The Long Goodbye: Part One

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The golden cups
are in his hand,
his hand is on the knife
and the knife is
above my head.

- Taliesin*

Three times I drew the Seven of Cups, card of soul-wrought dreams and tempting fantasies beckoning, and possibilities so numerous they seem to paralyze all ability to choose. Three times I drew the card in daily meditation before I finally agreed to seek for further guidance.

Where It's At

Things have been all tangled up lately. The puzzle box or wrinkled seed that was planted in my heart during my time in Northern Ireland — the small, mysterious thing curled in upon itself that I had all but forgotten about as things returned to normal — has been creaking and clicking as one by one its latches unhook and slip open... or it has been germinating and putting down roots that slip their sly tendrils in to pry open the soil of my soul. It all sounds very dramatic when you put it like that, but the truth is that I have been growing increasingly dissatisfied and frustrated with certain aspects of my work. And when I say work, I mean the soul-work of my writing, that strange little hobby that cannot make me a living but is indispensable to making me alive.

I've started to have serious doubts about blogging as the appropriate medium for my writing. It takes a huge amount of pride-swallowing to write that sentence, considering it was only a few months ago I was raving about how Meadowsweet & Myrrh was like my online "home," and scoffing arrogantly at people who easily abandon their blogs and let them lie fallow and un-updated for months at a time. I take my writing — and thus my blogging — very seriously, perhaps too seriously at times. I am as slow to abandon a project as I am to leave behind a faith path that no longer meets my spiritual needs (and it took my nigh on half a decade of dilly-dallying to do that before I finally dropped the Catholic label and admitted to myself what everyone else already knew).

Dreaming the Blue Sword: A Vision of Nonviolence

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In 2007 the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing Mahatma Gandhi's birthday (October 2) as the "International Day of Non-Violence." The resolution highlights "the holistic nature and the continued relevance of the Mahatma's message for our times, indeed for all times to come. It encompasses the rejection of violence against oneself, against others, against other groups, against other societies and against nature."

We were in the dream, deeply, all of us abandoned to the dark and nervous landscape of nightmare.

There were so many of us, all strangers, all lost in what might have been a vast forest of ancient trees, their rough bark twisted with vines, or what might have been a great hall of smooth marble pillars, impassive as gods holding up the infinite ceiling of the night sky. Whatever it was, it was grand and tall and sweeping in every confused direction, and we bumped and stumbled together, low and frightened and half-blind. I was panicked, terrified, my heart pounding in my gut and my ears and in the soles of my feet. And in my hands, slick with sweat and fear, I gripped a sword.

Thoughts on Justice, Mercy, Beauty and Choice

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I call him by his real name, despite the numerous nicknames that he's adopted and that people at work are always throwing around — I'm like that, I used to call my preschool friends Christopher, and Jeffery, and Angela. He calls me Mundo: from Alison, to Ali, to Alamundo! like a war cry or something someone yells before leaping out of a plane. And now, it's just Mundo, which means "world" in Spanish, though I'm pretty sure he doesn't know that.

Life is Suffering

Yesterday he told me about the revelation he had while thinking about Schindler's List, about the old woman who was shot in the back of the head for stumbling, about the people who were murdered for no reason at all, the derangement of arbitrary killing. And he realized, he said, that "life is like that — you go through the world thinking there are rules and trying to do the right things, the things that will make a difference — you clean yourself up and quit the drugs and the drinking because everyone tells you it will make your life better and it's the right thing to do..." But the truth is, suffering is arbitrary, and pain so often unjust. You can do everything right, follow all the rules, and still walk through the world struggling and uncertain and alone.

And what's worse: sometimes those people you try to help, try to do right by, are ungrateful or selfish or flawed, sometimes they are puppy-kickers, sometimes they are the bastards holding the guns, sometimes — worst of all — they are innocent and happy and entirely unaware of how much you have given so that they can float through life on a pink fluffy cloud of security and self-assurance. And who are you, anyway? How pink and fluffy is that cloud that follows you around, dumping anxiety and inadequacy and prozac and corporate logos onto your bent head all day? We want to believe in causality and consequence, in the rational function of justice in the world — and yet, there is always something more you could be doing, and what you have done always seems ineffectual and misguided.

Where Is Peace?

I have been thinking about this, too, reading Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. The long history of the world, it seems, is people losing faith in their gods and heroes, discovering that carefully-prescribed sacrificial rituals cannot always spare them disaster, that reason can lead them as often into irrelevant sophistry as into kenotic paradoxes of silence, that while compassion and kindness and nonviolence are obvious they are also in general very badly done. And in the midst of these contemplations, are the thousands of dead in Haiti, the corpses piled in the streets, and another coworker of mine with a plane ticket in his hand for this Wednesday to go visit his family, a ticket now useless, and nothing but unanswering silence when he tries to call home.

I could say that I am angry at all the rich people in this country for believing so strongly in their ambassador of prosperity, the Almighty Dollar, running their telethons and sending their compassion truncated and stamped in green as impersonal donations, like the epitome of the saying: too little, too late — how I'm cynical that, despite the destruction and arbitrary suffering, despite the cruelty of our Mother who shrugs her shoulders and kills, our faith in finance isn't shaken a bit and we might even, deep down where we cannot admit it, feel a bit relieved that finally here is a way that our gods can step in and save the day on our behalf. (Or perhaps it's the relief that even the fickle, frightening gods of Consumerism and the Market are quelled in the face of tragedy and in that moment we are allowed to demand of them the self-giving of compassion.) I feel it too, there in the dark, urging that this is the right thing to do, that if this isn't justice, at least it's something like it, something close. At least it's better than sitting in my living room, praying, picturing imaginary peace and comfort that may never come. Yet in the small, cluttered office at work, a man sits at the company computer scanning through lists of the dead looking for names he might recognize. And am I supposed to offer him money? Am I supposed to offer him prayer?

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a day when most people in this country celebrate diversity and the continuing struggle against racism; but for me, it is also a day to celebrate pacifism and compassion, a commitment to nonviolence, a commitment to peace. This is about more than race, or money, or politics. This is about how we respond to suffering.

A Triad of Peace

We are so used to thinking about justice in terms of the blindly swaying scales of right and wrong, reward and punishment, revenge and reparation. We think of mercy as something else, something that turns away from justice for the sake of love and forgiveness. The pacifist, we think, cannot be just, because sometimes justice demands that bad people be punished and hurtful deeds be repaid in kind. We believe the pacifist must be a passive-ist, sitting back and acquiescing, doing nothing instead of responding with just retribution. The merciful person is the one who could act, who could punish or penalize and who would be justified in doing so, but doesn't. And so, we believe, we must choose: justice, or mercy; righteousness, or forgiveness; action, or passivity.

But this is a tension between two opposites, a duality that restricts us, limits our capacity to choose and to live freely and creatively. There are times when "mercy" alone seems weak and impotent, when "justice" unmitigated seems harsh and unfair. Druidic philosophy teaches us to seek the third, not merely a compromise between two opposites but another element entirely, one that can open up the tension of this-or-that, give it a spaciousness — give us room to move.

Three things that make peace: justice, mercy, and beauty.

What is "fair," after all? A thing of beauty, that which has a lightness of being, that which is gentle and warm, rather than hostile or violent. While "justice" comes to us from words meaning "upright" and "pure" — the unbending, the rigid boundaries between sacred and profane. And "mercy," the gift, the kindness bestowed, unearned, undeserved. One forever standing, on forever stooping, both concerned with restoring relationship to what is proper, appropriate, beautiful, fair. When we speak of justice: only the guilty, the violators can right the wrongs they have committed and restore that balance, through repayment or by suffering punishment equal to the suffering they have caused — justice will demand it of them. When we speak of mercy: those with the kindness and compassion restore relationship, through the gift of forgiveness, lifting up the flawed and the weak, guilty as they may be — mercy will overcome them. But how do we respond in times when there is no guilty party to be blamed, when natural forces cause suffering, and mercy appears too much like pity? Where is peace, where is the balance and harmony of right relationship, in such times, and how do we seek it, how do we help to create it? We create beauty.

And beauty is dynamic, it shifts, it moves — it is a balance that changes and responds. It is intimate; it is personal; it whispers. And sometimes, in the face of injustice, in the face of suffering and pain and tragedy which is simply and unremittingly unfair — sometimes the best response, the response that will restore relationship, is to be beautiful to one another. To mix this appeal in with the others: be just, be merciful, and be beautiful. The pacifist knows this, and because she knows this she is never passive, always active, always creative, always in the process of making peace. Even in times of terrible loss and grief and ugliness, when others look for scapegoats to blame or forgive — and finding none, flounder and stall and stumble to a stop — the pacifist knows that peace-making is not only about upholding justice and offering mercy, but about creating beauty, creating a moving balance out of failures and flaws, making harmonious relationship where before there was disconnection and silence.

