The Mother of Darkness (Part Two)

 (This is the second of two parts.  Please read Part One, published yesterday, before reading this.)

Her smile widens.

“I understand,” She says. “Perhaps some more stories will help. Since you are from the United States, I will start there.” Her smile becomes sad. “In Billings, Montana, many years ago, a young Jewish boy put a paper menorah in his window. There were people in the town that didn't like that Jewish folks had moved to the neighborhood and threw a stone through the window and the menorah. The boy's father talked to the police who suggested that he put bars on the window. Then he talked with his neighbors who were outraged that this happened. Soon there were paper menorahs in the windows of hundreds of Christians in Billings, as well as in the windows of churches and the windows of the Catholic school. In a small town in Nova Scotia, more than a decade ago, a ninth grade boy wore a pink shirt to school on the first day of classes and got bullied for it. A couple of twelfth grade boys found out and bought as many pink shirts as they could and by the end of the week most of the senior boys were wearing pink shirts. In a Massachusetts suburb, a lesbian couple put a rainbow flag outside their home. They woke one day to find that someone tore it down. When the neighbors found out, there were soon dozens of rainbow flags flying in the neighborhood, most in front of homes where the occupants were heterosexuals.”

“But...” you start to say, when She makes a gesture that beckons you to wait.

“Not long after the Twin Towers fell, there were two bricks thrown through the windows of an Islamic bookstore in Virginia, with some very nasty notes attached. The store owner was looking at the mess when a local rabbi stopped by to see what he could do to help. Several Christian ministers also came by to help and an anonymous businessman paid for a new window to be installed. Five years after that, in Pennsylvania, a milk truck driver shot and killed five young Amish schoolgirls before killing himself. At his funeral, several of the Amish showed up to comfort the killer's widow and mother. They also donated money to help the widow with her three young children.” She pauses for just a moment.

“And long ago, in Nebraska, a rabbi from New York City moved to a small synagogue to become the spiritual leader there. He soon started getting threatening anti-Semitic hate messages. He discovered that they were coming from the head of the Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska, who happened to be a disabled man. The rabbi responded by leaving loving messages for the Klan leader and offering him rides if he needed to go anywhere. It took quite a while, but eventually the KKK leader said that he wanted to give it up and started talking to groups about the perils of hatred. When he became ill, the rabbi and his wife took him in and nursed the man who had threatened them until he died.”

“Those are nice stories,” you say, “but what do you want me to do?”

“The word that you are looking for,” She says, “is kindness.” She is beaming now and a glow shines through her dark skin. “Be kind.”

You wake up and the sun is rising. It's dawn and the day is clear.

Dedicated to and in acknowledgment of the influence of four Black women:

Audre Lorde

Luisah Teish

Octavia Butler

and adrienne maree brown

The Mother of Darkness (Part One)

 by Raven Moonwood

It's night and you're dreaming when before you stands an open door. You step forward and fall into it. You land on a very small island in the midst of a restless sea.

The sky is black but full of stars which shine so brightly that everything appears sharp and clear. The sea around you is like ink with a sprinkling of foam on the churning waves.

There is only room for two people on the island and sharing it with you is a dark skinned woman wearing magnificent robes of pale blue with bits of pink and white. She is wearing scarves on Her head in an almost Islamic style, that cover Her hair. You realize that you are naked, and it's fine, but all that you can see of Her is Her face and hands and bare feet.

“Who are you?” you ask Her.

“Let me tell you a story,” She says. Her English is flawless but it might be a bit too perfect. You think that maybe She is from some African nation. “Slavery existed in many nations, many times around the world. It existed in Africa long before the Europeans came, but the Europeans took people from western Africa, brought them far from their homes, and sent them to work in the New World. Among other indignities, these folks who became enslaved were told that their old beliefs were primitive and savage and that they were to become Christians and worship a new God, who was the Son and the Father and the Spirit that was Holy. They were told that they could pray to the Mother who was named Mary. Mary was known not only as Virgin Mother, but as the Star of the Sea. In Her statues those who were enslaved saw Yemonja, Yemaya, Imanje, their ocean diety. So they began praying aloud to Mary, knowing that they were praying to the great Ocean Mother.”

“Are you Yemaya?” you ask.

“You don't see, do you?” She says. “Perhaps another tale.” She smiles and appears amused.

“On the islands of Japan, many centuries ago, Catholic missionaries came to preach and converted many folk. The emperor of Japan was furious and forbade Christian worship on pain of death. But many converts took statues of Kannon, the Japanese name for the bodhisattva Kuan Yin, and put tiny crosses on the back to remind them that they were praying to Mary, though the statue was of Kuan Yin.”

“So, are you Yemaya and Kuan Yin and Mary?” you ask.

“And Tara and Gaia and Pachamama and Sophia and Shakti and Shekinah. I am the Mother of Darkness, the nurturing mother of all that is chaotic, creative, dark, rejected, messy, sinister, smelly, erotic, confused, and upsetting. The Black Madonna, if you will.” Her smile widens. If there was such a thing as compassionate mirth, that might well describe the warmth that radiated from Her. “Perhaps a better question you could ask is where you are.”

“Perhaps I should,” you say. “Where am I?”

“This is the Interstitium, the liminal threshold that lies between.”

“Between what?” you ask.

“Between the known and the numinous, between the potential and the improbable, between what is and what might be, between almost and not yet. The waters that surround us hold all that is possible, yet all that is possible is change. And you must change, for I am change.”

