Holding Space

There are a lot of people out there who don't feel listened to.

Here's the thing about violence--we give it way more respect than it deserves. Because we consider tragic things holy, the aftermath of violence tends to be treated with a certain kind of awe; we honor people who died by violence much more readily than we do most intentional accomplishments. We reserve a kind of horrified respect for the aggressors; the same respect we give to other mysterious, incomprehensible, fearful forces.

But neither violence nor its outcomes are remotely respectable. Not by any measure. It defies every quality of a well-cultivated mind--self-restraint, patience, broad-mindedness, foresight, empathy. It is as shortsighted, small-minded, and unimaginative as a tool can be. It's not really incomprehensible or mysterious. It's just a brutish, simplistic solution to problems we can all relate to.

That it is still being employed, blunt-object style, by society at large, when we are on the other hand so sophisticated as to enable people across the globe to have nightly conversations with one another, shows just how entrenched and petrified our leadership has become.

Take comfort in knowing they don't represent the vast majority of people. Quite the opposite.

Well, okay, but even so, there's still a lot of desire for violence out there. There are still a lot of men, and, yes, women (far fewer, but they exist) who try to solve their powerlessness by asserting power in the most basic way on the world around them. Who can't see the beauty in crafting more complex and mutually agreeable solutions.

What do we do with all of that? We can't just let it be, can we? Isn't it our noble calling to attack and shame it and keep it in a perpetual state of discomfort until it changes?

Well, except, if you keep picking the scab immediately after it forms, the skin never has time to heal underneath.

I mean this more on a person-to-person level, because the Dakota Access Pipeline and the general Fossil Fuel crisis, the unjustifiable imprisonment of so many Americans, the puppet election of the oligarchy, these things are urgent and they deserve constant, relentless pressure and attacks.

But when it comes to other human beings, maybe it's our job just to love them as best we can for exactly who they are, like, for the majority of the time, and mayyybe once in a while, when they're feeling particularly receptive, offer them some insight?

I like to call this "holding space," and now I try to do it for myself, not just for others.

Remembering that "perfect" isn't really a thing in this time and space, let alone something anyone is supposed to already be. Seeing things that go wrong as interesting challenges instead of punishments for something someone was supposed to already be, but wasn't. Realizing that depending on what area of life you look at, you're no more advanced, or remedial, than most. Leaving both the "I'm awesome" and "I'm the worst" ego games alone (as much as possible).

Violence is attention-getting, and that's part of the point of it. I think it's worth trying to see all people right now, instead of waiting for them to do something worthy of praise, instead of waiting to love them until they've attained our approval by accessing and teaching themselves the mandatory things as quickly as possible. When we can manage to. And if we can't love them, we should hold space for them until they do learn.

Everyone deserves the space to become.

In Pursuit of Glory

It's not that anyone is perfect. Somewhere, stitches are being dropped. Somewhere, misspellings. With mortals there is always going to be slack that demands being picked up. Most of us enjoy being able to pick up someone else's slack plus our own on occasion, but individualism at its finest, at its most marble, at its coldest, says that if you can't pick up your own slack always, you are a waste of the resources it takes to keep you alive.

People who hold themselves to a standard of perfection are the ones most keenly familiar with the idea of "cruel to be kind." No one is crueler to themselves in the name of kindness. Lacking the ability to hold perfection at arm's length and assess its worthiness as a personal goal, the lived experience of prioritizing it over all else, mistakenly equating intangible benefits with the psychosomatic (considering them therefore impossible to experience), they constantly evaluate the world around them for warmth and love and find it barren and cold, unwilling to acknowledge the possibility that it is the starting point of distrust and the tests themselves which drive the temperature down. 

Religious perfectionists find a somewhat less painful path, suppressing the understanding that faith is a willfully blind leap into certainty, hiding it under the willfully joyous blanket of faith, which offers not only blinders (should the Truth turn out to be not such a beautiful thing), but also a cure for loneliness, as it offers sound structures within which to receive and offer love, free of ulterior motives, it offers tangible imperatives to serve others, and of course the promise that everything will definitely get better if only you persevere.

