Struggle to Find Hope

a Spiral Dance essay

I slept well, but woke up early. Perhaps, as a result, or perhaps not, I am feeling rather cynical this morning. Remember that cynics are actually disappointed idealists.

I am disappointed in you, humanity. I am disappointed in so many of you individually, as well. You could do so much better, and yet you so often flinch away from the effort, settling instead into your little living hells, comfortable because they are familiar. Comfortable with suffering because enlightenment is just too much work.

I am not going to go into a rant that even I will find predictable, against the usual suspects, hatred, fear, murder, pain, suffering, doubt. I won't go into that rant because it won't make any difference. No one listens to such rants anymore, because the horrors have become normalized, and even those who would agree with you are eager to scroll on as quickly as possible.

I am not a believer in either the defeatist "biology is destiny" camp or the pseudo-Darwinian "humanity is inherently violent" camp; yet on days when I wake up feeling cynical, I can't really generate a coherent argument against the social and political consequences of entropy. But that's why I am disappointed in you, humanity, and you, people who choose to embrace entropy rather than defy it. You give in way too easily.

You disappoint me, humanity, because of your constant cowardly reluctance to look the abyss in the eye, and spit at it. Fuck nihilism. Nihilism is just another ideology, just another -ism, that looks at only part of the picture and thinks it's the whole. I cannot name a single -ism that does not make that mistake. You disappoint me, humanity, with your constant tendency to look at only one part of the elephant and think it's the whole elephant.

You disappoint me, humanity, because you constantly think too small, too provincial, and in the end too narcissistically. You are still primates, humanity, in that you embody the preconscious tension between group/mob psychology and the necessary urge to evolve, and all too often default back towards your personal comfort zone and simplistic easy answers to life's challenges.

You disappoint me, humanity, because you so often miss the whole point of what it means to be human: Biology isn't destiny, although it's the starting gate. We are given the gift of consciousness, which allows us to override and rewrite our biological programming. We are not locked into anything, we merely believe that we are. The elephant is much bigger than we think it is. Our potential is precisely as large as our imagination. We have the power to shape reality, and we usually fail to do so because we choose to be so small. Biology and biography are not destiny because we can overcome them. We can change our destiny because we believe we can. To do so, we have to defy the downward slide that is entropy, and walk uphill. Suffering is easier than enlightenment, because suffering slides downhill, while enlightenment means claiming the mountain in the worst weather, when you're already tired.

The mark of suffering that most individuals who work for and towards the light bear is sheer, constant exhaustion. It's an uphill battle, necessary and worthwhile and rewarding, yet the hardest work you will ever do. (Until you reach that point where you let go; then it becomes the easiest.) It can kill you. It can make you cynical. I am tired all the time, humanity, and it's directly caused by the majority of you refusing to take up your share of the load of the work that needs doing to make the world a finer place. I understand the anger of some social activists; it comes from exhaustion, frustration, and those days when it feels like no one actually wants to grow up.

Cynics are frustrated as well as disappointed idealists. We all have our days when it's too hard, there's too much to do, and the news reports how once again we have failed to grow up as a species.

Warfare has been continuous for more than a century now, because it's been made too easy. The technological advances since the Industrial Revolution have brought many benefits and changes to our modern world, but it has also made it easier to kill people in large numbers. Before the Industrial Revolution, war was always limited in scope; it is no longer. Terrorism is a word for warfare on a social scale, a different kind of battlefield. Extremists who use terror are always smaller in number than armies; but they are feared because their commitment is total, fanatical, nihilistic. Fuck nihilism again. The proper response to terror is to laugh at it, just as the proper response to the abyss of fear is to give it the finger, in fierce and laughing defiance. Fuck terrorism. You can't live in fear.

There are words I struggle with, when I am feeling disappointed in you, humanity, but the struggle is when it matters most:

Hope. Love. Faith.

Those are words that it is very easy to misuse, and when misused they turn toxic, deadly, violent to the spirit, even more than wounds to the flesh. So I always use them with vast caution. No one knows better than a bard or a wizard how easily the power of words can turn dark. Use them with caution.

