This brutiful world.
Just when we think we can’t take any more inhumanity, the dying dragon Hateriarchy lifts his head and flame-throws another roar, hiss, and spew.
It’s the second Sunday of January (or is it the 92nd?) of this reckless new year and here it is and here we are, and here we go…seat belts not so securely fastened.
Here now, we are being called to witness. Unflinching witnesses. Even as we feel like voyeurs to a stage production that comes with all the worst content warnings. Like it or not, we are children of this political age.
Call it pseudo-science if you like, but depth psychologist Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche, has done something fascinating by connecting the pale blue dots, as in planetary alignments through the ages, to cataclysmic events on earth like wars and revolutionary stuff that brings about transformation. I watched a documentary called “Changing of the Gods” a few years back about this and I found it really intriguing to consider the overlap between the unrest of the 60s and that of the early 2020s.
These theories and thoughts resonate with me, I think in part because they catapult me out of the immediate story and dramas of the day and into the larger, cyclical realm of star stuff and metaphysics.
In other words, we are part to whole; individual energies connected to the swirling communal ball of energy and lifeforms.
I keep looking for signs that unworkable, uncooperative worldviews are dying and to a degree, they are. But it’s hard to believe it with the rise of billionaire world order, AI, and extremist ideologies.
Anyways, it has me looking again at my place and indeed, our collective place in the resistance.
Is resistance futile or is it fertile? It’s fertile. Consider the trees who brace themselves for the coming storm season. They do so by grounding themselves and entangling roots.
“Look at the anatomy of trees as one of nature’s examples of successful organizing that realizes that our power is in our ability to both be fiercely centered and grounded but also infinitely reaching towards our unique sources of energy, light, and growth. Each tree’s elements are reliant on one another but totally unique in form and function. There is no competition or pressure to be the root or the trunk or the buds that bloom. Each tree is a universe, a master delegator, a puzzle and a puzzle piece. They have encouraged me to not worry so much about making everyone ‘feel important’ and to focus on how to create systems and support efforts where everyone is important and clear on how their work is unique, crucial and totally interconnected.”
—Morgan Mann Willis from Adrienne Maree Brown’s
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
And so, like the trees, my friends, we must plant our own healthy, sustainable forests and rise up rooted for these times. We must draw lines in the sand against species and eco-extinction, genocide, fascism, and the police state because make no mistake: the dragon is many-headed and the dungeons they’ve built are no different than the prisons and enslavement ships of old; they’ve just been re-branded, is all.
Sigh. Here I am, jumping from a “we are all one” polemic to an us/them duality. Faith/fear, fear/faith. See how precarious and unstable this sinkhole ground is beneath us?
Rise Up Rooted was my 2016 anthem. It’s hard to believe it’s already been 10 years ~ what a fierce decade this has been. This time, ten years ago, I was prepping for a solo trip to Spain and Italy in honor of my 50th birthday. I remember the many conversations with Europeans who were fascinated by the unbelievable prospect of Donald Trump being elected President.
So much has happened on the world stage since then. The Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and Free Palestine movements, to name just three, found voice in the midst of the requisite atrocities that led to their resurgence. A global pandemic showed us the best and worst of us.
It’s hard not to think back a century to consider what the 1918 influenza epidemic, the culture of consumerism that defined the Roaring Twenties, the British Mandate of 1922 that heralded the rise of Zionism, the Great Depression, the conditions that brought about Nazism, and the WWI and WW2 war machine have to teach us today.
Sung to the tune of, when will we ever learn? When will we ev-er learn?
To be honest, I think we are learning. I think the great turning Joanna Macy speaks of and the awakening that Richard Tarnas and others hint at is happening, albeit slower than fucking molasses. I don’t know the difference between the Age of Pisces and Aquarius, but I can feel in my bones the arthritis of a Dark Age that has us collectively seeking a more monastic way of living, which is to say, more books, more bread/wine/cheese, more solo walking and far less peopling because, as I’ve said time and again, people have a tendency to suck.
Except when we don’t. We are brutal and we are beautiful. Perhaps no other perspective is more important for flexing our resiliency muscle than holding this both/and duality. We are both/and & always will be. We and our shadow.
And so one of the ways we can hold this duality in a season of great darkness is to build community—one trust bond, one zany idea and one gentle intention at a time—underground. If such hive-ernation sounds suspiciously like the groundhog who popped his head up, saw his shadow, freaked out, and ducked back down again until such time as the sun promises to come out again, I’ll buy that.
Real stuff happens in the fallow time. Creativity takes seed. I’m picturing those Portland ICE protest frogs just now, an image which reminds me of mycelium or as I like to spell it, MySilly!’em—fighting fire with hilarious attire…I mean, that’s partly what the revolution is asking of us. To report to the Ministry of Silly Walks.
These are big thoughts for a winter Sunday, and I am thinking them. I’m thinking back to the mid to late 90s when we lived in Islamabad and how our driver Amin’s motto of “might has right!” — whenever he honked his horn and pushed his way through the mess of traffic that is everyday Rawalpindi, Pakistan — has terrible long-term consequences.
And I’m thinking that if I am to look for teachers and find inspiration, the non-human creaturely and natural world is where those glimmers live liveliest.
Look to the worms, the winter bears, the squirrels, the cedars, and the perseverance of the dandelion who knows, to bastardize Leonard Cohen, that wherever there’s a crack, which is everywhere because there’s a crack in everything, there will also be light.
Advice to Myself #2: Resistance
by Louise Erdrich
Resist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.
Resist your disappearance
into anything except
the face you had before you walked up to the podium.
Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book —
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
Resist all pressure to have children
unless you crave the torment of joy.
If you give in to irrationality, then
resist cleaning up the messes your children make.
You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix.
Resist cleaning up after your husband.
It will soon replace having sex with him.
Resist outrageous charts spelling doom.
However you can, rely on sun and wind.
Resist loss of the miraculous
by lowering your standards
for what constitutes a miracle.
It is all a fucking miracle.
Resist your own gift’s power
to tear you away from the simplicity of tears.
Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions,
so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph,
or to get a laugh.
Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.
Resist all chairs.
Be the one sitting on the ground
or perching on the beam overhead
or sleeping beneath the podium.
Resist disappearing from the stage,
unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,
the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face
that has become your own, though all your life
you have resisted it.
So much sustenance from the soapbox today. Thank you.