The Seven of Cups indicates the paradox of choice, and the difficulty of choosing when too many opportunities and options seem to beckon. Unable to decide which course it would be best to pursue, we starve and waste away like Buridan's ass paralyzed into inaction by an unpredictable future. The card was telling me what I already knew, what I had been experiencing for the past few months as I tried to juggle an increasing number of obligations while fighting to keep down my frustration at not making very much progress on any of them.
Obligation and Divination
Throughout my life, I have been pretty good at following my intuition, listening for the cues of my subconscious to help guide me in making important life decisions. It was this kind of listening that led me to choose the college I ended up attending — where I met several people who would change my life, where I had the opportunity to do independent research that eventually led me to my Pagan path, and where I earned a degree as valedictorian of my college class. It was by listening to my intuition that I found myself moving across the state to the lovely city of Pittsburgh — where I first entered a graduate school program and then left it for being wholly unsuitable to my personality, where I found a job as a waitress (against everyone's hopes and expectations) and spent five years wandering spiritually and intellectually in ways I never could have if I'd settled down and gotten a "real" job. It was intuition that led me to seek out a connection with Jeff, who happened to have connections in Pittsburgh through both family and work and who eventually took a leap of faith of his own and moved here to be with me. And it was intuition that prodded me into taking a trip across the ocean to the land of my ancestors, despite being terrified of both airports and flying, and having never traveled alone or abroad before.
But these were all times when a singular opportunity presented itself, and I had a simple choice to make: stay, or go. Now, I found myself in a much more complicated situation, with almost endless possibilities any of which might be fruitful depending on how I chose to direct my energies. I also had more responsibilities and obligations, not least of which were the children to whom I'd soon become a stepmom. And so I also had a pressing sense that it was important to make a choice of some kind and follow through with it, rather than languishing passively and allowing Spirit to drag me along where it would. I had spent a lot of time cultivating my will and honing my skills — now, I felt a strong and definite call to step up and be active in my own destiny, to act out my gratitude for the blessings of my life by taking a more directive role in the work I would do in the future. But of course, that work still needed to be grounded in Spirit and soul-longing.
Showing posts with label growth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label growth. Show all posts
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Pagan Peace-Making: A Call for Submissions
Six months ago, I resolved to write a book. Or, at least, to try. I gave myself a year, to flush out all the insecurities and psychological stumbling blocks that were in the way, and begin the work of articulating my vision and song of practical Pagan peace-making.Six months later, the journey has changed shape. The process I committed to has come to demand that, first, before the sojourn of writing there must be a period of pilgrimage, a going-out along the peace-forging path in a new and more social way, learning from others as I go. Back at the beginning of May, I was invited to join the blogging project Pagan+Politics, and the familiar anxiety swept over me again as I wondered if I was up to the challenge. The experience has been both simpler and more difficult than I anticipated, with a great deal of stress and distraction as I have fought the urge to follow arguments far off course, into unfruitful bickering and petty fact-checking. Yet it has helped me to clarify my own thoughts, as well as get a better sense of where the detractors and dismissers of peace-making are coming from. Most importantly, however, it provided an opportunity to hear from readers the relief and gratitude at discovering they were not the only Pagan Pacifists out there, and to discover just how important it is for us to hear the voices of others and to know that we are not alone.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Three Humans Walk into a Bar: Language, Labels & Naming Spirit
The three of us perched on barstools at a small tile-topped table near the emergency exit, sipping our beers and talking about Spirit: a polytheist, a panentheist, and an agnostic. Stop me if you've heard this one.
Pondering Deity
I've been thinking a lot recently about polytheism and deity, prompted in part by Kullervo's post about his "conversion experience" (for lack of a better term), and in part by my own continuing explorations in meditation and daily spiritual practice. I can feel it--part of me is waiting for something to click. And it hasn't happened yet. When I read about others' experiences of deity--the power and beauty and awe that go along with it, the certainty as well as the surprise--and when I talk with Jeff about his own views of the gods and goddesses, I feel as though I might be missing something. But try as I might, I can't seem to wrap my head around these ideas of gods, at least not in anything but a metaphorical sense. Faeries, Shining Ones, elemental beings and spirits of all shapes and sizes striving and thriving together in an "ecology of Spirit" that echoes and gives rise to the physical world--sure, hell yeah. But where do the gods come into it? How do I understand them? I'm still waiting for that part to fall into place.
As a child, and even into my teens and college years, I had experiences of what you might call "personal deity"--the small, intimate kind. Jesus and I were rather close for a while, even though I'd always had a better grasp of the Big Guy, the Transcendent Spirit of Godhead, the Breath and Life that infused everything, everywhere, with love and connection. In her recent post, Cat talks about how she began not with this unifying, unified Spirit that was too big and abstract, but with the little particulars of the world. For me, it was just the opposite--the Spirit moving over the dark face of the waters was something almost tangible to me, as though all these particulars were secretly veiling something else, some deeper essence. I could feel it in the wind and rain, in the bright summer fields, and in the way everyone's shoulders rose and fell together in one rippling intake of breath reciting the Our Father during Mass.
For a while, in fact, I struggled to understand where Jesus came into it at all, besides playing the role of wise teacher and political rebel. But at some point, this role as wise and loving shaman-sage developed into full-blown deity, Jesus the Christ, the Reconciler who brought transcendence and immanence together in a uniquely and fully human form. Jesus was not just embodied Godhood, but conscious, living, breathing, moving, evolving Godhead--change and flux within the perfection of essence, the human becoming as an expression of utter being. And other kinds of mystical language. But the simplest way to put it is, he was the broken-hearted god I met in dream: sitting quietly in an empty corner sipping his beer and watching the careless violence of love and connection bloom and shred to dust under dancing feet... he was the shy bisexual and misunderstood poet-lover shunned by the noise and callousness of the raging house-party, and utterly in love with every drunkard there. He was the one I could turn to when I needed to understand devotion and sacrifice, loneliness and death.
And then, gradually, we just lost touch. Almost without noticing it, I began once again to relate to the world with an immediacy that seemed to have no need for a medium or Reconciler. I went through periods of depression and near suicidal moods (that is, if a heart aching for connection, even if such connection means bodily death and the dissolution back into the universal tides of Spirit, could really be called "suicidal"); yet during these times, the world would not abandon me, would not leave me alone. Its presence--both beautiful and terrible in its indifferent, impersonal, imperfect perfection--bore down on me inescapably, so that I knew I could not merely cease to be even if that was what I wanted. All this time, it was the world-as-sacred, the immanence of what I once would have called Holy Spirit, that lurked in every blink of an eye, moved through every corner of being before I could look away. Transcendent Godhead seemed far away, or rather deep, deep within past the dull, devastatingly holy mechanizations of embodiment. And personal deity seemed about as real and relevant to me as things like "getting a real job" and "establishing good credit." It was something that happened to other people.
Where am I now? Back in February, I felt as though I might be onto something, something having to do with imagination and love and the way they work in tandem to create images of deity. I had some realization--which I can now barely remember--about the way poetry and metaphor led me back and forth between the transcendent Universal and the intimate Particular, and how these same faithful allies could teach me about personal deity in a polytheistic sense, about the role of archetype and personality, guardian and guide, in my understanding of divinity. I was making progress, developing an interesting if not always warm-fuzzy relationship with Caer Ibormeith, the faery swan-maiden of Aengus Og's dreaming, exploring through meditation and prayer ways in which her story of independence, strength, transmutation and love might have lessons to teach me. Perhaps I learned those lessons a bit too well; soon after that, I found myself plunging into a new romantic relationship that fulfilled and sustained parts of me that had been starved and bitter for several years. The need for personal deity once again dropped out of view, as the very real and immediate presence of a fellow human being took precedence.
Labels & Names
Three real and immediate human beings walked into a bar. I might be a masochist, but I can't resist the urge to provoke debate between two dear friends when I know they disagree. I sat nursing my Woodchuck (all right, not exactly a beer, I'll grant you) between Raymond, my old anam-chara, and Jeff, my new kindling flame. You might call Raymond a skeptic, or even an agnostic--if you wanted to sit through a long lecture about how he rejects labels like "god" and "spirituality" and "agnostic" not because he is uncertain or unwilling to commit to certain beliefs about this possible Something else, but because he respects the power of language and would not idly rob that Something of its namelessness. And you might call Jeff a polytheist--as long as you knew about the time his Zen Buddhist mother asked him if he believed the gods were actually real and he replied, with a conspiratorial wink to anatma, "As real as I am." And I sat in the middle, as if some literal-minded playwright had scripted the event, hardly saying anything but listening intently to their conversation.
I might call myself a panentheist--someone who believes in both the immanence and transcendence of divinity--and in fact I have called myself that for many years now... Except that more recently this term has started to sound redundant, as though it were almost too obvious to bother articulating. What else could Spirit be than "the eternal animating force behind the universe, with the universe as nothing more than the manifest part"? I don't exactly like the slightly dismissive sound of "nothing more than"--the vast complexities and mind-blowing, heart-wrenching harmonies of intricate manifestation are nothing to sneeze at--but in a nutshell, there it is: immanent manifestation and transcendent source, the complete package. Still, for me this doesn't resolve the question of the gods. From the panentheistic point of view, it seems to me that everything is God, you might even say that everything is a god in one way or another. But what could this possibly mean for traditional ideas of polytheistic gods like Apollo, Brigid, Cernunnos, Odin? I might feel the deity-aspect of ocean, but it is this ocean here, not some abstracted Manannan mac Lir striding through myth; just as it is this sun and not Apollo; or this woods and not Cernunnos. I struggle to bridge this gap between particulars in the manifest world, and particulars in the realm of transcendent divinity where specific gods and goddesses rule over certain ideals, realms, activities and cultural traits. Isn't the nature of transcendent Spirit precisely that it does not break and fracture into bits and pieces, but resides in a kind of unity of Universality? And yet, I understood Jesus at one time as personal deity--connected to that transcendent Godhead. Was this different, because I imagined or experienced him as "in the world" in a way that these other deities seem not to be? (Am I dancing around the need for idols, perhaps, and places of consecrated space dedicated to the gods and allowing them residence in the manifest world?)
