Hi there, readers. (All two of you.) I've decided to finally jump ship from blogger, since its user interface has just been getting worse and worse, and Google's latest decision to kill off Google Reader has me worried that they'll soon be making similar decisions about other less frequently used products. Besides, Wordpress is just a nicer platform anyway.
So Working the Three Realms can now be found at this address: working3realms.wordpress.com/
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Keystones, Trophic Cascades, Ecology of Fear, Part 1
I'm having one of those mornings where I wish my education in ecology was a bit more systematic and comprehensive. (And seriously wanting to go back to school for a degree in ecology and environmental science... as if we could afford that just so I could feel more knowledgeable!)
As I mentioned, I've been researching and working on this concept of "keystone species" as part of my Wild Earth column for Aontacht, and I also began this morning's work by looking at the Pagan Blog Project letters I've missed over the past couple weeks to see what topics I might cover in order to catch up. Two topics I definitely want to write about are "Death and Decomposition" and "Fear: Living at Peace with Predators." I've written a lot recently about loving nature, and it's too easy to slip into an idealized, idyllic view of the natural world as pastoral and largely domesticated, so turning back to more disturbing and/or morbid topics will hopefully provide a good counterbalance to that tendency. In the course of doing that, though, I finally had a chance to read "Living in a Landscape of Fear: How Predators Impact an Ecosystem," which is Chapter 2 of Cristina Eisenberg's new book, The Wolf's Tooth, and was reprinted on Scientific American here.
In reading this, though, I was reintroduced to the fact that even the idea of "keystone species" is somewhat controversial in the study of ecology. Keystones are generally part of the broader theory known as the "green world hypothesis," which suggests that the planet is "green" (i.e. covered so thickly with plant life) because apex/keystone predators help to control the populations of herbivorous prey that would otherwise explode and consume much of the vegetation. Eisenberg points out that this is just one way of conceiving of the relationships between predators and prey, and that it involves top-down forces being exerted on populations which not all ecologists agree are the most important:
I feel distinctly uncomfortable with my own less-than-firm grasp on the complexity of this issue, particularly considering the rant I left on Brendan's blog post a couple weeks back, in which I roundly reject the idea that any serious ecologist would recommend mass murder or forced sterilization as a way of controlling human population problems because, as I wrote at the time, "the study of population dynamics in the science of ecology clearly links population growth to resource availability." This would be the bottom-up dynamic Murdoch is talking about. And obviously, I agree with it to a certain extent even though I have spent the last few months studying keystones and trophic cascades. Arguably, self-imposed human genocide is not really the same thing as a predator-prey relationship in a naturally functioning non-human ecosystem.... but still, that I stumbled so blithely into this kind of false dualism (because I agree with Peterson and Soulé that it is a false dualism) in order to defend a particular ethical stance feels very embarrassing. I do still think that the whole environmentalists-hate-people-and-want-us-to-kill-ourselves is a straw man argument, but I should have done a better job of explaining why (besides the fact that I've hardly ever seen someone actually make that claim).
One aspect of why predator-prey relationships aren't all about mortality rates is exactly what Eisenberg gets into in her book excerpt: the influence of fear and vigilance on prey populations in the potential presence of predators. Basically, the presence of predators in an ecosystem will affect the behavior of prey populations in significant ways, so that prey will spend more time being vigilant and looking for predators (rather than with their heads down grazing), they spend more time on the move from one grazing spot to another rather than staying in a single area, and they are more likely to spend time in areas where escape from predators is easier (so, depending on the prey species, this might be open areas without obstacles to vision or flight, or densely forested areas where hiding is much easier). In the absence of predators, prey species (like deer and other ungulates) are more likely to behave like domesticated livestock, showing little fear response, spending much more time grazing, especially in one spot. As a result, they tend to severely deplete vegetation growth above a certain height (the height they can comfortably reach), preventing the natural succession of a field or meadow into a forested area, and generally reducing the biodiversity of the area. Predators like gray wolves tend to target larger herds, because they are easier to find -- but larger herds are often those which have family groups containing both young and potentially sick or injured animals. So wolf predation acts as a natural population control not only by picking off the sick and weak, but by disturbing what would otherwise be the most passive and stationary herds with the most young in them. Eisenberg also gets into how apex predators influence the behavior of mesopredators (predators such as, in some ecosystems, coyotes, which also change their behavior in the presence of more dominant predators).
She also talks about trophic levels as conceptual tools for thinking about more complex relationships, in a paragraph that I admittedly found a little difficult to follow:
One example she gives is the effect that orcas had on kelp forest biodiversity when they began eating more sea otters, a keystone predator that helped to keep sea urchin populations in check (which would otherwise overgraze on the roots of kelp and greatly reduce the kelp forests and the diverse other creatures that depend on them). In this case, the sea otter-sea urchin-kelp relationship went from an odd numbered trophic cascade, to an even numbered one (orca-sea otter-sea urchin-kelp). I think her way of phrasing this is confusing, since she refers to "top-down" systems as one where plants are limited by resources (which sounds more like bottom-up, where resource availability (i.e. food) exerts the most influence over plant populations), while "bottom-up" systems are ones where plants are limited by grazing (which sounds like top-down, because plant populations are being influenced most by the beings above them in the food pyramid). It only makes sense once you remember that we tend to be animal-centric and somewhat biased in how we conceive of things. What's actually going on is a complex dynamic between bottom-up forces that support populations and top-down forces that suppress populations.
For instance, if you take into consideration inorganic resources that kelp depend on (like sunlight, water, nutrients and suitable habitat), you get something that looks like this:
With the green arrows representing a relationship in which the lower trophic level supports the population of the higher level through resource availability, while the red arrows represent a relationship in which the higher level suppresses the population of the lower level through predation. Thicker, darker arrows represent greater influence or impact, compared to lighter, thinner arrows.
