 illustration by Laura Scroggs Welp, here we are in the week of Thanksgiving, the one day America devotes to gratitude. This week crosses us over from autumn to holiday season, America's celebration of family and cheer and nuclear-sized greed. I'm gonna go all Quaker on you for a moment. Friends learn as children in “First Day School" that every day is a sabbath; we name the days of the week by number (first day, second day, and so on) as a way of observing that each day is as holy as the next. How would this reframe the idea of a holiday for gratitude? What if every blank calendar day were considered sacred? Matthew Zapruder’s wonderful poem "Lamp Day" (link below) presses the re-set button on gratitude practices. We could arbitrarily pick a memento, or person, or place, and reconstruct its history. It's not, Zapruder tells us, a sentimental or mawkish activity, but rather a scientific study: "On Lamp Day we try / not dreamily but systematically / to remember it all." Zapruder is proposing an earnest celebration of the objects of our affection, rather than a celebration of our own gratefulness. This practice is an invitation to take something, anything, and trace its contours with our consciousness, revering its place in our lives. We "do it by thinking about the hidden reasons [we] love something small." Zapruder leaves the question of its importance unanswered but makes clear that thinking about why we love things is not about their exchange value.
Surrounding an object with our attention is an internal process, not for show: we alone "make a sunlit / and rainy map no one / will ever be able to hold." Like the hotel window, we begin to reflect the history all around us, each object in its wholeness, "calmly reflecting / everything bad and good." I connect this mode of perception with the Tibetan concept of shiné, as I've understood it from Pema Chodron's teaching: the quality of mind that sees everything from a place of calm but at the same time with crisp, accurate clarity. As if under bright lamplight. "I am plugged in. I am calm. / Lamp Day has a name." As if to bring home the poem's focus not on itself, but on the stories of objects, this seeming finale of the poem drifts off into an awareness of the speaker's coffee cup, inscribed with the story of its origin: the word Omaha. Gratitude lamplight is sharper and more edged in Robinson's "Portable Paradise." The references to island beauty suggest, half-ironically, a reprieve from sustained and daily stresses. As a Trinidadian living in England, Robinson knows life under pressure and also knows all about the orientalist fantasy of an island utopia. So this poem sticks a knife in it. Staring at whatever is precious in your memory bank is a way to stay hopeful, a way to sleep at night. The speaker has been taught to conceal his happy place, its white sands and fresh fish, like a weapon against the dominant culture lest it be stolen. Here, if you sing the song of peace, you'd better hum it under your breath. To combat the "sustained and daily" stress, this poem recommends finding a safe, private space to pour out any remnant of calm, like shards of shrapnel, and comb through it under the mind's lamplight. As we await an autocracy coming into power and announcing, just for example, its plan to deport a massive number of people - quadruple the population of Chicago, according to today's NYT report - here's the message: keep your Omaha safe in your pocket. PRACTICE "Plugging in" to this mode of clear, accurate perception requires that we include, rather than dismiss, our emotional response to the phenomena around us. Zapruder's window reflects everything, bad and good. We are challenged to take in the objects around us with attention to their history, their function, their story, their feel. In somatics we call it "orienting." Perhaps you could glance around your room, taking stock of the objects that catch your gaze. This does not have to be a sentimental acknowledgment of stuff you like; as the edge in Robinson's poem implies. It's a witnessing of your world with fearless precision, inclusive of feelings of threat, or rage, or sorrow. Choose an object and linger with it. If possible, hold it in your hands, feeling its shape as you would a worry stone. Turm in the palm of your mind its round, full-bodied history. What is its resonance for you, its lesson for you, its role in defining you?
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I think Walt Whitman would be tickled pink - or rather, tickled red-jellied - to be named the poet of the groin. Or really, the poet of any other physical structure! Think of his worshipful list of sacred body parts at the end of "I Sing the Body Electric": eye-fringes jaw-hinges neck-slue hind-shoulders breast-front man-balls man-root knee-pan foot-ball lung-sponges stomach-sac skull-frame palate-valves breast-milk womb teats marrow in the bones and thin red jellies: "O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,/ O I say now these are the soul!"