Choose to be Beautiful

And there will be people who tell you this isn't enough. But then, nothing is. What could possibly be enough? When he comes to me and says, "Mundo, the world is shit" — am I going to tell him he is wrong, that it all works out in the end, that there is a plan, a the big picture, and God is watching us from a distance? I figure you have to start from where you are, you have to face the possibility that he's right, the world is shit, and this is what you have to work with. And then you have to make a choice. Sometimes all you can say is, "Yes, but..."

Yes... but if the world is shit, if it really is, and no number of rules will bring justice, and no amount of mercy will relieve pain, and nothing you do really matters in the end — then what excuse do you have left? Be beautiful, choose to be beautiful anyway. Choose to be the person you want to be, the best of yourself — choose it not because of the rewards or the consequences, not because of what your beauty will do, but for the beauty itself, for the sake of beauty. Choose to make peace, to create works of art, to laugh and tell stories. Choose to sit in the office and listen to the memories that come bubbling up in grief and worry, and in laughter and affection too, of impoverished life in Haiti, the woman waiting with the pregnant belly, the uncle who drinks, the mother who lectures. Choose to shake his hand before he leaves, and laugh together about the cliché of white clasping black, your small pale hand lost in his huge dark one. Choose to sing the songs you don't remember, and dance your beauty, and call each other nicknames.

I don't have any answers. It will never seem good enough, you will always feel like there is something more you should be doing. There will always be aspects of the world that leave you feeling angry and cynical and impotent and sad. There will always be people trying to shut up your beauty in a box and put that box on a scale and calibrate that scale with disaster and prejudice and hatred and all the wrongs of the world, to make sure you're doing your part to compensate, to outweigh them, to even the score. There will always be people for whom beauty is a paltry, small thing hardly worth noticing. Who insist that it is justice which shapes the world, and mercy which saves it, and that beauty is too intimate and inconsequential to make any difference at all.

And yet... and yet... E pur si muove!

Peace-Making, Despair & Resolution

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I will finish my book manuscript.

I will, in fact, begin my book manuscript. And I will finish it. This year.

That is my resolution. And it's a difficult one, because I've been wanting to write this book since... well, since forever, it seems. And yet, there's always something standing behind me, as if looking over my shoulder, throwing a shadow across the page. I might call it fear — fear to turn back to look over the past several years and delve deeply into the frustration and loneliness that brought me to this place, or fear to share this part of me in a form that strangers and, worse yet, family members might freely peruse, giving perhaps only cursory thought to it, not understanding. O yes, there's the old fear of misunderstanding skulking there. But I think the truth is, what I'm really afraid of is what I might ask of others. I'm afraid of asking others to face despair.

Because in some ways, that's the worst of what I might do. There was a moment — a moment that now lingers in my memory like a haunted hillside where no one ever goes anymore and the stone footprints of some forgotten foundation lie half-hidden in the overgrown weeds, outlining where the ancient house once stood — there was that moment. When I rested quietly beneath the crabapple tree and willed my body to dissolve into mud, willed the worms and flies to turn over my flesh into compost, willed the rain to wash the pulpy heart muscle from its cage of bone so that I would be empty, so that I could empty myself finally, once and for all, into the world. That was despair. And it was, in some ways, beautiful. In some ways, like a surrender, a submission to the force of life and spirit that kept this mass of molecules and neural twingeing cohering in form when everything else seemed to have dropped away. God was not there. Love had not saved me; it had only intensified my sense of longing and separation, my impotence. I cannot choose, I am not free. Let me dissolve, let me give myself up to this tragic beautiful mess of hungry nature... so that my love might, somewhere, do somebody some good. Echoes.

First, you have to love something that much, you have to want something like peace (or God) with your entire being — and I don't mean the "rest in peace" kind of escape from responsibility and pain, but the active, squirming interconnection of creation that throbs through everything. You have to want it so much that you would die in order to accomplish it, or just to get out of its way and let it happen. And then, you have to know that it doesn't matter, that it's too big for you, that you are, either way, too small and careless and fragile. Because that is love: love is touching something bigger than you, too big for you to control. If you cannot touch that hugeness and feel your life like a flicker of sardonic laughter on the edge of chaos, then it isn't love. If you do not reach out with all of your ridiculously insignificant being and seek for it knowing full well your ineptitude and failures, it isn't love. It isn't love, if it doesn't drive you to despair.

This is not some teenage-angst love poem. It's not that kind of despair. It's the despair of ecstatic helplessness, the utter out-going of surrender. You cannot live your life this way, and so you don't. You give it up — and yet somehow, it goes on anyway. Even your life doesn't need you. I made a resolution then, too, that I would eat and drink and work to pay for shelter, and I would wait. I would let my life go on, if that's what it insisted on doing. I would stand up from under the crabapple tree and go home, and I would keep the body fed and healthy, I would exercise and think and breathe and meditate and write (because these things were a necessary discipline), and besides that I would simply wait. I knew who would win out in the end, after all; suicide by living well is still suicide. There were days when I thought maybe this was something like what Christ had felt (or Jesus the historical person, if that's all he was, some poor sod who'd had his body broken on account of his for-so-loving the world): wanting, whatever the cost, for my existence to contribute even one minute particular to the overwhelming Divine Loveliness of Being, and more than that, wanting painfully to just Not Screw It Up.

And somewhere in that despair, I found freedom. Not go-kill-some-foreign-jerks-who-object-to-imperial-capitalism-to-protect-our-freedom kind of freedom. Not even freedom the way I'd always thought I had it all along, that freedom of free will, the freedom to think and experience thinking, to be aware and to experience self-awareness. No, I found a freedom that exists within the tension of Perfect Will and Perfect Love, within the paradox of that loneliness of being a being who longs to unite with Being, and that loneliness of being a being who is already and has always been united with Being. And it is because of that freedom that I can believe in peace, in the possibility of pacifism as peace-making, as creativity that weaves a world of beauty and integrity and breathless, messy Spirit.

And so I've been trying for a while now to write a book about peace. My blog posts last June (and recent articles published in Sky Earth Sea) are ways that I have tiptoed around the idea, trying to work up my courage. But the truth is, I do not know a way to peace-making except through real love, and so too through real despair. (The man who invented the peace sign says he wanted to evoke the image of a person holding their hands outstretched in despair, the peasant before the firing squad.) And the idea that I might not be capable of writing a book that can give to someone this necessary love of existence, of being, of Spirit, is hardly terrifying at all compared to the possibility that I just might succeed, even the least little bit, and suddenly find that what I have given is something painful and heart-dissolving and... awful. Can we make peace without experiencing despair? Can we skim the surface and come away mostly unscathed but still better for it and ready with our hands clean and our tongues ready? (Can I even make any kind of sense to people when I'm bogged down by poetry, rhetoric and convoluted sentence structures?)

And then there is the part of me that feels (please, Pagans, forgive the Old Testament reference) like Job after the game is done — a bit of me that is scarred over and will probably always carry a certain amount of resentment and hardness for what I went through, a part that might not ever completely heal or cease mourning for when I thought I was innocent, when I was not yet burned up. There are people who love me deeply now, better than I have ever been loved — but this part of me that used to really believe I deserved it and could revel in such love, that part is slower to respond and may be a permanent cynic. (And so there is also joy, the disbelieving shock of discovering, over and over, that love, too, comes whether you believe in it or not, that like life itself, love doesn't need your faith in order to be real.)

But peace-making isn't about being joyful or feeling good all the time. And if I made a resolution once, I can do it again. So I'm giving myself a year, a year to write the book I'm afraid to write, a year to churn out whatever terrible drivel and agonizing truth might be left over lingering in my skin from that afternoon under the crabapple tree. This year.

This year. I will begin my book manuscript.

And I will finish it.

Fear and Thanksgiving in Lancaster County

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Driving to my parents' house through central Pennsylvania, we passed a billboard that read, "Without Coal, Most Cities Would Be Dark." In an alternate universe, I turned to Jeff and asked him to pull over. I popped the trunk, rummaged for my anti-propaganda protest gear, and scurried up the sign's scaffolding through the chill, foggy night. In an alternate universe, as we pulled away again, we left behind a sign that now blazed in bright white graffiti lettering the addition: "And We Could See the Stars."

But in this universe, we drove on without stopping. Four hours in a car with no radio. Just the two of us, the kitten in his carrier in the backseat, and the humming silence of tires on pavement. Long road trips always make me think about the future. Maybe it's the metaphor of traveling, rumbling through the dark towards that ever-receding horizon....

