Today we took a hike in one of our favorite stomping grounds, the Taconic Mountains Ramble zen garden. It’s unseasonably warm here, but not warm enough for this little guy in the photo above. My heart stopped a little when I saw him perched on high, overlooking his beautiful home, where it is difficult to tell if he had taken his last breath or if he is just hibernating. This is one of the bullfrogs who I talked to during my morning runs over the summer. So that’s the first thing. If he is indeed dead, then I have lost a friend. If he is not dead, then he is in a precarious situation to be in a state of hibernation. On top of those concerns, you might recall the cover of my inner child work journal (see “Done” post). Here it is again:
Yes, that’s a bridge from my adult self to my inner child, here represented as a frog. I drew frogs like that in elementary school, in part because my first nickname was “Froggy.” So all sorts of things come up for me. Mainly, I get the sense that this little guy, or gal as the case may be, has gone Home, leaving this home in a state of peace.
Then there is the question of what in the hell she was doing up there in the first place. Was she confused by the unusual warmth and then got caught as the temperature dropped overnight? Is she just another casualty of climate change? Or is she just surrendered to what Is, without a concern in the world? Who knows? Whatever the case, my sense is that we all need to find this bridge home, this bridge to peace, sooner rather than later, alive rather than dead.
So with that in mind, I was fortunate this week to have had conversations to help me move in that direction. One set of conversations was with my new students. That new job that I mentioned in my last post is as a professor in the Architectural Studies program at Middlebury College. It’s a dream job at a place that has spearheaded our consciousness surrounding climate change through the efforts of people like Bill McKibben. Middlebury has a joint degree between Architectural and Environmental Studies, which is where I will find my home.
For starters, I get to help students set off on the right foot from day one, reframing what role architecture has to play in healing our relationship to nature and to each other. Within a liberal arts context, I get to address the broader issues. That means that I get to dig down deep into the primary issue, a worldview that pits us both against nature and against each other. That is to say, I get to talk interbeing. One week into Winter Term, I have already addressed how self-actualization must be hitched to system-actualization if it is to be successful. This is the key to evolution. If we learn nothing else, that understanding alone will guide us home.
The good news is that the students are responding at Middlebury just as they did at Prairie View A&M. Let’s face it, these institutions represent two radically different demographics. One is for the academically elite and the other is for the academically underserved. One is overwhelmingly white and the other is overwhelmingly black. We need both fully engaged in forging our way home to each other. We need both sides of the equation to understand that, in fact, they are both panthers. Literally… that is the mascot of both schools. And they are ready to embrace our sociological-ecological challenges. This generation is eager to step up to the plate. It’s heartening.
Already this week I have had students, some of whom will major in architecture and some of whom will not, convey back to me that they are excited about my class and that already they are seeing things in new ways. And I’m teaching an introductory design studio! The vehicle hardly matters. Their chosen majors or professions hardly matter. No matter who you are or what you do, the question is quite simply: how is the actualization of your own unique potential meant to actualize the potential of the system at large?
For me, part of the answer to that question is to help others in discovering their own unique potential through teaching. To do that, I have to actually learn what each student has to offer. I have to be their student. I have three Chinese students in my studio. Two are here just for college and the other moved here with her family when she was fifteen. It occurred to me, as I was discussing the relationship between self and system-actualization in relationship to political systems- capitalism, socialism, and communism- that I really don’t know the first thing about China. I have zero first hand experience. I only have the stories that we here in the United States are told. So when I had the opportunity to sit down with the latter student, I asked!
In the context of the Hong Kong protests and trade wars, China is not high on our list at the moment. Not that it ever has been. We have routinely called the country out for “crimes against humanity” that we believe are inevitable with any communist system. In fact, Congress just issued a report on China again calling them out for such crimes, in particular in regard to a lack of religious freedom… for Muslims specifically. You can read about it in Reuters (which ranks high as being a non-biased media source):
“U.S. congressional study urges sanctions on China over ‘crimes against humanity'”
Incidentally, my measure of any political system is the same as my measure of anything else: how well does it tie self-actualization to system-actualization? The Soviet version of communism severely oppressed self-actualization. That is why it no longer exists. So I was curious how my student felt about the opportunities for self-actualization in China. Perhaps surprisingly, she reported not feeling all that repressed. In her account, the government doesn’t really get in your way. You might argue that she has been brainwashed, but let me remind you that she went to high school in Brooklyn and is in the midst of a liberal arts education that asks us to question everything.