I have more thoughts on this, but it's now after lunch and we need to get ready and head out to the ponds for some homeschooling time. (Honestly, I'm feeling pretty damned exhausted and not up for teaching, and the weather is basically going to be chilly and rainy for the next several days. I would much rather just stay home, but the kids are going stir crazy and are already obsessed with their visit "not being fair" compared to the other two, since they had nicer weather last week and an extra weekend day here. Not to mention, last night's frog walk was a flop because it was just too chilly for the frogs to be out -- we heard them briefly as they approached the pond, but they quieted down almost immediately as we got close. Sigh. This whole arrangement is so disruptive and difficult, and I know the kids don't mean to guilt trip us... but they do. Never mind that in the autumn, it was J and F who had the gorgeous week or sunny weather and the following week when S and J came, it rained the entire time.)
Okay. Ponds time.
As I mentioned, I've been researching and working on this concept of "keystone species" as part of my Wild Earth column for Aontacht, and I also began this morning's work by looking at the Pagan Blog Project letters I've missed over the past couple weeks to see what topics I might cover in order to catch up. Two topics I definitely want to write about are "Death and Decomposition" and "Fear: Living at Peace with Predators." I've written a lot recently about loving nature, and it's too easy to slip into an idealized, idyllic view of the natural world as pastoral and largely domesticated, so turning back to more disturbing and/or morbid topics will hopefully provide a good counterbalance to that tendency. In the course of doing that, though, I finally had a chance to read "Living in a Landscape of Fear: How Predators Impact an Ecosystem," which is Chapter 2 of Cristina Eisenberg's new book, The Wolf's Tooth, and was reprinted on Scientific American here.
In reading this, though, I was reintroduced to the fact that even the idea of "keystone species" is somewhat controversial in the study of ecology. Keystones are generally part of the broader theory known as the "green world hypothesis," which suggests that the planet is "green" (i.e. covered so thickly with plant life) because apex/keystone predators help to control the populations of herbivorous prey that would otherwise explode and consume much of the vegetation. Eisenberg points out that this is just one way of conceiving of the relationships between predators and prey, and that it involves top-down forces being exerted on populations which not all ecologists agree are the most important:
When [Nelson Hairston, Frederick Smith, and Lawrence Slobodkin (HSS)] formulated their hypothesis, the scientific community commonly accepted that bottom-up processes, mostly related to competition between species, were the primary forces shaping populations. The green world hypothesis provided an alternative view of population regulation driven by top predators, via carnivory. It enabled predation and grazing to play roles equally important to resources or habitat, with predation having the key role for some populations and resources having the dominant role in others.
[...] Not everyone bought the green world hypothesis. William Murdoch's counterargument, termed the plant self-defense hypothesis by conservation biologist John Terborgh, suggests that food (bottom-up control) has the strongest influence, that the world may be green because not all plants are palatable to herbivores, and that predators are unnecessary for ecosystem regulation. Or, as evolutionary ecologist Stevan Arnold puts it, the world is green, but that doesn't mean it's edible.
Murdoch asserted that food shortage and plant defense strategies may be regulating herbivore numbers. He hypothesized that while plants are essential for the survival of the trophic levels above, the reverse is not true. He and other critics of the green world hypothesis, such as ecologists Donald Strong and Gary Polis, suggested that HSS' failure to address the full complexity of systems, which includes omnivory, weakened their hypothesis. Some have identified HSS' tri-level trophic model as a hypothetical construct because in the real world food webs are not so tidy and can have fewer or more than three levels. Still others, such as conservation biologist Michael Soulé, believe that top-down versus bottom-up, like all dualisms, is false, because the natural world is complex and bottom-up forces (nutrient flow) interact with top-down forces (the effects of predation). Other scientists, such as Rolf Peterson, concur; in the wolf–moose–balsam fir system he studies in Isle Royale National Park, it's never one or the other but a synergy of the two.
I feel distinctly uncomfortable with my own less-than-firm grasp on the complexity of this issue, particularly considering the rant I left on Brendan's blog post a couple weeks back, in which I roundly reject the idea that any serious ecologist would recommend mass murder or forced sterilization as a way of controlling human population problems because, as I wrote at the time, "the study of population dynamics in the science of ecology clearly links population growth to resource availability." This would be the bottom-up dynamic Murdoch is talking about. And obviously, I agree with it to a certain extent even though I have spent the last few months studying keystones and trophic cascades. Arguably, self-imposed human genocide is not really the same thing as a predator-prey relationship in a naturally functioning non-human ecosystem.... but still, that I stumbled so blithely into this kind of false dualism (because I agree with Peterson and Soulé that it is a false dualism) in order to defend a particular ethical stance feels very embarrassing. I do still think that the whole environmentalists-hate-people-and-want-us-to-kill-ourselves is a straw man argument, but I should have done a better job of explaining why (besides the fact that I've hardly ever seen someone actually make that claim).
One aspect of why predator-prey relationships aren't all about mortality rates is exactly what Eisenberg gets into in her book excerpt: the influence of fear and vigilance on prey populations in the potential presence of predators. Basically, the presence of predators in an ecosystem will affect the behavior of prey populations in significant ways, so that prey will spend more time being vigilant and looking for predators (rather than with their heads down grazing), they spend more time on the move from one grazing spot to another rather than staying in a single area, and they are more likely to spend time in areas where escape from predators is easier (so, depending on the prey species, this might be open areas without obstacles to vision or flight, or densely forested areas where hiding is much easier). In the absence of predators, prey species (like deer and other ungulates) are more likely to behave like domesticated livestock, showing little fear response, spending much more time grazing, especially in one spot. As a result, they tend to severely deplete vegetation growth above a certain height (the height they can comfortably reach), preventing the natural succession of a field or meadow into a forested area, and generally reducing the biodiversity of the area. Predators like gray wolves tend to target larger herds, because they are easier to find -- but larger herds are often those which have family groups containing both young and potentially sick or injured animals. So wolf predation acts as a natural population control not only by picking off the sick and weak, but by disturbing what would otherwise be the most passive and stationary herds with the most young in them. Eisenberg also gets into how apex predators influence the behavior of mesopredators (predators such as, in some ecosystems, coyotes, which also change their behavior in the presence of more dominant predators).