Cynicism and disappointment are only fatal if you let them be. If you stop exploring the rest of the elephant, and give up, and stay in your cave. I am very disappointed in you this morning, humanity, but I haven't given up on you. You really need to grow up, and quickly. Take your hands off the stove, children, before they scar over and you can no longer feel the rest of the elephant. I'm not going to tell you what's on the other side of the door, you won't hear it, you won't listen. You disappoint in that, too, humanity. Children. But I will tell that there is a door, and the keys to open it are words that have to be used in the right tone, not with irony, despair, or the other faces of entropy. Entropy is going to tell you that have already failed. Don't listen. The keys to the door are those words, used in the right way, used in the proper frame of mind. Words which, when you get past cynicism and disappointment, even if it takes a lot of effort and all day, open up into the balm against disappointment, and the solution to terrorism:

Hope. Love. Faith.

Well, then, humanity. What the fuck are you waiting for?

Gratitudes 2016

Gratitudes 2016

Every year I write Gratitudes instead of New Year's Resolution. This has been my practice for a number of years. I am going to start working on that. After the past actually fairly challenging year, and looking forward to having to redo all the civil rights and social justice progress we've made over the past fifty years, I'm honestly not sure where to start. I usually start small.

To be clear, I'm announcing intent, not completion. I will have to start somewhere, And I will start where and when I can.

•

I am struggling a bit with Gratitudes this morning. I am also feeling somewhat emotionally fragile this morning, after having felt more resilient these past few days.

Some of this, no doubt, is that now that the Festival of Being Grateful at the Feast has been accomplished, and it was a good one, now we must face the prospect of continuing to be grateful when not at a feast. But that's when it counts even more. Anyone can be grateful at the feast; gratitude goes deeper when there's apparently less to be grateful for.

Some of this, also, is that one has had a few days of joy and celebration in each others' company, and is very grateful for that, and now one must turn to face the unsolved problems and unaddressed fears that still hover in the corners of the room, that will not go away, because the world has become a Scarier Place overnight. One has had the days of horror, followed by some healthy days of forgetting about the horror and focusing on the joy and friends who share and co-create the joy, and now one has to get back to work.

What I will NOT be doing today is Retail Madness. I have clean-up to help with, leftovers to enjoy, and people to spend the day Doing Nothing with. I do not plan to subject my still-raw nerves in any way to the annual Consumer Madness Blow-Out (that phrase bigger typeface and lots of exclamation points) that seems to possess people. But then, we live in the culture of the Religion of Money, no matter what lip service is given to other religions, cults, sects, and belief-systems.

I cannot help but remember what the second Bush Presidency said needed to happen after 9/11: You people need to go out and do your patriotic duty and spend lots of money on things you don't need, to help boost the economy back into health, and revive the American spirit. Linking consumption and nationalism is one of the earmarks of fascism. (I said that in 2001, and nobody wanted to hear it.)

Well, huge sales on Black Friday only make sense if you actually have money to spend on things you don't really need. You might want them, and that's fine, but needing them is another story. (To be fair, I have a few close friends, most of them tech people, who do take advantage of the HUUUUGE SAAAALES to get tech stuff they actually DO need. That's just clever, creative timing about shopping, as opposed to consumerism per se.) And still, you have to have to disposable income to get things you need, even on sale. This year, as with last year, I must lay low.

Am I grateful for any of that? I am grateful that I still have some choices in life, including choices about what not to engage in. I am fearful of the times changing in such a way that choices continue to be legislated away from me (which if you want to be fair has been happening my entire lifetime; but I don't want to be fair about that), making me life harder rather than easier, creating more chaos at a time in my life when I can barely summon the strength to cope with existing chaos. I could list those fears, I've certainly thought them through in detail, and right now I don't want to.

Can I find something to be grateful for, in the current political climate of the public ascendancy of the rhetoric of hate and selfishness? That's a challenge. I suppose I can find something in the spinning coin in which Hope is on one side of the coin and Despair is on the other: hope seen in many people rallying together to fight for their rights and refusing to normalize fascism; despair in that those civil rights we spent the last two generations fighting to acquire will now have to be fought for all over again. That's the true dynamic with Hope/Despair (I am amazed that this isn't so bloody obvious to more people than it seems to be): it is the Tao, always spinning, the seed of the light born out of the darkness, the seed of the darkness always born out of the light. The Balance is the dynamic that keeps it spinning, which is good, because if it ever comes to rest permanently on one side, well, that's when things *really* fall apart.