And you see that the Mother is a doorway, a portal to the possible, and you're not sure that you want to go there.

(To be continued tomorrow...)

Prelude to The Mother of Darkness

 I had all but abandoned this blog.  I am spending lots of time these days posting stuff on the Commune Life Blog and the Commune Life Facebook page.

But recently I have been doing a bunch of writing of other types of stuff--fictional mostly.  I have decided to publish some of it here.  I just published a fictional 'book review' that I thought was funny (describing the past year as a "Bad Dystopian Novel").

I recently wrote a very short story (someone I shared it with described it as a 'treatise') that I called "The Mother of Darkness".  The story is a good description of my current spiritual beliefs.  It's also written in the second person, something that I don't recommend except for the briefest of stories (which I think that this is).  I intend to publish it in two parts, beginning tomorrow.

With darkness closing in

I haven't completely abandoned this blog, but close.

I am currently living in our very small commune in Queens, sharing income, cleaning, shopping, and cooking, going to meetings, and writing fantasy stories. (More on this in a moment.) And I am once again writing a post for Commune Life--once a month.

And waiting with fear and trepidation for the next election.

This is the time of the year that I almost always write a post.  Pagans call it Samhain, Mexicans and others call it the Day of the Dead,  and lots of other people call it Halloween, but under any of those names it is about darkness, decay, and death.

For me, it is a time to look at my fears and face the fact that things are always going to fall apart. That's just a part of life.

I should probably be doing more important things than writing fantasy stories, but doing it is very satisfying, even if no one is reading them.  I'm considering publishing them as a blog, the way that I did with Lagoon Commune.

And now that I am back with Commune Life, I want to see it grow, even if I am not the one running it any longer.  Maximus, who is running it is mostly using it to display his videos and the actual blog part of it has only had two posts in the last two months, both by me.  I have some ideas of how to change that, but I will need to run them by Maximus.

And our little commune will be a year old in less than a month, and there is still only three of us at the core.

Everything is uncertain but it seems like this is the best time of the year for uncertainty.  I am trying to embrace the darkness. It isn't easy but it seems appropriate. Not knowing is honest and just how things are. It's trying to pretend anything is certain, or that I can be certain about anything, that is the dangerous path.

I invite you to embrace uncertainty and enjoy the darkness of the season. It will pass, but right now it is closing in.

Quote of the Day: "It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share." - Pema Chodron

Difficulties, Tragedy, Complexity, and Kindness

I generally try to be optimistic. Optimists live longer, for one thing. And they are more likely to be listened to, for another.

I know a man who launches into a tirade about mass extinction on very little provocation. It doesn't make others want to do anything about climate change; it makes others want to avoid him.

But, as much as I want to be optimistic, I try to be realistic as well. The world isn't going to be the way that we want it to be, the world is the way that it is and it is very complex. There are a lot of wonderful things going on and a lot of worrisome things going on and one doesn't negate the other.

I try to keep a fairly positive tone in this blog but lately I have been thinking about some of the difficulties with social change (social change being the focus of this blog) and I think it's important to talk about them.

As much of a communities booster as I am, communities are far from perfect and acknowledging that and pointing out the pitfalls and difficulties is part of showing what real community (not an ideal utopia) is, warts and all. Knowing the problems with communities doesn't make me want to give up on them, but it makes me appreciate even more how difficult building them is and some of the limitations of communities as vehicles for social change.  I will write more about this in my next post.

Even more difficult to look at is climate change and the ways we are destroying the earth.  This, indeed, is tragedy. The man I spoke of could be right, we could be headed for extinction, or, at the very least, one poisoned planet. And we need to look at that as well--and I intend to in a future post.

And then there's population, which I want to talk about.  And the slow pace of social change, which I may also devote a post to.

There are just so many problems in the world.

I don't plan on tackling all of them in this blog, but I will say that I am grateful for anyone working on any of them.  I do want to acknowledge three in particular that I don't intend to write a post on at this point, but I think are particularly difficult and troublesome.  These are racism, male domination, and economic inequality.

More than fifty years after the civil rights movement began, black men are still being shot by police, and being incarcerated at horrendous rates.   Recently, two black men were arrested at a Starbucks for asking to use the restroom and, even more recently, three African-American women were stopped by the police as they were moving out of an Airbnb because a white woman in the neighborhood saw them and was afraid there was a burglary in progress.  It turns out that there was also a white woman with these women, but she wasn't seen as “suspicious”. Unfortunately, I see articles like this on a regular basis.

Women are finally being heard about the abuse and harassment and exploitation they receive from men, particularly rich and powerful men. Unfortunately, that continues as well. The #metoo movement is exposing a fault line in sexual relationships that has been needed to be looked at for a long time. The communes have been pushing consent culture even before this, but even in the communes, there are a great many problems. As long as men have more power than women, this is going to continue, and changing power dynamics is far from easy, especially when men don't want to give up power.

The point of income-sharing communities is to reduce economic inequality, but I don't see that changing in this society any time soon, either.  In fact, with the current administration, I suspect economic inequality will be increasing. And even if we got it under control in the US, our lifestyle causes poverty and hunger around the world.  And that's hard to change as well.

My question is always, what can we do?  At the very least, we can care. We can live simply and treat others well. Above all, we can be kind--to others and to ourselves.   It's not accidental that my first two Quotes of the Day on this blog were about kindness. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “There's only one rule that I know of… you've got to be kind.”

