What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

“What are you going to write about this week?” asked my friend Lindy. “Do you go into it knowing your topic, or do you just show up and see what’s there?”

I just go into my lab and see what’s there. And I did, yesterday, my regular blog day. And I actually started writing. But the piece I bit off was way more than I could chew, and trying again this morning to chew it further, I find myself no closer to clarity. I’m wanting to go back to that anger question, that impulse to “rant and rave,” and speak to the other impulses inside of me, beyond the righting of childhood wrongs. But it seems the muse has little interest in what I’m wanting these days. I cannot seem to force it, the clarity I think I want. I can’t make my thinking tidy and whole. I can’t get my words to line up on the page in the correct order. I can only slog through, it feels like, always on the path but never reaching the goal. And I can only chew as quickly as I can chew.

There’s too much. Too many things demanding my time and attention. So it’s hard for me, frightening even, and deeply challenging, to put myself into this uncontrollable, unknowable space of looking and seeing and feeling and writing and sharing. Some days in the lab I feel moments of joy and fascination. But some days I feel only confusion and haziness. I feel lost. Gray and disinterested. Flummoxed. And all I can think to do is flick off the lights and go back home.

None of that would be a problem, save for the fact that I’ve created an expectation. I have my own expectation, that I write every Tuesday. But that I can deal with. I’m actually pretty gentle with my own expectations. But as Lindy’s question makes clear, there’s an expectation “out there” as well. And when the expectation is “out there,” the whole game changes. Expectation brings the possibility of disappointment. And one of my most tender and uninsulated bits of wiring is about disappointing people.

At some point in my young life, it was made very clear to me that somebody important and powerful was unhappy, and that I was the cause. I could recall and recount people and incidents and events as “the cause,” but it’s difficult to really be sure that I’m seeing clearly. The window into my own past has always been pretty fogged and dirty, and the glass wavy and slumped, leaving me to cobble together my story with thick layers of guesswork for mortar. Perhaps none of that really matters. Whomever it was, or what it was that happened, I had disappointed someone greatly, or so I was told. Perhaps many times, with multiple people, over many years. And some part of me vowed never to do that again.

And those childhood moments were so soul-searing, and my resultant vow so powerful, that I can now, and still, spend life energy worrying about the fact that I didn’t blog on Tuesday like I said I would, and that now, even though I’m cranking something out, it’s not the “deep and meaningful” stuff my ego seems to think is somehow the most “real.” It can feel crazy making, and the only way to “dis-spell” it, I find, is to speak it out loud so that it cannot hide, trusting that, once in the open, whatever it is will crumble away in the light of consciousness. It’s like psychological cloud-busting, perhaps. It’s like lighting a fire to warm a cold room. It’s like naming the elephant in the room, with the room being my own body, heart, and mind, and the elephant being some story, belief, or assumption stomping around inside of me, tearing up the green grass of my best self and leaving footprints on my soul.

So today is not the day to write more about ranting and raging, or to sit further with the “mid-century extinction meme.” Today is a day to name elephants and flick off the lights and step out into the sun to honor the muse, rather than my ego. I can no longer live up to that childhood vow. No amount of present-day keeping of agreements and meeting of expectations will ever go back in time and heal those old “failures to be.” And there are too many big things out there in the here and now that call me to service, for me to waste my life energy clinging to such old and bankrupt strategies.

Begone, elephant. Out, fear of disappointing. Away with ye, childhood vow. Come, sun, and burn away the fog.

I’ll be back next time.

T

As stated when I began this blog, this space is my laboratory, the place in which I, as an “otter of the universe,” as a “pure research man,” follow my fascinations, peer into boxes that intrigue me, and step down paths that call to me, following whatever fairy is singing, or whatever distant tower gleams in the morning sun. I am, as I have also said before, both by intention and proclivity, a mosaicist, a bricoleur, a term for which I thank Daniel Quinn. I gather pieces together - found widgets, flotsam and jetsam, radar tracings, unidentified fascinating objects, and hailstones left behind by brainstorms - and weave them together, searching for meaning and guidance as though I were pawing through entrails or casting bones. I do this mostly because it grounds, guides, goads, and delights me, but also because I believe, or trust, or hope, that my doing so will help my tribe. I do this as a means of transcending and augmenting my analytical, rational, scientific mind. I do this because it feels like the path I must take to becoming someone I can only now vaguely imagine. And I do this because, in this time and on this planet, when the world shakes underfoot and all that I thought I knew has fallen into bankruptcy and disrepute, it feels right and useful, to me, to do something else.

