That January wish for spring/ banging around the house

The sun is fading from the sky here at five o'clock. It's the beginning of the signs of spring returning. Soon, daphne. I've been sick. And tired. Separate, but equally true. And today is the first day I've been out of the house during daylight hours in several days. I found myself blinking under the bright sky as I emerged. (If there is anything that humbles...)

I've been doing a lot of writing, a lot of thinking, a lot of talking, a lot of organizing internal space—the internal spaces of my mind. A lot seems to be about to change in my world, but I'm not sure, at the moment, which way it's all going to bend. I'm about to start the final term of my MFA program, and what I've come to understand about art, about what I mean when I talk about art, about who I am in relation to it has changed so much over the past year, that I don't quite know how to orient myself. I'm pleased to have found myself making lists again over the past few weeks—lists of the trajectories of my artistic aims, lists of ways to make visible the things I want to say, the things I care about.

Days have been passing in a fog, as the undercurrent rushes below. I feel its beginnings of bubbling up in the bursts of pressure, the crystalized moments that seem, for a nanosecond, to exist outside of time. Right before my thesis year of undergrad I felt it too. I knew that the threads I'd been pursuing were starting to weave together; I just didn't know how yet. It is the same here. Human rights, intimate and international relations, socio-politics, the persistance of making, these things are family. I just haven't fully traced their genealogy. I don't yet fully understand the foundation upon which these things lie, the soil from which they all grow. I know it has something to do with consciousness, something to do with awareness and making meaning. It is, somewhere at its root, about interconnection, and about unveiling the ways in which we are all entangled.

As winter begins its leaving, I'm beginning to feel that old familiar tug, that itchiness in my limbs, the spark of excitement as streams approach convergence. Yes, I'm beginning to feel it; it's time to wake up.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

I keep thinking about paralysis lately, about the things that stop us from forward momentum, the ways and reasons we sometimes don't do the things that we want/need to do. What is the origin of the voice that keeps one spinning?

I want to change the world. (What a cliché, yet I can't think of a better way to say it.) And I want to do it without causing anyone any discomfort. Crazy, totally crazy. How to gently and compassionately say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done? How to offer everyone, anyone, enough grace?

I called a friend today and left a message on his voicemail that went something like this. "I'm having another existential crisis. You want to go get a beer with me this evening and talk about the meaninglessness of art, and how that meaninglessness actually makes it meaningful, and how we create structures of ever-deepening complexity in order to reveal simplicity? Anyway, hope you're having a nice day, ok..."

It comes down to that simplicity, you know, it all does. Everything is about presence and consciousness.

Oh, but I fail.

This morning I wanted to go to church. The social justice minister was delivering a sermon titled Blessed Unrest: 'Inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover, re-imagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It requires something far greater.'

I felt I needed that little nudge that my church often offers me. But I didn't wake up in time... which is fine. It happens. What isn't quite as fine, is that after a frenzied running in circles trying to gather myself, and realizing that we weren't going to make it in time, all I wanted to do was go back to bed. I felt defeated. Now, what is it in me that makes that defeat so close, creates that precise and specific view of success? I need to learn to fumble and stumble and keep trying, keep pushing. What is that quote? Samuel Beckett? Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Yes, try again, fail again, fail better.

I've mentioned this at least twice now, and it this point it seems almost like a tease, like some sort of game I'm playing with myself, but I've been trying to find a way to talk about something hard, something that I know might offend some people whom I care about very deeply... so I keep hesitating.

I'm the sort who wants to be very very sure of my reasoning, of my position, before I put something out into the world, especially if that particular something might cause anyone any discomfort, any pain. But I've spent a long time thinking about all of this, and the truth is, I'm sure. I'm very very sure. So, (deep breath,) ok, next post. I promise.

Eisler and hope for peace

I've been working on a post for days here, and I can't quite get what I want to say to untangle itself. It's been rolling around in my head for a while. It's become like a rock rolling down a perpetually steepening slope.

I've been reading as much as I can get my hands on by social scientist, author, and one of my new favorite scholars, Riane Eisler.

It's been good medicine after a lot of hard world news recently, and a lot of reading and thinking about violence, particularly about violence against the most vulnerable.

In Eisler's acceptance speech for the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award she talks of spiritual courage, "We've been taught to think of courage as the courage to go out and kill the enemy. But spiritual courage is a much more deeply human courage. It’s the courage to stand up against injustice out of love." This is the kind of courage I am trying to have. To put it in the simplest of terms, it is hard.

