nakedjen

Naked Blogher Thoughts

There's nothing I can really say about Blogher09 that hasn't already been said in many thoughtful ways by the very many talented bloggers who were also there and who write with words and sentences I could only hope to compose. 

I went to the conference not truly knowing what to expect.  I knew there were going to be a whole lot of people there whom I did not know and I decided before I left Salt Lake City that I would make it my mission to meet 100 people.  As a geekly girl without a television, I already have over 1000 (no that is not a crazy typo) blogs in my google blog reader and I knew that I could definitely squeeze in the time to enjoy and read and devour 100 more.

So that was my plan. 100 new blogs that I never knew about.  100 new blogs to stretch my mind in new and interesting ways.  100 new blogs that would push my own boundaries, that would perhaps make me question my own sensibilities, that would ask me to be a better me.

I made it a point, that no matter where I was, or what I was doing, to always be gracious, to always smile, to introduce myself and to ask each person about their blog and what made them excited to write it?  And then I made sure that I listened. 

I found my 100 blogs.  Actually I found 117.  So bravo, Blogher.  You definitely gave me the stuff I needed. 

What I didn't need, though, and I do have to go here, I'm sorry, was the overwhelming amount of swag.  I know it is a choice whether to accept it or not.  I chose not to accept it in most situations.  I will admit that my eco-conscious vegan activist went a bit nuts over the amount of waste I kept seeing literally piling up in the hallways around me

Here's what bothered me most, I suppose.

I'm a refugee from the hey day of the dot com insanity.  I was the Marketing Director who threw the lavish parties in San Francisco and spent 500K on a single launch party.  I know how much promotional materials cost.  I also, prior to that job, was the graphic designer creating the print materials for all those brochures that were tossed about and into the recycle bin.  I actually do know about the print production costs not only to the company, but to the environment.

What I kept seeing were dollar signs.  I couldn't help it.  (The same thing happens to me during Sundance, I'll confess).  Massive amounts of dollar signs and I couldn't help but think of our children, their schools, the funding that is being cut from the oh so important non-profits across America, the very non-profits that benefit so very many of those who are less fortunate than many of us who were fighting over free laundry detergent at that hotel.

I wanted to scoop up all the free laundry detergent and take it to the nearest woman's shelter.  I wanted to ask the Quaker Oats folks to please take their oatmeal to the homeless shelter or a nearby magnet school.  I just, well, I just got totally overwhelmed and wanted a check-box on my Blogher Registration that said:  "Please have the sponsors give the $$ equivalent of my swag to Habitat for Humanity". *

I want to believe that I am not unusual in this respect.  That if you were given the chance to perhaps give the $$ equivalent of the plastic Mrs. Potato Head and the Gerber Teddy Bear and the Mickey Ice Cream to a cause close to your heart, in lieu of paying extra to ship it home, you would do the same.  I want to believe that we're all bloggers with big, generous hearts that care more about those who are less fortunate than about getting that free video camera from Kodak.

I want to believe that.  Actually, I have to believe it.  If I don't, than this world is not a world I want to live in.  And I've only just started living my very best me.

My Finest Blogher09 Moments:

1. Michelle of Everyday Celebrating. Who was my ad-hoc publicist and wrangled the crazy.  I am beyond blessed to have her in my life and I can't imagine attending a Blogher without her.  Seriously.  The woman is made of GOLD.

2. The scream heard around the Blogosphere with Grace Davis at the People's Party on Thursday night.  Grace has begged me to come to Blogher every.single.year.  I finally made it.

3. My Escalator Ride.

4. The Lush Party with Anna.  The Lush party was truly lovely, but sharing that whole evening with Anna, who happens to be one of my dearest friends on the planet?  Nothing better.

5. The Community Keynote. You all, each and every one of you, blew me away.  You made me proud to be a blogger and you made me ache to be an even better one.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.

6. Melle recognizing Buddha and Stella before she recognized me. No, seriously.  That was a button-bursting proud mama moment for me.  She even knew their names!

7. Meeting Jenny. She was exactly as I imagined she would be. Meeting and whispering about all kinds of good things with JenB. Who I have loved for so long it felt like I was talking to my very best friend. It's a Jennifer Universe, you know.  We just let the rest of you breathe the air.  Sometimes.  If you're good.  And we like you. 

8. The Vaginally Challenged session.  I may have been miffed by some of the things that were said, but honestly, it is good to have your buttons pushed.  I learned things in that session about myself.  Learning about yourself = GOOD!

9. Kevin. He took the train in from his secluded suburb and we debriefed on Sunday. He's known me since long before I could construct a grammatically correct sentence.  He still loves me.  He is family and I am so very grateful that he is a part of my life.

