Gratitudes, Then...Long Overdue

I stumbled into a SiriusXM radio show a couple weeks ago--the Peri Peltz Show--which had invited a dear friend, Rabbi Irwin Kula, to reflect on the post-election currents in our world today. [Irwin and I go way back in some collaborative teaching we did, and more...he's what the Quakers would call a 'weighty elder' for spiritual wisdom and innovation...]. The conversation that night was wide-ranging and worthwhile, and can be found here. A good thirty minutes of your time...

A paraphrase? Irwin closed his observations with a marvelous invitation to daily practice that would counteract the polarization in our country today: gratitude, curiosity, and service. These words in this blog post actually began a couple weeks ago, but seem spurred by some unexpected reconnections and invitations to remember: gratitude. I love it when the universe converges...

But first, a glimpse of what he means, my paraphrase of his words: At the end of each day, name at least one specific thing you’re grateful for. Just one. More could be welcome, of course, but just start with one. Gratitude. “My husband crafted our home that nice meal,” in my case. Or, “My dog Nala has been a constant companion today, when I was sad.” Gratitude. Second, reflect on your day for the moment when you heard yourself say or think, “Huh...I never thought about that in that way…” or “I did not know that but now can see what you mean…” Curiosity. “Whenever anyone tries to generalize about 70 million people, remember there is nothing 70 million people actually have precisely the same. Nothing.” For instance...perhaps asking “What is a vision of public safety that does not center in the police? Are there jobs police are doing today that were never intended to be their work in community safety?” Questions I’ve rarely heard asked to be asked, outside of a political soundbite and conflict. Curiosity. Finally, name one way that you made a difference in someone else’s life this day. Doesn’t need to be a big “make a difference” or “saving the culture,” but just one thing that you did that made someone else’s life better. Service. I listened to the heart-strings of a dear friend, fearful of losing one of her dear friends. I communicated authentically with a new acquaintance, when she was having a tough day. Service. 

Why is that going to help us? Rabbi Kula was asked. “Those three things are a direct attack on the polarization, the splitting, in our world today.

Gratitude is the psychic grounding where we can grow new stuff, and we have to grow into new sorts of human beings. Curiosity is the engine of learning, humbled when we realize we often don’t even know who we are. How may we encounter another when we need to encounter ourselves first? And happiness points outward, he concluded, citing Nietzsche and others. When there is a lot of injury in the culture, we have to repair it. Kindness is an act that can shape our lives forever, or just for that moment. It heals.

For tonight, then: gratitude. 

A lot of energy goes into dissecting the gifts and challenges of Facebook these days, which is of course legitimate and necessary. Facebook has sculpted much of our human imagination and fear, gaining millions into the billions for companies across the globe. I am glad the Corporate Beings are beginning to take some responsibility for ‘tagging’ fake-news and at least putting banners on things that may harm others. I know that others call this 'censorship.' I tend toward 'curation' myself, and our world is better with a bit more organization, I figure. Besides, Facebook is already the old-school platform, of course, having been complemented by Twitter and now all the rage (literally) about Parler, the social media platform (begun in 2018) to which Trump supporters, Conservatives, and Saudi Nationalists have been flocking. [If you enjoy a bit of liberal celebration over the election, you can shake your head and smile with Liberal Redneck, Trae Crowder, “Parler and Bridging the Gap.” If you’re more mature than that, skip the link and move on. :) I’m not mature enough not to post it at all.] 

In the last weeks, as my own mental discipline has been returning me to the actual Earth and her creatures, I am increasingly aware of waves of gratitude for my own little Facebook ‘bubble.’ I stayed really intentional about being connected across relationships-identities-persuasions, some of which I found easy and others I found not so easy. Here, I simply want to bow to those Facebook connections that held some semblance of hope and reality as this year’s election-season(s) unfolded. I know this bubble says more about me than anyone I will name here, but I am thankful...for so many I won't name, but for a variety of reasons, the ones I will name...all of you… So, in no particular order

Doc Gee Bee Jay...I have had my eyes opened to the connections you live into life, from the power of Greek Life to love for your Harlem neighborhood. I’m not even sure how we connected over the years, though I remember your ordination service, having traveled there from Princeton as a lilly white woman, naively entering the worlds she knew not. Spirit took care of all of us and it was a joyous day to experience. I’ve steeped in your rage as well as your gentle celebrations of all you can celebrate as a black man in America today. I learn because of how you post, both things I’m drawn to and things I realize liberals also need to hear, to allow. I am a better theologian today because you participate in expression the ways you do.

Josie Jay… We connected as FB friends because of CrossFit, which you joined during the pandemic but seem to have withdrawn in these later weeks. We got to workout side by side when the box reopened, and I appreciated your tenacity amidst a third-shift job in law enforcement. You have been my link into Trump-Devotion, making me uncomfortable yet allowing me to see a side of America I have needed to see to believe. I respect your devotion to law enforcement and I bow to your religious devotion, though we are vastly different believers of the same God. I wonder about your worldview, so different from my own, and yearn for any flames of fear or hatred to wane… I respect your passion and invite you to explore it more deeply in seminary studies of the Christian tradition, centuries old, beyond your current leadership voices. God is more than the loudest speakers present today.

