The Tower
We didn't notice it. We spent hours contemplating, ruminating, worrying, arguing, going over the plans back and forth, up and down. We had consultations, supervision, feedback. We read books, we did exercises. We wrote reams of pages on everything that might have gone wrong and how to make it right.
When it hit, we didn't see it coming. The one thing no one contemplated, or contemplated seriously anyway. A passing thought. A glance up, a flicker of an intimation: that seems off somehow.
Our precious self-concept. Our beautiful agenda. Our magnum opus. Our utopian dream. Our religious vision. All dashed to dust from a moment's carelessness, a glance in the wrong direction. How can something take so much effort to build and so little to destroy?
Yet the cracks had been accumulating. Nothing happens in an instant but the impact and the fall. Nothing occurs in a vacuum. Nothing is separate. That is the lie that caused us to build. If only we can get higher from this ball of dirt and filth, if only we could touch the firmament! Then we would free ourselves of this vale of incoherence, death, and meaninglessness.
The ball of fire is the apple of chaos thrown into the party. Discordia revenging her snub. The thirteenth witch offering her unwanted blessing. And after all this, after all the heart and passion poured out, all that's left is to watch the edifice collapse upon itself.
Now we return to the dirt. Some of us are screaming and crying. Some are blaming each other, or the gods. Some choose to ignore what is happening. Some pretend we will begin again and make something better. More clinging and delusions.
We cannot rush to the next project. The collapse must be mourned. We will never learn if we simply walk away now. We may take the time to clear away, to salvage what can be saved, to dispose what must.
Having lost the center of our activity, the sterling epicenter of our idealism, we now have Geb, the open fields supporting us, and Nut, the starry sky stretching above. We have possibility, terrifying and free.
to commemorate my Saturn Return
Saturn in Libra 1. Beneath the scales dispute the blessed ones: With outstretched hand, one measures the land, dispersing food and hearth from each according to their labor, to each according to their wealth. The other, with grasping hands, demands power for what is his. In agitation, the sun glowing illuminates the work of many to feed the few. Meanwhile, her wings unfold the balance, her heart the fulcrum of understanding and wisdom, mercy and strength, love and power. 2. In my throat lives shame, who says: “Do not speak. Admire the melody of laughter, beneath which thrashes muffled pain. Smile through clenching larynx, cage the voice and leash discord.” In my belly rage says: “These assholes and fools. Admire the civility, gold-plating pasted over disdain for suffering and pronouncements of ignorant judgment.” Now seething in complicity, efforts wasted as rage and shame compound in blame. Neither reason nor justice can survive when power twists to choke upon itself. 3. If I change, so must we, and so will you. Decide for yourself what to do. You could not change while I remain the same. Stasis. 4. This blind silver moonlight is my left eye, vibrating tides of your fathomless urge, upwelling desire to flow with you. This hot scarlet sunlight is my right eye, piercing the seed to crack the shell, calling the stalk to thrust upward, to claim its due. 5. This one: the decimating desert storm blasting righteousness to unveil the wicked. The other: sky that holds us all in love, arched in witness to justice and to vice. Sickness is harmony without dissent, falsehood eating serenity of soul. Torture is aggression devoid of love, evil begets evil among the scared. 6. Let both hands upset false balance. Justice will seek its own return. The goddess bends her hip, tilts her hand. Whatever you fear most to say, speak; and then listen.
The Lord of Karma
Now is the time of what is known as my Saturn return, in which the planet Saturn arrives at the location it was in during the time of my birth. In some views, it has been occurring for the past few years, since Saturn arrived in the sign of Libra. In another, it happens officially on Tuesday, when the positioning is exact.
One title of Saturn is the Lord of Karma, and according to many, the time of return causes one to confront the essence of whom they truly are and how their lives align, or fail to align, with that essence. If someone finds they are not living an authentic life, many tumultuous changes can occur during and after the Saturn return.
submitting to the work
I've yet to find the relationship with writing that really feels right to me. Or if I have, I keep letting resistance get in the way of bringing it home.
In working on a new long piece, I've set a goal for myself that I will write 600 words, 6 days a week, allowing myself one day of my choosing to rest. I've come to re-embrace the concept of Sabbath, in giving myself a break from my regular duties to relax, reconnect to what is divine and important in my life, and allow some spontaneity. Otherwise I would plan my life to death. Truly, there have been times when I wanted nothing more than to have a fixed daily schedule in which I spent half an hour meditating, an hour exercising, an hour writing, half an hour cleaning the house, eight hours working, two hours with my partner, and maybe a half hour for unstructured free time. Thus, the logic in my head goes, I won't die feeling regret that I never achieved my goals, though perhaps I might die wondering if I had ever made time to live.