She also talks about trophic levels as conceptual tools for thinking about more complex relationships, in a paragraph that I admittedly found a little difficult to follow:
Ecologists Lauri Oksanen and Stephen Fretwell proposed that if we treat trophic levels as units, systems having four or more trophic levels may have more than one level representing predation. In this scenario a predator at the fourth level will dominate a predator at the third level, and this will release the herbivore population at the second level from predation, causing its numbers to increase. This in turn will cause overgrazing of plant communities at the first level. Trophic cascades in which a top predator controls its herbivore prey via top-down forces will therefore always have an odd number of trophic levels. Removal of the top trophic level in such systems will have a radical effect on lower levels, causing herbivore irruption and over-consumption of vegetation. In any food chain, energy flow alternates; in odd-linked systems, plants will be limited by resources available to them (top-down control); in even-linked systems, plants will be limited by grazers (bottom-up control). Thus systems with an odd number of levels will be green, while systems with an even number of levels will be brown or barren.
One example she gives is the effect that orcas had on kelp forest biodiversity when they began eating more sea otters, a keystone predator that helped to keep sea urchin populations in check (which would otherwise overgraze on the roots of kelp and greatly reduce the kelp forests and the diverse other creatures that depend on them). In this case, the sea otter-sea urchin-kelp relationship went from an odd numbered trophic cascade, to an even numbered one (orca-sea otter-sea urchin-kelp). I think her way of phrasing this is confusing, since she refers to "top-down" systems as one where plants are limited by resources (which sounds more like bottom-up, where resource availability (i.e. food) exerts the most influence over plant populations), while "bottom-up" systems are ones where plants are limited by grazing (which sounds like top-down, because plant populations are being influenced most by the beings above them in the food pyramid). It only makes sense once you remember that we tend to be animal-centric and somewhat biased in how we conceive of things. What's actually going on is a complex dynamic between bottom-up forces that support populations and top-down forces that suppress populations.
For instance, if you take into consideration inorganic resources that kelp depend on (like sunlight, water, nutrients and suitable habitat), you get something that looks like this:
With the green arrows representing a relationship in which the lower trophic level supports the population of the higher level through resource availability, while the red arrows represent a relationship in which the higher level suppresses the population of the lower level through predation. Thicker, darker arrows represent greater influence or impact, compared to lighter, thinner arrows.
I have more thoughts on this, but it's now after lunch and we need to get ready and head out to the ponds for some homeschooling time. (Honestly, I'm feeling pretty damned exhausted and not up for teaching, and the weather is basically going to be chilly and rainy for the next several days. I would much rather just stay home, but the kids are going stir crazy and are already obsessed with their visit "not being fair" compared to the other two, since they had nicer weather last week and an extra weekend day here. Not to mention, last night's frog walk was a flop because it was just too chilly for the frogs to be out -- we heard them briefly as they approached the pond, but they quieted down almost immediately as we got close. Sigh. This whole arrangement is so disruptive and difficult, and I know the kids don't mean to guilt trip us... but they do. Never mind that in the autumn, it was J and F who had the gorgeous week or sunny weather and the following week when S and J came, it rained the entire time.)
Okay. Ponds time.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Food, Health, Kids, Keystones
It's Monday, the first two kids have made it safely back to Pittsburgh and we're in for another round of intense germ-fighting with the second two. Though it seems to be going better -- Jerilynn's cough, which apparently persisted all of last week without any relief, has almost disappeared after less than 24 hours with us. So I consider that a win. On the other hand, she managed to dump almost an entire water bottle full of water on herself and the bed in the middle of the night last night, put a pillow over the spill and then promptly forgot about it until after breakfast this morning. So all the sheets and the bed padding are back in the wash for the second time in as many days, and I'm hoping the soaked couch cushions won't be too much worse for wear if we can give them the day to dry out. But it means instead of spending the morning in bed resting, the kids are both out in the living room and I have no space on the desk to work, so I'm in our bedroom. With iced coffee. Trying to chill out a little bit.
It's weird how different the two pairs of kids are. Josh and Savanah are very clearly the loud, bossy ones, very intense, and you have to explain things to them two or three times (like about which shower door to use). They listen, they insist they understand, and then when they mess up they always have some weird justification for why they just weren't paying attention and they'll argue with you about it for very stupid reasons instead of just apologizing and trying to be more considerate in the future. (Even though I gave S her own dedicated trash can and tissue box, we're still finding random dirty tissues stuffed into couch cushions, though while Jeff was making the airport exchange yesterday I did a pretty thorough cleaning of every room in the house.) Jerilynn and Fiona, on the other hand, are pretty good at listening the first time, and Fiona especially is about ten times better at listening and thinking things through before doing something than her oldest sister is. But if they do make a mistake, they're much more likely to try to hide it and lie about it, hoping to just not get caught, instead of trying to justify or explain it away. If they do get caught, they just say sorry and try to downplay it and move on as quickly as possible (and all of this is more true of Jerilynn than Fiona). Totally makes sense, if they're dealing with other family members who are super bossy, tending towards melodrama and eager to argue every minor point until they're blue in the face. So on the one hand, J and F are the "easy ones," but on the other, you never know when you're going to discover some weird thing after the fact. Like when they arrived, several outfits in their bag were damp and moldy. No idea why or how it happened (J says the bag got wet during their layover in Chicago, but even if that were the case, that doesn't explain the mold). We were planning to wash everything anyway to try to degermify everything (which is how we discovered the mold to begin with), and it's easy to blame Emily for being an incredibly bad example of cleanliness and not bothering to do simple things like wash the kids laundry (apparently, each kid only has enough outfits to last a single week... and that's regardless of weather or season, which is kind of insane and makes us wonder where the hell Jeff's child support money is going if it's not to buy his kids some decent clothes). On the other hand, J did just demonstrate that she's prone to spilling things, hiding the fact and then forgetting about it. On the other other hand, Jeff and I are at least paying enough attention to realize this and then take the necessary steps to keep things clean, instead of leaving everything for our fucking legally blind housekeeper to take care of when she comes by once a week. At least J hasn't said anything about the gluten issue (I think the talk we had with her during solstice hit home), but she is still obsessing about her weight and talking about how she needs to eat less because she's too fat. Disturbingly, Josh said something similar last week about how he's too fat. I really, really hate the fact that these kids live in a house with people who are so immature and insecure that they have to project their own weight and health problems onto their children. Not to mention that most of what they eat is meat and butter based meals, so even though neither of them are actually overweight by any stretch of the imagination, it's probably true that they do need to eat more fruits and vegetables than they are probably getting at their mom's house. Did I mention that being a long-distance stepparent sucks?