Growing up in the rather-well-off suburbs of Lancaster county, my family would often drive the two hours west to visit family living in the heart of Coal Country, PA. There was the highway known locally as the "Road to Nowhere" because the town it had once led to had dwindled away with the collapse of the coal industry. There was the ghost town of Centralia, whose underground coal fire has been burning since 1962, releasing toxic fumes into the surrounding landscape, and could go on burning for another century yet. And there was my grandmother's old house, tiny and dirty, where she managed to raise six children despite her poverty, the house where she lived alone and slowly losing her mind to poorly-medicated bipolar disorder until she died more than a decade ago. This is where my father grew up, who was raised partly by the local Catholic Church community that provided clothing and food when his family had little else to survive on. A local church community that was so far out in the boondocks that none of the higher-ups could be bothered to enforce strict conformity to doctrine. So my dad grew up believing all that nonsense about love-thy-neighbor and service to the poor, but never learned, like a proper church-going lad, to fear homosexuals or kill abortion doctors. My father never learned the lesson of inventing enemies. Cold and hunger were too real, poverty too obvious, and the relationship of an individual to the community was, in a very real sense, my father's literal source of salvation.

But all this is the past, the history of my family, the history of my father. Traveling as a child to visit our relatives still living in central Pennsylvania hadn't been about returning to "where my family came from." It had been about gathering for Christmas or Independence Day parties, getting together for birthdays or to meet the newest puppy adopted into the family. As a child, traveling was about anticipating what next fun thing was about to happen, seeing how the cousins had grown up while we were parted, or trying the new cakes or cookies my aunt had been experimenting with baking. And the drive home was the classic quiet, slightly-bumpy ride in the backseat, half-asleep, gazing up at the stars while my parents listened to soft rock on the radio and shadows of silos, barns and rolling farmland rushed by along the horizon.

Now when I drive through the dark, making the four hour trip between Pittsburgh and Lancaster, I think about the future. And usually, the conversation turns to politics. And I wonder if the kids will grow up in a world where it's possible for them to live ethically without sacrificing basic needs. Will they be able to eat good food that came from a local farm that didn't use petrochemical pesticides and genetically-modified seeds? Will they be able to earn a living doing something that doesn't fundamentally compromise simple principles like "don't exploit the impoverished," or "don't bombard the public with billions of dollars of marketing in order to brainwash them into buying your product," or even just "try to make the world a better place"? Will they be able to live in a world where war isn't inevitable at every drop of a hat or a pin or a tower or a word? (The second-oldest is reading Zinn's A Young People's History of the United States; when I asked her how she was liking it, she shrugged and pursed her lips, saying, "There's a lot of war..." And there I was, brought back to myself, realizing that I had been experiencing something close to glee until then, a kind of excitement or pleasure at the idea that we were helping her be strong and knowledgeable, that we were "fighting the system" and showing her that America is not the world's Savior and we do not always do the right thing. But what we are doing, really, is asking her to confront the fact that, yes, there is a lot of war, and violence, and greed, and senseless hate in the world. "Yes, but there is a lot of goodness, too. And courage, and compassion, and beauty.")

During our trip this time, Jeff and I talked about how we don't know what is going to happen. Nobody knows. Before 1989, everyone knew the Cold War and the USSR would go on forever. Just after the first World War, the Great War, everyone knew there would never again be such a devastating conflict, and yet in 1910 everyone knew there could never even be such a huge, continent-wide war in the first place, or if there was Britain would find it an easy victory. Now, actions no longer seem to have consequences. We have been at war with Iraq for more than six years; we have been living in a post-9/11 world for almost a decade. Is it just going to go on like this forever? Every year, the same tug-o-war to convince people that the earth is dying, that we're killing each other needlessly with both poverty and guns? Every year, the same worry, the same hopes, the same sense of uncertainty? Is it just going to continue? It couldn't possibly.... but can you conceive of an end, can you really believe that suddenly one day, we'll all wake up and come to our senses? Sometimes I really don't like my country.

And yet, I love this land, this landscape I grew up in. I love the family I have here, although they're scattered and imperfect. I love the rolling hills and fields and the random awful farm smells wafting across the highway that let me know I'm headed home again. There is a lot of goodness and beauty and love in the world, too. Very small moments of meaningful brilliance are going on all the time. For instance, Friday afternoon, after a typical wearing day at work and a late lunch, Jeff and I returned to the car to discover a tiny stray kitten hiding behind the front wheel. After more than an hour of gentle coaxing and tempting with smells of hot clam chowder, after strangers passing by sometimes indifferent and sometimes all too eager to help in loud, clumsy ways that only terrified the poor creature--the four guys who had parked behind us returned to their car and were more than happy to help. On their hands and knees, these young men who could have been college football players or barroom brawlers were cooing and whispering and reaching gently, with all the tenderness in the world. Finally, they managed to herd the startled animal out from under the car onto the sidewalk, where I caught it up in a sweatshirt and scooped it into my arms, cradling it against me. Trembling and terrified for only a moment, it soon began to purr in the warm dark safety, and peak its tiny head out to gaze at me curiously. So now, there is a tiny black kitten as part of my family, a brave, playful, cuddly little boy named Cu Gwyn.

And although the car ride was devoted mostly to politics and worry about the future, there was Cu Gwyn in his carrier in the backseat, curled up in his blankets, his ears twitching to the rising and falling of our voices. "Cu Gwyn" is Irish, and translates roughly as "white dog." In part, our choice in naming the kitten was ironic, stemming from a nerdy sense of humor and a suggestion by a friend who had just adopted a small white dog herself (whom she proposed to name Cath Dubh, or "black cat"). But the white hounds of Irish myth are also creatures of the Otherworld, guardians of the gateway between realms, hounds with glistening white fur and red ears, who hunt the great stag through the wild forests. And the stag is a solar symbol, an animal of the sun, of light and enlightenment. So I name our new kitten Cu Gwyn, in honor of that hope that we all hunt for our children (biological, adopted, or abandoned to hide beneath cars in the gutter), the little bit of light like stars in a night sky, like the little bit of white wisps of fur showing through the black. And in hopes that, like the man tossing starfish back into the ocean after a terrible night of storm, even if I cannot save the world... I can make a difference to this one.

Elements of Peace: What Any of Us Can Do

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I suppose everyone has been talking recently about the shooting at Fort Hood. It's been difficult for me to wrap my head around. I remember a time, eight years ago when the towers fell, everyone seemed full of rage and fear and thoughts of revenge, and all I could muster was a devastating sadness, a sadness that sank deeply into my bones, a sorrow like liquid in the marrow. Now, I see around me, on the news, in the paper, online, people grieving, mourning, moaning with that same sorrow, the washing tides of grief — and all I can feel is anger. Anger and frustration at having carried such sadness alone for so long, only to see it spewed forth in cathartic forms of patriotism, twisted to serve the purposes of war and control.

I could spend hours deconstructing the language of isolation, the mythologies of exceptionalism and cold-heartedness at the root of these misdirected efforts to grieve. But it would be only so much talk, like trying to describe a sunset to the blind, and I am tired, and running short on words. What can I say that would make any difference? I have spent my life writing, it seems, and sometimes it feels paltry and ineffectual, self-indulgent at best. Can words open up the heart? Can mere words step between two enemies at war and throw open their arms in command and invitation? Can words save a life? And I don't mean metaphorically, in some warm-fuzzy white-light chicken-soup-for-the-soul kind of way. What comfort can words be to a dying woman watching her blood seep away, or a man who lies in his hospital bed knowing that if he ever recovers it will only be to face the vengeful cruelty lurking hungrily under the guise of "justice"? How can words change the world, except for the worse? Justice, freedom, honor, sacrifice — when have I ever seen these words serve any but the powerful and the strong? There are those who live justly, who live their peace and love in the everyday world, the world beyond words, the world of touch and smell and sunlight and sorrow. And there are those who only talk about it. And do they talk. What can I do with my words that can overcome that? What can any of us do?

So I've found myself recently plunging into making, plunging my hands into boxes of beads, counting out stones in my palm, twirling thin wire between my fingertips and looping it back and forth, gently, carefully. This is my catharsis; not moralizing or justifying or preaching to the grieving choir. For the past week, I've been coping with crafts. I have been weaving sets of prayer beads, each delicate stone representing one of the three Druidic elements — nwyfre, gwyar, calas; wind, water, stone; breath, blood, bone — or the inspiration of Awen, the life of Spirit, spiraling and deep. The work demands my concentration, a steady eye and a steady hand, and silence. And for a time, these small, intimate, precious things are the only things in the world to me. They are the world, the three realms of earth, sea and sky, woven together with the invisible threads of — of what? I might say love, or peace, or even something like harmony or Song. But the truth is, these are prayer beads, and they are woven together, and bound to each other, with words.