These days I work at a job where the hours change daily, and my days off change weekly. Between that and being in graduate school, I don't have the stability of schedule that allows me to rigidly plan out my life, so I've needed to be even more disciplined while going with the flow. Which means I need to make sure I write when I have time to write. The nice thing about setting limits is that I also give myself permission to stop. I don't have to spend all day fretting about getting enough done if I've hit my benchmark.
The problem is when and where. Lately I've been exploiting the hell out of a Netbook I appropriated from my beloved husband, to the point where it seems to be rebelling against me. I found that writing on the bus could be quite invigorating. Since I had a limited amount of time, I could compel myself to bypass the inner critic and censor, skip past the dilly-dallying, and just write, just get out the 600 words, who cares what they are.
The downsides, of course, were that I only wanted to write when the bus was relatively unoccupied. I hate people reading over my shoulder when working on the first draft of a piece. Such privacy is rare on a bus. If I missed my work on the commute, I would try to squeeze in writing during my breaks at work, but it became all too easy to peruse the Internet and veg out.
Turns out, I have a wonderful computer at home, and a room of my own in which to work. I love my office. I've dreamed of having one for years and now I do, and now there's a part of me that wants to avoid the hell out of it. I suspect it's for the same reason that makes it seem easier to write on the bus. There's something about actually sitting down and sinking into the work that is unsettling to some part of my personality, the one that would rather procrastinate or indulge in some fruitless vice. Perhaps it's tied to why I find it hard to settle into stillness when meditating. Is it the ego? Whatever it is, it rebels against discipline, it hates settling into the process where it's just my self and the work.
I find it easy to half-ass writing. To do it on the bus, say, or at the table while chatting with my partner, or in front of the television. All great ways to avoid totally focusing. Without that full commitment, I'm not sure I can produce my best work, but perhaps that's the out my subconscious is seeking. "Oh, if it's not very good it's because I didn't try very hard." That no longer feels good enough.
So this week I'm choosing to recommit to working on my writing in my office. Not on the bus, not at work, not on the netbook. (Naturally, I am writing this blog post on the netbook at the dining table.) The process of sitting down to write creatively, to write fiction at my computer was wonderful. I could turn on the atmospheric, spooky music I loved, shut the door, and let myself write. When I was a teenager, this was my great passion. To enjoy the music I loved and create, using my computer as the medium of creation. It's a lonely process, and there's a sacrifice in time that could be spent with others. At the same time, in doing the work, I feel freed up to be more there with others. I'm not trying to squeeze in writing on the bus or while half-assing conversation. I can do my work, unplug myself from the computer, and be there for the rest of my life.
defensive white men
If you are a white man in the United States, I invite you to open your heart to the possibility that you are inculcated with the racism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, sizeism, classism, and ethnocentrism of the dominant culture. That to the extent you fit into the privileged categories of society, you are given benefits and special treatment not allotted to others not in those categories.
If you read the first paragraph and you are already laughing, rolling your eyes, getting angry, getting upset, or wanting to argue with me about how your opinions are legitimate or your view is ignored, I invite you to take a breath and ask yourself what of those reactions are grounded in the above. Pat Buchanan said a few years ago that "white folks built this country," presumably for the benefit of white folks. Believing in that statement is a barometer of how much you have ingested the whitewashed version of history. This country was built by white folks, but also black slaves, indentured servants who at the time may not have been considered white, and underpaid Asian and Mexican immigrants, among others. The early colonists benefited greatly from their ability to simply move into existing Native American villages that were emptied out due to disease and genocide. But if you're white in this country, you are given a version of history that says your people braved the wilderness alone and forged a powerhouse out of nothing. That is the white myth.
Not fitting into all of those categories does not negate the privilege you have from some. If you are a middle-class gay white man, you may not have heterosexual privilege, but you still get the benefits of being white. Other privileged people pay attention to you and your viewpoint more readily than the views of trans people, people of color, working class people. Kyriarchy cannot be mapped using a linear equation, like saying a gay white man is "less white" than a straight white man. That's like using a measuring stick to calculate how much water is in a glass. Each axis of privilege intersects in a human life with very different consequences.
Isms are personal contributions to systemic oppression. We receive and produce them. I did not actively choose to integrate stereotypical and harmful beliefs about other humans, nor did I choose to be white or the privileges given by being white. Even so, I am white. I have privileges because I am white, and a man, and not trans. I have internalized attitudes, thoughts, and feelings about people of color, women, trans people, and more that are constantly imprinted upon me by our overculture. To promote justice rather than injustice, I need to accept this reality and be willing to observe myself. I need to be willing to be called out for these when they translate into bigoted actions.
