Month: June 2020

In Love

It’s all just one big love story, you know. And we love it. We love every second of it. The ups, the downs, the twists, the turns, the heartaches, the triumphs… all of it. As I will point out again and again and again, our story is our world. We tell the story that we do, and live the story that we do, because we are in love with this thing called life. Forever seeking to get ever closer to its core, its heart, its mind, its essence, which at the end of the day is nothing but our own. The world reflects us back to ourselves perfectly. Even though we often don’t like what we see in that mirror, we intuitively know that there is something more, much more, beneath the surface image. So we keep engaging in an effort to find it, to find ourselves. 

Sometimes we make up stories that don’t reflect our true nature, or the nature of the world that we inhabit. It’s o.k., we all do it, and perhaps have to in order to come to understand what we are not. I do tend to think that is a necessary step on this crazy journey called life. One by one we can, through a process of deduction, cross off this and that as not the real me. Eventually there will be nothing left standing but the real you. Paradoxically, of course, that will be the same moment that you come to understand that there is nothing that is not you. Go figure. Ah, but what a moment of sweet liberty, and of complete responsibility at one and the same time. There is no escaping this end, but go ahead and try if you must. 

Houston is a swamp. There, I said it. The founders of Houston were speculators who sold it as something other than a swamp, something more like a new beginning in paradise. The Place upon which they laid out their new town, however, likes to send up reminders every so often. “I am a swamp,” she says. Houstonians pay her no mind. We are too busy writing a different story. We are busy creating a different version of paradise, which requires transforming the swamp into something that it is not. The swamp has her own mind with her own ideas about the paradise she once was, so in protest she sends out more frequent, more stark reminders. “I am a swamp!” The city floods. We think we must conquer this swamp thing once and for all, and so we try even harder to do so. This will not end well. The swamp will win. 

The swamp will win because you can’t fight millions of years of ecology, much less the billions of years of geology that it rests upon. We are infants in comparison to their hard earned wisdom. We would do better to start by examining our own story. Is it in alignment with what we now know to be true about the world and our place in it, or is it off somehow? When we begin to deeply ask that question, to face our unexamined assumptions, we begin to unearth not only ourselves, but everything we have buried alongside us. To jump to the chase, we must face that the worldview, the very foundation upon which Western civilization has been built, was off about the nature of reality: 

  • The world is not an objective place, separate from our subjective experience of it.
  • The world is not made up of dead, mechanistic matter that has been imbued with an extraterrestrial spirit (in the case of humans only).
  • Life is not a competition. 
  • Life does not unfold in a linear process of cause and effect. 
  • We are not separate entities.

Yet while we may have been mistaken about these assumptions, our path has not been a mistake. We had to come to know what we are not before we could move into what we are:

  • The world is intelligent and in a constant state of co-creation with everything in it.
  • Matter and energy (spirit) are one and the same thing.
  • Life is a collaboration.
  • Life emerges out of a complex, integrated network of interactions such that every little action effects the whole in ways that we cannot predict.
  • We are inextricably interconnected. We are One.

We have written this world into existence:

  • We wrote patriarchy (hierarchy with its associated powerlessness) into existence.
  • We wrote separation into existence.
  • We wrote exploitation into existence.
  • We wrote shame into existence.
  • We wrote oppression into existence.

…and on and on. We can, therefore, write a different story. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, “When you know better, (write a better story).” 

The house that I now call home was a camp first built by a guy named Jack Murray in the late 1940’s. Jack loved both nature and culture, as evidenced by the library of photos that he left behind of his extensive travels (which we now possess). He also painted. His painting of his beloved Lake Hortonia still hangs in our house. Jack was a neighbor of Shannon’s family when she was growing up in Brandon. He shared his beloved spot with them and they, too, fell in love. Understanding this, Jack essentially willed his camp to them as one of his final acts of love. Shannon spent her summers here for most of her childhood, but summers frankly weren’t enough. They wanted to live on the lake year round, so out of this love they built up and out. They winterized and moved in. Permanently. Being good Vermonters, they did all of this themselves utilizing only the skills which resided within the family. They built their dream. They created a new life for themselves.