One thing I try to intentionally interrupt is my White Guy™ need or training to “sew it all up.” My days of pretending that I can wrap it all tightly with a bow, that I can present the unassailable case, that I can know and teach and be Right™, have largely ended, crossed off my life’s calendar with a thick permanent marker. I go slowly here. I leave loose ends dangling. I stop before I am finished because I no longer think there is a finished. I make connections, proffer suggestions, raise questions, and log reactions. I let things slide and ride and glide, leaving them to sit on my lab tables and gather dust when something else arises to demand my attention. As an otter, I’m more interested in slipping playfully down the river than in stopping on the shore to build an edifice. As a pure research man, I allow myself to walk without knowing where I am headed. My intention, simply, is to notice what I am noticing, feel what I am feeling, think what I am thinking, and speak what is in my mouth to speak, trusting that, as I move through time, my weaving will form a fabric of some sort, that the bits of broken tile will one day form the picture of my being here.

My intention this morning is to continue my exploration of “ranting and raging,” but only by adding more bits for the bricolage, bits only to be gathered together and pondered, with no hope for resolution, whatever that is.

-It has been notable to me, to see how many, in response to my recent explorations, have felt the need to defend the rightfulness or utility of “ranting and raging,” as though I were questioning their right to be angry, or to express their anger.

-It has also been interesting, as I’ve walked the streets of Facebook City and ventured weekly into Blogland, how peoples’ responses fall into predictable categories, and how I react to those responses. I find myself largely disinterested in anything that feels like a) advice, b) cheering up, or c) sympathy. Responses that fall into these categories tend to confuse me. I do find, however, that I’m really digging responses that fall into a fourth category: empathy and resonance.

-There are a few people I bump into regularly in Facebook City who seem to be always cussing and judging, muttering complaint, displeasure, or anger in short and sometimes indecipherable bursts. I find myself walking away from these people as quickly as I can.

-This came across my radar this week and has stuck to the glass:

The Holy Longing by Goethe

Tell a wise person or else keep silent
For the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive
And what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm waters of the love nights
Where you were begotten,
Where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in this obsession with darkness
And a desire for higher lovemaking sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.
And now, arriving in magic, flying
and finally, insane for the light
You are the butterfly.
And you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced this,
To die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest on a dark earth.

-This also came across my radar, and resonates deeply:

There is Nothing Wrong by Jeff Foster

Sadness is not wrong. Fear is not wrong.
Confusion is not wrong.
Our pain is not wrong.
Resisting our pain is what makes everything seem wrong.
And yet here is a deeper truth, for those who are open:
Even our resistance of pain is not wrong.
If that’s what’s happening, it cannot be wrong.
It is a valid expression of life in the moment.
Beyond ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
This love even embraces resistance.
This Now is vast, and forgiving.

Yet even ‘resistance’ is just another concept.
Another judgement.
Another way to make ourselves wrong.
“Resistance bad. Acceptance good.” That’s what we learn.

It’s not that we “resist” our pain.
We just never learned how to be with it.
How to sit with it. Stay with it. Have a cup of tea with it.
See it as a beloved friend, at home in the vastness.
Our ignorance is our innocence.
We just never learned.

Our pain is not wrong.
It is an invitation.
An ancient teaching.
Universal. Free.

Life invites us to come closer…

Falling through imagined layers…
Into great mystery…

-This feels like an important piece, a poster taped to a wall in Facebook City, attributed to Courtney A. Walsh:

“Dear Human: You’ve got it all wrong. You didn’t come here to master unconditional love. That is where you came from and where you’ll return. You came here to learn personal love. Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love. Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love. Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling. Demonstrated through the beauty of … messing up. Often. You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are. You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous. And then to rise again into remembering.”

-And this Eckhart Tolle quote feels important to hold: ”Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.”

-As does this article about Sinead O’Connor and the Magdalene laundry.

-And this graphic:

Enough. Flotsam and jetsam. Bric-a-brac and bricolage. Widgets and tracings and hailstones. Perhaps one day the picture will emerge. For now, the sun shines. The crow calls. And I’ve a trip to the post office to make.

Pax, all,
T

“Timmy did excellent work this year. It was a pleasure to teach him. He is very sensitive, and we’ve been working to overcome this, as school will be a happier experience if we solve this problem.”

Vera Hartwig, from my kindergarten report card.

I want to return to my first question from last week: what the hell is that blood-rising, heart-pounding feeling inside of me all about? And why am I so strongly compelled to rant and rage? But before I do, I want to notice three things:

First, that post earned far more likes, more comments, and more shares than any other post I’ve made since returning to a weekly blog, to the point where I joked to Sally “Maybe I need to become a ranting Doomer again!” For somebody who’s wondering what helps, what makes sense to do, what’s relevant, this is an interesting data point. One that I shall ponder for a while.

