The hydrangea seemed like an odd character, sagging from the weight of the hot heavy air, like a reclusive Boo Radley watching the world from behind a curtain of tall grasses.
Much of the day we are like Boo. The heat and humidity keep us – and Dogga – huddled close to the air conditioner, appreciating the whirl of the fans. We would wilt otherwise. We emerge from the house in the early mornings. We walk in the cool of the evenings. We move slowly through air that’s the consistency of soup. Nature is helping us to abandon our hurry.
It is morning as I write this. The sky is growing dark. The phone pinged an alert: lightning is in our area. Thunderclouds blot out the sun and I am glad that I did not water the grass this morning. For me, this summer’s prevalence of storms have become metaphoric of the nation. Heavy. Dark. Threatening. A good time to take cover. A good time to stay inside. A good time to reread To Kill A Mockingbird. Its themes are suddenly current and vital. Tolerance. Empathy. Understanding.
I am an introvert and understand Boo’s preference to seclude. When I saw the hydrangea peeking through the curtain I said to no one listening, “I get it! Me, too.”
***
we are trying to regroup, rethink and refocus our melange blogpost writing a bit. we – like you – know what is really happening in our world and do not need one more person – including ourselves – telling us the details of this saddest of descents destroying democracy and humanity. though we know our effort will not be 100% – for there is sooo much to bemoan in these everydays – we have decided to try and lean into another way – to instead write about WHAT ELSE IS REAL. this will not negate negativity, but we hope that it will help prescribe presence as antidote and balm for our collective weariness. ~ xoxo kerri & david
In Japan the clematis is a symbol of moral beauty. Consider it.
There are very few adequate synonyms for the word ‘beauty’ yet we know without doubt what it means. It’s a word of the senses. It is felt in the heart. It is a cup overflowing with awe and appreciation.
On the other hand, the word ‘moral’ has many, many synonyms. Virtue. Doing the right thing. Honest. Decent. Truthful. Upright. Right-minded. Just plain good. And from these adjectives – descriptions of a quality of being – we experience the undefinable: beauty.
Moral beauty. The clematis climbs. It aspires to reach new heights. Things that climb are often associated with gaining broader perspective and, therefore, wisdom attained from the experience of climbing, of overcoming obstacles, of persevering. From the heights – and the journey to get there – we see the landscape and our inner landscape more clearly. We are more capable of discerning between what is important and what is not, what has value and what does not, what is honest and what is not.
The clematis blossoms. Our blossom is called moral beauty.
It is why many of us shudder watching the ugly amorality goosestepping across this nation. It is a descent into darkness. Indecent. Dishonest. Wrong-minded. Synonyms of ‘ugly’ include perilous, dangerous, hostile, menacing, ominous. Are these not perfect descriptors of ICE?
The clematis climbs.
The nation falls.
Rather than beauty our nation reveres an alligator infested swamp. It champions a liar. Narrow minds threaten and erase greater perspectives. This nation, once a beacon of hope is now afraid of the light. Rather than overcome real obstacles, our leaders manufacture them to fuel outrage and circumvent and/or undermine the Constitution. Ignorance bellows over wisdom. History is whitewashed. The truth is hidden away in the files.
I return to the question, “What do we do?” The clematis climbs. It overcomes. It perseveres. We need not fall into the muddy pit.
It occurs to me that we have in our tradition a Golden Rule. It begins with the word “do”. It provides guidance for what we might do as a first step: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
It is a wisdom that comes from standing upon the heights after a difficult climb. That is why it is so simple. Do Empathy. Do Reciprocity. Do Consideration. Do Generosity. Do Kindness. Isn’t that what we want done unto us?
We know what to do, don’t we? We know where to start, don’t we?
This sedum is a volunteer. It somehow took root beneath the deck and yet has found a way to reach the sun. It’s funny. Each day I check on this little plant because its resilience gives me some small measure of hope: good things can take root in dark places and through natural tenacity, find a way to the light.
When I step back from our national horror story and take in the whole picture, I am overwhelmed at the abundance of light. People showing up for other people. People expressing outrage at the treatment of others. The shadow spaces are small in comparison.