Peace has been at the center of my spiritual life for so long, I'm not even sure I can think of what it means to be "spiritual" without it. And we need peace these days, we need it desperately. It was this need that led me to write the two pieces that appeared in the most recent issue of Sky Earth Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality: an essay on "peaceful warriorship," and a description of my personal use of the "Druid Prayer for Peace" as a daily meditation. In the wake of recent events — and the on-going political wars and environmental destruction that continues seemingly unchecked — a few thousand words read by only a handful of people seemed worse than useless. But even in my cynicism and frustration, the prayer still meant something to me, something powerful, something more than mere words. And I wanted to create it again, to make it into something tangible, something I could hold between my hands, something I could give to another not just metaphorically, but physically. And so, I began sorting and beading and weaving.

And as I worked, I thought about my best friend, a musician of incredible talent, who had sent me a letter recently about his own frustrations with his art, and his doubts that music could change the world. What can we do, he asked me, and what right do we have to lecture others when our own efforts seem to be so small and meaningless, our actions so impotent and our intentions always usurped and distorted by systems of violence and fear? And it seemed to me that the answer is, and that it always is: we do what we can. We have to try, we have to allow ourselves that much. Even if our uncertainty shakes us to the soles of our feet, even if our knowledge of the world and its vastness make us feel small and helpless, even if bloated systems of fear and myopic self-interest loom over us, leering and licking their chops — we do what our hearts and minds and hands urge us to do.

And then we have to forgive ourselves. Forgive ourselves for failing, for not being perfect, forgive ourselves for not being able to save the world. Because if we don't give ourselves permission to try anyway, knowing the odds are stacked, certainly no one else will. And there are already enough cynical asses in the world who would rather sit back in comfortable complacency than face the risk that their capacity to care about something might just be greater than their capacity to control it. Because that's the risk we run when we allow ourselves to love, when we open ourselves to something bigger than we are. That's what's at stake: our willingness to connect with something, through compassion and devotion and gratitude and joy, that is not completely under our control. Try as we might, the world is too big for us to control. And yet we participate, at every moment, with every breath, we participate in its creation and its thriving community of life. Peace, I think, is no more or less than coming to understand that creative participation, rooted in freedom and mystery.

So maybe my words might not save the world. I am a writer. All I can do is what any of us can do: be most wholly and fully who I am, and live my peace on a daily basis in the best way I know how. And right now, that means giving away prayer beads. Maybe it's a silly idea, maybe it won't make a difference — but gods and politicians be damned, I just have to try!



So, dear readers, if you are interested in receiving a set of prayer beads, please send me an email at meadowsweet.myrrh@gmail.com, with your name and mailing address (and blog or webpage address, if you have one). At the moment, I have two sets to give away, though I will probably be making more over the next few weeks. During the first week of December, I'll put all the names I receive into a hat and draw a few winners at random, who will receive a set of prayer beads and a copy of the Peace of the Three Realms meditation. All I ask in return is that each of you make a promise: a promise to spend some time over the next year working honestly and whole-heartedly towards peace in whatever way you can, whether it be through prayer, art, politics, or other forms of service, and a promise to give yourself permission to care.

Samhain: Thinning the Veil

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No one mourns that the body is dark. I do not mourn that my body, thick with muscle and skin and blood, is dark inside, opaque, layer upon layer of translucent flesh wrapped around hard white bone so densely no light can get in. Is bone white? I have never seen mine. Sometimes I can see, through the thin veils of my skin, that my blood can be a deep blue, even close to the surface, can be purple just a razor-edge from spilling brilliant into red. But inside, all my blood is dark — coming from my heart or going, rounding the lungs or settling into the extremities of my toes and fingertips, red and blue are nothing but potentials in the darkness of my body. My throat, my ears, even the centers of my eyes show that darkness. People look into my eyes, and no one mourns.

This is what happens when we move inside, when we look inside without first dissecting and slicing and splaying the body open on the autopsy table. What we find when we move inside the living body as it really is, not exposing it, but entering in gently. The heart as it really is, dark, hidden in a dark body. And there is a sadness there, in the darkness, a sadness like our obscure working heart beneath the veils of translucence.

The world is so full of color, and brilliance, and motion, and we are so full of pain. We walk around, these dark bodies wrapped in the beauty of color and light. Our skin shimmering, our hair and eyes and fingernails shimmering — and the ache exists here, in us, in these bodies, held within us by this thin veil of physical flesh, wrinkled and wrapped up tight, fold upon fold. Our nerves are dark corridors of pain, our hearts raw with sadness. The world is so gentle and soft, it gives way before us when we move. We walk like celestial beings, made of stardust and sunlight, we tread lightly over the muddy ground and only sometimes do we remember the earth, too, is dark beneath us, beneath her green and lovely veils. Only sometimes do we turn our minds inwards into the earth, where the dark is moving, too.

What is that sadness? What can I say about it? It is the sadness of having an inside, and of what remains inside. The sadness of memory, making room to hold within it what has been lost, the place where grief lives, and injustice, and fear. And the sadness, too, of hope, and helplessness. In countries where the women are not allowed to dance, it is the slow dancing of suffering to the dark music of blood and dreams. It is where we touch, in the darkness, in each hidden center of our beings — we rub one another raw, finding our way out, groping towards each other through the dark. It is the tender sadness of connection, the ache of opening a small way in. We open our mouths wide, we cry out, we would swallow sunlight if we could — but inside, the dark remains, no light can find its way. We are dense, through and through, and that mystery is sadness, too.

But the veil is thin. Just this flesh, ordinary and marvelous that we walk around every day without a thought to its myriad shining porous cells. And there are times — like these — when we play at the edges of the veil, lifting a hem, worrying the seams between our fingers. We paint white bones and polished skulls on the windows and the doors, we revel in the red of blood and imagine ourselves full of it, brimming with the color of it, the light gleaming off each turn and curve of our veins. We fill ourselves with color — the colors of gore and pus and bone — we place candles behind the eyes of pumpkins emptied of their insides. We bring the light in, deep within, past the folds of the veil, and place it like a sun churning at the center of the earth. The dead are not jailed within memory, but drift free and translucent in the moonlight. Pain and fear — we set these loose, too, release them like stories into the outside world, a world full of color, and brilliance, and motion, and love. We set fire to this dark sadness within our bodies, and we look — past the shadowy masks of obscurity and illusion — we look into each other's eyes. We look, and nobody mourns.

Cultivating an Environment of Truth

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"Truth is generated from its environment; in that way it becomes a powerful reality."

- Chögyam Trungpa

The man is a regular. He's a thin man, with dark hair and a work-worn face stretched from years of cigarettes and morning coffee and whatever it is he does to earn a living during the day, and he sits at the counter sipping slowly from his cup. Some of the other servers have complained about him in the past, about how he rifles through the pile of discarded checks next to the register, looking for unused coupons that other customers have carelessly left behind. Why does he need two dollars off? All he gets is coffee and toast... A cheapskate, some of them call him, even though he always tips a dollar, just to sit and read the newspaper and joke with the other regulars.

This morning, I'm wiping down the metal knobs and syrup dispensers before refilling the small red buckets of sanitizer and replacing the old used rags with fresh ones. It's early, before seven still, and dawn is flat like a diorama beyond the restaurant window. Behind me, the regular complains to his buddy. "They're shutting down half the city for the G-20, I don't know if we'll be able to get any work done. Maybe they'll give us the week off, but I doubt it. Anyway, you won't be able to get anywhere..." His buddy makes some amused grunt and pours one tiny creamer into his own coffee mug, delicately pinching the white plastic between his large, grubby fingers. "Well, hopefully the cops'll beat up some protesters anyway. And catch it on film, so they can play it on TV, over and over..."

I barely even flinch or pause in my cleaning. It's no surprise that the man is a committed conservative. He once complained about Obama perpetuating fraud against the U.S. government because he wasn't born inside the United States (I did not bother to point out to him that Hawaii is, in fact, part of the United States, whereas McCain was born in Panama). To complain about such matters when the previous administration allowed wire-tapping of citizens, torture of unjustly detained prisoners, and an illegal war based on false evidence... well, it was already clear the man didn't derive all his political priorities from careful reasoning and unbiased sources.

But I struggle to get over this last remark nonetheless. During my college days, and occasionally afterwards, I had been a protester. I had "turned my back on Bush" at his second inauguration, only to come face to face with a fat little man wearing an "I Salute Dick Cheney" baseball cap and baring his teeth through spittle at me and the thin, hippie-dressed girl beside me as we raised our fists in peace signs over our heads. I had marched in D.C. just a week after the Iraq War had begun; I had stood among others at peace vigils in the chill of winter and the reawakening of spring alike during the following years, holding stubby candles in flimsy paper cones to catch the dripping wax. I had swallowed tears of frustration and anger over Katrina and the slaughtering in the Gaza Strip, attended talks, lectures and poetry readings, wandered through galleries of photographs bearing stolid, unflinching witness to the things human beings can do to each other.

