Risking Interbeing

Impasse

Time for a little honesty. For weeks now I have been thinking that I need to address the social unrest of the summer directly through these pages. I haven’t until now because frankly I am struggling with a sense of despair that comes in waves. I first have to say that due to the fact that I taught at Prairie View A&M University for the prior six years, my reaction to yet another and another and another senseless killing of a Black person mirrors to a degree the reaction that I know many of my PVAMU students would have to those events. This is in no way to say that I will ever be inside of their experiences, it is simply to say that I can’t help but view these events through their lens as expressed through their own voices. Of course there is deep despair there, but the moment the “White Outrage” sets in what often bubbles up to the surface is “Give me a break.” As in, “Oh, NOW you are outraged?! Really??!!” And it isn’t because they don’t appreciate being seen, it’s just more than a little irritating when these things have been going on since practically the beginning of time… o.k., at least from the first inklings of Western patriarchal culture. And more importantly because these are still quite literally everyday events in their lives. Every day, all day.

I hope that us Whites finally get it this time. I’m not convinced that we will. Outrage has a tendency to run its course pretty quickly. Blacks know this. They’ve seen it all before. I remember once being surprised about the nonchalance of my students to this event or that. Take for instance the election of Donald Trump. I figured they would be mortified. But in fact what they were was generally indifferent. Don’t blame them. They have a legitimate reason to be so. History has told them that it really doesn’t matter who the President is. It is all the same to them. It had hardly even mattered that there had been a Black president, because systemic racism and implicit bias were still their everyday reality and they still had to fear for their lives. This isn’t to discount the historical significance of a Black breaking through the presidential boundary or of Obama’s legacy. Yet it is a legitimate question to ask if there has ever really been significant change on the racial front in this country. Slavery simply changes forms from physical to legal to mental to emotional, from possession to exclusion to incarceration, always becoming more sophisticated in the move from apparent and external to hidden and internal.

So I wrestle with all of this, wondering what on earth I can really say. I get extraordinarily angry every time I see a Confederate flag. Really??! I live in Vermont. I live in rural Vermont, that is. I have for some time now been considering starting a one woman organization entitled “Southern Woman Against the Misappropriation of the Confederate Flag.” I figure I’ll go around collecting flags: “Excuse me, but as a Southerner, I take great offense to you flying the flag of my homeland, which I am quite certain that you know nothing about. If you want to fly that flag, then you are going to have to sign up for my one year (or however long it takes) course on Southern history. In the meantime, hand it over. I’ll give the flag back to you to burn once you realize what an ignorant asshole you are being.” You see…I am angry.

The annual arrival of Vice President Mike Pence to upset our little haven on Lake Hortonia for Labor Day Weekend didn’t help my cause. Our first impulse was… where can we get a flag???!!! Of course we weren’t talking about a Confederate flag. We were instantly in the market for rainbow and Black Lives Matter flags. Note to all: flags are very difficult to come by at the last minute in Vermont. We spent half an afternoon searching online and even asking to borrow from friends, all to no avail. It ruined our entire day. Pence’s presence ruined our entire weekend. If this sounds irrational to you, perhaps you don’t realize that Pence has a belief system and policy history that says that neither I or my wife should even exist, much less be married. Now how would you feel if somebody who believes that you shouldn’t exist and has used his political power to eradicate your existence showed up in your backyard? For me, beyond flag waving, I wanted to paddle my kayak over to his boat and chew him out upside down and sideways before telling him that he is no more welcome in my world than I am in his. Take that, asshole. You see… I am angry.

But I didn’t. I don’t generally do any of these things that flare up out of my anger. The thing is, I really don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to feel hopeless. I don’t want to be disgusted with humanity. I don’t want to get tense when confronted with viewpoints that I find reprehensible. I don’t want to be judgmental. I don’t want to hate. I don’t want my day to be ruined every time I see you or your flag. I especially don’t want to live in the world that “othering” creates. No thank you. I don’t want to accidentally become “my enemy” in an effort to overcome “my enemy”. More than anything these days, I want no part of it.

Yet the battle lines have been drawn. Seems the only thing left to do is to decide whether you believe this or that, and whether you want to live in this country or that. We have been here before as a country, not to mention throughout the history of humanity. For each side, always, it is unthinkable to go the route of the other. For me, even as a Southerner, I can in no way fathom the world that would have ensued if the South had won the Civil War. Of course if that had happened we would have ended up with two separate countries, and I would like to think that my family never would have immigrated from the north (the remaining United States) down to Houston (the Confederacy). Thankfully the South didn’t win, but has anything really changed? Just about anyone I talk to these days- on both sides of the proverbial aisle- feels that we are headed for another civil war. And it is even harder now because the divide is no longer territorial. It’s everywhere… even here in one of the most progressive states in the Union.

So now what? Vote. Yes, for sure. But also realize that no matter who wins we will remain very much divided. The real question that we need to be asking ourselves is how do we heal the divide? It starts within. It starts by meeting our anger with love. This is hard work. The hardest. While I deeply respect fellow tiger Michelle Obama, I have to admit that I have a hard time swallowing her advice that “when they go low, we go high.” That just doesn’t seem to be working. But here is what I do know. If I confronted the Confederate flag wavers or Mike Pence or anybody else who sees things entirely different than I do with anger, it wouldn’t help one iota. In fact, all that does is entrench both sides in our own perspectives, our own fears, our own suffering… in short in everything that caused the divide in the first place.

And yet, I know that somehow we must participate in bringing about the world that we envision. We must stand into and live into our higher potential if we hope to get there. But let’s keep this real. I am angry. Remember? When my anger is seething beneath the surface, what I am doing these days is noticing it. I acknowledge it. I witness it. In doing so, what comes into my awareness is that I do not really want to feel this way about humanity or about life. It’s painful to stay stuck in a place that is much less than Who We Really Are. After my tirade plays itself out in my head, I then ask myself how I could show up differently. I am a fighter, after all. I believe in fighting for our evolution and for the better world that we are capable of and that we deserve as Divine beings.

But if all of our fighting just results in more fighting, then what? This is when I remember that there is a better way to fight. In fact, the only effective way to fight is not to fight at all. This is the ultimate goal of martial arts training, as represented by the high arts such as Tai Chi. Much more than non-violence, the secret to this higher wisdom is non-resistance. The best way to defend ourselves is to not defend ourselves at all. I know that sounds crazy. But the truth is that when we don’t give a punch a hard place to land, the punch can’t land. As a result, the puncher ends up throwing him or herself to the ground under the thrust of their own attack. The attack lands in its proper place… upon the attacker. Upon reflection of such a turn of events, the attacker must come to the proper conclusion: “I am only hurting myself.”