Whitman is my favorite would-be Quaker. If his ol' gramma or great-gramma hadn't been thrown out of the faith for marrying outside it. He referred to his "Quaker intuition" and for years obsessed about writing a book on Quaker minister Elias Hicks. The very heart of the Whitmanian ethic dovetails with Hicks': a worshipful approach to nature and the belief that the divine resides in all beings equally. But Whitman couldn't get on board with Hicks' thrall to purity. How different, if little Walt had been born a few generations earlier. Before we'd been forced to erase the quaking body from our culture and history to protect our people from brutal persecution, creating the scrubbed-down, repressed Society of Friends we see today. Anyone encountering contemporary Quaker culture would be hard pressed to see how we could have possibly been mocked for quaking. But originally, we practiced a deeply embodied 'enthusiasm' (spirit possession) and divinization (an inner experience of oneness with the divine) - a trust in the personal, individual channeling of spirit that happily coexists with faith in the spiritual power of the collective. Early Quaker forms of communing with the divine included shouting out, speaking in tongues, reenacting the birth pangs of the second coming, practicing hands-on healing, and chanting ministry in an incantational style. Whitman would be right at home inside the wild mysticism of first generation Friends. So would I. So this week in classes and workshops I've been inviting a little Whitman into the collective bodysoul. To shake things up and remind us to keep Quaking. Here's a quote from the post-election live embodiment practice with Prentice Hemphill: "Let us be guided by the tremble - the kind of connection that changes us, that allows us to feel what is, to come undone, to be more real, more honest, more here. We seek connection that has us shake a little bit. Take a moment to think: Where might I find connection that can allow me to be with what is here, without requiring me to comport myself into what has been, what we know gets things done or makes the world make sense? Or, how might I come to connections that are familiar, in a new way - with a soft front, with an open belly?” The rhyme between comport and contort isn't by accident. We can only resource from community when we feel our imperfect ragged humanity mirrored and supported. We need to stop contorting ourselves into artificial shapes in all the ways that are so popular right now, like virtue-signaling, performative allyship, and righteous public proclamations. Instead we need to show up with all our confusion and our conditioned tendencies, encouraging it to come undone by letting ourselves shake a little. That's the only way to allow a new shape to emerge. Borrowing from the traditional association of the pelvis with the earth element, let's dunk down into our soulful, soilful hips and visualize the bowl of the pelvis as a thick earthen flowerpot full of rich, life-giving mulch. What do we have to do with mulch? We have to turn it, aerate it, mix it up to break it apart so that it may yield something new. What turns your mulch, my friend? What practices stir you, allow your patterns to get a little mixed up and turned around, so that you can put yourself back together differently, allowing for the emergence of some new life, new form of being? You might invite more mulchification, by rocking your pelvis on your ever-rooting-down ischial tuberosity tubers. Here (for the gazillionth time) are Walt Whitman's marching orders, when we're all so lost in what we should do in this crazy moment of history: “This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” -Preface, Leaves of Grass Whatever stirs your soulsoil, that's your calling. The thing that revitalizes your creativity, that brings you into connection because you are pulling from the most intimate recesses of who you are and what you care about. That's what you've got to offer the world, from the most authentic level of your being. Please. Bring. It. Right. Now. "Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear..." (insert music note emojis). Just follow your leading, be faithful to the call, and bring it. This time of year - not just the election results but also the time change and the swing marked by Samhain - is about getting very real very low down very near to the bottom floor very raw. It's about starting over at a deeper level. Moving down and in, towards the core of things. It's nature's movement towards darkness, a turn towards the kind of radical stripping down necessary to yield something genuinely new. It's about truth-telling. To gain access to the underworld, to see beyond the veil, Inanna had to strip herself of everything. Clothes, ornamentation, all of it. To see the worlds that are possible, all of this needs to be stripped, and the eye of the body needs to be clear. It's called the naked eye for a reason!