For all the man knows, I could be protesting come September, when a handful of the obscenely rich come to meet in my city, a city half-empty and struggling from collapsed industry, trying to rebuild with dignity, culture, art, medicine and education. I could be in the streets soon, holding up signs or handing out pamphlets asking why we still believe, so gullibly, that these men of power have our best interests in mind and not merely their own. I could be protesting, giving voice to the incredulity and hope in my bones. I have thought about it. Even though the papers say that G-20 protesters are struggling against government opposition for their right to legal permits for protest space. I've thought about marching in the streets, adding my voice to those who object, who say "no" when so many others hunch up, keep their heads low and try to avoid trouble. I am lucky, in some ways; I have very little to lose.

"Fucking protesters, man." The man chuckles to himself as his buddy finishes adding creamers to his styrofoam cup and leaves two dollar bills for the coffee at the front register before heading out the door. Then the regular is left alone at the counter, one hand wrapped around his warm mug, the other playing absent-mindedly with the edge of a napkin. I see him almost every morning I work, and sometimes I pass him on the street as I walk the neighborhood on my days off. He always greets me with amiable familiarity, trusting in the gentleness and civility that I have cultivated in my work as a waitress. To him, I must seem like a Nice Quiet Girl, and he's not really wrong in thinking so.

"Did you hear me honk, this morning?" he asks me as I'm refilling his cup. "You were walking up Monroe Avenue--I honked, but I didn't know if you heard me."

"O, that was you?" I smile, though my mind is still churning silently over his last comment, imagining the officer--maybe one I know, maybe one who comes in for breakfast and gets his meal for half-price--imagining the raised baton, or the mace or taser, imagining the officer approaching a row of us pacing along the curb, signs wavering and drooping as we wonder whether we should run...

"You walk alone to work like that every day, in the dark? You'd better be careful..."

"O, it's not really that dark, it's early morning by the time I'm walking to work, except in the winter when it's too cold for anyone else to be out. And this is a good neighborhood, I've never had any problems."

"Still, I hope you carry something--a handgun or something. There are a lot of crazy people out there."

For a moment, my sarcastic sense of humor whispers like a friendly devil in my ear, No shit, I'm looking at one... Carry a gun, for gods' sake!? This is a family neighborhood, with children, and dog-walkers out before the sun comes up. I know my neighbors, medical students, and grandparents whose grandkids visit on weekends, elderly Jewish ladies whose families have owned houses on this hill for generations, and young yuppy couples biking through the wooded park to their yoga classes. Carry a gun! But even this man, this regular who sips coffee and munches on his toast for forty-one cents on someone else's coupon...even he isn't the "crazy" people I might fear, if there are such people. He, too, is part of the neighborhood in its stability and community. I don't believe for a second that he would wish me harm, and as he looks at me over his coffee, I can tell that even his cautions and advice come from a place of goodness and caring for my welfare, no matter how mistaken they may be.

I wonder if that would change if he knew my political views. I wonder how he would feel if it was me on television being beaten by the cops, if it was my slim, defiant body huddled against the pavement, arms bracing against the blows. He didn't believe I was at the Superbowl riots in Oakland last winter, standing quietly in the snow completely sober and awake to the night, as students raged around me smelling of beer and sweat-dampened scarves, setting broken furniture on fire and tipping over cars. I watched the new horned moon set between buildings and let the pulse of city energy run through me, allowing it to swell and subsided into stillness again. I seem small, maybe even fragile, but I am hardly ever afraid. There are people much bigger than me, much less sure of their own power, who carry fear with them everywhere, like a handgun. He doesn't believe I could be a protester, some messy liberal pussy with nothing better to do than make trouble, someone who deserves a beating, sport for the hard-working, entertainment for the up-standing. I have worked to become gentle, kind, self-disciplined--he likely believes I am both too weak and too sensible to be caught screaming and waving my anger in the air under a banner of anti-anything.

It's not so much that he's wrong about me. He is wrong about protesters.

"What is wrong with spelling out the truth? When you spell out the truth it loses its essence and becomes either 'my' truth or 'your' truth; it becomes an end in itself. But by implying the truth, the truth doesn't become anyone's property.

When the dragon wants a rainstorm he causes thunder and lightning. That brings the rain."

- Chögyam Trungpa

Protesters aren't some special category of crazy leftist hippies. They're just people, of course, but then it depends on what you think of people. Despite some of my experiences in this world so far--watching unjust war, corruption and greed, fear-mongering and propaganda, starving children wasting away to support extravagant lifestyles for the wealthy on the other side of the world--despite this, I trust in a fundamental goodness in human beings. There is a beauty to the mess and flux of the world, and people share in this beauty, striving in all kinds of ways, through stupidity and ignorance, through kind intentions and fears of failure, to become better, to do what is good. I have never had reason to doubt this, never in my experience come upon a person who did not have some good in them working its way out.

The regular, sitting before me at the counter with concern on his face, is not an evil man, not a person who would sincerely wish violence on another person. When he jokes about cops beating marchers, he does so casually, almost as if it doesn't actually happen, not in the real world, not to real people. He has forgotten how to really look at other people, to see in them the complexity and messiness that reflects his own. He sees people--or, anyway, some people--merely as means to an end, as the irritable causes of effects in the political world that he does not like, causes that should be stopped, gotten rid of. I cannot agree with him on this view of people, and because I can't agree, I also can't hate him for it. He is not a Reason This Country Is Going to Hell... he is just a man, foolish and messy, with good in him working its way out.

So how do I correct him? Can I spell out the truth for him? No doubt there have been plenty of people dictating the problems of war and corruption, putting forth arguments and making passionate pleas. Sometimes I add my voice to this crowd, crying out for justice and peace and compassion. I am someone who speaks out, who acts to demonstrate my commitments and my ideals. But I am more than that, more than a voice in the crowd, more than a protester and conscientious objector, more than a mind twisting and twirling facts into the strong ropes that hold together an argument for peace and local community building. I am also the young woman who serves this man coffee four mornings a week, and helps him sort through two-dollar-off coupons.

When a person discovers the basic goodness in herself and in others, she discovers fearlessness. She discovers that there is no reason to be afraid, even when destruction and death threaten. Destruction isn't personal, and there is no cause for resentment. When a person discovers this inner strength, this courage within her, she becomes gentle with others as well as herself, she does not worry so much about correcting every wrong view around her. She trusts. Because she knows that the way to remedy fear is not to render life docile and harmless through explication, but to encourage others to discover the goodness in themselves. How to do that? It takes courage to face this truth (though why it should be so hard to admit to ourselves that we might be basically good just the way we are I've never quite figured out). But you cannot just tell people about it; to explain it would rob them of the opportunity to embody courage themselves, to face this truth on their own.

In the end, I don't say anything to the man at the counter. I cannot change his view of people except by being most truly myself, by treating him with respect and gentleness, holding up a mirror that he might see his goodness belying his prejudices, revealing his blindspots. In the end, I don't say anything, this time. There is nothing I could say that I am not already saying with my being, with my presence there full of everything I am--pacifist and intellectual and poet and mystic--all crammed into the body of some unassuming waitress, coffee pot in one hand, clean rag in the other.

Comfortable with Crazy: The Dis-ease of Trusting Truth

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"Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude."

- Robert Anton Wilson

I am not postmodern when it comes to my view of truth. I believe, as Fox Mulder did, that the Truth is, in fact, out there. Somewhere. I also tend to believe that "in here" and "out there" aren't as starkly distinguished as many people think, and so I spend a lot of time looking for truth within my own heart and mind, within my own body and bones and the concrete senses that used to inspire me to write teenage poetry about iced-over duck ponds and the spinning shadows cast by ceiling fans on hot summer afternoons. I trust in the world, in reality, and in my relationship with reality. That relationship, like most relationships, includes a lot of give and take and mutual influence, and it demands respect. The world is real. And, unlike that narcissist control-freak ex you've been avoiding for a year, I know full well that the world will go on without me. I believe in truth and reality, but I am not so arrogant as to think that I know them definitively.

So when I read a post like the one written recently by Sean Carroll (my cherished punching-bag stand-in for Scientific Atheist Fundamentalists everywhere), I find it hard to work myself into a sympathetic state of outrage and disgust over the ignorance of Creationists and their grabs for intellectual legitimacy in the media. Truth will work its own way out. You might say I have a kind of evolutionary approach to truth, in fact. A "natural selection" of ideas, in which clearly false or ultimately unsustainable, unsupported notions of pure fantasy will collapse under their own weight and reality will, once again, reassert itself. It always has. The world does not need us to believe in it in order to exist (though our belief in the world may be necessary if we are to go on existing, or living in any meaningful way).