Deborah Klawan Haizman… I have met you in person maybe twice? In the Bronx… And yet I love your “Me and Julio, down by the schoolyard” theme, with smiling pix and new locations, shared with friends. I revel in your love of family, your clear sense of belonging and being your own woman amidst so much that calls to you. As the sister of a soul-sister in my life--so connected yet not directly connected--we yet seem to align so completely in a startling number of things--family, fun, politics, books, arts, music, city life, service, and more. It was a balm to my soul to hear of your own political volunteer work, your appreciation of those of us in the middle of the country working toward a safer, more democratic world. I love your celebrations of family, of tradition, of fun and the joy of living. 

Perdita Finn & Clark Strand… Your work found me early in this pandemic pause--The Way of the Rose--and I regularly receive nourishment from the gentle community-closed-group you steward on Facebook. My devotion to Our Lady has deepened because of you both, and I have attuned my ears and words toward a gentleness of speech that I might not have been able to sustain as easily without such steady nourishment. Your sacred work has brought a community together online, which has even connected me to a dear new sister-friend from Hawaii! An artisan of rosaries, two of which will be landing in my home by January 4th, so the tracking code suggests!

CrossFit peeps -- Nicki and Jim Hagler, Melissa Matthew Mitchell, Jesse Grigsby, Marc Herbst, Cindy Rinesmith, Kirstyn Nyegard, Steve and Colleen Kandel, Megan Baldwin, Mike and Michelle Weaver, Attiga Wolfe, Wendy and Thornton Thompson, Vicki Brubaker, Lori Larreategui and so many more… This community bent on fitness and health has been my rock of sanity amidst the swirls of so much INsanity in our country today. The interesting thing is that we are a remarkable cross-section, just as we are. I know the depth of your hearts in how I experience you with your fitness journey, your kids, your partners AND I know several of us voted across our divides. Being with you several times a week has not only made me more fit--metcon, WODs, intensity of effort and such--it has made me a more sensitive and aware human being. I’m able to hold more ambiguity because I can see and feel your own life’s passions in between the ‘official’ reasons we’re together. 

Lacey Morris Vickers -- The vagaries of higher theological education obscured our connection when we both lived in the same town, not to mention the collegial connection I enjoyed with your husband. It did mean that I rarely got to encounter your voice without lots of other persons and functions in the mix. Today, these years later, your FB feed is a regular stopping place for me, as it was during pre-election months. You welcome a cross-section of folks into your listening/viewpoints, and you steward a care-full and often quite funny space for so many different folks to converge. You have a special gift in this, I've learned. I've also loved learning about your curated-life, doing what you love to do. I often laugh aloud at a discussion-strand you've started. New Year's Eve 'memes' most recently. I'm thankful and glad to know you're in this world now.

There are so many more I could name, of course, but these are the regular ‘encouragements’ and ‘windows into life’s complexities’ that made this past election season bearable. I have my own convictions and passions into which I’m living for a better country for more of us. AND I am wiser for being in the feeds of seriousness and silliness you offer in precisely who you are. I am thankful.

May all that is Holy bless you, and bless our country, together.

Hopelessness Then...Wondering

I don’t know if I can invest in the hope again, I heard myself say to him.

It takes a lot for me to profess hopelessness aloud. I may feel it, usually unaware that I feel it because I have learned to resist my feelings for so long. Instead, I’ll sense a numbness, an apathy or lethargy that I simply cannot seem to shake. I will allow it to take hold for a while, maybe even wallowing in it so to really honor its presence, whatever “it” might be. Then I create some disciplined, structured creative renewal plan to kick myself into gear, to pull myself up by proverbial bootstraps, to get over myself and get back to productive contributions to communities and people I love. But today...I don’t know if I can invest in the hope again, I said.

I’ve not written in these cyber-pages for quite a while, even as I have whisps of topics and perspectives I’ve been thinking into, feeling my way into and out of… The whole blog-project started within a felt-wave of “Do what you can do...I’m a writer and theological professor with Facebook connections to my institution’s alums and various other church-folks in my life...I’ll write, then.” I have found my voice in a more public fashion, in political-civic things of which I traditionally steer well clear. I have retained the commitment to write from rising feeling, not any intellectual or political point my mind may want to make. It’s been important for me to stay close to my body, to my energies, to rising feeling and the drive to become articulate about what I sense, feel, in these complicated days. 

I’ve not known how to write about the hopelessness I feel, reading the news-media headlines, hearing the hyped anxieties and unconscious traumatic-responses (for some) and enraged certainty of (anticipated) triumphalism (for others). I don’t even know what the last blog-focus was, to be honest, and it was weeks ago now so I’m not going to return there. I have been struggling to keep a commitment to ‘crossing the bridge of the divide’, of insisting upon the humanity of all involved, even as the triggers are so ready all around us, in each of us, for our worst selves to explode any bridges we might attempt.