I am losing myself in language once more, it seems, as I try to articulate my own stumbling blocks. Jeff's views of polytheism seem simple and elegant, but at times almost too literal for me to connect with in a deeply meaningful way. I admire the trust that both he and Kullervo express when they speak of taking their experiences of the gods at face value, and yet as someone without such experiences of my own I wonder if I'm missing something, or if I'm just not as good at make-believe. Of course this sounds insulting, but it's not meant to be. There are certain things in which I believe almost as though they were a part of my nature--reincarnation, for instance, and to some extent faeries and elemental beings--and I have wrestled before with the question of why some beliefs, which are no more rational or mature, come naturally while others just don't "click." But even if this struggle cannot help me to appreciate the language of polytheism, in other ways it helps me to understand where my friend Raymond is coming from when he objects to the use of certain words as unhelpful, even bordering on meaningless.
Because if there's one thing I do believe in, it's the power of language--not to label things, but to name them. For me, words are never fatal, killing a thing dead when we speak about it. Indeed, words are powerful--they allow us to think, they provide us with a structure, a grammar and vocabulary of thought. But a word that cannot evoke a meaningful and complex reality is useless to us; it is language which depends on a thriving essential connection to the real world, and not the other way around. When a word--be it "god" or "truth" or whatever--is thrown around too easily or too often misapplied, then yes, something does die: the word itself. A word that cannot speak to experience is dead indeed, empty and disconnected. But we're mistaken if we think that because the word is dead, we have killed the reality with it, or even that we have cut ourselves off from that reality in its uniqueness and intimate presence. The struggle to articulate our experiences can lead us far from the original immediacy as we knew it at first, but working through this divergence eventually brings us back again to a place in which reality can speak on multiple levels at once, both through particulars and through universals, without one denying the other. When we respect the role that language can play, when we respect both its power and its limits, words can become an instrument of connection, freedom and creativity, rather than a barrier or killing blow.
This, I believe, is the difference between naming and labeling, or the difference between limit and restriction, choice and decision, as I've discussed before. I have never allowed labels--even those applied to me against my will by others--to act as a restriction on my freedom to be who I truly am. Quite the opposite, in fact: I have always felt that who I truly am shapes and gives context to whatever words might attach themselves to me. This is the essence of a name. This is why I am and always will be an "Ali," not because my parents knew me before I was even born (they barely know me now!) and somehow picked out the best label for me, but because the arbitrary gift of that name has given me something to work with creatively and deeply, and I have made it my own. Likewise, being "a waitress" has not restricted me or forced me into a role I do not like; instead, I help to define and expand on what it means to be a waitress by accepting the word as a name and working creatively with it. Being "a Druid," I do the same thing, my ideas and experiences adding meaning, context and life to the word, instead of sucking life out of me and rendering my spiritual experiences shallow or silly. When someone seeks to label me, I do not worry too much that I might somehow be lessened in their eyes, for if they reduce me to a label it is not really me they are talking of, and if they acknowledge my own true being then the label itself is transformed and expanded by "my good name," so to speak.
Understanding the limits of language, as well as its power, means that I also relax a bit and develop a sense of light-hearted playfulness. Words are immensely powerful in shaping our thoughts (and our thoughts do, arguably, shape reality in turn), but I am not just my thinking. I am also my poetry, my music and aesthetics, my intuition, my laughter, my crying, my running and walking, my dancing and my sitting quietly in the park. I am my meditation, whether that meditation is discursive explorations of reasoning and free associative logic, or imaginative journeying through inner landscapes, or the zazen practice of sitting still and quieting the monkey mind. For me, language is something that I play with, in the same way a musician might play his instrument, setting aside all the theory and "right" ways of making music, breaking all the rules in order to give his own soul-song a chance to breathe and speak. To be able to play, to act creatively and discover or make new meaning, I need the freedom of allowing myself not to take language so seriously all the time. I need the freedom to say whatever occurs to me, without worrying if it's always precisely and exactly what I mean, to explore what sounds good and what evokes suggestive or provocative images and ideas, even if it doesn't say something "true." This is what allows me to write poems and stories about gods and goddesses that still hold meaning and power for me, even if I do not know what I believe exactly about deity or the truth of others' beliefs. By playing with language and allowing myself to explore, I learn what it is these words mean for me.
Where It Gets Me
It gets me right here. The other night in meditation, I posed the question--to Caer in whatever form she felt like showing up, or to the universe in general, or to my own subconscious--why I don't seem to experience personal deity any more. The answer came back that it was simply because, at some point, I decided I didn't need personal deity anymore, that this focus on mystic transcendence or whathaveyou was more valuable or more real or simply more meaningful to me. But this was a choice I made, based on what I believed about the universe, and not necessarily some revelation of inherent universal truth. It was the name I chose for my own spiritual path, and to some extent I have been working with that name and making it my own ever since. That doesn't mean this approach is any worse than relating to divinity through personal deity or deities....and it's certainly not a matter of whether or not one "needs" gods or God to grow or love or evolve or connect. I don't think gods, or even a conscious connection with what I call Spirit, is necessary for these things. But that doesn't mean, either, that having a spiritual life that includes ideas about Spirit and deity is worse or more damaging, or prevents people from connecting, growing or appreciating reality, anymore than having relationships with family, friends and so on prevents me from realizing the unity and interconnection at the heart of all our uniqueness.
So in the end, I continue to question myself and others about these subjects. Sometimes I'm surprised that I've been worrying this same bone for more than three years now; other times it just amuses me how some things are ingrained no matter what kinds of other revelations we might have. It is not that I feel my spiritual life is somehow lacking or that I'm not making progress. It's that I am curious about these experiences of personal deity as experiences, as things that others have experienced. In a way, I want to see if I can choose differently, choose a new way of approaching Spirit, precisely because then I will know to some extent that I do indeed have the capacity to choose freely and truly as a creative, free individual. If I have such experiences of my own, I will understand the experiences of others better and the language they use to speak about them. Perhaps, if it is true that not everyone can wield the power and limit of language effectively without slaying the reality it means to express, then I might have some other gift to offer, speaking or writing about these ideas and experiences in ways that are meaningful for others and articulate things they themselves have not yet learned to say. I can only ever talk deeply and meaningful about my own experiences, in the end, but I can strive to shape and work with language in ways that illuminate and communicate meaning and truth, rather than obscuring and detracting from it. And if this effort can help to honor and praise Spirit, in whatever form, then that's what I will work at until my bones ache and my tongue and fingertips are sore.
Pondering Deity
I've been thinking a lot recently about polytheism and deity, prompted in part by Kullervo's post about his "conversion experience" (for lack of a better term), and in part by my own continuing explorations in meditation and daily spiritual practice. I can feel it--part of me is waiting for something to click. And it hasn't happened yet. When I read about others' experiences of deity--the power and beauty and awe that go along with it, the certainty as well as the surprise--and when I talk with Jeff about his own views of the gods and goddesses, I feel as though I might be missing something. But try as I might, I can't seem to wrap my head around these ideas of gods, at least not in anything but a metaphorical sense. Faeries, Shining Ones, elemental beings and spirits of all shapes and sizes striving and thriving together in an "ecology of Spirit" that echoes and gives rise to the physical world--sure, hell yeah. But where do the gods come into it? How do I understand them? I'm still waiting for that part to fall into place.As a child, and even into my teens and college years, I had experiences of what you might call "personal deity"--the small, intimate kind. Jesus and I were rather close for a while, even though I'd always had a better grasp of the Big Guy, the Transcendent Spirit of Godhead, the Breath and Life that infused everything, everywhere, with love and connection. In her recent post, Cat talks about how she began not with this unifying, unified Spirit that was too big and abstract, but with the little particulars of the world. For me, it was just the opposite--the Spirit moving over the dark face of the waters was something almost tangible to me, as though all these particulars were secretly veiling something else, some deeper essence. I could feel it in the wind and rain, in the bright summer fields, and in the way everyone's shoulders rose and fell together in one rippling intake of breath reciting the Our Father during Mass.
For a while, in fact, I struggled to understand where Jesus came into it at all, besides playing the role of wise teacher and political rebel. But at some point, this role as wise and loving shaman-sage developed into full-blown deity, Jesus the Christ, the Reconciler who brought transcendence and immanence together in a uniquely and fully human form. Jesus was not just embodied Godhood, but conscious, living, breathing, moving, evolving Godhead--change and flux within the perfection of essence, the human becoming as an expression of utter being. And other kinds of mystical language. But the simplest way to put it is, he was the broken-hearted god I met in dream: sitting quietly in an empty corner sipping his beer and watching the careless violence of love and connection bloom and shred to dust under dancing feet... he was the shy bisexual and misunderstood poet-lover shunned by the noise and callousness of the raging house-party, and utterly in love with every drunkard there. He was the one I could turn to when I needed to understand devotion and sacrifice, loneliness and death.
And then, gradually, we just lost touch. Almost without noticing it, I began once again to relate to the world with an immediacy that seemed to have no need for a medium or Reconciler. I went through periods of depression and near suicidal moods (that is, if a heart aching for connection, even if such connection means bodily death and the dissolution back into the universal tides of Spirit, could really be called "suicidal"); yet during these times, the world would not abandon me, would not leave me alone. Its presence--both beautiful and terrible in its indifferent, impersonal, imperfect perfection--bore down on me inescapably, so that I knew I could not merely cease to be even if that was what I wanted. All this time, it was the world-as-sacred, the immanence of what I once would have called Holy Spirit, that lurked in every blink of an eye, moved through every corner of being before I could look away. Transcendent Godhead seemed far away, or rather deep, deep within past the dull, devastatingly holy mechanizations of embodiment. And personal deity seemed about as real and relevant to me as things like "getting a real job" and "establishing good credit." It was something that happened to other people.