Speaking of weight and health, though, Jeff said the other night that he's hit his lowest weight and fat percentage in something like two years, which is awesome. We've been doing lots of hiking and spending time outside on weekends (and also these two weeks in the afternoons with the kids), which I'm sure is helping, though biking to work also probably helps. I'm wondering if the cooking with Leah is also making a difference, since it's a chance for Jeff to experiment with food. I know that Jeff really loves thinking about and working with food, and sometimes I feel bad that cooking just doesn't interest me that much. It's not that I don't enjoy and appreciate (and understand the value of) good, healthy food and how that impacts my body and my physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual health. But I just don't spend much of my time thinking about cooking, it doesn't interest me that much. Cooking is like chemistry -- there are lots of really interesting ways to combine things, and some people love that experimentation and exploration. I'm a hunter-gatherer, not a cook. I like having simple foods I can eat right away whenever I'm hungry, especially fresh fruits and veggies, and I don't have the interest necessary to spend lots of time in preparation and experimentation. That's awesome if other people do, especially if they don't mind sharing the results. But left to my own devices, I pretty much always revert back to hunter-gatherer mode, not complex agricultural we-have-to-burn-this-with-fire-before-it's-edible mode.
I think this might also have parallels with health and exercise. Someone shared a link on Twitter to a blog post written by a fat-acceptance/fat-positive blogger, in which the blogger proudly (read: maybe a bit defensively) declares that she just isn't interested in being healthy, and that should be okay, who are we to judge her? Now, I can totally understand if what she means is that she isn't interested in the kind of compartmentalized, weekend-warrior exercise-routine madness that some people do. Personally, I've always rather liked trying out different exercise routines, and I've been my healthiest when I've done a combination of meditation and regular exercise like that... but just like cooking isn't for everybody, that approach to exercise isn't for everybody either. I do think it's probably a bad idea to conflate this with "being healthy," though, in the same way it's a mistake to think that because I don't care much about cooking that therefore I don't care about the quality of the food that I eat and how it affects my body. For some people, particular forms of exercise are like hobbies, that require all kinds of special equipment and training. But you can be perfectly healthy without doing that kind of thing, and plenty of people who are into that stuff aren't necessarily all that healthy. Same thing with food. You can really love food, but not necessarily eat shitty bad-for-you foods all the time. In fact (and this is one of those fat-shaming bingo phrases that people freak out about, but I'm going to say it anyway): the better food you eat, the more you actually enjoy it. So go nuts, eat lots of food. And be whatever shape and size you are. The point is that there are many, many ways to be healthy, and lots of them are easy and natural. We are biologically designed to be healthy, and living in the kind of civilization we do -- with sanitation and indoor plumbing and a wide variety of medical practices from herbal remedies to acupuncture to modern Western medicine -- most of us won't die of things that might have killed our ancestors. But saying you don't want to be healthy is like saying you don't like breathing. I just don't believe it. Everyone wants to be healthy and feel good, and to be physically capable of doing the things they enjoy doing without feeling sore, exhausted, breathless or queasy.
The problem isn't that we're being super-judgy by expecting people to want to be healthy... it's that a lot of our social structures and institutions undermine what should otherwise be a completely natural aspect of our lives. It'd be like if, in order to get fresh air and not die of lung cancer, you had to drive out to special "fresh air bubbles" in the countryside once a week where membership cost $100/month. Yeah, if that were the case, then people would be perfectly justified in saying they resent having to put even more of their time and money towards that and they're just "not that interested" in fresh air. Likewise, when most people have to earn a living sitting in a tiny, dimly lit cubicle staring at a computer screen and eating grease-drenched meals out of a food truck during a "working lunch break".... they might feel resentful at being expected to put even more time, energy and money towards good food and exercise, when those things should be naturally, easily and freely available to everyone. I mean, you're already putting so many hours into a shitty way of life just to get by, and then people expect you to give up your free leisure time to do something that's unnecessarily difficult instead of being able to use that time to do something you want to do? That totally sucks. But this is a social problem and requires a social solution. If, instead of demanding that healthy food and lifestyles be readily available to everyone and that obstacles to healthy living be reduced or removed, we throw up our hands and say we're just "not interested in being healthy," we're doing not only ourselves but everyone else a disservice, too. We're making it harder for everyone to be healthy, by not demanding that healthy living be a viable, natural way of life supported by social infrastructure.
Speaking of things that make health easy... I wish there was an easy way to make iced tea. Jeff and I have been drinking this iced coffee (instead of soda) which is super easy to make -- it's just an instant organic coffee mix, combined with a tiny bit of sugar, almond milk, some chocolate or other flavoring if desired, and then heated (but not boiling) water added to top it off. Shake until frothy for an iced latté drink. The result is a luke-warm mix that can be poured immediately over ice or stuck in the fridge, and you can make it in small enough batches that one jar will last one or two days, which is the perfect amount and a small enough container that it won't get shoved to the back of the fridge and forgotten about like all of our taller containers. Making iced tea is a pain in the ass. I haven't found a good way to make iced tea quickly in a way that doesn't involve not only steeping the tea, but then allowing the mixture to sit and cool for another hour or so before being able to put it in the fridge, let alone drink it. Leah mentioned finding a good iced tea recipe for us, but most of the ones I've seen online involve adding all sorts of extras like fruit juices and herbal blends to change the way they taste. Again, I feel like there's an assumption that my disinterest in cooking comes from not enjoying the taste of food, or because cooking is hard, rather than from the pretty straightforward fact that there are just things I want to be doing with my time other than elaborate prep that takes longer than the meal. I tend to drink tea plain whetever kind it is and I enjoy simple teas, anyway, so a complex iced tea recipe with all sorts of extras and lots of steps is probably just going to leave me even less motivated to make iced tea than before. Anyway, what I want is an easy to way to make "instant" iced tea that won't result in a jar that's too hot to pick up for an hour but that still allows the tea to steep relatively quickly. I think the best approach might be to brew a super-strong concentrate, and then add cool water to end up with the same kind of luke-warm mix as the iced coffee, that can be put over ice right away or stored in the fridge.