In this way people are no different than plants. Our tendency – our need – is to seek and find the light and the light is found in the community and what it values. A community can only stay in the dark for so long before it – like a plant – begins to perish.
“They have no respect for human life,” she said, showing me the latest video of an ICE arrest. And then came her list of disrespect: “Decimating USAID, cuts to Medicaid and SNAP…” It was a very, very long list.
I responded, “They have no respect for others because they have no respect for themselves.” It would be impossible to vote for that Big Bloated Bill and be able to look at yourself in the mirror.
They crawl into dark places to flee the light. The assault on the free press. The prevention of congressional oversight – and the nation – from seeing into their “deportation detention centers”. The restrictions (elimination) of due process and habeas corpus…This, too, is a very, very long list. Dark hearts creating dark places.
Here’s the thing: in dark places people lose track of where they are. Disoriented, they also lose track of where others are. In panic, they lose track of how important others are. They become physically, mentally and morally confused. They default into “every man for himself”. In survival-mode, people push others underwater in an attempt to elevate themselves. In the end, all drown.
In the dark we lose track of who we are because we can only know ourselves in relationship to others. Societies collapse in shadowy amorality and the dim fantasy land of every-man-for-himself (obviously).
It is the way of fascist regimes to drag the people of their nation into the dark. Our current leadership in these un-United States is following the Nazi playbook exactly. To perpetuate their dark intention they need to manufacture enemies; the trail of enemy creation will eventually lead back to themselves. They will eventually have to eat each other in their dog-eat-dog fascism. Even though it doesn’t look like it at this moment in time, dragging us into the dark will bring them to perish in an inky bunker.
Like the sedum rooted beneath the deck, it is our natural tendency is to reach for the light.
The only real question that remains is how much dark-malfeasance will we tolerate before we-as-a-nation say, “Enough,” break free and turn toward the light?
And, if we make it, if we survive this dark time and stumble back into the sun, I hope we will have the courage to look at what the light reveals to us – about us. I hope we have the capacity to see fully the totality of our history – all of it. I hope we are capable of asking why so many of us drank from a fox-fire hose of lies and so willingly embraced fantastic falsehoods. I hope we might once and for all align our actions with our rhetoric and put to rest the ugly idea that We-The-People only applies to a privileged few, but applies equally to all of us – a wildly diverse community dedicated to keeping the experiment of democracy vibrant and in the light.
Don’t be surprised if you find us in the store, eyes closed, delighting in the scent of the Warmies – those cute cuddly stuffed animals filled with lavender. My favorite is the sloth. Kerri is fond of the bear. They provide a dose of instant calming. They are serenity found in an unlikely place, an oasis of comfort in aisle 9.
Tranquility is hard to come by these days. Each day, inundated as we are in the politics of hate, I search for tranquility in words and sometimes find it – momentarily – in a poem or the heart-touching-story of a fortuitous puppy adoption. I am buoyed by writers from Rumi to James Baldwin, keepers of our conscience, sirens to kindness.
But for lasting peace of mind it is necessary to break beyond words. Nothing beats the senses for a call into the immediate, the only place where contentment can be found: the smell of basil, the cooling evening breeze after a blistering hot day. The delightful chirp of a hummingbird as it zips overhead. The distant foghorn underscoring the cry of seagulls. The vibrant colors of the sky transitioning into night. Lavender. Rosemary. Onions and garlic sauteing. The first sip of bold red wine. The Warmies on the grocery store shelf.
I used to lead an exercise in which people would face a partner. Standing a few feet apart, the instruction was to be present-with-the-other. No words were allowed – so no fortress of distraction could be erected. Simply see and be seen. A few minutes would feel like an eternity as the impulse to hide and deflect and control slowly surrendered to the scary vulnerability of presence. The fortification, the hyper-management of image fell away. Only then could the beauty break through the mask. Unprotected, the partners would either weep or laugh or both. Seen. Seeing. In presence the tide turned. Serenity was discovered in a most unlikely place. An oasis of comfort found in the eyes of the other.