Where am I now? Back in February, I felt as though I might be onto something, something having to do with imagination and love and the way they work in tandem to create images of deity. I had some realization--which I can now barely remember--about the way poetry and metaphor led me back and forth between the transcendent Universal and the intimate Particular, and how these same faithful allies could teach me about personal deity in a polytheistic sense, about the role of archetype and personality, guardian and guide, in my understanding of divinity. I was making progress, developing an interesting if not always warm-fuzzy relationship with Caer Ibormeith, the faery swan-maiden of Aengus Og's dreaming, exploring through meditation and prayer ways in which her story of independence, strength, transmutation and love might have lessons to teach me. Perhaps I learned those lessons a bit too well; soon after that, I found myself plunging into a new romantic relationship that fulfilled and sustained parts of me that had been starved and bitter for several years. The need for personal deity once again dropped out of view, as the very real and immediate presence of a fellow human being took precedence.
Labels & Names
Three real and immediate human beings walked into a bar. I might be a masochist, but I can't resist the urge to provoke debate between two dear friends when I know they disagree. I sat nursing my Woodchuck (all right, not exactly a beer, I'll grant you) between Raymond, my old anam-chara, and Jeff, my new kindling flame. You might call Raymond a skeptic, or even an agnostic--if you wanted to sit through a long lecture about how he rejects labels like "god" and "spirituality" and "agnostic" not because he is uncertain or unwilling to commit to certain beliefs about this possible Something else, but because he respects the power of language and would not idly rob that Something of its namelessness. And you might call Jeff a polytheist--as long as you knew about the time his Zen Buddhist mother asked him if he believed the gods were actually real and he replied, with a conspiratorial wink to anatma, "As real as I am." And I sat in the middle, as if some literal-minded playwright had scripted the event, hardly saying anything but listening intently to their conversation.
I might call myself a panentheist--someone who believes in both the immanence and transcendence of divinity--and in fact I have called myself that for many years now... Except that more recently this term has started to sound redundant, as though it were almost too obvious to bother articulating. What else could Spirit be than "the eternal animating force behind the universe, with the universe as nothing more than the manifest part"? I don't exactly like the slightly dismissive sound of "nothing more than"--the vast complexities and mind-blowing, heart-wrenching harmonies of intricate manifestation are nothing to sneeze at--but in a nutshell, there it is: immanent manifestation and transcendent source, the complete package. Still, for me this doesn't resolve the question of the gods. From the panentheistic point of view, it seems to me that everything is God, you might even say that everything is a god in one way or another. But what could this possibly mean for traditional ideas of polytheistic gods like Apollo, Brigid, Cernunnos, Odin? I might feel the deity-aspect of ocean, but it is this ocean here, not some abstracted Manannan mac Lir striding through myth; just as it is this sun and not Apollo; or this woods and not Cernunnos. I struggle to bridge this gap between particulars in the manifest world, and particulars in the realm of transcendent divinity where specific gods and goddesses rule over certain ideals, realms, activities and cultural traits. Isn't the nature of transcendent Spirit precisely that it does not break and fracture into bits and pieces, but resides in a kind of unity of Universality? And yet, I understood Jesus at one time as personal deity--connected to that transcendent Godhead. Was this different, because I imagined or experienced him as "in the world" in a way that these other deities seem not to be? (Am I dancing around the need for idols, perhaps, and places of consecrated space dedicated to the gods and allowing them residence in the manifest world?)I am losing myself in language once more, it seems, as I try to articulate my own stumbling blocks. Jeff's views of polytheism seem simple and elegant, but at times almost too literal for me to connect with in a deeply meaningful way. I admire the trust that both he and Kullervo express when they speak of taking their experiences of the gods at face value, and yet as someone without such experiences of my own I wonder if I'm missing something, or if I'm just not as good at make-believe. Of course this sounds insulting, but it's not meant to be. There are certain things in which I believe almost as though they were a part of my nature--reincarnation, for instance, and to some extent faeries and elemental beings--and I have wrestled before with the question of why some beliefs, which are no more rational or mature, come naturally while others just don't "click." But even if this struggle cannot help me to appreciate the language of polytheism, in other ways it helps me to understand where my friend Raymond is coming from when he objects to the use of certain words as unhelpful, even bordering on meaningless.
Because if there's one thing I do believe in, it's the power of language--not to label things, but to name them. For me, words are never fatal, killing a thing dead when we speak about it. Indeed, words are powerful--they allow us to think, they provide us with a structure, a grammar and vocabulary of thought. But a word that cannot evoke a meaningful and complex reality is useless to us; it is language which depends on a thriving essential connection to the real world, and not the other way around. When a word--be it "god" or "truth" or whatever--is thrown around too easily or too often misapplied, then yes, something does die: the word itself. A word that cannot speak to experience is dead indeed, empty and disconnected. But we're mistaken if we think that because the word is dead, we have killed the reality with it, or even that we have cut ourselves off from that reality in its uniqueness and intimate presence. The struggle to articulate our experiences can lead us far from the original immediacy as we knew it at first, but working through this divergence eventually brings us back again to a place in which reality can speak on multiple levels at once, both through particulars and through universals, without one denying the other. When we respect the role that language can play, when we respect both its power and its limits, words can become an instrument of connection, freedom and creativity, rather than a barrier or killing blow.
This, I believe, is the difference between naming and labeling, or the difference between limit and restriction, choice and decision, as I've discussed before. I have never allowed labels--even those applied to me against my will by others--to act as a restriction on my freedom to be who I truly am. Quite the opposite, in fact: I have always felt that who I truly am shapes and gives context to whatever words might attach themselves to me. This is the essence of a name. This is why I am and always will be an "Ali," not because my parents knew me before I was even born (they barely know me now!) and somehow picked out the best label for me, but because the arbitrary gift of that name has given me something to work with creatively and deeply, and I have made it my own. Likewise, being "a waitress" has not restricted me or forced me into a role I do not like; instead, I help to define and expand on what it means to be a waitress by accepting the word as a name and working creatively with it. Being "a Druid," I do the same thing, my ideas and experiences adding meaning, context and life to the word, instead of sucking life out of me and rendering my spiritual experiences shallow or silly. When someone seeks to label me, I do not worry too much that I might somehow be lessened in their eyes, for if they reduce me to a label it is not really me they are talking of, and if they acknowledge my own true being then the label itself is transformed and expanded by "my good name," so to speak.
Understanding the limits of language, as well as its power, means that I also relax a bit and develop a sense of light-hearted playfulness. Words are immensely powerful in shaping our thoughts (and our thoughts do, arguably, shape reality in turn), but I am not just my thinking. I am also my poetry, my music and aesthetics, my intuition, my laughter, my crying, my running and walking, my dancing and my sitting quietly in the park. I am my meditation, whether that meditation is discursive explorations of reasoning and free associative logic, or imaginative journeying through inner landscapes, or the zazen practice of sitting still and quieting the monkey mind. For me, language is something that I play with, in the same way a musician might play his instrument, setting aside all the theory and "right" ways of making music, breaking all the rules in order to give his own soul-song a chance to breathe and speak. To be able to play, to act creatively and discover or make new meaning, I need the freedom of allowing myself not to take language so seriously all the time. I need the freedom to say whatever occurs to me, without worrying if it's always precisely and exactly what I mean, to explore what sounds good and what evokes suggestive or provocative images and ideas, even if it doesn't say something "true." This is what allows me to write poems and stories about gods and goddesses that still hold meaning and power for me, even if I do not know what I believe exactly about deity or the truth of others' beliefs. By playing with language and allowing myself to explore, I learn what it is these words mean for me.
Where It Gets Me
It gets me right here. The other night in meditation, I posed the question--to Caer in whatever form she felt like showing up, or to the universe in general, or to my own subconscious--why I don't seem to experience personal deity any more. The answer came back that it was simply because, at some point, I decided I didn't need personal deity anymore, that this focus on mystic transcendence or whathaveyou was more valuable or more real or simply more meaningful to me. But this was a choice I made, based on what I believed about the universe, and not necessarily some revelation of inherent universal truth. It was the name I chose for my own spiritual path, and to some extent I have been working with that name and making it my own ever since. That doesn't mean this approach is any worse than relating to divinity through personal deity or deities....and it's certainly not a matter of whether or not one "needs" gods or God to grow or love or evolve or connect. I don't think gods, or even a conscious connection with what I call Spirit, is necessary for these things. But that doesn't mean, either, that having a spiritual life that includes ideas about Spirit and deity is worse or more damaging, or prevents people from connecting, growing or appreciating reality, anymore than having relationships with family, friends and so on prevents me from realizing the unity and interconnection at the heart of all our uniqueness.
So in the end, I continue to question myself and others about these subjects. Sometimes I'm surprised that I've been worrying this same bone for more than three years now; other times it just amuses me how some things are ingrained no matter what kinds of other revelations we might have. It is not that I feel my spiritual life is somehow lacking or that I'm not making progress. It's that I am curious about these experiences of personal deity as experiences, as things that others have experienced. In a way, I want to see if I can choose differently, choose a new way of approaching Spirit, precisely because then I will know to some extent that I do indeed have the capacity to choose freely and truly as a creative, free individual. If I have such experiences of my own, I will understand the experiences of others better and the language they use to speak about them. Perhaps, if it is true that not everyone can wield the power and limit of language effectively without slaying the reality it means to express, then I might have some other gift to offer, speaking or writing about these ideas and experiences in ways that are meaningful for others and articulate things they themselves have not yet learned to say. I can only ever talk deeply and meaningful about my own experiences, in the end, but I can strive to shape and work with language in ways that illuminate and communicate meaning and truth, rather than obscuring and detracting from it. And if this effort can help to honor and praise Spirit, in whatever form, then that's what I will work at until my bones ache and my tongue and fingertips are sore.Thursday, June 18, 2009
Lost In Thought....
