Welcoming the Other

 

CC Jean Stimmell– August 2nd, 2024

Like deja vu all over again, today’s burning issues are the same as those two generations ago. That much became apparent to me from reading a 1995 interview with Allen Ginsberg, a well-known poet and 1960s guru who highlighted a nagging paradox: “How can you maintain your civilized world when everybody else is starving?^⁠1 “

Since he wrote that, things have only gotten worse: the disconnection between our aspirations and our actions has become ever more extreme.

Take immigration for example. Ginsberg, back in 1995, declared that our root problem is how we demonize immigration: “There are civil wars in foreign countries, in Latin America, Africa, which are taking place on the streets of America too. Demagoguery about homogeneity and immigration are taking place… How much immigration can you stand?… All these arguments about how much we restrain hoards from countries we wrecked from taking refuge here.”

He says the biggest thing about immigration that we miss – the elephant in the room – is our lack of compassion for the plight of refugees. Today, the problem has expanded to include the ever-increasing homelessness in our midst.

Record income inequality has hollowed out the middle class, causing more and more of us not to be able to make the mortgage payment or the rent, and consequently, adding to the rising tide of the dispossessed.

Worse yet, the recent Supreme Court decision has made it illegal to sleep in public. Manchester and Concord have already passed laws to punish this behavior with fines of several hundred dollars for the first offense. If the homeless had that kind of cash sitting around, they probably wouldn’t be homeless in the first place.

Indeed, where is our compassion for our neighbors? For Ginsberg, compassion requires a spiritual orientation, something increasingly absent in our dog-eat-dog world, which praises “survival of the fittest” millionaires like Elon Musk most often.

David Brooks recently addressed this crippling dysfunction through the lens of James Davison’s new book Democracy and Solidarity, addressing the cultural roots of this disconnection,^⁠2

Davison points out that a fundamental tension has broken down that has long defined America: It is between the Founding  Father’s rational Enlightenment ideas about liberty and the divine ideals of Christianity. He writes that throughout our history, we have prospered living with one ear attuned to each tradition: 

“If you want to see these two traditions within one person, look at Martin Luther King Jr. He used a Christian metaphysics to show how American democracy could live up to both Enlightenment and divine ideals.”

Tragically, he writes this fruitful cultural tension died with King. As a result, since the 1960s, America has grown less religious, which explains America’s increasing polarization: We have lost our former set of moral foundations to settle disputes.”In other words, Americans lost faith in both sides of the great historical tension and, with it, the culture that had long held a diverse nation together.” 

According to Brooks, the solution to this unraveling is to renew our spiritual foundations: “My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel around love of neighbor and hospitality for the marginalized.”

I agree with Brooks that societies absolutely require a coherent moral foundation. From my studies in sociology, I’m aware that every society, going back into the mists of time, has had at least five essential institutions: religion, education, family, economy, and government(political). Human beings are social animals and can’t live without these institutions.

Even science has even gotten on board, touting the centrality of spirituality in our lives!

Theorists like Neil Theise assert that consciousness is the fundamental element in the universe, not material things. He is following the lead of Max Planck, the famous quantum physicist from the early 20^th century who said this directly: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”^⁠3

According to Theise’s poetic description, “Our brains aren't fleshy computers that create consciousness but, instead, act like transducers that connect us to a single, all-encompassing consciousness in the same way my tiny transistor radio could link up to a rock and roll radio station when I was a teenager.^⁠4”

I’d say that’s a pretty powerful endorsement of spirituality. We are all one, embodying the ever-present consciousness of the universe, an entity that many would call God.

xxx

¹ https://tricycle.org/magazine/spontaneous-intelligence/?utm_source=Tricycle&utm_campaign=922d9bea48-Daily_Dharma_07_3_2024_Subs&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1641abe55e-922d9bea48-309926126

² https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/opinion/trump-biden-authoritarianism.html

³ –Theise, Neil. Notes on Complexity Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition. P. 89

⁴ Theise, Neil. Notes on Complexity (p. 153). Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition.

