(pt 6/? stevetony ocean’s 11 au, ao3 link in bio)

“You’re out of your goddamn minds!”

Steve, admittedly, has to acquiesce to that. “It’s never been tried before…” he says, in an attempt to appeal to Fury’s daring and ambitious side.

Fury scoffs. “Oh, it’s been tried, three times, unsuccessfully. What do you have that the other three didn’t?”

“A divorce,” Bucky mutters under his breath. Nat steps in his foot under the table and he attempts to hide his wince, to no avail if Fury’s raised eyebrow suggests anything.

“I know casino security and these guys… they have enough ammo and people to occupy Paris. And even if you manage to make it out of there, with your money and your life you seemed to have forgotten that you’d still be in the middle of the fucking desert!”

“Would I go to you with a half-assed plan?” Steve challenges, then amends after Fury’s look, “Would Nat let me show you this with a half-assed plan?”

“Fine.”

“They’re Laufeyson’s places.”

Fury pauses for a second. He knows exactly why Steve and his little, soon to be expanded, gang came to him: he has money, an entirely justified vendetta against the greasy little fucker, and incredibly misplaced trust in Steve Rogers.

“If you’re going to steal from Loki Laufeyson you better be prepared for the aftermath. This sort of thing used to be civilised. You’d hit a guy, he’d whack you. Done. Laufeyson… at the end of this, he better not know you're involved, not know your names, or think you're dead. Because he'll kill you, and then he'll go to work on you.”

“I know,” Steve says, simply, “we’ve gotta be careful, precise. Well funded.”

“And batshit crazy,” Fury adds. “Who you got?”

“Well, we’ll need an AV guy…”

Bucky watches the patrons of a coffee shop go about their daily routines, bleary-eyed students amongst immaculately dressed businesspeople interspersed with tired parents desperately trying to console their children, eventually finding Clint despite his seemingly desperate attempts to blend in with the haggard students, if his dress and general demeanour is anything to go by. Clint spots him barely a second after.

“What do you need?” Clint asks, pressing a hot drink into his hand a minute later.

“Can’t I just visit a friend?”

“Sure. Just a little sus’ that you’re making a social call less than a week after Rogers’ got out, don’t you think?”

Bucky grunts and doesn’t even question how he knows that Steve got out, instead, he presses a plane ticket and an address into his hand. “You better make it. He’s planning on taking down Loki,” he tells him before he does a significantly better job of blending into the crowds.

“...a demo guy…”

“Thor?” Steve suggests. Nat shakes her head.

“Overseas.”

“Technically,” Sam interjects, “on the seas.”

Steve doesn’t groan aloud but it’s a near thing, “Don’t tell me he’s with…”

“Hey, last I heard he’s settling fantastically into the pirate life!”

“With a guy who takes advice from his pet raccoon.”

“With a guy who takes advice from his pet raccoon.”

To be fair, Steve doesn’t actively hate Quill and his gang of modern pirate mercenaries, he’s even worked with them before. But he does actively believe that Thor can do a lot better, though, if he’d blown up a small, mostly desolated Norweigian town and was on the run he too would go to sea.

“Well, who else do we have?”

Natasha watches from the safety of a cop car as alarms start blaring and, consequently, a stream of young, pretty criminals get arrested, Carol trailing behind at the end. She waits another minute, lets the real cops cuff her before she swoops in, flashes a badge and tells the disgruntled cop to “go get my partner, tell him we got this.” Under the guise of roughly handling her, she passes a set of materials to her, “That enough?”

Carol nods as Nat reminds the officer to go get her fictional partner. She hears a loud snap from behind Carol and she mutters “Thirty seconds.”

They make their way through the yellow tape, “Steve here?” Carol asks, tossing her makeshift explosive into an abandoned squad car.

“‘Round the corner,” Nat confirms, unlocking her handcuffs and tucking them into her pocket, “ten seconds?”

Carol grunts. “Almost. Be good working with professionals again.”

“Okay,” she says, after a beat, “go!” They both start running as Nat yells to her ‘colleagues’.

“Get down! There’s a bomb! Everybody down!!”

Amongst the chaos and mayhem, Carol and Nat manage to slip away mostly unnoticed; a baby in a strolling blinks distrustingly up at them as they pass them and their father, who appears to be very engaged in a phone call that seems to have taken a turn for the worst, but aside from that, they’ve made a fairly clean break.

“Captain.”

“Major.”

“Matt?”

“Isn’t he still mad at me?”

“He’s also still working pro bono for cherry pie.”

“You knock,” Steve tells Sam when they find themselves in front of a door that grandly declares that this is the location of Nelson, Murdock & Page.

Sam looks only slightly affronted. “Why me?”

“Matt doesn’t like me.”

Before they can carry on bickering the door swings open, and the man in question appears before their eyes. “Matt likes the Steve Rogers that doesn’t make him defend an undefendable case.”

“Aw, you think I’m undefendable?” Steev mocks, electing not to comment on the fact that 1. Matt talking in the third person heavily disturbs him, and he’s been to Jersey, and 2. he plead guilty.

“Ignore him” Sam interjects.

“Often do.”

“We have a score. Big one. Vegas.”

If emotions could radiate from people, Matt would be screaming suspicion and distrust. He doesn’t do well in casinos far too much input, though he has enough faith in Steve that he’s pretty sure he’ll never actually cross the threshold. “I’m the whole list, aren’t I?”

Steve looks in betrayal at Sam, “He’s the whole list?” Sam, as he also often does, ignores Steve.

“Combination of cons. One night. $150 million between us.”

“You’re lucky it’s a slow week,” Matt grumbles, before he shuts the door in their face.

“Well. That went better than I thought it would.”

Sam just rolls his eyes and shoves Steve in the general direction of out.

“Eight should be enough, right?”

Nat shrugs, mentally ticks through their current roster and matches the skill sets to jobs and watches Steve do the same.

“You think we need one more?”

Nat shrugs, tilts her head. She could do it, Matt could probably do it but...

“You think we need one more.”

Nat shrugs again.

“Okay. we’ll get one more.”

Steve doesn’t often get the subway. It brings back… interesting memories. This time, he’s not going particularly anywhere, just watching a guy who looks barely old enough to graduate high school - by recommendation of JJJ. The train comes to a sudden stop and all the commuters sway forth with the air of people who have come to expect it land have given up fighting it, like a child with a broken backpack, with the exception of Parker. He, committing subway etiquette blasphemy, bumps into a guy who looks like he believes he’s too good for the subway, sleek, well-dressed Wall Street type. Steve has fond memories of breaking into guys like his houses. Parker, in one of the smoothest lifts Steve’s ever seen, takes the guy’s Apple watch and his wallet, muttering a shy, bashful, “Sorry,” after.

Steve follows him, unnoticed, as he gets off the packed train into an even more crowded station. He’s not in any rush: he’s done this before. Parker fluidly dodges the crowds with the ease of a kid who grew up here, who grew up blending in without any intention of hiding.

Steve brushes up against him, without acknowledging him in the slightest and forges on, plan fulfilled. All he has to do it wait. Then, out of pure curiosity, he doubles back and follows him through a series of back alleys until he reaches the backside an apartment complex flirting with ‘decrepit’. Parker takes maybe two steps back before swinging himself up 2, 3, 4 floors via the fire escape. A broad skillset could get one very far in this world.

Up in apartment 4C, Peter Parker empties his pockets to find the Apple watch and, instead of the overstuffed wallet, to his dismay, he unpockets a business card with a name, location, and time. Well, if he’s going to be kidnapped at least the culprit has been kind enough to give their name - possibly an alias, the primary location - a relatively popular diner, and the time - dinner.

When he gets to Ditko & Lee, a man, steely-eyed and ruggedly handsome with the beard, makes eye contact with him. On the tabletop next to a half-drunk cup of coffee, there’s the wallet from the Wall Street guy. Against all better instincts, Peter approaches him.

“Who are you?” Peter asks, a name just doesn’t cut it for him.

“Friend of JJJ,” Steve replied. Peter supposes he intended to be vague and somewhat mysterious and elusive, but to Peter’s admittedly limited knowledge, Mr. Jameson doesn’t actually have that many friends. “Sit down.”

Peter sits.

Out of his jacket pocket, Steve brings out a plane ticket and places it parallel to the wallet. He keeps his hand over it. “This is a plane ticket, job offer. In or out, right now.”

“What if I say no?”

Steve shrugs. “We get someone not as good and you can go back to… petty pickpocketing, Peter Parker.”

He considers it. It could be a trap, what for, he’s not entirely sure, but he’s come across many a shady person in his life. Steve is definitely shady, but he feels like he wouldn’t screw him over. Peter thinks it’s the eyes.

He looks down at the wallet and the ticket, equidistant from him. One or the other. Take it or leave it.

Steve, as a test for more his own enjoyment than anything else, decides to signal a passing waitress for a refill. When he turns back to the table the wallet is still there, but the ticket is gone.

“That’s the best lift you’ve done yet,” Steve had, at the very least, expected to feel it. Maybe he’s losing his touch, getting soft.

“Las Vegas, huh?”

Steve shrugs. “America’s playground.”

 “I didn't know you owned casinos?” Steve said rolling over to face Tony properly. It’s stupidly late, a kind of late that’s really far too much into the next day to really, feasibly be perceived as stupidly late and really, is stupidly early, early enough that the sun’s begun it’s daily rise, streaming in soft, pale dawn light through Steve’s loft’s windows. They’d stayed up the entire night, just talking, actually getting to know each other.

“Technically,” Tony said, fighting a yawn, “I don’t. A subsidiary of Stark Industries owns the bank that owns some of the casinos down there.” His hair was messy, not intentionally, black-and-white photoshoot in a workshop that’s actually very well composed soundstage, but ridiculous bedhead messy. Steve rarely found Tony not gorgeous, but right now, curled in his comforter, light casting long, lazy shadows dancing around the room, Tony seemed so vulnerable and trusting and open and he knew it was way too early for words as strong as these, but he was falling, he’s falling hard and fast and all he could think was I love you.

So instead he made a stupid joke. The type that you would only find even the slightest bit funny if you had been awake for over a day and now found yourself in a situation where time moved like sticky sweet syrup, where urgency had never bothered to be invented, where you’re so drunk on intimacy and love you can barely see what’s ahead of you, and honestly, in that moment, in the moment where nothing else exists and it feels like the world was made for you and for them and for you to be together in that moment, you can’t care that you can’t see what’s looming ahead.

“Casino’s are like… fairgrounds for adults. With greater consequences,” Steve wasn’t sure if the sentence even makes sense, but Tony giggled and he found that he couldn’t care for grammatical structure and other such follies.

“America’s playground,” Tony mumbled, far more interested in pressing feather-light kisses to Steve’s jaw, tender and loving. Maybe, Steve let himself think, let himself hope that he felt it too. Hard and fast and damned foolish.

MORE FG Analysis....(I think I might have a problem)

I keep rewatching and rewatching the Clover and Qrow scenes we have so far and trying to see the bromance thing or the platonic buddies thing and I just... can’t? 

Look, I don’t run around with shipping goggles on if that means anything to anyone. I got through the entirety of The Lord of the Rings and the first two Hobbit movies without shipping a single couple (Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage punched me in the heart in the third Hobbit film, but that’s another tangent for another time). I wasn’t even fully on Bumblby until volume 4. 

There’s just no other way to view these scenes. Things keep escalating between these two. I don’t really have a good scale for measuring romantic/sexual tension, so I’ll just try to pinpoint the moments in which things tick up a notch or two. Starting with...

The Mine Scene

The baseline here is the casual conversation that Qrow initiates. From there, here are the beats:

Conversation turns personal very quickly, thanks to Qrow opening up

Clover catches Qrow

They engage the Grimm

Qrow warns Clover

Qrow shares his semblance (again... Qrow is the one to get personal, which I find extremely telling)

Clover shares his semblance (and puts Qrow at ease)

Clover flirts (look, I’m trying to be as objective atm as possible, but the wink, the smile, the eyebrow wiggle, the full-body lean, and the lingering stare as he turns around... I’m sorry, there’s no other word for that. I challenge anyone of you to replace Qrow with a woman, show it to someone who doesn’t watch RWBY, ask what the tone of this still-shot is, and find me a single person who will tell you it’s not romantically charged. I dare you.)

Qrow stares back (this is absolutely from a myriad of emotions running through him and I will not discount that, but can we all at least admit that he seems to come out of this shock in a pretty okay place?)

They reach the main cavern and... more flirting/showing off from Clover. (The toss, the smirk, the salute, and the fancy-ass backflip which, considering he hooks Kingfisher to the ceiling and goes zipping upwards directly after this (thank you @fairgame-is-endgame​) was completely unnecessary.) 

The joke! How did I miss this?? Qrow doesn’t joke about their semblances for the first time at Schnee manor. He does it here! (Sorry, I couldn’t get the dialogue in there with Qrow’s eyes open.)

Clover counters with: “Hmm. No. I’d chalk that one up to talent.” (Already highlighting the difference between their attitudes regarding their semblances. For Qrow, everything bad that happens is his fault. For Clover, semblance isn’t everything. A very healthy person for Qrow to be around, no?)

The Truck Scene

Now we shift to the truck scene. Again, trying to pinpoint the beats where the romantic tension clicks up or something significant happens:

Clover initiates conversation. (Apparently, him mentioning Ruby is enough to put people on edge, but might I point out a few things? (Jesus lord, this is turning into another essay.) He brings up Ruby as “[Qrow’s] niece”, first of all. And that’s it. You know where he shifts the focus from there? On to Qrow. This is Clover’s next line in this exchange: “It’s a good thing they had someone to look up to and get them through it. Not everyone is so lucky.” Real nefarious there, guys. Way to have Master Spy Clover probe for info. Oh, don’t get me wrong. Clover is absolutely probing here but it’s for another reason entirely.)

Qrow shifts from being closed off and a little taciturn to making sure the conversation doesn’t drop. (He thanks Clover in case anyone wants me to be specific about that). 

Qrow gets personal. Again. He opens up about being an alcoholic.

And the peak of this scene? Clover calls Qrow on his self-deprecating habits and tries to offer him something solid and good to hold on to. Which I and others have written about ad nauseum, to the point where repeating myself is getting annoying, so have some visual aids instead:

James’s Office

Non-verbal communication. Here, surrounded by people that both Clover and Qrow know better than they know each other at this point, and their first instinct in this moment is still to seek each other out. Enough said.

Schnee Manor

The second inside joke between them about their semblances. 

Qrow flirts openly. Similar to Clover’s “You’ve had more of an effect on them than you realize” line delivery here, Qrow’s “I mean, they already invited you, didn’t they?” carries a very specific and multilayered tone. He’s playful, he’s open, he’s relaxed, he’s enjoying himself, and yes, the man is flirting. It’s in the voice, it’s in the smile, it’s in the body language. And it is absolutely in the lingering stare as Clover walks through the door (a mirror of Clover’s lingering stare in the mines, btw).

Final thoughts/speculation

Does anyone want them? You’re gonna get ‘em. 

I think the fact that Qrow is the one who gets personal when he has every damn reason right now to be guarded is ridiculously significant. In the last two volumes before this, his sister tried to have him murdered, a long-trusted colleague (Lionheart) turned out to be a traitor, and Oz was revealed to be a massive liar (I love Oz, I really do, but the man screwed up). Qrow has no reason to drop his walls for just anyone so you know what this tells me? He’s interested in Clover from the beginning. Qrow’s early-stage flirting style isn’t to wink and show-off (at least not anymore), it’s to lower his guard and see how the other person responds. I think he’s gotten to the point of “if you can’t deal with my ugly shit, you won’t be getting the rest of me either”. Qrow Branwen is doing a little probing of his own and, in light of this, you could make the argument that he’s the one to open the door for their relationship to happen. 

Clover’s early-stage flirting style, on the other hand, is very overt. He’s more guarded about himself personally (notice how he keeps the focus on Qrow quite a bit and even does a bit of deflecting of his own in the truck scene) but he is perfectly comfortable with making his interest known in a very straightforward and physical manner. 

There are reasons for this!! Reasons deeply intertwined with character and who these men are.

Qrow sees himself as the eternal monkey wrench that no one wants. He’s finally starting to recover from this viewpoint, I think, but he’s also very aware that no matter how healthy he might get, he is always going to come with a little... extra. He has his semblance, he has his depression, and he has his alcoholism. He’s tired of secrets and he’s tired of games, and if he’s going to get involved with someone, they sure as hell better be ready to deal with all of that, because it’s not going anywhere. The solution? Put it all out there and see how the person responds. He gets the wrong response, he’s going to shut that down and move on. The right response?? He’s going to keep moving forward to see where it goes. Clover is giving him all the right responses.

As for Clover, he’s not only military but he’s also the leader of the elite Ace Ops and the man with the good-luck semblance. I know we don’t have a lot on him, but I suspect that the pressures of all that get to him quite a lot, to the point where he has major trouble being personally vulnerable for anyone. He’s probably used to having to keep it together at all times, to presenting that tightly controlled professionalism he displays with Robyn and even with Jacques Schnee to a degree. He’s used to everyone else relying on him, including James. This means that even in the presence of mutual interest, he’s going to flirt in ways that are emotionally safe, at least at first. 

The balance inherent in this is so unbelievably beautiful. And, I’m starting to realize, a complete subversion of early expectations. 

Qrow isn’t the one who has to learn to open up. He’s already doing that. What he will have to do is learn to accept someone (outside of his nieces) loving him without strings attached. He’ll have to learn to trust that Clover (and by extension their relationship) isn’t going anywhere, even if/when things get bad. Clover can be the one who stays. 

Clover, on the other hand, is the one who is going to have to learn to open up. He’s going to have to learn how to return that emotional vulnerability that Qrow has already given him, and he’s going to have to learn that Qrow can be the safe place where all that confidence and self-control can finally drop. Clover might have to be the unshakeable support structure for everyone else in his life, but Qrow can be the one place where he can lean and just breathe.

warning: this is going to be a long post. transphobia and bigotry under the cut

I am posting this rebuttal of a person who got (hilariously) angry at someone who Does Not Care (me) and wrote an entire-ass essay on this post because apparently this is how I spend my time. Defending my identity which does not need to be defended because it is immutable from transphobic trolls who won’t even see it cause they’re blocked from this account.

Anyway. Be careful looking under the cut.

TERFs, gender-crits, radical feminists, transmeds, nb-exclus, anti-mogai, and anyone else whose ideology promotes transphobia and/or trans erasure, please kindly do not fucking touch this post. I am not kidding when I say that I will report you all to tumblr for hate speech if it takes me all fucking night.