It takes one kind of courage to do what’s necessary, never mind the cost. It takes another kind to pause and think about the likely side effects of the realization of your desires. If you never think beyond victory, beyond the finish line, you never stop to wonder if winning is worth the price you’ll pay to get there. Then again, if you are always trying to calculate the relative value of your efforts, you forget what a pleasure it can be proving that you can exceed your own expectations.

Maybe you believe that we all start out as a drain of resources and have to earn our way into validation (Ayn Rand is probably one of the best known prophets of the secular version of the “fallen man” stance.) Or maybe there’s some other inherent part of you, besides your tendency to mess up on occasion, that you feel the need to explain to people, to apologize for. Where you were born, or the color of your skin, or your gender, or the way you express it. Some part of your appearance, your beliefs or your education level or your parentage.

When we all ought to be learning to give of ourselves joyfully and often, to accept of others gracefully and often, and also to pay attention to the balance of things around us, power, gratitude, awareness, respect,

instead we're taught to be ashamed or proud, depending on how we compare to others, using measures mostly having to do with our usefulness as units of production. We're taught to assess every individual and situation in terms of its immediate usefulness to us. We're taught to see bad things that happen to us as punishment for our failures, for our neglect, instead of useful experiences that teach us important lessons of empathy and care.

We're taught to look for reasons not to connect with others. Our principles, our principled lives, so noble in our heads, turn into a reason not to connect with or invest in anyone who is unable or unwilling to commit to the same path.

Our love of beautiful things, of quality, of craft, of a well-turned phrase, can become a reason not to extend our love towards that which is not immediately appealing or accessible.

Our self-respect and respect for others can lend itself to exclusion of those who don't express respect in ways we recognize, or offer it more cautiously and slowly than we do.

Our awareness of power structures and illusions can keep us from noticing the beautiful individuality in how each so-called cog negotiates the paradox and complexity of being human in a repressive society.

Sometimes it seems like first thing we see is all of the choices we wouldn’t personally make. We celebrate the disasters of our ideological opponents as validation of our own ideologies and we distrust and dislike their joy, because if their worldview makes them so happy, maybe we’re the ones who are wrong.

You're not a waste of resources, you're the hallowed reason they exist in the first place. What you produce, or don’t, for the Powers That Be (PB) is not a good measure of your value. You may have picked up on this theme in our stories and reality shows and culture at large--that to prioritize massive monetary gains means essentially giving up on having genuine, loving relationships.

Your intangible value, which the PB don't give a dying duck about, is the you-ness, the gifts of yourself that you give to those around you. The most valuable thing any of us can offer. Which is why it's such nonsense that we get rewarded for our tangible contributions based on our specific skillsets, instead of just nurtured as a matter of fact for being a part of the human fabric.

If the religious people weren't all so busy making sure gays know it really really IS a sin to love someone with your same genitalia, or that when you murder a baby you're really really murdering a baby, this is what they'd be hurrying to tell you: That you're precious just for being alive. That this life is a gift to you and you are a gift to everyone in it and they are a gift to you too.

How should we measure the success of our competing relationships with the divine? How about the relative skill with which we love one another? Whether or not our love is being experienced as love by those who receive it?

According to that measure I still have a long way to go, but I’m starting to improve. 

Look, we were thrown into this arena and handed pointy sticks and told to battle it out, and just look how many of us are instead helping one another and living for art and finding cool alternate things to do with pointy sticks.

You can agonize if you want over all of the stitches you drop, but just remember: the people who come across as perfect aren’t, at all; they’re taking the toll out beyond your line of sight.

Somewhere in all of us is the expectation that everyone else should see our inherently loveability; that they should all be trying their darndest to love us. But sometimes trying gets in the way of doing.