Quote of the Day: “Love and kindness are never wasted.  They always make a difference.” - Barbara De Angelis

Thank You Power

I’m currently working in a bookshop (part time, mostly to have a little spending money).  I’m not sure how good an idea it is; it’s a little like hiring a kid to work at a toyshop.  There are so many books and so little time.

I found this book, Thank You Power (by Deborah Norville), in the dollar bin at the store.  There isn’t a lot in it to distinguish it from a lot of similar books.  (I think Brené Brown is one of the better writers in this area and I should review her Spirituality of Imperfection someday.)  But it’s a great reminder of the importance of gratitude, has a bunch of scientific studies that back this (and all sorts of other positive stuff) up, and has some pretty good quotes.

Here’s one about how the best way to be happy is to do things for other people (and there are a lot of studies that show this):  “Happiness is a by-product of an effort to make someone else happy.”  (Gretta Palmer)  The converse of this is that directly pursuing happiness is a sure-fire way not to achieve it.

Another way to achieve happiness is to do meaningful work, especially stuff that inspires you.  The quote for this one is: “If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert.  He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that had rolled under the radiator striving for it as the goal itself.  He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of each day.”  (W Beran Wolfe)  Pretty true (if you ignore the sexist assumptions in the quote.)  I think, of course, that the best way of all is to do meaningful work that makes a lot of other people happy.

Finally, perhaps the key thing that can really bring happiness is being thankful.  To everyone and for everything.  It’s an important and often neglected practice.  And that’s why I bought this book.  Even though it may not be the best written book I’ve read, gratitude is the main focus of Thank You Power.  

Being grateful, constantly appreciating others and life, changes us.  We can’t be reminded of that too often.

Quote of the Day: “What if… the secret to happiness was within each of us?  What if a lasting sense of completion, an enduring sense of completion, was possible--simply by changing the lens through which we viewed daily life? …

“Here’s the good news: you’ve got the power right now. … That power begins with two words: thank you.” - Deborah Norville

Addiction and Connection

I've just read a pretty interesting article online. I'll admit that I'm skeptical about it, but the premise is intriguing.  It's all about the question of what causes addiction.  The basic idea (and the author backs it up with a bunch of studies) is rather than chemical dependency being involved, he claims that the cause of addiction is isolation and disconnection. 

Johann Hari makes at least two major points from this.  The first is that the war on drugs doesn't stop drug addiction.  He thinks, and uses the example of what's been done successfully in Portugal, that drugs should be decriminalized and addicts should be given social supports.  This is not only more humane but works a lot better. 

More important to my thinking is his second point.  We also need to deal with the social isolation and lack of connection that this society fosters.  As he put it, "We need now to talk about social recovery -- how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog."

I think (no surprise to anyone who reads this blog) that community is one of the main antidotes to isolation and that we need to rebuild this society so that it's based on human connection (as well as our connections to the earth and the ecosystem) rather than selling products and controlling people.  This is real social alchemy.


Quote of the Day: "...the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. ...
"Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love." - Johann Hari

All Lives Matter

It's important to say at the beginning of this post that this is not a negation or replacement of the phrase Black Lives Matter.  Black men are killed with appalling regularity.  These days I go through the horrible litany: Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Alex Nieto, Ezell Ford, Michael Brown, Tamil Rice, Eric Garner--and it goes on and on. The church across the street has a big bold banner saying Black Lives Matter on the steeple.  It's a very necessary reminder.

Cops Lives Matter as well.  It's not just Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.  Police officers are killed with alarming regularity as well.  And their deaths and the deaths of young men of color are intertwined.  The likelihood of a police officer being attacked or killed means they are less likely to take chances.  Unfortunately there is an ugly truth to the phrase "Shoot first and ask questions later".  You have scared young men out there with guns--and many of them are police officers.

And the lives of queer folk matter, too.  The suicide of Leelah Alcorn, splashed all over the news yesterday, is just the latest in a long list of deaths of transgendered people.  There is a Transgender Day of Remembrance held every year on November 20th to mark their deaths, often at the hands of others.  Just because there's same sex marriage in many states now, doesn't mean that young GLBTQ folks aren't still committing suicide out of despair, not to mention being killed by homophobic people, sometimes in their own family.

I could go on and on.  We are all hurting.  When people affirm the 99%, the 1% get scared.  They may have all the power and privilege, but it doesn't stop them from fear.  Everyone gets worried about being left behind.

How can we say to each person that their life matters as well?  This isn't some kind of new age platitude 'everyone's life is important'.  That's true but it doesn't address specifics.  It doesn't address oppression and hierarchy and the way that suffering is intensified in some communities.

When Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were killed in New York, the family of Michael Brown spoke out, 'condemning' the murder.  "We must work together to bring peace to our communities. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the officers’ families during this incredibly difficult time..." their statement read in part.  The Ferguson Action Coalition also released a statement saying "We mourned with the families of Eric Garner and Mike Brown who experienced unspeakable loss, and similarly our hearts go out to the families of these officers who are now experiencing that same grief."

It is the same grief, the same horrendous loss.  We need to approach each loss, each point of pain and suffering as unique, requiring a unique response.  Sometimes we need to go out there and demonstrate, or write strong demands on what we must do, and sometimes we need to come together and grieve quietly.

We also need to approach each person in our lives, everyone we come in contact with, in the most gentle, loving way that we can, acknowledging the uniqueness of their situation.  On January 1, 2010, I posted Leo Tolstoy's story, Three Questions, which ends with the statement "The most important person is always the person with whom you are, who is right before you..."  We need to approach each person and each tragedy by looking at what is important for them.  In the same way, I believe we need to love each person that we come in contact with in the way that most affirms who they are, while giving only what we truly can.