Image Description

Two screenshots of a reblog from tumblr user homosexual-means-gay. The post reads:

please tell me how literally every single gay man being repulsed by ppl with vaginas hurts you! tell us why it’s a problem gay ppl aren’t attracted to the opposite sex like straight and bi ppl are!

homosexuality isn’t a political movement it’s a regular natural innate sexuality. gay men aren’t attracted to biological females and it hurts gay ppl when you side with conversion therapists and it hurts bisexual ppl who actually are attracted to both sexes when you erase them for your homophobic agenda. you’re not a victim. you’re happy to eliminate homosexuality from existence as long as you’re able to reinforce heteronormative gender roles the gay community has always opposed. your bigotry harms trans homosexuals too, not that you transhets care about the gay trans ppl either.

erased from history? you want gay ppl correctively raped out of existence bc you love socially constructed gender roles more than human rights. you deserve all the hate you put out into the world. im sorry our innate orientation and culture prove how flimsy and useless the gender roles you define yourself by are, but homophobia will not improve your self esteem. you’re driving away ppl who would be happy to support your made up identity by attacking how we were born same sex attracted. sorry you can’t relate bc you’re straight. sorry you think you can use your privilege against us. but it’s not something we’re doing to you. it’s not something we can change and it’s not something we want to change. there’s never been a gay man in existence who likes pussy, not even the gay trans women like marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera. you’re a sad little straight girl alienating all potential allies.

hurting us doesn’t validate you. it doesn’t hurt you that no gay man will ever like pussy.

End ID

(If someone wants to do a better ID that’s fine, I just wanted to put everyone on an equal playing field when it comes to understanding the content of this post.)

I’m going to go line-by-line and refute every single bullshit thing this person said.

> please tell me how literally every single gay man being repulsed by ppl with vaginas hurts you!

factoid actually just statistical error. TERF Tommy, who has committed multiple transphobic hate crimes, is an outlier and should not have been counted. I know many cis gay men who are attracted to trans men because they are MEN, not because of the genitalia they have. And I know you want to say ‘that makes them bi’, but no, it doesn’t. You want to accuse me of homophobia? Telling another gay person that their identity is invalid just because they express it in a different way than you do is literal homophobia.

>  tell us why it’s a problem gay ppl aren’t attracted to the opposite sex like straight and bi ppl are!

because... some are? And you don’t speak for the entire gay community? Especially not the other side of it, for the opposite binary gender than yours.

>  homosexuality isn’t a political movement it’s a regular natural innate sexuality.

and transness isn’t a political movement either, it is a regular natural and innate gender identity. You know that gender identity is inherent, right? When people say ‘gender is a social construct’ all that means is that it is not a natural thing. Humans created the concept of gender and assigned value to it based on what we could perceive as a means of giving order to the world around us. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t parts of it that are inherent to individuals.

>  gay men aren’t attracted to biological females and it hurts gay ppl when you side with conversion therapists and it hurts bisexual ppl who actually are attracted to both sexes when you erase them for your homophobic agenda.

I’m sorry this is literally incoherent. To reiterate: some gay men ARE attracted to assigned females. Yes, siding with conversion therapists hurts gay people. No, I am not siding with conversion therapists. I have never once stated -- in fact, the entire point of my post was the opposite of this -- that anyone should EVER have sexual interactions with a person they don’t want to. Even if the reason for that is because they have a genital preference, which is NOT the same thing as a sexuality.

(I know I’ve been over this before but here it is again. A sexuality is a measure of what GENDER/S you want to have sex with. A genital preference is a measure of what genitalia you are willing to get all up close and personal with. Both are innate, one can be manipulated. They are not the same thing.)

Hurting bisexual people... hey, fellow bis, am I hurting you by *checks notes* existing in time and space?

>  you’re not a victim. you’re happy to eliminate homosexuality from existence as long as you’re able to reinforce heteronormative gender roles the gay community has always opposed.

I am literally A GAY PERSON. Even by YOUR MEASURE I am a victim. And I do NOT want to eliminate homosexuality, I just want people to acknowledge that language evolves and definitions can change as our society does. Also, have you ever met a trans person in real life? Because like 80% of all the trans people I’ve ever known have been gender non-conforming, so like. That invalidates that point. The trans community opposes gender roles as well.

>  your bigotry harms trans homosexuals too, not that you transhets care about the gay trans ppl either.

Please point to where it says I’m straight. Please. I want to see it.

>  erased from history? you want gay ppl correctively raped out of existence bc you love socially constructed gender roles more than human rights.

At this point I’m just repeating myself. Please see the above points for rebuttal.

>  you deserve all the hate you put out into the world. im sorry our innate orientation and culture prove how flimsy and useless the gender roles you define yourself by are, but homophobia will not improve your self esteem.

Says the person berating a minor for *flips notecard over* agreeing with them that people shouldn’t be forced into sex. I’m sorry that you’re so hurt and angry that you have to push your pain onto other people just to feel better. I genuinely am. It makes me so sad to see how much some people are hurting. But I won’t just sit and take this kind of verbal abuse. I don’t deserve it, quite frankly.

>  you’re driving away ppl who would be happy to support your made up identity by attacking how we were born same sex attracted.

I doubt anyone calling it a made-up identity wants to actually support me. Next.

>  sorry you can’t relate bc you’re straight. sorry you think you can use your privilege against us. but it’s not something we’re doing to you. it’s not something we can change and it’s not something we want to change.

Again. I am not straight. I do not have any straight privilege to use against anyone. Even if I was cis I still wouldn’t be straight because I’m aroace and attracted to anyone and everyone. My gender identity isn’t something that I can change, either. And even if I couldn’t, I wouldn’t want to. I love being a man, and I love being a trans man. 

>  there’s never been a gay man in existence who likes pussy, not even the gay trans women like marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera.

I’m sorry, WHAT. Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera can’t be both gay men and trans lesbians. Which one are they? You gotta pick, babe.

> you’re a sad little straight girl alienating all potential allies. hurting us doesn’t validate you. it doesn’t hurt you that no gay man will ever like pussy.

So am I a transhet or am I a straight girl? Also I’m not sad, I’m quite happy with where I’m at in my life. I do not feel validated by hurting anyone, because I don’t enjoy pain. I’m not masochistic or emotionless, I am in fact hyperempathetic due to my autism, and I don’t like it when anyone is hurt. This can be evidenced by this post here where I wish well upon a group of people who have directly hatecrimed me in the past. 

I will repeat that. I have literal trauma from physical violence as a result of the actions of this group of people, and I am still wishing them good things. 

Nor does it hurt me that ‘no gay man will ever like [AFAB genitalia]’ because this isn’t even a true statement. As I have mentioned previously, I know personally multiple gay men who are attracted to trans men. And reader, please note the fact that this person uses a slang term, a deliberately vulgar one, where in my original post I used the medical term ‘vagina’.

Hope this clears some things up.

TERFs, gender-crits, radical feminists, transmeds, nb-exclus, anti-mogai, and anyone else whose ideology promotes transphobia and/or trans erasure, please kindly STILL do not clown on this post. I am once again not kidding when I say that I will report you all to tumblr for hate speech if it takes me all fucking night.

credit (x)

&. BASICS

Full Name: Lucy Vivian O’neal Lynx

Nicknames: predator, Donna, beast

Age: 125 years old

Sexuality: bisexual

Date of Birth: November 18th 1895

Place of Birth: Miami. Florida, USA

Gender & Species: cis woman & (earth) sprite

Current Location: Terra, Concordia

&. MORE BASIC INFO

Languages: English, Spanish, Russian

Religion: atheist

Education: graduated from high school and has been taught on the streets ever since

Occupation: Assassin/Donna of the O’Neal crime family

Drinks, Smokes, & Drugs: yes to drinks and drugs, no to smoking.

&. PERSONALITY

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio -- Scorpio is the eighth sign of the zodiac, and the Eighth House is all about sex, death, and the cycle of regeneration. With their penchant for all things spooky and magical, female Scorpios are natural Queens of the Underworld, and thus usually not ones to shy away from the more intense or heavy characteristics of life. This sign gets a bad rap from most astrologers for being “too much,” overly dark, or even downright evil. This stems more from modern western culture’s inherent discomfort with discomfort with discussing the Pluto-ruled subjects of sex and death (typically not your general everyday dinner-table conversation). Reviled as a Scorpion woman can be, not many can deny her magnetic personality and the aura of mystery, magic, and sensuality that she wears around her like a cloak. This is not a woman who tolerates surface-level interactions easily. She prefers to give her attention to those willing to go deep with her. With a Scorpio’s electric gaze powerfully focused on you, it’s easy to feel like a bug pinned under glass, examined by a curious scientist determined to learn everything there is to know. Scorpios rule over the occult sciences, and the true meaning of the word “occult” is “hidden” – hence, the Scorpionic tendency toward secrecy and inscrutability. Only the most determined (and respectful) will be granted permission to explore the secret caverns within the heart of a Scorpio woman.

MBTI: ISTP -- ISTPs are equally difficult to understand in their need for personal space, which in turn has an impact on their relationships with others. They need to be able to "spread out"--both physically and psychologically--which generally implies encroaching to some degree on others, especially if they decide that something of someone else's is going to become their next project. (They are generally quite comfortable, however, with being treated the same way they treat others--at least in this respect.) But because they need such a lot of flexibility to be as spontaneous as they feel they must be, they tend to become as inflexible as the most rigid J when someone seems to be threatening their lifestyle (although they usually respond with a classic SP rage which is yet another vivid contrast to their "dormant," impassive, detached mode). These territorial considerations are usually critical in relationships with ISTPs; communication also tends to be a key issue, since they generally express themselves non-verbally. When they do actually verbalize, ISTPs are masters of the one-liner, often showing flashes of humor in the most tense situations; this can result in their being seen as thick-skinned or tasteless.

Likes: being outdoors, having her way, gore, breaking rules, power, the woods, Terra in general, inspiring fear into others, day-drinking, confidence 

Dislikes: mundane interactions (for the most part, she warms up to it from time to time), extreme heat, feeling helpless or unheard, crowded places

Bad Habits: her jaw is tensed most of the time and if she talks Lynx has a habit of showing off her sharp teeth to assert dominance. She also just.. stares a lot. 

Secret Talent: (not so secret) killing, negotiating, sensuality

Hobbies: hunting for sport, scheming, watching others from afar, getting to know the newbies and possibly teach them, talking about the old days

Fears: being dominated, being forced into the spotlight for too long, Terra throwing her out, losing her powers

Five Positive Traits: confident, challenging, playful, tough, dominant

Five Negative Traits: insensitive, predatory, cantankerous, obsessive, hedonistic

Other Mentionable Details: has fangs due to her nature and abilities (ref. picture) as well as sharp, claw like nails (ref. picture), almost always wears dark, unassuming colors

&. APPEARANCE

Tattoos: none

Piercings: earlobes

Reference Picture: ref picture

&. FAMILY INFORMATION

Parent Names: William O’Neal (former don, drug dealer) & Meredith O’Neal (socialite)

Parent Relationship: Lynx never really cared for her parents, especially not their authoritarian ways. She killed her own father, so there’s really nothing to be said here other than she didn’t care about them and wanted them gone.

Sibling Names: she has no siblings

Sibling Relationship: --

Other Relevant Relative: None at the moment, she’s a loner.

Children: --

Pets: --

&. BIOGRAPHY

( tw: death, murder, drugs, violence )

She grew up in the wildest of neighborhoods in the wildest time imaginable. Miami was one of the sunniest, loveliest cities in Florida if not the entire United States. Lynx, formerly known as Lucy O’Neal, confronted her surroundings with the reality that she wasn’t too eager to follow rules. As the daughter of a prestigious drug lord, Lynx grew up sheltered, yet surrounded by crime. A spoiled brat, as some liked to call her, always able to command those around her with ease. The constantly increasing demand for drugs had helped the O’Neals enter Miami’s elite. With drugs being widely accepted and legal at that time, Lynx’ father expanded his business to more shady dealings like fraud and bribery of politicians. The O’Neals had no real reputation. Like a shadow in an otherwise sunny city they remained near celebrities of all walks of life while simultaneously waiting for them to open all the doors for them. Lynx, however, didn’t care to be subtle. Within her school years Lynx had developed an aptitude for breaking the law and getting away with it, either through her father or intimidation. Intimidation and aggressiveness she’d learned amongst the ranks of her father, no doubt. Thus began her reign of power and chaos — the reign of a girl boxing her way through etiquette and rules.

Others described her as reckless, selfish, careless, wild — a lot of descriptive words for someone who never wanted to be categorized or labelled. Lynx desired to be her own master without restraints. She was nineteen when the United States prohibited domestic distribution of drugs, weakening her father in the process. She’d been running her own little empire in secret, consisting of assassinations and intimidation tactics. While her father knew about her business and certainly used her talents from time to time, Lynx distanced herself from her father as much as possible. In her early years Lynx began with using poisons, but quickly decided for a more direct and sadistic approach. People always commented on finding fun in work, so she did. Call it irreproachable customer service in which the boss did all the dirty work. Gladly. Lynx fully focused on work and, as the war for customers and booze increased after prohibition in the early 1920s, she got to target someone close to her heart. Her father had dominated the Miami crime scene for decades, forcing others into submission — and Lynx saw an opportunity to pull ahead, to play by her (non-existent) rules. The next morning Lynx called her father and customer to a meeting under the guise of killing one as mandated by the other. With two shots being fired into the round, Lynx left behind whatever shred of rules they had set in place. From that an even larger empire arose. Her targets became her prey after all rules had been abolished. She ruled over Miami all on her own, leaving claw and bite marks everywhere she went, recklessly ripping into every poor soul who dared to threaten or annoy her. 

Lynx oftentimes decided to stalk and expose her prey, no, let them expose themselves before she got rid of them. She pulled the strings, watched them squirm, satisfying her sadistic tendencies in the best way possible: up close, sometimes even while dragging her prey along to display them. While other women her age enjoyed being hunted and hit on, Lynx loved to hunt and hit people, having fun in the only way she’d ever known: with violence, dominance and cunning. After Miami had been hit by a hurricane in 1926, Lynx decided to expand clientele after she’d already made numerous headlines back home, warning of an assassin roaming the otherwise sunny streets of Miami. A killer they couldn’t identify, but given the strength displayed and the lack of attention for detail the press was quickly to pinpoint the assassin as being male, possibly large and in his 30s. While this would’ve been an undoubtedly good disguise, Lynx loathed the idea of giving them even more fodder for their yellow press. She boarded the Horizon to assassinate her last target before eventually expanding all the way up to Chicago or even New York City. That’d never happen — and cats weren’t really known to like water that much. 

Lynx awoke in a strange land, surrounded by a sense of belonging despite everything being so foreign. The sea took her prey, her former home and washed her ashore into a new world, everything she’d once hoped for. Concordia turned out to be a beacon for powerful beings, a birthplace for the wild and creators. Creators of various kinds — chaos or peace, death or life — Lynx joined Terra, accepted her new name upon being reborn, and practically planted herself into its social structure. For the first time Lynx tolerated some rules. She found shelter in one of the caves, though Lynx spent most of her time training with her new powers and causing random battles to test them out. Once the hunt and battles were finished Lynx returned to her cave; a feral predator loving solitude, rarely seen, but if so she was one of the most threatening presence safe for the monarchs and older sprites. The years, however, began to bore her after a while. Without fresh meat and the monarchs back and forth the days felt much longer and all her mice weren’t that interesting anymore, either. The truce opened Concordia, a change Lynx welcomed with open arms. Fresh, innocent meat, ready to be corrupted, turned and molded. Unlike her human years Lynx decided to recruit one or two people if given the chance, to raise, teach and protect a new generation of sprites -- in the only way she knew: with fangs, claws and ferocity.

LANGUAGE PRISON

A close friend of mine recently came out publicly as identifying as gender queer/non-binary. For those of you who might not be familiar with the terminology, non-binary refers to those who don’t subscribe entirely to a traditional male or female gender identity. This person was assigned male at birth (amab is the acronym), but find that they feel more comfortable expressing and embodying a feminine identity. I suppose trans is another good term, although it doesn’t mean quite the same thing as non-binary. If you’re confused I’d give it a google - there are lots of people out there who are more equipped to properly explain the terminology than I am. I’m a straight cis girl through and through, so I don’t really feel qualified to make any solid definitions of language in this realm. I have no idea what feeling that way might be like, so it’s my job to just listen.

This friend came over the other day and we got to talking about their coming out experience. Prior to them coming out publicly (via Facebook), I had really no idea that this identity was a part of them. I’d always known and referred to them as male, but they said this is something they’ve sort of known for a few years, and recently become increasingly sure of. My boyfriend Ryan, who is generally more perceptive and observant than I am, told me that he wasn’t surprised by our friend coming out - he had a sense that this was something they were feeling.

Anyways, our conversation got me thinking about language. Our friend (I’m reluctant to use their name for anonymity’s sake on my public blog) said that the main deterrent they felt from coming out was being unsure of the language to use. Language is obviously universally relevant, but it’s particularly important when it comes to gender identity. I’m talkin pronouns and labels. You saw in my first paragraph that language can be tricky with a topic like this, because people ascribe different meanings or connotations to different terms. Some people feel comfortable being “labeled” as one thing, others do not. Our friend expressed in their (quite impressively eloquent) Facebook post that for now, they were okay with people referring to them with any pronouns, be it he, she, or they, as long as it’s meant with respect. I’m gonna default to using they/them/their because I think it’s the most neutral, and I want to respect their wishes as much as possible while they’re learning how to be comfortable expressing their identity in the public realm. But it’s tricky. It can be really hard - like I said, I’ve known this person as “he” for so long, that my brain sort of defaults to that when describing them. 

Using the wrong pronoun can be hurtful for someone, especially someone who’s trying to break out of their assigned biological label or exist outside of a binary. It’s often seen as being intentionally disrespectful, and sometimes it is. But a lot of the time it’s just our brains being stuck in the societal gender binary, or a force of habit. But language is powerful, and it’s malleable. You can make it mean different things, and you can change the way you use it. I’ve found that conversationally, it’s not really that difficult to avoid using pronouns altogether, and just use someone’s name instead. That’s what I would be doing in this post if I wasn’t wary of keeping their identity safe.

Matt mentioned something in our conversation with Boris about how language can be restrictive. It inherently holds powerful meaning because it’s the vehicle we most commonly use for expression, and words have history. For people experiencing a largely earth-shattering transformation or realization, language can be incredibly sensitive. Our friend said they still weren’t really sure of the language they wanted to use to describe their feminine identity, but that hopefully one day it would come. I think that’s really fascinating, that you can know something in your brain, but not be able to express it verbally. I think I experience that a lot with different ideas or emotions. It’s like the language doesn’t exist, or isn’t sufficient to describe what I’m trying to say.

Communication is fascinating. 

