To Celebrate And To Remember

It is a joyous day for those of us who have suffered through Trump’s self-serving lies, indecencies, and continual attacks on the democratic principles on which this country was founded. This morning in his daily newsletter, Robert Hubbell wrote a chilling and poetic evocation of what we have endured these past four years:

  Vulgarities. Daily assaults on decency and civility. Sordid affairs with porn stars. Islamophobia. Anti-Semitism. Nepotism. Defending white supremacy. Cloying praise for dictators: Putin. Kim. Duterte. Collusion with Russia. Obstruction of justice. Withdrawal from Paris Climate Accords. Pardons for racists. Children in cages. Assault on NATO. Profiteering in the Oval Office. Bribing Ukraine. Impeachment. Firing whistleblowers, Lies. More lies. Conspiracy theories. QAnon in the White House. Blaming Black victims of shootings. Defaming Black Lives Matter. La Fayette Square. Claiming election fraud. Subverting the Constitution. Inciting insurrection. The Capitol Insurrection. Impeachment (again).

It has been a terrible time, but much has been revealed. That Trump could rise to the Presidency and maintain his grip on power in spite of his egregious behavior is a clear sign that our vaunted democracy includes forces and people that have little interest in democracy. The urge to authoritarianism is not something we had taken seriously before Trump’s Presidency. The willingness of politicians to bend reality to their purposes is nothing new, but the new dynamics of the social media information systems have created the possibility for untruths to be cultivated on an unprecedented scale. These are disturbing truths that will not end when Biden is sworn in at noon.

This morning Trump will, however, leave the White House greatly diminished with the Republican party and the people that supported him these four years is in the process of self-destructing. Trump has made it clear there is no party except him and that he will stop at nothing in his desire to maintain complete power. Republicans now must choose their party or their allegiance to Trump. Trump has pardoned many of his accomplices and will take millions of angry and disturbed followers with him. The QAnon lies and anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-Semetic, anti-other zealots will follow him and will be the cauldron he continues to simmer and stir—hoping for some magic elixer to sooth his wounded ego and make him the Grand Ruler of All.

But there is some wisdom in the hackneyed saying ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ The body’s natural response to a virus is to create antigens that recognize and fight against it. Of course, as in the case of COVID-19, sometimes the virus overwhelms the individual body or the collective body and leads to great loss and even death. But when we face adversity, there is the possibility of learning and growing. We are called to remember what is most important and we are challenged to exit our self-reinforcing bubbles of contentment and engage in the world in new ways.

The flip side of Hubbell’s distressing list are the deep shifts in awareness and action that we have seen over the past four years. Beginning with the Women’s March on Washington right after Trump’s election and continuing to the Me-Too movement, we have seen a renewed recognition of the rights and power of women. Women are running for political office and winning at historic highs, both at the state level and at the national level. Trumps unrepentant misogyny has awakened a necessary and ongoing movement toward gender awareness and equality.

And Trump’s continual race baiting and bigotry is part of what led many into the streets and revivified the Black Lives Matter movement earlier this year in response to our ongoing police violence against black and brown bodies. We are in the midst a national conversation about the impact of racism at every level of our society. There is an emerging national consensus that we must consciously work to guarantee the basic rights for safety and security for all members of our society regardless of the color of their skin or where come from.

Though Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will not be sworn in until noon today, they have already begun their leadership of our country. Yesterday they presided over a brief and moving remembrance for the over 400,000 victims of COVID-19.   Biden spoke simply from the heart as Mourner-in-Chief for our grieving nation. His words and his actions give hope that the coming four years will lead us toward a new healing. This healing must include a reckoning with the pain and violence that implicates us all. The way forward is not a recreation of ‘how it used to be’, but a brighter and more creative possibility in which we learn new ways of being together with freedom and justice for all.

In Biden’s own words: “To heal, we must remember. It’s hard sometimes to remember. But that’s how we heal. It’s important to do that as a nation. That’s why we’re here today.”

Mutual Vulnerability

Many years ago I did a two-day training with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a social action organizing group that works to bring people together across differences to mobilize for positive change. As I think about how we might begin to rebuild connections across the acrimonious divide of red/blue and white/black, several things from the training arise that may be useful tools.

The IAF taught that effective social action and change requires organizing people around their own self-interest. The training I took did not teach us how to convince people to care about a cause, but rather how to have conversations to uncover what people already cared about. At that time, they called these conversations one-on-ones.