In a list of 10 things we can do to approach the new Trump presidency, Waging Nonviolence started with this. In the face of autocracy, we need radical trust. Trust in our own embodied experience to resist the brainwashing and the overwhelm. We need to be trustworthy - not just with information, but also in representing our emotions truthfully. We need to resource trust in community, joining with organic collectives of like-minded people with whom we feel deep trust, to stay clear. To stay grounded. We need to metabolize what we feel - the grief, the disappointment, the loss - and not in public online expressions of outrage, but in REAL TIME with real bodies, to whom we are accountable. Attuning with our own whole selves, bodies minds hearts feelings, and other whole human beings. We can only experience intimacy and we can only truly heal our patterning when we show up as our real selves. This list wouldn't have looked the same ten years ago, before the importance of embodiment entered into justice work. And the other new kid on the equity block is - spirituality. This is the moment for the vertical plane of the spiritual and the horizontal social plane to come together. This can only happen inside the real lived experience of whole humans, inclusive of messy bodies and delicate, unruly hearts. It hasn’t been possible in 'Murica until this moment, but... now! Now! Now we have the contemplative Catholics trying to figure out how to marry their faith and practice, articulating how a deep abiding personal relationship with the divine lends itself to the discernment to be able to engage in right action. Forget about it, the way Judaism is wrestling with a version of this, the way Muslims are - ALL the reckoning is going down. The need to marry ancient truth with continuing revelation is showing up in a more full-bodied way. Meanwhile, the cult of woo is starting to acknowledge the limits of pursuing ecstatic experience or personal wellness without any true attention or accountability to the larger ecology we all rely on. And meanwhile, justice work is slowly but palpably turning towards spirituality! There's a turn towards spirit within activism, which has shied away from it because bypassing has undercut the showing-up required for social change, because organized religion has caused so much harm, because faith can take the tooth out of the fight, because religions resort to ancient prophets and stories and creeds to justify behavior that doesn't always synch up with contemporary reality. Everyone - in organized religion, in social movement work, and in the alternative wellness world - is coming to grips with the poisons of either/or thinking, of hierarchical thinking, of zero-sum thinking, of glorifying rational logic and evidence-based argumentation. Everyone is seeing that in terms of the cultures of our social organizations and the nitty-gritties of our everyday interactions, we need to do some serious ethical reckoning. Everyone recognizes our need to see one another, to stand inside a foreign point of view. Whether we're kneeling in the pews or marching on the street or lighting candles on our altars, everybody can cop to the fact that we're not even a little bit living up to the most sacred refrains all these traditions share: forgiveness, gentleness, kindness, and loving those who aren't like us. We're not living up to our own professed ethics. There's seems to be a shared recognition that there's something missing in this historical moment that spirituality knows about: practice. Spiritual practice offers tools for working with mystery and paradox, for mobilizing the gridlock of either/or thinking. Only practice can touch ground with what lies beyond our opinions, which can only go so far. Even the staunchest, most righteous convictions have their limits, because they often don't touch the deeper, more mysterious layers of our being. The future, the past, and the non-human all show up inside our experience in ways that we don’t understand - like - at all. To navigate the strangeness of the body and the whole universe of the heart, we need practices. We need practices that access our soul and the mysteries of our soma that science (including traditional psychology) doesn’t yet understand, but that different spiritual traditions have given exhaustive maps for. There are precise instructions for navigating and rewiring psyche and soma and respecting the architecture of the more-than-human realms. Practices that have been built over thousands of years, and then shoo-ed away by a couple hundred years of bullshit imperialism and the idol of “evidence.” We need them back. And because I approach this from a Quaker angle - from a tradition that believes in continuing revelation, continually interrogating our faith and practice to match the historical conditions, I believe we can creatively riff on these practices, play with them, bring them in contact with the demands of this right now. THIS right now, as empire lies gasping in its terminal phase - NOW we need to discover what's real inside so we can be authentic outside. Keeping our faith in whatever we hold dear, whatever we lift up, whatever we stand for. You who practice not just to still the mind but to also listen for messages in the stillness, you witches you sorcerers you lovers you seekers of the Real you truth-tellers, here we are. Trembling with the power of a radical loving way of living that could, in fact, change this world at this moment. The election results are a beginning, not an ending, and we are in this together for the long haul, Friends. Let's go practice. |
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