If we could only bring real love and compassion to everyone we meet, especially all who are suffering, we would make a difference in the world.  We need to care about each other and we need to care for each other.  Because, truly, all lives matter.


Quote of the Day: "Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens." - Ella Baker

Spreading the Light

I've blogged each year on the winter solstice since I started this blog, five and a half years ago.  This is the shortest day of the year.  From here the nights get shorter and the days grow longer and light returns to the northern hemisphere.

As people who follow my blog know, I also blog at the end of October/start of November (aka Samhain) about the blessings of darkness.  Light also has its blessings.  We need light in order to see, we need light in order to find our way. 

There are treasures in that darkness, but we often need light in order to find them.  At this time of the year, it's the small lights that count: candles and flashlights and moonlight and starlight.  Given how tough it is to find our way at this time in our world, each of us can be a bit of that light, helping others to find their way and helping to find what is hidden in the fertile darkness around us.

I write this, of course, from my own challenge of finding my way and helping others find theirs.  I'm a bit lost at the moment.  I know where I want to go and I'm not sure how to get there.  But this is the season of wandering.  With the light returning, hopefully the way will become clearer.


Quote of the Day:  "There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."  - Edith Wharton




Unity, Diversity, and Love

Here we are, in the midst of a time out of time, past the Solstice, past Christmas, into Kwanzaa and the dark days of winter.  In the middle of all this it's important to stop and notice the stillness.  It's important to remember that love is the miracle that keeps us going.

It's 'Boxing Day' today, the feast of St. Stephen, and the first day of Kwanzaa.  The principle for the day is Umoja, Unity.  It's not hard for me to draw a line from there to love.

I have quoted my mother as telling me that "Every one of my children is different and I love them all the same."  Truly, every one of us (worldwide) is very, very different from each other and we are all connected.  How can we create unity out of that diversity?  How can we create room for everyone--no matter how they think, what they look like, what they believe, what they say they want?

Love is about opening our hearts to everyone.  Love is about seeing the connections, seeing the unity in this very diverse world.  Love is about saying yes to it all.

Yes, there is sorrow and pain here.  Yes, there are some pretty horrible things happening.  Yes, people do awful things to each other.  Yes, many things in this world have to change.  And, yes, I will love no matter what.  Because love is the miracle, the miracle that we can still love in spite of it all, that we can see each other's vulnerable helplessness even when we try to hide it by doing all the terrible things we do.  Only love can stand up to atrocities, love and forgiveness.  Only love can see the wonderful unity in our rich diversity.  Only love can say yes to it all.


Quote of the Day:  "Don’t ask what love can make or do. Look at the colors of the world." - Rumi

Beginning Again

I never wrote my usual 'Samhain' post--I was too busy getting ready to go to Twin Oaks.  (Once we were there, ironically, we were immediately invited to a late Halloween party.)

Every year, also, I've written a post for the 'Yule', the Winter Solstice.  I think of this as the end of the year, the beginning of a 'time out of time', and the prelude to the new year (which I sort of celebrate with everyone on Jan 1st).  But this is the time, as the darkness reaches its deepest point and begins the turn back toward the light, that I celebrate.  A time for summing up the old year and thinking about the new.

This past year brought major changes to my life.  I abandoned my latest attempt at community and have become (by choice) homeless and jobless, a drifter, a nomad, and a couch surfer--as well as a community... well, some people have said, consultant, but I think that both glorifies and marginalizes what I'm trying to do.  I intend to be a real participant, a helper and supporter, of new and starting communities.  I'm looking at (as I explained in my last post) a time of traveling up and down (and back up and down) the east coast of the US, from MA to PA to VA and back.  A circuit-riding preacher of community, trying to live and learn what I'm also trying to teach.

Not what I was expecting at all, but in a way something that all my work on starting communities has prepared me for.  I'm hardly an expert on building community, but I've certainly learned a few things on the way and I really want to see more community arising.

And what does all this community stuff have to do with social change, social alchemy, the subject of this blog?

I see community as step one.  It's not the final goal, it's the foundation for creating social change, a little laboratory to try living differently.  I still believe strongly in simplicity, equality, and sustainability, I still think that the SLoBIND (starting Small and LOcal, and building the changes in a way that's Bioregional, Interconnected, Networked, and Decentralized) is the way to go, I still think the most important goal is to meet people's real needs.  I just think that community, for me, is the clearest way of beginning this.

So, here I am at the dark of the year, the beginning of winter, dreaming and scheming and getting ready for what might happen next.  My only definite plan at this point is returning to PA in March to see what I could be part of there, but there are several other things I'm playing with, that might or might not emerge.  At this point I also have a bunch of new resources I want to review and a small series that I hope to write for this blog on issues in community--things I've learned from my travels this fall and my experiences and learnings from others, that I think would be worth looking at.

Beyond that, who knows.  I certainly didn't expect to be where I am now and I certainly don't really know what the new year will bring.

Welcome Winter. Happy Yule everyone.


Quote of the Day: "Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance." - Yoko Ono

The Great Triple Love

In the middle of all my busyness and worry, I want to write about love.  Love, compassion, kindness, caring, concern, generosity, and forgiveness.  These are central themes in my life and I'd like to devote my next two posts to them.

