June 3, 2009
Yesterday was my birthday – and I’ve established a ritual I love on my birthday. Every year for MANY years, I’ve spent the day in a spirit of curiosity. I don’t plan it ahead, but spend the day noticing things that I’ve never done and trying at least one. It’s a way of spending the day being open to possibility. And I usually wonder, at the end of the day, why I don’t live every day that way. It has uncovered for me the magic of yoga, of bleacher seats at Fenway Park, of a manicure and pedicure, of many kinds of food and many other things.
So today, I started thinking about my little birthday ritual in a new way. I started wondering about all the things I do (and we do) because I know them. And started wondering what would happen if I spent more time in this curious unknown place. What if I didn’t spend as much time keeping ground under my feet? What if design and facilitation didn’t fall on the old tried and true quite so much? What if the stories I tell myself about why people (or groups) do the things they do weren’t true – or were only one version of what’s true? What if I spent the day noticing situations and what I normally do – and playing around with something else? What might emerge then?
I’m not advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But merely wondering what would happen if every day was a little more fresh – and grew out of a spirit of curiosity? I think, as well, about the post Marianne made recently, in which she talked about our need to approach the current situation with new thinking, with a paradigm shift. In that spirit, I’m wondering what habitual ways of thinking and acting I have as an individual – and also what habitual ways of thinking and acting that we have as organizations and as a community working toward social justice and social change. What would happen if we paid attention, noticed what we usually do – and strategically tried something different?
April 22, 2009
For a while, I’ve been fairly unsuccessfully trying to create a space in my apartment that works both for my heart and for my head. My meditation cushion is there – as well as my altar and poetry and spiritual books. It also has my desk, computer and two bookshelves overstuffed with books and journals about power, white privilege, race, class, genocide, conflict and social issues. If I’m really honest about it, it’s the most chaotic room in my apartment.
I’ve been intentionally trying to create this space because I’m trying to bring these two parts of my life together. In part because I’ve been noticing what seems like a split in progressive groups. For some of us, talking about the ways society is structured to benefit some groups and deny those benefits to others rolls off our tongue and is a framework that holds great resonance. Others are more comfortable talking about the ways we’re all connected – oneness and love are foundational ways we understand the world. There are a few wonderful examples I know (or know about) of people who fully integrate both. But I don’t know that many. Most people seem to lean in one direction or the other.
So for those of us who lean toward one or the other, talk of structure without spirit – or of spirit without structure – seems incomplete. As if the speaker is missing a huge part of our experience and belief. They may even seem to deny what we think of as reality. We tend to then move more vehemently to our “side.”
From a Buddhist perspective, reality can be described as being made up of two truths in which we live simultaneously – the relative (or historic) truth and the ultimate truth. The relative truth describes the world in which there are deep separations – it is the truth that describes a world with oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia and many other divisions. The ultimate truth describes the world in which there is no separation, in which we are one. The understanding is that both these truths co-exist – though we may only be aware of one.
The question I’ve been having (and don’t yet have many answers to) is this: How do we become aware of both, in our work toward social justice and social change, so that we build an authentic bridge between the two – so that anyone, no matter their leaning, can walk with us as we talk about structure or spirit? So that no one feels their truth is left behind. I’m wondering where others are in thinking about building that bridge – or would advise about setting up that room.