The ‘Other’: Dark Currents of Democracy

Arny Mindell, the founder of Process Work and World Work, asserts that everything we encounter is part of our world—part of us. Drawing on Carl Jung, shamanic traditions and Eastern philosophy, he speaks of a world of reflective interconnection, where we are all part of a constant process of emerging. This ongoing becomingness of reality is the dynamic and ephemeral world in which we live and act. We cannot control what is happening, but we can join with the energetic currents of the moment to support the natural evolution of life.

Arny has worked around the world in places of deep and unrelenting conflict, bringing opponents together to speak what has not been spoken and to listen to what has not been heard. I have attended some of his trainings and I have never seen a human being so genuinely delighted with whatever is happening. His certainty in that the ‘arc of history bends toward justice’ is palpable as he works not to contain or smooth over conflict, but to find out the essence of the problem in the assurance that the current disturbance is exactly what reality needs to move forward.

This Process Work position is not so much something to be believed, but rather a perspective from which we can engage in our lives and the world around us. If everything we encounter is part of our world, it means that ‘the other’ that we wrestle with is part of us. This ‘other’ usually appears as an embodiment of what I am not. All of the qualities I do not see in myself, I project onto some person or group because I can’t admit to them in myself. Jung called this the ‘shadow’ – that part of ourselves that we have not fully integrated.

For more than a year now, Trump has been rousing crowds around the country with promises of ‘getting rid of the bad actors.’ He populates the world with dangerous ‘others’, then proposes to undercut democratic principles and processes in the name of necessary safety. It’s the Muslims. It’s the Mexicans. It’s the fictitious rise in crime. We are in danger and we must be strong. We don’t have time for the niceties of due process.

So it was in the fifties with Joe McCarthy and ‘Communists’. So it was with almost every wave of immigrants into our country – the Chinese and Japanese, the Irish, the Italians, the Poles. Every group is initially seen as ‘the other’ – almost sub-human. It is essential for us to see the perennial appeal of this response to anxiety: blame someone else.

But I can’t recount this American history without going further back. The very foundation of our country rests on a hatred for and extermination of ‘the other.’ Our great nation, which we claim is based on the principles of liberty and justice for all, has its roots in the extermination of native peoples and the enslavement of black people on an unprecedented scale. You and I did not do this, but we must begin to take responsibility for the racism and violence that is woven into the fabric of our great democracy.

Our work to preserve the foundation of democracy in our country in the face of Trump’s daily assaults must to include a new awareness of and work to undo the ongoing structures of racism and economic violence that have been conveniently hidden from many of us.

Tribal Trouble

Human beings are tribal. We are hard wired to identify with a limited group of people (who are ‘like us’) and against everyone else who is ‘different.’ The ‘different ones become the ‘other’ the ‘enemy who we must band together to fight. In his wonderful Ted Talk in November, Jonathan Haidt describes this tribalism as ‘Me against my brother. My brother and me against my cousin. And all three of us against the world.’ As this description suggests, tribalism is not a rational, analytic position, but a visceral and instinctual response to danger; real or imagined.

This basic human tendency to create a common identity in the face of external dangers could easily have given some early humans a survival advantage. ‘Us against the world.’ might have allowed small bands of people to act quickly and powerfully together to deal with real dangers to the group. Members of the tribe might be filled with strong emotions that gave them powers and the fearlessness to risk their lives for the sake of their tribe. Groups of humans that were more laid back and welcoming to the world may have lost the struggle to survive and did not pass their genes on to the next generation.

Throughout history, finding a (or creating) common enemy has always been a way of bringing people together. On a personal level, we do this when we gossip about one another. We bond together when we discuss the real or imagined faults of others. The ‘truth’ of what we are saying, the degree to which it corresponds to a verifiable reality, has no impact on the closeness we may experience in the activity itself.

This observation about humans tendency to organize around a common ‘other’ or common ‘enemy’ is readily apparent these days in the activities and spirit of the liberal part of our country. Many liberal commentators have called this activation of the left, the silver lining in Trump’s Electoral College victory. I myself have been uplifted by the Women’s March, the protests against the Immigration Executive Order, contributions to the ACLU. Suddenly people who share my worldview are caring enough to do more than talk.

Trump himself is a master at activating these tribal tendencies. He effortlessly and constantly speaks of ‘the others’ that we need to protect ourselves from. His focus on the wall he wants to build between the US and Mexico is a perfect illustration of this point, as is the Executive Order on immigration. The reason many Americans are feeling economically stressed and left behind is that there are too many people not like us in the country and coming into the country. We must unite against ‘those people’ who are taking away our security and prosperity.