The sensation crept up on me slowly over the past week or so. I would sit down somewhere with my laptop, sit down to write, and that creeping, subtle sense of confusion would descend. Or maybe that's not quite it. Maybe I would descend, settling down into the inner landscape of my own mind, looking for the trail of breadcrumbs and blue pebbles left behind from my last writing session. Nothing ever looked the same. Sure enough, the words were there, for the most part where I'd put them, signifying directions and ideas, places I had intended to go. Now where was I? What had I been saying? I would write intensely and slowly until I was tired, until sunset and twilight, and then I would go to bed. And in the morning, I would wake up like a half-dazed sleeper in an unfamiliar place, and ask myself: where was I, now?Writing isn't usually like this for me, at least not anymore. Writing posts for this blog is usually like a pleasant trip out into the countryside, equipped with a picnic blanket and a set of colored pencils. Find some hill with a panoramic view of sky, green and lovely rolling hills, maybe a stream wending its way to the ocean always inexplicably just beyond the horizon--spread my blanket and pull out my sketchpad. It was all there in front of me, and I sat still and quiet, attending, moving my fingers through the air, moving my pencils in scratches and scribbles across the page. Today, I would say, I want to write about meditation, and I would go sit on a hillside somewhere and watch the subject of meditation slowly coalesce in cloudforms and move in sheepish shadows over the shimmering fields below. Or, today, I want to write about grief and longing, and I would sit by a shallow creak and watch the muddy algae flicker and bend in surrender to the restless redundancy of its current. Or, today, I want to write about what it's been like to write...
In college, I used to build things with my writing. Sometimes what I built was a poem, but more often I was building essays, academic papers, analytical responses. I built with the raw material of class discussion and scholarly citations. This kind of writing was not quite like going out to the countryside to watch the wind and waters move across the earth; it was more like clearing a small patch of flat ground and propping up a shanty out of local stones and fallen branches. Sometimes I liked what I built. Every once in a while, an essay I wrote struck me with a kind of shy impressiveness and I would catch myself thinking, "Look what I made with these ideas, look how I supported this one with that one, how I found the best way to utilize the sharp edge of this argument and the suppleness of that philosophy... and how it all holds together, yes, quite nicely I think." What I made was my own in design, but I was working with what fellow students and teachers, what classes and texts, what others had given me. I learned the craft of engineering an argument.
But this is something else. For the past couple weeks, I've been struggling. There are times when I wonder if I'm not as smart as I used to be, if my brain is out of shape, like a muscle I haven't used all that seriously since I graduated college and left grad school to pursue my own passions. If I had stayed in graduate school, I could have a masters, maybe even a doctorate by now, I could be some wizened professor (or perhaps still unemployed, but with a scholarly publication or two under my belt). I would have a foundation, a network of vetted and institutionally-educated peers, some external confirmation of my work and my progress. Maybe I have been fooling myself, believing that I chose freedom when really I chose laziness and lax standards. Maybe if I were still in school, my brain would be accustomed to endurance and resistance training. Maybe writing these posts about pacifism wouldn't be such a struggle.
But then, maybe that's not quite it. Maybe it's just that I'm descending, settling more deeply into my own thoughts. I don't know what I would build with the ideas of others on pacifism and peace--but I have that creeping sensation that this is not engineering anymore, that I am not really building an argument at all. Instead, each writing session feels like turning again towards the jungle, going out once more into the wild. There are tracks and the thin trails worn by animals in the underbrush of my thoughts, and I step carefully, one foot in front of the other, swinging a stick from side to side to beat the bramble and insects out of my path. Each day I go out into the wilderness of my own mind to see what has been living and growing there, what howls in pain at night, what flowers or fans its feathers in the shifting light of sunset or dawn. How could I not know? How could I be so unfamiliar with my own internal landscape?I want to pause, to catch my breath--but this is the jungle now, not the pleasant farmland and sunny hills closer to home. I'm on the edge of my own consciousness, pushing forward into the dark where seeds planted in childhood, planted lifetimes ago, have grown up thick and unchecked to obscure the lay of the land, where ideas are skittish and comfortable with camouflage. Something leaps from branch to branch high above in the canopy, and all I catch is a glimpse of brown fur, a long tail, the rustling leaves--I have to move quickly before it's gone.
I can feel it, every time I sit down to write, that urgency, that lack of perspective. I keep moving, feeling my way deeper, hoping to stumble suddenly upon a glade or vast gaping valley where I can stop to look around, to see where I have been and where I might be going. I don't know if my ideas hang together, if the words I have set down here and there to mark my way give trustworthy direction. Sometimes I feel as though I can't even be sure what I'm trying to say, or if what I want to say makes sense at all or rests instead on some secret, shoddy framework that may come skidding and tumbling down with the next heavy rain. This is not a mapping or surveying expedition. This is an excavation; this is a scavenger hunt. This is me, edging half-blind through the inner wilds tracking the ghosts of memory and culture, of Gandhi, King and Christ, catching the scent of reverence on a dense and sluggish wind curling through the limbs of trees as ancient as the heart; this is me, stooping now and then to turn aside a stone or trace the spiral lines of new-grown ferns, collecting samples and cuttings and discarded animal bones to bring back with me for closer study.
Now.... where was I?
Monday, June 15, 2009
Pagan Values: Relating to the Wild
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.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Pagan Values: Violence, Destruction & The Difference
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.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Finding Your Center: A Meditation on Movement
"This is sometimes known as the 'Devil's Chord,'" my guitar instructor says, spreading his fingers claw-like across the frets. "And not because it's a bitch to play. In medieval times composers avoided it; they believed its dissonance made it inherently unstable and inappropriate for truly well-written music."
First finger in the first fret on the thickest string, second finger in the second fret on the second-thickest string, third finger in the third fret....
"But don't worry about what it sounds like," he says as I fumble, strum and grimace. "This is an exercise in changing chords. The point is to learn how to move from the tritone chord, to this"--first finger down to fourth string, second finger to third, third finger to second, fourth to first--"with as little movement as possible."
"That's impossible!" My fingers feel stretched to their limits already, straining just to maintain their current position. Next to me, the instructor cradles his own instrument, hand curled around the smoothly polished rosewood neck. He moves his fingers between chords, back and forth, back and forth, with a relaxed fluidity that makes me frown and laugh at myself.
I'm not sure where all this motivation is coming from recently, but I'm certainly not one to object. I've spent what feels like the last couple years taking one day at a time, passing on plans, moving very slowly, cautiously, through life. Life on my own. A life of solitude and, often, a great deal of quiet. There were times when I might go two or three days in a row without uttering a word, content to spend my days off puttering around my apartment, reading or surfing blog posts online, doodling in my sketch books or walking in the park. Writing sometimes felt like speaking, except without the throat and tongue getting in on the action. Instead of the deep vibration of breath in the body, there was the tapping at the keyboard, quick fingers, "chicken pecking" they called it in tech ed. class back in sixth grade.
But over the past several weeks, I've been doing a lot of talking. Long phone calls with family and old friends, not to mention juggling a relationship that remains long-distance until the beginning of June. Then there are the in-person conversations, the laughter and joking at work, the singing and guitar practice, the running, yoga and twice-daily meditation. That's right--I've been meditating twice a day! In the morning, I set my alarm fifteen minutes earlier than usual, drag myself through my usual routine and then sit quietly in my living room, gazing into the flicker of a small tea light. At night, I make myself some tea or sit with a glass of water, close my eyes and center, align my many bodies, circulate energy and, finally, sip gently and offer libation. The hot liquid of the tea or the cold ripples of clear water trickle down inside of me like rain working its way through cracks in stone. Fire and water, wind and energy. Even moments of relative stillness have their own sort of movement, a pulse, the circulation of blood and breath. The more engaged I become, the more momentum I can feel, urging at the base of my spine, sweeping me along on the soft soles of my feet.
"The key is not in the fingers, but the thumb," my guitar instructor says, smiling patiently. "See how my thumb barely moves at all? It stays anchored against the neck and gives the support that makes the loose movement of the other fingers possible. Don't worry, you're already doing this with most of your chords without even noticing. This is just a warm-up exercise to teach you to pay closer attention..."
I'm fiddling with strings as he speaks, already beginning to get the hang of it. I try a few familiar chords, and what he says is true--I've already been learning to switch from one to another with an economy of movement, my thumb rocking gently as my fingers drape and press over the ribbed metal of the strings. I go slow, watching the pale knuckles of my left hand, tense and release, squeeze and skip, moving in and out of the diabolus in musica.
The more I move, the more I feel as though I can sense that still center deep within myself, the hub around which everything else is turning. Recently, with the encouragement of my boyfriend (who I think really just likes the way I look in sweats, bless him), I've taken up yoga in addition to my weekly running routine. Gliding gently, fluidly, from one form into the next, feeling each pose stretch my limbs (a little farther each day) and warm my skin to perspiring, I notice those places in my body that hold their shape. The delicious natural curve of the spine as I sweep from virabhadrasana into trikonasana and back. The long, hard cord of balance that suddenly pulls taut from the top of my skull all the way to my tailbone, heel and down through the wooden floorboards for that split second when, in vrksasana, I spread my toes, stop wobbling and take my hand off the wall. After two weeks of this practice, sometimes at work I find myself with the distinct sense that I'm floating, that my body is suspended like the hot-blooded gwyar around some calas-like core, and that I'm not really walking at all, but willing myself from one place to another, wafting or sailing along on the intending breath of nwyfer, spirit. Wind, water, stone. Breath, blood, bone.