She acknowledges that not everyone gets to vote and that there is only one party, which is why we call it communism. But to her, the government feels more like what we call socialism. Nonetheless, in order to “earn” the right to vote, you must gain admittance to the one and only party- the Communist Party- which is as difficult as gaining admission to an Ivy League university and encompasses only approximately 6.5% of the population. Virtually everyone who has the right to vote in China does vote as opposed to only about 60% here in the U.S., but still. China is not a democracy, although they are slowly moving in that direction.
To me, the larger questions tie back to the self + system-actualization framework. If crimes against humanity are occurring, there is a serious breakdown of self-actualization. The problem with us throwing stones at China, however, is that we are also guilty of such crimes here in the U.S. Sorry. I know the truth hurts. If you are struggling with this assertion, just think about what is happening at our southern border, not to mention the mass incarceration of our black population. Again, sorry, but our truth isn’t as pretty as we would like it to be. Hence, if you read the above article, it should come as no surprise that China threw it right back at us. And we deserve it.
Now back to my student. Her question is this: who is anyone to tell another country what is in their own best self-interest? Who are we to tell other countries what is the best form of government for their particular situation at any particular moment in time? China has a hell of a lot more people than we do. In her observation, China has “too many people” and they have “too many people” problems. We know nothing about that situation, although it is easy enough to observe that when those of us who have been dominant in this country start to feel outnumbered, we tend to want to restrict the “other’s” right to vote, and we do.
If you want my honest opinion, I don’t think any of us have it figured out just yet. Although if I gauge which countries are doing the best at self-actualization, I would have to give it to those practicing a version of democratic socialism. If you feel inclined to dismiss my observation, I invite you to check out for yourself how we rank in any of the metrics that we have to measure self-actualization: upward mobility, education, freedom, happiness, etc. Check the numbers before you decide how we are doing. The UN 2019 Human Development Index ranked the U.S. as 15th in the world. Fifteenth. Not first:
I’m not saying that we can’t get there from here. In fact, I would argue that it is the mandate of the United States of America to get there. It is our founding vision. I am saying that we are not there yet, nor have we ever at any moment in our history been there. I am also saying that it is not guaranteed that we will get there. That will depend on how well we remember our vision, update our vision as we learn new information, and take the steps to move toward that vision. Most pointedly, we will not achieve the conditions that support self-actualization if we do not hitch it to system-actualization. That’s a Law of Nature that is as real as gravity.
Abiding by that Law of Nature is what will lead us home. And if all of this sounds overwhelming, the main thing to remember is that it all starts at home- with you, with me. This leads me to the other conversation that I have been having this week- the one that I am having with myself. I have been working intensely this year to heal my inner child. At the moment I am doing that through conversation with my body through the guidance of my childhood friend, Chausey Leebron. Chausey is a Psychotherapist who practices Spiritual Psychology. As the new year approached she asked her friends if anyone would be interested in a course on healing our relationship with our body. She got an overwhelming “yes” which led her to launching an online course, which you can find here:
As the name indicates, this is a 33 day process, which I will leave to Chausey to describe in the introductory video. I am 8 days in and what I can tell you is that I have been deeply dialoguing with the parts of my body that have been holding my wounds, stresses, challenges, worry, judgements, etc. You see the thing is, if we want to heal our relationship to Nature, we have to, have to, have to start by healing our relationship to our own nature- to our body, our emotions, our thoughts, our energy… which of course are all interdependent and interrelated. This post is long already, so I will leave more about my experience of this for next week. For now, let me just express my desire for the highest self-actualization possible for me, for my students, for you, and for every single human being on the planet. If this sounds like too much to ask for, I would like to counter-offer than anything less is too little to ask for.