The Tsunami COVID-19, Beware the Undertow

The crushing power of a tsunami can destroy almost anything we can build, including entire communities. And as the wave of destruction retreats, as it must always do, the undertow can drag what is left of our world out to sea, forever lost to the eternal black deep. As these waves of COVID-19 surge around the globe, we need to take heed of the ensuing undertow. It holds the power to strip us of a core evolutionary need that has allowed us to thrive on this planet. Our need to connect, bond and care for each other.

From our caveman days we were more successful in cooperative packs. Families and allies, banded together were more effective in hunting, breeding and protecting themselves against danger.

Millenniums of this success is bred into our genes. Most recent generations have created powerful social structures predicated on this need, we marry, have kids together, reside in purpose-built towns and cities, encourage our children to develop socially and send them off to schools where they learn to cooperate and operate as a team. We rely on connection to be successful and to thrive.

And along comes COVID-19, a tsunami that threatens to tear apart our communities.

The only tools we have in our arsenal right now to prevent our world from being swept away by this virus are hygiene and distancing. We are being told, lectured and even threatened to accept that to get close is dangerous, even deadly. Gatherings are being quickly outlawed, whether to march for social justice, get married or bury our dead. The language of our offense, distancing, isolation, quarantine seem to tell us and our young and most formative generation — getting close and connecting is a dangerous thing. This is the undertow. And it is a current that can drag us away from the very essence of what makes us successful as humans.

Hope…

At the same time, there are beautiful and powerful signs of hope. Forced to remain physically distant people and communities are finding unique, creative and fun ways to come together. We can give thanks for the digital age that has provided the tools to be able to have a heart to heart, face-to-face conversation with a loved one on the other side of the planet. We are discovering and promoting virtual dinner parties, online communities, and the capacity to set-up offices and workgroups from home. Yet these digital connections cannot fully replace what we get from the in-person, face-to-face experience. We rely deeply on non-verbal communication including body language and micro-expressions. But still, there are reasons for hope as these tools, our creativity and our biological/psychological imperative to come together empowers us dig in, and hold fast against the undertow.

It’s not just you, it’s us…

The effects of long-term social isolating are not known. But we do know it is contrary to our very nature. This need is encoded in our DNA and is linked to a vast array of physical and mental health problems: depression, dementia, heart disease and even death. A 2018 Danish study concluded that objective social isolation was associated with a 60–70% increased all-cause mortality. Before the recent dictums to distance and isolate to ‘level the curve’ (minimizing the spread of the virus), Statistics Canada reported over one in five Canadians reported feeling lonely, and this number skyrockets when we poll seniors. The epidemic is so bad the UK government appointed a new minister for loneliness!

Connection not only cures loneliness but it buffers the effect of stress. Stress well-modulated provides us with temporary motivation and strength. However unchecked, stress like loneliness has long been known to impact both mental and physical health.

Conserved Transcriptional Response to Adversity or CTRA, is a gene expression we find in human immune cells which responds to chronic stress by increasing the production of inflammatory proteins — it is intended as a short-lived acute inflammation to adapt and increase the immune response to fight an injury or infection. Long-lived it becomes a threat and meanwhile, CTRA is downregulating (slowing down) our anti-body genes that decrease our ability to fight a virus. Loneliness, fed by a lack of connection only worsens this response, which in turn harms health and furthers isolation. It’s a system that can weaken our ability to resist the undertow and being swept into the dark abyss.

All of this adds up to just case for a dire warning. We need to be vigilant about what we are learning, or not, from this necessary loss of connection. History has taught us the nefarious power of capitalizing on individual and communal weaknesses, utilizing them to further our disconnection and thus divide and conquer.

Globalism breaks down borders and allows trade and life to move freely across borders. Anti-globalism existed before Covid-19 and is a tried and powerful tool of governments seeking to gain and hold power. The politics of fear and blame have levelled democracies and birthed holocausts. Shut down borders. Build walls. The call to fear, isolate, disconnect from our neighbours and blame the other are the makers of despots and dictators. It frees the individual and their community of responsibility for the inherent challenges of community. What is wrong is ‘their fault’ not ours, and governments and leaders can rise to power on the backs of their chosen targets — usually the weak and most vulnerable.

The dangerous irony is that to beat COVID-19 we must shut down borders and build walls.

Left unnoticed and unchecked the undertow can and will destroy our communities and nations.

There is a solution…

Our well-being and survival are intrinsically linked to our connections with others. Our biology mandates connection…stress, well-managed, boosts our immune systems. It can encourage us to seek and provide support. CTRA is downregulated by positive altruistic connections — the happiness found in caring for others. (Fascinatingly, a study in 2013 at the University of Florida found in hedonistic happiness has the opposite, negative, impact on this gene expression.) In short caring for others improves out health.

Anyone who has flown knows the well-rehearsed safety briefing that tells you, “In an emergency, put your own oxygen mask on first.” It is not an act of selfishness — you need to be conscious to help others.

I live a life walking the fine lines between being a psychotherapist, deeply rooted in the science of neuropsychology, and a spiritual director, who is deeply rooted in academic Christian theology and very wary of organized religion.

I believe in hope, and I know grace. I’m fascinated by the intersections of science, theology and the creation of reality.

I know each of us has a history, and very few of us escape burdens of trauma and oppression. We are all wounded and suffer in some way. Isolation and distancing are a potential mental health crisis in the making and can serve to further our trauma. Some of us suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Our life history seems to be a life-sentence, not a life-lesson. We struggle to shift this paradigm. Communally we may be moving towards a new systemic PTSO, (Post-traumatic Stress Order).

The crisis starts with the individual and like this virus, it can spread through our communities and infect us globally. No community or leader is immune. Without great intention by each of us this virus will win. The tsunami will crush us, and the undertow will drag what is left out to sea.

But there is hope. And it is harder to access for some than others. We must come together. We must find connections in the isolation and build walls that break the tsunami, stop the virus, and still let our compassion flow freely.

It is too easy for me to tell you to wash your hands, stay home, breathe deep, meditate, eat well, get your sleep, and use technology to build connection — good advice, yet these are only options for those of us who have enough privilege to do so.

So many won’t because they can’t. It’s simply not in reach. They don’t have freshwater, a home, a bed to sleep in, or technology. Their trauma runs deep, and should they close their eyes for but a moment they see flashes of terror, not moments of peace. In varying degrees, we are all weak, vulnerable and incapable.

But there is grace. Grace is our ability to regenerate and sanctify, to inspire virtuous impulses, and to impart strength to endure and press past temptation. For some grace is of divine inspiration, for others is simply an inherent pillar of humanity. Through grace, we access the biology of connection and the power stress gives us to put on our own oxygen mask first, giving us the strength to care for others. Through grace we find the compassion to carry those who can’t carry themselves.

We can do this. We have the capacity to survive. It is found in connection. It is in both heeding the wisdom of experts and those who have walked the walk. It is being the hands and feet of those who can’t, and when we can’t be those hands and feet, allowing grace to flow as others put on our oxygen mask for us.

So yes, if you can, wash your hands, stay home, breathe deep, meditate, eat well, get your sleep, and use technology to build connection. And if you can’t know through grace you can find connection and community that will bring the compassion that heals.

Todd Kaufman, MDiv, BFA, BA, RP

Toronto, CANADA

“A Clockwork Messiah” (Essay by High Preist Peter H Gilmore)

Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of The Christ” is a rather tedious exercise in graphic brutality and strained reaction shots, with a generous dollop of anti-Semitism and a soupçon of anti-paganism thrown in for good measure. In a clever fusion, Gibson melds the aesthetic sensibility of the plague-ridden late Middle Ages with the over-the-top mayhem of a contemporary shoot-’em-up video game to craft an ultra-violent “religious” film fit for today’s box office.

His Satan, an omnipresent, androgynous, deep-voiced figure wrapped in a cloak, is perhaps inspired by medieval depictions of “death triumphant”: a sexless, worm-riddled avatar of corruption. Satan at one point parodies images of the Madonna and Child by hefting a bloated demonic infant. It certainly suits the aesthetic choices made by the director, but is not congruent with our symbol of Satan as heroic individualist.

It seems pretentious to have the actors speak in Latin and Aramaic, but it’s all part of the director’s attempt to create a “you are there” sensibility in the viewer’s mind. In fact, the gospels which served as the source for this tale were crafted long after the time of the alleged events by people who could not have been present. Gibson is trying to sell the audience a myth by presenting it as if it were as authentic as a historically-accurate recreation of a Civil War battle. Additionally, the dialogue is often not even subtitled, particularly when Yeshua is being abused by the Romans, so those unfamiliar with Latin will miss the precise meaning of the epithets being showered upon the bruised Nazarene. Translating Latin curse words is a no-no; rubbing your nose in graphic violence is A-OK!

Gibson is trying to sell the audience a myth by presenting it as a historically-accurate recreation

of a Civil War battle.”

Like the Dark Age passion plays, the film focuses solely on the beating and crucifixion of Yeshua, and Gibson wastes no time in presenting the culprits. With a full-moonlit night to set a horror film context, Judas goes to the Sanhedrin and betrays his mentor for the traditional 30 pieces of silver. The Hebrew priests are depicted as heavyset, overdressed, and utterly dedicated to the murder of Yeshua, whom they consider a rival to their spiritual authority. They send their military lackeys, also Jews, to “begin the beguine” by putting a beating on Yeshua and his hippie-like followers in the garden of Gethsemane.

Contrast this image with the later depiction of the pragmatic figure of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of this far-flung cesspit of a province filled with religious maniacs. He does not see why Yeshua should be killed, and only orders the already-battered and obviously meshuggah fellow to be flogged in hopes of appeasing the bloodthirsty Jewish ruling class. Now do you wonder why some folks might contend that this film has a certain slant?

Of course, the fellows who administer the punishment are a bunch of rowdy pagan brutes, dull-witted frat-boy-turned-corrections-officer types, who go too far. Here follows the most brutal whipping ever filmed. Yeshua, rather buff for a desert-dwelling prophet, is first caned until he is beaten down, his back deeply marked in the closely-depicted process. But he stands again, which prompts the sadistic Romans to choose more damaging implements, to wit, leather-thonged flails woven with metal beads. These are used with utmost effort and we are treated to close-up views of gobbets of flesh being torn from Yeshua’s body. He is nearly beaten to death, finally lying on the cobblestones in a literal sea of blood, and Greg Cannom—who is known for having done make-up effects for horror films—has wrought a body suit that lovingly details the ribs showing through the flayed flesh. Splatter fans may find this of interest. It certainly goes way beyond anything that could remotely be considered erotic sado-masochism into the realm of disgusting atrocity.

You all know the rest of the tale, but Gibson has added some personal touches.

Perhaps [Judas] should be considered the patron saint

of thankless tasks?”

We are treated to a number of flashbacks, one of which depicts Yeshua the carpenter as having crafted a table which is too tall for local traditions. When his mother remarks upon it, he says he’ll make chairs to match. So, not only is he the Messiah, but he’s a brilliant innovator of furniture design! I wonder if that bit was in one of the non-canonical gospels?

When Yeshua stumbles the second time on the way to his place of execution, his mother recalls in flashback a scene wherein little toddler Yeshua falls and she rushes to comfort him. Not particularly subtle.

We need not deal in detail with the inherent contradictions in the tale. However, it is interesting to note that, as shown in this film, Yeshua knows at the “final nosh” that he is going to be executed (as his deity-father wills), and he knows that Judas will betray him to set the deal in motion. But then Yeshua seems angered at Judas who is only doing what his God has ordained him to do. You’d think Judas, who supposedly loved and revered his mentor and thus felt great pain at being the one who had to do this, might actually be considered a hero by Christians for having to be placed in such a painful situation that he is driven to suicide. Perhaps he should be considered the patron saint of thankless tasks? Such an odd cult is Christianity.

Also of interest is the scene wherein the two criminals crucified along with Yeshua express their take on the situation. One believes in him as a holy man, the other challenges this dying Messiah to exercise his powers to get them the hell out of there. The doubter is punished when a raven arrives and pecks his eye out. Seems a tad bitchy of God, wouldn’t you say? The Romans who savaged Yeshua are unscathed, while somebody under great personal duress who presents a verbal challenge gets mutilated. Anyone else think this is a strange hierarchy of values? And of course, the Almighty lets his son be abused and saves the vengeful earthquake as an after-death climactic scattershot retribution. Poor timing? Why wreak havoc upon those who are doing what you wanted them to do, Jew and pagan alike? Seeking sense in this myth system has been fruitless for millennia.

When Longinus’ spear pierces the side of Yeshua to make certain he is dead, it releases such a fountain of blood and body fluids, that one must recall “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” to find a similarly overdone gout. Several people ecstatically bathe under this torrent; the director celebrates this revolting behavior.

The penultimate pieta image of Mary embracing the shattered body of her dead son was one of defeat and resignation. Indeed, that is a human touch, and would be the natural reaction to witnessing such events. There was no triumph and resistance and looking ahead to resurrection—only pain, degradation, and intense suffering. And since the director clearly blames this death on the Jewish community leaders, it wouldn’t surprise me that Christians who hold this myth dear might find such imagery spawning vengeful feelings toward those depicted as being responsible—as they also forget that their own deity is supposedly the ultimate author of the scenario. We all know that throughout history, Christianity, when linked up with the state, did turn implements of torture, similar to those used on Yeshua in this film, against anyone who would not buy into their sick faith, as well as against those “heretics” prone to hair-splitting of doctrine and dogma. They’ve had plenty of “tit-for-tat” over the past two thousand years, so one might reasonably expect they should now be sated.

This film takes abuse, torture and execution to pornographic excess and it is not suitable for viewing by children. If a film depicted any other individual—fictional or otherwise—being put through such a harrowing experience, I would think it likely that it would have been rated X, or banned outright as being obscene, perhaps even if it had been Hitler cast as the victim. That such generally objectionable imagery can be made palatable to a broad audience by placing it in a religious context is food for thought.

With that in mind, I could speculate that innovative pornographers might find this to be the time to introduce a new Messiah. A “spiritual” young lady (“hot” by contemporary standards, with her legal age statement properly on file), a true daughter of God, receives a vision that Mankind is so sinful that the death of Yeshua just wasn’t enough. She claims that God has inspired her to subject herself to the ultimate degradation of the world’s biggest “gang-bang,” so that Mankind’s multitudinous sins will be expiated through her selfless act as a receptacle for the jism of thousands of “fallen” men. They too will be saved through contact with this prostitute-paraclete. If such were realized with enough piety, perhaps in time this myth could be the foundation for a new religion? Is it any less ridiculous or obscene than what Gibson has portrayed?

It seems that many are forgetting that the imagery of Gibson’s film has been previously approached with the same glee. Recall the sequence in Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” wherein violent delinquent Alexander De Lodge finally reads the “Holy Scriptures” while incarcerated and imagines himself as a Roman, lustily flogging Yeshua on the way to Golgotha. Gibson has made little Alex’s wet-dream into a feature-length snore/gore fest. Perhaps one day, this director—much as another one who uses savior images but casts extraterrestrials in such roles—will feel the need to retouch his work. He might see that he gave torture too much of the center stage, and so he will create a revised “special edition.” In this, the brief image of resurrection will be extended into a view of Yeshua and the believer-thief entering into a brightly-lit heavenly kingdom, thronged with angels, much as Spielberg’s Paul Neary entered the mother ship in the revamped “CE3K.” Or perhaps the impulses that fueled “Braveheart” will come to fore and he’ll depict the risen Yeshua harrowing Hell in a flashy action sequence.

Your present humble narrator leaves you now with the proposal that this dull work is indeed an embodiment of the essence of Christianity. Witness the concentration on pain and suffering as the central value, joined with the idea of a father-deity torturing his child to death and this being celebrated as a positive image. We Satanists find it accurate to the spirit of Saul of Tarsus (aka “Saint Paul”), the true creator of Christianity, and we reject all of this as a vile creed, unfit for anyone who loves life and seeks joy in the world. I’ve always thought it a perversion to link the word “passion” to these mythical events of hideous torture, and this film has more than confirmed my opinion, as well as my wariness of those who do feel that this is a proper use for the word. Such twisted folk cannot be trusted.

How do people maintain deeply held moral identities in a seemingly immoral social environment? Cultural sociologists and social psychol- ogists have focused on how individuals cope with contexts that make acting on moral motivations difficult by building supportive networks and embedding themselves in communities of like-minded people. In this article, however, the author argues that actors can achieve a moral “sense of one’s place” through a habitus that leverages the material di- mensions of place itself. In particular, he shows how one community of radical environmental activists make affirming moral identities cen- tered on living “naturally” seem like “second nature,” even in a seem- ingly unnatural and immoral urban environment, by reconfiguring their physical world. The author shows how nonhuman objects serve as proofs of moral labor, markers of moral boundaries, and reminders of moral values, playing both a facilitating and constraining role in moral life.