And if we haven’t figured out how to love ourselves, how should anyone else be able to? They’ve got less information than we do. They’ve got less insight into what we’ve been through and what we hope for. 

Work on loving yourself. Work on giving yourself actual reasons to love yourself. Its some of the most important work you can do on behalf of humanity.

Religious vs. Secular

The terms "religious" and "secular" are often used to divide both people and activities into two groups: spiritual matters and the concerns of the world. It makes it sound like you have to be part of a specific religious tradition to concern yourself with anything beyond the material plane. It also makes it sound like religious people are completely separate from the material world, that they don't concern themselves with worldly matters at all.

I prefer the terms "vertical" and "horizontal." "Vertical" referring to inner growth, mastery of the self, growth that allows us to be less reactive to our environments, less conflicted and doubtful, more confident and present and loving. The spiritual. Internal peace and balance. "Horizontal" meaning outer growth--mastering our existence in the physical world, developing skills and talents, learning to care for ourselves and others, take good stewardship of resources, learning to get what we want and negotiate our way with others. Thriving in a material sense.

Nearly everyone alive is engaged in both of these forms of growth.

There are some extremes where people renounce one or the other. Nuns, monks, artists and recluses will give up the horizontal. No more attempt to survive and thrive in the world of people and things. All concerns focused on the relationship of the inner self to the Divine All. Then there are people who allocate time to inner growth only as a means to maximize material growth. Any self improvement is focused on maximizing material gain. I don't think I've ever met a person like this, but I believe they exist: people who renounce the vertical plane.

But the rest of us, Christian, new age, pagan, Muslim, atheist, Jew, etc. are concerned with both. 

"Even as ye have done unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me" and "Love one another as I have loved you" equate well with the humanist ("secular") belief that because we are all born onto this planet together, and we have the ability to empathize with one another, we should treat each other as well as possible, just as we'd prefer to be treated.

There's a great parable about a guru who tells a young student, "You are Brahman. You are God." and the student says "Wow, I am God!" He's walking through the streets, still marveling at this idea, and he sees an elephant coming down the road. The driver yells at him to get out of the way. He says "If I am God and the elephant is God, why should God get out of the way of God?" So he just stands there. The elephant wraps its trunk around him and tosses him out of the way. He's very shaken up by this, and runs back to the guru and tells him the story. "I thought I was God!" the guru says, "You are." "Why should God get out of the way of God?" and the guru says "But why didn't you listen to the voice of God telling you to move?"

Consider the language of the vertical, the spiritual. Inner peace and affirmation. Confidence. Warmth. A burning flame.

These feelings are experienced by a wide variety of people under a wide variety of vertical experiences. In affirmation of God. Or many Gods. Or no God. In response to nature. Or self-denial. Or self-care. Or unity with a group. Or disengagement with one.

So maybe, then, regardless of who is absolutely, end-all, be-all "right," it's equally important to listen to other humans, all of them, as it is to listen to God as He or She or They talk/s to you and yours.

As a good friend of mine said, "In God we trust, and God is us." We must trust one another. We must not wait until others become more like us. We must trust and listen to them now.

Righteous Wrath, the Great Distraction

Believe me, I of all people understand how compelling righteous wrath can be. How difficult it is to resist that infuriating comment on your friend's thread. How important it seems to use just the right words to explain why that other person is terrible, why their beliefs are damnable, why their way of being in the world is a threat to all that is good and holy.

The last post, "The Cliff," offers one reason to put that attitude on the shelf. Here's another very compelling argument that may give you pause next time you feel tempted to ride the wave of justifiable anger.

The Cliff

We are a world on the brink. Many of us feel a great deal of fear. Fear of the future, fear of one another, fear of losing what little we have left. We are stampeding towards the edge of a cliff.

Those who have paid attention to the stories of stampedes passed down by the generations before us understand exactly which cliff we’re headed towards.

The cliff is hatred.