The skills involved in these one-on-ones are:

• • clarity of purpose,
  • curiosity and deep listening and
  • mutual vulnerability.

Clarity of purpose means to be intentional about the reason for the conversation. Most of our conversations drift from one place to the next. We talk about the weather, then politics, then our latest Netflix binge. These are fine and even nourishing conversations. But he purpose of a one-on-one is to deepen a relationship through sharing stories of personal events that have shaped our lives.

William James, the founder of modern psychology, wrote that each person has a ‘hot spot,’ where we truly come alive—some thing or cause or activity that lights us up. When he spoke with people, he was always looking for what he called ‘the ground of a person’s joy’. As we meet each other, can we discern this beating heart of interest in the person in front of us or on the screen with us? It’s often easier with children who are less self-conscious about their dreams and fears. But we adults have been carefully trained to cover over what we really care about. We hide it from others for fear of being disappointed or ridiculed. Eventually we hide it from ourselves because we have grown so discouraged or distracted that we simply forget.

The curiosity and deep listening in a one-on-one conversation are listening for this aliveness. These are exactly the skills I was taught in my life-coaching training—listening and following the aliveness. We all care about something, but clarifying that something and then acting on it is the work of a lifetime.

But the part of one-on-ones that was most surprising for me was the mutual revelation and vulnerability. From the time I was a young boy, I observed and absorbed my mother’s endless curiosity about other people. When we went on family vacations to new places we would often lose her. The rest of us would be moving on and notice she was no longer with us. We would then retrace our steps and find her in deep in animated conversation with some random shopkeeper or bus driver or passerby. She was promiscuous in her interest of the world.

My early training in one-on-ones also involved our Saturday morning trips to the local downhill ski area. We would get up in the dark to make sandwiches and take advantage of the ‘early-bird special’. While skiing individually, we played a family game. The object of the game was to see how much you could learn about the person you rode up on the lift with. (These were the days of ‘T-bar’ lifts and allowing ten-year olds to practice independence through wandering up and down snowy mountains.) Exhausted at noon, we would eat our sandwiches on the way home in the station wagon and tell stories of the strangers we had interrogated.

But the idea of sharing parts of yourself in conversation was not something I was accustomed to or comfortable with. While it may surprise the readers of these daily reflections, I tend to be rather introverted. I have this odd enjoyment of being up front and being the center of attention and have taken up this public practice of exploring my inner life through these daily writings, but in individual conversations I’m much more interested in listening to other people than I am in talking about my inner life. (We are all such a wondrous blend of this and that – of open and closed, of private and public.)

But in the one-on-ones, you ask questions about what people care about—about what has led them to where they are—about turning points in their life. Then you respond by sharing the same for yourself. The main focus is on the person you are talking to, but the practice is intentional mutual vulnerability.

I’m incredibly excited about the inauguration tomorrow. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be our new President and Vice-President! This, for me, is incredibly good news. But the work ahead to bring our country together will take years and will require the ongoing engagement of us all. Perhaps these few skills from the IAF may be useful tools for the journey.

MLK Day: Celebrating Truth

Martin Luther King, Jr was not a gradualist. He was not willing to wait patiently for things to change. Many of his colleagues, both black and white, urged him to be more conciliatory, not to do things that would upset the status quo. ‘Don’t poke the bear’ they might have said. ‘Don’t do things that will further antagonize the people in power.’ ‘Don’t cause trouble.’ King heard their voices of moderation, then went ahead organizing and leading courageous non-violent actions which exposed the violence and hatred that were woven into the fabric of our country.

King’s words and actions and the words and actions of those who stood with him, changed our country and changed the world. But the events of January 6 make it obvious that the violence and hatred of people with black and brown skin, of immigrants, of Jews, of intellectuals, of women—of anyone we perceive as different, is still very much present in our country.

Being nice and engaging in polite conversation is fine, but on the most important matters, it is not nearly enough. This applies in our civic life as well as in our daily lives. In a relationship, you might not want to share some important truth for fear of upsetting the other person. ‘They wouldn’t understand.’ ‘They won’t be able to hear this.’ These statements may or may not be true, but they often function as excuses to avoid life-giving conversations. We can feel righteous in our ‘care’ for the other while, at the same time, protecting our fragile self-image against information that might be disturbing. Often, it’s not really that I don’t want you to be upset, it’s that your upset will be upsetting to me, so I hold back to protect myself.