INTRODUCTION

How do people for whom living “morally” is a key part of their identity le- verage the apparent moral challenges posed by their environment to sus- tain a sense of moral selfhood? The relationship between moral values, action, and social context is a long-standing area of inquiry for social psychologists ðsee Blasi 1980; Hardy and Carlo 2005; Lizardo and Strand 2010Þ, but it also bears heavily on a range of sociological analyses. Members of impoverished inner-city minorities Duneier 1999; Anderson 2003; Liebow 2003 or the work- ing classðLamont 2000; Sayer 2005Þ frequently confront the low status af- forded to them by society by asserting their moral worth. Employees in non- profit hospitals or hospices must balance a commitment to health care as a social right with pressure to economize on or limit treatment ðLivne 2014; Reich 2014Þ. Political activists, too, must weigh wanting to change the world with living in a social milieu where most do not share their worldviews. This article shows how such actors may make living morally seem like “second nature” by drawing on the material world.2 I approach morality as a set of individual or collective beliefs that spec- ify the kinds of persons or actions that are “good” or “right” evalua- tions that apply to actors across different situations and over time ðTavory 2011, p. 273Þ. This definition sets up the central problematic of this article: how actors, in the face of situations that appear to make living up to the range of their motivations to act morally difficult, nonetheless achieve a sense that maintaining a moral identity is a habitual, relatively unproblem- atic, and sustainable second nature. A long line of thinking within cultural sociology, frequently drawing on Durkheim has focused on how an indi- vidual sense of living morally is facilitated by group life.4 This article argues, however, that the material characteristics of place can provide resources for sustaining a sense of moral selfhood. In particular, I show how nonhuman objects can serve as proofs of the substance and significance of moral labor, markers of boundaries that distinguish moral actors from those they per- ceive as less moral, and totemic reminders of moral commitments. At the same time, these material proofs, reminders, and markers add a dimension of unpredictability to moral life that actors must manage see Latour 2005. In short, I argue that one way individuals can achieve what Bourdieu ð1990, p. 295Þ might call a moral “sense of one’s place”—a degree of comfort with the possibilities and limits of living up to a moral identity but that nonethe- less allows for the ongoing development of a moral identity through the crea- tion of new moral practices—is through a habitus that constructs and is con- structed in dialogue with material objects. I develop this argument through an ethnographic study of the moral lives of “freegans” in New York City. Freeganism is a small emerging movement within radical environmentalism in the United States and Western Europe whose participants attempt to dramatize the unsustainability and excesses of mass consumerism by claiming to minimize their participation in the cap- italist economy and living off its waste ðEdwards and Mercer 2007; Gross 2009Þ. Freegans are best known for publicly “dumpster diving” and redis- tributing discarded but edible food from supermarkets, but freegan practices also include gardening in abandoned lots; creating and repairing bicycles, clothing, or furniture from discarded materials; foraging for wild food in ur- ban parks; and limiting paid employment in favor of full-time activism. Freegans are ideologically heterogeneous: some describe themselves as anarchists while others evince a more reformist critique of capitalism’s ex- cesses. Nonetheless, nearly all frame their activism as centered on a deep, moral motivation to live more “naturally.” Jeff, a tall, muscular white free- gan in his mid-20s with a degree in filmmaking, explained: “My vision is that eventually we live in a world where we don’t have any of this modern tech- nology. Live with the land, on the land, and everything we get comes from nature. Civilization is fundamentally, inherently crazy and unsustainable, and eventually it exhausts itself. I think we can be mature, responsible beings, but still be wild animals. That’s what other animals on the planet do, why should we be any different?” Jeff’s description of freeganism harkened to the “back- to-the-land” communalism that flourished in the 1960s, except in one obvious respect: Jeff, and the other freegans studied in this article, all live in New York City. In fact, Jeff continued to work at a job he said he loathed in order to make monthly rent payments to a landlord he claimed was exploitative, so he could live in a city he characterized as a “black hole sucking up the re- sources of the planet.” Yet the apparently problematic human environment of the city was none- theless necessary for freegans’ practices, such as publicly displaying and politi- cizing wasted food. What is more, I argue that the very adversity of the city, when combined with the physical resources the freegans made out of their environment, allowed freegans to carve out a sense of moral place in the city. For all his rhetoric, there was an evident comfort and familiarity in the way Jeff navigated the streets of Brooklyn on the bike he built from abandoned parts, combed the curb looking for useful waste, and cultivated a garden amid slabs of broken concrete behind a local community center. Jeff’s everyday habitus belied this discursive clash between the ideals of living “naturally” Making the City Second Nature 1019 American Journal of Sociology and the reality of life in a city. In fact, living naturally in the city seemed like second nature thanks to one of the city’s apparently most problematic fea- tures: waste. I begin this article with a review of recent literature on morality, which has emphasized interaction and group life as sustaining moral identities and motivating moral action. I then reconsider Durkheim’s later work on to- temism and Bourdieu’s work on practical action, supported by more recent work in cultural sociology, to reemphasize the role of the material world in moral life. I theorize how nonhumans can serve as proofs of moral labor, markers of moral boundaries, and reminders of moral values. I then explore freegans’ contradictory relationship to urban life, showing how freegans make living naturally central to their identities yet live in a city that appears to make doing so difficult. I then demonstrate how freegans invert the seeming “prob- lems” posed by the city, turning it into a place in which morality can seem second nature, through engagement with the physical world. Nonhuman proofs, markers, and reminders are not just props or conduits for the con- struction of moral selves, but active players that both enable and constrain moral action, findings I reflect on in the conclusion. THE MATERIALITY OF MORALITY Moral Identities, Motivations, and the Habitus Theories of the relationship between moral values, moral action, and social context have undergone several paradigm shifts within post-Parsonian so- ciology ðsee Lizardo and Strand 2010Þ. “Tool kit theorists” recognize the frequent divergence between what people say and do and thus reject the notion that a coherent moral worldview shapes action ðSwidler 1986, 2001; DiMaggio 1997Þ. Instead, individual action is patterned by an external scaf- folding of cultural codes, roles, and institutions from which individuals draw in a situational, ad hoc fashion. This approach to the relationship between values and actions presents “morality” as, foremost, justifications for actions undertaken for potentially nonmoral reasons ðLamont 1992, 2000; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006Þ. From the perspective of tool kit theory, asking how individuals act in ways they see as “moral” in social contexts that make doing so difficult does not really make sense. If “moral responsibilities are not fixed, but are im- provised” ðSanghera, Ablezova, and Botoeva 2011, p. 169; see also Brown 2009; Turowetz and Maynard 2010Þ, the problem becomes one of situational impression management rather than bringing action into accordance with some inner moral “core” ðsee Goffman 1959Þ. Actors might need to expli- cate gaps between beliefs and actions but feel little need to close those gaps themselves in the name of some stable moral sense of self. 1020 More recent work within social psychology and sociology, however, has asserted a more systematic relationship between moral beliefs and actions. As Vaisey ð2009Þ argues, deeply internalized, but not necessarily verbalized, moral worldviews may “motivate” action across time and across social con- texts. From this perspective, the “problem” of maintaining a moral sense of self becomes more comprehensible: actors carry relatively constant moral motivations but confront environments that vary in the degree to which they facilitate acting on them. Even if individuals can live with contradictory moral commitments, struggle to articulate what those commitments are, and hold them alongside nonmoral desires, the ability to act on moral beliefs can none- theless be an important source of personal “ontological security” ðGiddens 2009, p. 50Þ. While these two visions of moral action appear incompatible, social psy- chologists have partly bridged them by suggesting that the relationship be- tween moral norms and action may depend on “moral identities” ðBlasi 1980; Monroe 2001; Hardy and Carlo 2005; Reynolds and Ceranic 2007Þ. Nearly everyone sees himself or herself as a “moral” person and thus feels some need to account for his or her actions in terms of shared moral codes. At the same time, the degree to which acting morally is central to the conception of the self—and, as such, plays a motivating role—is variable ðMonroe 2001; Aquino et al. 2009; Stets and Carter 2012Þ. Disparities between motivations and ac- tions might be primarily a concern for individuals with a high degree of moral identity—such as, I will show, the freegans—for whom not being able to act morally is injurious to the sense of self ðBurke and Stets 2009, pp. 69, 80Þ. How do individuals with a high level of moral identity interact with the world around them in practice? Vaisey ð2009Þ observes that to constantly reevaluate one’s lifestyle vis-à-vis moral values would be “cognitively over- whelming.” Instead, as ethnographers in the Bourdieusian tradition have ar- gued, becoming a “moral” actor with a “moral” identity entails the devel- opment of a “moral habitus,” a “thoroughly embodied and practical form of moral subjectivity” ðWinchester 2008, p. 1755; see also Ignatow 2009; Abramson and Modzelewski 2011Þ. This moral habitus is more deliber- ately cultivated and less deeply ingrained than the primary habitus but none- theless serves as a powerful subjective and behavioral force ðWacquant 2014, p. 6Þ. Although Bourdieu himself was skeptical that moral norms were the basis for action ðfor a critique, see Sayer 1⁄22005Þ, this extension of habitus captures important points that have appeared elsewhere in the sociological literature on morality. Moral beliefs and identities are not just prior to moral action but are constructed in a dialectical fashion through action, creating a sense of one’s moral place relative to the surrounding social structure ðWinchester 2008, p. 1755Þ. Moral assumptions and beliefs are often intuitive and embod- Making the City Second Nature 1021 American Journal of Sociology ied rather than discursively articulated ðSayer 2005, pp. 42– 43; Abend 2014, pp. 30, 55Þ. And even as morality can constrain individual action, it can be generative of new practices ðJoas 2000, pp. 14, 66Þ. When the everyday moral habitus and the actor’s position in social space are aligned, actors are like a “fish in water” that “does not feel the weight of the water, and takes the world about itself for granted” ðWacquant and Bourdieu 1992, p. 127Þ. In such situations, following the motivating im- pulses of one’s moral identity becomes “second nature,” something “experi- enced as non-problematic—expected, understood, 1⁄2and navigable” ðMartin 2000, p. 197Þ. This happens not just through occasional situations when actors can make themselves feel they are “moral enough” but through the ongoing dialectic of everyday habitus and social environment. Group Life and a Moral Sense of Place Bourdieu’s ð1984, 1990; Wacquant and Bourdieu 1992Þ work usually em- phasized the homology between the mental structures of the habitus and the “rules of the game” in the surrounding field. Nonetheless, it is clear that the specific moral habitus and the avenues of action open to it are not always congruent ðSayer 2005, pp. 26, 44Þ. To be a committed Muslim in a Chris- tian country or an animal rights activist at an event catered for meat eaters entails adjustments to a pure enactment of moral motivations. What is the consequence of these situations? Bourdieu suggested that one result could be “hysteresis”—a habitus ill adapted to action in a particular social environ- ment ðBourdieu 1990, p. 62; Lizardo and Strand 2010, p. 221Þ.5 But while Bourdieu is often read as describing a habitus that stems from and thus reproduces the outside world ðsee Sallaz and Zavisca 2007, p. 25; Wacquant 2014, p. 5Þ, Bourdieu ð1990, p. 61Þ himself points out that the social world and the habitus are constructed together. Agents can generate contexts in which, even as a fish out of water in the wider society, their moral habitus can align with its social milieu. For example, Vaisey and Lizardo ð2010Þ show how actors “prune” their social networks to increase interac- tions with others who share their moral worldviews.6 Participants in de- viant communities, for example, often differentiate themselves on the basis of moral criteria of personal or collective worth, which almost by definition put them “out of place” in society ðBecker 1963; Goffman 1963; Moon 2012Þ. Subcultural participants can sustain their opposition to conventional norms partly through group life, which provides “free spaces” and rituals that re- inforce identities and motivations and create contexts for acting on them 5 This is similar to “identity theorists’ ” suggestion that an “unverifiable” identity is liable to be replaced ðBurke and Stets 2009, p. 80Þ: frustrated freegans, e.g., reverting to their identity as middle-class urban denizens or more moderate political agents. 6 Identity theory, as cited above, makes a similar point about how actors search out sit- uations in which salient identities are likely to be confirmed ðBurke and Stets 2009, p. 73Þ. 1022 ðFischer 1975; Fine and Kleinman 1979Þ.7 Recent work has more explicitly argued that the appeal of subcultures stems from simultaneous development of an individual moral habitus and the structures, rules, and rituals of devi- ant group life ðWacquant 2004; Abramson and Modzelewski 2011Þ. These conclusions are consistent with a long line of sociological thinking on morality. Drawing on Durkheim’s ð1997Þ analysis of suicide, for example, sociologists of religion and health have focused on how the presence of so- cial ties facilitates individual moral worth, meaning, and self-preservation ðIdler and Kasl 1992; Maimon and Kuhl 2008; Wray, Colen, and Pescoso- lido 2011Þ. Offering one canonical reading of Durkheim’s analysis, Bellah ð1973, p. xliiiÞ concludes that “it is the very intensity of group interaction itself that produces social ideas and ideals and . . . it is from the warmth of group life that they become compelling and attractive to individuals.” In ad- dition to providing “warmth” through social integration, groups also exert regulation, shaping and constraining the ability of actors to diverge from their moral motivations or abandon their moral identities ðDurkheim 1997Þ. This literature thus offers a clear prediction that can be brought to bear on empirical material. If freegans have achieved any sense of living morally as second nature, it likely stems from having created groups or interactional spaces within their moral habitus in line with the social environment. This is not the same as saying that group life is purely harmonious, only that it affords individuals the opportunity to act out moral motivations in ways that affirm moral identities. As noted in the introduction, however, I posit another, material route to finding a moral sense of place. Materiality and Moral Second Nature Durkheim’s thinking about morality evolved over the course of his life ðsee Abend 2008Þ. Although he maintained that “society . . . is the source and the end of morality” ðDurkheim 1953, p. 59Þ, in Elementary Forms he ex- plored more circuitous connections between individual and group moral life. In fact, although morality is derived from society, its power stems from the fact that it is perceived as extrasocial, coming from “something greater than us” ð1965, p. 257Þ. Along the same lines, in Suicide, he insisted that “man cannot live without attachment to some object which transcends and sur- vives him” ð1997, p. 210Þ. Hence, we invariably see morality as originating not in society but in external entities, such as gods, or abstract concepts, like “nature” ðDurkheim 1953, p. 79Þ.8 7 The same point has been made for social movements ðHirsch 1990; Polletta 1999; O’Hearn 2009Þ. 8 Durkheim’s argument in Elementary Forms for “primitive” societies is analogous to his argument about “advanced” ones, in which the moral regulation of society must come from an entity outside of it: the state ðsee also Durkheim 1957Þ. Making the City Second Nature 1023 American Journal of Sociology It is from this interplay of the social and nonsocial in moral life that Durkheim’s conception of totems originates. Actors make totems out of the desire to represent the impersonal social forces that they see as acting on them. Thus, although totems are “the source of the moral life of the clan” ð1965, p. 219Þ, they are nonetheless always, in part, tied to something out- side the clan, such as wild animals ðp. 87Þ. Far from being simple outgrowths of moral life, totems exert moral influence over individuals, as evidenced by prohibitions on eating animals of the totemic species. Consequently, the religious forces Durkheim describes are “physical as well as human, moral as well as material” ðp. 254Þ. Subsequent work provides a further basis for considering the material world in moral life. Drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s ð1962Þ critique of Durkheim, Jerolmack ð2013, p. 14Þ shows that the animals and plants drawn on in totemic religion are not just “good to think with” but enable qualitatively different ways of thinking, perceiving, and classifying the social world. The implica- tion is that the objects coded as “moral” are not just arbitrarily pulled from the environment but instead are selected on the basis of moral beliefs and re- worked through moral practices. In fact, groups in a “moral minority,” like the freegans, may indeed be pushed to draw on items that are not coded as moral by the dominant group—such as, I show later, waste. A central contribution of this article is that relationships between humans and the material world may not just enhance or contribute to the confir- mation of moral identities in group life but may actually themselves be- come the basis of an individual’s moral sense of place. The notion of a practi- cal reworking of the material environment is an important element of habitus ðLizardo and Strand 2010, p. 211Þ, but I break from Bourdieu’s ð1990, pp. 71, 76, 273Þ assumption of a three-way homology between the subjective hab- itus and the objective social and material world. Instead, an actor whose moral habitus is out of sync with the behavioral expectations and patterns of the social environment may nonetheless be like a “fish in water” with re- spect to his or her ongoing reordering of physical space or material milieu. At the same time, linking the dialogical relationship between habitus and en- vironment to developments elsewhere in sociology, I insist that objects are not just passive props in a social morality play. Instead, as Latour ð2005, pp. 10, 74Þ argues, objects may actually do things that social actors cannot and can transform rather than simply transmit the meanings that humans attribute to them.9 I focus on three distinctive roles that objects can—and, as hinted at by the existing literature, do—play in moral life: ð1Þ proofs of moral labor, ð2Þ mark- ers of moral boundaries, and ð3Þ reminders of moral commitments. 9 Although I agree with Latour that objects “make a difference,” I make no claims to the existence of a “flat” world in which objects live moral lives or are intentional or reflexive in the same way as humans ðsee Jerolmack and Tavory 2014Þ. 1024 Moral proofs.—Recent work in the symbolic interactionist tradition has shown how behaviors toward nonhumans can reflect, anticipate, and even prompt human action ðTavory 2010Þ. Jerolmack ð2013, chap. 5; Jerolmack and Tavory 2014Þ, for example, explores how urban pigeon handlers’ rela- tionships with birds can serve to foster new human connections. Yet even if we accept the Durkheimian notion that the roots of moral values themselves always reside in social life, this does not mean that all moral action is directed toward or made with reference to other human beings. Pigeon handlers— like an animal shelter employee or art conservator—may very well have moral identities founded on their relationships with the birds themselves. I draw on the study by Boltanski and Thévenot ð2006, p. 131Þ, who argue that moral justifications must be buttressed by moral “proofs,” which in turn are “based on objects that are external to persons.”10 But, once again, moral- ity is not just about proving that we are moral to others. Actors with strong moral identities in social worlds that make acting on moral motivations dif- ficult must also find ways of proving their morality to themselves. In this re- spect, having tangible, physical evidence of moral action can be a crucial confirmation of the depth of moral commitments, even while other actions or objects can contradict them. Moral markers.—The drawing of boundaries between groups and indi- viduals graded on a hierarchy of moral worth is a key aspect of moral life ðLamont 1992, 2000; Edgell, Gerteis, and Hartmann 2006; Sherman 2006; Sanghera et al. 2011Þ. But what makes the “symbolic” boundaries of moral- ity “real”? Cultural sociologists have argued that symbolic meanings are sta- bilized and transmitted through physical carriers ðMukerji 1994; Molotch 2003; McDonnell 2010Þ. Indeed, a range of research has suggested that phys- ical objects can make boundaries a more consistent presence in social life than discursive expressions.11 I show how freegans distinguish themselves from others, even when placed in social situations ðlike jobsÞ when acting on the moral motivation to live “naturally” seems difficult, using material identifiers. Yet precisely because of their material presence, objects can also invoke moral boundaries when human actors do not intend to do so ðsee Tavory 2010Þ. The “wrong” object— like a Wal-Mart bag carried into a “fair-trade” shop ðBrown 2009, p. 872Þ— can highlight discrepancies between moral values and action to both external audiences and actors themselves. 10 Identity theory also considers “resources”—physical objects alongside social relation- ships—as crucial for “identity verification” ðBurke and Stets 2009, chap. 5Þ. However, these authors quite explicitly move away from viewing material resources as distinctive from social ones in their functions. 11 The role of physical markers in constructing boundaries has been shown in studies on subcultures ðHebdige 1979, p. 78Þ, class differentiation ðGoffman 1959, p. 36; Bourdieu 1984, p. 184Þ, or religion ðWinchester 2008, p. 1770; Tavory 2010Þ. Making the City Second Nature 1025 American Journal of Sociology Moral reminders.—As Durkheim ð1965, p. 391Þ noted, society “cannot be assembled all the time.” Totems serve to remind the individual of his or her moral motivations even when that individual is outside of the social context from which those motivations originated. We might predict that, in a modern city, where individuals move rapidly between different groups and locations ðsee Simmel 1⁄21903 1971Þ, such “totems,” far from being primitive hold- overs, might actually become more important in sustaining moral identities. Indeed, Jerolmack and Tavory ð2014, p. 73Þ argue that “everyday totemism” reaches far beyond religious life. Interactions with even “mundane” non- humans such as pigeons ðor more obviously signifying ones, such as flags or clothingÞ can allow humans to connect with social groups “in absentia.” Once again, though, we should go beyond simply seeing objects as a proxy for social ties, or what Durkheim ð1997Þ described as “social integration.” Objects can also step into the other role Durkheim envisioned for the group: moral “regulation,” one of “monitoring, oversight, and guidance” ðWray et al. 2011, p. 508Þ. As I show, nonhuman objects can forcefully remind freegans of their moral identities, even when they are outside the freegan group itself, and in contexts in which freegans might prefer to set them aside temporarily. DIVING IN: METHODOLOGY I elaborate my theoretical argument about the relationship between moral identities, moral motivations, the habitus, and physical objects with an em- pirical study of how freegans rework their material environment. This study is based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork with the activist organization freegan.info in New York City, between 2007 and 2009. Over this time, I attended scores of freegan.info events: “trash tours” ðpublicly an- nounced dumpster dives open to newcomers and mediaÞ, wild food foraging expeditions in city parks, collaborative sewing “skillshares,” “feasts” held in freegans’ homes, and monthly organizing meetings. As time went on, I be- gan to spend time in the freegan bike workshop and freegan “office”—really, a nook in the cluttered, windowless basement of a converted warehouse in Brooklyn—which led to more interactions outside of formal group events. In spring 2009, I conducted 20 interviews, which constituted nearly a com- plete census of active members of the freegan.info group who self-identified as “freegan.”12 I also analyzed several thousand e-mails from freegan.info’s “freeganworld” listserve ðwhich has over a thousand subscribersÞ, giving me a better sense of freegan ideology and practice across contexts. In 2012, I re- turned to New York and conducted follow-up interviews and observations. 12 I defined “active” group members as people who attended freegan events over a period of at least three months. Only two such individuals declined to be interviewed. 