The fact that I've spent even this much time thinking about how to make iced tea, instead of writing about something else, is starting to discourage me. But I'm taking the morning to do some free-associative journaling, since I spent all of last week working on my next column for Aontacht.
Speaking of which! I've been expanding the outline for that column series, so now it's definitely going to be at least four parts, but possibly more. I've been thinking about ways to expand this series into an e-course that will last four to six weeks, with emails going out about twice weekly with short articles, follow-up resources and recommended exercises. From there, the entire thing can probably be expanded into a short ebook of 60 or so pages. I'm also trying to brainstorm something similar for SageWoman, so that each of my columns can be the building blocks for longer works that we can produce through FF&C as online long-distance learning courses and ebooks. Only doing one podcast episode each month will give us lots more time to develop these other aspects of FF&C, instead of always leaving them on the back-burner and spending all of our time on the podcast research and editing. I'm hoping that after we get some feedback about the correspondence e-course, I can develop an in-person workshop along similar lines, especially for people in the local area. It's one thing to talk in broad, abstract terms about the importance of grounding your spiritual practice in the local landscape. It's a totally different thing to actually teach people directly about the specifics of their own landscape. Since Aontacht has a wide readership in the U.S., Europe and Australia, it's pretty much impossible to get specific, though I do end up using a lot of examples from my own bioregion since that's what I'm most familiar with. But what I'd really love to do is actually work with people to transition from "this is why it's important to work with the local bioregion" to "this is how these big ideas translate into specific relationships and practices involving this bioregion." I can only really do that if I work in-person with people who live in this area. But starting with a basic structure for the workshop and/or multi-workshop training course by building up a long-distance e-course is a good place to start and makes the work much more manageable.
I do love working with people in-person, though. It was awesome going to the ponds twice last week with Savanah and Josh, not only because it gave us more time outside but because the critters we encountered were quite different on the different days. Including this beauty:
Who hung out only a dozen yards away for much of the time we were there. This brings me back, again, to why it's so important to show up and do the work, even while acknowledging just how big a role grace plays in how our spiritual encounters in the wild are going to be. I've been reading a lot about Taoist philosophy and, to a lesser extent, ritual (especially movement-meditations like QiGong and T'ai Chi) -- I'm very drawn to the simplicity of these types of approaches, and I feel like it would be very beneficial to inject some of this simplicity back into modern Paganism. I know lots of Pagans are drawn to the elaborate, arcane ritual work of ceremonial magic and reconstructionist traditions, and I do enjoy crafting rituals like that for some holidays. But for daily work, I think developing a strong foundation of simple practices that open us up to the presence of spirit(s) and grace is really important. I think that's why I've enjoyed working with and building on this idea of the "keystones" so much. The Keystones are so important to a landscape, and their presence can be seen everywhere if you know how to look for the signs, but actually encountering them directly is often a moment of grace, an encounter with mystery and surprise that you can't plan for, though you can definitely seek it out. This is why, as good as meditation and visualization is, I don't think it's sufficient for regular spiritual work. It's too easy for that kind of work to devolve into navel-gazing, and if you're going to be doing that kind of work with any intensity, you almost need some kind of teacher or mentor to hold you accountable and keep you grounded in the world beyond your own mind. If you don't have that kind of teacher or friend, you need to make yourself an apprentice to the world itself, and show up to the world around you as much as possible in order to be open to the presence and grace of the divine acting in the world. My best meditative practices have always been sitting quietly in a natural setting watching what's going on around me, rather than the times I sit inside in my own home, eyes closed, trying to "clear my mind" (or visualize some natural scene, for that matter, though both of those techniques can be good for getting to know your own mind). As usual, I think it comes down to balance, and knowing how to cultivate the kind of self-reflection that makes natural observation and movement-meditation the most effective and meaningful. When developing this e-course and ebook, I want to focus on finding a way to strike that balance with the lessons and exercises, so that regardless of the student's strengths or weaknesses, they will have some things that challenge and stretch them in one way or the other.
Jeff just stopped me to let me know that, astrologically, right now the moon is new (in fact, literally right now, as I'm typing this, it's both new and only about ten minutes away from being at its peak elevation for the day) -- so, this is a good time for intention setting. Tomorrow, something's going on with Ares (blanking on the details), which means that things are going to move pretty fast towards whatever intentions I'm setting today. So I think the rest of this week would be a good time to finish working on the outline for the remaining columns for Aontacht and maybe start brainstorming ways to expand that into an ecourse. I want to be able to launch the ecourse for FF&C Pro Members by Beltane, May 1, if not sooner. I'd also like to be a good way done with the book so that the final ecourse lesson can include an offer to purchase the book for people who want to continue working with the Keystones more in-depth.
But now, it's lunch time! Soup!
