Inauguration and generative disillusionment
The political is personal because politics are a manifestation of how humans relate to and govern all of life. What are we collectively and ceremoniously bringing about the beginning of?
It’s easy to ruminate on what feels hopeless, repeatedly kicking the tire of futility until our toe hurts, but all that will do is make it harder to stride forward. In the collective trauma field of present day politics, many of us feel the eerily familiar characteristics of obligation to a toxic family system. You can’t leave, but you can’t change it. They are both your parents and you depend on them, but they are the ones hurting you and preventing you from being able to progress with dignity and self-determination. You can’t align with the left or the right, so you bounce around like a pinball in the news feeds, limping away on your bruised kicking toe, feeling concussed.
There is an anxious familiar feeling that it's going to erupt into violence any second and you fear you won’t be able to escape the shrapnel with a bruised toe and concussion. But the narcissist is going to get his fix- inauguration!
inaugurate
verb
in·au·gu·rate i-ˈnȯ-gyə-ˌrāt
1: to induct into an office with suitable ceremonies
2a: to dedicate ceremoniously : observe formally the beginning of
b: to bring about the beginning of
What are we collectively and ceremoniously bringing about the beginning of?
When I feel especially consumed with disgust, hopelessness or despair, there is a tool I like to use that I call ’turning it inside out’. It’s very simple, really. I just ask myself ”what do I want instead?” It’s simple, but it’s not easy. The brain holds onto traumatic information more easily to keep us safe. Hyper vigilance to the frightening narrative is a brilliant adaptation the brain conjures to psychologically survive.
The memory of being burned by fire is in the most accessible file of the brain, while memories of effectively putting out a fire are less accessible files. It takes conscious effort, or mental hygiene to choose a resourceful state. To get out of reaction to negative memory and into remembering positive memory, we have to intentionally practice active imagination. Think of it like a filing system, we have to keep the files containing evidence of our agency and resourcefulness piled on the desk of our pre-frontal cortex and leave enough room on the desk for something never imagined before to emerge.
’Turning it inside out‘ is an active practice. Just recalling, meditating, and imagining can become a spiritual bypass. You have to go out and do the thing so you can embody the agency and resourcefulness. The brain doesn’t differentiate between giving and receiving, so giving what you most want will satisfy the need to have what you most want. It’s an everyday miracle for mental health and community wellness.
The thing I most want isn’t being offered on the right or the left. It’s not on offer in the tragic comedy of American politics at all.
What I most want are durable human bonds. I want to move away from modern colonial desires and toward accountable autonomy and unconditional response-ability to all living things.
I want all the things in this list by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira:
To heal intellectually, emotionally, relationally, economically, and politically
To abolish colonial and racial violence, inequality, hierarchies of worth and separations
To center the heart and de-center our egos, identities, human narratives and projections
To age and die in regenerative ways
To care for, rather than compete with, everything and everyone
To plant, repurpose technology, compost, repair, and regenerate everything
To prioritize the common good for humans, non-humans, and the planet
To use words and conversation carefully and wisely, with humility and maturity
To own up, sober up, clean up, grow up, show up and exist differently
If it feels like that is a really ‘pie in the sky’ vision, it’s because it totally is. In fact, it may even feel absurd compared to your everyday news reel. It is. But it's actually emerging like mycelial bodies all over in places not often searchable by syndicated news API’s. It’s emerging in the community that is gathering on our Sunny Joy Farm land in Talent.
In order to make possible deeper engagements and better relationships we will need to reactivate our capacities for sensing, relating, and imagining that have been deactivated. We must make ourselves available to the seemingly absurd in order to allow our precious attention to be fully diverted from the binary narratives of right and left, mom and dad, the immobilizing nature of the toxic family system that is our American government which renders us bruised and concussed and unable to act or imagine outside of its confines.
What we need is to embody generative disillusionment with toxic modes of relationship in order to imagine new ways of relating.
I recently read about a popular saying in Brazil that offers us some insight using water as a metaphor. It is said that in a flood situation, it is only when the water reaches one’s hips that it becomes possible to swim. When flood water is encompassing our feet up to our knees, we can only walk or wade. We might only be able to learn to swim, to exist differently, once we have no other choice. Our priorities are bound to the level of the water around them- the narrative we are immersed in. We can prepare to swim by embracing the teachings of the water as well as the teachings of those swimming for their lives against currents of colonial violence, neo-liberal hellscapes and toxic family systems.
If you sit long enough with water striders, you’ll see that they use the tension of the surface of the water to their advantage, going wide to stay aloft. We must go wide, reaching for each other to transform the flooding narrative to our advantage and absurdly stride on the tension together to make a generative future.
We must learn from water striders to co-adapt to the flooding, wildfiring, destructive chaos of a toxic two party system. We must welcome generative disillusionment and inaugurate ourselves into relational community.
a big metabolic body
with broken bones
in between the silence I notice
how we are addicted to the power
and to the pleasure
of denying that my arrogance
is the cause of so much scarcity
In order to heal the wound
we must cry the grief
of a world that burns
of a life-way that leaves us empty
In order to heal the wound
that so deeply hurts
we must move in song
we must care deeply for each other
It is not about right or left
It is about the depth that is stored in the roots
in the hands that weave,
in the hands that hold
those that sow the corn seeds
and the plantain, the beans, the potato,
the hands that sow the resistance, the resilience,
the winds, the waters, the bloods.
our mother earth
with broken bones
and in between the silences I notice
that we are addicted to the power
and to the pleasure
of denying that my arrogance
is the cause of so much scarcity.
~Song lyrics, author unknown