They created to the best of their understanding, skills, vision, imagination, and resources. They knew nothing of nutrient pollution into the lake. They knew nothing of species depletion. They knew nothing of climate change. They knew nothing of the dismantling of collective life. They knew nothing of the oppression that is associated with our way of life. But now we do. It is therefore up to us to imagine a better future, to write a new story, and to create a new reality. 

How to begin? With the foundations, of course. We must unearth our unexamined assumptions, bring them to light, and start over again with a new worldview based on our better understanding. Still in love. Still with a great sense of gratitude for the love that went before us. People ask us every day why we didn’t just tear the house down completely and start over. Well it’s because too much love had gone into that house to just throw it all away, into some landfill somewhere. Our job is to pay the love forward by constantly reaching not only for our true selves, but also for the true Lake Hortonia. There is a story that is true for everyone and everything, and it wants to be known. We must reach for it again, and again, and again, and again right up to our very end, so that we too may pass this place along to the next generation in our final act of love. 

Used To

It’s funny how much our comfort level is dependent upon what we are used to. When I was used to having a washer and dryer in my house, it was a pain in the neck to do the laundry. There’s the collecting and separating of the dirty stuff (which requires scouring the whole house and inevitably forgetting something), keeping an ear out for when the first load was done so that the wet load got moved to the dryer and the next load started (which almost never occurred in a timely fashion and therefore usually meant a mad dash to finish the job when I really wanted to be sleeping without the noise of a dryer keeping me up), the endless folding and folding and folding, and only then maybe, just maybe, actually having energy left over to put the dang things away (almost never happened until much later… or in truth we lived out of the laundry hamper until it was time to do the whole thing over again). 

All of that seems like a royal pain in the ass until, well, you no longer have a washer and dryer at your disposal in your home. That is the case for us in Vermont because nothing in our house at the lake was plumbed to the septic system except the toilets, and it could barely handle that. So that means that we have to go to the laundromat. Want to talk about a pain in the ass now? Add to all of the steps above the fact that if you forget to put something in the pile before you head out it’s too late. It’s not going to get washed this week. I will say that it is easier to have multiple machines at your disposal as that speeds up the job considerably. But you can’t just go about your business as the laundry is going. Best to bring a book along. Add then my least favorite part, which is having to figure out how to wrestle the folded clothes back into a laundry bag to cart it back home for unpacking (good luck with them maintaining any memory of having been folded). Lastly, there is the putting it all away, which of course comes with all of the same resistance as mentioned above except now some of those clothes are in a laundry bag rather than a hamper. It’s very hard to find what you need in the morning searching through a bag, so inevitably the clothes end up stacked in a pile on the floor because it would take way too much effort to move that pile to the shelves that we put in place for that purpose in the closet. 

That all seems like a royal pain in the ass until, well, you no longer have a laundromat at your disposal. Add to that not having running water in your house, much less hot water, and the real fun begins. I’m just going to be very real with you right about now. Shannon and I have pretty much been smelly most of the time since this pandemic began. Yes, we shower, but certainly not every day or even every other day. It just takes too much time and effort to set it up (although Shannon has made many innovations to help speed up the process). As for clothes washing, after the first few weeks of wearing the same clothes (because we don’t have room for all of our clothes in the tiny house, we had left a lot of our clothes in the lake house which was for most of that time up in the air), we finally broke down and washed a few items by hand in a bucket and hung them out to dry. Thanks to Shannon for motivating on that front. She could only wash a few things however, because as anybody who was alive before the invention of washers and dryers knows, washing clothes is a full time job without them. And it takes hard physical labor.  It’s no joke to equate the invention of washers and dryers and such things with the beginning of the liberation of women. 