I know that Blogher09 was exactly what it was supposed to be for me.  I laughed, I loved, I cried, I hugged more beautiful souls than I've hugged in two years and I was reminded that it really and truly is the love that you give that is most important.  Make sure you give lots and lots.

* McFrug has come up with something thoughtful to do with all those BAGS.  I want to send oodles of good chalk, quite frankly.  NeverNakedBeth is a lifetime teacher and I can't imagine what she'd do if she could only use one piece of chalk for an entire year?!

A Bit About Blogher that Probably Is More Not About Blogher Than Is

So, yes.  I was in Chicago for Blogher09.  The blogging conference for women.  Yes, I also got naked.  It wasn't so much that I got naked because that is what I do.  I got naked because, well, people asked me to get naked and I obliged.  Of course I could have easily said, "No fucking way." But, well, I don't say no fucking way when someone or many someones ask me to please get naked.  I get naked. 

I feel compelled because there were so very many lovely beautiful people there who have never ever laid eyes on this blog or me to perhaps explain myself just briefly.  Really briefly.  Getting naked is not my shtick as many of you were wont to believe over the course of the conference.  I do not blame a single one of you for making that assumption.  Again, you'd never in your life even heard of Nakedjen and there I was stark naked standing in the lobby of your hotel.  Not exactly something you're expecting and for the majority of you I am just guessing that it was not at all something you really wanted to see.

I get naked for you.  I know that's difficult to even possibly comprehend or believe, but I do.  I do it because for most of my life I lived in complete shame and, honestly, in a world of constant fear about my own body.  I was uncomfortable in it.  I was shamed by it and for it.  My skin literally crawled with all kinds of creepy crawlies when someone looked at me and I walked the planet in a shroud of black, doing my best to just disappear completely into the darkness.

My body was not my own.  It was owned by the men who had abused it over and over again, then it was owned by my own abuse that I continued to inflict upon it.  It was a body that was unloved, not cherished, unwanted and really, well, almost offed completely.

I was asked at one point during this conference by someone brave enough to ask when my wake-up call really came?  What clicked for me?  How I went from the woman who so despised her body that she cut it and spent most of her days in a drug-induced haze to the woman many of you witnessed standing stark naked before you in that hotel lobby?

I can't honestly answer that.  Because I honestly do not remember.  I will share that it feels like it took an entire lifetime to get here.  It was a perilous and scary journey back to me and I will also share that there were many days I wanted to just give up, retreat to the darkest corners in the back of my closet with a big old bottle of something 100 proof and just end it all. 

My heart, my spirit, the me that is me was bigger than all the many years of abuse.  Some how, some way, through the grace of the Universal spirit that binds one person to another, I managed to learn to truly embrace and love me.  Me.  A person I had never valued, never believed was worthy of any love at all.

The celebration of my body, the embracing of the body I have, the sharing of my body is because I know that if I can do that, if I can truly own it, if I can love it that much, then I will never allow anyone, not a single soul, to abuse me again.

This is what I mean by saying that I do it for you.  I know that my story is not at all unique.  I know that I am not the special poster girl for the horror stories of sexual abuse.  I know that I have sisters (and brothers) out there who have suffered just as much as I have.  Or much, much worse.  In ways that have seared their souls and shamed them into an existence where they live completely outside their own bodies and feel as if they are always just an observer.

I do it for all of them.

Love needs to happen first with ourselves.  We must love our precious selves first.  If we are incapable of loving ourselves first, how is it ever going to be even remotely possible for us to begin to love others?  I do not believe it is possible. 

I get naked for love.

It is so very easy in this world for any one of us to say, "I hate..." about ourselves.  We do it subconsciously, without thought, as an aside.  We look in the mirror and are frustrated with the bulges at our hips that are really just beauty marks from giving birth to the future, the sag in our breasts from feeding our own children, the wrinkles around our eyes caused by years of shared smiles.  Badges of honor, grace, and survival should be worn with pride, but we all work furiously to hide them.

I will not hide.  Not anymore.  I will not live in a world of shame, intolerance or hate.

I will stand before you gloriously naked.  I love my body, it is mine and it is precious and perfect.

This is my body. 

This is your body. 

We are all naked. 

Bed Before Blogging

I am home.  I am exhilarated, I am enervated, I am grateful and I am flush in pink flamingo feathers.

I am also going to bed.  

Thank you.  Yes, you.  And you.  And especially you way over there.  Every beautiful one of you. You are inspiring, you are fierce, you are overflowing with love and you all, each one of you who blessed me with such genuine kindness, have given me hope to be an even better me.

xoxox

Hello, I'm Nakedjen. Yes, That Nakedjen.