1026 Fieldwork initially focused on freegans’ public, performative claims- making. The centrality of nature to freegans’ moral worldviews, and their discursive critiques of urban life, emerged through the course of observation. These findings led me to ask whether and how freegans carved out a moral place in a city they frequently characterized as immoral. As time went on, I attempted to test emerging hypotheses derived from theory through field- work, a process of theoretical reconstruction congruent with the extended case method ðBurawoy 1998Þ. As Tavory ð2011, p. 289Þ observes, “the less the environment is built to cater to a specific category of people, the more moral situations would arise in these people’s lives.” I thus view freegans—with the apparently gaping chasm between their articulated moral identities and the reality of the urban environment—as a strategic research site for examin- ing in accentuated form how living in an adverse context can actually be- come the basis of a moral sense of place. A crucial objective of participant observation was getting past the ad hoc reasons freegans offered for their behavior to identify any underlying mo- tivations, which Vaisey ð2009Þ argues are best identified with forced-choice survey questions. But his argument assumes that sociologists must ultimately rely on some kind of verbalized representation to study moral beliefs and be- haviors. Using participant observation, however, we can actually see pat- terns of behavior and identify trends that reveal the underlying motiva- tions behind them by “sampling” across a range of situations and moments in time ðJerolmack and Khan 2014Þ. Ethnography thus is a valuable tech- nique for studying morality “in the wild” ðHitlin and Vaisey 2010, p. 11Þ, as actors deal with practical moral conundrums and conflicts. Nonetheless, the concern with the materiality of morality adopted here poses problems for ethnographic examination. The value of observing moral action rather than asking about it stems from the notion that meanings are made “between individuals” rather than “by or within individuals” ðJerol- mack and Khan 2014, p. 200Þ. However, I assert that moral motivations are also acted out between individuals and nonhuman objects. By defini- tion, though, any situation I could access involved at least two humans: the observer and the observed. I adopted three strategies to evaluate if, how, and why freegans’ actions were directed at objects. First, I looked for the unintended material “traces” ðLatour 2005, p. 193Þ of freegan practices. Second, by quite literally “getting my hands dirty” at freegan events—by, for example, eating discarded food— I gradually gained access to the more unguarded and candid moments of freegans’ lives. Finally, I also began to engage in freegan practices on my own, including subsisting almost entirely on discarded food for a six-month period. Through embodying freegan morality myself, I more fully under- stood how everyday relationships to the physical world could help sustain a sense of moral place in an apparently adverse context. Making the City Second Nature 1027 American Journal of Sociology FREEGAN MORAL IDENTITY AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF URBAN LIFE Consistent with the definitions of morality cited above, freegans invoked deeply rooted, cross-situational and cross-temporal identities founded on the “right” or “wrong” way to live to explain their involvement in freegan- ism. David, a bearded white male in his early 30s, claimed that—despite growing up in a conventional, middle-class home—“1⁄2I always felt like I had to minimize my impact and live as nonviolently as possible. I’ve ba- sically always been an anarchist.” Prior to discovering freeganism, three- quarters of freegan.info participants reported their primary activist involve- ment as animal rights, a movement whose participants are overwhelmingly motivated by moral beliefs ðJasper and Nelkin 1992Þ. Most moved beyond veganism when they realized the moral limits of a vegan diet: continued sup- port for environmentally destructive agriculture or poor working conditions in the food industry. While freegans’ worldviews were undoubtedly shaped by their early in- volvement in other social movements and activist networks, freegans none- theless experienced their motivations to act morally as a permanent, intrinsic part of their identities. As Jeff articulated, “I was always radical. Sometimes it was latent, sometimes it wasn’t encouraged, sometimes it was covered up by other things. But I was always radical.” My own observations of freegan. info participants during an extended period of time ðover five yearsÞ sug- gested that living morally, for them, was not just a temporary project. In- stead, as one put it, “Realizing what you believe and trying to live that is very complicated and something that a lot of people—especially myself— are going to spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out.” Whether or not they still identified as freegans, when I returned in 2012, all of the rein- terviewed informants offered examples of how trying to live morally con- tinued to structure their lives. More than just rhetoric, freegans’ moral beliefs were built into their everyday practices, or habitus. David began dumpster diving when he real- ized that even organic farming killed small mammals and insects. Although I could not verify his claim not to have bought food for 13 years, I never saw him acquire food any other way than “dumpstering.” At various times, I also observed him spending hours searching for and dismantling mouse- traps, meticulously picking live flies off of wax paper, and berating other residents of his shared house for poisoning bedbugs. Madison quit a job with a six-figure salary and sold a luxurious Manhattan apartment after having her “mind blown” at a freegan.info event. Perhaps most notably, even though it was, as one freegan put it, “horrifying and disgusting” to others, most freegans regularly recovered and ate wasted food because they perceived purchasing food as morally anathema. Freegans, then, appeared to be indi- 1028 viduals with strong moral identities who made their capacity to act on their moral motivations a core and enduring part of their sense of self. But what did living morally actually mean? The definition of freegan- ism on freegan.info’s website is a sprawling list of virtues and vices: “Free- gans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed” ðhttp://freegan.infoÞ But in interviews as well as in public events that explained freeganism to those unfamiliar with the movement, freegans frequently focused on a moral imperative to live more “naturally.” As Benjamin—a freegan activist in his mid-20s who lived in a squatted building in Brooklyn—explained, “We’re just so disconnected from it 1⁄2nature. One of the goals 1⁄2of freeganism is just connecting with each other and connecting with the rest of life on earth, connecting with the earth itself.” Freegans evoked humanity’s fall from grace, central to Judeo-Christian moral narratives, and made nature central to the story. As Evie, a speech pathologist in a public hospital and lifetime Palestinian liberation activist, articulated during one meeting, “There was a point where human beings stepped out of nature and decided to control nature,” and it was at this point that the seeds for a whole range of social ills—mass consumption, ex- ploitation of animals and humans, and ecological devastation—were planted. Nature provided both a centerpiece of freegan discourse and a guiding principle for new freegan.info projects. Proposing that the group start an urban garden, Guadalupe noted, “My ideal is a little different than just having a mini-farm. I’m very interested in letting the plants that just nat- urally grow in the area do their thing and even help them grow. This in- cludes ‘weeds.’ I don’t really believe in the concept of an undesirable plant. I believe in biodiversity.” That freegans would evoke nature as central to their moral worldviews was unsurprising. The power of nature as moral principle has a long history in strands of American culture ðNash 1973; Cronon 1996Þ, often in opposi- tion to very different framings of “the good” in terms of consumption, com- petition, or free-market capitalism. Unsurprisingly, sociologists have shown that beliefs about nature—for example, freegans’ claim that living natu- rally meant not consuming animals—are culturally and temporally variable social constructs ðGreider and Garkovich 1994; Freudenburg, Frickel, and Gramling 1995; Fourcade 2011Þ. Yet, paradoxically, research also shows that the appeal of nature as a framework for determining right and wrong stems from the popular belief that nature is free from social influence ðBell 1994, p. 7; Jerolmack 2013, pp. 134–35Þ. This was precisely the sense in which freegans used nature: to refer to something that was immutable, primor- dial, and uncontestable, a moral concept “outside of us” in the Durkheim- ian sense. Making the City Second Nature 1029 American Journal of Sociology Freegans’ discursive commitment to living naturally and the reality of freegan.info as a group based in a city built by humans would thus seem to be in direct contradiction. Indeed, when I asked freegans in interviews about their views of urban life, they often repeated a familiar American cul- tural trope that valorizes the natural aspects of rural life and demonizes the city ðsee Hummon 1990Þ. One freegan characterized the city as an “evil haven of decadence and debauchery”; another described it as “incredibly psychologically destructive” because it separated residents from natural spaces. Ryan speculated that “rates of depression are so high in America because we’re in a city, and we aren’t in some heavily forested area being spontaneous and finding wild asparagus.” On a more practical level, aspects of the urban environment made con- forming to some elements of the officially articulated freegan identity dif- ficult. According to the movement’s informal manifesto Why Freegan? and the homepage of freegan.info, freegans engaged in a “total boycott” of the capitalist economic system, meeting as many needs as possible outside the market. For example, freegans claimed they could live for “free” by squat- ting illegally in abandoned ðor “wasted”Þ buildings. Yet in New York, prop- erty values are high enough that abandoned buildings are rarely left un- occupied for long, and the police actively search for and remove unlawful occupants. As such, even though “true freegans don’t pay rent,” as one told me, the reality was that nearly all of them did. Some had eliminated rent payments, but only by buying a home outright. The result was an admission that, for all their political and moral commitments, there were many parts of freegans’ urban lives that they could not control. As one freegan told me, “there are so many things I see that I can’t change. I can’t change the way the building I live in operates. I know that if I lived elsewhere, I would do things completely differently.” A similar apparent divergence between articulated values and avenues for moral action could be made for employment. One of the pamphlets that freegan.info passed out during events on public sidewalks averred, “Free- gans are able to greatly reduce or altogether eliminate the need to constantly be employed.” But nearly all freegans maintained conventional, waged oc- cupations, because needing money was an “unpleasant reality” as long as they lived in a city. While some had found employment in activist organizations or nonprofits, others worked in more clearly problematic fields like product design. As Evie, herself a homeowner, admitted, “I’m freegan in lots of lit- tle things in my life. But at the end of the day, I am paying taxes and fund- ing a couple of enormous wars, and sort of everything bad that’s going on in the world.” Reflecting on the divergence between freegans’ moral ideals and the exigencies of urban life, one freegan sighed, “Manhattan is one giant contradiction.” 1030 CLAIMING CITY CONTRADICTION, FINDING URBAN NATURE How did freegans respond to this apparent disparity? When confronted with the gap between the two, most freegans offered to others what might be framed as a moral justification: they stayed in the city because it was an efficacious site for their activism. At one “freeganism 101” event, a new- comer asked Jeff why he hadn’t moved to the countryside. He replied, “Setting up a commune out in the country would be good for me, but I don’t know how that would be for the overall resistance. I definitely want to get out of the city eventually . . . 1⁄2but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done in all different places . . . and lots of it needs to happen here, and not in the country.” In truth, it is difficult to imagine freegans’ polit- ical tactics outside of an urban context. Cities concentrate retailers in a small geographic area, allowing freegans to organize public, performative dumpster dives for passersby and the media and to recover a wide range of goods relatively easily.13 In a sense, what looks like moral contradiction is thus inherent in freeganism: the movement depends on the unnatural urban environment in order to protest the economic and social system that the city symbolizes, all in the name of living more naturally. If we view “morality” through the lens of tool kit theory, freegans’ ex- planation for the gap between beliefs and practice, and the various ways they deploy that reasoning in interaction, could be the focal point of anal- ysis. Or we could view freegans as satisfied with reaching a certain, sub- optimal threshold of acting morally ðsee Gigerenzer 2010Þ. I have argued, however, that the notion of moral habitus implies that action creates a more ongoing sense that living out a moral identity is “second nature.” Did this process of finding a moral place in the city happen through group life— that is, social dynamics within freegan.info? Certainly, as Durkheim would suggest, freegan.info provided a space where freegans could freely discuss, develop, and reinforce moral beliefs that would otherwise struggle to find a hearing. During feasts, for example, freegans held freewheeling debates about elements of their natural ethos, such as whether humans were “pri- mordial vegetarians,” if they should return to agriculture or revert to forag- ing, or whether human beings should voluntarily go extinct. Yet, despite the sharing of freegan skills I describe below, freegan.info was less successful in helping freegans act on their moral motivations. Free- gan meetings were often filled with announcements that one or another practice or product had turned out to be environmentally destructive or 13 In five years of monitoring the freegan world e-mail list, I have not encountered a single mention of rural freeganism. The one academic account I can find of rural free- gans notes that they frequently go into a nearby city in order to dumpster dive ðGross 2009, p. 61Þ. Making the City Second Nature 1031 American Journal of Sociology exploitative, leading to a new escalation of what moral living entailed with little sense of how to achieve it. In 2008, Rob and Leslie, two core freegan. info activists, attempted to extend freegan principles and address concerns that freegan.info was facilitating an insufficient range of anticapitalist or ecoconscious practices by founding a collective household for anarchists in Brooklyn. The space, “Surrealestate,” hosted a bike workshop, community meals with dumpster-dived food, and activist fund-raisers. Yet even that space charged rent, which led many in the group to reject the very notion that it was “freegan.” Others alleged that the project constituted first-wave gentrification. This acrimony was emblematic of a frequently evoked “basic lack of trust” within freegan.info, which I saw play out in strident arguments during freegan.info meetings. The overall sense, as one person told me, was that “there’s no real freegan community.” While the presence of conflict certainly does not invalidate the possibil- ity of a social group providing a moral sense of place—Durkheim, after all, never claimed that groups had to be harmonious—other evidence also sug- gests otherwise. In interviews, many freegans claimed that “true” freegans engaged in practices like dumpster diving “on their own”—not just at free- gan.info events. As one explained, “Freegan.info is just a side project to the real thing, which is being freegan itself.” Some freegans even experienced the group as a barrier to living morally: in 2008, Guadalupe, a Latina mother from a low-income background, announced that she would be “stepping back” because she had spent so much time with the group that she had been unable to dumpster dive enough to support her family and thus was buying food—a situation she saw as morally untenable. When I returned in 2012, freegan.info had collapsed under the weight of internal discord, yet most freegans described how they continued to deepen their understanding of what was required to maintain a moral identity and thus faced the same challenges of creating a sense of affirming that identity—albeit without any support from the group itself. What is more, while at its height freegan.info met only a few times a month, clashes between freegans’ moral habitus and the social environment of the city were frequent. In a society where many social situations involve buying something—from a beer to a movie ticket—being a freegan meant either profound isolation or constant violations of freegan principles. As Barbara told me, “You can sit in a room of five or ten people, and they’re talking about bargains and sales and ‘Where’d you buy that?’ and what the latest technology is, and you can really feel like you don’t want to partic- ipate at all, or that you have to guard it 1⁄2your freeganism.” Benjamin elaborated how the ideology behind his freeganism fed into a feeling of alien- ation and disaffection: “I always stand around in a room full of people and think, ‘Oh my God, no one is an anticapitalist here.’ I feel so alone, I feel so out of place. . . . It’s so lonely. It’s depressing as hell to live here 1⁄2in 1032 New York.” Others reported an involuntarily shrinking social network as nonfreegans were pushed away from them and few new freegans appeared to fill the holes. Despite their deeply rooted moral identities and the barriers that social existence in the city posed to acting on them, though, freegans still insisted they were living morally. Perhaps more importantly, many debates about abstract principles did not translate into anxiety in day-to-day life, suggest- ing that freegans were not among those actors who “churn through their moral narratives in their internal conversations almost obsessively” ðSayer 2005, p. 29Þ. In their daily lives, both within and outside freegan.info, free- gans showed few signs of a Bourdieusian “hysteresis,” suggesting that their habitus and environment were, in a sense, aligned. As I show, though, the en- vironment they were aligning with may not have been primarily a social one. Freegans could rarely articulate how they managed to find a moral sense of place in the city, except that it had something to do with nature and the city itself. As one told me, “Freeganism . . . it’s a way of downscaling the city somehow. It tells me, ‘Okay, I can live small here.’” Rob, a tall freegan with a shock of curly red hair, speculated, “Within the city, nature is a park, a tree, or a bug. Or maybe it’s noises or creepy things or shadows. That’s nature to me. Freeganism is a way of relating to nature in the city. It lets things happen organically. Everyone is part of the equation. It ends up being just, sort of, magic. People are like nature and there are all sorts of varie- ties and uniquenesses in any situation.” As I argue in the rest of this article, freegans made a city seemingly full of contradictions into a “common-sense world” ðBourdieu 1990, p. 58Þ, within which living naturally was second nature, by practically appropriating and reconfiguring their material world into moral proofs, markers, and reminders. MAKING THE CITY “SECOND NATURE” Moral Proofs and Natural Resources Freegans’ “wild food foraging tours” through city parks were, in large part, neither political nor practical. Foraging events lacked the performative cri- tique of capitalism that made freegan trash tours appealing to the media. They were not particularly helpful in allowing freegans to survive “out- side” capitalism either. Ryan, an experienced forager, got only a fraction of his calories from it; Guadalupe remarked that dumpsters have “tastier food.” Yet whenever Ryan announced his willingness to lead a tour, the group was invariably enthusiastic and turnout high. The appeal, I argue, stemmed from the way tours functioned as a kind of “nature work” ðFine 1998, p. 4Þ, a directed process of relating to the physical environment that enabled freegans to see the city as providing natural resources that func- tioned as tangible proofs of their efforts. Making the City Second Nature 1033 American Journal of Sociology On one tour along the northwest edge of Manhattan, a visiting activist from California commented how, to his surprise, the plants the group was finding were identical to those he found in his home state, despite vast dif- ferences in climate. Ryan replied, “There’s lots of biodiversity in the rain- forest, but there’s unique species here 1⁄2in the city too.” Both presented the city as an ecosystem, replete with its own species, flows of resources, and cycles of food availability. Wild food foraging tours were not just a way of imagining the city as a natural ecosystem, but treating it as such through concrete and material—yet, as the notion of habitus suggests, simultaneously also symbolically and morally laden—practices. As Ryan admonished the group, “Here you see a bunch of ostrich ferns growing in a clump together. If you know to only pick half of them, they’ll grow back. But pick all of them, and it dies.” At another point, Ryan’s guidance more directly touched on a key moral motivation for freegans—finding value in waste. Motioning to a downed tree, he observed, “Lots of things that look like waste aren’t waste when you look a little closer.” He took us to the other side and re- vealed edible mushrooms growing on it, which freegans then picked—in moderation. Expeditions to find burdock root and edible flowers were not the only moments in which freegans approached the city as a natural resource base that furnished proofs of their ability to live naturally. They also did so with respect to human-made urban waste. Of course, despite a social scientific trope of waste as “urban metabolism” ðHeynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006Þ, there is nothing superficially natural about New York’s vast waste disposal apparatus. Indeed, in their public events, freegans often went to great lengths to emphasize the highly unnatural social processes that cre- ated waste. As one freegan explained to a group of 15 newcomers on a trash tour, “It’s not individuals, it’s the system 1⁄2that produces waste. The stores are trying to extract surplus value, to borrow a Marxist term. But our sys- tem ends up with a huge amount of waste and unrecognized costs.” While in their deliberate, planned events waste served as a symbol of all that was wrong with the city, in everyday practice waste became a fixed aspect of the physical environment. One weekend, I joined Benjamin and Lucie, two young freegans, for a free art festival on Governor’s Island. We had been discussing the recent closure of the Occupy Wall Street encamp- ment, and I commented that the island had large tracts of open space that could be occupied. Benjamin replied, pensively, “Yeah, but what would you eat? You’d have to go into the city to dumpster 1⁄2dive, and there are only ferries on the weekend.” Lucie laughed, “You remember that food comes from places other than dumpsters, right? You could farm it.” “Oh right,” Benjamin replied, “I forgot.” In effect, the social origins of food waste had receded to the background in a moral habitus that drew its power from treating waste as a natural resource. 1034 The availability of garbage depends on the vicissitudes of store employ- ees and sanitation workers, yet for self-described “urban foragers” like freegans, it was nature that provided the waste. Noted one freegan, “The difference between foraging and agriculture is trying to control nature, versus preparing yourself to respond to whatever nature throws at you.” Although waste in New York is so abundant that freegans could easily eat only prepared food or only organic produce if they wanted, freegans none- theless often “rescued” unappealing items and turned them into food. One autumn evening, the group uncovered dozens of ears of dried, ornamental corn. When one newcomer moved to put them back in the garbage—as- suming they were inedible—Madison snatched them. The next week, she returned having transformed them into hominy: a time-consuming and im- practical move, but one that affirmed a moral identity that, as she put it, allowed her to make use of “whatever nature throws at you.” While freegan political activities were a direct challenge to urban social institutions, freegan nature-work transformed the environment in more subtle ways, through de- veloping a habitus that would allow freegans to partly subsist on precisely what their nature-work on the city made available. While freegans’ self-description as “urban foragers” and their labeling of waste as a “natural” resource might seem strained, these discourses were tied to concrete practices. One freegan observed how the often unreflective, in- grained habits of a dumpster diver paralleled those she envisioned foragers— the reference point for her moral motivations—as having: “When you go dumpster diving . . . you do things in the natural way. It’s like . . . going in the forest to find food. . . . You need to explore, first, to find good spots. Then you need to really work for your food: it’s harder, you need to open bags, to search, to climb into a dumpster. . . . It’s always surprising. You don’t know what you’re going to find. It makes it more natural. It’s like going back to the time when people would go into natural spaces to get food.” For her, dumpster diving was “natural”—and, therefore, also in her eyes, moral—precisely because it required effort. It was precisely the adver- sity of place that allowed her to have a “sense of her place” that she could envision as analogous to life in a forest. As the quote suggested, even as freegans imbued the urban waste stream with moral meaning, the physical characteristics of the waste stream itself required ongoing readjustments. This was particularly evident with respect to the way the rhythms of the urban waste disposal system structured free- gans’ time. While a grocery store might be open 16 hours a day, the win- dow of time for dumpster diving is just a few hours between when stores close and garbage trucks appear. One night, I was working in the freegan office with David—who did not cook and usually ate directly from dump- sters—when he looked at his computer and declared, “It’s 8:30. We can almost go dumpstering.” Eating like a forager meant gathering food at the Making the City Second Nature 1035 American Journal of Sociology inconvenient times it was available and going without otherwise. Need- less to say, frequent changes in stores’ disposal practices themselves pushed freegans to reconfigure their routines to shift to new sites or new times. For freegans working normal jobs, this was not necessarily easy—which was, perhaps, part of what made it meaningful. Marion, a woman who had been “surviving” from waste reclamation for more than five years, despite having a significant income, explained, “I try to project and say ‘This is what I have, I probably won’t go on this day because of the weather.’ But I have to plan in advance to make sure I’m prepared. . . . It gets laborious, to stay on the street, late late at night, day after day. So I try to limit it to get what I need, at least. It can so easily turn into still 1⁄2being on the street at 1:30 in the morning. It’s exhausting for me.” In order to act on their con- ceptualization of living naturally, freegans had to conform to the rhythm of waste metabolism on a seasonal as well as daily basis. Back-to-school shop- ping season, for example, was one of the only times freegans could dumpster dive office supplies. Barbara—a tenured and, by her own admission, well- paid public school teacher—noted that the “only” time she could find instant oatmeal was during move-out days from college dorms. While she could certainly have bought instant oatmeal and no one in the group would know the difference, it appeared that she didn’t. Instead, for two Saturdays in a row, I found her alone in the dumpsters of New York University looking for oat- meal. Her solitary efforts suggested that, insofar as urban waste functioned as a moral “proof,” she herself was the primary audience. At times, freegans’ public denunciation of waste and their treatment of waste as a finite natural resource base were overtly in tension. In 2009, Ryan lamented, “There has been less waste lately. . . . No more bulk boxes with one bottle broken and the rest intact but slimy.” Some speculated that the decline in waste output was a result of the economic downturn. Others, though, returned to ecological metaphors, noting that a particular “fertile” chain of stores in Murray Hill had been “overharvested” and thus become “exhausted” by the overly frequent “exploitation” of local divers. A lack of care toward the natural resource base that waste represented, then, could serve as a sign of a habitus gone awry. In a context in which physical rather than social relationships were key to affirming moral identities, these cir- cumstances threatened freegans’ “identity kit” ðGoffman 1961, pp. 14–21Þ. Some freegans even embarked on a series of collective efforts—including a futile visit to the stores’ managers asking them to “give back the garbage”— to rectify the situation. Indeed, throughout my time with the group, there was an ongoing con- flict between those who wanted to call attention to waste in order to grow the movement and those who wanted to keep it hidden in order to ensure their ability to maintain themselves on the system’s margins. This conflict played out in practice: while some welcomed others to join them on dives 1036 outside those scheduled by freegan.info, others would hide evidence of their activities out of fear that nonfreegan divers would discover their favorite spots. Paradoxically, the nature of freegans’ resource base—and its depen- dence on store managers’ and employees’ fickle actions—meant that free- gans’ political actions threatened to deprive them of the very objects they used to prove to themselves that they were living naturally. Such tensions are constitutive of moral life, insofar as we recognize that moral identities exist alongside other, nonmoral identities ðStryker and Burke 2000, p. 290Þ, and the dispositions of the habitus are only partly coherent and integrated, owing to their construction within multiple environments ðWacquant 2014, p. 6Þ. Moral Markers and Human Nature Urban waste was not just a proof of freegans’ moral identities but also a way of physically differentiating freegans from both the capitalist main- stream and other animal rights or environmental activists, with whom free- gans made common political cause but whom they saw as morally wanting. Speaking in front of an otherwise receptive audience—an undergraduate class on food, waste, and sustainability at NYU—David lectured about the uselessness of formal education: “We live in a profoundly deskilled society. We’ve been infantilized, and very few of us know how to do anything out- side of our little narrow box of employment.” Real skills, he observed, were those that would allow humans to survive in nature—skills that freegans were already developing. “We have false ideas about what constitutes fresh food,” he noted. “A lot of food tastes better when it looks worse. But those are not the tactile and aesthetic qualities people look for when they pur- chase produce.” During the trash tour after the presentation, David pulled me over to a bin filled with discarded tofu, chicken, and cheese from the store’s hot food salad bar. He commented, “A lot of vegans would just leave this here, but look.” David plunged into the mixture and pulled out a sauce-covered white chunk and explained how to identify whether it was meat on the basis of the way it broke when crushed between the thumb and forefinger. For him, living naturally off the city’s resource base—rather than unnaturally from its supermarkets—required connecting with another version of nature: human nature, embodied in corporal practice ðIgnatow 2009, p. 100Þ. Indeed, suc- cessful urban foraging required all the senses to be constantly if not always consciously attuned to the physical surroundings in a natural way, because edible items were signaled not by neon signs but by more subtle and diffi- cult to discern hints: lumpy plastic bags or the faint smell of food. The above example was not the only time that David used physical ob- jects as a marker of moral distinction. At monthly “Really Really Free Mar- Making the City Second Nature 1037 American Journal of Sociology kets,” where freegans would gather with other scavengers and anarchists to swap surplus household items, freegan.info would often provide a buffet replete with carefully washed, aesthetically pleasing dumpster-dived food. But when I accompanied David to more mainstream animal rights con- ferences—where he was a frequent gadfly—he reversed the style of presen- tation. He would make a show of the fact that freegans’ flyers were printed on the back sides of “rescued” paper—in sharp contrast to the glossy pam- phlets of the Humane Society of the United States—and flaunt that the food on offer at the table was past its sell-by date, not free of genetically modified organisms or organic, and obviously from a dumpster. These objects helped David balance a political desire to be present at the conference with a moral motivation to distance himself from mainstream veganism, which he saw as a “bourgeois ideology that worships consump- tion.” Certainly, anyone in attendance who spoke to David would become aware of his views, but, on one level, they didn’t need to because the bound- ary was materially manifest. A similar duality appeared during regular trash tours, when freegans used expensive and desirable recovered items—like still-bagged organic coffee—as an “interactional hook” ðTavory 2010, p. 57Þ. The lure of free stuff would temporarily drag passersby into freegans’ po- litical project. Yet if when the freegans revealed the foods’ origins the others expressed disgust, these objects instantiated moral boundaries. Although, in these instances, freegans’ self-differentiation was overt, their moral boundary marking through sensory relationships to food was a more implicit part of their everyday habitus. In response to a query about food safety, Marion quipped, “I never look at the sell-by date, it’s irrelevant to me. It’s about the condition of the food: you smell it, you taste it, and if it’s horrible, don’t 1⁄2eat it.” Eating safely meant cultivating knowledge of the material properties of food, knowledge that freegans claimed had been lost with urbanization: “Not knowing about food, and thinking about safety standards, that comes from living in the city. . . . If you take a yogurt, and you don’t know what it is and you don’t know how it’s made, and all you know is the expiration date, then after the expiration date you’ll throw it away. If you know how a yogurt works, you know it could be good two months after. You just taste it.” Media and bystanders frequently queried whether dumpster divers ever got sick. Invariably, freegans responded that no one ever ailed from recovered food, asserting first their own knowledge of food—which set them aside from the incompetence of the ordinary con- sumer—and then a more general claim about the real nature of the human body. As Guadalupe told one reporter, “People in this country are a lot more freaked out about dirt than they need to be. We need a little dirt in our lives for our immune systems to be strong.” These comments were not just bluster. Freegan.info as an organization discouraged participants from eating straight in front of the camera, for fear 1038 of the media’s propensity to splice together images to maximize dumpster diving’s “ick factor.” Outside the public eye, though, freegans would often spend hours debating politics and revolutionary strategy while eating di- rectly from the trash bin. My own meals with freegans in their homes, as well as glances into freegans’ refrigerators, suggested a striking willingness to eat over-the-hill and rotten food. In effect, these scavenged items were exemplars of how “the most mundane objects . . . 1⁄2can become a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile” ðHebdige 1979, p. 2Þ from the still essentially middle-class world in which freegans lived and worked. And, in a Latourian sense, these objects occasionally “acted back” in unpredictable ways: although reticent to admit it, some freegans could recount how their embodied confidence that they were conforming to humanity’s more resil- ient internal nature led them to eat food that left them sick for days. Freegans’ moral habitus of relating to physical objects could help main- tain boundaries when the more conventional aspects of their lives threat- ened to erase them. From 2007 to 2009, freegan.info operated a bicycle workshop in the cramped basement space of an anarchist “infoshop” in a low- income neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Leslie, a college-educated “rad- ical social ecologist” in her early 30s who was one of the shop’s main volun- teers, described how her first visit to the space was “exhilarating” because, for the first time in her life, she realized that she could “build and create things and figure out how to do stuff, solve problems, use tools.” Rob, who had a degree in computer science from an elite private university, offered a similar assessment of how the skills he learned in the workshop—skills his classmates lacked—brought him closer to human nature. “Bike repair really got me into working with my hands,” he explained, “which is, like, so critical to being a human being—to be able to manipulate your environment and physical things. You don’t get that in school.” For Rob, the bikes that came out of that space were materializations of freegan values. Through problem solving and careful repair, decaying discarded parts became bikes that could provide sustainable transportation for decades. But the bikes were also markers of difference. In a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that freegans saw as full of “hipsters” riding “expensive fixed gears,” freegan bikes were almost ostentatiously worn looking and ugly. Some particularly unconventional activities for which freegans them- selves had little explanation made sense as projects that developed the hab- itus and the physical environment in a morally affirming way. After one freegan feast in Jeff’s apartment, eight of us stayed around to watch Ryan conduct a “skillshare” for the group. Ryan removed a handful of yucca leaves from his backpack and placed them on the floor. He demonstrated how to scrape the flesh off the leaves, which isolated the internal fibers. These, he explained, could be woven into rope. After half an hour, Ryan had created a drawstring for his hat, while the rest had only a few sloppy, short strands Making the City Second Nature 1039 American Journal of Sociology of fibers to show for their efforts. Nonetheless, the group was so enthralled by the event that, immediately after, they began discussing plans for simi- lar training in canning and preserving fruit, sewing clothes, and making wine. The moment was one of Durkheimian ð1965, p. 236Þ “collective ef- fervescence,” in which the social affirmation of freegans’ distinctive moral identities was amplified with palpable markers. These same objects could act as markers of moral difference in self-evidently “nonfreegan” situations. Freegans could—and did—ride their salvaged bikes to work or take dumpster-dived food to potlucks with nonfreegan friends, giving a moral tinge to otherwise problematic situations. Barbara described writing her lesson plans on the back sides of paper that she pulled from other teachers’ recycling ðor wasteÞ bins, a practice she readily noted set her apart despite their shared participation in paid employment. But Barbara’s “quirks” could have unintended consequences: she recounted that once, after sitting down with her dumpster-dived lunch, a colleague stood up and walked away, announcing, “I will sit here with my clean food.” Here, the “waste” Barbara at other times used to draw moral bound- aries evoked them when she had not intended to, providing an unintended “mold” for interaction ðsee Jerolmack and Tavory 2014Þ. While for free- gans objects recovered from the garbage could set them apart as moral, for nonfreegans they could invoke “pollution rules” that made them “wicked object1⁄2s of moral reprobation” ðDouglas 1966, p. 170Þ. Freegans could thus not seamlessly “enlist” the physical world ðsee Latour 2005Þ. Indeed, the use of these objects as moral markers could give freegans a sense of place in the urban environment even as it deepened their sense of being out of place in their social milieu. Moral Reminders in the Urban Frontier Finally, physical objects functioned as “moral reminders” for freegans’ moral motivations, including those developed or shared within the group, outside the group context. Like so many other self-identified freegans, Lola, an itin- erant art student who had come to New York in the summer of 2008, claimed to see the city as the antithesis of morality, averring, “I think that the urban culture is what I’m opposed to.” And, like other freegans, she also offered proof that she could turn the harshly unnatural city into a nat- ural urban frontier. Referencing her bike, she told me, “Bicycling is such a freeing feeling. You’re in direct contact with nature. The physical aspect of it is amazing. It feels to me like breaking through some kind of invisible barrier. . . . You can’t fall asleep on a fixed gear 1⁄2bicycle. You can’t just ig- nore things that are going on. You can’t just look up at the stars; it’s actu- ally being in contact and being directly involved with what is happening.” 1040 To Lola, nature was something with which she could be in “direct contact” in the city, found not by “look1⁄2ing up at the stars” but by engaging with her more immediate, built environs. Lola expressed particular pride at her fixed-gear bike: she built it her- self, which to her meant that “I know every part of it and understand why and how everything works.” As with becoming an “expert” on food, under- standing the material properties of her bicycle was crucial to Lola’s moral identity as someone living a more natural life than other urban denizens. More than that, though, her bicycle seemed to function as a personal totem, a ward keeping the immoral forces of the city at bay. In the summer of 2008, Lola spent a stint house-sitting a luxurious apartment in the Upper West Side. She invited me over, and I noted that she had crammed her bicycle into a tiny corner of her bedroom rather than leaving it elsewhere in the capacious apartment. She confided, “It felt really weird to stay here, so I brought my bike into my bedroom with me, just as a reminder.” Here was a moment when the clash between values and environment threatened to make her feel quite literally out of place, until Lola reworked that place in a small but tangible way. All freegans juggled tensions between their political ideals and everyday lives, but these contradictions were particularly acute for Ryan. Despite helping Jeff and David organize an “antitechnology” conference in 2009, Ryan had a degree in computer science and was working 40 hours a week in Connecticut programming touch-screen computers that, in his own words, “made it easier for rich people to watch TV.” That he was not just an or- dinary college-educated computer programmer, though, was inscribed on his person. When Ryan showed up at one freegan meeting in midsummer, he was wearing a backpack that he had built out of bicycle tire inner tubes and was clad in sandals he put together from a discarded fire hose. At- tached to his backpack was a trowel he told me he used to dig up edible plants he finds in long bicycle trips, one of which brought him to some of the most remote regions of northern Canada. He emphasized the impor- tance of his sensuous relationship to the materials: “When I buy something I really need, I don’t feel like I own it. I’m afraid to sew it, patch it up. This backpack, I can feel it. I know what’s wrong with it; I know what’s right with it. If something’s not working, I can cut it up and make it work for me in a new way. It’s all about ownership. . . . Once you make some- thing, you can control exactly what it’s going to do.” When I pressed Ryan as to why these skills were so important, he demurred: “I don’t know where exactly my learning is going towards.” A comment he made more infor- mally, though, was telling: “I came straight from work,” motioning to his backpack and shoes, suggesting that he had worn them to his rich clients’ houses. While, in such contexts, Ryan probably could not raise his “anti- Making the City Second Nature 1041 American Journal of Sociology civilization” beliefs, his evident skill in dealing with physical objects re- minded him that he was, in his own mind, more a rugged frontiersman than an urban professional. This was not the only time I saw freegans draw on practices toward material objects to remind themselves and others of their moral commit- ments in moments when these self-conceptions felt threatened. One De- cember evening, I attended a freegan feast in Madison’s Brooklyn flat, which she had purchased after quitting her corporate job. I noted my sur- prise that Madison’s building had a doorman; she replied, “I know, I didn’t feel great about it either, but look at what I did with it.” She then walked me around the flat showing how nearly every item of furniture had been taken “right off the street.” Analogously, Barbara once confessed to me something she had been hiding from the group: that she had recently taken a flight for a vacation. “Have you ever dumpster dived a plane?” she whispered, before taking from her backpack complementary food, napkins, and utensils she had acquired while walking past the first-class seating area. She did not show the items to others in the group. Instead, as she suggested, she recov- ered them because the objects themselves reminded her of an opportunity to actualize her moral motivations at an unexpected moment. Although some uses of physical objects as reminders were deliberate, ma- terials could call on freegans to put their environment back in its moral place when they were not intending to do so. One cold winter night, we ap- proached the back side of a Food Emporium, where, from a distance, it was clear there was a larger than usual amount of food. As we walked up, Bar- bara exclaimed, “Oh my god, this is going to be outrageous.” It was: the store was evidently destocking, and so large quantities of unexpired, non- perishable goods were on the sidewalk. This night’s event was supposed to be a “trash trailblaze”—where the group would quickly investigate new potential spots and then move on—but the group lingered long after every- one had taken what they could carry. When I asked Madison why we stayed, she opined, “It’s like an elephant graveyard. Right now, we’re just mourning the food.” Although it was ultimately store employees who put the waste on the curb and freegans who decided to imbue the waste with symbolic meaning, it was the wasted objects themselves that redirected freegan behavior. At other moments, these reminders had a more positive valence. In con- trast to a modern industrial food system built on standardization and pre- dictability, freegans embraced the unscripted moments of dumpster diving, averring that “it’s always unpredictable; that’s part of the adventure of it!” Reflecting Fine’s ð1998, p. 49Þ conclusion that “meaningful experiences of nature must include uncertainty,” I witnessed firsthand the excitement that emerged whenever there was a rare find, like a box of tempeh or a pome- granate—their unexpected appearances potent reminders that freegans were 1042 not shopping or even growing food, but doing something they saw as fun- damentally more natural. Waste could capture freegans’ energy even when not with freegan.info. Although food is wasted at predictable places and times, other items free- gans need to find in order to avoid spending money—clothes, toiletries, and appliances, to name a few—appear more stochastically. The “dumpster eye,” as one described it, was at times only at the margins of freegan conscious- ness ðsee Tavory 2010, p. 56Þ, but the right garbage could unexpectedly bring it to the forefront, breaking down barriers between when they were or were not acting on their freegan moral motivations. When I began to dumpster dive more myself, I realized that traversing the city on foot—often regardless of my intentions—took much longer than it had previously, as I zigzagged across streets in order to examine any garbage that looked re- motely promising. Some admitted that their practice of freeganism bordered on hoarding, because they felt a strong compulsion to “rescue” only marginally useful items. Observed one freegan, “In my apartment, we have all sorts of things lying around, because you never know when you’re going to need to build this or fix that. You just keep everything.” This ethos of “making do and getting by,” many freegans claimed, harkened not just to prehistoric foragers but, more recently, to homesteaders on the American frontier. But living out these values could be taxing: “I get tired of trying to save the world,” sighed Barbara, after spending an hour trying to find someone to take a shoe rack she had found on the sidewalk. Objects demanded freegans’ time and attention in other ways as well. While in the previous section I noted how building bikes from discarded parts was part of what helped freegans “mark” themselves as living more naturally, they were also a source of constant frustration. Salvaged bikes were constantly breaking down and needing new scavenged parts, which themselves would not last long. Similarly, the implacable materiality of food—namely, the fact that it perishes, and if it has been “rescued” from a dumpster, it perishes quickly—often led freegans to spend significant time paring moldy fruit, recooking and transforming old vegetables, or redis- tributing excess bread. Although on a purely rational level freegans knew that “rewasting” food had no additional negative environmental impact, they nonetheless exhorted themselves—often in private—to “not waste the waste.” This embodied set of practices reworked freegans’ world in a way they sensed as natural yet threatened to remind freegans of the very “unnaturalness” as these objects returned to a wasted state. CONCLUSION: MATERIALS, NATURE, AND MORALITY Although freeganism as a political movement is an intrinsically urban phe- nomenon, the social dimensions of city life—finding a place to live, working, 1043 Making the City Second Nature American Journal of Sociology and interacting with others—posed substantial barriers to individual free- gans acting on moral motivations with which their identities were closely bound. Freegan.info as a group provided ongoing reinforcements of free- gans’ moral motivations—much as the Durkheim-inspired conclusions of literatures on social movement “free spaces” and subcultures would suggest— but it only infrequently provided them with a social environment aligned with them. Nevertheless, freegans were able to achieve a sense of their place in the city, one that made living morally frequently unremarked and second nature. They did so through a habitus that both drew on and reconstructed the physical environment in line with their frequently unarticulated and var- ied conceptions of “nature.” While freeganism is no doubt an idiosyncratic movement, these findings have implications for studies on materiality, na- ture, and morality. Material objects can play a significant, and distinctive, role in social life. As recent work has shown, objects are not mere bearers of cultural mean- ings but can actively reshape those meanings ðLatour 2005; McDonnell 2010; Jerolmack and Tavory 2014Þ. I have added the assertion that material ob- jects—or, more generally, the nonsocial—can be the ends of moral life. In truth, “bringing materiality back in”—to evoke a sociological cliché—is consistent with common sense. Although “waste” is not a common object of moral concern, it is nonetheless arguable that significant moral action is di- rected toward nonhuman entities, such as “gods” or “nations” ðsee Cerulo 2009Þ. Physical representations of those entities, such as idols or flags, can call forth powerful moral commitments. Yet the moments when objects proved uncooperative—when bikes broke down, food rotted, or others interpreted waste in a radically different fashion—also speak to the complexities, limits, and risks of the material world in sustaining a moral self. The three roles of objects I have demonstrated here provide a basis for further research into the extent and role of the material world in moral life. The fact that freegans made living morally seem like second nature through their interactions with waste itself has intriguing implications. On one hand, waste’s banality would seem to reaffirm Durkheim’s ð1965, p. 52Þ asser- tion that mundane objects—ranging from “a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, 1⁄2or a house”—can be imbued with moral meaning. A cru- cifix around the neck could be a significant marker of moral boundaries; an old photo a potent reminder of familial commitments; a carefully sorted re- cycling bin proof of an ecological identity. Yet that freegans chose waste was not random. Waste for freegans was “polyvocal” ðMcDonnell 2010, p. 1803Þ: at once a symbol of capitalist immorality and privately a resource for moral living. Waste evokes intensely negative emotional and moral meanings in broader Western culture ðsee Douglas 1966; Abbott 2014Þ. In a group that set itself up in opposition to mainstream ðimÞmorality, using waste provided an effective way to leverage the adversity of the environment. High-end green 1044 consumption may be just a cover for elite distinction ðsee Johnston 2008; Elliott 2013Þ, but low-end salvaging is a way of abnegating a social status perceived as immoral through contaminating oneself with negatively coded objects. These findings also bear on literatures examining the social construction of nature. Sociologists have largely moved beyond older nature-city binaries, convincingly showing that urban denizens can have meaningful experiences of nature even in a modern metropolis ðWachsmuth 2012; Jerolmack 2013Þ. Some “radical constructivists” have gone further to claim that “in a funda- mental sense, there is nothing unnatural about New York City” ðHarvey 1996, p. 186; see also Heynen et al. 2006Þ. Yet my findings remind of an im- portant caveat: whether or not nature is “constructed” from a social scientific point of view, freegans would doubtlessly say that nature’s power as a grounding for morality stems from the fact that they perceived it as not constructed and not coming from society. Freegans, like many modern- day environmentalists and ecoconscious citizens, drew on nature as a po- tent, transcendent ideal, much as others might appeal to Christianity or socialism. Urban homesteaders, gardeners, or dumpster divers are not simply “think- ing” nature into existence, however. Nature is made through practice and interaction ðFine 1998; Jerolmack 2013Þ. While these interactions are in- variably shaped by social characteristics ðBell 1994; Jerolmack 2013Þ— freegans’ visions of nature, for example, reflected a distinctively Western and middle-class worldview—physical objects were also a key and indispens- able component of these constructions. Indeed, in the absence of physical referents, freegans’ construction of the city as natural would lack credibility, both to themselves and to others. By focusing on the physical material out of which nature is made, we can understand that, while nature may be socially constructed, it is not done so effortlessly or evenly. Even if freegans’ capacity to imbue the city with natural meaning supports a constructivist viewpoint, freegans implicitly understand that rendering the city natural is more dif- ficult than, say, doing the same to a rural farm. Further research should ex- amine how deploying the notoriously nebulous culture code of nature is facilitated or blocked by different physical environments. Finally, this article speaks to the resurgent sociological interest in moral- ity. I have offered an intervention into perennial debates about how moral beliefs relate to action by arguing that, although the two are rarely perfectly in sync, a moral habitus can nonetheless draw on the challenging aspects of the environment to create a context for acting on moral motivations. I do not want to imply that achieving an affirming sense of one’s moral place is inevitable or in all cases necessary; actors—including those who, like free- gans, appear to have strong moral identities—can and do live with glaring contradictions. I do, however, concur with those recent studies that suggest Making the City Second Nature 1045 American Journal of Sociology that at least some actors do have an internalized moral core and do make serious, if inconsistent, efforts to live up to it. Morality should not just be studied in terms of achieving a particular and often unattainable bar of “right” but also as part of the ongoing striving for the “good�� ðJoas 2000, p. 168Þ. By thinking in terms of a moral habitus, we can refocus on this striving’s generativity of new practices, the formation of moral beliefs and identities through action, and the notion that living morally can be an almost subconscious second nature. Freegans had a sense they were living natu- rally but rarely could explicitly explain how. If freegans did manage to rework their physical environment in a way that gave them a sense of moral place, it came at a price. Living morally was something intrinsically desirable, yet at the same time, they recognized that morality could interfere with other things they desired, ranging from main- taining social relationships to being efficacious activists. They thus remind us that, as Durkheim ð1⁄21914 1973, p. 152Þ observed, “we cannot pursue moral ends without causing a split within ourselves, without offending the instincts and the penchants that are the most deeply rooted in our bodies.” The material dimensions of morality confirm that, precisely because morality is seen as coming from things outside of ourselves, making morality second nature often comes into conflict with the “first nature” of other identities or motivations. In the end, in motivating action that transforms the world, morality often presents a barrier—perhaps a physical one—to actions that would remake the world for other reasons and to other ends.