There comes a time, apparently, when it’s important to name that hopelessness has triumphed, at least for now. I do not have it in me to extend a hand to any Trump Republican who thinks the election was stolen. Recounts, handcounts, over fifty law-suits engaged with only 1 court victory for Trump’s claims--with a huge number of those judges appointed by Trump himself, btw. I do not have it in me to ‘consider the best of the other’ when this ‘other’ population resorts to violence, intimidation, death threats, lynching threats, and hysteria about Democrats eating babies. I simply do not have it in me…

...which ruptures a self-image I’ve carried and honed for a long time. I’m no longer as amenable or compassionate, innovative or willing as I used to think I was. 

I’ve been a true-believer about the Sacred and its work of reconciliation, holding irreconcilable opposites together in a patient tension until some better and unperceived Third Way could emerge from the fierce devotion held between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ I’ve held (and continue to hold) learning/teaching spaces for this Work to unfold within those training to become religious-ecclesial leaders today. I make jokes about my expectations of ‘success-rate’ in this work, of course. If 10% of a class finds the doorway into an experience of non-dual awareness, even for just a moment, I consider the class a raging success. I don’t anticipate raging successes in my work there, but I’m persistent and trust the Universe to open portals as students are ready. And not a moment before (which would do damage to the student). Sometimes, though, I realize I’m in a grief-pocket about this… I mean, why bother with the depth and challenge of this journey when sunlight-Christians--those who find ‘faith’ to be only the positive, and ‘doubt’ to be a sin or weakness--really don’t want to bother? Sometimes it does feel hopeless. Thankfully, though, I’m well-trained in that this Sacred Work doesn’t come from me anyway. It comes from Spirit, Source, however you may want to name...so I steward my gifts as best I can and make jokes about the 10%.

A bigger chunk of hopelessness rests in another part of my body, another part of my Sacred Work in the world: circle. I devoted the last seven years to being-in-circle and holding-circle-spaces well and good for awakening, deepening consciousness, journeys with one’s own shadow (both ‘negatively perceived’ [wound stories] and ‘positively perceived’ but not claimed [hidden gifts yet to blossom]). Here’s another grief-pocket I often find myself in, I now see: I thought I had found a community of practice that would be my home for a very long time. I had finally arrived at a woman’s Shangri-La, a community with an expansive vision to create anew and be created anew after centuries of silencing and such violence on our bodies we can’t help but jump at sounds even in daylight. And for some blessed, short years, it was that. Until, as per a now familiar pattern, I was reprimanded for advocating for our (supposedly shared) values at (admittedly) some structural-administrative expense. Everyone really did the best s/he could do AND wounds were sustained all around. This community of practice became what it always has been--a fragile and very human collective with its own shadows and frailties inflicted upon those (perceived to be) moving outside of its norms. Human being, living in a living-breathing-active community? You're gonna get wounded. You just are.

So today I had a conversation with a fellow I’ve met before, a Circle-y guy whose poetry and listening-ways I enjoy…I heard myself say, I don’t know if I can invest in the hope again. Can any of us, really? Maybe we human beings really are simply too far gone to be anything but the increasingly isolated, anticipatedly-violent, traumatized-grief stricken wounders that we are. We refuse to imagine it could be different. We refuse to exercise our spiritual-heart-muscles to see another’s pain with compassion. We hide from the suffering of others. And now some of us are obsessively focused on an authoritarian reality-show TV host-cum-politician duping millions of us that he’s going to save us. Save us from what? From whom? Ourselves?

Not even Donald Trump can do that…(she says satirically, feeling it wise to be explicit about satire).

[On a lighter note that I both feel and don’t feel: Autocorrect keeps altering my spelling of human wounders to wonders. Maybe it really is up to you, literally. You have to intentionally put the ‘u’ in wonder. Wondering forward then, shall we?...]

Loyalty and Legitimacy...Can We Look at Ourselves?

I have gotten curious about the word legitimate in our political milieux (plural, divided, polarizing…), particularly as I feel the wide divergences (the ‘gap(s)’ to be bridged) and a rather chosen short-sightedness, even acute amnesia, in the more liberal-progressive voices in our midst. Legitimate today seems most bandied about in the flurry of our presidential election politics, but not surprisingly, the ‘sides’ are using the term in different ways. 

An easy Google starting point, just to lay some groundwork: Legitimate in its adjectival form means conforming to the law or rules. The verb form, to legitimate something, is to justify something or make it lawful. Merriam-Webster gives a bit more nuance and depth, of course. 1a: “lawfully begotten,” and 1b “having full filial rights and obligations by birth,” as in a legitimate child, or more often in a dispute over patronage or kingship, an illegitimate child. Legitimate here is historically significant for patriarchal-aristocratic lineages and succession, but rather offensive in contemporary speech. No child is illegitimate today; every child is a human being in need of honored dignity and opportunity. I’m struck by 1b, of course, the idea of being born into obligations. We’ll come back to that.