It is a warm evening. The breeze has shifted and comes off the lake, blessed cool. The bird alights on the pinnacle of our roof. Like us it pauses in the refreshing breeze. It drinks it in and rests. This image, this moment, is ancient and I am taken by it.
In the midst of the chaos of the country, the seeming unprecedented circumstances we now face, it is somehow comforting (to me) to remember that no one escapes the cycles of mythology. Mythology is a universal growth pattern, cutting across culture, delivered through story. It is a human-life-map. It is unwise to confuse mythology with make-believe.
Our collapse of moral authority in leadership is not unique in history. Neither is the rise of our tyrant. Neither is the corruption of our court Supremes or the silent cowardice of Congress. We follow a historical pattern just as we perform a mythological cycle.
The Roman Empire fell for much the same reasons that the American Experiment is now wobbling: political corruption, the widening gap between the haves and have-nots eroding social cohesion (maga, the impact of inanity like “trickle-down-economics”, unfair taxation, granting “personhood” to corporations…), the exploitation of division, overspending on the military, limits imposed on innovation and education (the impact of DOGE and the decimation of research among other things).
When servant leadership is upended by self-serving-leadership, the path becomes explicit. It doesn’t happen all it once. It is gradual, this erosion of the foundation takes time. This is a mythological death.
Of course, each death signals the birth of something new. As Joseph Campbell wrote of times like these, it is wrongheaded and naive to try and go back in time to capture some imaginary heyday. It is equally misguided to try to force the fulfillment of some imagined ideal. Both facilitate dismemberment.
Our protests of autocracy, our resistance to brutality, plant the seeds of our transfiguration. We will never restore our democratic republic as we’ve known it. Neither will we fulfill it as first conceived: exclusive; democracy for the few. Fire transforms and what will emerge from this hot collapse is anybody’s guess. I will probably not live long enough to see it. Gestation like this takes time, too.
However, I take heart knowing that the cycle will eventually present us with a new generation of servant leaders, people who rise from the wreckage and sacrifice personal gain for the common good. People who were transformed by this current fire. They will carry in their hearts the pain of their ancestors’ regret.
The bird on the pinnacle served as a herald of that distant day. The wind shifts, cutting through the heat, bringing with it sweet relief and the promise of the cycles of change.
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” ~ T.S. Elliot, Little Gidding
It is not so simple to Be You.
I’ve yet to meet a person who knows without question, without doubt, who they are.
That is not a flaw. It is a given since we are not a piece of furniture, not a thing or an end result. We are so much more. An unearthing. A discovery.
We are human beings. Questioners. Questions.
We are both seeker and sought. We are both archeologist and vast hidden city.
Of course, that is not the meaning behind the message stitched on the rainbow hat. Be You is an affirmation of inner truth in the face of social pressure to Be Other than You.
There are other seekers – other people – who, in their fear of the unknown, attempt to define you. Confine you. They make rules, absolutes. They wish to stop the seeking.
Your difference is a disturbance in their rigid field of sameness.
They desire limited commerce and will only travel well-worn paths. They worship control – so controlling you, they believe, will keep them safe in their comfortable known. They would have you walk on their paved path. Color within the lines. Worship as they do.
Your difference shakes their cage. Your difference is a siren’s call to the scary edge of the unknown, to growth since growth is always in the direction of the unknown.
They quake. They fear your difference because they fear that they will disappear if they step toward the rim of learning: they fear what they will find in themselves – or have to admit to themselves – so they sail far away from the edges.
Be You? Just as others propel you forward in your discovery, just as resistance helps you discover the parameters and depths of your belief, your difference serves as a harbinger for others, a message in a bottle, calling them to the precipice of their greater archaeology.
What is over there? In there? Under there? Beyond? Me?
Is it an end? A beginning? And who will walk with me? Why?
As always, rather than a book of rules, a fistful of pat answers, is it not more useful – more honest – to ask and ask and ask a better question?
[Quinn called these The Big 3: Who am I? Where do I come from? What is mine to do? We never arrive at an absolute answer since we are a moving target, always growing in a relationship with the unknown. The point is not to nail down a forever-answer; the point is to be brave enough and open enough to continually ask the questions.]