This is in no way to suggest that this is easy. That is why they call it mastery. And as I’ve said before, we are a long way from mastery as a species. It is infinitely harder to apply to a collective situation. It is extraordinarily difficult when people are losing their lives to the people in power. I am not here to suggest that I have some magical or easy answer. I don’t. All I know is that somehow we each have to at least start to come to the realization that when we judge, hate, slight, oppress, attack, slander, exclude, or in any way diminish an “other” as if they were anything less than God, we are only hurting ourselves. Keep it up and we may well witness the Fall of Rome. Then again, the old story has to die in order for a new one to be born. Here’s hoping that our next story recognizes the Divine in each and every human being, in each and every species, and indeed in all things in existence or not.

Ode to the Goatee

One year. It’s been an entire year since I last shaved off my goatee. When I first decided to go one day, then two, then three, then a whole week on what was essentially a whim, I had no idea where I was headed. My nerves were so shot by the end of that first week that I couldn’t even imagine going an entire month much less a year. I couldn’t imagine doing any of the things that I have now done while sporting my own unique version of a goatee. It only seems appropriate that I stop for a moment to reflect. This is my Ode to the Goatee.

Not that I have decided to ditch it, because I haven’t. The entire way through I have woken up with the open question: to keep it or not to keep it? While that question was quite loaded for much of the way, these days it is more of a curiosity floating around in the background. In the foreground I hardly think about it anymore. It’s just a part of me, no different from any other part of me. As I wonder about whether or not I want to keep my goatee now, what comes up is the opposite question of whether or not I want to resume all of the time consuming plucking, trimming, and shaving. Not that my goatee doesn’t require maintenance. It’s just that that maintenance is actually, well… fun.

Not too long after being set free, my goatee decided to take a turn. It whirled back up toward its roots, expressing itself by creating a curly cue. “Free at last! Look at how I can flip upside down and over!! Doesn’t it make you smile?! Don’t I look like a magical creature?!” She didn’t whisper, she shouted. She didn’t hide, she made herself as big as she could muster. She wasn’t angry, she was joyful. She didn’t push away, she invited you to look closer, to come closer. “Come and see me! Let’s get to know one another,” she excitedly exclaimed like a newborn who had just entered the world.

Did anyone bite? I can’t say for sure what effect it has had on those who have or have not approached me. I can only observe that as time has passed, people have seemed to shy away less. No doubt that was a reflection of my own growing comfort level with myself. That nobody has dared to ask me directly about my goatee hardly matters. The only thing that matters is whether or not I accepted my goatee’s invitation. And that I did. I’ve let her grow to her heart’s content- about 6 inches long to date. I’ve tended her each morning, encouraging her own unique expression… often laughing, smiling, beholding, appreciating. I would like to think that in turn my goatee smiles upon me, daring to show up as I am.

We have become one, me and my goatee. That dread about the maintenance involved if I were to choose not to keep her is really only a secondary thought. The truth is that now I am having a hard time even thinking about not keeping her. If I were to shave her off, I know I’d more than miss her- I would feel like I had lost a part of me. Of course it’s just hair, right? It would grow back, but still! I suppose she will always be with me, no matter what.

I used to think that I would be done with this experiment when it no longer mattered to me whether or not I let my goatee be. When it mattered not whether I chose to let it grow or not, I would be healed. It never occurred to me that actual healing would come when I truly fell in love with her. Not in any superficial sort of way, but with that deep understanding and appreciation that comes with being in an unconditional and allowing relationship. Healing comes in the recognition of and gratitude for our shared uniqueness, our inseparability no matter the time or the distance or the difference, our interdependence bolstered by our individuality, and our grand excursion into the relative so that we might experience once again the mind-blowing grandeur and mystery of our Oneness.

Thank you, Goatee, for being my companion, my teacher, my guide, my guru. It would make me happy to watch you flaunt yourself for another day. Have at it, Dear. I love you.

Slow

Everything has gotten way too fast. Way too quick, too easy, too convenient, too expedient, too disconnected to pay the least bit of attention to what is actually going on. This isn’t, incidentally, a veiled attempt to make excuses for the long delay between my last post and this one. For that I truly apologize. Actually, scratch that. Instead I’ll say that I missed this way of connecting and I have heard that others have too. I am happy to be back here with you! I hope that everyone is well. I hope that everyone is finding their way along the path of your own individual and our collective evolution.

I have been busy. Busy, busy, busy. This is perhaps shocking given how much things have slowed down in response to COVID-19, but we are in a rush to rebuild our home before snow falls. It wasn’t just that. Somewhere in there, after a hiatus since in the midst of last winter, the calling came to pick back up writing my book. Book has now become books. I have written the first two and am now onto the third. Don’t get too excited though! I am going to take my time editing while beginning the long process of moving toward potential publication. So that’s my brief update.

Now for the longer, slower version. The house reconstruction is a bear. Everyone who has ever gone through constructing their own home knows that it is an emotional roller coaster. We knew that it would be going in. Fortunately this is not our first rodeo. Shannon and I have worked on quite a few design-build projects together. We have learned many lessons along the way about how to navigate ourselves and each other. That doesn’t mean that it will ever be easy, but at least we have some skills that prevent us from actually killing each other. We have been employing those for sure!

The harder part is the inevitable meltdowns. We finally hit what we hope to be our biggest doozy thus far (and hopefully for the duration) this week as we were demo’ing the interior of the house. Actually it has been building for more than a few weeks now, beginning with the realization too late that the house didn’t come down as level or as plumb as we hoped for. It’s one thing dealing with an old camp that has been through at least four iterations over its lifetime. It wasn’t level to begin with, so it wasn’t like it was going to magically be so after the new foundation was put under it. It’s just that it could have been better than how it ended up. The out-of-plumbness is beyond what I would consider structurally sound. That means that while we were already planning to do a great deal or reworking of the structure, we now have to do even more reworking than we were planning. The end conclusion: we should have torn it down and started over. That would have been way easier.

We had considered- no belabored- that option, but couldn’t quite pull the trigger to just flat out demolish Shannon’s childhood home. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. We couldn’t bring ourselves to submit it to a wrecking ball. That would have been faster, of course. It would have been gone in a matter of a day or two. The bandaid would have been ripped off and discarded. As it is, we are dismantling it stick by stick, board by board. Much, unfortunately, will go to the dump. That said, we are saving anything and everything that we can, carefully removing things like wood finishes and dimensional lumber, which I then carefully denail (as in pry out the nails one by one). It’s slow and tedious work.

We started on the second floor ceiling and walls last weekend. Then by midweek we had moved on to the first floor. Opening up the walls revealed a veritable shit show of one mangled surgery after another. No, let me rephrase that. What is being revealed with each blow of the hammer, yank of the crow bar, or buzz of the sawzall is the long, complicated, twisting and turning story of this place. We had moments of appreciating that up until the opening of the first floor walls. That threw us over the edge as we realized we would have to reconstruct much more than we had planned. Let me just be honest. Our meltdown wasn’t pretty.

The thing with Shannon and I is that we are so finely tuned that typically when one of us heads into a tailspin, so does the other. That is the nature of our interconnectedness. That leaves neither of us to save us from ourselves. We know this, however, so we have learned some strategies for how to deal with it. I took space by heading home to sit with myself and feel my feelings. Shannon stayed behind, reaching out to the ever supportive Bob and Edie (thank heavens for Bob and Edie!!!!). Bob was able to remind us that we got this, which Shannon shared with me when she came home to find me curled up in a ball on the couch in Tiny Drop. We were then able to talk ourselves off of the ledge.