If I can accept that these things are inside of me, I can be in more control of my behavior. I know that it's not all that I am. I know that I have values that call me to be an ally as well as these thoughts and feelings.
Being called out for privileged thinking and behavior is challenging. It triggers my vulnerability that does not want to be seen as bad, as bigoted, as not-progressive. It triggers my white male complex that I am being unfairly blamed for things outside my control, or that somehow being called racist is worse than the pain I cause when I act from my unthinking privilege. The best thing I can do is take a breath, listen to the criticism being offered, ask for clarification if needed, and figure out how I can do better. It's not about me or my feelings at all. Those are my responsibility to manage so that I can be a better ally. I may not be to blame for the crimes of my ancestors, but boy howdy do I still get all the perks, and my defensiveness does nothing to assuage that.
aphorisms of the damned, stanza 1
There is no belief so heinous as the one most recently discarded.
There is no group so hypocritical as the opposition to yours.
Ask a complex question, get no answer.
Ask a simple question, sit through ten minutes of conversation until you can finally get your answer.
a prayer
May we listen to each other, then speak, then listen.
May we know our hearts thoroughly that we may receive the wisdom of our peers and loved ones.
May we embrace the plurality of opinions, and engage each other with fierce attention.
May we fight with open hands and vigor, striving for a greater truth.
When the demons of our hearts arise, seeking to punish others for different views, seeking to ostracize the different and unfamiliar, seeking to erect brick walls against the force of an uncomfortable truth, may we hold these urgings with soft hands and still face our enemies with open eyes, open ears, and minds ready for dialogue.
May those who have been marginalized, oppressed, and made invisible be given their rightful place.
May those who have been elevated, privileged, and made grandiose accept their deflation with grace and understanding.
May we enter a time in which understanding and wisdom are valued more than righteousness.
May every voice be given its merit, may every being feel heard and valued.
Happiness
There are times when I feel as though I'll never be happy. Life feels generally unsatisfying for no particular reason, or for a million reasons that all present themselves at once with seeming authenticity. In this state, it feels to me like being pulled down into dark water, and it feels like I have always been there and will never get out. These times are fortunately fewer and further between than they once were.
This state of thinking and feeling can be a toxic pattern into which I get locked, a reaction to a momentary sense of dis-ease or displeasure. All of which can feel very real and all-encompassing in the moment. The words "always" and "never" often come up, signifying that this is a story that has taken hold of my consciousness. As with taking a test, nothing is always always true, or never never true.
Another distinction is that thinking "I'll never be happy" is different from "I feel sad." Really, truly feeling sad is feeling filled with life force, with the power of my attachment, my loss, my disappointment, whatever uncomfortable feelings are arising, and letting them move within me. When I am in the place of "I'll never be happy," I am not letting myself feel those feelings, nor am I moving past them.
United States culture is quite attached to happiness, the pursuit and accomplishment thereof. Oprah Winfrey, may she be blessed, has built an entire industry upon promoting the practices and products that will engender happiness in the consumer, as though happiness is not an emotional state that arises within us, but something we need to imbibe. My suspicion is that we are so preoccupied with happiness because our society is desperately unhappy. According to some studies, social equality is the primary indicator of a healthy, happy society. Living in such disparate conditions between great wealth and poverty, we are constantly aware of our place within this society, between those that have more and those that have less. Either direction seems tantalizingly close. At any moment we might experience a windfall of success, we dream, or a devastating loss that leaves us empty-handed. All of this speaks to a mindset of lack, of not having. My intrapsychic experience of being dragged down correlates to other experiences I have around feeling threatened by failure, by loss, by my fears that I cannot meet the demands of my life.
I wonder if my experiences of unhappiness are not necessary for being more essentially grounded in reality. Instead of withdrawing into fantasies and wishes, I am truly seeing my life as it is and seeing how it differs from life as some part of me wishes it could be. Without that dissatisfaction, would I have any impetus to work on myself? If I simply accepted life in a state of endless bliss, would I bother to be compassionate toward my loved ones? Which isn't to say that unhappiness is good or happiness bad. My whole humanity contains all of these experiences. What endangers me is the "always always" and "never never" stories, and reacting to my pleasures and displeasures with a fearful retreat from my experience.
When I stop to open myself to these underlying fears, however, something shifts. That intensity of feeling arises and passes. I walk on solid ground and feel that experience of being pulled down, but what I notice is that it is like gravity. I am not, in reality, being made to drown. That downward energy is met be the support of the earth, who holds my experience and lets me become more deeply rooted.