Then there are adjectival definitions 2-4, which are more often the contours of our current predicament: 

• 2: “being exactly as intended or presented; neither spurious or false” (a legitimate grievance); “being an actual example of something specified” (a legitimate threat to national security); “genuinely good, impressive, capable of success” (a legitimate contender for the Gold medal)

• 3: “accordant with law or with established legal forms and requirements” (a legitimate government) and “ruling by or based on the strict principle of hereditary right” (a legitimate king)

• 4: “conforming to recognized principles or accepted rules and standards” (a legitimate expenditure) and “fair or reasonable : VALID” (she raised some legitimate concerns)

My curiosity here first arose in a piece by Heather Cox Richardson on the necessity of a loyal opposition in any healthy democracy. It landed next on the multiplicity of uses we can see for legitimate in our current civic worlds. I’m not sure where these two strands will meet as we listen together, but they seem connected somehow, with both needing more conscious attention. I’ll start with the Richardson bit on loyal opposition, then weave in what I see with legitimate.

“This recognition of a loyal opposition was key to more than 200 years 

of peaceful transfers of power….until now.”

Each morning, I receive an email from Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who teaches 19th century American history at Boston College. (These words above are hers…). I’m most intrigued by her recent book--How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America--though I’ve not invested time or money there yet. Christmas is coming… But this daily email is a calming thing for me--a slow presentation of facts in the news day, supported by links to the sources she’s relying on for what she says. It doesn’t have flashy news-media ‘eye-grabbers’ or advertisements. It doesn’t try to catch my attention with salacious or volatile prose. It’s a gentle overview of the news, given her social location and historical expertise in American political history, especially. I’ve been making the rounds of other news outlets for headlines--Washington Post, BBC, The New York Times, then a smattering of others including Fox News via Flipboard. But this morning email feels like a deep breath of something grounding and sane.

I am well aware that part of the reason why it calms me is because she writes and convinces through a communication style I value. The words aren’t flashy. She is persuasive within well-supported fact-based language. She is well-versed in American history that becomes relevant, or she makes so relevant, in her daily review. I love the sense of continuity in our country’s history I gain from her expertise. I appreciate the distinctive things she teaches me ‘on the sly’ as I’m ‘reading the news.’  Because of course I’m easily dis-eased by news events these days, whether it is the salacious news coverage of the Trump family losing status and power while grasping for it, or souring it for the Biden/Harris Administration, or the silent majority of Republicans watching this play out in the news each day, refusing to speak into the maelstrom of refusal and denial. This daily email affirms the things I yearn to have affirmed...a sense of logic, New England rationality, our American history (both proud and shameful aspects of it), and a clear head amidst entertainment politics.

It was informative to read the various developments of a news cycle last week, within her historical argument for the purposes of a loyal opposition in a healthy democracy. In the centuries before the founding of the Colonies-Become-States, you either agreed with the king or you were a traitor, who then often lost everything--standing, resources, even life. Eventually, in England, the idea of the loyal opposition emerged. One could criticize the policies and actions of the king and be loyal to the country (and keep one’s head firmly planted on one’s shoulder, Richardson jests). In this context, Richardson is pointing out that we have lost the felt-sense of “a loyal opposition.” The polarization of our country today means “the other side” is consistently delegitimized and condemned as ‘unPatriotic.’

A clear view from the liberal side: Loyalty to the country we all share means dissension and confrontation of Trumpist Republicanism and its dissolution of governmental institutions created to protect-support all of us... A view from the conservative side: Loyalty to the country we all share means honoring Trump’s presidency as legitimate, regardless of whether you agree with him or not. The question of the health of American democracy lives and breathes in this tension AND I will suggest that all of us have something to learn from ‘the other side,’ no matter how distasteful we may find it.

Richardson’s prose points to the obvious in the  news cycles. A majority of Republicans are refusing to honor that Democrats have legitimately won this election and will now legally govern. She cites a “generation of Republican rhetoric claiming that Democratic votes are illegitimate.” 1986, Republican operatives began to talk about cutting down Black voting under a “ballot integrity” initiative in hopes that would depress Democratic votes. Then developments like these in 1993, 1994 on into the 2013 Shelby v Holder decision in which the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Richardson next summarizes the increase of gerrymandering-- manipulation of census and redistricting--which manipulates the power of the vote from the inside of government, wrestling it away from any ‘one-person-one-vote’ power of the people to speak plainly. She covers other topics here, but she concludes, “Aside from the outcome of this particular election, this attempt of Republican leaders to delegitimize the Democratic Party is an assault on our democracy. Here’s why…” 

She outlines the development of a loyal opposition in English history, and the natural development of it in the early United States, with the Jeffersonian Party that formed in response to George Washington’s power as First President. “Democracy requires at least two healthy political parties,” Richardson reminds us, “so there is always an organized opposition to the party in power.” This does two things…”it enables people to disagree with current leadership while staying loyal to the nation, and it provides a means for oversight of the people running the government.” Given how “loyalty to country we all share” is configured today--a classic either/or with an old white man straining for authoritarian (or at least oligarchic) rule at the center--we no longer remember the healthy practices of loyal opposition all of us will need over years of citizenship. It’s like the gloves are completely off, with blood everywhere...