By the following morning it dawned on each of us separately that we could have it no other way. Our decision to move forward as we did was not arbitrary. It was not without careful consideration. Yes, we could have opened up those walls to understand better what we would be confronting, but I suspect we would have made the same decision. And the truth is that nothing really prepares you for the journey. Sometimes you just have to step into the shadow of the valley of death not fully knowing what awaits you. In many senses it is better to not know. That is what we had done. The best way- perhaps the only way- forward is through.

After our crash we found ourselves centered enough to reflect on what was actually happening. With each step we were not only uncovering the story of this place, we were confronting each and every decision, pressure, skillset, knowledge, limitation, hope, dream, fear, and love that had shaped that story. We were learning it one board, one nail at a time. Slowly. Ever so slowly. That is the only way to truly take in a story. We go way too fast these days to notice how much we miss. Within this particular story is not only the story of Shannon’s childhood, but also her family, their family friend who gifted his camp to them, and of the place that brought them all together – Lake Hortonia.

The only way forward is through. Shannon and I have both been committed to our shadow work for quite some time now. That means that we go in to face and heal our childhood wounds. Incidentally, if you don’t know this already, we all have one. When we don’t acknowledge it, face it, notice the patterns that we have constructed around it in order to survive, work to deconstruct those patterns, and reconstruct new ones by nurturing the innocent child within, then our shadow rules the day. When our shadow rules, we slowly rot from the inside out, all while projecting the cause of that rotting to some force outside of ourselves. The rain, the wind, the snow, the whatever, is the problem. The house itself isn’t the problem. Or so we tell ourselves.

The only way forward is through. If we want to live in healthy houses, we need to slow down to deconstruct the house that we are living in board by board, nail by nail. We need to learn our own stories. What shaped them? What did we include? What did we not include? How did we respond to the various experiences that shaped us? What skills and knowledge did we have at the time? What skills and knowledge did we not have? What pressures were we responding to? What were we aiming for? What did we accept? What disappointed us? What gave us the hope and strength to continue? I could go on and on. Just ask the question and then go down that rabbit hole. Is it scary? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely. On the other side of that abyss lies our true selves. Walking through that abyss is the path of healing. What awaits us on the other side is pure potential, wellbeing, freedom. What awaits us on the other side is the world that we all long for. In order to get there, we each need to face our own shadows while we together face our collective shadows. Story is our way in and through. Let’s do this. We got this. A better story awaits.

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):

Cheap and fast food
Cheap clothes
Cheap stuff that we don’t need but somebody has convinced us that we do
Cheap energy
Cheap anything really
Oversized, perfectly conditioned, energy intensive housing
Gadgets designed to take the place of any physical exertion
Fast transportation to anywhere in the world
Free delivery of just about anything right to your front door
Instantaneous connectivity
Constant entertainment
Throw away containers, or throw away anything really
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:

Men are inherently superior to women: smarter, stronger, more rational, more divine, etc.
Whites are inherently superior to all other races.
Our genes determine who we are and what we are capable of becoming and achieving.
People are inherently evil (sinners).
People are inherently lazy unless motivated to be otherwise.
Women are the birth of sin.
Blacks are dangerous.
Homosexuality is unnatural.
Humans are superior to all other species.
No other living species is sentient.
No other living species is intelligent.
Only humans have a soul.
The world is an objective place that has no soul, much less intelligence.
Rational thought is the best and only way to know the truth.
Matter (physical things) and energy (non-physical things) are two different things.
Life is a lesson that we must endure until we graduate out of it.
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.

What I did…

… over my Covid-19, um, “vacation.” Vacation in quotes in part to not take the situation in any sense lightly, and in part because we’ve kept ourselves quite busy. For myself, I am currently only working on the drawings for the gut renovation of our lake house, while deferring another job until I have our house drawings done. I am also fortunately not teaching this semester (i.e. I am not currently going through all of the craziness that every other professor is going through to move all of their teaching online). That gives me until the fall semester starts to focus on our own projects, which are requiring all of my attention at the moment. The brief update on our lake house is that work proceeded a couple of weeks ago and they now have the new basement walls poured! Here is what it looks like now:

That also means that we will be switching gears tomorrow from work on our tiny house/mountain retreat to work on the lake house. And as I say that, I have to acknowledge how incredibly fortunate I feel to have two amazing places- dream places really- to work on, or with as the case may be. We are super excited about how things are evolving up on the mountain. At the same time, we know that the lake is going to be equally amazing and challenging and will also ultimately help us to feel deeply at home in the world. It’s a ton of work, but again, how lucky are we?

Shannon has been off of work for the last month as well, but is returning to work tomorrow. That doesn’t help so much with our house cause, but again, so much to be grateful for. I know that not everybody gets to say that they will be returning to their jobs. I know this disruption won’t be a simple blip in the map for anyone. In the coming rearrangement, I hope and hold intentions for everybody to find meaningful work that allows their true gifts to come through.

In the meantime, we have used our free time tackling our long list of projects up on the mountain. This list, incidentally, will literally never be done. It’s already longer than two people could achieve in the time we have left on the planet, and it just gets longer every day. The lake list is equally long, so like… we are already seriously double booked! Ironically, I like being done, so my penchant for imagining more and more to create doesn’t really help that cause. Add Shannon’s penchant for the same, and well, let’s just say that we have a wealth of things to do for the rest of our lives! It’s a great practice for me to just be with taking one step at a time, enjoying the process, celebrating each little milestone, and watching it evolve as it does.

That’s the lead in. Now for the fun stuff we have been up to! First off, hats off to Shannon for the fruitful month that she has had. I am thoroughly enjoying the fruits! I honestly can’t believe how much she has done. What I really love is that she has loved every second of it. It started with a bunch of tweaks to the interior of Tiny Drop to improve storage and functionality. Then she moved to building the little shed that we needed to house the outside unit of the composting toilet. Then it was on to the big stuff.

The first of these was the front entry to Tiny Drop. The way these things typically go is that we get an idea for something and then one or the other of us sketches it up. We have a pile of sketches. Fortunately, we had also already accumulated materials for some of these projects. That means we had piles of stuff we were wanting to get cleaned up, and the way to do that was to build! Did I mention Shannon is a champ??? Check this out:

In the process of building the whole thing gets tweaked and new ideas added. In this case, what we needed was a place to get dry and take off our shoes before entering the house. We also wanted an outside bar to mirror the bar inside. That means that when the french casement window is open, we can have an intimate dinner for four! Of course there is shading and weather protection involved here, but the grand last minute act of creativity came from Shannon. She added a star gazing seat that we can access out of the roof windows from the loft (not to mention to help with egress in case of emergency). I mean seriously, how cool is this?!