In fact, pull on the string of this one little tidbit of understanding and you’ll pull down the whole house. Let me explain. The creature comforts that we are used to require, and have always required, cheap labor. Scratch that. Not simply cheap labor, but in many cases free labor. In other words, the creature comforts that we are used to require some form of slavery. This has been true since humanity “evolved” from a hunter-gatherer society into an agricultural society right up to today. In the former, labor was divided equally according to what one was best equipped to do and all jobs were valued as equally important. That meant that things that typically tended to be “women’s work” such as gathering, weaving, cooking, etc., were valued equally to things that tended to fall on men such as hunting. This was in part because it was understood that while the hunting may have taken more strength, the gathering provided much more of the tribe’s subsistence than the hunting did. Women were, therefore, equal. That is to say, there was no such thing as patriarchy, or any such notion that men were superior to women. 

It wasn’t until we settled down that labor got thrown for a loop. Agriculture takes a whole lot more effort than hunting and gathering. It also leads to population increase because frankly, you need more labor. Yet even getting busy in the bedroom won’t do the trick on that front. You need more labor than you can produce and you need it as cheap as possible. So what did we do? We enslaved “others.” This didn’t just happen over night. It took time. It began, as it turns out, with the demotion of women to a possession of males. The male head of household became the owner of his wife and children. Literally. That became the law. Interesting too that he could elect to end the life of his children- after birth. Go figure. The patriarchy was born.

From there, it simply got more and more sophisticated at co-opting free labor from “others.” When owning women as wives proved to not provide enough labor, some women were demoted even further to slavery. Yes, women- those captured from a conquered peoples- became the first slaves. Women. That’s because the conquerers couldn’t trust men with hoes. Those hoes were way too similar to the types of weapons that were used in battle at the time. Women, on the other hand, couldn’t defend themselves. Don’t go on thinking that the dominance of men over women (patriarchy) is a natural occurrence. It was invented to deal with a labor shortage. 

As population increased and urbanization progressed, more and more free labor was needed. The patriarchy needed those conquered men too. It wasn’t long before humans figured out that it is much easier to implement slavery through psychological rather than physical oppression. All you have to do is isolate a certain group of people into an “other” category and give it an “other” label according to gender, family/region of origin, and of course race. Then rank the categories and convince everyone that the ranking is the natural order of things. Easy enough, as history has more than proven. I need not say that white men are at the top of that pecking order. We all know that quite well. We have been telling that story for literally thousands of years, since the dawn of Western civilization.

That story permeates everything: our economic system, our social system, our educational system, and especially our religions. Make no mistake about it, the patriarchy was well established by the time the Bible was written. If you think that no human would ever co-opt a sacred message to serve their own need for control over cheap labor, they’ve got you. True divine messengers never, ever said any such thing that would indicate that one person, or category of people, was more valuable than another, or that the dominance of one group of people over another was divinely justified. Nope. Any truly divine messenger has known full well that there is nothing but God, and that everyone and everything is That. I am sorry, but to whom is God subservient? To whom, therefore, does God need to be obedient? Nobody. 

Yes, I am calling bullshit. I am calling bullshit because, like you, I’m tired of it. I’m exhausted in fact. I’m so over it that I barely have the energy to respond to the endless drama that is born of the Story of Patriarchy. As a gay woman I know oppression first hand. I of course will never know the more severe oppression that comes with being Black in this country. I am honored, however, to have had the opportunity to be a witness to the inner world of Black life during my time at Prairie View A&M University. I was teaching there when Sandra Bland lost her life at the hands of the county sheriff. I got to see first hand not only the grief, but even more so the resignment, of a people.