Second, that post’s popularity seems clearly connected to the fact that it did contain a rant, and I note that more than one person expressed concern over the notion that I might stop ranting, or expressed encouragement for me to do even more ranting.

Third, that post’s popularity also seems clearly connected to the fact that that Dodge Ram Commercial stirred up many people, given the number of parodies, alternatives, and articles I saw about it. It has become a meme. I think my take on this commercial is different from these other takes, but that feels like a topic for later. For now, I’ll just link them below for safekeeping.

Back to my question.

First answer: my feelings of ranting and raging were born and raised in my family of origin. They are the direct result of being, as far as I can tell, very different from those around me, and of having my different needs and skills and desires not only not seen, nurtured, accepted and cherished, but actively suppressed. The deep grief, incredulity, disappointment, and anger that rose from my family experience still lingers inside of me, ready to cast it’s shadow across my life when I fail to shine the light of my present being.

I used to joke, when asked about What a Way to Go, that my primary motivation for making the film was to make my family wrong. Thing is, that wasn’t really a joke. Or not totally. I think I was born onto this planet with the knack for, or simply the willingness to, in Daniel Quinn’s words, “take off the obscuring lenses of Mother Culture” and see what is really there. And I think that a very young version of me could see and feel things about my family, and my world, that others were unable, unwilling, or unready to see and feel.

But this is mostly conjecture, as that sensitive, sensitized, reality-seeing little tow-headed boy would have quickly learned, would have been forced to learn, that there was no real market for what he had to offer. Not in his family. Not in his school. Not amongst his friends. It was a tough and sharp edged world, a place of hard work and control and denial, a place of too bad and tough shit and go out and blow the stink off and it’ll grow hair on your chest. Sensitivity to the underlying realities of the world around me would not cut it here. And as there was seemingly nothing to be done about the way things were in any event, nobody wanted to hear about it. What there was to do was to try to forget who I was and why I came here, find a way to fit in and go along and pretend to be happy.

This I did.

For decades.

Until I could do it no longer.

My conjecture is grounded primarily in my adult experience of the past fifteen years or so, as I broke from my marriage and my family of origin and made the attempt to say what I saw and speak the truths that I’d kept so long hidden in my heart. Having been raised in the same conflict-avoidant, psychologically unsophisticated family system I was trying to speak into, my attempts were, to say the very least and especially at first, imperfect. Conflict arose and feelings were hurt and misunderstandings settled in between us and we have not yet been able to find, or create, the deep dialogue that might bring us back into forgiveness and connection. It has gotten to the point where, (save for one brother who, having himself been the family’s outlier at times, seems able and willing to see me for who I am) I have little to no interaction with most of my family, including my own children.

This, as you might imagine, has and continues to be a source of great pain and grief.

My adult experience with my family, and my ongoing work with Sally, has allowed me to reconnect with my best, most essential self, the self who slid down the gravity well and donned a flesh-suit with both a vision and a purpose. And, having reconnected with that beautiful tow-headed being, and armed now with the wisdom derived from my more recent experiences, I have been able to feel my way into and through the processes and predicaments that caused that young soul to don the hard, crusted armor of reactivity and belief and assumption he strapped on as a salve to his deep wounds and a shield to further hurts.

It’s that same armor that I’ve spent my years with Sally learning to take back off. Parts of it. Some of the time.

Clink.

So the feelings that arose within me as I first watched that Dodge Truck commercial - that ranting of can’t you see? and that’s totally wrong! and you do not understand! - those feelings are deeply rooted in the heart and soul of a sensitive young child struggling to be seen and understood, striving to be allowed to simply be himself. They are, in the final analysis, feelings of powerlessness, as I certainly felt powerless in the face of my mother’s anger, my father’s denial, my family’s system of rules and assumptions, and the surrounding culture’s overarching paradigm. I have great facility now in noticing and understanding the source of those feelings, but they remain inside me, deep ruts in my neural pathways, strong pillars in my ego structure, the sharp-fanged alpha males of my monkey mind, and they still arise to shadow my life.

I can say now, I think, that my family experience has colored my entire relationship to the world. It has shaped every relationship I have ever had with other human beings. And it has flavored the whole of my journey through the material I call Doom™.

And I find that this is hugely important. Because if I’m meeting our present predicament using tools invented by a powerless and despairing child, then I may not be using the tools now available to the clear, conscious, and powerful adult I now am. My fear is that ranting and raging simply creates the very separation that underlies our present predicament. If that’s the case, then I’m ready to stop.