The other big building project Shannon completed is our first trail bridge. We are focusing on the trail up to the sanctuary, and this is part of that. We didn’t have a sketch for this one, but had seen something similar to this on one of our hikes last fall. Shannon used the materials that we had on hand to make it happen. I only provided peanut gallery consulting on this job. We love it:

We really love that it beckons us to come up from the porch of Tiny Drop.

O.K., o.k. So you are probably wondering what in the hell I was doing as Shannon was doing all of that. It turns out my job might best be described as ditch-digger! At least digging a bunch of ditches was the prerequisite to putting these next visions into place. The first was part of what I have described previously as an effort to slow down water as it comes down the mountain. When I asked the mountain what it needed, this was the request. So I chose one particularly swampy spot to start a pond. This is still a work in progress as we give it time to see how it is working, but here is pond #1 in the works (which Shannon thankfully helped me to dig):

This will ultimately be a micro zen garden along the path to the sanctuary. We are imagining many more spots such as this. Another such spot is just beyond the Moon Gate. I had started garden beds, a retaining wall, and the first steps of this trail to the sanctuary with stone left over from the Moon Gate, but hadn’t finished it yet. So that was next on my list. Here goes:

It went so smoothly and the garden made me so happy that I just wanted to keep going! I have long had a vision for a terrace garden on the slope just beyond the Moon Gate, but I thought that project would be a ways off because I envisioned needing a lot more stone for the project. But rather than wait we figured we would just see what we could do with what was on hand and what we might find as we started digging.

I had a lot of help from Shannon on this one too, first on the initial leveling of the ramp and digging of the first gardens beds, and then thank God as I started pooping out on day 3 of moving dirt on the next level up. For all of you Houston gardeners, you know how incredibly hard it is to work with gumbo clay. It’s hard! Most of what we were digging through here was also clay, and while not as hard as gumbo clay, it was hard instead because water is literally leaking out of every inch of this mountain! That means that I had to use my best permaculture tricks to dig trenches and build berms to get the water to go where we needed it to go. Good grief, I did a lot of digging. So far it looks to be working. From there I built stone retaining walls for the landings and beds. Then we ordered a truck of good soil and a bunch of seeds. Soil is now in place and here is what it looked like before and after:

We were going to plant the seeds on Sunday, but then it snowed Saturday night!!! When is it going to stop snowing on us?????!!!!!!!!! O.K., I just had to get that out. So seeds aren’t in the ground yet, but hopefully soon.

That leads to our new favorite form of entertainment at Tiny Drop: movie night. Movie night consists of downloading movies onto my computer (only downside is that it takes way too long to do so down in town), setting ourselves up in the loft, pulling the blackout shades, sending the sound through our bluetooth speaker, and of course making popcorn, hot chocolate, etc. It’s the greatest! It’s like having the theater all to ourselves with the best seat in the house and surround sound. Of course this also has led us to thinking that we need to permanently install a screen on the ceiling that can tilt down for this purpose. And you know one of these days we will!

Our other favorite form of entertainment has become listening to podcasts. On that front, I have to give a shout out to Brene Brown’s new podcast: Unlocking Us. So, so great. So great that I am going to leave you with that tidbit and encourage you to take a listen:

Unlocking Us

Oh, one more thing- I just ordered a ton of books. The one I am most excited about is Glennon Doyle’s new book Untamed. More on all of this soon. For now, I hope you all are finding your own restorative, creative inspirations during this timeout.

Dreams

Dreaming much lately? I sure am. So is Shannon. So is Shannon’s mother. In fact, a few days ago I heard a promo for an upcoming segment on NPR indicating that a whole lot of us are. I am not usually a lucid dreamer, or at least I don’t usually wake up knowing that I have been dreaming much less remembering what I might have been dreaming about. There are exceptions, of course, but this is generally true. Not these days. I wake up so tired from dreaming that I wonder if I would have been better off staying awake!! While I don’t necessarily remember, or perhaps want to remember, what I was dreaming about, I am quite aware when I wake up that I have been lost in it. And “it” was weird.

Before I get into that, here is a quick update on our stay-at-home tiny house experience. As mentioned previously, we have no internet or cell service up here. That means none of our usual forms of entertainment, which largely consists of Netflix, are available to us. We also like board games, but we don’t really have room for boards! We do, however, have one game that we are quite fond of that takes up next to zero space in storage: Bananagrams (thanks, Sara, for the intro even if getting our butts repeatedly kicked by you was extremely frustrating!). So that’s what we do. We play Bananagrams. If you aren’t familiar, the game basically consists of utilizing a Scrabble-like letter set to race each other to make a Scrabble-like crossword puzzle. It’s fun, but I have to say that you can only near-tie each other so many times before hitting a bit of a wall. That’s when the creativity breaks out.

Shannon and I some time ago had become tired of playing and just randomly started putting words and then phrases together. They almost always ended up being weird, funny, poetic, etc. A few nights ago we reverted into that mode when Shannon had the idea of starting a phrase with “Jedi Sayz,…” That was all it took to set us off on a whole new obsession with playing Jedi Sayz. We are up to nearly 40 or so phrases at this point and are aiming for 108 good ones to share. The photo above is a sampling. For starters, we’ll share them one by one on our FB and Instagram pages. They are providing us with a whole lot of insight about where our psyches are. We hope you enjoy!

Back to the dreaming, who in the heck knows what we are all dreaming about, but I find it fascinating that so many of us are. Even as we practice social distancing it indicates how inextricably interconnected we are. It points to a reality beyond the one that we comprehend through our usual frameworks. Those frameworks tell us that this is all terribly real, whereas what happens in dreams is some sort of residue from our conscious lives. It is our subconscious expressing itself. Maybe so, but I don’t think the “sub” gives dreams their full due. Let me explain.

In the framework that I do my best to live by, my soul (aka Self) abides (lives) in the Absolute realm (the non-embodied realm or field which I call God/Oneness/Consciousness). As such, it isn’t subject to my subjective experience in the relative world. It’s not that I am a separate entity from my Self, it’s just that the latter has a 360 view on What Is (aka reality) whereas the former only sees what it can see from the perspective of the life I am currently inhabiting. From this framework, it would be more correct to say that my self is a dream of my Self than the other way around. In other words, this is the dream (the world as we have created it), not the realms that we travel to when we manage to break free from what we perceive to be real. So to call the non-embodied realm sub to this one, in my view, is an incorrect framing. It’s the exact opposite.

O.K., o.k., that may be a lot. So why stop now?? There is an indigenous tribe in South America called the Achuar. Their culture is centered around their dreams. When they wake up in the morning, the first thing that they do is gather to share and discuss their dreams. What they discover in their dreams then determines the course of their day. They let their dreams guide them. Now this may sound like crazy talk from the framework that we operate in, but it is not the least bit crazy from the framework that I described above. In fact, it is quite possibly the only sane way to proceed if we understand that our “dreams” are one of the best ways that our Self has to communicate with us.