Carroll divides the world into two kinds of people: Sensible People (who can be either friends, or worthy opponents in debate), and Crazy People (who are, at best, embarrassing allies, and at worst, crackpots). The Crazy People, Carroll suggests, should never be given even the appearance of legitimacy or credibility, should not be engaged with in debate. (One wonders why, then, he even bothers to keep a blog.) They can occasionally be mocked, in moderation, as a natural and healthy outlet for the frustrations of Sensible People, but that's as much attention as they deserve. In short, Crazy People should be isolated. Kept away from us (it's always an "us") Sensible People. And this attitude works well, if you believe that insanity and sensibility are absolute and exclusive characteristics. If you believe that truth and reality rely on the relative sanity of their believers for their meaning and value, then this perspective is just fine.

The problem with the view that Some People Are Just Crazy, of course, is its corollary, Those People Aren't Us. The certainty that Sensible People have the monopoly on truth, that they always know what's really going on around here and can safely make decisions not only for themselves but for the Crazy People, without input from the latter... that kind of certainty gets us into trouble. Trouble like the holocaust and global warming. That kind of certainty obscures all kinds of old habits--habits steeped in denial and disconnection, habits with their own special kind of insanity--habits that plenty of Sensible People stick to even despite all scientific evidence that a lifestyle of consumption is fatally unsustainable, despite all appeals to the bravery of compassion and loving kindness for fellow beings.

Last week, a man walked into a fitness club in my city and opened fire. Four women were killed and eight more badly wounded before the man, desperate, lonely and steady-eyed, turned the gun on himself. In his blog--in which he'd written detailed plans for the event and recorded his deepening frustrations at being unable to connect with women despite following lots of dating advice--he wrote that his pastor had thoroughly convinced him that "you can commit mass murder then still go to heaven."

Reality reasserts itself. Sometimes in painful, devastating ways. There is chaos in this beautiful world. The question is, how do we respond?

Some of us respond by locking down, by devoting ourselves all the more rigidly and strenuously to the certainty of our sensibleness and the danger of others' lack of sense. When we find ourselves confronted with sorrow, stress and insecurity, we tighten our grips and we try to increase our control of the situation. With the world divided into Sensible People and Crazy People, salvation can only come from the Sensible ones--they shoulder all the responsibility, they must carry that weight all on their own. When things go wrong, the Sensible People step in to fix it, to fix the mistakes others have made, to fix those Others, too, if they can.

This is the disease of Truth, of the one right way. This is why people like Carroll spend much of their time trying to control who gets to speak, why they expend energy censoring and shutting down debate when it doesn't seem to play in the favor of what is true and correct. And it's why the people they're trying to shut up--the Crazies, the fundamentalists and creationists and right-wingers--do the very same thing. Carroll would probably say the fundamentalists try to monopolize or shut down debate because they know, deep down, that in honest, open debate they would lose. But why should truth--the really real Truth--need such fanatic defenders as Carroll? Why isolate the Crazies? Isn't truth strong enough to withstand their insanity, maybe even rub off on them a little with time and exposure? It's almost as though Carroll is just a bit scared--maybe, way deep down--that Craziness rubs off, that Sensibility isn't as impenetrable a stronghold as he'd like.

What is the definition of "crazy" after all? How do we determine who is nuts and who isn't? Society has traditionally defined insanity as the condition of being unable to function adequately in the world--to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, relate to others, do the simple things necessary for survival. And yet billions of religious individuals the world over, even including quite a few creationists, continue to eat just fine, raise children, hold down jobs. So what if they believe the universe was made whole-cloth six thousand years ago? They're quite likely wrong, of course, and holding a wrong belief may sometimes be a symptom of some underlying problem, or a cause for any number of unraveling negative consequences. But being wrong about the world is not, in itself, insane. Especially when those trying to correct you so clearly hate and fear you, and so can hardly be expected to have your best interests in mind.

The world, I have found, continues to exist regardless of my sanity. I have gone through times of depression and suicidal contemplations, times when neuroses and anxieties threatened to overwhelm me. I have had moments of profound clarity and connection, too, when I glimpse shifting patterns that seem to ease my way. Yet the world persists, in its messy beauty, giving birth to dancing stars while others die to dust. Almost as though my sanity didn't matter one way or another. This is the dis-ease of truth: the essential discomfort of knowing that your own strivings to live ethically, peacefully and rationally do not guarantee a safe and rational world to live in, and the humility of learning that your own missteps into irrationality and senselessness cannot overthrow the basic functionality and goodness of the world.

It is also an immense comfort. Knowing that we each have chaos and craziness within ourselves frees us from our need to control others with such a tight grip, it gives us permission to relax and reconnect for a moment, to give the larger wisdom of the world a chance to lift us clear of the fray. Indeed, there may be times when the Sensible People are marching calmly and rationally towards destruction, when we need to seek the chaos and creativity of our deep selves. Sometimes, doing what is good and ethical may seem a bit crazy, may seem futile or pointless; sometimes the way through a bad situation is obscure and beyond reasoning. Craziness offers us the gift of intuitive, creative engagement, fluidity and flexibility. It opens up our crazy pink hearts to tenderness and sorrow and allows these things to run their course without channeling them into systems of tension and pressure and stress.

This past Saturday, one of my best friends got married. The wedding was beautiful, a simple and hastily-planned ceremony and reception nestled among the sheltering maple trees and holly bushes of her new mother-in-law's backyard. Paper lanterns hung suspended among baskets of flowers and twinkling strings of lights twined the dark branches where fireflies, too, drifted lazily in the summer night heat. As the ceremony began, a few drops of rain began to fall. Watching my friend's lovely upturned face--her eyes shining with joy and tears--I remembered the murders from a few days earlier, I thought of the unwieldy institutions of consumption, denial and repression pervasive in our culture that can sometimes make us feel alienated and alone, I thought of how both the bride and groom had divorced parents and how half of all marriages these days end that way... I thought, you'd have to be crazy to want to get married, to believe in happily-ever-after and lifelong love. And my heart filled with happiness and gratitude.

Later, my boyfriend and I sat together at one of the tables left empty by everyone else who had sought shelter from the rain under the large white canopy. He'd forgotten his dress shoes and wore sandals with his slacks, and a purple tie that matched my dress. I sipped from the half-dozen abandoned champaign glasses, by now watered down by the weather, each reflecting the candlelight in a million different glimmerings of raindrops along their smooth curves and spiraling stems. Rain speckled our warm shoulders and smudged our eyeglasses, and we laughed each time the elderly usher came over to us, smiling kindly and almost knowingly, offering us wine, fruit and cake. Then, we would bend our heads together, my beloved and I, and murmur crazy words of gratitude and praise--for the night, for each other, for the lovely newly-wedded couple, for the children tottering around among the folding chairs, for the minister and his wife dancing slowly in the grass in front of the DJ's table... for all the craziness and love in the lovely, crazy world.

Pagan Values: Relating to the Wild

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If you thought my last post ended kind of abruptly, you're right! Plugging away at my discussion of pacifism, defining ideas like violence and destruction in order to talk about Just War theory and environmentalism, I hardly noticed how long and how far afield I'd gone until the clock chimed eight (metaphorically, anyway). It was time to call it a night, and leave the rest for another day. For today, actually.

When I last wrote, I'd set out to find a workable definition of "violence" that would give us some insight into the fundamental principles of pacifism and how they're reflected in the modern environmentalist movement. Opponents of pacifism would like to blur the distinction between destruction and violence and back advocates of creative nonviolence into a corner defending the straw-man view that we can somehow avoid all forms of destruction. Of course we can't, nor would we want to! But luckily, we've seen that this unsubtle approach fails to address how we actually experience the world around us. When we define violence as the rejection, denial or diminishment of the unique and meaningful individuality of being, distinct from destruction as a natural and inevitable aspect of the manifest world, we see that we can strive to avoid violence, against others and against ourselves. Cultivating honorable, reverent relationships and recognizing the utter uniqueness of all beings as meaningfully interconnected is something that we most certainly can accomplish, right here, right now. It also transforms the way we relate to the natural world, and challenges us to reconsider the initial myth of an inherently violent "human nature" at war with each other and its surroundings.

Violence Without Spirit

Our contemporary Western culture suffers from a kind of schizophrenia or sociopathy when it comes to our relationship with the natural world. Exceedingly, almost irrationally anthropocentric, we have come to view almost any check to human well-being, longevity and prolificacy as a kind of malicious rejection of our assumed right to thrive. Under a definition that mistakes all forms of destruction as forms of violence, human beings not only act violently against the wheat field, the deer and the tree; nature itself acts violently against us. The natural force and power of storms and quakes, the inhospitable landscapes of desert, jungle and tundra, even the annual withering and hibernation of winter, all of these become not merely forces of destruction with which we strive, but ways in which the natural world acts out violently. Against this violence, we assert our right to survive, aspiring to tame and control for the benefit of our species.