I'm on my way to Chicago this weekend.  For a blogging conference.  If you're a woman with a blog this is the conference for you.  Especially if you're a mommy with a blog.  Yes, I realize that I am not a mommy with a blog unless we count Buddha and Stella and Zelda as children, but my most recent attempts to add them to my IRS Tax forms as dependents did not go over so very well.  Plus, those mommy bloggers?  They take the mommy business rather seriously, so I don't think I should even in the slightest way insinuate that my mothering of my fur kids comes close to the daily challenges of the mothering of their human kids even if my fur kids do need help with their math homework and if I'm having to cook them their all organic meals every single day.

Blogher is this weekend.  If you were a person who places bets in Vegas, you might place odds that I will not actually be attending the conference this weekend. While I have actually paid for this conference for the last five years, I have not actually managed to attend it.  Each year, right about now, something important happens and I capitulate and I bestow my golden ticket on some other lovely blogger who is just dying to go.

Which is why I don't think I have ever actually written about Blogher here with the exception of posting a naked photo taken with my naked partner in crime, the beautiful Badger, that was taken at a pre-Blogher dinner one year, hosted by our esteemed Grace, that I did manage to attend. 

This year, though, I do really plan to show up.  First off, Grace is part of the keynote address and I could not be more proud of her and I plan to sit very close and beam proudly as if she were my own child and applaud, applaud, applaud!!  I'll admit that I'm also terribly excited to meet and hug and thank in person so very many of the writers of blogs whom I have read for so very long who have written words that have touched my heart and soul and opened my mind in ways that can only happen when writers are willing to truly write the words that they must write instead of the words that they believe they should.

There has not been time for me to worry about what I'm going to wear or get a proper pedicure but then I suppose I would not be Nakedjen if I was going to fret about outfits and the color on my toes.  I will confess I did scout out vegan eating options last night.  My priorities, people, seem to be rooted deeply in my stomach.  I also will give a shout out now to any of my readers who happen to live in the Chicago area.  If you want to get together while I'm there this weekend, please email me or send up smoke signals or just give me a call at the hotel.  I'm perfectly serious.  I'd love to see all of you.  Let's do a Naked Friday photo at the Navy Pier! (Oh...how cool would that be??!)

So, the folks who are going to this big shindig this weekend are all sharing things about themselves as a way of introduction to one another.  While I know there's the "About Me" page up there that anyone can read, summing me up in one line would basically be this:  I'm a naked, vegan, holistic healer, who is an activist for body, dog, and the planet.  I'm tiny, but I'm loud.  Really loud.  And I laugh.  Loudly.  And a lot.  I'm told I laugh way too much, and I think I laugh just enough, thank you.  But there's just so much more to me, I think.  And I really hope that if you're coming to Blogher, if you've ever read even one entry here on this blog, you'll come and say hello.

I'm Nakedjen.  Yes, that Nakedjen.  And I really am thrilled to meet you.

Snippets

I am still flying rather high.  So high, in fact, that I am forgetting to actually fold up my fairy wings, flit back down and slumber.  It's been a fitful week of non-sleep sludge through work.  I know, quite honestly, that the people who share the cubicles around mine wish I'd just land and shut up already. 

My soul really needed that.  I know that all of you who have been reading this blog for ages and ages already knew quite well just how much my soul needed that, but somehow I managed to push the exact recognition and knowledge aside.  It's my best survival tactic, truthfully.  Ignore how much you positively ache for the nourishment that feeds the very you that is you and you can get pretty good at convincing yourself that it really isn't a necessary part of your diet.

Until you drink from the silver cup, that is.  The silver cup that only love can fill.  Then, well, then it kind of feels like you're guzzling from a fire hose: your soul being so very parched from its nearly two years wandering in the desert. 

So the question is this, people.  I already have my answer, but it is still here to remind me not to forget it.  How to keep drinking from that silver cup?  How to live the fair every day, not just those special three days when we all gather in magical Oregon?  How to thrive alive, not just live to survive? 

Something for even those of you who don't sprout wings and get naked in the woods on random weekends in July also to consider.

*    *     *    *

Things I just do not want to forget from this, my 23rd and counting, year at the fair.

"You look great.  I look like I voted for McCain."

"We can Feng Shui this entire place, if you'll give us a lifetime of passes."

"It's all about the bustle."

The OCF Mamas!

The Great Tomato!

"Jen, I read the New York Times.  When my friends are on the front page, I notice."

I Lay My Dimes Down

Celebrating NakedFriday properly with Kevin.  Kevin!!

Finally getting to the front of the long and winding food line at the Tofu Palace and not remembering what on earth I ever order there and having the fabulous person who works there say, "Oh, you...you get the boat. With everything.  No Guac, because you're allergic!"  This, people, is why I go to the fair!

The truly amazing beet painting. That I still want to bring home.  Please?!?

Cherries!

A girl named Yoko. 