There’s something happening here– it’s in the air

 

Much has been written about the transcendental nature of group experience over the centuries. Unfortunately, most of this accumulated wisdom is ignored in our culture because of our emphasis on individuality and aloneness over community and belonging.  But we ignore it at our peril.

Emile Durkheim, the legendary 19th-century French sociologist, studied this question at length, concluding that individuals can only rise above mundane lives by connecting to the collective mind of society. 

So what is this collective mind of society? Sometimes, it can be all-consuming. I’ve only seen that happen once in my long life, although I think it’s happening again right now. If so, both are variations of the Camelot myth.

Camelot featured the mythical, 12^th-century exploits of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. This myth has endured because it represents a bedrock part of our community process, an enduring symbol of courage and wisdom in how we conduct our politics.

The first time I saw Camelot emerge was when I was a teenager, trying to recover from the deployable witch hunts of the McCarthy era, alleging that communists were taking over our nation, combined with the muscle-cramping memories of hiding under my school desk for protection from nuclear bombs that, supposedly, could start falling at any moment. 

Against this backdrop, the Republicans ran a candidate, Richard Nixon, who hyped this Cold War hysteria. He was devious and cunning, joyless and unsmiling, painting an apocalyptic picture of the world. Does that sound like someone running for president today?

That’s when, suddenly out of the darkness, my first Camelot appeared: a young hero rode onto the stage to rescue me from my adolescent despair: John F. Kennedy. The feeling was electric, a new day was dawning. A vibrant, charismatic knight against old-school Tricky Dick and his 5 -o’clock shadow. 

He issued this ultimatum:

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights…^⁠1”

He added this challenge: “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” He wasn’t a top-down technocrat; in order for this to work, we all had to become involved at the grassroots.

Now, amazingly, more than 50 years later. I get to see it happen again with Kamala Harris. 

Once again, she is electrifying a previously zombie presidential race and challenging us to do our part: “Now, at this moment, our nation needs your leadership once again. In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation. “One focused on the future, the other focused on the past. With your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”

The difference is between night and day. Before Kamala announced, the Democrats were attracting a few hundred volunteers a day, but after her speech, 170,000 folks immediately volunteered; meanwhile, her campaign was flooded with an unheard-of $200 million in the first week.

I haven’t seen such excitement since JFK ran for president although, I realize, most folks would include Obama. Either way, this is truly a Kamelot Moment!

It’s in the air beyond individual control and can’t be stopped. Furthermore, I predict that this “Kamelot Moment” will break the MAGA fever that has held us captive for too long and expose Donald Trump for who he really is: a brittle and delusionary old man.

xxx

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_John_F._Kennedy

Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty

 

This birch tree is special to me. It was just a mere sapling back in 1977 when I was building my house. Marauding kids, footloose for the summer, snuck by and peeled off a large swatch of its bark, prompting me to feel so sorry for it that I did not cut it down, despite the fact it was perilously close to my foundation.  

The birch tree survived and prospered over the last roughly 50 years, while we, enduring our share of shady campaigns. have become old war buddies,  The scars on our trunks from calamity and surgery are marks of our character, proving we have lived through dark, stormy nights of the soul, not just a succession of sunny but eventless days.

I took this photograph,  literally swooning in the recent record-setting heat. As I composed this picture, a quote by the iconoclast Junichirō Tanizaki flashed through my mind like a bolt of lightning, “Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,”^⁠1

Tanizaki was a Japanese writer and a follower of the Tao. I had read this quote before, but its significance never sunk in until, perhaps because of my susceptible state, I was able to witness this swirl of shadow and light in real-time through my viewfinder. As Tanizaki sees it, “beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”^⁠2 

Somehow, taking this photograph under these unique circumstances, short-circuited my normal Western way of seeing things: The tree was no longer a logical concept: a straight, vertical line with a bushy top. Instead, I saw only gyrating patterns of black and white. 