It's weird how different the two pairs of kids are. Josh and Savanah are very clearly the loud, bossy ones, very intense, and you have to explain things to them two or three times (like about which shower door to use). They listen, they insist they understand, and then when they mess up they always have some weird justification for why they just weren't paying attention and they'll argue with you about it for very stupid reasons instead of just apologizing and trying to be more considerate in the future. (Even though I gave S her own dedicated trash can and tissue box, we're still finding random dirty tissues stuffed into couch cushions, though while Jeff was making the airport exchange yesterday I did a pretty thorough cleaning of every room in the house.) Jerilynn and Fiona, on the other hand, are pretty good at listening the first time, and Fiona especially is about ten times better at listening and thinking things through before doing something than her oldest sister is. But if they do make a mistake, they're much more likely to try to hide it and lie about it, hoping to just not get caught, instead of trying to justify or explain it away. If they do get caught, they just say sorry and try to downplay it and move on as quickly as possible (and all of this is more true of Jerilynn than Fiona). Totally makes sense, if they're dealing with other family members who are super bossy, tending towards melodrama and eager to argue every minor point until they're blue in the face. So on the one hand, J and F are the "easy ones," but on the other, you never know when you're going to discover some weird thing after the fact. Like when they arrived, several outfits in their bag were damp and moldy. No idea why or how it happened (J says the bag got wet during their layover in Chicago, but even if that were the case, that doesn't explain the mold). We were planning to wash everything anyway to try to degermify everything (which is how we discovered the mold to begin with), and it's easy to blame Emily for being an incredibly bad example of cleanliness and not bothering to do simple things like wash the kids laundry (apparently, each kid only has enough outfits to last a single week... and that's regardless of weather or season, which is kind of insane and makes us wonder where the hell Jeff's child support money is going if it's not to buy his kids some decent clothes). On the other hand, J did just demonstrate that she's prone to spilling things, hiding the fact and then forgetting about it. On the other other hand, Jeff and I are at least paying enough attention to realize this and then take the necessary steps to keep things clean, instead of leaving everything for our fucking legally blind housekeeper to take care of when she comes by once a week. At least J hasn't said anything about the gluten issue (I think the talk we had with her during solstice hit home), but she is still obsessing about her weight and talking about how she needs to eat less because she's too fat. Disturbingly, Josh said something similar last week about how he's too fat. I really, really hate the fact that these kids live in a house with people who are so immature and insecure that they have to project their own weight and health problems onto their children. Not to mention that most of what they eat is meat and butter based meals, so even though neither of them are actually overweight by any stretch of the imagination, it's probably true that they do need to eat more fruits and vegetables than they are probably getting at their mom's house. Did I mention that being a long-distance stepparent sucks?
Speaking of weight and health, though, Jeff said the other night that he's hit his lowest weight and fat percentage in something like two years, which is awesome. We've been doing lots of hiking and spending time outside on weekends (and also these two weeks in the afternoons with the kids), which I'm sure is helping, though biking to work also probably helps. I'm wondering if the cooking with Leah is also making a difference, since it's a chance for Jeff to experiment with food. I know that Jeff really loves thinking about and working with food, and sometimes I feel bad that cooking just doesn't interest me that much. It's not that I don't enjoy and appreciate (and understand the value of) good, healthy food and how that impacts my body and my physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual health. But I just don't spend much of my time thinking about cooking, it doesn't interest me that much. Cooking is like chemistry -- there are lots of really interesting ways to combine things, and some people love that experimentation and exploration. I'm a hunter-gatherer, not a cook. I like having simple foods I can eat right away whenever I'm hungry, especially fresh fruits and veggies, and I don't have the interest necessary to spend lots of time in preparation and experimentation. That's awesome if other people do, especially if they don't mind sharing the results. But left to my own devices, I pretty much always revert back to hunter-gatherer mode, not complex agricultural we-have-to-burn-this-with-fire-before-it's-edible mode.
I think this might also have parallels with health and exercise. Someone shared a link on Twitter to a blog post written by a fat-acceptance/fat-positive blogger, in which the blogger proudly (read: maybe a bit defensively) declares that she just isn't interested in being healthy, and that should be okay, who are we to judge her? Now, I can totally understand if what she means is that she isn't interested in the kind of compartmentalized, weekend-warrior exercise-routine madness that some people do. Personally, I've always rather liked trying out different exercise routines, and I've been my healthiest when I've done a combination of meditation and regular exercise like that... but just like cooking isn't for everybody, that approach to exercise isn't for everybody either. I do think it's probably a bad idea to conflate this with "being healthy," though, in the same way it's a mistake to think that because I don't care much about cooking that therefore I don't care about the quality of the food that I eat and how it affects my body. For some people, particular forms of exercise are like hobbies, that require all kinds of special equipment and training. But you can be perfectly healthy without doing that kind of thing, and plenty of people who are into that stuff aren't necessarily all that healthy. Same thing with food. You can really love food, but not necessarily eat shitty bad-for-you foods all the time. In fact (and this is one of those fat-shaming bingo phrases that people freak out about, but I'm going to say it anyway): the better food you eat, the more you actually enjoy it. So go nuts, eat lots of food. And be whatever shape and size you are. The point is that there are many, many ways to be healthy, and lots of them are easy and natural. We are biologically designed to be healthy, and living in the kind of civilization we do -- with sanitation and indoor plumbing and a wide variety of medical practices from herbal remedies to acupuncture to modern Western medicine -- most of us won't die of things that might have killed our ancestors. But saying you don't want to be healthy is like saying you don't like breathing. I just don't believe it. Everyone wants to be healthy and feel good, and to be physically capable of doing the things they enjoy doing without feeling sore, exhausted, breathless or queasy.
The problem isn't that we're being super-judgy by expecting people to want to be healthy... it's that a lot of our social structures and institutions undermine what should otherwise be a completely natural aspect of our lives. It'd be like if, in order to get fresh air and not die of lung cancer, you had to drive out to special "fresh air bubbles" in the countryside once a week where membership cost $100/month. Yeah, if that were the case, then people would be perfectly justified in saying they resent having to put even more of their time and money towards that and they're just "not that interested" in fresh air. Likewise, when most people have to earn a living sitting in a tiny, dimly lit cubicle staring at a computer screen and eating grease-drenched meals out of a food truck during a "working lunch break".... they might feel resentful at being expected to put even more time, energy and money towards good food and exercise, when those things should be naturally, easily and freely available to everyone. I mean, you're already putting so many hours into a shitty way of life just to get by, and then people expect you to give up your free leisure time to do something that's unnecessarily difficult instead of being able to use that time to do something you want to do? That totally sucks. But this is a social problem and requires a social solution. If, instead of demanding that healthy food and lifestyles be readily available to everyone and that obstacles to healthy living be reduced or removed, we throw up our hands and say we're just "not interested in being healthy," we're doing not only ourselves but everyone else a disservice, too. We're making it harder for everyone to be healthy, by not demanding that healthy living be a viable, natural way of life supported by social infrastructure.