At the bottom of the cliff is the realm of terrible deeds we shuddered over as children, horrible acts we could hardly bring ourselves to imagine, the sorts of things from which entire generations never recover.

For too long, we have listened to, and repeated to one another, a story of how the masses, i.e. most of us, are foolish. Ignorant. Incapable of governing ourselves. How we are hateful and poor in spirit and undeserving of more than we have.

It feels like a loving story when we say to ourselves and the people we love that we are not like the rest. We look out for our circle, the way no one else does. We are kind, intelligent, decent, and well-intentioned, the way no one else is.

We deserve everything we want. No one else does.

No one else does. These words are the dogs driving us ever closer to our collective misery and doom. Every time we turn to condemn one another, they grow more powerful. Every time we ignore the evil within and the good without, they grow more powerful.

The sheep at the front of the herd are the easiest to blame for the direction we’re all headed. The ones who can see the edge of the cliff already and who, instead of turning back, are screaming “CANONBALL!” Yet their confidence comes from the noise of the rest of us thundering on behind them in the exact same direction.

Here is the loving story: We are not better or worse than one another. We are all good. We all do evil things. We are all intelligent. We all do foolish things. We are all well-intentioned. We all hurt one another.

If only we could break free of the tight, fearful pack, we could verge off, away from the cliff, to the right, to the left, back the way we came, whatever makes sense to each of us, and make it to safety. But the ones on the right are fighting back against the ones on the left, and the ones on the left are pushing hard against the ones on the right, and most of those are pushing hard against the ones in the front, so we’re all stuck in a tight pack, running hard towards disaster, blaming one another all the way.

We are all capable of governing ourselves. Together. As long as we listen to one another. How bad must things get before we assume the mantle of responsibility? Before we trust that we can do a better job than whoever we’ve trusted with the task thus far? Before we stop saying we’re powerless and start proving that we're not?

Give it long enough and it won't matter whose fault it was. It won't matter which part of the pack we were in, the front, the sides, the back. 

So let's not.

It can be extremely difficult exchanging ideas between people who see the world very differently from one another. People have such different associations with different concepts,  different ideas of what is healthy and virtuous vs. insidious and upsetting. So I'm working on establishing some extremely basic definitions for use across belief systems. We need a common language to remind us of our mutual interests, like the need for respect, like the need to ask others what respect looks like to them, like the need to care about the answer.

GOOD: When we are nurtured

EVIL: When we are destroyed

The vague revolutionary "they" catches a lot of flak so I'm pretty proud of this new definition, which applies to everyone, regardless of creed, party, faith, or socio-economic status. 

THEM/THEY: Those who act without regard for us

Every time we make some excuse not to have another's interests at heart, or forget to, or choose not to care, we join THEIR ranks. See, people don't often set out specifically to do evil. More typically evil is a byproduct of that disregard that goes along with their actions.

US: Sentient life, all of it, regardless of creed, nationality, education level, socioeconomic status, race, gender, philosophy, and, importantly, behavior (i.e. even THEY are US)

Those few who do specifically set out to do evil to others, of these Chilean director, shaman, and philosopher Alejandro Jodorowsky says: 

"a criminal (does not) exist who bears all the guilt: 

all individual crime is a product of the family, the society, and history." 

Pain comes from pain comes from pain. As another of my favorite artists, Zak and What Army?, said, "We're all escaping from the same hell"; the hell of the love we needed and didn't receive, the love we needed to offer and couldn't bring ourselves to, the hell of our failure to properly appreciate the love we do give and receive every day.

But the question remains: what do we do about THEM? They are, after all, hurting us, and allowing them to continue doesn't exactly show regard for us. 

First, whatever we need to do to make ourselves safe (without becoming THEM), and second, whatever we can do to help THEM become one of US again.

Our aim for THEM can never be anything other than accountability and rehabilitation. Desire for retribution, vengeance, any wish of pain for another, is THEIR territory. By definition. 