When our anxiety is channeled against one person or one group, we actually feel some relief. We are no longer alone. The problem is not us, it is ‘those people.’ We turn shoulder to shoulder to join together to take action.

How do we use the energy of our tribal arousal to take action against Donald Trump’s very real threats to the democratic foundations of our country while not being carried away in the very thing we are fighting? (to be continued…)

Better Than a Blizzard?

Five thirty-three a.m. here at Blue Spirit resort in Costa Rica. Mostly dark.  I sit in shorts and t-shirt by the pool deserted pool. Most of the others sleep while the strong breezes push the big palms. Their naturally tattered leaves rattle and flutter with practiced ease. A faint lightening of orange creeps over the eastern hills.

Nearby, the howler monkeys practice their strange vocalization. These small arboreal creatures sound like the monster from the deep come to eat you up – but really are happy nibbling leaves as they effortlessly traverse the canopy overhead.

Everything, still in silhouette, moves with the breeze. The repetitive dark lines of the palm fronds stick up over the horizon line in the mid-distance. Nearby, the sound of water running constantly over the edge of the infinity pool.

We are all infinity pools – moving bodies of liquid – always spilling over. Not really stopping at the skin line, though that is the fiction we live by. Helpful enough to persist, false enough to cause lots of trouble. Each of us is always overflowing – always sending off messages to others of our kind: in our movements and our stillness—our expressions and lack of expressions—our voices and our smells.

Looking right, about forty feet off the ground in the small branches of a large tree without leaves, I see one of the smaller howler monkeys. A small dark and furry animal with a long prehensile tail. Prehensile (according to Mirriam-Webster): 1 : adapted for seizing or grasping especially by wrapping around 2 : gifted with mental grasp or moral or aesthetic perception. So with his tail he stabilizes himself as he goes from branch to branch. He is not in a hurry, and shows not the slightest fear of the height or precariousness of his position. Clearly height and tenuous grasp are not concepts he understands.

I love the second definition “gifted with mental grasp or moral or aesthetic perception.” With the tail of our mind we grasp thin straws to make a coherent and opinionated world which appears to reside completely outside us.

The eastern sky, now turning robin’s egg blue. A wispy pink cloud floats ambiguously above. The wind still blows hard in gusts, rattling the surprisingly tough leaves. The howler monkey ascends higher – now leans out over empty space, effortlessly finding the next branch. He seems to especially like what’s on the end of the smallest branches and is willing to lean out to get it.

Today, back home in Worcester, Massachusetts, a blizzard.

In this dream-life, I walk up to the pavilion to fill my high-tech travel cup with Costa Rican coffee and a little ‘letche’, before heading to the deserted beach for morning qi gong.

What to Remember When Writing Poetry

I’ve always wanted to be a poet and I suppose I am, because sometimes I write broken lines on the page and I find myself continually willing to step through the barrier of ‘Who do you think you are?’ to see what happens.

Words sometimes cohere like strange attractors to reveal patterns that bring me deeper.   Finding some shape of sound and meaning that pleases me, I am send it off—post it as my gift to the universe. I suppose I should be more careful with creations. I should work longer to ensure only the highest quality. But I refuse to work that hard, so when there’s a spark, I trust that to be enough.  (Even when there’s not a spark, I try to trust that too.)

For me, this trusting is the key to creating anything—remembering that there is nothing to prove, we are already OK. Since whatever we do will never be good enough to earn our keep, we don’t have to try so hard. It’s not not caring. It’s just remembering the beating heart has been given and already fills our entire body with the red liquid of life – the energy that sustains us – the life that is us. Whatever our considered opinion on the matter, we are always and nothing but the universe universing—the incarnation of God’s love.

The key to dancing in life is to begin knowing that nothing is good enough to earn this love that has already been given. As we consciously receive this unmerited gift of life, then not so critical, not so hard. Everything we do, every word we write, every move we make is our love song to the mystery—a deep bow to all that is already.

Words come together (or not) and express some fraction of life. Always a fraction over zero. Always the fullness of the universe even in a few poorly chosen words.

May it be so.

May I remember that it already is so.

Poetry on the Beach

4,148 miles from home. Blue Spirit Retreat Center in Costa Rica. The sun is coming up as I sit on the balcony in t-shirt and shorts, in a rocking chair, with my morning cup of coffee. Warm in the morning breeze, I am grateful for this ease of time and space. The view and sound of Pacific waves in the distance.