No, I hadn’t suffered terminal heatstroke. Instead, under the influence of Tanizaki, I had fallen into the mysterious realm of the Tao; I had moved beyond language and thought into the constantly shifting patterns of the present moment. Alan Watts, the well-known interpreter of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences in the 1960s, called these shifting patterns “wriggly.”

He said that the whole world in the present moment is “a great wiggly affair. Clouds are wiggly, waters are wiggly, plants are wiggly, mountains are wiggly, people are wiggly. But people are always trying to straighten things out.” But it can’t be done. The only solution is to surrender to the wriggly.”^⁠3

Indeed, for Tanizaki, the world was profoundly wriggly and full of ambiguity. For him, seeing imperfection as perfection was a fundamental way of being in the world. Shadows were essential. He criticized the progressive Westerner who was obsessed with always improving his lot: “His quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate the minutest shadow.”^⁠4

Shadows are certainly being eradicated today in our hyper-polarized country. It’s reached such an extreme today that any subject debated has only two separate sides: black or white. Shadows are banned. Nuanced arguments are dismissed as the meanderings of the weak and the indecisive.

Tanizaki understood that the remedy was to stay in the present moment in the realm of ever-shifting shadows where nothing is permanent and nothing lasts. It’s a mistake to take our Western way of life so seriously, like immortal building blocks that will never change. We could do worse than start reading the romantic poet Percy Shelley again, who displayed the wisdom of an Eastern guru;

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever

From creation to decay.

Like the bubbles on a river

Sparkling, bursting, bore away

xxx

¹ Chayka, Kyle. The Longing for Less (p. 192). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

² Ibid. P. 192

³ https://medium.com/@Cat_knees/this-world-is-a-great-wiggly-affair-39d1c8c3d62f

⁴ Chayka, Kyle.  (p. 193).

Communities have become places to escape

 

Pittsfield, NH  
CC Jean Stimmell

Have you ever noticed your status in your local community no longer depends so much upon your behavior, character, and reputation. In fact, you may be vilified for just trying to be a good citizen. Look at how poll workers and school board members across the nation are being threatened just for volunteering to serve their community. 

In my lifetime, communities, rather than something we hold dear, have become something to escape.

I first noticed this trend in the 1980s when I took my young family to Disney World because my mother-in-law conveniently happened to live nearby. Over and above the thrill of the Disney rides, participants loved the experience because all the employees were super nice, everything ran on time, and the streets were spotless. There was no trash, graffiti, protests, or dissenting voices. Some claimed it was a perfect world. 

What a missed opportunity, I thought. How much better it would have been if all our families had stayed put back in our communities and devoted, over the course of the year,  the amount of time equal to the vacation—plus the amount of money the Disney vacation cost—to work alongside our neighbors to make our own community better.

Disney was an early example of offshoring local community to corporate interests.

This suspicion that we were being exploited came to the surface again in the 1990s when I saw the movie The Truman Show. It starred Jim Carrey, who played a character unwittingly living on a TV program. As time has gone on, it’s like we’re all becoming like Carrey’s character,  bit actors on a mass media stage.

Things went further downhill when “Survivor” became a major hit after its premiere in 2000. Once again, rather than cheering for our fellow Americans working together against obstacles to achieve a common goal, we were snookered into rooting for them ruthlessly competing against each other—lying and cheating as necessary—until only one was left standing. And that person was declared the winner! While that may be the principle of capitalism, it is a death sentence for a community.

“Survivor” has spawned a swamp full of imitators until today. It's estimated that 80% of adult viewers watch such shows. That’s according to Emily Nussbaum, the author of Cue the Sun,  a history of reality TV.^⁠1  While she notes this genre is often written off by its critics as trivial, reality TV’s cultural influence is undeniable. In fact, as the author acknowledges, it is shaping American politics.

And I think that’s an understatement!

While in early programs like “Survivor,” the producers and directors were flying off the seat of their pants, over time, they got more sophisticated. By the time “The Apprendice” came along, they had mastered their craft.