But reducing destruction and violence to synonyms has another effect: it confuses our perception of indwelling spirit, allowing us to ignore nature as animate and full of divinity whenever it suits us. Only today, when we have employed our knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology and other sciences to subjugate vast realms of the physical world to our needs and desires do we feel secure enough to set aside protected lands and national parks for recreation and aesthetic pleasure. In these places set-apart and roped off, we can open ourselves up to the sacredness of the natural world, we can perceive nature as something with which we might enter into relationship in a meaningful way. But outside of these designated spaces, we slip back into an attitude that treats the natural world as spiritless and empty, something which we can control and use for our own purposes.

The wild tiger is merely an amoral predator mindlessly acting on its base instinct; it can be hunted down, or protected, according to our current sentimentality. When a tiger attacks within the "safe space" of a zoo, however, we perceive it as a being capable, at least in some truncated way, of relationship and so we seek to "punish" it, as though killing the creature might serve as a lesson for other tigers or obtain justice for the victim of the attack. Likewise, we tend to react with horror to those who suggest floods and earthquakes are vengeful acts of an angry god, labeling such views superstitious and ignorant. Yet we respond with apathy or even reluctant acceptance to the pervasive ecological destruction happening around us on a daily basis. We step in to prevent it most passionately only when it mars our "national treasures" or favorite recreational spots. In this way we foster a disconnect between our perception of "wild" nature as senseless and dangerous, and "tame" nature as charming, revitalizing, and sentient only to the extent that it is also relatively safe.

As with many other attitudes of modern culture, we project these assumptions back in time onto societies quite different from our own, and draw odd conclusions. We quite rightly recognize that for most of humanity's existence, the wildness and wilderness of the natural world was a very real and constant danger. Yet we fail to grasp how our ancestors were able to relate to the wild as sentient and radiant with immanent divinity without reducing its force or controlling its power. Instead we assume that ancient peoples, surrounded as they were with danger and challenge, were themselves more prone to violence and less capable, in a milieu of fear and hardship, of developing the mindfulness necessary for peaceful, "civilized" living. The pacifist sees violence as "mindless" because it involves the willful forfeit of mindful choice to respect and honor unique Spirit in all beings. But a mistaken view of human nature as inherently violent attributes that same mindlessness to the complete absence of our ability to choose. The closer we come to nature, in other words (either by looking back in history to when our ancestors lived entrenched in it, or by sloughing off the social assumptions and restrictions that keep us civilized and safe), the closer we come to our own inner mindlessness. When we leave the confines of the zoo, we once again become ruthless predators. Like the natural world itself, we are wild, dangerous and a bit senseless at our core. At our very heart beneath the layers of civilizing influence, implies this view, we lack the capacity to make mindful choices, to relate "face-to-face" with other beings.

Old Stories of the Hunt

As a pacifist who believes that people are not only capable of peaceful, reverent relationship with one another but supremely and deeply suited to such relationship, I don't accept the view that our core is empty of empathy and spirit. Rather, it seems to me that the closer we come to nature--our own and that of the manifest world in which we live--the more capable we become of real connection and understanding. I suspect that our ancestors, living in more intimate contact with wildness and wilderness on a daily basis, were probably less violent than we believe them to be, perhaps even less violent than we ourselves are today. Our modern tendency to sanitize and depersonalize violence with technologies that also allow us to commit horrific acts on a massive scale can fool us into believing we live safe and peaceful lives, but this illusion only lasts as long as we can maintain our ignorance of the real consequences of violence and war.

Among ancient tribal cultures, on the other hand, life-threatening wildness and bodily conflict and destruction were always lurking at the edges of ordinary awareness. Because of this, ancient peoples learned to build relationships of honor and appreciation with the potentially destructive forces and powers of the wilderness, both outside and within themselves. Their stories and myths can show us even today a way of relating to the wild with reverence instead of fear, affirming a mindful relationship with Spirit rather than a senseless battle of instincts. These stories speak to us from a time when human beings remembered, recognized and imagined our roots as deeply entwined in the natural world, when we had only just come into our power as a species capable of cleverness and creativity. A time when we still appreciated these traits in ourselves as an aspect of our own unique individuality within an expansive and inclusive world, and not as qualities that set us apart from and above the world.

From the Cheyenne, for instance, comes the myth of the Great Race, a contest among all creatures to determine who would eat whom. The story goes that long ago, the buffalos, who were huge and strong, used to eat people instead of the other way around. But the people cried out that this was unfair, and so the buffalo proposed there be a race between the four-legged and the two-legged animals to decide the proper relationship among them. The buffalo chose the strongest and fastest of their kind to contend. The people, meanwhile, enlisted the help of the birds of the air who, although only two-legged like the people, outstripped the buffalo on their swift wings. From then on, people hunted buffalo for food, though they would not consume the beard of the buffalo because it was a reminder that once they had been the prey.

Among the Blackfoot, there is another legend about the hunting of buffalo. In this story, no one could induce the buffalo to fall to their deaths over the edge of a cliff, and so the people were slowly starving and wasting away. In the kind of desperation that gives way to jest, one young woman promised that she would marry one of the buffalo, if only they would jump; and soon they were running and tumbling down the cliff, while a great bull, master of the buffalo, came to claim her hand in marriage. The girl's father, outraged and afraid, went on a journey to rescue her and bring her back to her family, but he was soon discovered and trampled to death by the herd. As the girl mourned, the bull pointed out that such was the sadness of the buffalo, too, when they watched their relatives plunge to their deaths in order to feed the people. "But I will pity you," said the bull, "and make you a deal. If you can bring your father back to life, I will let you go, so that you may return to your family." And so the girl found a shard of bone from her father's shattered remains and sang a secret song that restored her father to life. The bull honored his agreement, but said, "Because you have shown that your people have a holy power capable of bringing the dead to life again, we will show you our song and dance. You must remember this dance, so that even though you hunt us and eat us, you will afterwards restore us to life again." This is the story the Blackfoot tell about how the Buffalo Dance began, with its priests dressed in buffalo robes and wearing bulls' heads shuffling along and singing the continuation of life for the massive beasts.

In both these stories, we see a new relationship with the natural world, one that respects its wildness and potential danger without rejecting meaningful relationship. The people who told these stories were buffalo hunters, in relationship with the animal not as domestic stock but as great, untamed creatures perfectly capable, through death or deprivation, of hurting the people who depended on them. It would be easy to say that these legends simply serve, like our modern justifications, to excuse violence as inherent or necessary. From the perspective of Just War theory*, the hunting of animals for food can be considered a form of "just" violence. The needs of the people and the practical benefits of killing outweigh whatever negative consequences the people might suffer, as well as the needs or desires (including the desire to live) that the animals being hunted might have. When an animal has the power and potential to be dangerous and even life-threatening to a human being, the case seems even more obvious; after all, there is no reasoning or other "peaceful" means of reconciling with a senseless animal. Such stories of contest and exchange might amuse or reassure us, but for the most part they're just superstition, overlaying the reality of pragmatic survival.

But what if instead we take these ancient myths at face-value? In Just War theory, the enemy or opponent does not consent to his own destruction, but at the heart of these myths is the awareness of nature, as well as people, as capable of consent and choice. The buffalo himself takes initiative, proposing conditions of equal exchange and just, honorable relationship with human beings. He consents to the terms of the great race or the marriage, accepts the consequences and even, in both stories, demonstrates empathy with human suffering. In the Blackfoot legend, especially, through intermarriage human beings and buffalo come into more intimate understanding, recognizing their common "holy power" to create new life through music and ritual. These stories are not a rejection of "face-to-face" relationship, but a celebration of it. Rather than a prize wrestled from the flesh of unwilling prey, the survival and fruitful life of human beings becomes a gift, in which nature gives of itself by its own consent with the understanding that we, too, will give of ourselves in return. And so, even though the end result is the same (the people still hunt and kill the buffalo in order to survive), a potential act of violence is transformed into an act of mutual empowerment and renewal.

This transformation is what practical pacifism can help us to realize. It puts us in touch with our awareness of relationship, and where there is relationship there is the possibility of generous giving and of gratitude, even in the most difficult, dangerous or destructive circumstances. To hunt a species to extinction dishonors the gift of life that creature has given us, but it also means we rob ourselves of that gift. When we diminish others, we also diminish ourselves. But when we see ourselves as connected to and concerned with the prosperity and protection of others at our most fundamental level, we become more care-full in how we act and react, how we live in and respond to the world around us. We can longer turn a deaf ear or blind eye to others; we learn to listen to them closely, to reach out to them in connection and communication, so that we might know what gifts they offer and how best to honor those gifts in return. At its simplest, pacifism asks us to care for other beings and preserve them from the callousness and diminishment of violence. For when we empower and appreciate others, when we recognize in others the capacity for choice and consensual relationship, we also empower and elevate ourselves and honor our own potential.




*To be fair, Just War theory is rarely if ever actually applied to anything other than literal warfare among humans; however, its implications about the nature of violence and our relationship with potentially destructive forces can be more widely considered and applied.