Speaking of things that make health easy... I wish there was an easy way to make iced tea. Jeff and I have been drinking this iced coffee (instead of soda) which is super easy to make -- it's just an instant organic coffee mix, combined with a tiny bit of sugar, almond milk, some chocolate or other flavoring if desired, and then heated (but not boiling) water added to top it off. Shake until frothy for an iced latté drink. The result is a luke-warm mix that can be poured immediately over ice or stuck in the fridge, and you can make it in small enough batches that one jar will last one or two days, which is the perfect amount and a small enough container that it won't get shoved to the back of the fridge and forgotten about like all of our taller containers. Making iced tea is a pain in the ass. I haven't found a good way to make iced tea quickly in a way that doesn't involve not only steeping the tea, but then allowing the mixture to sit and cool for another hour or so before being able to put it in the fridge, let alone drink it. Leah mentioned finding a good iced tea recipe for us, but most of the ones I've seen online involve adding all sorts of extras like fruit juices and herbal blends to change the way they taste. Again, I feel like there's an assumption that my disinterest in cooking comes from not enjoying the taste of food, or because cooking is hard, rather than from the pretty straightforward fact that there are just things I want to be doing with my time other than elaborate prep that takes longer than the meal. I tend to drink tea plain whetever kind it is and I enjoy simple teas, anyway, so a complex iced tea recipe with all sorts of extras and lots of steps is probably just going to leave me even less motivated to make iced tea than before. Anyway, what I want is an easy to way to make "instant" iced tea that won't result in a jar that's too hot to pick up for an hour but that still allows the tea to steep relatively quickly. I think the best approach might be to brew a super-strong concentrate, and then add cool water to end up with the same kind of luke-warm mix as the iced coffee, that can be put over ice right away or stored in the fridge.
The fact that I've spent even this much time thinking about how to make iced tea, instead of writing about something else, is starting to discourage me. But I'm taking the morning to do some free-associative journaling, since I spent all of last week working on my next column for Aontacht.
Speaking of which! I've been expanding the outline for that column series, so now it's definitely going to be at least four parts, but possibly more. I've been thinking about ways to expand this series into an e-course that will last four to six weeks, with emails going out about twice weekly with short articles, follow-up resources and recommended exercises. From there, the entire thing can probably be expanded into a short ebook of 60 or so pages. I'm also trying to brainstorm something similar for SageWoman, so that each of my columns can be the building blocks for longer works that we can produce through FF&C as online long-distance learning courses and ebooks. Only doing one podcast episode each month will give us lots more time to develop these other aspects of FF&C, instead of always leaving them on the back-burner and spending all of our time on the podcast research and editing. I'm hoping that after we get some feedback about the correspondence e-course, I can develop an in-person workshop along similar lines, especially for people in the local area. It's one thing to talk in broad, abstract terms about the importance of grounding your spiritual practice in the local landscape. It's a totally different thing to actually teach people directly about the specifics of their own landscape. Since Aontacht has a wide readership in the U.S., Europe and Australia, it's pretty much impossible to get specific, though I do end up using a lot of examples from my own bioregion since that's what I'm most familiar with. But what I'd really love to do is actually work with people to transition from "this is why it's important to work with the local bioregion" to "this is how these big ideas translate into specific relationships and practices involving this bioregion." I can only really do that if I work in-person with people who live in this area. But starting with a basic structure for the workshop and/or multi-workshop training course by building up a long-distance e-course is a good place to start and makes the work much more manageable.
I do love working with people in-person, though. It was awesome going to the ponds twice last week with Savanah and Josh, not only because it gave us more time outside but because the critters we encountered were quite different on the different days. Including this beauty:
Who hung out only a dozen yards away for much of the time we were there. This brings me back, again, to why it's so important to show up and do the work, even while acknowledging just how big a role grace plays in how our spiritual encounters in the wild are going to be. I've been reading a lot about Taoist philosophy and, to a lesser extent, ritual (especially movement-meditations like QiGong and T'ai Chi) -- I'm very drawn to the simplicity of these types of approaches, and I feel like it would be very beneficial to inject some of this simplicity back into modern Paganism. I know lots of Pagans are drawn to the elaborate, arcane ritual work of ceremonial magic and reconstructionist traditions, and I do enjoy crafting rituals like that for some holidays. But for daily work, I think developing a strong foundation of simple practices that open us up to the presence of spirit(s) and grace is really important. I think that's why I've enjoyed working with and building on this idea of the "keystones" so much. The Keystones are so important to a landscape, and their presence can be seen everywhere if you know how to look for the signs, but actually encountering them directly is often a moment of grace, an encounter with mystery and surprise that you can't plan for, though you can definitely seek it out. This is why, as good as meditation and visualization is, I don't think it's sufficient for regular spiritual work. It's too easy for that kind of work to devolve into navel-gazing, and if you're going to be doing that kind of work with any intensity, you almost need some kind of teacher or mentor to hold you accountable and keep you grounded in the world beyond your own mind. If you don't have that kind of teacher or friend, you need to make yourself an apprentice to the world itself, and show up to the world around you as much as possible in order to be open to the presence and grace of the divine acting in the world. My best meditative practices have always been sitting quietly in a natural setting watching what's going on around me, rather than the times I sit inside in my own home, eyes closed, trying to "clear my mind" (or visualize some natural scene, for that matter, though both of those techniques can be good for getting to know your own mind). As usual, I think it comes down to balance, and knowing how to cultivate the kind of self-reflection that makes natural observation and movement-meditation the most effective and meaningful. When developing this e-course and ebook, I want to focus on finding a way to strike that balance with the lessons and exercises, so that regardless of the student's strengths or weaknesses, they will have some things that challenge and stretch them in one way or the other.