I see love (etc) as having three focuses.  (Many religious people will want to add a fourth.)

I want to begin with love of self.  This is often disparaged as being selfish, yet it's absolutely essential.  The bible says (Leviticus 19:18, Mark 12:31), "Love your neighbor as yourself."  It sounds good, but how would that work if you didn't love yourself?  At a Sufi dance I went to, someone taught us the song, "I love me so much, That I can love you so much, That you can love you so much, That you can start loving me."  (Attributed in at least one place to James Bevell.)  I think we need to begin by loving ourselves.

This allows us to love others, which is the second focus of love.  I will talk more about this in my next post, but I think we need to focus on loving everyone we possibly can.  The bible says to not only love your neighbor, but to love your enemies (Matthew 5:44), love the stranger (Deuteronomy 10:19), and, most important, love one another (John 13:34). While I think it's important to love everyone, I think it's most important to love everyone you come in contact with.  (Loving world figures, people in the news, "the oppressed", "the oppressors", politicians, etc, is good but I think it does more good for you then for them--unless you actually see them or email them or otherwise get in contact with them.)  I try to imagine how I can be loving with each person I meet today.

Beyond loving others is loving the world.  This focuses on the natural world, but includes humanity since, really, we are part of the natural world.  We forget how dependent we are on it but gaia/the ecosystem/the earth gives us our life as well as what we need to live.  We wouldn't live a minute without it and it is a beautiful, amazing process that isn't hard to love if we open ourselves up  to it.  And we need to love and care for the world because if it dies we die and everything we love dies.

So we need to love ourselves, others, and the world, and we need to work on ourselves, support each other, and take care of the world.  This is why I talk about personal growth, social change, and ecological awareness.


However, from a whole systems perspective, as well as an ecological perspective, a Buddhist perspective, a Taoist perspective, etc, there really isn't any separation between ourselves, everyone else, and the world.  We are all one giant interconnected system and therefore the Great Triple Love is really only one love. Love all, serve all, be grateful to everyone, be grateful for everything.


Quote of the Day: "If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than yourself, you will not succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person..."  - Meister Eckhart

Those of Compassion

I love reading things in very different places that I see mirroring each other. For example, two women, following different spiritual paths, write about legends from those paths, and I see similarities in the different legends that they write about.

Rachel Naomi Remen (see my posts, Blessings, 3/9/10, and More Blessings, 3/23/10) tells the legend of the Lamed-Vov. (I have written this up in More Blessings and will quote some from that.) "In this story, God tells us He will allow the world to continue as long as at any given time there is a minimum of thirty-six good people in the human race. People who are capable of responding to the suffering that is part of the human condition. ... If there are fewer than thirty-six such people alive, the world will come to an end."

She was told this story by her grandfather and when she asks him if he knew who these Lamed-Vov (the thirty-six) were, he replies, "Only God knows who the Lamed-Vovniks are. Even the Lamed-Vovniks themselves do not know for sure the role that they have in the continuation of the world, and no one else knows it either. They respond to suffering, not in order to save the world but simply because the suffering of others touches them and matters to them." Rachel Remen goes on to say that the Lamed-Vovniks could be anyone, anywhere. "What mattered was only their capacity to feel the collective suffering of the human race and to respond to the suffering around them."

Finally she asks her grandfather what the Lamed-Vovniks need to do to keep the human race safe. His answer is, "They do not need to *do anything. They respond to all suffering with compassion. Without compassion, the world cannot continue. Our compassion blesses and sustains the world."

This story resonates with me and reminds me of another story from Joanna Macy that she writes about in her book World As Lover, World As Self (see my post, World As Lover, 1/15/10, for more). Here the legend is of the Shambala Warriors which she learned about from a Tibetan Rinpoche in northern India. In brief, the story goes: "There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. ... In this era ... the kingdom of Shambala begins to emerge.
"... it is not a place ... It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambala warriors... [you can't] recognize a Shambala warrior... for they wear no uniform, or insignia, and they carry no banners.
"...the Shambala warriors go into training... in the use of two weapons. ... The weapons are compassion and insight."

Two different stories, from two different traditions, Judaism and Buddhism, yet I see several parallels. The first is that both of them are about special folks, each of which uses compassion to save the world. A second is that you can't tell them from anyone else. In some ways I see them as the same story, about people, perhaps even unknown to each other, who heal the world with their compassion. Any of us could be part of the Lamed-Vov or the Shambala warriors. Maybe everyone who brings love, compassion, insight, and clear thinking to trying to make the world a better place is part of this select band. And perhaps that even includes you.


Quote of the Day: "You have to have compassion because it gives you the juice, the power, the passion to move. When you open to the pain of the world you move, you act. But that ... by itself is not enough. It can burn you out, so you need ... insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. ... With insight into our profound interrelatedness, you know that actions undertaken with pure intent have repercussions throughout the web of life, beyond what you can measure or discern. By itself, that insight may appear too cool, too conceptual, to sustain you and keep you moving, so you need the heat of compassion. Together ... these two can sustain us as agents of wholesome change. They are gifts for us to claim now in the healing of the world." - Joanna Macy

Darkness and Despair

No, I haven't disappeared from the face of the earth. Life at home has been stressful and my quiet job has gotten very, very busy. I haven't had the time to put into this blog. Life will probably quiet down but it might not be until December--or next year.

I started writing the intro for a new series on 'Life After Fuel', and I have lots of ideas for it (and lots of resources), so hopefully when I get the time I can plunge into that.