The children's glow stick parade and my neighbors, Rob and Lorraine.

Jerry Garcia crooning to me in my tent.

Ichabod!

Eric Olson.  He does exist.

"Nakedjen?  As in THE Nakedjen?  Wow." 

"So, you weren't here last year, what happened?? " (Goddess, those people, all those beautiful people, I love you all!)

and...the mud.  i don't think any of us who were truly there will ever possibly forget the mud.

My Heart Took Flight

This past weekend, I went home.  My heart burst into a thousand fairies and took flight.  I was unable to contain my happiness, my joy, my weeping, nor could the rain and sometimes knee-deep mud deflate my soaring spirit.

I have often said, more times than I can possibly count, that the Oregon Country Fair is my religion.  After living these last eighteen months in the long shadows of the Mormon Temple, learning to both respect and question those who are not quite like me, I soaked and drank deeply from the love bestowed from my tribe.

There were so many beautiful moments.  It was as if I was experiencing the fair for the very first time in so very many ways, and perhaps, honestly, I was.  Certainly it was my first fair in this incarnation of me.

I made so very many new and special and dear friends this year.  Hello new friends!  I also renewed cherished friendships that I am blessed beyond blessed to share with such a vast array of truly beautiful souls. 

The most important lesson I learned, was perhaps something I already knew, deep down, way down in those corners of my soul that only I can possibly know.  It will never matter who else may decide to go to the fair because the fair has always been about community, about sharing, about love.  The abundance of joy experienced just standing amidst a throng of grooving strangers is enough to light up your megawatt smile for the entire rest of the year. 

I am blessed, I am renewed, I am naked with ecstatic gratitude.  And there's just 361 days until I get to do it all over again.  I've a lot of loving to do between now and then, while I keep the joy and wonder alive, alive, alive!

Sunday Evening Seven

1.  The Brits are celebrating Naked Friday.  In a whole new way.  At the office!  And it's even going to be televised.  Who would have imagined that my beloved Brits would be getting their kit off at the office on a Friday in hopes of boosting office morale before some brave cutting-edge start-up did it right here in the United States?  I'm proud of them.  This takes Naked Fridays to a whole new level, don't you think?

2.  Yesterday there was a twitter conversation about the possible offspring of Nakedjen and Karl Rove.  Never, honestly, never would I have ever guessed that my name and Karl Rove would appear in the same sentence.  Not in a million years.  The fact that it happened on the 4th of July?  The day we each individually celebrate that which makes us proud to be American?  Well, that just was the icing on the cupcake.  Cracked.me.up!

3.  Isn't it rather odd how we celebrate our independence and freedom by spending all that money on firecrackers made in China? 

4.  I officially live in Salt Lake City now.  I am uncertain how the shift really happened and I feel rather schizophrenic even saying this as my heart still feels so very attached and deeply connected to Santa Cruz.  There's no denying, though, that Salt Lake City is home.  I know this because I go out and about in this city, this city of hundreds of thousands of people, and I run into people I know.  Friends!  Randomly.  Just going about my everyday life, I have chance smile encounters that warm my heart.

It's the warming my heart thing that has sealed the deal.  There are beautiful people here (as there are everywhere!).  I am glad to know them and to call them my friends.  I'm glad to live here with them.  I'm glad to be home.

5.  I leave for Veneta on Thursday.  On Friday evening, while celebrating Naked Friday, I actually found myself just a tad melancholy at the thought that the next Friday I would be in Veneta at the Oregon Country Fair and the first day would ALREADY BE OVER.  I'm such a sap.  The fair truly is my most favorite of all my festivals and it's all I can do to truly immerse myself in the love and soak it all in for those 72 hours.  My soul, my heart, my everything just.can't.wait.  Whee! (If you're meeting me there, please email me, so we can square away the details! xoxox)

6.  There's vegan ice cream in my freezer.  Vegan ice cream made without soy.  Vegan ice cream that is free of processed sugar.  Vegan ice cream that makes me smile from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.

7. I use Twitter.  So does he.  I use Facebook.  So does he.  I write this blog.  There's overlap and intersections that come from the people that sew together our lives.  Is it ever possible to say what I really want to say, sometimes what I absolutely must spit out from the dark reaches of my aching soul, without causing pain to someone and protecting my/his/her/their privacy?  I've learned, it just isn't possible. To truly do that, I need to journal in small notebooks.  I've filled my share of small notebooks.  I would have to exit the Internet, Stage Left, and me being me, I am just not capable of doing that.  At least not yet.  This is my therapy.  It was my therapy while we lived our happy marriage online, it is still my therapy while I untangle those lives lived entwined and sort it out into my own.  It is what it is.  I just have to remember that not every email that ends up in my inbox is going to be kind, not all words written about me are true, and that he has his own version of our story, too.