I find it fascinating how movement can teach us about stillness. Especially slow, deliberate movement done with attention, but even the quick flurry of desperation or panic. For all that time that I spent holding still, quietly waiting, there were times when that center seemed elusive. When I first began meditating off and on back in high school, this was one of the first things I noticed. I could sit very still, close my eyes and, eventually, lose my sense of the body as a bounded thing. I couldn't feel my hands resting on my thighs--all I could feel was the warm sensation of pressure on my thighs, and the warm sensation of support beneath my palms, but the two seemed distanced, unrelated. My mind seemed to unfurl into itself, into a spacious darkness in which the conscious mind always looked remarkably like a tiny, pale lima bean. Holding still, holding my body and thoughts still in meditation, taught me about my perimeter, about boundaries and limits and finitude, and the extent to which these things interpenetrate and become blurred, illusory.But it is movement that teaches me about my center, about the eye of the storm that is my little living soul. You might think it would be the opposite--that in stillness we retreat to our center and take the time to settle down firmly and comfortably within ourselves; and that movement shows us our boundaries, our extremities, those parts of us that are always bumping into one another and rubbing raw on the external world. And maybe for some people that's how it is. Maybe I've just spent too long holding still, too long nesting in my center and not enough time venturing out to sing the dawn bright. But these days, I'm amazed by how movement and activity, how work, sends shivers of recognition and peace into the silence of my center, like so many pond ripples suggesting the secret, sinking stone.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Thoroughly Thurled
In the dream, my old college professor feeds page after page of the Torah into the scanner, letters scrolling down a nearby computer screen in a kind of river-like matrix, flickering, converting to numbers and back again.The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels; this is what my boyfriend and I discussed over lunch the day before, sitting in the cafe of the local natural history museum, munching on organic veggie wraps and grilled cheese sandwiches. The linguistics of thought, the shape of consciousness, mind itself, embedded with grammar, running over syntax like water over stone, plunging, eddying and moving on again. Breath, exhalation, that which is sacred and cannot be written. The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels. We asked each other, does that make a difference?
In the dream, the computer script searches for meaningful combinations of letters reconverted according to some obscure theological algorithm, a pulsating crossword-puzzle alive with juxtaposition. Now and then, a word in red slips by amidst the stream of symbols and nonsense text. "A red-letter day," my old professor jokes. Mundane words, articles and adjectives, verbs, nothing that coheres or speaks. One catches my eye, and I peck at the keyboard to check the software for bugs.
"There's something wrong," I answer my professor's raised eyebrow, "It's generating noise, now. 'Thurl,' for instance, isn't a real word."
"Yes it is!" He laughs shortly. In dreams, he's often laughing.
"I've never heard of it. Then what does it mean?"
"It is the time," he says, "in a TV Western pistol duel, between when somebody shouts 'Draw!' and somebody else shoots. Or, it is the time right after afternoon tea, but right before an early dinner." I can tell he's teasing me. I wake up scoffing and grinning.
Down at the park that day, I'm too enthralled by the moving surface of the stream to notice the hem of my dress darkening with muddy water where it drags along the rock's edge. I crouch, bare feet planted on the warm rough stone where it juts out into the middle of the creak, and watch the tangled green locks of algae wriggle in the current beneath webbed reflected sunlight.
"I looked it up," I tell my boyfriend, "and it turns out, it means, 'the hip joint of cattle.'"
"So you got that one wrong!" He dips a big toe into the water, saying, "It's not as cold as I expected--but slippery."
"Well, I don't know. So, the other definitions were, 'an aperture or hole'--or as a verb, 'to cut through, to pierce.' And then there's something to do with mining, 'a communication between two adits.' An adit is the long, horizontal entrance or passage into the mine."
"I still don't see what that has to do with dueling." He straddles rocks, gripping his way from one to another towards where I'm perched over the raw umber rushing water. The stream presses itself through a few cracks in the stone, becoming a small waterfall that churns iridescent and pushes an exhalation of soft-gray bubbles down to brush the bottom of the streambed before rising swiftly back to the surface. From where I sit, I can watch this happening forever, never growing old.
"There's a story--I think it's a Zen parable--about a butcher whose knives never get dull. Everyone thinks he must have some magic about his knives, or a special kind of metal, so that he never needs to sharpen them. One day, his young apprentice gets up the nerve to ask. And he explains, his knives never get dull because he doesn't actually cut through the meat and bone the way a less skillful butcher would. Instead, he finds the thin-spaces-between that already exist in the flesh, and he just slips his knife into them."
"That sounds like it's probably Zen," my boyfriend agrees. I stand to embrace him as he steps cautiously onto the rock where I've been crouching. It's then, straightening up, that I notice for the first time my skirt's hem, damp and heavy dragging along the rock, leaving a dirty streak where it slaps and clings to my pale lower calf. "Don't you feel as though winter is still hanging around?" he asks, looking out over the surrounding swamp. The noisy creak twines through last year's leftover straw-like cattails. The sky above is an aching hue of blue unbroken by clouds. A few overhanging trees have just begun to bud. He holds me close, and I can feel his diaphragm expand and contract, his whole body warm against me as he sighs.
"Maybe a little, but I can't really feel it when you're smothering me like this," I say to provoke him. He pulls away in playful defiance, teases and prods me until I recant.
"I think it was a story about the time between when you breathe in, and when you breathe out," I say, sometime later. "But the 'hip joint of cattle' reminded me of it, and then there are all those obsolete definitions about piercing and apertures, openings, entrance-ways, communications. And--if you think about it, that moment of a duel between the draw and the shot, that thin-space-between when nobody breathes. Or the time between meals, I think that was supposed to be a joke about just how wide that space-between can feel sometimes, when someone is hungering. And then, if Hebrew has no vowels, 'thurl' is just how you'd say 'thrill' without the 'i', thrll. Isn't thrill also a kind of moving through the thin-space-between?"
He looks at me with a mix of incredulity and amazement. "How is it that you can learn vocabulary in your sleep?"
"I'm just that good." I wrinkle my nose at him, which is my way of winking or raising an eyebrow.
"And this morning you were saying you were 'too full of words.'"
"I was--too full of words, my brain was noisy. I couldn't focus. But being out here..."
We're walking home, through the wooded ravine that will lead out of the park back into the cluttered urban neighborhood. The soles of my feet are still recalling the warm solidity of rock beneath them, my toes the quick sliding skin of water. We're still stuck smack in the city, the white-noise grind of traffic reaching us through the trees, but everywhere the birds are following each other, the scrappy chipmunks skittering over roots and the ruts left by bicycle tires in the mud. There are insects again, bees in the underbrush, and I feel as though I have escaped, finally, from some cold pressure that has wrapped my lungs for so long I had ceased to notice it. There is space again, movement in all directions that pull and stretch the landscape into distance, opening it up again. Everywhere, life is opening it up again under a high, bright sky. Birdcalls pierce the breeze, connecting one long, dark tunnel of mind to another.
"Being out here... I'm so full of thurl."
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
& Sleepless Spring
I am in one of those odd moods tonight, a mood that has grown into an odd compulsion, really--the compulsion not to go to sleep. Perhaps it's only because I spent most of the day (after an important meeting this morning), lounging around the apartment reading and watching the snow fall.
Yes, you read correctly: here in Pittsburgh, it's been snowing all day.
This morning was suffused with a kind of strange quiet joy. As I walked to my appointment, there seemed to be so much light, all things seemed touched with and emanating brightness, and stillness. And yet, the clouds overheard were thick and gray, rolling in layers, and I could not find that place in the sky where the sun's presence carves out a hard blindness into which you can't ever look. I could look anywhere, everywhere, and yet...
O, I'm not articulating myself very well. It's late. But the blossoms on the trees, flush and swollen with recent rains, each petal soft and opened as if lapping at the snow, and the snow like heavy pieces of light broken off from the gray, billowing skyline and scattered, drifting, settling in the nooks and curves of every limb, still mostly bare and so dark and thin. The pear tears, tiny bursting bouquets of white flowers, and the magnolias--goddess of the magnolia!, she bewilders and overwhelms me every April--and the tight little fists of the dogwood blossoms and pursed lips of the crabapple trees, not yet open, pinched shut against the cold and snow. The trees seemed to exude the crystalline white dusting like sap running warm up from warm earth, touching every tip and seeping as though from a thousand eager wounds, while the frigid petals of winter's last precipitation bloomed midair, everywhere, amongst a brightness that brought tears shivering on the edges of my eyes, running one, then another, loose along my cheek, protesting against the wind.
There are too many exuberant words in this description--it was simple, and quiet, god so very quiet. It was not a lapse back into deadening, claustrophobic winter--it was the opposite! As if everything that was not Spring had ceased or shut itself away beneath the brightness shimmering, every blooming thing etched and framed with the perfect emptiness and void of snow, as if to say: this, this here is the season, these green and growing bits, here, the yellows, lavenders and rose, the pussy willow buds holding their breaths until they explode with tufts of pollen... I'm not saying it right. You had to have been there, to be walking in it.
It's not that I feel as though I can't go to sleep--it's more like I have the strong impression that I shouldn't. That I should stay awake, that I should... remain awake. Perhaps forever. Perhaps only for tonight.
I might be in love.
As I was walking, through the piercing brightness of day, I thought about gods, and why we believe in gods who cannot save us, who cannot stoop to tilt the earth back into healthy cycles of warming and revolving, or intervene in war and famine, or perform even the most ordinary of miracles. I thought about gods, and why we bother. But there are mornings--and the nights that follow them--when you can't ask those kinds of questions. They don't make sense. The words are in the right order, the sounds move and you recognize the inflection and the tone--but it is all only so much noise and rhythm in the still. These are the gods that come and go, this is the world as it has always been, holy, infused, en-chanted, wide open like a wound or a dead thing or a cupped palm filling with water and then draining again. Why--the pale curl of the fingers, the white blood cells gathering, the white worms working their way to the surface of the flesh--we work and work at the why, but there's no way of taming a god.
At night, either you believe, or you go to sleep alone. I have slept that way for years, alone with my body, with my whys and cupped hands and busying blood. What will I say next? How will I get from there to here, to where I am tonight? Two months ago, it occurred to me to change, to shift, and I found that I could do it. This is all nonsense. It's late, and I'm not really saying anything. There was a moment I thought I made a movement, a course correction, but now I think that was just a trick of the light. Still, before where there was only myself, not even that, less than even that, now there are hands, dark and solid and warm and not my own, there are magnolia blossoms, deer moving in the hollow, an undoing, a belief in something, a compulsion or longing or wakefulness, and breath, and sleepless spring.
Yes, you read correctly: here in Pittsburgh, it's been snowing all day.
This morning was suffused with a kind of strange quiet joy. As I walked to my appointment, there seemed to be so much light, all things seemed touched with and emanating brightness, and stillness. And yet, the clouds overheard were thick and gray, rolling in layers, and I could not find that place in the sky where the sun's presence carves out a hard blindness into which you can't ever look. I could look anywhere, everywhere, and yet...