A teacher-mama’s rant

Those who know me personally are probably aware that I’ve been in the habit of sort of “adopting” various kids and teenagers. I’ve been happily married twice—which sounds funny, until I reveal that I was widowed at a relatively young age. Both of these good men were previously married, and had children that I came to know and love as if they’d been mine—even though they weren’t in my house full-time. I’ve step-mothered a grand total of seven kids: four girls, three boys. I also have an almost-three-year-old little girl with my husband.

When my first husband died, I only got to see his kids twice more: at the funeral, and when they came to get stuff from our home. This wasn’t by my choice, but because their mother had never liked me, had spent the years of my marriage systematically belittling her ex and his “fat wife” to not just the children, but to anyone whose social circles might happen to overlap with both of ours. Any attempt on my family’s part to communicate with the children after their father’s passing was met with hostility and barely-veiled threats.

To contrast, my second husband’s ex-wife has only ever been kind to me and about me to everyone, openly encouraging her children to love me and be happy about their father’s remarriage. We aren’t best friends, we don’t always agree on everything; but we are friendly, and we can come to an agreement on tough issues without animosity. The effect on these children’s mental health and self-concept is monumentally different than in the first case.

Why the background? It’s certainly not to air past grievances, though if you want to hear some wild “I thought that kind of thing only happened as a dramatic ploy in movies” stories, give me a shout. What this is about is, you might say I’ve become rather good at parenting other people’s children.

This is compounded by the fact that, by profession, I’m a teacher. It’s not the best-paying job for a person with a master’s degree, but I love it. I work at a school that is almost smack-dab in the center of Salt Lake County, Utah. I teach high school Spanish, but I’m also privileged to teach improv comedy theatre and coach an amazing team of comedic actors. I don’t expect Spanish to be everyone’s favorite class. It wasn’t mine when I was a teenager. But I build a rapport with my teenaged students that improves my life, and I believe it improves theirs. A lot of people that age don’t feel comfortable talking with their parents about their problems—not because of something wrong with the parents or the kids, but because they’re stretching into the independence of adulthood. I’ve become the trusted adult confidante for some vibrant adolescent people going through things nobody would want to.

I’ve taught in four different schools across two states: both public and charter, in Florida and Utah. I’ve taught at a high school, middle school, a K-8, and a K-12 (though the latter two have had me teach secondary kids only). I’ll be the first to admit, large groups of small children scare me. I adore my sass-bucket of a toddler, and have real love and affection for many children of friends and family members, but once you gather more than five of the really young ones together, I’m looking to skedaddle. My favorite group to teach is high schoolers, followed by middle schoolers. I personally believe that decent people who teach elementary school deserve a free pass straight to heaven.

With my high schoolers, they prefer for me to discipline with humor, even good-natured sarcasm. Yes, it exists. The secret is that they have to recognize that the snark is said with genuine affection and concern for their well-being. Because I have developed an easy-going balance of individuality, respect, and classroom rules that prevent violations of either, I rarely have large discipline issues crop up.

Being a teacher in Utah, which is the well-known capital of mormondom, comes with some interesting variations from the norm I came to know in Florida. In the interest of full disclosure, I am LDS, and have been my whole life. I was raised in a combination of states, birth through age 12 on the East Coast, then junior high through college in Utah. I remember living in the Bible Belt in my later childhood, and meeting people who’d never known a Mormon. My own sister had a close friend once that, when her family found out we were LDS, basically dropped all connection with us. I’ve had friends of other Christian faiths (yes, I do see myself as Christian, and no, I don’t accept your classification of me as not) who have sheepishly told me that their pastors have said some nasty things about my faith over the pulpit. Other friends whose primary knowledge of Mormons come from jokes on South Park, binge-watches of Big Love or Sister Wives, or the Book of Mormon musical. Of course, none of these accurately portray LDS doctrine, and mostly focus on lampooning the culture that has grown up around the religion.

But, bypassing the issues I have with entertainment that purposefully mischaracterizes anybody’s faith, there’s something that’s been on my mind as a student, and much later, a teacher in the Beehive State. When I moved here as an almost-teen, I had some major culture shock, HAVING GROWN UP MORMON. It was strange being one of many Mormon kids at school, hearing others in the halls talk about mutual or going to the temple, or any number of things at school. It was off-putting to me to see some of the same kids who were all mormony at church turn around and say and do some very non-mormony things at school. I often managed to find open-minded friends who were not really judgmental towards others (yeah, I write this after just passing judgment—my whole thing is, whatever you claim to believe, act it, and don’t be a jerk about it). Even as a young teenager, though, it BOILED MY BLOOD when people I knew excluded the non-LDS kids because they weren’t Mormon. And I totally called them on it when I saw it. Because I lived on the other side of that. My mom had it worse, and sometimes told me childhood stories of how kids at her school in South Carolina asked to feel her horns. I mean, our own Sunday School lessons often rehashed the histories of the early members of our faith being verbally abused, physically assaulted in various painful and dehumanizing ways, driven out of a string of places, and even martyred for being different. I wanted sometimes to just scream at people for being so sanctimonious that they couldn’t see how counterproductive it was to our claim of Christianity.

Calm down, Meg. It still makes me really angry, though I like to think it’s more along the lines of Jesus chasing the money-lenders out of the temple than along the lines of Herod being miffed at another king happening and ordering deaths as a result.

Back to the school where I teach. Overall, there have been a few factors that seem to have reduced bullying there greatly from the average school of that size. It still exists: wherever you have teenaged people on the path to self-discovery, you’ll find some whose insecurities drive their mean behavior towards others. But I have seen much less of it in our specific student population. We are also more diverse than your average Utah school. In many areas of the state, a visit to school will show you a bunch of white faces, with a tiny sprinkle of other other groups. This isn’t to say I don’t like white people or any other people, but having lots of different racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds represented is fun and fascinating to me. Humanity is this gorgeous mosaic, and the presence of so many shades of skin and eyes and hair, the scents of foods we call “comfort” and those we deem “exotic”, the songs inherent to the accents of the languages of the Earth...they all make it more beautiful.

I’ve heard kids of both LDS and non-LDS backgrounds bemoan ill treatment from the other side, and rightfully so. I’ve personally overheard some kids making the blanket statements of “all Mormons are...” That being said, it’s not nearly as common as the numerous stories of “they were my friends until it became clear I wasn’t interested in coming to church” from both students AND adults of my acquaintance.

It breaks my heart to think back on this week, hearing a mother recount to me how her daughter, a bright, talented, kind young woman, has been repeatedly marginalized by people who should be her friends on grounds of shared values, not passing acquaintances because she worships differently. Just like any mother, her tears were deep-seated, thinking back on the pain her beautiful child has endured from people who regularly consider themselves to be some of the nicest people in the world.

This is NOT a religious thing. It stands against all doctrine of which I’m aware. By being exclusive, by all these series of small unkindnesses, by being dismissive of those who don’t share ALL beliefs and values, you become for others what we’ve always denounced in the mobs that persecuted the early members of the church.

I’m a believer in the doctrine. The culture we’ve created surrounding it still needs work. I’m an LDS mother, but many of the kids I’ve “adopted” into my tribe as a teacher are not of my faith, and I’m asking you to take and apply Elder Uchtdorf’s words. Stop it. Please love “my” kids as friends for yours as much as you do those of our faith.

They are not a number to be added to our millions. They are not a problem to be solved. They are children of God who deserve to be loved, befriended, and accepted in their beliefs as much as your own children do.