I won’t go any further today. It’s enough to make plain the connections and leave it at that. I can feel that there is more to say. At some point, I will say it.

Until then, I touch the ground again…

T

God Made a Factory Farmer

God Made a Farmer: Recognizing Women Farmers

So God Made a Latino Farmer

God Made a Farmer: We Fixed It

So God Made a Banker

So God Made a Farmer: Know Your Meme

So God Made a Farmer: Wikipedia

Watch this video, a commercial from the recent Super Bowl:

I saw this in FaceBook City a couple of days ago and I thought to myself “what utter bullshit.” I watched it again, then downloaded it for repeated viewings, my blood rising and my heart pounding. Bullshit, I thought again. Lies. Fairytales. Half-truths.

I couldn’t ask for a more concise encapsulation of the foundational stories of the world-spanning culture we call Empire than is present in this commercial. It’s about putting humans in charge and ruling the Earth. It’s about how that role was supposedly given to us by God His-Own-Self. It’s about the endless hard work and devotion required to extract a living, to extract our very lives, from an inhospitable “natural world.” It’s about “God and country, about community, loyalty, steadfastness, and resolve.” It’s about bootstrapping, about order and control, about never giving up and getting ‘er done.

And it’s about selling Dodge Ram Trucks.

Please understand that some of my best friends are farmers. Sally, my own wife, can now fairly claim that label. (And maybe even I, as the chief chicken-kisser, should try on that hat to see if it fits.) I was born and raised on farms, surrounded by Grandparents and Aunts and Uncles and Great Aunts and Uncles, most of whom worked the vast stretches of rolling farmland which comprised my haunts and my playgrounds. I grew up feeding orphaned lambs and making tunnels in the hayloft and growing vegetables in our garden and running through the tall corn. My memories of this are fond and wistful. There was beauty in that life.

But when I look at it all through my current habitual lenses, I see the global ecological consequences of our devotion to these stories. I see species extinction and climate change and depletions of forests and topsoil and water. I see greed and corruption and denial and debt. I see toxins and technofixes and terminator seeds. And I see that, while there are now many farmers trying to find a better way, working hard to bring good, clean food to their local markets without destroying their landbase, and while we are now doing that out of seeming necessity as we seek to transition from what clearly does not work to something else which might, I see little questioning of the foundational stories that undergird our assumptions about life and death and power and collaboration and what it means to be a human being on this planet.

You see, from what I think I know, God did not make a farmer, no matter what Paul Harvey said. Certainly not the sort of farmer that we’ve become. I think both science and the Judeo-Christian scriptures are in complete agreement on this point. Evolution made hunter-gatherers, who lived for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years (depending on your definitions), before some of them began to tell themselves the Planet-Ruling stories that now shape and inform both our “agriculture” and our Dodge Ram commercials. God made Adam and Eve, who lived in a garden that provided everything they needed, a world of “low hanging fruit” there for the easy plucking. It was not until Adam and Eve were banished from that garden that the “sons of Adam” got into the whole farming thang, and we all know how that ended. Whether it was snakes and sin, global catastrophe and trauma, alien influence, the “parable of the tribes,” or simply the scarcity that resulted from overpopulation, whether it was inevitable or avoidable, human beings left the garden and entered into what Daniel Quinn calls the most labor-intensive lifestyle yet invented. For whatever reason, it seems we humans made the farmer. And ever since, we’ve been telling ourselves that this hard-working, land-destroying, extra-people-producing work is not only good, but blessed by the Almighty.

Which is why we get to have one of those trucks: we’re on a mission from God.

Okay. Stop. Having made that point, I want to stop and step away from it. All of the above? I’ve done that for years. That sort of analysis comes as easy as cake to me. Piece of pie. Been there done that and all that and amen. It’s my automatic setting. And I’m good at it.

But what really interests me here is this suite of questions: what the hell is that blood-rising, heart-pounding feeling inside of me all about? And why am I so strongly compelled to rant and rage? Does such ranting help any more? Did it ever help? Or have I been spending my own life energy to little avail? If I stopped spending my energy in this way, what else might I do? What’s needed now? What’s wanted? What will help? Can I help? Am I supposed to help? Is it good to help? Is the rant above even correct? Or are there much larger perspectives to take into account, and different lenses through which to look, which might shed some very different light on these issues?

I won’t go any further today than to ask these questions. I have too many juicy things on my plate right now, and they require my attention. But this is a beginning, and a way to simply release that ranting energy from my body, knowing that I can come back to it when the time is right.

I want to take off my habitual glasses and see what else is there. I have not found that ranting and being Right™ has served me in the way I would have hoped.