O, I'm not articulating myself very well. It's late. But the blossoms on the trees, flush and swollen with recent rains, each petal soft and opened as if lapping at the snow, and the snow like heavy pieces of light broken off from the gray, billowing skyline and scattered, drifting, settling in the nooks and curves of every limb, still mostly bare and so dark and thin. The pear tears, tiny bursting bouquets of white flowers, and the magnolias--goddess of the magnolia!, she bewilders and overwhelms me every April--and the tight little fists of the dogwood blossoms and pursed lips of the crabapple trees, not yet open, pinched shut against the cold and snow. The trees seemed to exude the crystalline white dusting like sap running warm up from warm earth, touching every tip and seeping as though from a thousand eager wounds, while the frigid petals of winter's last precipitation bloomed midair, everywhere, amongst a brightness that brought tears shivering on the edges of my eyes, running one, then another, loose along my cheek, protesting against the wind.There are too many exuberant words in this description--it was simple, and quiet, god so very quiet. It was not a lapse back into deadening, claustrophobic winter--it was the opposite! As if everything that was not Spring had ceased or shut itself away beneath the brightness shimmering, every blooming thing etched and framed with the perfect emptiness and void of snow, as if to say: this, this here is the season, these green and growing bits, here, the yellows, lavenders and rose, the pussy willow buds holding their breaths until they explode with tufts of pollen... I'm not saying it right. You had to have been there, to be walking in it.
It's not that I feel as though I can't go to sleep--it's more like I have the strong impression that I shouldn't. That I should stay awake, that I should... remain awake. Perhaps forever. Perhaps only for tonight.
I might be in love.
As I was walking, through the piercing brightness of day, I thought about gods, and why we believe in gods who cannot save us, who cannot stoop to tilt the earth back into healthy cycles of warming and revolving, or intervene in war and famine, or perform even the most ordinary of miracles. I thought about gods, and why we bother. But there are mornings--and the nights that follow them--when you can't ask those kinds of questions. They don't make sense. The words are in the right order, the sounds move and you recognize the inflection and the tone--but it is all only so much noise and rhythm in the still. These are the gods that come and go, this is the world as it has always been, holy, infused, en-chanted, wide open like a wound or a dead thing or a cupped palm filling with water and then draining again. Why--the pale curl of the fingers, the white blood cells gathering, the white worms working their way to the surface of the flesh--we work and work at the why, but there's no way of taming a god.
At night, either you believe, or you go to sleep alone. I have slept that way for years, alone with my body, with my whys and cupped hands and busying blood. What will I say next? How will I get from there to here, to where I am tonight? Two months ago, it occurred to me to change, to shift, and I found that I could do it. This is all nonsense. It's late, and I'm not really saying anything. There was a moment I thought I made a movement, a course correction, but now I think that was just a trick of the light. Still, before where there was only myself, not even that, less than even that, now there are hands, dark and solid and warm and not my own, there are magnolia blossoms, deer moving in the hollow, an undoing, a belief in something, a compulsion or longing or wakefulness, and breath, and sleepless spring.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Conspire, Perspire, Expire
The Actual Conversation
The muzak system is playing Smash Mouth: Somebody once asked could I spare some change for gas, I need to get myself away from this place... Sitting in the last corner booth after work today, next to the day-shift manager as he trains the newly promoted cover, Steve, in number-crunching paperwork. "Two to thaw, three to bake. Have them bag up four dozen, we go through a lot on weekend midnights." I twirl my fork, push spaghetti around my plate. I said, Yep, what a concept, I could use a little fuel myself, and we could all use a little change...
Across from me Steve bends over the pages and pages of prep lists and stock inventory, scribbling in numbers with the stub of a pencil. He's dressing up these days, classier than the polo shirt and eye-bleedingly red apron he used to wear like the rest of us servers; now, he's in black slacks and a button-up collared shirt and tie, also black. It's like he's trying to turn the restaurant into the Matrix. Would you like the red pill or the blue pill? Can I bring you fries with that? Steve's girlfriend is Pagan. They're both amazingly industiral-goth when not in uniform. Now he's crunching numbers as middle management in the food service industry. This is how life is sometimes.
The day-shift manager asks me to slide out for a second so he can go make a phone call in the office, and in a moment Steve and I are joined by another friend, Frank, who's snacking on some fries before his dinner shift begins. Frank is tall, with no waist, a neatly trimmed goatee and big clunky shoes; he always brings his uniform to work in a backpack stitched all over with anarchy symbols. Once when there was a bomb threat at the post office next door, he turned the bag inside out just in case the investigating police might get the wrong idea. When Frank is being funny, he purses his lips and blinks his eyes.
"Rob said he loves me like a rock," I tell Frank, to make conversation. "So I asked him if he meant that he really loves rocks, or that rocks have very strong emotions." Frank raises his eyebrows at me. "You know--if he loves me as though I were a rock, or if he loves me as though he were a rock... He told me to shut up."
"Maybe he meant the-way-in-which-he-loves-you is like a rock, you know, solid and durable... and slowly being worn down by the constant erosion of wind and water." Frank and I both giggle. Steve continues crunching numbers, chewing on his lip and ignoring us.
"See, I was just about to say, 'Yes, but that's not as funny,' but you proved me wrong." I twirl more spaghetti onto my fork. (This is the way my conversations at work go, hopping from one clever or ridiculous non sequitur to another, seeing what acrobatics of wit or syntactic contortions we can accomplish. So after a pause, I add:) "Stupid global warming."
Steve, in his all-black-cover-manager-threads-and-silk-tie, mutters without looking up at either of us, "Global warming isn't real."
For a moment, Frank and I don't say anything. I mumbled with my mouth full of pasta. "What?" Frank asks.
"I said, 'Well that's enlightened of you...'" Then, holding my hand up on the wrong side of my mouth, I say to Frank in a faux-whisper that Steve can hear perfectly well, "But I was being sarcastic."
"Global warming isn't real," Steve says again, this time stopping his scribbling and tapping the pencil stub on the table a few times. "It's just something the government made up to make money."
It's hard to read Frank's expression, his lips working into a purse but his eyes wide open. Still, I can't help but chime in (at risk of being the only person at the table with, you know, a functioning brain), "I don't know... making money by asking us to consume less; sounds kind of counterintuitive."
"I think," Frank says, blinking, "instead of addressing any real problems, they should just invest everything in some ridiculously pointless master plan. You know, like a Planet Umbrella," he adds, saving us all from having to muddle through a serious conversation.
I laugh. Steve goes back to his paperwork. Frank finishes his fries as the conversation moves on to other things.
What I Should Have Said
Now wait. Let's pretend I'm a slightly different person than I am, someone with more practice (or less civility) in confronting people about the fundamentally ignorant or frightfully misinformed statements they sometimes make in the course of casual conversation.
"Global warming isn't real," Steve says again, "It's just something the government made up to make money."
"Let me get this straight," this Other Ali would say. "You're telling me that our government, the government of the United States of America, invented an elaborate lie about global warming as early as the 1970s, then conspired to spread this lie all across the world, convincing scientists from every industrialized nation to 'independently verify' such a concept through hundreds of studies, all conducted independently. Then, when the rest of the world has completely fallen for this thoroughly convincing lie and everyone begins signing silly Kyoto Protocols and such nonsense, you know, cutting emissions, designing more energy-efficient vehicles, the U.S. government--the same government that supposedly conspired to tell this Lie of Global Warming in the first place--refuses to play along and instead decides to reject the whole idea, to reduce regulations and to encourage hugely wasteful and backwards industry models that only serve to put our manufacturing and technology industries far behind foreign competition. Despite this, our government persists, cleverly, in being very vocal in the fake denial of the lie they conspired to create and disseminate, and this goes on for decades and decades (meanwhile, the country's weathermen and meteorologists are in on it, too, reporting on the ever-increasing number of 'record-breaking heat waves' and extreme weather conditions all over the world). All of this, so that now, when even fellow American citizens have finally come to believe the lie the government has been telling them by way of everyone-except-the-government, they can make a little money off the fad of shopping for organic tomatoes and driving foreign-built hybrid cars. This is the story you want me to believe?
"I'm all one for conspiracy theories," this Other Ali would continue, "but I'm more inclined to wonder why the only 'scientific' studies that call global warming into question have been pursued and sponsored by corporate and government think-tanks. Or why it is only the American media that assume 'fair and balanced' means including misleading claims of the hypocritically-capitalist, irrationally anthropocentric Religious Right to balance out the bias of actual fact confirmed by countless peer-reviewed and respected scientific studies. Or why the CEOs of American car companies continue to spout global-warming-denial rhetoric and portray fuel-efficiency as merely a trendy innovation; the same rhetoric proffered by oil companies who make billions of dollars in profit when gas prices rise in response to national security threats and personal economic anxieties that the government helps to create and maintain with its fear-mongering and willful incompetence. Conspiracy? Sure thing. You're right there, Steve.
"Certainly, now that global warming has become so firmly established among the educated population of the world, now that its effects are becoming apparent even to the amateur observer with any long-term memory of what childhood winters used to be like--in short, now that the government and corporations of this country can no longer get away with complete and unadulterated denial... of course they're now trying to make money off of global warming, trying to reduce it to a trend, a brand, a marketing strategy. They're racing panicked around the deck of a sinking ship, dismantling it board by board and trying to sell the parts to us as life-preservers. Certainly they wouldn't want us to take anything too seriously, to question their priorities or actually maybe change the fundamental way we live our lives. Gods forbid we learn how to swim.