We are all trying to do what's right. I believe that. It's what I see when I can step away from my ego, away from my fear, away from my anger. We are all trying. We are all doing our best.

But our best, right now, isn't working.

We live in a violent world. It's something I've been struggling to understand, something I've been struggling to see through to the heart of. We have a justice system that is brutal and deeply classist and racist, a social structure that allows for people to own mansions and jets and yachts while there are children and families starving and sleeping on the streets; we have a culture so permeated with violence, that we hardly notice our youth playing video games designed to numb soldiers to the brutalities of combat. We live in an ever-increasingly militarized world. We hear about child suicides in response to 'bullying' (though let's be honest and call it what it is, gay-bashing). The political climate and rhetoric in this country are getting more heated, more polarized, and increasingly more violent. Just last week, a 22-year-old young man, aiming for a congresswoman, shocked us all by shooting into a crowd, wounding 13 and killing 6.

It seems everywhere you look, someone is lashing out violently, lashing out in fear. Violence is a response to feeling threatened, a way to defend something or someone. Sometimes it is a belief, sometimes it is an idea or ideal, sometimes it is a person, sometimes—and I'm afraid more often than not—it is in defense of a hierarchical structure of dominance.

Back to Eisler, because she is giving me hope. She points to the connections that I have been seeing, and I feel such a huge relief wash over me when I read her words. Someone is doing this work. Someone else is talking about the intricate web of interconnection between social policy, international relations, domestic relationships, parenting, and economic and ecological health. The connection is in two underlying social categories: a domination system and a partnership system:

In the domination model, somebody has to be on the top and somebody has to be on the bottom. Those on top control those below them... Families and societies are based on control that is explicitly or implicitly backed up by guilt, fear, and force... In contrast, the partnership model supports mutually respectful and caring relations. Because there is no need to maintain rigid rankings of control, there is no built-in need for abuse or violence.

No built-in need for abuse or violence. Power, then, "is exercised in ways that empower rather than disempower others."

The current political climate is a clear indicator of a society built on the domination model—we must destroy our enemies, rise to the top, subjugate the 'other'—but the rhetoric of leadership that is slowly taking hold is one of the partnership model. The best leaders inspire not followers, but more leaders. When we empower others to act on their best selves, we can shift the thinking. When we stop the cycle of domination—in our families, in our relationships, and in our communities, we create the opportunity for a better way.

Insomniatic Mumblings

It's quarter after five in the morning. My lids are heavy and my body feels the heaviness of exhaustion, but I haven't been able to sleep. I need to get up and start my day in the next couple of hours and I fear I've reached that crucial crossover where falling asleep now would be disastrous. No, I must just push through.

It's raining this predawn Thursday morning. I can hear it through the bedroom window—the sound of the water in the spout from the gutters, a sound I've grown accustomed to in my years in this apartment. The sound of it at this early hour, something to which I've also grown accustomed.

My earliest recollections of true insomnia are from this room, latenights my undergrad thesis year, my first year at the museum, work stress and excitement keeping me up, then following years up far too late talking or thinking. I remember tiptoeing out of the bedroom to sit on the patio some middle-of-the-night a few years ago, staring out at the street, the swaying shadows of trees under streetlights, the occasional sound of a passing car, the windchimes; feeling the whole of the world spread out beneath me, the root of myself settle into something; feeling, in that quiet moment of the darkest hour of night, a sort of peace, a sort of gratitude and grace, a deep settledness within myself.

I've been thinking a lot about that root of myself, about the gratitude I feel for being allowed to nurture it...

I've just deleted 6 or 7 paragraphs here, paragraphs describing all the thoughts that have been keeping me up, but I'm not sure I'm capable of being eloquent about it yet. It all came out as a rambling jumble. It is important to me. I'd like to say it all better than I can now. I'd like to find the words.

Suffice it to say for now, it has something to do with that anchor, something to do with what Unitarians list as one of their (ok, maybe our?) basic tenets: the inherent dignity and worth of every person. It has something to do with violence, something to do with empathy, and something to do with our rights to be nurtured as our selves, nurtured and loved as our own individual, flawed, confused, struggling, striving, radiant selves.

A Happy 2011 to You

At the end of every year, I spend time writing about the year that has just passed; month by month, I try to put it into words. This time, I got lost somewhere trying to recount the last year. Sometime in March I lost momentum. Something about that rings true: sometime in March I lost momentum. But that isn’t quite it, not exactly; it is that something has changed, and I am just beginning to understand the nuances of those changes.