Pagan Values: Violence, Destruction & The Difference

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Is it really the case, as I claimed earlier, that there is no equivalent to the "just war" theory when it comes to understanding our relationship with the natural world? With a moment's thought we can soon list lots of occasions when an individual or group of people have had to hunt or harvest, plow fields for food or cut down trees for shelter, in order to survive. To say that people are not sometimes "at war" with or struggling against their local environment treads dangerously close to the naive view of nature as benign, beneficent, even tame.

The truth is, the natural world is anything but tame; it is wild, it is the epitome of wildness and wilderness. Forces of the natural world--the ferocity of a wildfire, the upheaval of an earthquake, the very barrenness of a desert or the pummeling pressure of a river's relentless current--can be sources of terrific destruction and obstacles against which we struggle every day. Meanwhile, the "red in tooth and claw" reality of predator and prey certainly seems founded on an inherent relationship between violence and survival. How can we choose to live by principles of pacifism and creative nonviolence in light of this wildness? How can we apply pacifism to environmentalism--let alone to our everyday, social and political lives--when violence appears ubiquitous, especially in the natural world?

Violence in Human/Nature

Really, it has always been the apparent violence of nature as a whole--more than that of humanity alone--that has been the greatest stumbling block for the philosophy of nonviolence. Most arguments against pacifism as an unrealistic ideal only rely partially on the actual history of human violence; after all, there are also many examples in human history of our capacity for empathy, kindness and near-infinite adaptability. Opponents of pacifism more often use nature as the best evidence against its practical realization. Projecting back in time an imagined pure or fundamental "human nature" imbued with all the base self-interest of the animal world and drenched in the blood and strife of continuous struggle against competitors for the scarce resources needed to survive, they argue that people simply cannot overcome an innate tendency towards destruction. The closed system of the earth itself means there is only a finite amount of land, food and other resources to go around. We continually find ourselves in conflict, destroying when there is no more room to create, surviving and thriving at the expense of our rivals and our prey. Even those rare individuals, the argument goes, who can overcome or mitigate violence do so through suppression or denial of their own nature. But this requires extraordinary discipline and strength of will not available to most of us. Pacifism might be an option for the inhumanly committed with unwavering focus, but as a general goal for the average person it just doesn't work.

The flaw in this view is that it takes for granted that destruction is synonymous with violence, and where the former exists the latter must also be present. To kill a neighbor to gain his prosperous fields is, from this perspective, hardly different from the act of eating the harvest of those fields, or hunting down a stag, or chopping down a tree to build shelter. In all these situations, one life is destroyed for the sake of another. We might say that killing a fellow human being is worse because, by some unspoken measure, human beings are better or more important than a stag, a tree or a field of wheat. But this objection relies on a rather flimsy judgment of value. To make a distinction between violence against human beings and violence against non-humans misrepresents our own intuitive relationship with destruction. As soon as we acknowledge that humans are not inherently "better" than the rest of the natural world--something many Pagans find obvious already--we lose what ground we've gained towards a nonviolent philosophy and find ourselves again faced with the overwhelming presence of destruction, and therefore (supposedly) violence in nature and humankind.

Natural Empathy & Our Need for Destruction

The more appropriate and useful distinction that we need to make is, I believe, between mere destruction and violence. That is, between destruction as a natural and inevitable aspect of the manifest world; and violence as an intentional form of destructive dishonor or irreverence towards the unique individuality of being. Not only does this subtle shift circumvent the false dichotomy of humanity-versus-nature, but it reflects the difference between destruction and violence that we experience intuitively and reveals exactly what it is about violence that makes it so damaging and undesirable.

As self-aware social animals, we human beings have developed a natural tendency towards empathy, evident even in early childhood. This ability to connect imaginatively and emotionally with the "other"--not just with other people, but any being that we perceive as animate and aware, from pets, to plants, to landscapes and weather--allows us to function well in supportive communities, but it also means that we feel a visceral discomfort when witnessing others in pain. When cornered by our own urgent needs or fears, however, our capacity for self-consciousness and imagination can come to serve violence rather than empathy, encouraging us to invent convincing justifications for inflicting pain on others. These justifications--self-defense, punishment, deterrence, and preemptive force, to name a few--hold in common a typical diminishment of the "other" into a being less worthy of our empathy, less capable of suffering, against which we can direct destructive force guilt-free.

Sometimes this diminishment portrays the other as a less-than-complete being, not merely an animal but a vicious, repulsive, uncomplicated thing that cannot be trusted to live peacefully and behave civilly, and must therefore be either contained or exterminated. Other times, we diminish the other by viewing it as an abstract destructive power against which we have every right to strive for life. The mugger with the knife looming up out of the dark is as impersonal as the tornado or the virus that threatens us, and we react with a similarly reflexive defense. The criminal condemned to execution is, as Ani DiFranco says, "a symbol, not a human being; that way they can kill [him], and say it's not murder, it's a metaphor." An excellent example of diminishment comes from Jared Diamond's book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal:

[I]n 1982 one of Australia's leading news magazines, The Bulletin, published a letter by a lady named Patricia Cobern, who denied indignantly that white settlers had exterminated the Tasmanians. In fact, wrote Ms. Cobern, the settlers were peace-loving and of high moral character, while Tasmanians were treacherous, murderous, warlike, filthy, gluttonous, vermin-infested, and disfigured by syphilis. Moreover, they took poor care of their infants, never bathed, and had repulsive marriage customs. They died out because of all those poor health practices, plus a death wish and a lack of religious beliefs. It was just a coincidence that, after thousands of years of existence, they happened to die out during a conflict with the settlers. The only massacres were of settlers by Tasmanians, not vice versa. Besides, the settlers only armed themselves in self-defense, were unfamiliar with guns, and never shot more than forty-one Tasmanians at one time.

Such justifications, listed emphatically one after another, bely the utter absurdity of such attempts at diminishment. As Cobern's explanations grow more and more bizarre and unlikely (the Tasmanians had a "death wish"? the settlers "never shot more than forty-one" at a time?), what becomes obvious is her desperate need to prove that the deaths of the Tasmanians were, one way or another, inevitable.

Choice & Consent

Why this desperate need to prove inevitability? Because destruction really is inevitable, unavoidable. It is, in essence, simply another aspect of creation, that which breaks down before it can build up, making room for the new and letting the old and stale lapse back into the void of potential. We recognize this basic fact at gut-level, so deep is this relationship between destruction and creation, dark and light, winter and spring. Destruction is not always undesirable; sometimes it can even be a welcome relief. And so, what every form of diminishing the other has in common is our need to justify violence by transforming it into a form of destruction.

These justifications would not work so well, or even be necessary, if we did not already understand on an intuitive level that destruction and violence are not the same. We would not need to deny the relevance of empathy and reverence, to deny our own active participation in destruction, if we did not sense on some level that these things make a difference. What we already know is that some deaths, some break-downs, some sources of pain and suffering, are not inevitable. What we already know is that, unlike destruction, violence is always a choice. It is a choice to destroy, to induce pain, to allow our own needs and passions to overshadow those of the other and to force our will upon others without their consent. The word "violence" itself comes from the Latin violentia, which translates as vehemence or impetuosity. Both words suggest the application of force without thought or consideration, without empathy for the suffering it might cause. Related is the verb violare, which gives rise to the English "violate" and means "to treat with violence or irreverence, to dishonor."

When trying to understand a philosophy of pacifism or nonviolence, therefore, we can define the word "violence" broadly, without making the absurd claim that all destruction should or can be avoided. Personally, I define "violence" as: a rejection or denial of the unique and meaningful individuality of a being. Rejecting that another being has a unique and meaningful individual existence independent from our own can lead us to impose our wills or passions on them by force. Such force can be physical and cause physical injury or even death, but it can also be emotional, psychological or even spiritual. In her book Living With Honour, Emma Restall Orr talks about the Welsh and Gealic words for "face," and invokes the notion of "being face-to-face" as at the heart of what honor means in Celtic society. An act of violence against another is an act of dishonor, refusing to come face-to-face, diminishing and disempowering others, alienating and isolating them and denying them relationship with us, denying our interconnection.

We can also act violently towards ourselves; this kind of self-violence is more often emotional or spiritual than physical and so less often acknowledged. But if we remember the definition of violence, then we realize that any time we reject our own individuality as unique and meaningful, any time we deny our capacity for creative engagement with the world, we commit an act of spiritual violence against our own beings. This diminishment of our own being is why we so often seek to justify violence, insisting that it is actually inevitable or necessary destruction in which we had no choice or active participation. When we have the capacity and opportunity to choose, and yet forfeit that choice thoughtlessly, rejecting our capacity to act as a unique individual "face-to-face" with another, we act violently not only against the other, but against ourselves. For every act of violence, both victim and violator become "faceless," both are dishonored and diminished.