As Nussbaum said in a PBS interview: “The Apprentice” was “a beautifully made season of TV, and it was made by skilled, polished professionals, because at that point it was an industry. Like, people knew what they were doing. It wasn't anymore like the spaghetti-on-the-wall period for reality TV where everybody was making it up from scratch.”^⁠2

As such, the spinmeisters behind “The Apprentice” created one of the most successful marketing schemes of all time. But, more ominously, it exposed, as Nussbaum points out,  a dark truth: “They took an extremely rotten product and polished him up and sold him to the world.” Then Trump, rebranded by these marketing whizzes, was able to exploit this scam to propel him to the presidency.

If the Trump story had been published as a work of fiction, no one would believe it. And if he manages to win again, truth and fiction will have switched positions, mass rallies will have replaced community, and democracy will be a thing of the past.

xxx

¹ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/history-of-reality-tv-and-impact-on-society-chronicled-in-new-book-cue-the-sun

² ibid

Returning to an ecological way of life

 

A sunflower in my garden

I enjoyed doing the research for my gardening essay last week. It enticed me to dig deeper into the essence of gardening. I started reading Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit, a book I had never finished, a frequent failing of mine. I wanted to find out more about how Orwell’s gardening affected his writing and his philosophy of life.

Orwell tells us that working in a garden is the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. “It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect. At the end of the day if you dug, how much you dug is as clear and definite as is the number of eggs collected from the chickens.”^⁠1

Gardens remind us of what is undeniably real. “Gardens are also places in which the inseparability of life and death is apparent in innumerable ways,” Solnit says. Then she leads us deeper into Zen with this enigmatic quote by Wendy Johnson, Buddhist teacher and master gardener: 

“Watching the things of the world come apart and recombine is core Zen work and the fundamental anchorage of every gardener’s life.” She notes that garden fertility comes out of “the discarded waste of our lives.”^⁠2

I find this quote profound.

By using gardening as a metaphor, Johnson demolishes our current one-way, linear notion of time. Digging in the earth is a primeval reminder that time is circular: Our greatest insights aren’t original but recycled from “the discarded waste of our lives.”

From the beginning of human evolution until recently, we understood time from an ecological perspective: We knew it was circular because that’s how nature works. One can make a strong case that technology is the culprit that changed our thinking from the natural rhythms of the seasons to a linear trajectory, that has accelerated like a rocket. 

At first, technology was human-affirming, making revolutionary strides to reduce disease and poverty around the world. It has continued to steamroll ahead to today, creating labor savers of every sort, even the iPad I talked about last week. This recent human history of linear, one-way advancement introduced us to the notion of progress.

But with this progress has come hubris, leading to the current delusion that we are more powerful than Mother Nature, so dominant that we can force Her to submit to our every advance. As a result of this ignorance and arrogance, we are on the cusp of wiping out most of life on earth, either through the big bang of nuclear war or the collective death rattle of climate apocalypse.

So much for the wonders of linear thinking.

Gardening, on the other hand, takes us back to what’s primal in us, the timeless wisdom of our indigenous past. As we dig into the earth each spring, sowing seeds to grow plants that will soon die, it is a concrete reminder that our lives are rhymic and circular, from the movements of the sun and the moon to the cyclical rhythms of our very own bodies: “our heartbeat, breath, sleep-wake cycle, or circadian hormone secretion, among others.”^⁠3 

Understanding that life is cyclical gives us reason for hope, even in these apocalyptic times. Yes, we are suffering the stench and depravity from this winter of our discontents. But the foul, mud-slinging debacle we are enduring today –“the discarded waste of our lives.”^⁠4  – is the fertile ground that will give birth to a new spring, re-incorporating the ancient wisdom of Indigenous peoples around the world.

If we are to survive, we must remember – and take to heart – that we are but one species codependent on a multitude of others on our little blue planet, spinning on its rhymic, cyclic path around the sun. 

Our choice is returning to a sustainable, ecological way of living or having no future at all.

xxx

¹ Solnit, Rebecca. Orwell's Roses (p. 46). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

² Ibid. p. 44

³ https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898197.003.0011

⁴ Solnit, Rebecca. Orwell's Roses (p. 46). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.