You see, while us Whites are so busy being appalled by each and every new event that makes it into the news, for Blacks this is just everyday reality. Trust me, it is. I can’t tell you how many times a student would show up to my class shaken because they had just been pulled over by said county sheriff and asked to step out of their car for a minor, if any, infraction. Being resigned doesn’t mean it hurts any less or it makes one any less indignant at the status quo, it simply acknowledges that it’s hard to keep up the fight on a daily basis knowing that this is the way it has always been. At some point you just have to try to cope. You have to try to live your life as best you can, even as you are constantly watching your back- because you have to in order to stay alive. 

So what do we do? My answer to that question is always to get to the root of the issue. The root of this issue happens to be the same root of every other issue we are facing. It’s the Story of Patriarchy (aka, The Story of Separation). Please understand. It is a story. It is a story that we made up a very long time ago because we couldn’t imagine a better one. We couldn’t think up a better solution to what was essentially a labor problem. All of the shit that has gone down since- war, oppression, slavery, poverty, environmental degradation, climate change, and on and on- are a result of this very shitty story that we made up about the nature of reality. We are way past due to write a new and better story.

Now I’m not suggesting that we should be ashamed of ourselves. I don’t believe that humans are evil. I think that we almost always do the best that we can according to what we know. What drives me nuts is that long after we have known better, we keep telling the same old tired story. Why do we do it? Ah…. comfort. We are comfortable with what we are used to. Change is hard. It’s disruptive. It’s particularly disruptive when you have to dig all the way down to a faulty foundation and start over. Nobody really wants to be that uncomfortable. It’s easier just to make the best of it, until it isn’t. What gets lost in our comfort is the much better world that we are aiming for and that we all deserve. 

So let me be as clear as I can be: what we are used to is a bag of shit. I can’t be any clearer than that. If we truly want the better world, then we must be willing to get very, very uncomfortable while we transition. I will leave you with an invitation to consider the things that we are used to in this country. Ask yourself what is required and by whom in order for you to enjoy the things that you do. Are you paying the true price for them, or is somebody or something else taking on that cost for you (often with a loss of freedom and/or life)? Here is a list to get you started (in no particular order):

  1. Cheap and fast food
  2. Cheap clothes
  3. Cheap stuff that we don’t need but somebody has convinced us that we do
  4. Cheap energy
  5. Cheap anything really
  6. Oversized, perfectly conditioned, energy intensive housing
  7. Gadgets designed to take the place of any physical exertion
  8. Fast transportation to anywhere in the world
  9. Free delivery of just about anything right to your front door
  10. Instantaneous connectivity
  11. Constant entertainment
  12. Throw away containers, or throw away anything really
  13. Toilet paper (just because)

Now dig a little deeper and consider the ideas that you are used to. If you think that you don’t think certain things, then you are not yet aware of the fact that they were built into the worldview that was given to you and is reinforced day in and day out by our culture. Here is a list to get you started:

  1. Men are inherently superior to women: smarter, stronger, more rational, more divine, etc.
  2. Whites are inherently superior to all other races.
  3. Our genes determine who we are and what we are capable of becoming and achieving.
  4. People are inherently evil (sinners).
  5. People are inherently lazy unless motivated to be otherwise.
  6. Women are the birth of sin.
  7. Blacks are dangerous.
  8. Homosexuality is unnatural.
  9. Humans are superior to all other species.
  10. No other living species is sentient.
  11. No other living species is intelligent.
  12. Only humans have a soul.
  13. The world is an objective place that has no soul, much less intelligence.
  14. Rational thought is the best and only way to know the truth.
  15. Matter (physical things) and energy (non-physical things) are two different things.
  16. Life is a lesson that we must endure until we graduate out of it.
  17. Heaven (our true home) is somewhere other than here.

I promise you that these two lists are inextricably related. I am imploring you to get to the bottom of it. I thank you in advance for any effort that you make to do so. My greatest hope is that we can get to a place where we can truly say that we used to think and do these things, but we now know better and do better. To get there we must write a better story, a story in alignment with the true nature of things. Godspeed.