So what do we need to learn collectively to honor, allow, attempt to reinstate for an honest, trustworthy loyal opposition to breathe...a way of being in our country that by definition will be dissenting with the party in power? What are the boundaries and grounds of healthy dissent, of resistance of the inhumane?

My gut sense is that there is some movement for us here in considering legitimacy and its uses in public discourse. It became a tag-word for me, of course, because of the everpresent focus on the legitimacy (or not) of the presidential election results, painstakingly certified by local officials in counties and then states across the nation and daily-hourly undermined by President Trump in his tweet streams and farces of legal challenges thrown out by judges for being farcical, all iced with right-wing media selling advertising to willing (and fearful) publics. It was helpful to receive Richardson’s historical overview, pointing out the Republican intentional focus on strategies for attacking the legitimacy of the (Democratic) vote, or any vote that would push Trump out of power. Suppression of the vote, gerrymandering districts so to corral power by the current party in power is a longstanding, historical practice of politicians forgetful or neglectful of their constituencies in more immediate contact with power-mongering in Washington. Which of course is a liberal-leaning way to describe what-is before us.

The Republican use of the word legitimate seems to land solidly in MW’s #2, with some #4 thrown in. [2: “genuinely good, impressive, capable of success”; 4: “conforming to recognized principles or accepted rules and standards.”]  Republican tactics rhetorically focused on phrases like “ballot integrity” and “too easy access to voting” seem to arise in response to Democratic “get out the vote” movements that strive to empower anyone and everyone who is eligible to vote to vote. Before I say more, it seems wise to recognize that we need both of these forces for balanced elections with deep integrity. We need the expansive everyone who is eligible and we need the specifications of what eligibility means. 

In this frame, so far, these Democratic ventures are legitimate in the #2 sense--genuinely good, impressive, capable of success--and so Republican strategy has been to focus on legitimacy in the #4 sense--conforming to recognized principles or accepted rules and standards (or arguably eroding the standards themselves, so to honor only those purposeful for the tactic). A fine tension, workable just as it is...except when a country’s history and systemic refusal of black-brown-PoC is explicitly and tacitly ignored. I struggle to understand these Republican strategies as patriotic or humane. But I also struggle to understand my husband’s conservatism that will choose an institution over a people, community, or person. Yet he does, and he still loves people. The important point here is that the tension is needed and the use of legitimate speaks to different things. We talk past each other (big surprise). We cannot welcome all who are eligible unless we are also clear on what eligibility means.

The other focus of the word legitimate I will tend to today has longer reach back into these last four+ years, arguably even longer in the rancorous discourse(s) between Democrats and Republicans. #NotMyPresident points to this phenomenon, almost independent of ‘side’ and presidential administration. 

Almost independent of ‘side’ and administration. 

What I wish Richardson had seen and named aloud for her readers is the trajectory of Democratic rhetoric challenging the legitimacy of Trump’s Presidency these last four years. We are all reaping what all of us have sown, in some fashion.

One of my own family’s truisms can speak to this...from an exchange mirrored back to me for years as I was growing up. Somewhere in my youth, I learned that “It’s not fair!!!” had some social capital, some political capital in my family...until it didn’t. I would exclaim, “It’s not fair!!” and at first, I’d get the balancing attention I sought. But eventually my folks, wise to the competitive-sibling dynamics unfolding, would respond, “No, it’s fair. You just don’t like it.” In my family today, smiling, we know “It’s not fair” now means “Lisa doesn’t like it.” Today’s Democrats desperately need to learn this distinction, particularly as our democracy appears to be so incredibly fragile right now...

...to which we have contributed all along. It's so easy to condemn current Republicans who voted for Trump because the Biden-Harris Administration is now certified as Elected. But complaining about their refusal of the election seems more and more petty to me, coming from liberal Democrats who refused and called Trump illegitimate. Say the man's character horrifies you. Say America is not the America you thought it was. Be horrified by the threats to our democracy and do everything you can to protect it. But own this is who we as a collective selected, against our own collective best interests. We have fertilized these seeds for four years, even longer...

Four years ago, the top-echelon of Democratic Party leadership honored the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, though none of them liked it. [#3-4: “accordant with law or with established legal forms and requirements” (a legitimate government); 4: “conforming to recognized principles or accepted rules and standards” (a legitimate expenditure) and “fair or reasonable.”] Hillary Clinton conceded the day after Trump’s projected ‘wins’ (which must have been excruciating). The Obamas peaceably welcomed the incoming Trump administration, honoring the institutional legitimacy of it all (also bowing to Obama’s relative quiet amidst the four years of administration debilitating or trying to debilitate most of these institutions…). Countless others honored in actions that spoke louder than words: Trump’s presidency was indeed legitimate. But a stunned, liberally-based Democratic Party did not like it...was repulsed and horrified.