There are a thousand excuses for not telling the truth and for letting things be. But most of them are self-serving and ultimately lead away from the authentic connection and truth that we long for.

What is ‘the truth’? Of course, no one knows. Or there are multiple truths. Perhaps a working definition of truth could be that which leads to reconciliation and authentic connection. This kind of truth requires naming what is going on and what has gone on. When lies are told—lies about things that have happened, things that are happening, things that will happen—they must be confronted or they will fester and lead to more of the same, but bigger and more harmful.

The storming of the Capital on January 6 by people carrying Confederate and Donald Trump flags was a demonstration of the destructive power of lies. Trump’s barrage of patently false statements about November elections were repeated and amplified by Republican Congressional leaders for two months leading up to the events of that day. While the names of all who supported and participated are still emerging, the resulting images are seared in our collective memory.

Now there are calls for unity and harmony from these very people who spread lies in order to retain their grip on power, even if it meant overturning the very system that elected them to power in the first place. ‘Lets not focus on the past.’ ‘Let’s not hold the soon-to-be ex-President accountable because it will further divide the nation.’ These calls from extreme Republicans are the ones that would have us avoid the reckoning and the truth-telling that must be part of any genuine reconciliation.

It’s probably not surprising that these calls to move on and forget mirror the calls by many about race in our country. ‘Let’s not talk about slavery, or lynchings or the raft of legislation passed over the years that has inflicted violence against black and brown people.’ ‘Let’s just move forward.’ But we cannot forget or move beyond what we are unwilling to acknowledge.

Forgetting is a kind of pretending. But the damage of lies is ongoing. The pain and violence of the past can never be undone. Only when we are willing to honestly confront what has happened and what is happening even now, can we find a way forward together.

So, this morning, in honor of one of our great national heroes, Martin Luther King, Jr., let us recommit ourselves to truthful and courageous conversations grounded in love. Let us be willing to disturb ourselves and others on the path to the reconciliation, justice and harmony that we all dream of.

Winter Gardening

The first sign in my household of the coming spring is the arrival of seed catalogues. They come with a reliability and glamour that belies the real nature of gardening which is much more provisional and gritty. I like both. But the catalogues have come this year, as they do every year, to remind me that in eight to ten weeks, I’ll be stumbling upon my first snow drops back by the side door where they seem to spring up overnight next to the snow piles.

Without periscopes or even eyes to look in the periscopes, how do they know the snow is gone? Do they grow in the frozen ground up to near the surface and wait to sense the warmth of the early spring sun before they make the final break into the light? Do they feel the release of pressure as the snow melts? And do I never notice them until I see their tiny nodding white blossoms a few inches above the ground because of the pace of their sprouting and blooming or is it that over each winter I loose the habit of paying attention to the earth at my feet?

So many questions. This lovely wondering is one of the delights of the gardening life. Even as I write this, my heart warms slightly and something, in the middle of winter, begins to grow inside me again.

I had a friend who taught art in high school and she said that her job was to teach her students to pay attention. It wasn’t about aesthetics or creativity or problem solving—all those things are a secondary outcome to the paying attention. I think it’s so with gardening and perhaps with most of life. Master gardeners, carpenters, lawyers and teachers are people who have learned to pay attention in particular ways.

Paying attention and wondering. If you ask me, this is the good life. I’ve never been good at being an expert. Though I have been known to have a strong opinion or two, what I like most is to appreciate the infinite wisdom and variety of the world—both around and within me. I’m enchanted by stories of the Chinese hermit Zen poets who refused positions of prestige and accountability. They lived lives of intentional obscurity and freedom. Of course the ongoing irony is that the ones we know about are the ones who were less successful. The truly successful hermits were never found and left no stories to seduce us. But perhaps the intention of some of these wild seekers of beauty was not to cut off connection, but to be free from the praise and opinion of others.

In Loving What Is, self-realized teacher Byron Katie wrote: “If I had one prayer, it would be this: “God, spare me from the desire for love, approval, or appreciation. Amen.” Many of us contort ourselves into intricate pretzels trying to be good or wise or competent enough to earn the love, approval and appreciation of others. Being free from the desire for these things that come and go is a great blessing.

But you can’t just say: ‘I don’t care.’ I mean you can say that, but it doesn’t change anything except to require more work to pretend that what is true is not true. These desires for approval and appreciation are natural and, despite what Katie preaches, are not a problem. Being human is complex, problematic and painful, but it is also wondrous, fascinating and endlessly emerging.