For most of my conscious adult life (excepting my late teens and earliest twenties here—for that is a different sort of conscious, in my case, adult, but not conscious in the ways I have come to know consciousness since) I have self-identified as an artist, a visual artist, a maker of things. Over the past months, as I have been forced to see and articulate parts of myself in new and deeper ways, I have come to see that that label, that way of understanding myself has been shifting beneath me for some time.

Creating objects of meaning that affect only those who are already in the position to connect with them isn’t enough anymore. I’ve come to see that what drives me, the thing I think about almost constantly, is social consciousness—social justice, morality, criticality. I see so much around me that needs changing: so many people so deeply-rooted in belief systems that allow them—even encourage them—to cause harm; I see so much deep-seated fear and bigotry, and the pervasive stains of those things in people whom I love: that almost ubiquitous fear, shame, and guilt. And we all know that fear, shame and guilt do not inspire us to do good, make good; they instead grow roots in the darkness, and in that darkness, they strangle the roots of love, of courage, of truth.

We need to do better. I know we can do better. For all the wrongs I’ve seen perpetrated, I still see the goodness in the hearts behind them. At first glance, this is almost devastating, but it is also heartening. We have the capacity to wake up. We must wake up. We must learn to look critically at the things we believe, why we believe them, how they serve us, how they help us to serve others.

I want every action to be rooted in empathy, in compassion, and in love. Now, I know that for most reading this, that statement may seem like a classic no-brainer, but the kind of empathy I’m talking about involves a deep vulnerability, a purposeful and intentional criticality. We must make a practice of stepping out of our own shoes, and begin to try to think about the impact of our actions on every living creature.

We must learn to imagine the provenance of our vegetables: Who grew them? Did the farmers and farmhands receive a living wage? What practices do the farmers use? Do these practices help or hinder the health of the land? The people? Who delivered these vegetables? How far did they travel? What effects do these modes of transportation have on our air, our water, our communities? What is the local, immediate and communal impact when I buy a banana from Ecuador instead of an apple grown within fifteen miles from me? Do my political/social beliefs and practices correspond with the well-being of those who are feeding me?

We must also learn to imagine and observe the ripple-effects of our kindnesses as well as our unkindnesses.

I take care of children, 2 beautiful children, an almost two-year old girl and a four-and-a-half year old boy. In them I see the manifestations of how they are treated. They are kind to one another; they are gentle, thoughtful, curious, and loving. The boy reasons carefully with his younger sister when she grabs a toy from him. He does not yell; he does not hit. He reasons with her. He tries to understand, and he tries to help her to understand. I see this as a direct result of the way their parents treat them. The children are treated as people, and they are respected. In turn, they are respectful and thoughtful young people. They learn the real consequences of their actions by being allowed to explore within safe and loving boundaries. The older child understands that the consequence of grabbing the toy back from his sister is her sadness, her sense of loss. Cultivating that empathy in him is far more powerful than some artificial imposition of consequence or punishment. He is given the opportunity to devise better solutions, and he rises to that challenge. He values the responsibility entrusted to him. He learns to be gentle with her, because those who love him are gentle with him, and because compassion is rewarded. She, in turn, is learning this gentleness not only from her parents, but from her brother as well.

This is how we should all be with one another. It is so clear to me. I know that my ability to see this comes in part from the encouragement in my own upbringing to think critically, to question that which does not seem right, to stand up for what I believe in even if it's unpopular to do so, even if it is painful. For this I am deeply grateful.

My morality is rooted in empathy, in the knowledge that we do not have the right to hurt each other. As I say that, I realize that it bears repeating: We do not have the right to hurt each other.

We must learn to always think about power, about how we choose to wield it, in what ways we choose to bow to it. Power, privilege, authority… these must always be questioned, must always be measured against the deep knowledge of our hearts, our conscience, our consciousness.

I strive to live my life with an ever-awakening consciousness, an ever-deepening willingness to look at the world around me, look at myself, and be willing to see what is being shown to me by the universe, by God, by the world—by whatever we choose to call that energy to which we all are rooted, that energy from which we all came. I seek to live with vulnerability, with perpetually renewed willingness to be changed. I hope never to cling blindly to dogma. I hope never to use ill-founded beliefs of other fallible humans to defend actions that my heart knows are wrong.

This is not an easy task, and I am always failing. But I continue to be humbled by my failures, and I continue to strive. This is how I want to live. This is how I hope I can encourage others to live.

May we always be willing to grow and change, be willing to be wrong, be willing to reevaluate what is right. And above all, may we always listen to the call of our hearts towards empathy, towards compassion, and towards justice.