Yesterday I went by myself to the beach while everyone was doing something else. Down the gravel road – between the palms – out into the open brightness of blue and white. Late morning. I go into the water with no one around. Strong waves and currents with no particular allegiance to tourists encourage awareness. So I float deliciously yet carefully in the warm salt water of this momentary paradise.

Safely out of the water, I air drying off in tropical heat. I unfold my blue camp chair in the shade of the bank, hidden from the harshness of the sun. I break open the book of William Stafford’s poetry that I have brought mainly on the merits of its thinness. I mean to enjoy each poem here. Page one: ‘A Story That Could Be True.’ I read it out loud to myself, alone with the beauty of the beach, the water and the sky. It’s not an amazing poem, but I read it several more times, hoping to find a way inside.

After a few recitations, I find a few lines that might be about me: ‘Then no one knows your name, / and your father is lost and needs you / but you are far away.’     That no one might know my name, I can imagine, but that the consequence of this is that my father (not me) is lost? This is a possibility I hadn’t considered. Certainly my father is lost – lost in so many ways now that he is dead. Maybe he was lost before he was dead. Lost to me – lost to himself.

‘Your father is lost and needs you’

You can take a line from someone else’s poem and learn something you didn’t know. It doesn’t matter what the poet meant, now it is yours and speaks uniquely of your life. Play with it, let it play with you. Roll the words around on your tongue to taste its sound and allow it to mean new things.

So I spend the morning with this one poem, uncovering precious shells of meaning on the beach of these uneven lines. I put it them all in a side-pocket of my mind to nourish me on the journey ahead. Each sounding of the poem, a prayer to life.

JetBlue Flight 897

I still love the falling
away of the world
as we rumble off
the runway and leap
into the morning sky—
my body gently pressed
back against my will
in the rush of it all.

Lifted in the irrational
levitation of this silver
leviathan—manifesting
the brilliant hubris of
us dreaming and determined
bipeds. Only the children
and the simple-minded
remember to be astonished.

And I always want
a window seat
to view my kingdom
from above. I marvel
at the exquisite handiwork
of the pattern-maker—
visible once again
as my earnest reality
drops away and
wonder is restored.

Thank You Bill Murray

I missed Groundhog Day again. February 2^nd came and went while I was busy doing something else. Did the little fellow see his shadow? Will we be trapped like Bill Murray (in the eponymous movie) in the same day over and over again until we learn our lesson? Hard to know what is coming next. Impossible to know what is coming next.

Our world changes through incremental events, until it changes through radical and seemingly unexpected events. Like how the meteor caught the dinosaur party by surprise. Or how the Berlin Wall of my childhood one day was reduced to rubble. Or how Donald Trump got elected President of this disturbed country.

We can always look back and find the unnoticed patterns that seemingly led to the dramatically shifted  tectonic plates of the moment. But we humans also have the capacity of creating a reasonable explanations of how two unrelated things are actually related. My computer and the giant turtles that lay their eggs on the Pacific beaches of Costa Rica.

My sociology professor in college, Phil Ennis, used to say that the universal correlation is 20%–the degree to which any two random objects determine each other is somewhat. Phil Ennis also used to write good ideas he had onto the white kitchen cabinets of his apartment with magic marker and to always watch TV without sound to better understand what was going on. He was very curious about the world. He once said to me in a tone of great urgency “The world is an interesting place and you can think.” In terms of advice from teachers, this ranks right up there with my high school band teacher, Mr. Sam Cifonelli, who once stopped the whole rehearsal to exhort to me and my alto saxophone: “Rynick, stop sucking that horn and blow it!” And Mary Risley, my Masters ceramics teacher who said: “Better to be bold and wrong, than timid and right.”

But back to this unpredictable world that may repeat itself indefinitely for the benefit of our education until we learn whatever it is we are supposed to learn.   Or may veer off course in a heartbeat into a future we never could have imagined.  We can’t ever know for certain. We can’t really comprehend where it all comes from and how it all fits together. We can only know what we know up to this moment. After this, the new will come with imperceptible slowness and in overwhelming landslides that change the geography even as we walk on it.

We are advised to keep updating our maps of this changing external and internal terrain. It behooves us to keep our eyes open, make lots of mistakes and to learn as we go.

Creating Separation

For most human healthy beings, there is a fundamental distinction that organizes the world: me and you. Me and the world I live in. I experience myself from the inside while everyone else lives outside of me. I may imagine what they are feeling and thinking, what their intentions are, but I can never really know.