Theodicy
A while back, I got into an argument with a Christian about meditation and whether one could claim to be able to connect directly with God. Of course, the first problem is that we were having an argument about "God" in which both of us likely meant very different things, although generally we both wanted to hit the target of "whatever divine force or Being that is greater us and has something to do with our reason for existence." In his opinion, it was arrogant of me to assume I could ever be capable of connecting with this Being by myself. To him, God was something unknowable and beyond us, not present in our day to day world. My idea of God is panenetheistic, included in all things and containing all things, though we humans need our spiritual practices in order to be consciously aware of this on a consistent basis.
What struck me most about the conversation was him talking about his dying grandmother. He asked me, if I were there with her, would I think God was there? Would I sit and meditate and try to connect with God? To which I responded, Yes, God would be there, but I would not be sitting in removed meditation. More likely I would want to be present with the dying person, because God is in them as well. In a Neopagan worldview, the cycles of living and dying are sacred, part and parcel of our existence in this cyclical world. Dying is not an evil thing to be avoided at all costs. But for this person, not necessarily all Christians but this person in particular, it seemed that he could not accept that God could be in any way connected to his dying grandmother.
In retrospect, this attitude bothered me most. It arises from a theology that attempts to bolster this idea that God is a discrete entity that is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, yet lives somewhere off in the sky. A belief in such a deity might lead to profoundly moving and sustaining religiosity. Jesus himself was purported to have come from heaven to endure the worst this world had to offer. If the Christian God was so willing to do that, out of love for his people, then why wouldn't he be present for one dying person?
Yet if the religious person is unwilling to include death, evil, or any of the miseries of our world into his or her worldview, I cannot see how this could be a sustaining or nourishing spirituality when the hard times come. It's a question I continue to unpack and revisit throughout my life---what is the nature of the gods, and why is there suffering in the world? Myths of creation offer intriguing ideas as to the nature of suffering and its origin in the human psyche, but pain and death predate human existence. There have been many casualties in the project of living, from failed evolutionary missteps to creatures feeding upon each other for survival.
I suppose my answers these days are largely Existential. Suffering exists because that's the nature of life. Yet I find that beauty exists as well, and love, and softness, and joy, and the possibility of something greater. I've found that times of personal suffering have yielded profound shifts in my self-awareness that have led me to become generally happier and more whole than I was before. I also find that some wounds continue to ache years after I think they're healed.
I don't think of God as a discrete entity that is mapping out existence like a game of chess. I think of God as every thing that has been, is, and will be, working together as one interconnected ecosystem. Yet I also think of the intelligence that arises from all its parts. When I say "God," I mean the name for Everything, and I believe everything is included in her. The mystery of dying, the grief of surviving, all of that has worth and importance, and all of it can be sacred in some way. We have to claim our own capacity to make meaning, as our divine birthright.
You Must Change Your Life
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
-Rainier Maria Rilke
In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler's protagonist teachers her followers that "God is change." In this view, God as Everything is in process, nothing is fixed except the fact of fluidity. Living in the material cosmos, all that exists is ever-changing. Our human psyches develop myriad ways to convince ourselves that either this isn't true, or that somehow we can escape this reality. Finding perfect love. Writing a work of art that will last beyond our deaths. Adhering to some rigid moral code or practice in the hopes of achieving an eternal, fixed existence beyond death. As a pagan, I am not sure I believe in any kind of heavenly existence that exists beyond the natural cycles of life and death. Yet I do think that I have a soul that is more than the physical body, that may survive the death of this life and move on to another. There may well be a realm outside of the cycles of life and death, or a dimension of existence that includes all these things and thereby transcends it, but it does not feel useful to me while I'm figuring out how to manage the changes of this life.
The torso of Apollo, Greek god of music, medicine, poetry, plague, and light, animates the poem above. Time has dismembered the sculpture, as in a way it had dismembered the ancient religion celebrated by the sculpture. Yet the passion and fervor with which the artist created the icon still suffuses the curves of the sculpture's body. The power of the god beams out like light through the power of its curves, a facet of sun embodied, stretched further by the power of poetry. Here the power of the sun elicits further change for you, the viewer-reader, by virtue of being seen. Being seen, completely and totally, necessitates change.
The work of psychology and many great spiritual traditions requires the participant to develop the capacity to see. To see themselves more clearly, and thereby to see the world without the blinders of personality and history. We go through every day of our lives doing some behavior that makes us unhappy, never quite understanding why, until the day comes when a sharp insight into our own nature penetrates so deeply that there is no way we can act as we have, though we may not yet have the will to become who we wish to be.
Such change is not easy. It's not the inevitable, passive, entropic change, or even the explosive change of volcanoes. Any change inspired by such seeing, by the light of Apollo, is best bent toward the conscious becoming of one's brightest self. In this process, it may be we can tap into some eternal quality, that light that radiates from the torso of Apollo in spite of age, damage, and the loss of history.