This photo is of Apollo’s chariot arcing across the sky. It’s only visible because the clouds buffer the chariot’s brilliance.
Zeus is scheduled to come through later tonight. There is promise of thunderbolts. Dogga is not a fan of the flash-and-boom. Frankly, neither am I. Zeus is too showy for my tastes.
Persephone is back from her stay in the underworld and Demeter couldn’t be more pleased. The blossoming peonies are proof. The wild grasses and ferns are a-poppin’. The tomato plant promises to be as tall as I am!
Ares children have been let loose on the land. Phobos and Deimos – Fear and Terror; they wear masks and ambush immigrants. They bully because it makes them feel superior. They pull people from their homes and cars. They take children from schools. They tackle senators. They answer to a minor deity, Dolos. He is renowned for his orange color, his penchant for lying, his empty promises otherwise known as deception.
I, for one, am waiting for Hestia to fully show up on the scene. Welcoming, unifying, an ancient powerful goddess who exudes peace and quiet. She is the hearth, the warm center of “home”. She is formidable because she deals in simple honesty. You might recognize her: she is the force that pulled people into the streets, uniting them to rebuke Dolos and his nasty servants. It seems she might team up with Athena who brings a healthy dose of wisdom and strategy to the mix, capable of easily corralling Fear and Terror and sending the orange Dolos back to the swamps where he belongs.
No doubt the goddesses will provide the antidote for the toxic masculinity that ails us.
[Juneteenth! It is especially important to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in the USA – particularly in the face of an administration that whitewashes our nation’s history]
“In the art world, lines are a fundamental element used to create a wide variety of effects. They can define shapes, create movement, guide the viewer’s eye…” ~A-I Overview to my inquiry about lines in art
I confess that I am having a hard time. I’m in the middle of a mini-moral crisis.
I’ve written this blog since 2010. I set out to write about positive things, affirmations and stories of the best of us. At the time I began writing I was traveling around the nation, working with incredible people everywhere I went, so I had a bucketful of stories to share, celebrating the best of the human spirit. Kerri and I began writing our Melange 382 weeks ago. We had so much art and music in our folios and files and we wanted to bring them into the light of day. Sharing the best of us – another way of celebrating the human spirit.
After all of these years I enjoy a small but enormously appreciated (by me) audience.
Lately, I am aware, that my daily writing and my focus is not about celebrating the best of us but has almost exclusively become about ringing an alarm against the worst of us. I am sometimes snarky. I am mostly horrified at how dulled we as a nation have become to the outrageous. I am alarmed at our normalization of the monstrous, the disappearance of Congress, the collapse of the system of checks and balances.
Each day I have a chat with myself about staying focused on the positive but I am lately finding that to be naive to the point of dangerous; it is akin to sticking my head in the sand or plugging my ears so I hear no evil.
Each day, more and more people are being swept off our streets. Each day, they are denied due process. This morning I’ve been reading – and verifying – accounts about the unnecessary death of a Haitian woman in one of our many overcrowded detention centers. The conditions are appalling. She is not the first. She will not be the last. Her crime: trying to escape abject poverty and enter the land of the free and the home of the brave.
90% of the people – human beings – are being held without due process in privately run detention centers that are by many accounts no better than concentration camps. Think about it: “privately run” means that they are detention-for-profit; the more people swept up and crammed into these camps the more money they make. Inhumanity with a profit incentive.
Which brings me to my moral crisis. I am both a visual and theatre artist. I know how to create movement that guides a viewer’s eye. I know how to make an audience see in a story what I want them to see. I also know how to prevent them from seeing what I don’t want them to see. It’s akin to the magician’s trick. Create a distraction so the mechanics of the trick go unnoticed. Our national media are masters of distraction. They make rather than report news.
We-the-people are being distracted. We are being pitted against each other so we do not look at the magic trick that is making our rights – and the rights of others – disappear. We are not supposed to see what is happening in the detention centers – we are not supposed to know how our taxes are being used, what we are paying for, what we are creating: a police state.