In the early 1990’s, Achuar shaman and elders began having disturbing dreams about the health of the Earth and in particular the devastating impact that humans were having on it and themselves. So, in true form, they began wondering what to do with this information. The guidance that they received was that they needed to reach out to Westerners and to start co-creating a new dream for the earth and humanity’s role in it. At the same time, a group of Westerners including Bill and Lynne Twist got the same call from the other end. They heeded that call and sought out the Achuar. Together they initiated the Pachamama Alliance. The network that they have built, while still invisible to our society at large, is extensive. I am part of it having first completed their “Awakening the Dreamer” course and then having gone through the training to lead that course. These days all of this coursework can be found online, with multiple more programs to choose from. If you find yourself with disturbing dreams these days, perhaps the best thing that I can recommend is to put that energy into taking one of the courses. You can check it out here:

Pachamama Alliance

To take this one step further (you knew I would!), I would make the case that if we are to chart a new course for humanity and for Gaia, then that guidance is going to have to come from the level of our soul/Self. As my good friend Chausey Leebron Jameson says, we simply don’t have the altitude from where we sit to know how to navigate ourselves out of this maze. When we work and push and fight for change, those efforts are more likely to lock us into the reality that we have created rather than catapulting us out of it. That is because when we do these things we are often operating from within the same frawework/worldview that was utilized to create this world, all while expecting a different outcome. It’s not going to happen that way. Sure, there may be a power transfer from one group to another, but the resulting dynamics will be the same. In order to create a reality that does not resemble the one we are trying to evolve out of, we need to reach beyond the frameworks with which it was constructed. We have to reach into the realm of pure potential, where our souls live.

That doesn’t mean that you will or should stop showing up in whatever way that you do. Maybe you are an activist. Maybe you do amazing, transformative work in the world. Maybe you do your best to take care of your family, friends, and community. I’m not suggesting that any of that stop. I am saying that all of our actions will be better serving if they are sourced from the non-embodied realm: from the field of pure potential, from Consciousness, from Oneness, from dreams, from God, from Self. To tap into that requires not a concentrated effort, but a letting go. Mind you, one of the best ways that we have of reaching a state of letting go is to exhaust ourselves in the concentrated effort, so in that sense… fire away on all pistons! Just pay attention and watch for that moment when you have reached your wit’s end and honor what is conveyed to you in your surrender. That is where the answers will come from.

Jedi Sayz, “Happy dreaming!”

Tiny

If you want to get a good taste of interbeing, try living in a tiny house… with another person and two not so small dogs. Our Tiny Drop is a whopping 160 square feet, and that is including the sleeping loft. The ground floor footprint is only 106 square feet. It is truly tiny. Fortunately, because we did a hell of a job design-building it, it doesn’t feel that small. But the reality of its smallness sets in when two people can’t pass by each other when one is trying to do the dishes and the other needs to go pee and there is a dog in the way to boot. Let’s just call it snug.

Let’s just say that everyone is always in each other’s space. It’s more workable when the weather conditions are nice. Under those circumstances we spend a considerable amount of time outside on the deck, in the hammock, working outside, or exploring the 40 acre ecological sanctuary that is our backyard. But that’s not right now most of the time. More often than not, it’s snowing (yes, even in mid-April), raining, or just plain cloudy and cold. And that means we spend most of our time inside in our intricate daily dance with and around one another. And did I mention two crazy dogs?

We realize that this isn’t for everyone and one of the things that Shannon and I appreciate about one another is that it is for us. Of course at this point in our 13 year relationship, we understand well how such experiences serve to constantly push us deeper into our stuff. And we embrace that. It has helped both of us to take charge of our own healing for the sake of stepping into more of who we truly are in the world. The tendency that we both have to put ourselves in extreme situations is all just part of it.

I’m not going to lie, though. It isn’t easy. For starters, Tiny Drop is not yet fully functional. Primarily, while it is plumbed with a kitchen sink and full bathroom, that plumbing is not yet connected to an outside water source. That is due to the fact that we have needed power in order to make that happen. Our property is completely off-grid. It took us some time to get the 2.5 kW solar system installed to feed electricity into the house. We do have that now, although there are still some glitches to work out. Our last hurdle is to get water from our spring connected to a large rain tank from where it has to be pumped into a pressure tank and then into the house. At least that is what we think has to happen. Then we need to finish the connections between the hot water heater and a propane tank.

Until then, water has to be manually hauled into the house and dispensed via glass jugs at the sinks and this crazy contraption that Shannon rigged up for us to shower in our very nice shower enclosure. If we want that water to be hot for showers and dishwashing, that has to be accomplished on our propane turkey cooker outside. Oh and we use gallon jugs to pour water into our composting toilet for flushing to an outside dry well. That has enabled us to pee inside of Tiny Drop instead of having to go to the Shittin Shanty, which we greatly appreciate in the middle of the night. But until we are able to hook up the exterior compositing unit (work in progress), no pooping inside. For that we still have to go to the Shittin Shanty, which has an internal composting toilet.

That sounds like a lot, right? It is. If you really want to deal with your shit, there is perhaps no better way than to actually deal with your shit. Know what I mean? That internal composting toilet has to have its bucket replaced when it gets full. That’s what I mean. When we take away all of the conveniences that we take for granted on a daily basis, it adds up fast. I’m barely even scratching the surface here. Again, I’m not going to lie. I’m tired. I know, however, that there is a gem to be found in the tiredness, in being worn down to your bones. Such endeavors have a way of washing away all of the illusions that entrap us in a certain way of being. Our modern lives have us believing that the only way to get water is by turning on a faucet. Yet if we had to, if our spring stopped running, we could walk down our driveway and across the street to collect water in the river… for free. No plumbing required. And, yes, we can poop in the woods just like everyone else.

I’m not saying that we should give up all of our modern amenities and technologies. I am saying that it is a worthwhile endeavor to strip yourself of them from time to time to see what effect they are actually having on your life. Are they really making life better, or are they caging you in some way that you have become desensitized to? It’s worth asking, lest we end up in a world that we did not really intend.

All that said, my friend Amanda asked for an example of “that’s on you” from my last post. I happen to have a good one from a few days ago. Shannon and I were on a walk up to the sanctuary on the mountain. The sanctuary is in a clearing about half way up the mountain where the previous owners had started to build a rustic cabin on a huge rock outcropping. They didn’t get any further than setting a stone foundation and a timber-framed floor that has since rotted. Yet the place is indeed special, and we have therefore designated it as the location of the future sanctuary to our ecological sanctuary. Moving up from the sanctuary is “Meditation Mountain,” a surreal place with multiple stone outcroppings spaced out in such a way that provides the perfect opportunity to choose your spot to sit in stillness. Turning to the right before Meditation Mountain is the forthcoming path that we are calling the “Middle Way” as it runs between a split in the mountain stream and then proceeds up through Split Rock to a lookout over the adjacent mountains.