This is a helpful observation and gives rise to such nuggets of wisdom as ‘Don’t compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.’ Whatever your fantasy of someone else’s life that looks so much more together or happy or easeful than yours, it’s not true. It also means that we can never experience ourselves as other do and no one can ever fully understand or judge our life. Each one of us is a singularity—a never-before-happening being. These are indeed helpful things to keep in mind as we make the choices that shape our lives.

But it is also true that this fundamental division of the world is a fiction. Though it appears that I am separate from the world in which I live, I am actually seamlessly woven into the fabric of this vast network of being. The world that appears so clearly to be ‘out there,’ is actually part of me and lives inside me.

Shunryu Suzuki, a twentieth century Zen teacher, put it this way:

. You may say something exists outside of yourself, you may feel that it does, but it isn’t true. When you say, “There is the river,” the river is already in your mind. A hasty person may say, “The river is over there,” but if you think more about it your will find that the river is in your mind as a kind of thought.”

The Buddhist teaching is that the world we live in arises in the interaction between ‘us’ and everything that is ‘not us’. The world, that is so vivid and causes us so much trouble is actually partially created by us – by our thoughts, our words, and our actions. We might say that whatever we encounter is ourselves.

This is not to be confused with the nihilistic position that posits the world as a projection of the mind that can be controlled with appropriate thoughts. Though the river may be in your mind, you can still drown quite completely if you try to cross where the current is too strong.

What might this mean in a world seemingly dominated by the disturbance of a fast-talking man with orange hair? Turning away and pretending it’s all fine is not a responsible option. But finding the commonalities, the similar impulses and inner disturbers is also work we should be doing. Though we must each stand up to do our part to stop injustice and ease suffering, it all happens in the context of the intertwinkling of self and other—in the midst of this mysterious, interdependent and dynamic world in which we find ourselves.

How To Live

Many people I talk to are wondering about how to live in these times of change and disturbance. For many of us, the world feels fundamentally different than it did last year at this time. Our new President, instead of embodying values that are important to us, seems intent on undercutting the fundamental institutions and processes of our democracy—moving away from a spirit of respect and mutuality to a world of competing self-interest and power politics.

But the world is always all of the above. The inclusiveness and welcoming of difference that is one of the unique features of our country has never been experienced equally by all. And paradoxically, the movements to increase inclusivity and fairness have led sizable portions of our country to feel attacked and not included. Our focus on identity politics, appreciating the unique challenges and contributions of each group of Americans, has gone hand in hand with a virulent polarization of interests and positions.

For many of us liberal intellectuals who live in the cities or near the coasts, life has been reasonably comfortable. Certainly there have been economic and social challenges, administrations we agree with or find objectionable. But for the most part our children have gotten reasonable educations and had the opportunity to find decent jobs and begin their own independent lives. We have been able to rest with some uneasy confidence that the arc of history is bending toward justice.

Perhaps the harsh benefit of these times is that some bit of our comfort and certainty has been snatched away. No longer feeling in the majority, we are experiencing some portion of what many others are quite familiar with – a feeling of alienation, uncertainty and pessimism about the arc of our country.

Though in my personal life, I still have the option of not reading the news and pretending that my life is still normal, this is less and less a tenable option. I feel the increasing pressure of discomfort as arbitrary decisions are made by Steve Bannon and the President that are in direct conflict with due process and the values of our society. (Though I can’t write this without thinking of the Republican’s reactions to some of Obama’s executive orders protecting immigrants and the environment – a mirror image of my outrage.)

Each of us is going to have to find a unique way to balance integrity, engagement and sanity. Spending four years being outraged 24/7 makes no sense. But hiding and pretending makes no sense either. How do we hold our hearts open to this suffering world (including the suffering from fear and having to build walls to keep others out) and realize the limitations of our time and energies? How to still find time for what we love in the midst of making time for participating in our democracy as active and effective agents of peace and mutuality? This is our challenge.

Working the Night Shift

In the middle of the night
a switch flips in the brain
and the mind wakes up.

Nothing’s to be done—
the body still prone
when the inevitable
prowling begins.

I wander vast distances
in helpless search of
an object of obligation—
some forgotten bone
in dire need
of further consideration.

It’s a lonely life
sometimes—traversing
the long spaces
of these dark matters.

Morning always comes
by surprise, the digits
of the clock having jumped
ahead while I swear I
haven’t slept a wink.

Yet a faint dream lingers
as I stumble through the
half-light toward daily life.