Meanwhile, I almost always write something this time of the year to honor the pagan feast of Samhain. (Pronounced, for some reason having to do with celtic languages, like 'sow-wen'. See Darkness, 11/1/08, Out of Darkness, 11/1/09, and Death, Decay, and Impermanence, 11/1/10 for my previous posts.)

One aspect of darkness I want to look at is the feeling of despair. This is not an easy feeling for me--or for many people, I imagine. I have a natural optimism that keeps finding reasons for hope, no matter what. I also fear that if I felt some of the real despair that is all around, I would sink into it and become depressed and hopeless.

Yet the despair is there. I'm not sure we (the human species) are going to make it and I am sure that if we do, it will be through a lot of pain and suffering, and I often feel like there isn't much that I can do to affect that. I don't want to deny those feelings, but I also don't want to sink into them and give up. I am not going to give up hopefulness, but I wonder if there is a way to hold to both hope and despair and not give up (or give into) either.

As the darkness, and the cold, and the winter rolls in, I want to acknowledge my despair, and my grieving over the way we are stuck in what we are doing, and continue to do it, even if it means our destruction. I want to feel those feelings and also the hope that even the little I can do may make some slight bit of difference.

I've had the thought (occasionally) that if we are doomed, we should treat each other the way we'd treat someone who is dying. Like hospice work, we need to give comfort and care to each other. If we are going to disappear as a species, it's worth being gentle and supportive to people and allow ourselves to die out with dignity. Of course, I still want to work to make this not happen, but I think it is worth feeling the uncertainty, and the despair, and remain open to the possibility that we are not going to make it. And whether we do, or we don't, loving each other is the best way to go. And for now I will try to remain open to the darkness and despair.


Quote of the Day: "We are bombarded by signals of distress--ecological destruction, social breakdown, and uncontrolled nuclear proliferation. Not surprisingly, we are feeling despair--a despair well merited by the machinery of mass death we continue to create and serve. What is surprising is the extent to which we hide this despair from ourselves and each other. ...
"Despair in this context, is not a macabre certainty of doom or a pathological condition of depression and futility. ... Rather, as it is being experienced by increasing numbers of people across a broad spectrum of society, despair is the loss of the assumption that the species will inevitably pull through. ...
"So long as we see ourselves as essentially separate, competitive, and ego-identified beings, it is difficult to accept the validity of our social despair, deriving as it does from interconnectedness. Both our capacity to grieve for others and our power to cope with this grief spring from the great matrix of relationships in which we take our being." - Joanna Macy

Doing it!

Sorry for the sudden change in plans, but it looks like I will be taking a break at this point. It could be permanent but probably not. I really do have a lot of stuff I still want to blog on, but there are things that are much better than blogging.

One of the best is to do a lot of the stuff that I've been blogging on. Out of the blue (almost) someone who had noticed all the workshops I'd been offering on intentional communities offered to rent her house to me to create an intentional community in. (She and her family are actually moving to a rural community in another state.) How could I turn that down?

So now I have the opportunity to do a lot of what I've been blogging on--starting with doing it with love and compassion. (I write this as a reminder for myself as much as anything.)

Yes, this will be about Simplicity, Equality, Community, and Sustainability. Yes, I will try to find ways of embracing Complexity, Diversity, Individuality, and Practicality. Yes, this will be about starting Small and Local. Of course, I will try to apply Permaculture and NonViolent Communication and anything else I can think of to our situation. Of course, I want us to be eating locally, growing food (at least sprouts), conserving energy and water, and most importantly, taking care of each other, learning from each other, and listening to each other.

This house comes with a host of quirky things and a big bunch of challenges. The location is very urban and there isn't a lot of space for a garden--or much of anything. But as I wrote in my post on Attitude (8/31/10), a Permaculture Principle is: "Every resource is either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the use made of it. ... Disadvantages can be viewed as 'problems' and we can take an energy-expensive approach to 'get rid of the problem', or we can think of everything as being a positive resource: it is up to us to work out just how we can make use of it." The other Attitudinal Principle is "Permaculture is Information and Imagination-Intensive". We will need creativity and imagination (and some information as well) to deal with the challenges of this house, but if I can get a good mix of people for this community, we should be able to do it. Now I just need to find them.

Maybe my next post will be an update of how this is working out. Meanwhile, if anyone reading this is interested in being a part of this emerging community (or might know someone who is), please email me.

Wish me luck.


Quote of the Day: "How are you practicing what you preach--whatever you preach, and who exactly is listening? ... It is not going to be easy, but we have what we have learned and what we have been given that is useful. We have the power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the place where they were standing. We have the trees, and water, and sun, and our children. ... We are making the future..." - Audre Lorde

Love in Action

This will be sort of a wrap up post--at least for this calendar year, although I will be referring to a lot of posts that I wrote through the two and a half years of this blog.

My last post was on the importance of love (Love is the Source, 12/25/10). But in my very early post on Loving-Kindness and Social Change (6/24/08) I pointed out that love wasn't enough. You need to work as well. You need to put love to work.

Freud said, "Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness." Kahlil Gibran puts it even better, "Work is love made visible." So my question is, how do we take our love and make it work in the world?

The first, and a very important way as far as I'm concerned, to put love into action, is through forgiveness. I wrote a post on this a couple of years ago (Forgiveness, 8/7/08) where I quoted Martin Luther King as saying, "Forgiveness is not an occasional act: it is an attitude." Being forgiving and taking an attitude of forgiveness seems a very real way of making love visible.