"And isn't your girlfriend Pagan? Isn't her best friend Pagan, too, and you're all housemates together? Even if you're right about everything, even if global warming is a Big Lie the government has told us, even if that's true--how do you reconcile consumption and waste with a love of the earth and the sacred celebration of its seasons? How can you ignore the very basics of ecology, the cycle of resources, the vast interconnected web of being? How do you turn yourself off to the singing of the trees choked by smog, the streams humming as they empty into oceans clogged with pollution and whole continents of plastic refuse set adrift by our recklessness? What lie could the government tell that could be worse than this, worse than the lie that we have the right to live as callously and selfishly as we like, to consume and squander and whine for more, ceaselessly and without consequence? And what is Paganism to you, if it has no room for the earth in it? Just a mishmash of misguided antiauthoritarianism and fashion accessories, the fringe-thrill of worshipping gods that make the WASPs and JWs squeam? And have you ever stopped and wondered, then, who exactly is making money off of your religion?
"Not to get on your case, Steve. We're all friends here."
The muzak system is playing Smash Mouth: Somebody once asked could I spare some change for gas, I need to get myself away from this place... Sitting in the last corner booth after work today, next to the day-shift manager as he trains the newly promoted cover, Steve, in number-crunching paperwork. "Two to thaw, three to bake. Have them bag up four dozen, we go through a lot on weekend midnights." I twirl my fork, push spaghetti around my plate. I said, Yep, what a concept, I could use a little fuel myself, and we could all use a little change...
Across from me Steve bends over the pages and pages of prep lists and stock inventory, scribbling in numbers with the stub of a pencil. He's dressing up these days, classier than the polo shirt and eye-bleedingly red apron he used to wear like the rest of us servers; now, he's in black slacks and a button-up collared shirt and tie, also black. It's like he's trying to turn the restaurant into the Matrix. Would you like the red pill or the blue pill? Can I bring you fries with that? Steve's girlfriend is Pagan. They're both amazingly industiral-goth when not in uniform. Now he's crunching numbers as middle management in the food service industry. This is how life is sometimes.
The day-shift manager asks me to slide out for a second so he can go make a phone call in the office, and in a moment Steve and I are joined by another friend, Frank, who's snacking on some fries before his dinner shift begins. Frank is tall, with no waist, a neatly trimmed goatee and big clunky shoes; he always brings his uniform to work in a backpack stitched all over with anarchy symbols. Once when there was a bomb threat at the post office next door, he turned the bag inside out just in case the investigating police might get the wrong idea. When Frank is being funny, he purses his lips and blinks his eyes.
"Rob said he loves me like a rock," I tell Frank, to make conversation. "So I asked him if he meant that he really loves rocks, or that rocks have very strong emotions." Frank raises his eyebrows at me. "You know--if he loves me as though I were a rock, or if he loves me as though he were a rock... He told me to shut up."
"Maybe he meant the-way-in-which-he-loves-you is like a rock, you know, solid and durable... and slowly being worn down by the constant erosion of wind and water." Frank and I both giggle. Steve continues crunching numbers, chewing on his lip and ignoring us.
"See, I was just about to say, 'Yes, but that's not as funny,' but you proved me wrong." I twirl more spaghetti onto my fork. (This is the way my conversations at work go, hopping from one clever or ridiculous non sequitur to another, seeing what acrobatics of wit or syntactic contortions we can accomplish. So after a pause, I add:) "Stupid global warming."
Steve, in his all-black-cover-manager-threads-and-silk-tie, mutters without looking up at either of us, "Global warming isn't real."
For a moment, Frank and I don't say anything. I mumbled with my mouth full of pasta. "What?" Frank asks.
"I said, 'Well that's enlightened of you...'" Then, holding my hand up on the wrong side of my mouth, I say to Frank in a faux-whisper that Steve can hear perfectly well, "But I was being sarcastic."
"Global warming isn't real," Steve says again, this time stopping his scribbling and tapping the pencil stub on the table a few times. "It's just something the government made up to make money."
It's hard to read Frank's expression, his lips working into a purse but his eyes wide open. Still, I can't help but chime in (at risk of being the only person at the table with, you know, a functioning brain), "I don't know... making money by asking us to consume less; sounds kind of counterintuitive."
"I think," Frank says, blinking, "instead of addressing any real problems, they should just invest everything in some ridiculously pointless master plan. You know, like a Planet Umbrella," he adds, saving us all from having to muddle through a serious conversation.
I laugh. Steve goes back to his paperwork. Frank finishes his fries as the conversation moves on to other things.
What I Should Have Said
Now wait. Let's pretend I'm a slightly different person than I am, someone with more practice (or less civility) in confronting people about the fundamentally ignorant or frightfully misinformed statements they sometimes make in the course of casual conversation.
"Global warming isn't real," Steve says again, "It's just something the government made up to make money."
"Let me get this straight," this Other Ali would say. "You're telling me that our government, the government of the United States of America, invented an elaborate lie about global warming as early as the 1970s, then conspired to spread this lie all across the world, convincing scientists from every industrialized nation to 'independently verify' such a concept through hundreds of studies, all conducted independently. Then, when the rest of the world has completely fallen for this thoroughly convincing lie and everyone begins signing silly Kyoto Protocols and such nonsense, you know, cutting emissions, designing more energy-efficient vehicles, the U.S. government--the same government that supposedly conspired to tell this Lie of Global Warming in the first place--refuses to play along and instead decides to reject the whole idea, to reduce regulations and to encourage hugely wasteful and backwards industry models that only serve to put our manufacturing and technology industries far behind foreign competition. Despite this, our government persists, cleverly, in being very vocal in the fake denial of the lie they conspired to create and disseminate, and this goes on for decades and decades (meanwhile, the country's weathermen and meteorologists are in on it, too, reporting on the ever-increasing number of 'record-breaking heat waves' and extreme weather conditions all over the world). All of this, so that now, when even fellow American citizens have finally come to believe the lie the government has been telling them by way of everyone-except-the-government, they can make a little money off the fad of shopping for organic tomatoes and driving foreign-built hybrid cars. This is the story you want me to believe?"I'm all one for conspiracy theories," this Other Ali would continue, "but I'm more inclined to wonder why the only 'scientific' studies that call global warming into question have been pursued and sponsored by corporate and government think-tanks. Or why it is only the American media that assume 'fair and balanced' means including misleading claims of the hypocritically-capitalist, irrationally anthropocentric Religious Right to balance out the bias of actual fact confirmed by countless peer-reviewed and respected scientific studies. Or why the CEOs of American car companies continue to spout global-warming-denial rhetoric and portray fuel-efficiency as merely a trendy innovation; the same rhetoric proffered by oil companies who make billions of dollars in profit when gas prices rise in response to national security threats and personal economic anxieties that the government helps to create and maintain with its fear-mongering and willful incompetence. Conspiracy? Sure thing. You're right there, Steve.
"Certainly, now that global warming has become so firmly established among the educated population of the world, now that its effects are becoming apparent even to the amateur observer with any long-term memory of what childhood winters used to be like--in short, now that the government and corporations of this country can no longer get away with complete and unadulterated denial... of course they're now trying to make money off of global warming, trying to reduce it to a trend, a brand, a marketing strategy. They're racing panicked around the deck of a sinking ship, dismantling it board by board and trying to sell the parts to us as life-preservers. Certainly they wouldn't want us to take anything too seriously, to question their priorities or actually maybe change the fundamental way we live our lives. Gods forbid we learn how to swim.
"And isn't your girlfriend Pagan? Isn't her best friend Pagan, too, and you're all housemates together? Even if you're right about everything, even if global warming is a Big Lie the government has told us, even if that's true--how do you reconcile consumption and waste with a love of the earth and the sacred celebration of its seasons? How can you ignore the very basics of ecology, the cycle of resources, the vast interconnected web of being? How do you turn yourself off to the singing of the trees choked by smog, the streams humming as they empty into oceans clogged with pollution and whole continents of plastic refuse set adrift by our recklessness? What lie could the government tell that could be worse than this, worse than the lie that we have the right to live as callously and selfishly as we like, to consume and squander and whine for more, ceaselessly and without consequence? And what is Paganism to you, if it has no room for the earth in it? Just a mishmash of misguided antiauthoritarianism and fashion accessories, the fringe-thrill of worshipping gods that make the WASPs and JWs squeam? And have you ever stopped and wondered, then, who exactly is making money off of your religion?
"Not to get on your case, Steve. We're all friends here."
Sunday, February 22, 2009
In Perfect Love & Perfect Jenga!
You might not suspect it at first, but Druidry asks us to give up a lot.
I certainly didn't expect it when I first began exploring the Craft and aspects of nature spirituality back in college. At the time, I looked on the spiritual work embraced by Paganism as a release and an expansion of my artistic and creative work (which I had, in any case, always pursued "for the sake of the Divine"). I wanted to move beyond mere words and the music of poetry; I wanted the tools to transform my life itself, body and heart, spirit and mind, into an engaged, living work of art. The personal ritual, magic, meditation and prayer of Druidry offered me these tools.
I should have seen the inevitable coming. I was writing short stories as early as freshman year about the sculptor of Winged Victory chiseling away at all that was not goddess. I'd had intimate relations with poetry as long as I could remember, and had learned the tension and beauty of limits, those perfectly crafted lines and stanzas, the concise brute force of a few words juxtaposed. All that is not infinite has its limits, this is not a bad thing. It's nature. Limitation is so often descried, equated with restriction and censorship; but limit is only the daughter of form, that's all.
Druidry is, in part, about learning our own limits, celebrating our form and seeking out our boundaries, the edges of our sacred space, our nemeton. Without a sense of the beauty that resides in the liminal, along the edges of finite things, how can we know real intimacy, the lingering thrill of allowing others in or reaching out tentatively beyond ourselves? Music has form, song has limits--it has scale and progression, it has shape and movement. When we sing together, our voices in tune, our bodies are vessels sharing a vibration in the most literal sense. We move together, we share an imperceptible boundary that buzzes and blurs. Without limits, movement is impossible (where would we be moving to, and how could we be growing?). Druidry teaches us to sing our soul's song--to put the world to sleep for three nights, or provoke it into weeping or laughter--and to sing our spirit in harmony, with an attentive ear to the weaving, echoing melodies of the world. Love, too, has its form, and therefore its limits, though limit and condition are not synonymous.
