon is most excellently doing its thing for the hols though. A truly cold and foreboding moon, perfectly suited to communion through the veil between the worlds.

  Dressing up in her best moon suit,
  MD
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  32

  trick or treating

  by teejay in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  of all the holidays, for me halloween has the least appeal.. i have a memory of going trick-or-treating once, at my "worldly" father's insistence (he roasted peanuts in the oven for the door-knockers... i remember), about the time my mom learned the truth.

  i must've been about five years old.. despite the fact that i'm a hard-core agnostic and a fear of gods or demons are a non-issue, i still have trouble encouraging kids -- under the guise of costumes and fun -- of extorting treats from neighbors.

  can i get a witness?

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  Mommie Dark

  Hallowe'en and Days of the Dead have always been a part of harvest rituals in lots of cultures. In Mexico cleaning the cemeteries is part of the routine after the crops are in and it's done in time with the harvest moon. The veil between the living and the dead was believed thinnest during the 'death' of the year and it was considered respectful (and prudent) to honor your dead at this time of year. The fact that life can only continue if rooted in the decay of that which has gone before was celebrated with macabre glee, a collective ghoulish grin at our inevitable mortality, a necessary reassurance that the cycles of life continue whether we wear a mortal coil or not.

  Carve the veggies into lanterns for old lost skeptic Jack who didn't believe the faerie folk could lure him into the darkness...and give the little ghoulies and ghosties some sweeties so they don't play tricksies...you never know what spirits walk among the mortals on All Hallow's Eve, so smile and giftie all the wee ones who tap at the doors on Beggar's Night.

  It's not a Christian thing, it's a mortal thing.
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  2

  Poem: Why Words Are Unsatisfactory

  by Mommie Dark in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  language, bane and blessing, i have savored your wares,.

  saccharine, strychnine, balm of gilead,.

  and other flavors so removed from moderate.

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  Mommie Dark

  Language, bane and blessing, I have savored your wares,
  saccharine, strychnine, Balm of Gilead,
  and other flavors so removed from moderate
  only the jaded, bored, and desperate dare to sample.

  In your world are many waters:
  Oceans with rhyme and meter and measured tides,
  currents and undertows and reefs
  from grim to Paradise green;
  vast lakes formed from the pressure of political ice
  where storms churn and the sturdiest craft can be sunk
  and one bright Beat phrase may float the only survivors.

  Language, you have had your worshippers,
  martyrs, sycophants making sacrificial offerings of verse
  and sweat and tears and blood;
  your essential flaws dispose of most with a historic shrug
  and they disappear
  sink without a bubble
  beneath the surface of your inadequacy.

  Occasionally a desperate note in a jade-green bottle bobs to the
  surface,
  to be found and revered by some mad shaman
  in an ivy-covered ivory tower.
  Its meaning is misconstrued at best.

  My home has been here, rafting the seas of verse, hiking the arid trails
  of fact,
  seeking El Dorado across the trackless wastes of a thousand ideologies
  and praying nonstop to all the gods in your pantheon of synonyms for
  goodness.
  I get lost and waste valuable time hacking my way through hybrid kudzu
  drafts.
  Sometimes the trails are tortuous, littered with doggerel and dangling
  participles
  and snarls of hopelessly mixed metaphors.
  I am getting weary of your scapes and climes; the range of your
  possibilities
  appears of late to be just another obstacle.
  I grow weary of the substance of this world; itc very elements confound
  me with their
  complexity, their substance too solid for emotion, too weak for
  comfort... the clay feet of my paradigm.

  What peace, to leave this world of language! To just turn oblique to
  every phrase, and hang
  suspended between the molecules of thought,
  in a wordless dimension, fixed, bright;
  bearing mute testimony only to the light of being,
  without artifact or clue
  or telltale jade-green bottle.

  ***

  This old bit of doggerel is offered to those of you who have asked me repeatedly why I don't try to write seriously any more. I think it's self-explanatory. It was written while I was in serious therapy and struggling with some of the ego issues surrounding nurturing alleged talent.

  I found a lot of this junk cluttering up a perfectly good notebook recently. Amazing how much time I used to waste on this sort of magic trick. Fortunately I'm much better now...

  Realizin she hasn't evolved to a wordless dimension yet but workin on it,
  MD
  'just another onionhead and damn proud of it'
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  9

  JW Parenting Vs. Your Own

  by pettygrudger in

  1. social
  2. family

  i'm interested in knowing how any of you now raise your children.

  we all know how the majority of jw children are raised - berated, guilt-ridden, low self-esteem, spanked regularly, obey in fear, etc.

  neither have ever been spanked, i've never really raised my voice to them in anything other than a stern tone, and i don't punish for individual thought or action (unless they are/were in jeopardy of hurting themselves or others emotionally, mentally or physically).

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  Mommie Dark

  Lisa your rules sound so sensible and simple! Of course we all know simple does NOT mean 'easy'; it's obvious your child is learning good lessons in self-discipline from your rules. Congratulations on doing a spiffy job!

  I confess I sometimes err on the side of indulgence with Little Dark; reactionism to the whack-'em-into-submission style I grew up with and practiced on my older kids. However the basic rules are simple around here too and he is real easygoing about compliance, so I feel the occasional indulgence of the only kid in a houseful of adults is not harming him.

  He has a schedule we can all live with and school is no hassle. He is a fine student, newly-elected to student council, takes violin lessons, does his homework without complaint, and usually doesn't make a chore out of bathing. He loves to read and draw and has an incredible sense of humor. He plays D&D and other games with his grown family and keeps right up with them. I feel blessed to have a relatively 'easy' kid in my middle age (raising ADHD kids in the cult was a daily waking nightmare!) and it's obvious which method of childrearing gives superior results.

  If I could go back I would sure change how I treated my grown boys. I'm grateful they have turned out as nice as they did considering how they learned as kids. Personal responsibility is a much better way than cult fearmongering!