I don't really know anything about blogging !! Just looking for a place to throw down some thoughts and not expecting anybody to read it. Struggling lately, really just in turmoil on the inside. You know how those magicians in the old times would "cut a lady in two". She would end up split right down the middle. And with his magic wand- boom and she is back together. Well I'm quite in a state of being severed in two, and I haven't nearly got myself back together yet, and there isn't quite any magicians hanging around here that could be of help!

So here I'm torn in two, in two different ways. Quite a bad state of affairs. Firstly there is the split between being a modern indigenous person, and yet caught in the serious culture conflict that I live in the white man's world. That I don't feel free to be myself or really even know how to do so as an adoptee. Cue Nickleback, "Please...would you one time....let me be myself....so I can shine with my own light, let me be myself." But how to do that, how to really do that, when you've been cut off from your original way of life, your original culture. People raised in one single culture just don't get it. It's a trauma. You don't take a lion and raise it with tigers. You don't take a cat, and raise it with dogs. Sure it will adapt. But you can't change it's species. You can't change that a lion, raised with tigers, is still a lion. So I'm still working on the figurings out, of connecting myself with two cultural groups rather than one.

The other rift, is in the religious beliefs. On the one hand I can watch the Passion of the Christ film, and be more moved than anybody else watching. I can't even watch the beatings or the crucifixion. It's moving, it's daring, it's glorious, and it rips my heart out to think somebody would do such a thing, for sinners like me. And I really can't bear it. And I really can't bear to say "no" to this Christ who has had his skin ripped off. And when I watch that movie or another like it immediately I think of conversion. Immediately I think I am a fool for standing on the outskirts of Christianity.

But then the other part of me, Rachel Truth Seeker on the neverending quest for the True Knowledge of Life TM has investigated the scriptures and is horrified by the brutality of Yahweh, and the brutality of Jesus in many of his hellfire and brimstone speeches. Not a word about slavery, Jesus? That lesbian girl who was one of my only friends in school, that lesbian girl who didn't pick on me and humiliate me like all those Christian kids did.....you're going to burn her in hellfire, Jesus? You're going to bless those Christian kids Jesus, because they're in the "right religion", even though they make fun of me for being different and make me want to die?? I'm supposed to go to heaven with those kids? I think I want to stay with the gays and lesbians.

Two sides to every coin. No clear path to follow. Sooner or later there's a fork in the road and you cannot see where the paths lead. One looks as good or as bad as the other. And that is why life is so hard.