It's pretty understandable to want to punish some stranger as much as possible, to want to go easy on our loved ones. Protecting people from consequences is not loving. Important lessons are learned from consequences. Natural consequences are often the best spur for moral growth. And saving the really bad consequences for the people who fall outside of our circle of love is the perfect way to convince others to stop caring at all about OUR welfare. Like a FutureThreatsToOurHappiness machine, churning out more THEMs by the minute.

There is a philosophy of the universe that says there is enough to go around, enough for all of us to have what we want and need to be happy, yet in order for that to happen, we need to accept that everything might not happen exactly the way, or according to the timing we prefer. We can get what we want while still allowing the same for others. In fact, it's the only way to go about getting what we want that holds any promise of lasting happiness.

An Open Letter to Brock's Dad, aka Everyass

I don't know you, but I see you. You could be any entitled rich white ass. You could be every entitled rich white ass. You are Everyass. You are the poster child of Rape Culture, White Culture, Might Equals Right Culture. Because it’s all the same thing. 

What I can take was always mine, and will be forever, hallelujah, amen.

You’re still in caveman tribal mode: Good Guys vs. Evil. In that fight, you're justified in using whatever it takes to survive, no matter what. Smash and destroy and betray and disregard and overpower. Take what you need and want. Survive. No time for integrity. No time for compromise. No time for anyone else’s needs but your own. That's the price of success. As the media has been in such a hurry to point out, your golden boy was caught raping a woman at a top university. His swim times are phenomenal.

Surely though you can see why, when you claim he’s too delicate for the sort of consequences the rest of us suffer out here, here in this fantastic dystopia that you, Everyass, and those like you fight so hard to create, our rage begins to grow.

When you don’t bat an eye as families are torn apart and parents languish in literal slavery, when you don’t seem to think brown and black children are too delicate to grow up without parents who dared self-medicate with weed instead of OxyContin or Prozac or Xanex, but god forbid your rapist son spend six months in jail for condemning an innocent woman to a lifetime of trauma, our rage grows. Maybe you’re right; maybe jail is so cruel and unusual that even the cruelest and most unusual criminals, like rapists, shouldn’t be subjected to it. If that’s how you really feel, it’s about time you got more upset about all of your fellow Americans being subjected to it for far lesser reasons. 

The truth is, you don’t care about justice or liberty. What you really want is a personal, consequence-free zone for you and yours. And the more you succeed at this, the more you protect your children from any experience that would allow them to relate to, care about, and grow into decent human beings alongside of the rest of us. Money can stand in for a lot of personal growth. It has clearly saved you and your terrible spawn from ever learning a damned thing from life. You've nurtured a careful inability to understand that other people experience pain, too. Well done.

Empathy is not a small trait to be missing. The ability to balance your own needs and desires against those of others is a baseline skill for participation in a community. Your son caused another human being grave harm. He should suffer over that. You should feel anguish over that. If you had this basic decency I'm talking about, which you're going to need if you don't want to be voted off the island one of these days, you'd be examining your teachings, thinking about what attitudes you hold and convey about the value of other humans, the beauty of individuality, the inviolable sovereignty of a person over their own body. Maybe you couldn't have done any better but maybe you could have, right? Maybe a rapist son is a good wake-up call, a good time to re-evaluate your ethical model of the universe?

Sir, this is what it looks like to care about others besides yourself: you'd tell your son to spend as much time and energy as it takes to help with this woman's healing, to understand what she's been through, to do anything he can do. You'd encourage him to bow his head and accept whatever consequences society sees fit to give him. "Don't think only about yourself and what you're going through, son," you'd tell him. "That's what got you in this mess in the first place. It's time to start thinking about what experiences we provide for others; what kind of world we're creating for the people in our lives. It's time to understand, from her side of things, what experience you forced on this woman that night."