It then became easy and commonplace to argue that Trump was illegitimate, his presidency was a tweet-storm debacle. #NotMyPresident and excoriating refusals of the man, the Office, the Administration. [#2: “being exactly as intended or presented”...“genuinely good, impressive, capable of success”; 4: “conforming to recognized principles or accepted rules and standards” “fair or reasonable”]. All sentiments I understand in a deep-belly way, of course. I have tried (mostly) to hide from the news and participate in activist-advocacy ways for an honoring and rebuilding of our governmental institutions. But let's own up and see us all creating this threat...

Richardson’s email last week snagged something in me that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but finally could name when looking at legitimacy. Her fierce passion--deeply appreciated--is all about the current Republican Party’s refusal to honor the (now-certified) results of our Presidential Election, showing a clear victory for President-Elect Joseph R. Biden and Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris. She brilliantly outlines the development of the loyal opposition and argues a historical trajectory of Republican conservatism that has undermined the viability of honorable dissent in the face of an increasingly autocratic President.  And yet it is the Democrats of these last four years who have composted and fertilized the seeds of illegitimacy already all around us. And we are now surprised? A bit naive, don't you think?

Always, always here, it seems like all of us need to take a look at this man, our current President, Donald Trump, and see him as he is leaving the current stage (thank heavens) as who we are in some way. The aversions will be strong, and they will be different for each of us...but until more of our collective is willing to do just that, he--or authoritarians smarter and more malicious than he is--will return. Until we learn a new way...together...a new way in which everyone commits to help the current party in power to succeed on behalf of all of us.

The cynic in me says we have four years to learn a newer, better way. Let's not waste it by focusing on Trumpers. Can we look at ourselves? Really LOOK? Then LEARN? Perhaps a legitimate American is one who is willing to see his/her own shadow projections, constantly pulling them back from the political opposition to see what in that judgment speaks/points within. Perhaps every American is now born with the obligation to pull the projections back home and one action at a time, change the culture of discourse. Hmmm....

Projections Aren't the End...Welcoming Them Home is the Way

Today I received the ‘bookend teaching’ to a question I have carried for well over three years now. I know I project my own pain into the world, and I am the focal point of other people’s projections; what is the wisdom teaching to break the cycle? To compost the pain? 

Multiple psychological perspectives upon the complexity of the human condition show a typical human response to discomfort, pain, overwhelming emotion is the projection of that pain beyond the body’s sensation. This requires dissociation of the pain from the body--usually a mental operation--and then the projection of this pain-ugliness-aversion onto another person, race, institution, community. All of us do this, though of course some more than others. All of us are creative in our projections too. When things get really tough, we can project most of our pain onto just about anyone in order to relieve the pain.

The bookend teaching I name above is a practice called the shadow bag, given marvelous contour and example, illustration and practice by Chameli Ardagh, founder of Awakening Women, an online (now) community of women’s empowerment and embodied mythology. It is not a practice that I can invite you into through these simple words--it needs context, preambles of other practices, a community of practitioners in which to allow the descent into repressed pains, forgotten sensations. But I can share with you the fruit of my practice this afternoon. If you’re interested and willing, you can be in touch with Chameli Ardagh via the linked website here for what she might offer you.

The instructions that led me to the journey I want to share? 

• Drop down into your belly, your body, and identify a story or image in which you feel judgement of another. Feel the judgment. Describe it out loud, in your own voice, if you can.

• Using your arms, in a scooping motion, bring your projection back to you. Release the object of your judgment from your projection, bringing it back into your body. Do this several times to feel the energy returning home to your own body.

• Feel what you feel, back in your own body. Make space for it, in all its ugliness or pain or aversion. Let whatever images or memories that come arise into your awareness. Listen to your body for where the judgment-pain-aversion comes from. Where does it come from? Look into the Shadow Bag, to see what you learn...

• Let the emotions-sensations expand. Feel everything that comes--tears, pain, shame, guilt, etc. Let your body hold it, release it, hold some more, release some more.

• Perhaps using some music with a bit of a beat, a repetitive beat or lyrics, let your body move...gentle swaying...shaking...release… More may come...let it come…

• Ease out of the practice gently, letting yourself transition from the depth spaces back into consciousness that communicates, might use words…

• Sit with what you’ve learned...

My first exercise of this was a 'simple' domestic thing: my increased irritation and judgment of my husband’s way of eating at the dinner table. As our pandemic bubble has shrunk and we’ve had more and more extensive time together, I have been getting irritable about how he eats, the sound of him eating. It can become all I can think of when we sit there, sharing a meal. My stuff, not his. My judgment lands on him, unsuspecting and undeserving, but wow does it land. Sharing breakfast or dinner has become painful and distracting for me.

The fruit of the practice? I was led, viscerally, to a deep sadness I carry within me all the time, how often my own body as a woman gets judged...assessed… measured...even if it is to offer a compliment. I struggle to receive compliments from him, from many others, because to ‘succeed’ in beauty, the way beauty functions in our society, means others ‘fail’ at beauty. For a long time, I failed at beauty simply for self-protection in a world idolizing and abusing ‘attractive women.’ This was an unconscious choice, of course, so the judgments of my body by others and then internalized by me would cut me inside, for not being feminine enough, as ‘he’ defines ‘feminine’ (or as our society defines feminine, he has often retorted, like that would help). I shunned girly-girls or those ‘caving to society’s feminine’ as weak and uninteresting. And now today, this pandemic season, I’ve lost a ready source of seeing myself mirrored as beautiful in feminine eyes, nonjudgmental, curious, welcoming. I’ve lost the ability to be in loving and tactile ways of women being with women in circle time. Naturally, this old pain has arisen in me, projected onto him, at the dinner table. [Editorial note, 12 hours later: projection completely gone. Breakfast was delightful and free...].