The Buddhists have some very definite ideas about making love visible. One of these is doing a loving-kindness meditation. (I wrote about this in my posts on Spreading Love, 3/26/10, and Resources for Loving-Kindness, 3/30/10.) They also talk about the 'Brahmaviharas' (or Four Immeasurables/Boundless Virtues/Heavenly Abodes,etc). These are loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity--or as I put it in my post, The Four Gardeners (2/14/2010), simply Love, Compassion, Joy, and Serenity. I later talked about Patience, Forgiveness, Generosity, and Healing, in a post I called And Their Four Offspring (2/24/10), since I saw them proceeding from the four 'boundless virtues'. The more that we practice all of these the more that I think we can spread love in the world.

Rachel Naomi Remen (see my post on Blessings, 3/9/10, and More Blessings, 3/23/10) doesn't talk much about love, but she does talk about blessing others and serving others which I think are marvelous ways of putting love into action. The Dalai Lama uses the phrase 'to benefit others' (see Benefiting Others, 7/21/10) which I think conveys much of the same thing.

Another direct way of showing love is through physical affection--both nonsexual affection and sexual affection. (I have written about this in my posts on Love and Affection, 7/28/08, and Touch, Affection, and Sex, 6/30/09.) In fact, I think any form of closeness can show love. (Also see my post on Intimacy, 7/3/09.)

A great way of demonstrating love and creating closeness is by simply listening. I've written about it in my post on Listening to Each Other (6/7/10). I've also written about it in terms of Stephen Covey's fifth 'habit': 'Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood' (see Seek to Understand, 11/11/10) and in terms of Marshall Rosenberg's 'Nonviolent Communication' (also known as 'Compassionate Communication'--see my post on Nonviolent Communication, 11/25/10). When we really listen to each other, when we truly seek to understand another person, we are doing more than simply showing them respect. In a very real way we are loving them. (I have been studying and trying to practice Tonglen which is a very radical Tibetan Buddhist meditation where you imagine yourself taking in all the hard and awful things in the world, and send out good stuff, like love, joy, and healing. I realized a little while ago that when you can listen to another person's tales of woe--their irritations, upsets, worries, fears, and stories of maltreatment--and respond with compassion and caring, you are doing tonglen.)

Finally, as we go beyond loving each person to loving the whole world--not just the people but the animals and plants and microorganisms and the entire ecosystem--we are truly spreading love. Joanna Macy talks about seeing the 'World as Lover' (see World as Lover, 1/15/10) Yes, I believe that we can love the entire planet--and this means we need to show our love by taking good care of it. I've been thinking a lot about what I will call the great triple love: loving ourselves, loving each other, and loving the world--and in action that becomes caring for ourselves, caring for each other, and caring for the world. This is what I see as major social change, and what I see as love in action.

May you have all the love you could ever want and may you spread much love through the world in this upcoming year.


Quote of the Day: "We cannot avoid Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully." - Martin Buber

Love is the Source

When I began this blog, my third post was on Loving-Kindness and Social Change (6/24/08). My very first quote in my very first post was from the Dalai Lama, "My religion is kindness." While I've been clear that this blog is about social change, I've also been clear that love, kindness, forgiveness, and compassion are at the base of any real change.

I think that love is at the core of most spirituality. Many religions acknowledge this. In the Gospel of John, Christ tells his apostles to "Love one another." In fact, in the First Letter of John, he says it outright: "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." This goes all the way back to Leviticus in the Torah, "Love your neighbor as yourself..." Love even extends to our 'enemies'. In Matthew, Christ says to "Love your enemies" and in the Torah, in Exodus, God tells Moses, “If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to return it. If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help them with it." (In other words, be kind and helpful even to those who hate you.)

The Qu'ran begins with the line, "In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate..." and most of the following chapters (or suras) begin with this also. In Islam, in other words, God is mercy and compassion. The Sufis are particularly taken with love. I've heard it said that to the Sufis, God is Love, Lover, and Beloved. In my post on Rumi Night, a few days ago (12/20/10) I quoted from Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, Sufi poet and mystic, "Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed."

The Buddhist scriptures contain a whole piece on Loving-Kindness, the Metta Sutta, which says, "Even as a mother protects with her life, her child, her only child, so with a boundless heart, should one cherish all living beings..." In Hinduism, Bhakti Yoga is focused on love and devotion. Practitioners (according to the Bhagavad Gita) need to be "devoted to the welfare of all beings" and be someone who hates no one, "is friendly and compassionate... and... forgiving". (Chapter 12, The Way of Divine Love)

The witches I've hung around with follow the Charge of the Goddess that proclaims, "My love is poured out upon the earth..." and "...all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals." Thorn Coyle, a witch from the Reclaiming and Feri traditions says that "Love is that which uses the life force well, and for the good of all. ... It is a sharing, the underpinning of life that infuses all."

Some very radical folks also speak highly of love. Emma Goldman called love "the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy..." Che Guevara said, "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love." Malcolm X said, "...understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity." And Martin Luther King claimed that "Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend."

It's Christmas, which seems to me a celebration of love. Whatever path you follow, may it be a path of love. I believe that love is the source, the very foundation of what we need to do in the world. Whatever you do, do it with love. Loving one another is social change.


Quote of the Day: "The success of love is in the loving - it is not in the result of loving. Of course it is natural in love to want the best for the other person, but whether it turns out that way or not does not determine the value of what we have done..." - Mother Teresa

Rumi Night

(There will be a break for a while in my series on Survival Resources while I publish some posts on other matters but I have a bunch more to come on it.)