This place is magical. We are getting in the habit of walking up to the sanctuary every day as a way of becoming more intimate with the mountain while blazing trails at the same time. On this particular day, we were poking around the sanctuary trying to determine where exactly we wanted the trail to approach it. I was pointing with my hiking poles to two trees where I thought the path should pass through. Shannon couldn’t make out what I was pointing to, but I couldn’t think of another way to explain it to her other than pointing. In an attempt to understand me she said, “use your words.” That was all it took. I was triggered.

Triggered means that I was instantly in a world of hurt. My survival tactic to that hurt is to shut down and shut out. I retreat and cut you off at every path. Not that you won’t know that you’ve made a grave mistake, because I have my ways of making you feel it too. You’ll get my cold shoulder, my silence that can cut through just about anything and you in particular. Shannon knows this space well by now. In earlier versions of our relationship, this silence would have ensued for weeks or longer, ultimately escalating into the end of the world. Now I know what you are thinking… all of that just because of three little words?! Yup. All of that. Why? Because the button she had just inadvertently pushed was the activation button for my speech impediment wound. In other words, every pain and all the shame that I had ever felt from not being able to speak properly or to communicate when I was little was just brought to the surface in full force. Ah, now it makes sense. Right?

These sorts of experiences get exaggerated when the triggering person is one of our most beloved. “How dare you? How could you? I thought you loved me?“ These are all of the thoughts that accompany a triggered state of being. Fortunately with enough years of these types of experiences, I have learned to recognize in fairly short order what is actually happening. In this case, I immediately was able to push out “I don’t like it when you tell me to use my words. It makes me feel like a 5 year old.” Shannon also has enough years of this type of experience to recognize what is going on as well. For her part, she immediately said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel that way.” And she meant it. In previous versions of our relationship she might have said to me (as I would have to her if roles had been reversed) something to the effect of, “That’s on you.”

“That’s on you” because that wasn’t her intention and it is therefore on me that I took it that way. And, frankly, that is a correct assessment. It’s just not helpful. It’s not helpful because what “that’s on you” communicates is “I have no desire to help you with that and I don’t care that you are having that experience.” Another way of saying it is, “That’s not my problem.” It therefore exacerbates the problem, because it contributes to the triggered person’s story of “You don’t love me.” Yet here is where it gets tricky to grow out of and move beyond these dynamics. In our case, we have both done a ton of personal work aimed at healing our wounds. That is to say that we have both taken responsibility for our own healing and have put a significant amount of work into it. That is what enabled me to first of all speak my truth rather than defaulting to a shutdown. It enabled me to stand into it and stand up for my inner wounded 5 year old. Shannon’s sincere apology then made it safe for me to say moments later, “It’s because it triggers my speech impediment wounds.” Ah-ha. Of course. That makes perfect sense now.

We had each done our part perfectly. Shannon had zero other responsibility in this situation beyond apologizing for what she didn’t intend with complete sincerity. That is all I needed from her. The rest was entirely up to me. It was up to me to recognize that I was triggered and why. It was then up to me to acknowledge, protect, and nurture that part of myself. That all truly was on me. But it would not have been nearly so easy if Shannon hadn’t held the space for me to do my work. That is what the apology did, it gave me space. I didn’t exit the triggered space immediately, because these wounds run deep and they need some extra attention. But an hour or so later I was completely out of it and we went about our day in peace.

Yet to get to this point in a relationship requires trust and willingness. We first have to trust that the other person really does care for us and has no intention of hurting us. The triggered person has to be willing to take responsibility for his/her/their own wounds and to do the shadow work required to heal them. It is true that the triggering person doesn’t have to show up to any of this… unless of course he/she/they wants to foster a healthy relationship (a healthy YouMe) with the triggered person. In that case, it might behoove us to reconsider our knee-jerk “that’s on you” response and instead search for ways to hold space for, without taking on or over, the triggered person’s healing process.

Now if you can hang with me just a bit longer, I would like to also extend this to our relationship with the world at large. I’ll use our mountain ecological sanctuary as the example. We are calling it an “ecological sanctuary” because that is what we intend for this place and our relationship with it. It gives little indication of the actual state of this place at this given moment. The reality is that this mountain was “lightly logged” decades ago, and that assault left its wounds. Most of the remaining trees are not mature and, as happens in a young forest, too many adolescent and baby trees are fighting for their survival. When you are a tree living on a mountain you have to cling to the soil for life. Otherwise the massive amounts of water that move through here, as it is right now, take it away and leave you with no ground to stand on. As a result, way too many trees are falling down well before they reach maturity as they give way to the pressures of snow, ice, and wind from above followed by rushing ground water from below. The loss of trees results in further loss of the soil and roots needed to slow down the water. The water rushes even faster and exacerbates the whole cycle.

Shannon and I didn’t cause these wounds to the mountain. They occurred long before we became stewards of the mountain six years ago. We could easily say to her, “That’s on you.” After all, we don’t have the insights to understand what is going on with her, much less what to do about it. That being the case, the forest has to figure herself out. She has to find her own balance in time. And, honestly, that is a fair assessment. She knows herself much better than we do. Far be it for us to tell her what she needs to do to heal. But we are choosing not to say “that’s on you.” We are instead choosing to be present to her wounds, to acknowledge what we can see, to do our best to listen to whatever she might be able to communicate to us, to listen for any guidance that she may be able to give us about how we might help support her, and most of all to hold space for her healing process. We choose this, because at the end of the day, her healing and our healing are not two separate processes. They are one. We are one. If we can figure out how to heal together, this mountain and us, then it will be no tiny thing.

Relationships

It’s not like this interbeing thing is easy for me. I did a pretty good job of isolating myself in separation early in life, so frankly it’s a long road home. Of course it is for all of us. The point is to just start walking. Those first steps look a lot more like watching than they do moving though. It’s enough to start by noticing what might be off about how we are processing and doing life.

This past week I have been reading The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein. Again, I highly recommend this book for this particular moment in time. It is helping me to think through relationships in particular. This has very much been a process for me, and one that has been unfolding over a long time with input from various sources as well as direct life experiences and experimentation. What I know for sure at this point is that I have a long way to go yet. So deeply ingrained is our Story of Separation.

My current point of contemplation is surrounding a certain response that seems to have become common in our relationships these days. I have personally gotten this one more than once from more than one person in recent years. The words are almost always exactly the same: “That’s on you.” This has become a typical response to feedback from somebody that indicates that something that we did or said resulted in that person feeling this way or that way (notice that I said resulted, not caused, just in case your dukes are already up to start defending the comment). I have to admit here that I am usually at the receiving end of this response rather than the giving, but truth be told I have been on both ends of it. Being at the giving end of the comment, I understand completely where it is coming from and the impulse to set healthy boundaries that it originates from. I get it. On the receiving end of it, however, what always crosses my mind is, “yes and no.” And I think that response gets a little more at the complexity of relationship than the hardline border of “that’s on you” does. So let’s dig in.

First, yes, we have learned a lot from the vaults of codependency. We have learned that it isn’t actually healthy to take responsibility for others. We have learned that it is not only unhealthy for us, but it is in fact disempowering to another person to try to “fix” or “heal” him/her/they. I agree wholeheartedly with this assessment. I also believe that codependency comes from an incorrect understanding of what is what, in other words from a faulty worldview. And, yes, I have been more than guilty of this one in my life. So by all means, we should not try to take over anyone else’s life process or self-realization. In this sense, whatever anyone is experiencing at any given moment in time is first and foremost “on them.”