Simple, right?

So let’s lean into a larger field of judgment, easy at hand. President (for now) Donald Trump. There is little in our social media worlds today that will trigger judgment in me as quickly as hearing his voice in a soundbite (yes, on NPR, not Fox), or watching a clip of him at a pre-election rally, or seeing a picture of him sitting in a golf-cart with the presidential seal plastered to the front. I literally and physically clench by body, reactively, instinctively. My throat gets a lump in it. My stomach aches and sometimes, tears will come from a deeper place in my belly. I feel anger, rage, and I can wind up with an evening completely distracted and wasted in a futile sense of anxiety. I find him a reprehensible man, repulsive and painful to look at. (Uranus consciousness, AW would say, without the unified-unifying consciousness of Gaia who loves all of her children, even the most ugly/averse, mythically speaking).

What would it be like--what fruit might come--if I were to look into the shadow bag with this overflowing cauldron of judgment and condemnation?

First of all, the judgment being so plentiful and multifaceted, I’ll probably have to do this practice for days or weeks to get to even a portion of the strands of all of it. But I was surprised and quite moved by just the first strand of it, with a brief practice of it this afternoon, in the ‘online half-day retreat’ I’d registered for a couple weeks back. I dropped down into my belly… I felt the violence of the judgments in me, against him. My womb and stomach clenched, going into paroxysms of pain, tears, deep belly weeping. Part of me held the ground beneath me and invited it some more. As I ‘wept myself out,’ I breathed into the space opening up within my body, waiting for images or words or memories…

He is incapable of feeling, were the words that bubbled up. My heart has broken into a thousand pieces in these four+ years, seemingly again and again as he bluffs and postures, exacts suffering on a whim of his tweet, divides and accuses seemingly at random but ultimately, at the ‘other’ to himself, be that by economics (most important to him), status, race, ethnicity, ability, etc. As much as I condemn his actions to be inappropriate for presidential leadership and care, the source of my judgment is not these obvious rationalizations or arguments from within leadership studies. 

It is excruciating for me to see him living a life incapable of feeling…and it is excruciating because I know a bit of what that is now, from the inside. I have deep grief, rage, and sadness at my own achingly slow recovery of feeling in my own body. I have relatively recently awakened to my own body as a woman from the inside, having been reared in a devout, faithful loving family whose Protestant heritage was to rationalize feeling more than feel it, experience it. It wasn’t until I was 45 years old that I was finally strong enough to ‘retrieve this part of my soul’ or ‘break open’ to the abandonment of feeling that happened to all of us in my ancestral lineage upon our birth(s). I have slowly been regaining my capacity for feelings that have always been there but that I have dissociated, avoided, repressed, denied, projected onto… It is excruciating for me to listen to a man with as much power as he has had, seeing him so incapable of feeling...concern for another, love for a perceived ‘enemy,’ compassion for those suffering and dying (whether from COVID or in our armed services), even curiosity or wonder. I will react immediately with all my rage, grief, sadness when I see the unbearable suffering of so many I know, and don't even know, that could have been stopped if he was capable of feeling.

I can use political language and leadership studies to make a persuasive argument (to liberals and non-Trump Republicans) against Donald Trump, with logical reasons for the legitimate judgments I have made for years. But the source of my judgment, my projection, is me...my own journey back to deep feeling, the fears of being strong enough to withstand all that would arise, the pain of so much dissociated and separated from me, myself, and I.

What might our country become if instead of making arguments within the hallowed (and legitimate) halls of Reason, each of us was willing to really look into the Shadow Bag for where these judgments come from, for each of us? Every one of them would be different, for one thing, because no one's story is the same as another's. More importantly, however, this practice shifts the grief, rage, sadness in the body... I am more freed from my immediate triggers because the energy is different now in my body. He doesn't need to change in order for me to be free, in other words. I need to do this practice with judgment, opening space for compassionate listening to my rage, grief, sadness...releasing the feelings I've prevented myself from feeling for years, if not (often) decades. And then I don't get hooked into the liberal rage(s)...or the Trumpist rage(s)...

I've been gifted with a bookend practice to a question I have been asking for well over three years. In the fall of 2017, I became the lightning rod attractor of vicious projections from a participant in the Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy I led, co-facilitated. She wrote an excoriating several page review, spewing her pain onto me (mostly), and no one in the leadership circle could (or would?) protect or defend me in it. I knew everything she was spewing had more to do with her than with me, but I had no method or practice to move us to the next step (even if she would have wanted to be free of her pain, projected onto me). Our community line was "I refuse your projection," but that doesn't do any work with it, which is what we needed to learn how to do. But the leadership in our women's community didn't have the body-wisdom or the willingness...