If you had the baseline sense of empathy necessary to thrive in a community, you would recognize that the most important fact about your son right now is his demonstrated willingness to violently sacrifice another human's welfare to his whims. He is a threat to intoxicated women everywhere. You shouldn't protect that. Your son's delicate monsterhood doesn't deserve to be preserved!

What you call love is better known as psychotic overindulgence. A loving father wouldn't be trying to explain to the world about his son. A loving father would be doing everything in his power to help his son connect the suffering he will experience now to the suffering that others experience; the suffering that woman experienced. A loving father would be trying to help his son forge a new sense of self through adversity, shaped in important ways by the magnitude of the pain he has caused another.

I hope you figure out in time that the Everyass way of life is dying.

Sincerely,

A More Generous America Than You Should Expect

How to Shed Your Faith Without Losing Your Soul

Churchgoers! I’m here to tell you the good news! God did not put anyone else in charge of you. You’ve long suspected and feared this, and I’m here to tell you: it’s true. Each of us is a direct conduit of the divine. None of us needs someone else to interpret divine will for us. We are it.

This thought may fill you with fear. The fear of responsibility. The fear of accountability. The fear of losing what is most precious to you. Religion has been your comfort, your foundation for your sense of self, for your relationships. You may wonder what meaning your life could have without it. What if I tell you that everything you cared about when you were religious, you still care about when you’re not? Your family. Your friends. Making the world a better place. Becoming a better person. Loving those who despitefully use you. Helping those in need.

Religion is just a scaffolding to help us “fake it til we make it,” so to speak. If you can see the point and feel the benefits of living a life that is honest, useful to others, and focused first and foremost on loving one another, you don’t need religion.

The sense of specialness you get from being exclusively in tune with God, the sense of piety from denying yourself pleasure, the anticipation of a much better afterlife, these things are nothing next to the peace of mind you attain once you give yourself full permission to address cognitive dissonance and begin taking full accountability for the outcomes of your beliefs and actions. Those special, light-bathed moments that confirm you alone are connected to the divine? Everyone has those moments. Everyone is connected to the divine. Literally everyone. And it’s awesome.

Your faith’s structures are fantastic. Don’t stop using them. Keep coming together, singing, enjoying the holiness of community, presence, and worship of the divine. The feelings you feel are real. It is holy to sing together and celebrate the fact that we are here on this planet, the great mystery of our existence, it is holy to bring ourselves in tune with one another, it is holy to gather and experience love!

Instead of locating the divine in something far above you that demands you fit yourself carefully into a box through constant war with your own urges, listen intently to the individual path on which you are being guided, trust yourself, and celebrate divinity in the people around you, in the coming together, in unity.

Keep visiting one another. Keep seeing to it that every human being has invested humans looking out for them. Keep taking care of the sick, helping beleaguered new mothers and visiting the elderly. Encourage others to do the same and offer them venues without first demanding that they align their personal moral universe to match yours.

Keep your rituals. When we engage with the physical world, we communicate with the unconscious. As above, so below. Open up your temples to all who are willing to be respectful inside of them. Let them see their own rituals through. The symbols of others are not in conflict with yours. The rituals of others do not contradict yours. There is room for everyone.

Keep doing missionary work. Send your missionaries everywhere, teaching people to love and respect themselves for their own divinity, and to love and respect others for theirs. Don’t stop doing the good work. Keep it up. Shed the skin of conformity. The demand that you live your divinity by suppressing someone else’s is designed to free you. Let the hypocrisy unravel your faith; it's supposed to.

Religions all carry within them the key to breaking free of them. The very first of the Ten Commandments is “Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.” What do you think a human being standing in for divinity constitutes besides something coming between you and God, standing literally “before God”? Jesus Christ said that God is love, and that your only commandment is “Love One another as I have loved you.” Do you find that your faith makes it harder for you to love others or to receive the love that others feel towards you? Do you sense the intense wish of your unconditional love to flow free and unrestricted towards all, instead of stopping short when it encounters certain behaviors and ideas?

God is us! God is all! Free yourself! Surrender yourself to love!