I have been Sufi dancing a lot lately.

On Friday night, my local Sufi group held a Rumi Night. Apparently, December 17th, 1273, was when Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, Sufi poet and mystic, died. Every year at this time, festivals are held in his honor.

We were asked to bring a poem of his and be prepared to recite it. I didn't recite my poem (shy person that I am) but I did memorize one, and I want to post it here:

Love Is Reckless

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straightforward.

Having died to self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.

Religion seeks grace and favor,
but those who gamble these away are God's favorites,
for they neither put God to the test
nor knock at the door of gain and loss.


Quote of the Day: "Come, come, whoever you are.
"Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving — it doesn't matter,
"Ours is not a caravan of despair.
"Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times,
"Come, come again, come." - Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi

Nonviolent Communication

In my last post (Seek to Understand, 11/11/10) I talked about the connection that I saw between Stephen Covey's ideas about 'Empathic Communication' and Marshall Rosenberg's 'Nonviolent Communication' (also known as 'Compassionate Communication' and 'NVC'). In some ways, Rosenberg's writings seem an expansion of Covey's 'habit' of Seek First to Understand.

There are two parts to NVC: expressing what we want honestly and 'receiving empathically'. In the book Nonviolent Communication, Rosenberg seems to reverse the order that Covey set up in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as 'Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood'. Marshall Rosenberg begins his book by first teaching people how to communicate requests effectively. There is a chapter each on how to give clear observations, how to express feelings, how to clarify the needs, values, and desires behind the feelings, and how to make clear and reasonable requests. Only after all of this has been described does the book go on to listening. Yet Rosenberg writes, "I would recommend allowing others to fully express themselves before turning our attention to solutions or requests for relief."

I think the reason that the lessons on expressing ourselves come before paying attention to others in the book is because Rosenberg believes that it is essential that we can differentiate observations from evaluations and judgements, that we can tell what is really a feeling from an interpretation disguised as a feeling (he points out that terms like 'misunderstood', 'ignored', and 'abused' are all interpretations, whereas 'hurt', 'sad', 'irritated', and 'discouraged' are real feelings), and that we can identify the needs and beliefs behind feelings rather than putting the responsibility for our feelings on others. The need for this becomes clear as Rosenberg trains us to then listen for feelings and needs as others speak. Similar to Covey, Rosenberg suggests that we should reflect back to others by paraphrasing as well as asking questions that try to clarify the observations, feelings, needs, or requests that we hear in the communication of others.

Not that this is easy to do. I mentioned in my last post that I have become part of a group focusing on learning NVC. One of the members of our small group is a housemate of mine. Unfortunately, at our last house meeting I lost it about some trivial request another housemate was making. She was very attached to doing it one way and we started yelling at each other before I realized that it really wasn't that big a deal and I backed down. Afterwards, the housemate that I am in the group with said to me, "Don't worry, I won't report you to the NVC police." It was pretty funny, but I was also wishing that I had been able to listen to my other housemate's needs and feelings rather than get so caught up in my own stuff. Understanding all this is one thing, actually being able to do it is another.

In another real life example, I was also part of a group that fell apart rather dramatically one evening (with four group members walking out on us). I felt helpless and even think that some of what I did may have made things worse. But one woman in the group was marvelous--she stayed calm and compassionate and really seemed to be listening and being right with each person.

I asked to get together with her in the wake of the group's demise, so we could try to figure out what happened. When I pointed out to her how helpful she had been that evening she said, "I've been studying Nonviolent Communication..." When it works, it's powerful.


Quote of the Day: "I continue to be amazed by the healing power of empathy. ... What is essential is our ability to be present to what's really going on within--to the unique feelings and needs a person is experiencing in that very moment." - Marshall Rosenberg

Deserving Love

Turil has a blog that I sometimes comment on, just as she sometimes comments on my blog. A little while ago she wrote a post entitled 'Why do you deserve to be loved?' She raises a lot of good points in this post: the fact that many people grow up without understanding that they deserve love and the fact that many who are bullied about their sexuality commit suicide, feeling that they are unlovable. She asked readers to respond to why we deserved to be loved.

My response was (and she asked me to clarify it) was that being loved was our birthright, that we deserve love simply for being human. For me real love is unconditional--we don't 'deserve' it any more than we 'deserve' food or air.

This isn't to say that we always get unconditional love. Unfortunately many parents, who themselves have never gotten unconditional love, put a price on their affection ('I will love you as long as you... ') or, worse yet, give the message to their children that they are unlovable.

But love is not about conditions. Love is not about being good or bad or being any particular way. Love is, as someone said, like the sun, it shines on everyone.

Love is at the core of most religions. According to one source I found on line, it says to 'love your neighbor' eight times in the bible. My favorite is where Jesus say to "love your neighbor as yourself" which, I think, clearly implies that we must love ourselves. Jesus even says to love our enemies. And the Dalai Lama claimed, "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness." Love, kindness, and compassion are what real spirituality is about.

This is a blog about social change, and I believe that love is also at the heart of real social change. Che Guevara put it, "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." Love is what changes the world.

It is simple, as far as I'm concerned. Everyone needs love and everyone deserves love.


Quote of the Day: "Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life... Love needs no protection; it is its own protection. So long as love begets life no child is deserted, or hungry, or famished for the want of affection." - Emma Goldman