Only it’s not quite that simple. Let’s deepen the discussion by bringing Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Five Agreements or Byron Katie’s The Work into the equation. They provide deep insights into what messes up our relationships. And that is largely that we take things personally that are not actually personal. I don’t know about you, but I am guilty as charged on this one too. Take it from a sensitive, I quite naturally take just about everything personally! And I also tend to take personal responsibility for just about everything, which is at the root of the aforementioned codependency. All of this leads to a painful experience. So maybe it is no surprise to hear that I also wholeheartedly agree with the insights that both of them have afforded us, as the wisdom they have brought forth helps to relax our triggers and get over our inflated sense of self.

Ah, our triggers. That is what this all boils down to in the end, isn’t it? In a nutshell, our triggers are the buttons that activate our childhood wounds. Touch one and the whole wound relives itself in real time (which almost always is an exaggerated response to whatever actually just happened). Anytime we are upset about something, we are triggered. We are remembering the original wound, the original moment when the experience of the harshness of separation shocked and hurt us. It is nobody’s fault. It is not the triggering person’s fault (the person who put his/her/they finger on the button) any more than it is the triggered person’s fault. It’s just a reality of our experience from within the Story of Separation. It can’t be helped. But it can be understood, and that understanding is what will start to shift us out of that story and into one in which such things don’t occur. Hard to imagine, right?

As I said in the beginning, we have a ways to go yet. So let’s just try to keep working on the understanding. So far, nothing that I have said contradicts the assertion “that’s on you.” So why is it that I sense that it doesn’t tell the full story? At issue is the true nature, the reality or lack thereof, of the separate self. To cut to the chase, the separate self doesn’t really exist. That is to say that the truth of the matter is that there is nowhere that we can draw a clear line of distinction between where you end and where I begin. Now what? Now who is it on? See what I mean?

Delving further into this separate self business, I often take my students through a thought experiment to help them to lift the veil on the self. It goes something like this. Think about the food that you eat. When it comes into your body and is digested, some of it gets metabolized into the energy that fuels you, some of it gets discarded as waste back out into your environment, and some of it actually becomes you… which is to say that it is utilized to replace dying cells in your body which are also then discarded back out into the environment as waste. The question is, when does the matter that starts out as food start being you (or your actions) and when does it end being you? Can you draw that line?

For those of you who may still be operating under the belief that you are not one with your body, the same line of questioning can also be applied to all of the non-material inputs that you are metabolizing and which constitute who you are. Those ideas in your head did not originate in your head. They were given to you by someone or something outside of yourself. For example, we weren’t born with our worldview. It was given to us by our culture. When, then, does an idea start being yours and once you put it back out into the world, when does it stop being yours? Can you draw that line?

What I am getting at is that we are not actually separate selves in an objective world. Our very being is relational. That is to say that who we are is defined by our relationships with everything and everyone in our environment. Eisenstein refers to the well-proven theory from social psychology called “situationism” to explain this phenomenon. Situationism indicates that who we are is actually the sum total of all of our experiences (aka relationships). Not only are we the sum total of our relationships, but we actually don’t and can’t exist absent them.

So back to my question… who is it on? Who is responsible for who we are and how we are responding? It isn’t quite so clear now, is it? Maybe the sensitive in me is right. Maybe the sensitive in me understands that interbeing is the truth. Maybe. I won’t take it quite that far as I think that the truth is paradoxical. It always is. That is to say it is a case of both/and. In this case, there are some deep truths to be integrated from learning to say “that’s on you.” There are. I would like to suggest, however, that it would be a mistake to simply leave it at that. That would be to miss the whole other side of the coin.

So here is my evolving theory on this front. In the above diagram, the “you” and “me” bubbles represent the illusion of our separate selves. Incidentally, I do not mean to malign these illusions or our sense of self. We have to have one in order to be here. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with perceiving a self. Nor is there anything whatsoever wrong with drawing a boundary around this self. In fact we have to. It is absolutely necessary that we do so in order to exist in the relative realm. Good boundaries are part of maintaining a healthy, functioning, value-adding self that can participate in the larger whole of which it is a part.

That said, if we understand the self to be a truly separate, independently originated, and fixed self, then we reduce the possibility of our interactions with one another down to simple transactions. That is to say that the interaction between you and me is nothing more than a value exchange, where we give this for that, and the this for that had better be equal if balance is to be maintained. Otherwise one of us, either you or I, will end up depleted. We all have experienced this one, haven’t we? This is another inescapable experience of the Story of Separation.

When we understand ourselves to be relational beings, a completely different picture emerges. Rather than separate you and separate me merely transacting with one another, when we truly relate with one another we begin to experience not just our interdependency, but our interbeing. In essence, a third energetic being is born. In my diagram above her name is YouMe. I would argue this is what always happens when we enter into relationship (any relationship of any kind) with somebody, but since we don’t conceptualize it this way we tend to make a complete and utter mess of it. From this perspective, “that’s on you” completely misses the mark. It becomes like saying to a hungry five year old “that’s on you, the kitchen is over there.” Who is responsible for the five year old?

Well, in the end, if we want that five year old to grow into her full potential and contribute her own unique perspective and gifts to the world, then our best bet is find a way to hold space for her in her own self-realization. This is tricky business as any parent knows. It requires constantly navigating thin lines between nurture vs. smothering, interdependence vs. dependence, and so on. Sometimes we do have to say “that’s on you.” Yet at the same time we have to know that this thought is only one small slip away from gaslighting another person. Isn’t it? I don’t think it is any small coincidence that “that’s on you” has emerged at the same time that gaslighting has become a thing. Again, this is in no way meant to negate setting healthy boundaries and learning to properly allow others their own process of self-realization. Those are critical.

The truth is much more complex than any simple prescription for how to show up to a relationship. That’s all I’m saying. For me, I am contemplating what is required of me to foster a healthy YouMe while also fostering a healthy Me. I can’t promise anyone that I am going to master it any time soon. All I can say is that I am committed to getting better and better at it. I imagine that if we were all working from such a framework, our relationships would become a whole lot healthier, more loving, and more joyful. If that isn’t motivation enough, then how about the realization that YouMe is a whole lot more powerful than either You or Me alone. Not just twice as powerful, but exponentially more powerful in imagining and creating the world which we inhabit. Add a third person to the energetic mix and we discover the truth of what God meant by “when three or more gather in my name.” We discover the infinite power of interbeing. I don’t know about you, but I’m game.