And because I can’t end a blog post without something pulled from one of my fandoms, I’ll leave you with the quote from Yoda, one that I feel applies to all of us: “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”

Some reflection

It’s been roughly six months since I began my path as a witch. In some ways, I can’t believe that the six month mark came up so quickly–in others, not so much. Anyway, when I started this path, I promised myself I’d stop and take stock of my progress and feelings about the whole thing at the six month mark. Why? Well, that’s half a year, and a lot of people in and out of witchcraft stop considering people beginners after six months. So there we are. And since writing is a huge part of my life and how I analyze myself, I’m going to write it out. And who knows, maybe this will be of some use to others. :) 

So! if you’re curious, here’s my reflection on my craft, which in a sense didn’t get all of it’s legs from me. Also, fair warning, I’ve got some family history tied into this, and some language to match. :) Sorry. Check the tags for trigger warnings. I’m not really graphic, but you know yourself best, and what you can and can’t read. 

I have always been a bit too drawn to witchcraft for my own good. In a christian household where Harry Potter was forbidden, and the Chronicles of Narnia encouraged, witchcraft was a taboo. The closest we were allowed was during Halloween, in which all the spoopy fun was fine. Just as long as it stayed as a costume for a single night.

But there was always a fascination that, though I was very good at hiding, and at times, tried to quell on my own, never really went away. Eventually, I did read Harry Potter–Pirated the Audio Books (Relax, I’ve since gone back and bought them legally.) and snuck other such books to my room. Maybe such things I couldn’t love aloud, but through fiction, for certain.

Then when I hit college, I found my writing in need of something more. So I bought some oracle cards (Because I was too broke for tarot) and used them to randomize and switch up a character’s course. They were easy to hide–easier than my books, and honestly, felt good in my hands.

And then my grandmother started talking. Not just her usual hemming and hawing that she had most of her life, and all of mine–but truly speaking. She could, and still does, see her time here coming to a close, as her husband and one of her sons were both buried early this year. The church gave her no comfort, no kindness, and no answers. And for the first time, she began to speak her mind. She got angry. She admitted regrets. She cried about fears. And she told me the very thing that set me on my own path:

“If I hadn’t been born the way I was, in the world I was, I’d be a witch.”

Plain and simple. No preamble. No apologies. And none were needed. My grandmother had been born in a time where children from wedlock were automatically lower class. Perhaps in the north this wouldn’t mean much, but in the deep south in that time, it was known. To this day, the town I grew up in asks who your family is, or worse…already knows. And if being born from wedlock were not enough of a stigma, than being a girl was an additional problem. Girls were not as useful as boys at farming–they cost more and had to be married off, and without a good family background, that wasn’t likely. But despite those odds, my grandmother prevailed by societies standards. She was always kind, showed up to church, worked hard, and married at a reasonable age, and had three boys. 

Society was wrong. She married a working man who proved to be an alcoholic who was as mean as my grandmother was kind. Her sons got the brunt of his temper–screaming mostly, so who gave a damn? And each of them grew into something sad and tragic. The youngest became a reclusive hoarder, depressed, and unable to handle confrontation. He was a kind man, and I’ll never forget how much I wanted to slug my grandfather one Christmas for verbally abusing him. He belittled this gentle giant, picking out his every flaw and failure and screaming it out for all the family to hear. (Gods and Goddesses bless my Step Father for stepping in to stop that assault, and giving my asshat of a grandfather the riot act.) My father, the middle son, became an alcoholic like his father before him. Unlike my grandmother though, my mother had the resources and the strength to leave with my brothers and I in tow. My father, though I love him even now, (Though he pisses me off a whole hell of a lot) has forever seared into my mind what I don’t want to be. The eldest was the one who had been able to go to college for a semester. But just that one. School officials found a weed plant in his closet, and since he and his roommate blame one another for it’s existence, both were kicked out. And from there, he proved just as interested in addicting substances to numb him, (Not the safer weed, unfortunately) and while seemingly the most stable of the three, continues to abuse substances.

And now, my grandmother, looking over her life, seeing her husband dead (admittedly, none of us were or are particularly morose at his passing) and her son gone, and looking at what she has left, feels that desire that I believe like myself, she has always pushed aside. Why make things worse? Society wouldn’t support her. Not here. Not in the south. Not a bastard child with no prospects. She’d done okay by their standards.

But when we speak, when I hear her, even through her confused moments, even when her voice grows weak, I hear the undeniable in her. While she feels unable to change what she has left live, she looks at me, and prays to whoever will listen, that I won’t live a regretful life–that I won’t ignore what calls me.

So I chose not to.

It started with the trepidation most Christian and Catholic witches know very well. (Though I doubt they own the market. Let’s be realistic.) Could I be a witch? Wasn’t that…wrong? Then again, Christians debated Homosexuality all the time anymore. What was one more thing? So I googled my question.

And I found out that there were such beings as Christian Witches. And I had no idea what to make of that. So I read on. I researched. I learned about the many paths, the diverseness and vastness of witches, and that, despite of what I was taught, there were people like me, and people willing to welcome me into my own path. So I took my first step.

And as I walked, and I warded, and cast safe travel spells, binding those who did wrong, and learned what I liked and what I didn’t, I found friends. It started with my loneliness. Solitary practice is fantastic, but when you’re a closet witch, you crave a person to be witchy with. So I looked for a solution. And spirit work kept popping up. Both on my dash, in my research, and in my personal readings. And then there was a great opportunity for me, and I took it. And I have never been so glad in my life. L, is perhaps one of the best friends I’ve ever had. And while I’m still learning, I have become a far better witch for her company, her advice, and her love. I hope I’m half the witch she thinks I am or will be.

And then there were the spoonies. People who experienced similar issues with health and practicing witchcraft? How much more amazing can you get? More kindness and understanding, advice and camraderie than most college clubs I’d seen. 

As I walked though, I realized something that was both painful and wonderful. I was raised in a christian household by an amazing mother. Human, fallible, and someone who has certainly made a lot of mistakes–but also strong, capable, and practical. I digress. My whole life had been spent in and out of churches. Some were wonderful. Others were two steps from Cultism (And no, we obviously jumped ship on those as soon as those signs cropped up) Even now, church is important to her. But it no longer was for me. The God I had loved as a child wasn’t really there. It was as if he’d decided that I didn’t need him any longer. Or perhaps I felt too much christian guilt to ask him along the path with me. 

And so I decided to search. I didn’t know for who or what really. I felt like there was a feminine energy maybe–but then again, what did a young witch like me really know? So I asked for a sign. And for almost a week, I got one daily until I was able to identify her. The Morrigan. (And although I didn’t really get why she’d choose a chilled out, boring closet witch like me, I’ve come to understand and am truly grateful to have her in my life)

And then there were other challenges to face. Suspicious spirits, growing my craft, finding a fellow IRL witch also in the woods, more amazing online witches. And then there was H, and a guardian angel, Kokabial. (Which was a heck of a mental trip for me personally, but has been wonderful.)

And then there were the non-pagans. My dnd group, whom I admitted I was pagan to. And instead of the shock and or the mild amusement I expected to receive, it was treated with as much general respect as another player being a catholic, and another being an atheist, and so on. The most I ever got were curious questions and general acceptance.

While I am able to gush in joy over it all, there were many painful moments intermixed of course. There were times when I was afraid I was going to screw up my relationship with my companions because I was making thought-forms of them (I’m just good with psychic communication as it turns out. L still gets a kick from that though.) or concerns about spirits and why all the creepsters liked to hang around me and L despite my wards. (H has pointed out my problems with various wards–man have I learned a lot.) and the guilt and fear that having a guardian or guiding angel gave me. (Yes, I know. Angels are not inherently christian, and demons are not inherently satanistic. The guilt doesn’t go away just from knowing that.)There was pain that I couldn’t share my new path with most of my family because of how it would hurt them, and how it would damage my relationships with them. There were the fears of being alone, of not being enough, of not learning fast enough, of not being good enough (Sigils…I still am not good at making my own) or that I would anger or upset my goddess, my angel or my companions. (Oh hi Anxiety. Could you not?) 

But all in all I am glad I took my grandmother’s advice. I’m glad that at 25, I stopped trying to live against myself, and I decided to embrace myself. I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But I would rather embrace my good qualities and use them to help me grow and become better than who I was before. A spell to banish negativity, a thank you to the goddess for strength, walks in nature to refocus, movie nights with my companions for joy, and a quest to grow and be a better witch. And here, at the six month mark, I invite anyone who has thought about it, to consider it for themselves. Whatever path you choose in life, please, choose it for yourself. Whether you walk in secret with your loved ones as I do, or choose to be open in all you do, you stay with your craft or leave it, remain a part of your original religion or never pick one up at all, I pray that above all else, you you pick your path for yourself. Not for society, or your family, or for comfort, or for what you think you must or must not be according to someone or something else–but for you.

If I hadn’t been born the way I was, in the world I was, then there is a chance that I wouldn’t have ever been a witch.

~Coffee

The Body Never Lies: Unveiling the Mystery of Body Language come

Have you carefully watched the movie, Hannibal (2001), where Anthony Hopkins played the role of the protagonist? Let’s revisit a particular scene in that brilliant film: Inspector Renaldo Pazzi comes visiting Dr. Hannibal Lecter at his Florence apartment. Being a gifted psychologist, Dr. Lecter immediately realised that the actual purpose of Inspector Pazzi’s visit was not to investigate the disappearance of a Capponi Library curator; rather he was solely driven by the ambition to capture Hannibal for a huge award sum. What gave Pazzi away? His body language.

The Body Never Lies

In any situation — be it a favorable or a challenging one – your physical gestures and psychosomatic responses directly correspond with the hormonal changes in your body. Even highly trained professionals, who require maintaining a neutral outlook towards events around them, give away their humane reactions from time to time. Since the dawn of modern psychological studies, efforts to understand the human reaction from body language have produced volumes of literature. It was traditionally believed that physical gestures are the results of emotional conditions. Modern approaches, however, indicate that both mind and body complement and supplement one another. Scientifically known as embodied cognition, this idea asserts that the way mind controls body responses, in the same fashion physical gestures can also stimulate psychological responses.

 Power Pose: Challenging the Traditional Model and Its Relevance

 Amy Cuddy’s Power Pose theory highlights the relevance of embodied cognition in today’s social and professional spheres. According to this approach, by practising two poses every day, a person can enjoy more control over his/her emotional state. The theorist further asserts that power poses are not about demonstrating high confidence level; rather these gestures enable a practitioner in gaining stronger command over the course of hormones. Amy Cuddy’s experiment has also shown that power poses help in boosting testosterone and reduce the level of cortisol, which is known to trigger stress. This approach strikes at the core of the age-old practices that emphasized more on emotional controls for mood elevation rather than physiological responses.

The relevance of Amy Cuddy’s approach is gaining a strong positive response from modern communication practitioners and experts. Research studies find that in up to 90% cases, communications are non-verbal. In such cases, body language is the most powerful communicative avenue that delivers signs from an emotional response to another person or a group of people. Based on these signs, both at personal and social spaces, people develop an opinion about someone’s personality or his/her ability to cope with a collective environment. Therefore, it is essential that people not only rely upon emotional motivation but also focus on their respective embodied cognitive capabilities in order to learn, communicating constructively.

 Open vs. Closed Body Language

 A powerful example of body language-based communication can be cited in open vs. closed physical gestures. People with open body language or physical gestures usually make the natural choices for engaging in communication as they exhibit the traits, namely willingness to communicate, natural enthusiasm and ability to reciprocate to other persons. In contrast, people with closed physical gestures, such as sitting cross legged or arms across the chest indicate that they are not interactive or they prefer embracing defensive gesture in an interactive environment.

 In today’s collaborative environment, people with such body language do not encourage appreciation and are often sidetracked despite their inherent capabilities or skills in accomplishing assignments. The open vs. closed body language approach finds a robust foundation in the ' Mehrabian formula' (7%/38%/55%), which broadly states that only 7% words are actually spoken in comparison to 55% cased where communication is made through expressions.

 Final Words

The traditional model that professed physical gesture as a result of psychological stimulation is not universally acclaimed anymore. The relatively newer embodied cognition approach confirms that with the right physical gestures, humans can now stimulate their brain while sidelining stress or depression. Amy Cuddy’s Power Pose theory provides this approach with a more constructive shape, so that people in normal runs of life can easily practice it and enjoy the outcomes in a real-world environment.

Source:http://warhorse.in/2017/09/11/the-body-never-lies-unveiling-the-mystery-of-body-language/

23 Ways To Recognize Crystal Children

Reports of the unique generation known as the Indigo Children have permeated our collective consciousness since the 1980s. But as these “children” have grown into adulthood, we are blessed with an entirely new wave of beings known as the Crystals. Beginning to arrive en masse in the 1990’s, a few scouts made their way through to test the waters as early as the 1980’s. Their temperament is entirely fresh in comparison to their elder spiritual counterparts yet their unique life path and imprint on our world is just as profound. While the Indigos forged their way by challenging the establishment, the zen and blissful nature of the Crystal Children came here in sublime harmony to champion a loving partnership with the Gaia. It is the Crystal Children who will herald in the next phase of humanity honoring the ways of the natural world, protective of the Earth and in gentler ways illuminating ways to shift the trajectory of humanity. As we are witnessing the millennials (many of whom are early Crystals) re-shape corporate America, question established moral structures and step away completely from the materially driven ideal of success, we can see early inklings of just what their impact will be. The Crystal Children follow their heart in all matters, championing an idealism not as a lofty notion but actually put into practice. They are not contented to suck up and work hard in order to attain vernacular success but rather are driven in heart and soul by making the world better in every facet. DIAGNOSED DISORDERS: Because of their closeness to the spiritual realms, the Crystal Children often had delayed speech waiting until 3 or 4 years of age to begin connecting with the outside world. While this freaked out some parents, it is a sign of their divine intimacy with the other realms. Rather than panicking, many parents instead chose to nurture their telepathy and creativity offering more expanded forms of connection. Songs and physical language became the norm as they offered instead more meaningful ways of communication. Singing, rocking, touch and telepathy became their chosen mediums and ignited the psychic gifts of kids and parents alike. Their delays and unusual ways created a wave of labels – autism and Asperger’s spectrum were born of this generation. Beyond a limitation, this difference is striking and instructs their enlightened genetic blueprint. Parents should not be discouraged by these diagnoses nor should they seek to fix it! As literal angels that enter our world and gene pool, the Crystal Children are here to illuminate the inherent spirit of mankind. True autism means literally that they are unable to connect with others. Any encounter with this heightened being however shows us clearly this is not the case. They are re-connecting on higher dimensions than that of previous generations. Far from being cut off from others, they are here to bring these celestial frequencies into human form. Kindness, compassion and a deep love of the Earth and all her inhabitants are the norm. Non-verbal kids with autItism have the most to say and are grateful for an opportunity to be heard. They are avid walkers between worlds here to convey great knowledge and wisdom that will alter forever our understanding of the universe we inhabit. Their telepathy is strongly intact. Sensitivities of all manner –food allergies, intolerance of outside stimulus, and reactions to the prescribed medical model– are but a few of the ways these beings are highlighting the ills of the modern world. Because of their response, GMOs are being removed from mainstream foods, we are becoming more aware of the pollutants in our air and water. Their reaction to our world is enabling us to change to more natural ways of living on the planet free of harmful toxins and its effects. NOT FROM THIS REALM: The most notable physical feature of the Crystals is their eyes– deep, wide and penetrating– these beings ooze “old soul.” It is their wisdom which is most startling, for it feels as if they can at times see right through you beaming back loving compassion and understanding. From their eyes exude waves of divine light. Sometimes intense, not everyone can rest easy in their gaze, for their power is commanding. To be sure, being in their presence can be unnerving to those who walk out of sincerity. PATH OF THE CRYSTAL CHILDREN: Thanks in part to the aggressive trail blazing ways of the Indigos, the Crystal Children appeared in a unsteady society emboldened to walk in peaceful harmony and gently offer new ways of being. In their heart centered ways, they are more easily received than the Indigo generation and will help create a safer, more beautiful and inclusive world for us all. They move not from force but from clear purpose as beacons of possibility and peace. It was this generation that created school recycling programs, collected clothing and food for the less fortunate and spoke in public forums on what they saw as the demise of our civilization. Immensely connected to nature, they are creating a resurgence in living off the grid, working with crystals as tools for well being and seek healing outside of the medical paradigm. The Crystals emanate a pure vibration of love. More than simply the next wave, they are here to elevate humanity and pave the way for new compassion, community and ways of being that will uplift us all. They are the future illuminating true unity consciousness free of greed and ego based drives. CHARACTERISTICS OF CRYSTAL CHILDREN: 1. Large clear eyes which seem to see right through you. 2. Immediately likable, they are beings of pure love and people are drawn to them. 3. Deeply affectionate, their hugs will feel sincere and meaningful. 4. Start talking later in toddler years. 5. Vibrational beings and may have a gift for music and singing. 6. Highly psychic with no need for developing these skills. 7. Telepathic communicators you will feel them before you hear them. 8. May carry autism or Asperger’s spectrum labels. 9. Peaceful and loving toward all. 10. Protective of planet. 11. Compassionate and forgiving. 12. Their radiant vibration transforms those around them. 13. Highly sensitive both emotionally and environmentally. The Crystal children may be affected by loud sounds, chaotic surroundings, smells & textures. 14. Allergies and food intolerances – because of their more finely tuned frequency, they may have multiple food allergies and cannot endure chemicals and GMOs. 15. Animal Lovers. 16. Vegetarians at an early age – they can feel the pain of others and don’t desire to contribute toward suffering. 17. Empathic – in feeling everything around them, may not know the distinction between their emotions and those they experience in others. 18. Love crystals, rocks and gems – drawn to all things from the earth (even dirt!) they can elicit healing abilities through their connection with crystals. 19. Direct connection to Spirit – feel close to angels, ancestors and many have past life memories in tact. 20. Artistic and creative – coupled with sensitive and loving nature, they see the world through rose colored glasses and invite us to move into more compassion. 21. Fearless – due to their intuitive connection to the planet, they tend to know their boundaries better than we as parents may be comfortable. They are avid climbers and explorers yet not always mindful of the limitations of their little physical bodies. 22. Parents often are Indigos. 23. Internal governing force – These kids are ancient souls who are impatient with the limitations of their young bodies. They are eager to grow up and often know better than us what will serve them. Sleep schedules, food choices and arbitrary rules don’t fly easily as they innately know what is better for them than our idea of parenting permits. The blessings of these beings of light are certainly making our world an easier, kinder and gentler place to inhabit. When we can honor their teachings and new ways, we are more easily moving into a new vibration of consciousness. It will be these brave and delightful souls who show us the ways of the New Earth and herald in a golden age of peace.