I am grateful that I had a terrific Day of Feasting and Giving Thanks. (Spare me the postmodern cynical undercutting of that with whatever complaining you were thinking of replying with.) (You see: the spinning coin.) Thank you.

I am grateful that I don't have to do much today, the day after, either. Thank you.

I am grateful of who I am spending these days with, and where, and why, and for being provided with a haven in which I am free to spend my energy this morning on introspection rather than struggling to survive.

I am grateful that I don't have to struggle to just survive, this morning, this week, next week. Thank you.

I am grateful that I have the opportunity to spend my limited energy, this week, on creativity, on activism, rather than on struggling to survive. Thank you.

I am grateful that I do have friends who care, and are able to help me out when I really need it, even in small ways. I have needed so much support, and it has sometimes made me desperate (the fearful Despair side of the coin), and therefore not easy to be around. I acknowledge that.

I am grateful that I have learned to swallow my pride, and just fucking Ask For Help. I am still learning how to do that elegantly rather than desperately (thanks in part to the mentoring of Amanda Fucking Palmer); my apologies for when I have failed on that front.

I will continue to need support, going forward, and I worry sometimes about continuing to ask for help, because I DO know that everyone else needs help, too. I give it where I can, and pay it forward where I cannot. I will always be grateful, even when the clawed and scratchy-voiced thoughts dominate me that try to tell me that I am not worthy, and it is an uphill battle to remember that I AM.

I am grateful for neediness. Because I need to be needed, as much as I need to be supported. I need, like breathing, to be useful. John Cage spoke many times about how being useful is one of the most important values, underlying so many other definitions of what it means to be a "good" person. "Good" means nothing, because that is usually a Tribal morality concept in practice. "Useful" transcends good, if you just think about it for a minute.

I am grateful for opportunities to be of use. Even when I am feeling scared and desperate, and am bargaining for my survival, that does not negate that I am being of use to someone, even if seems like a barter or trade. Being useful helps me fight against the clawed and scratchy-voiced thoughts about being unworthy.

I'm very grateful that my multimedia installation in a corn crib at Silverwood County Park, titled "The Temple of Deep Time," created in 2014, was one of two installations extended far beyond the original time frame of the original project. I spent some time this past summer on maintenance and improvements, and am glad to see it go forward. Thank you.

In many ways, the past year or so has been, well, horrible. It's the art-making, the music, the art installations, that have kept me going. Sometimes the creative work is the only thing that keeps me going, so I'm very grateful to have had it. To keep going, I need to do even more. Thank you.

I'm very grateful that I've been offered so many opportunities in the past year or so and been asked to create location-specific landscape art and multimedia art. It's been fulfilling to be able to create, and I've been honored to be given so many opportunities. Thank you.

You want to know to practice Gratitudes?
What is the one thing you most hate doing?
Go do that.
And be grateful.

I am grateful for all of the people who have given me places to stay, this past year and a half of homelessness. Just having minimal security frees up so much of my energy otherwise spent on just surviving. If I have days and weeks when I don't want to go on, a lot of that is because I've been spending ALL of my energy on merely surviving, and none of it on anything that moves me forward, or feeds me creatively and spiritually (those are intertwined), and Despair looks like an endless tunnel of merely struggling to survive, with no point to it. (FUCK nihilism. FUCK you.)

I am grateful, therefore, that I have had a morning hour of science and solitude, to be able to hear these thoughts as they percolate up through the cracked and bubbling dolomitic bedrock of my recent experience. I am still catching up on being able to have this morning silence and solitude, which for me is as necessary as breathing, as necessary as host times out in the desert when I can Just. Stop. and listen to the stillness. This is my therapy. This is what keeps me sane.

I am grateful, also, therefore, to have access for now to a working kitchen that I don't have to set up, tear down, move, and spend all my energy on just making it work. Food security is a major relief. Food security is something you take for granted till you don't have it; just like being homeless.

I am grateful. Oh, I am still fearful. I am still fighting dire Despair, and depression. And I am grateful to have had even a few days when I had the strength TO fight, leftover from everything else I have to deal with.

Let's make this an Arts & Crafts Day.