Follow the lines. It is not so hard to see what we are not supposed to see. It’s ugly. A president ignoring the law, exploiting brutal immigration sweeps to incite violence, manufacture an “insurrection” in order to turn the military against citizens. The suspension of elections will surely follow. The sweeps will include voices of opposition.
It is morally irresponsible to look the other way. It’s morally reprehensible to say, “There’s nothing we can do about it,” or “I didn’t vote for this,” or “I had no idea what was happening,” or “This doesn’t impact me.” It is fundamentally immoral to pretend that this is something that we “Can’t talk about.” It is depraved to roll along as if the current course of this nation is anything other than ethically bankrupt. People are dying, being held without due process in deplorable circumstances. And we-the-people are paying for it. We don’t like where the lines lead so we change the channel. We look the other way or swallow whole-cloth the media spin.
What is my responsibility to write? To paint? To draw? How can I celebrate the human spirit, the best of us, when the leaders of the nation are every day grinning at, applauding and investing in brutality, taking delight in human misery? And our tax dollars are making it possible.
At this time of year, sleeping as we do with the window open, I have the impression that the birds sing the sun to rise. In the evening, they sing it to rest beneath the horizon. What happens between those two songs is always a surprise.
I recently read a quote by Aldous Huxley that struck a deep chord: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly, child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply…”
Dogga has been a great teacher. He is highly sensitive, keenly keyed into us. He feels everything I feel, we feel. If we start to take ourselves too seriously, he runs for his safe haven in the bathroom. At first his retreat to the safety of the bathroom brought us up short. It was like being slapped into consciousness. “We’re upsetting the dog.” We’d breathe, step back and change our tone. We’d lighten up. He’s become a barometer of whether or not we’re taking ourselves too seriously and we’ve learned to lighten up before he feels the need to retreat.
It’s possible: walking lightly through life can be learned.
“Look at the color of the sky!” she said, aiming her camera.
“It’s a Colorado sky,” I mused. The blue was intense against the new spring-green leaves.
We were slow-walking on one of our favorite trails, talking about the past decade, the seeming-forced peeling back of layers, the necessity of letting go of grievances and disappointments when she suddenly pulled her camera from her pocket. “Look at the color of the sky!” I smiled: evidence of not taking anything – especially ourselves – too seriously.
“So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly…”
It’s an ongoing life lesson. Feeling deeply need not be weighty. Especially now. There are, indeed, quicksands all around us, sucking at our feet. It’s always an option to disappear into the muck of fear and despair. As we have learned – and continue to learn – hopelessness is a heavy load. As is resentment. Regret is a guaranteed back-breaker. Denial is the heaviest bag of all. Our nation is currently learning this lesson.
The surprise between the birdsong? We can walk with the light astonishment of the new day or we can drag along yesterday’s heavy baggage. It’s our path, it’s our choice, either way.
[I just finished writing this post when Guitar Jim sent this gorgeous song by Darrell Scott. Serendipity, the song says it better than I ever will]:
To be honest, I began writing a post about self-love and bagged it. I don’t really know anything about self-love, which is why I wanted to write about it. Luckily, I realized that it was way too big of a topic for my little, little post.
Tara Brach wrote about her mother’s deathbed confession: “All my life I thought something was wrong with me. What a waste!”
Recently Kerri and I had a conversation about how different we feel – how different our lives have been – from our friends and neighbors. We did not color within the lines. Younger versions of ourselves were split in two: one half following the imperative of our muse, the other half chastising because we didn’t fit in. I’m happy to report that we’ve made peace with the paths we’ve chosen.
We’ve been alive, not necessarily safe.
I used to tell groups I facilitated that “Nothing is broken, nothing needs to be fixed.” I believed it but didn’t necessarily live it. I was looking for what was missing.
It turns out that nothing was missing. My chosen path looked chaotic when compared to the template expectation. It’s a damn hard road when you are both trying to fit in and trying to follow your star. The road was only difficult because I expected pavement when I was a dedicated off road traveler.
What follows is the complete text of my imagined graduation speech to the class of 2025:
The Direction of Intention 