Yet this is the wisdom of women committed to continual awakening. It is not to be done lightheartedly or haphazardly. It takes a strong container, a wise guide well versed in attachment and release of ego, a community of practice, and a willingness to descend with a trust that ascension will follow in its time.

Most Americans I know don’t have the preamble or patience for this kind of journey…so there's that...there's invitational and gentling work to be done to even open the portal(s)...

...but when enough of us are dead and dying...when the earth is even nearer her breaking point...then there will be more of us to hold the space for the rest of us to do this Work. This deeply Sacred Work of the Feminine awakening in women and men being readied for co-creation, new stories, better horizons...

Freedom is Complicated...Complicating

Today (as is every day) a good day to remember our veterans, to consider the complicated freedom for which they’ve given so much, even the most that can be given.

One of the CrossFit traditions I so enjoy is the ‘hero workout’ chosen by the ‘box’ to honor a day like today. McGhee was the wko selected today, and here’s a bit about the veteran. Corporal Ryan C. McGhee, 21, was a US Army Ranger who was killed in action on May 13, 2009 by small arms fire during combat in central Iraq. He served with 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment of Fort Benning, GA. This was his fourth deployment, his first to Iraq. Ryan was engaged to Ashleigh Mitchell of Fredericksburg, VA. He is survived by his father Steven McGhee of Myrtle Beach SC, his mother Sherrie Battle McGhee, and his brother Zachary. These tend to be longer workouts, more strenuous so to honor the discipline and strength of those serving, especially those who lost their lives in the line of duty. We partnered up to do deadlifts, pushups, and box jumps. My body is weary and appreciates this visceral sense of honoring Veterans’ Day, of remembering Ryan McGhee, of mourning alongside his family and his fiancee.

Freedom is the clarion call for so many who stress our country does not do enough to support our troops, honor their service. It’s easy to make the argument that more could and should be done, particularly if you enter into the Veterans Hospital systems or the VA. Veterans often don’t know the benefits available to them, and the resourcing of the VA has historically been the least funded and most administratively challenged within lesser resources. So if we support our troops, we should fund and support the institutions that care for them, right? Except that would require more government than most Americans want to spend our money on, Republicans especially harping on about the need to shrink the government.

Complicated, right? We could dive into freedom in its “freedom from” lens, or move first into “freedom for.” Given the human propensity to see the world in an anxious, even negative/fearful light, the loudest voices clamoring for freedom today come in the freedom from stream… Freedom from government oversight (economy, guns, small business regulation), except in the matter of women’s bodies, of course, which does not merit this advocacy in “freedom from government oversight.” Complicated. Freedom from tyranny too, of course, fighting authoritarians all over the world...unless you like y/our currently-governing authoritarian, in which case, freedom from tyranny is not the lens as much as freedom from “them” or “those” who might disagree with you. Again, complicated.

“Freedom for” tends to focus on other streams at some cross purposes, but not always, from the “Freedom from” voices. Many today clamor for freedom to live freely, without government interference into love or family choices, into health or medicinal (shall we say?) choices. To be the Land of the Free, this suggests, means Americans (US ones) get to choose their work, their lifestyle, their religion, their leisure. The diversity in this stream of thought is overwhelming and contradictory, by definition. Complicated, to even know the newest wave of human expression (gender, for instance) or voice (pronouns) or creativity (art, culture, ritual and more).

So how do soldiers today perceive their calling(s) to discipline and performance, to protect this Land of the Free? At the root of freedom is an irrepressible paradox, after all. Soldiers live (and some die) to protect freedoms they would not choose themselves, simply because they are the complicated Whole of the United States. We have even crafted a Union (so far) that patiently processes and protects the freedom of some to endanger the whole, to endanger the entire democratic experiment itself.

One of my favorite West Wing episodes is The Midterms, one of the early Season Two episodes following the shootings at Rosyln, Virginia. Josh is recovering from intensive surgery on his lungs/heart, trying to get CJ to open her briefing with a thing on the Theory of Everything. “Psychics at Cal-Tech have found…” she begins, then stops, then recalls, “That was probably supposed to be physicists...physicists at Cal-Tech…” Josh bangs his head against the hospital bed headboard. 

The most moving moment, however, is at the very end, when all of the efforts in the staff and down the Democratic Party line offered up the precise same number of seats in House with which they ran. Everything would remain the same. The staff sit outside drinking beer on the steps of Josh’s home, with him in his PJs and a robe. “Don’t tell me democracy doesn’t have a sense of humor,” Josh says. “Toby...what do you say about a Government that goes out of its way to protect even citizens that try to destroy it?” Then begins a refrain...spoken by each staff there...

God bless America

God bless America

God bless America

God bless America

Today, in the face of a confirmed and re-confirmed honest election, in the face of an outgoing President who calls veterans suckers and losers, especially those who have paid the ultimate price...I bow to all veterans who serve to protect all of us.  That has to feel so incredibly complicated, complicating...