Foundations

A funny thing happened on the way to fixing our foundation… a pandemic brought our project to a screeching halt. If I had a different life experience to date, I might be inclined to deem it incredibly bad timing. We hit the green light on the project in early February and then spent the rest of the month prepping. This involved packing and shifting our contents, demolishing the front porch, clearing the site, finalizing our construction loan, and moving ourselves out along with a few possessions that we would need over the coming months. All of that had to be done by the end of February for the March 1 start date. Over the next two weeks our site team lifted the house ten feet into the air. Then the word came down. Vermont ordered all non-essential businesses to shut down. Besides that, our crew couldn’t get concrete to pour the foundation. We were at a standstill. Our partially demolished house has now been lowered back down to a reasonable height as we wait. There is no telling when the project will resume, much less when construction will be far enough along for us to move back in.

In the meantime, we had just moved in to the basement of our friend Jean’s house when COVID-19 took the U.S. by storm. And here we thought that the hardest thing we would face would be keeping our dogs separated. The dogs were indeed challenging with two dogfights and multiple injuries to show for it, but honestly the high anxiety of our human situation was worse. Imagine being quarantined at home, only you are not at home. Therefore even the slightest bit of remaining control that any of us might have- control over our own domain inclusive of our response to the situation- was also lost to us. While we are truly grateful to Jean for opening up her home to us, we knew we needed to find our own space and give hers back to her for the wellbeing of us all.

I cannot say how fortunate we truly are. We happened to have a backup. We have Tiny Drop, our tiny house located on our off-grid mountain retreat. The only complication was that there is still two feet of snow on the ground. We can’t even drive up our steep driveway yet. Our water supply is fed by a spring that runs down the mountain. As soon as we realized we needed to make our move up here sooner rather than later, our first order of business was to find out if the spring was running and if we could get it flowing through the pipe down the mountain. The spring was running, but the pipe was still frozen. Fortunately, again, we had enough extra pipe sitting around that we were able to divert water from the existing inlet to get it down the mountain far enough that we didn’t have to hike all the way up to the spring every day to fetch water. Good enough. We made our move.

We relocated a week ago. Certainly this life isn’t for everyone. In some ways, life here is the equivalent of “glamping.” But it is perfect for us and for our dogs. It is perfect, especially, for riding out a pandemic. Our place here is completely off-grid with no cell phone connection or internet connection. (This post is coming to you from my car via the free internet out of the Free Library in Brandon.) We literally have no connection to the outside world other than the cars that we hear go by down below. That alone has been a huge relief from the constant flow of collective anxiety jamming up every artery of our hyper-superficial-connectivity. Then there is the social distancing, which frankly can’t get any better than this. We have no neighbors. But the very best thing about it is that it puts us right into connection with the very thing that we need more than anything right now- nature.

Mother Earth. You’ve got to love her. Snow, rain, cold… bring it on. When the sun comes out it is nothing short of glorious. We feel so incredibly grateful that we are going to be here to watch the season change in this place that we fell head over heals in love with over six years ago. If I haven’t made this clear already, spring hasn’t arrived on this side of the mountain yet. It’s beautiful in all seasons nonetheless. Although I have been warned about mud season, so perhaps I should hold off on such a bold declaration until I have fully experienced that. It will be here just as soon as the snow melts. In the meantime, I have a long standing tradition of posting photos of my Vermont “office” to irritate all of my Houston friends. Not to disappoint, here ya go!

Now that you have the picture and the update, let’s talk. Nobody knows how this thing is going to go. Yet I think it is safe to say that whatever we considered “normal” will likely never fully return. We will come out if this profoundly different than we were when we went in. It is possible that this moment will catalyze a full on paradigm shift. Then again it might only be a significant pre-tremor to the full on quake to come. If we are being honest with ourselves, however, we must realize that a paradigm shift is imminent. We simply cannot continue to inhabit the earth in the way that we have since the dawn of Western civilization. That game (of separation) is over, whether we are ready to admit it or not.

And that is downright scary. It’s terrifying to not know what comes next. It is disorienting when our foundations crumble beneath us and our sense of home becomes completely compromised. Trust me. I get it. Many of us, most of us, will fight to rebuild what was in order to get back to normal. Yet I will remind us, as many others are, that our “normal” has been extraordinarily out of balance for a very long time. When we live in an unhealthy situation, it is very difficult to see that from within it, particularly when it is all that we have ever known. Our best chance of gaining perspective is to get outside of it for a bit. This is that chance. It might be the only chance that we get before full on collapse, if that collapse doesn’t come quickly.

While paradigm shifts seem to come out of nowhere, they actually don’t. They are the result of a slow build up of pent-up energy that knows a better way. When that storehouse reaches a tipping point, the system literally gives way to the better understanding. The change seems sudden and certainly catastrophic to life as we know it. Yet it has been coming for a long time. I think the critical thing to understand at this moment is that we are not alone in this. That is to say that the “better understanding” is not something that has to or has been coming from us alone. Gaia will have her say. If we continue to insist on “othering” her, we can be sure that we will not like what she has to say. She has the power to vote us off the island. How silly would our conception of this being the era of the Anthropocene seem then?

On the other hand, if we move to heal our relationship with Gaia, if we move into an awareness of interbeing, then we will have a very good shot at being a healthy part of the new paradigm. That paradigm will be more joyful, more loving, more harmonious, and safer than the one we have been inhabiting. That paradigm will support the evolution of the system as a whole. It must. That is the way of life. We can only dodge the way of life for so long. Again, time is up for that charade. This new paradigm will look nothing like anything that we are used to. It is time to open ourselves to welcome this new reality, as frightening as it may be to leap into the unknown.

Fundamental to fostering a state of interbeing with Gaia and all of her constituent parts is to once again acknowledge her and every aspect of her as sentient. We must meet her as an actual living being. Not metaphorically, but literally. As I mentioned in my last post, this is extremely hard to do from within the confines of Western civilization. I am imploring each and every one of us to find a way to break out of those confines. I offer this reading list to support us in getting there:

The Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, Charles Eisenstein

Earth Acupuncture, Gail Reichstein Rex

Please, please take this opportunity to read at least one of these. They all very clearly describe where we are, how we got here, and where we might go from here. In short, they point to the underlying worldview, the foundation, upon which we have built the world as we know it. This worldview has put us on an unviable path. Nothing short of examining and reconstructing our worldview is going to get us onto a viable one.

If you are able to get out into nature, perhaps start by greeting her as you would a person. In fact, practice greeting anything that you never would have spoken to before as if it is a living being. You may feel crazy, but that’s only because our existing world paradigm has taught you otherwise. If you had grown up in an indigenous culture, developing such relationships with all aspects of Gaia would be a very natural and essential part of your existence and wellbeing. At this point in the game, I would argue that you have nothing to lose and the world to gain.

Last things last. I have to say that in this moment I could easily feel like the world is out to get me. I don’t. On the contrary I feel incredibly and perfectly guided, supported, and protected. I sense that I am exactly where I need to be at this very moment in time. I hear humanity awakening to and asking for the higher understanding that we are needing to face this moment. I hope that in your quiet moments you feel the same. Godspeed.

Impasse

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Ode to the Goatee

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Slow

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In Love

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Used To

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What I did…

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Dreams

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Tiny

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Relationships

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Foundations

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