Love--whether the "perfect love" of the Wiccan Rede or the "unconditional love" of Christian mysticism--asks us to give up a lot. If we love nature, the environment, the ecosystems of our world, we learn to move in sympathy with them, to find and feel a center and gravity other than our own. If we sing with the trees and the earth, it becomes more difficult for us to callously waste and destroy--we share an edge, we feel the limits and needs of nature rubbing up against our own, we overlap, and we flinch as destruction "over there" sends ripples of regret and anguish reaching all the way to the "here" of our own deepest beings. In love, limits are not "conditions" of restriction or rejection. They do not deny certain kinds of love to certain kinds of beings, nor do they negate or denigrate the self that loves. Instead, the natural limits of love--love as an activity, as a process of creation, as movement and form--make liminal experiences of intimacy and trust possible, and render meaningful our urge towards response-ability. In this sense, even as imperfect creatures living in a less-than-ideal world, we have access to the infinite potential of condition-less love, capable in every moment of responding uniquely to each infinitely unique being.
But our edges blur, the shore shifts between every tide and tiny snails take up residence in our crevices and unseemly dark places. Love asks us to give up a lot, including our assumptions about what we, as isolated individuals, need to survive and how justified we are in taking it.
Maslow has his (in)famous "Hierarchy of Needs," a pyramid built on survival, security, support, and respect. We human beings need food, water, shelter, air, sleep--we require basic physical conditions to be met, just to stay alive. And once we have these things? We want to know they will be there tomorrow, as well, and indefinitely into the future, or at least for a good long while. When our physical bodies feel sated and safe, the pattern repeats again on a socio-psychological level: we need to feel as though we belong, to a family and a community, and that our emotional and intellectual selves will find nourishment here; and then we need to feel respected, productive and accomplished so that this support won't suddenly be withdrawn and denied to us later. Only after all of these things do we come to consider what Maslow calls "self-actualization": creativity, imagination, contemplation and ethical activity. If we're lucky. Some of us never get there. Why? Because this is, after all, a pyramid--the higher we want to go, the larger the base. The more productive and respected we want to be, the more community ties we must maintain, and so the more security and basic material needs that must be met. Some of us will spend lifetimes building out our base, putting one block next to another on the first two or three tiers, until we have a man-made plateau that stretches wide around us on all sides.
Meanwhile, the snails are at their work, love wearing us down, smoothing away everything that isn't goddess or god. Love, and Druidry, ask us to give up a lot. To give up willful or careless harm; to give up eating meat, if our bodies can take it (which most of them can); to give up excessive consumption and energy waste; sometimes to give up the support and acceptance of a family or community that cannot understand our spirituality; in short, to give up many of the things that we've come to assume are fundamental to our survival. The "higher" we try to go, the more we seem to find the blocks of our life knocked out from under us. The work comes to seem less like the building of a Great Pyramid in a desert, and more like a precarious game of Jenga! in which our balance is our sanity, our spirit and our survival. How can we do it? How can we find it within ourselves to take the risk, to give up our assumptions and confront our fears?
Have you ever played Jenga!? I hope so, it's fun-for-the-whole-family, as they say. The strategy of Jenga! is essentially this: move slowly, calmly, and with trust. Test each block, push it gently with the soft tip of your finger--some will be stubborn and load-bearing, but others will slide free easily, as if by magic. Not only this, but as the tower grows higher, its weight will shift and some of those blocks that seemed impossible to move before may suddenly cease to be so important. In Ali's "Jenga! of Needs," the spiritual life is much the same--we move cautiously, with baby-steps, giving up what we can afford and, with each surrender, we also build, we reach further, higher, deeper. Where we find frightening emptiness, we seek new centers of gravity, the edges of others we love. We weave them intimately into our lives and allow them to lend us balance and strength. Furthermore: we create. We have no set number of blocks, we carve out our own, we not only build but we grow, and our own growth provides us with ever-new materials out of which to craft our life. Eventually, perhaps, some of us might grow to become like those mystics and saints, living high in the mountains on tea and yogic discipline, or deep in a monastery subsisting on prayer and consecrated bread. For some, love will knock us off our feet, and we will suddenly find ourselves able to fly.
But for now, baby steps: movement, limit, form, celebration and imagination, creativity and praise... in perfect love and perfect trust.
I certainly didn't expect it when I first began exploring the Craft and aspects of nature spirituality back in college. At the time, I looked on the spiritual work embraced by Paganism as a release and an expansion of my artistic and creative work (which I had, in any case, always pursued "for the sake of the Divine"). I wanted to move beyond mere words and the music of poetry; I wanted the tools to transform my life itself, body and heart, spirit and mind, into an engaged, living work of art. The personal ritual, magic, meditation and prayer of Druidry offered me these tools.
I should have seen the inevitable coming. I was writing short stories as early as freshman year about the sculptor of Winged Victory chiseling away at all that was not goddess. I'd had intimate relations with poetry as long as I could remember, and had learned the tension and beauty of limits, those perfectly crafted lines and stanzas, the concise brute force of a few words juxtaposed. All that is not infinite has its limits, this is not a bad thing. It's nature. Limitation is so often descried, equated with restriction and censorship; but limit is only the daughter of form, that's all.
Druidry is, in part, about learning our own limits, celebrating our form and seeking out our boundaries, the edges of our sacred space, our nemeton. Without a sense of the beauty that resides in the liminal, along the edges of finite things, how can we know real intimacy, the lingering thrill of allowing others in or reaching out tentatively beyond ourselves? Music has form, song has limits--it has scale and progression, it has shape and movement. When we sing together, our voices in tune, our bodies are vessels sharing a vibration in the most literal sense. We move together, we share an imperceptible boundary that buzzes and blurs. Without limits, movement is impossible (where would we be moving to, and how could we be growing?). Druidry teaches us to sing our soul's song--to put the world to sleep for three nights, or provoke it into weeping or laughter--and to sing our spirit in harmony, with an attentive ear to the weaving, echoing melodies of the world. Love, too, has its form, and therefore its limits, though limit and condition are not synonymous.
Love--whether the "perfect love" of the Wiccan Rede or the "unconditional love" of Christian mysticism--asks us to give up a lot. If we love nature, the environment, the ecosystems of our world, we learn to move in sympathy with them, to find and feel a center and gravity other than our own. If we sing with the trees and the earth, it becomes more difficult for us to callously waste and destroy--we share an edge, we feel the limits and needs of nature rubbing up against our own, we overlap, and we flinch as destruction "over there" sends ripples of regret and anguish reaching all the way to the "here" of our own deepest beings. In love, limits are not "conditions" of restriction or rejection. They do not deny certain kinds of love to certain kinds of beings, nor do they negate or denigrate the self that loves. Instead, the natural limits of love--love as an activity, as a process of creation, as movement and form--make liminal experiences of intimacy and trust possible, and render meaningful our urge towards response-ability. In this sense, even as imperfect creatures living in a less-than-ideal world, we have access to the infinite potential of condition-less love, capable in every moment of responding uniquely to each infinitely unique being.
But our edges blur, the shore shifts between every tide and tiny snails take up residence in our crevices and unseemly dark places. Love asks us to give up a lot, including our assumptions about what we, as isolated individuals, need to survive and how justified we are in taking it.
Maslow has his (in)famous "Hierarchy of Needs," a pyramid built on survival, security, support, and respect. We human beings need food, water, shelter, air, sleep--we require basic physical conditions to be met, just to stay alive. And once we have these things? We want to know they will be there tomorrow, as well, and indefinitely into the future, or at least for a good long while. When our physical bodies feel sated and safe, the pattern repeats again on a socio-psychological level: we need to feel as though we belong, to a family and a community, and that our emotional and intellectual selves will find nourishment here; and then we need to feel respected, productive and accomplished so that this support won't suddenly be withdrawn and denied to us later. Only after all of these things do we come to consider what Maslow calls "self-actualization": creativity, imagination, contemplation and ethical activity. If we're lucky. Some of us never get there. Why? Because this is, after all, a pyramid--the higher we want to go, the larger the base. The more productive and respected we want to be, the more community ties we must maintain, and so the more security and basic material needs that must be met. Some of us will spend lifetimes building out our base, putting one block next to another on the first two or three tiers, until we have a man-made plateau that stretches wide around us on all sides.Meanwhile, the snails are at their work, love wearing us down, smoothing away everything that isn't goddess or god. Love, and Druidry, ask us to give up a lot. To give up willful or careless harm; to give up eating meat, if our bodies can take it (which most of them can); to give up excessive consumption and energy waste; sometimes to give up the support and acceptance of a family or community that cannot understand our spirituality; in short, to give up many of the things that we've come to assume are fundamental to our survival. The "higher" we try to go, the more we seem to find the blocks of our life knocked out from under us. The work comes to seem less like the building of a Great Pyramid in a desert, and more like a precarious game of Jenga! in which our balance is our sanity, our spirit and our survival. How can we do it? How can we find it within ourselves to take the risk, to give up our assumptions and confront our fears?
Have you ever played Jenga!? I hope so, it's fun-for-the-whole-family, as they say. The strategy of Jenga! is essentially this: move slowly, calmly, and with trust. Test each block, push it gently with the soft tip of your finger--some will be stubborn and load-bearing, but others will slide free easily, as if by magic. Not only this, but as the tower grows higher, its weight will shift and some of those blocks that seemed impossible to move before may suddenly cease to be so important. In Ali's "Jenga! of Needs," the spiritual life is much the same--we move cautiously, with baby-steps, giving up what we can afford and, with each surrender, we also build, we reach further, higher, deeper. Where we find frightening emptiness, we seek new centers of gravity, the edges of others we love. We weave them intimately into our lives and allow them to lend us balance and strength. Furthermore: we create. We have no set number of blocks, we carve out our own, we not only build but we grow, and our own growth provides us with ever-new materials out of which to craft our life. Eventually, perhaps, some of us might grow to become like those mystics and saints, living high in the mountains on tea and yogic discipline, or deep in a monastery subsisting on prayer and consecrated bread. For some, love will knock us off our feet, and we will suddenly find ourselves able to fly.But for now, baby steps: movement, limit, form, celebration and imagination, creativity and praise... in perfect love and perfect trust.
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