A better way to work with our human dependence on others is to let it be and learn to pay attention to what really interests us. Each of us are drawn to different parts—different aspects of the world. For me it’s the mud—the wet earth from which we and the tiny snow drops and the mighty oak all spring. The wet earth, that when it’s sticky enough can be shaped into vessels and containers that we can drink and eat from. These basic earth things delight me both in the doing and the considering.

Now, mid-January, is the time of considering and dreaming of the gardens to come. I avidly page through the glossy photos, all perfect exemplars of what might be. I dreamof paths lined with blooming flowers and I look forward to the actuality of the thing itself which is gritty and emergent in ways photos can never be. My disappointments and inevitable failures will be more than balanced by the first green sprout that splits the moist earth and the fully improbable reality of those delicate snow drops that will be coming in the not too distant future.

Blursday

Saturday morning. Blursday morning. These days the days and weeks have a weird sameness. Shorn from their usual geographic reference points they blend together. Many of us no longer traveling to work or to see family around the country or even going out to diner for breakfast and coffee with a friend. My meetings have no specific place, they simply appear, one after another on the computer screen. My days and weeks have no specific place, they mostly happen here. And, now that it’s winter, here is pretty much inside—in these rooms where I live that are now more familiar to me than every before.

The new normal is not moving around too much—not consorting with human beings like we used to. We are told we must carefully keep our distance and stay safely beyond the point of contact. Invisible enemies surround us, now killing nearly 4,000 of us Americans per day. We must be constantly on alert. We have to stay away from each other. Our situation is beyond serious and yet some of us can still not comprehend the danger enough to wear masks, wash our hands and stay safely distanced.

This time is hard for us all.

The vaccine is here, but the coordinated roll-out will not apparently begin to begin until January 20 when a new administration is formally sworn in. The lies and rumors spread by the outgoing administration, including a number of ongoing Congressional Republicans, have created a culture of paranoia and disregard for basic science and the hard-won wisdom of our public health officials.

But I don’t want to go all political again this morning. I’m tired of writing and considering and wondering about the current state of our democracy. I’m tired of being outraged. (At this point, I notice the urge to list all the things I am outraged about. But, alert to my own part in disturbing myself, I choose, this morning to walk down another path. I’m taking an outrage break. Enough for the moment.)

So bleary eyes in the dark this morning. Cold January rain falls outside. The gutter company scaled the Temple building two weeks ago during one of our thaws and cleaned out the gutters, so the water that was spilling noisily over the roof edge above my window now quietly follows the gutter to the silent downspout.

Recently I’ve been singing ‘Itsy-bitsy Spider’ to my grandson on Zoom. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a dramatic song with gestures for little ones. A spider of diminutive proportions bravely ascends the water spout only to encounter a reversal of fortunes when the rain water sends him back to where he was before. But there’s a happy ending as the brave spider is heartened by the reappearance of the sun and sets out once again on their perpetual task.

Itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout.
Down came the rain and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain,
Then the itsy-bitsy spider went up the spout again.

Though the functioning of zoom and the reality of people on the other side does not appear to fully make sense to my grandson as he approaches his second birthday, he seemed to recognize the song and be curious about the hand gestures his Nana and I were making as we tried to make virtual connection. But the puzzling thing to me, was that when the sun comes up, the gesture he made was covering his eyes (with his cute little hands) rather than spreading his arms to be the reappearing sun.

I’m wondering if he is perhaps being taught an alternative version at nursery school. The correct version of the gestures encourages identification with the sun—manifesting self as the whole world. Apparently there is a heretical version circulating where you are supposed to respond as if you were there and the sun was bright in your eyes. This is clearly an inferior interpretation that not only encourages separation from the world around us but also leads to smaller gestures and diminished engagement.

But, I suppose this rainy morning, it’s all academic. Any spiders that had been safely playing and living in the non-functioning downspouts of the Temple with no need to climb back after every rain, are now fully washed out. It’s still dark, but the rain continues and there will be no visible sun this morning to dry up all the rain. We’ll be wet for the day.

So this wet day is all we have.  Cars pass on Pleasant Street as per usual. The pandemic rages and drags on. Democracy holds for the moment. My pleasantly mild oolong tea is now cold in my cup. Time to cease and desist with the complaints and speculation. Time to make my bed, fold the clean laundry that has been patiently waiting in a pile on the floor and climb up the waterspout of this new day.