Jeff just stopped me to let me know that, astrologically, right now the moon is new (in fact, literally right now, as I'm typing this, it's both new and only about ten minutes away from being at its peak elevation for the day) -- so, this is a good time for intention setting. Tomorrow, something's going on with Ares (blanking on the details), which means that things are going to move pretty fast towards whatever intentions I'm setting today. So I think the rest of this week would be a good time to finish working on the outline for the remaining columns for Aontacht and maybe start brainstorming ways to expand that into an ecourse. I want to be able to launch the ecourse for FF&C Pro Members by Beltane, May 1, if not sooner. I'd also like to be a good way done with the book so that the final ecourse lesson can include an offer to purchase the book for people who want to continue working with the Keystones more in-depth.
But now, it's lunch time! Soup!
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Two Lists
I've decided that it's a bit much to ask that I "limit negativity and complaining" (as per my Mindbloom task) all in one fell swoop, so instead I'm going to make a list -- or two lists, actually. And for every item on the "things that are annoying me list," I'm going to make sure there are two things on my "this makes the world awesome" list. Here goes.
1. Double-standards for history.
Prompted by someone on Twitter sharing a link to a youtube video by a professor of early Christian history explaining that "Christians weren't persecuted" during the first three centuries CE. Her statement is, in fact, that Christians weren't systematically persecuted for refusing to deny Christ, that stories of this persecution were later exaggerated and embellished, and that holding to a literalist view of there having been mass systematic persecution is harmful for today's society. Now, I'm totally down with the last point, and anyone who isn't aware that accounts of persecution were exaggerated is simply not aware of the process of myth-making that goes on in every religion as they seek to establish legitimacy and moral authority. But saying that there was not systematic persecution of Christians for the specific reason they claimed is a long way from saying "Christians weren't persecuted." There is documented historical evidence that some Christians refused to participate in certain political activities because of their religious beliefs, and they were punished accordingly (at times being put to death). No, this was not "systematic." And while the Christians believed that participating in specific activities would have been a "denial of Christ," those in power would not have necessarily seen it that way but would have seen it as an act of political rebellion. In our society today, we uphold the freedom of religion, which includes the right to abstain from political activities (like serving in the military or pledging to the flag) for religious reasons, or even simply as a matter of conscience if the issue holds a place of importance for the person equal to a religious conviction (believe me, as a pacifist, I have looked into this, and there are plenty of people who would like to make conscientious objection a crime on par with treason, an offense punishable by death -- so the issue of being killed for one's religious beliefs is still alive and well today). If someone today were put to death for refusing to comply with their government based on religious convictions (especially when their refusal did not result in any direct harm to anyone else), we would describe that as religious persecution. So yes, the stories were exaggerated, and yes, subscribing to a myth of mass victimization is definitely unhealthy. But only by holding some kind of weird double-standard can we come to the conclusion that therefore what happened to some Christians in the past somehow "doesn't count" as religious persecution.
This also goes for ancient Greek society. I've been seeing this claim popping up here and there that the view of ancient Greek society as patriarchal and sexist is incorrect and was the result of modern scholars discounting the role of women in that society as being inherently less important simply because they were women. This claim insists that, in fact, the role of women in the household and in private life was just as vital and important to society as the role of men in the public and political sphere, and that therefore ancient Greek society was not inherently sexist. But this claim overlooks a couple of serious issues: First, the activities of half of the population will be an important influence on a given society no matter what those activities include -- this is kind of a no-shit-Sherlock moment. Determining whether or not there is systemic sexism in a given culture is not a matter of determining how much influence women have, but what is the nature of that influence and what are the social and political forces acting on it, shaping it and restricting it. Second, the fact remains that a woman born in ancient Greek society had only very specific options available to her, and that these options were determined by her sex. Last time I checked, we had agreed that the "separate but equal" argument wasn't going to fly (in part because it's mostly an impossibility), and that it was still inherently unjust to restrict someone's lifestyle and choices according to race or sex. Were modern scholars biased in their claims? Maybe. But that doesn't mean that ancient Greek society wasn't sexist. By modern standards, I find it hard to argue that it wasn't.
2. Shitting on "nice" people.
I have never really understood why people feel like they're allowed to shit on other people for being nice. Calling people out (respectfully and constructively) for hypocrisy, duplicity, enabling and insensitivity or bullying in the guise of "caring" -- sure. But I think we're on dangerous ground (and living in a deeply cynical age) when the mere fact that someone seems pleasant and friendly is grounds to attack them. Knowing whether or not someone is being hypocritical or enabling requires a certain amount of familiarity with the context of that person's "niceness." It's worrying to me when people feel like they can presume that kind of insight into others based on stereotypes and broad generalizations.
"Nice" is an easy and fairly neutral word in most contexts; it's a word that a lot of people use to indicate a lack of familiarity, or a first impression. ("I only just met her, but she seemed nice," or "My coworker picked me up a coffee during their lunch break -- that was nice of them.") Last time I checked, it was generally a bad idea to go about disparaging people because of first impressions and a lack of information, assuming all sorts of nefarious schemes and ulterior motives behind a person's congenial attitude.
I think it's especially telling that the people who seem most eager to shit on "nice" people are people who tend to be somewhat caustic in how they relate to others. I wonder how often they themselves have been told that they aren't "all that nice." And I wonder how often the person telling them that was trying to communicate that they were in fact being rude, arrogant, defensive, disrespectful, or simply creating a hostile environment not conducive to real communication. (I wonder how often they were told directly and clearly that they were being disrespectful or defensive, and they chose to hear it as an accusation of not being "nice" instead of confronting the actual substance of the complaint.) But I guess being provocatively self-righteous about our bad attitudes is way easier than doing the hard work of learning how to communicate with others effectively and treating people with respect.
1. Exercise as meditation.
I've been doing yoga and tai chi in the mornings regularly for a little more than a week now. I tend to burn out on exercise precisely because I try to be too intense about it (and there's always an excuse about why I don't have time to devote an hour of intense exercise, followed by a cool down and a shower... and before you know it, it's been two hours and I haven't gotten to work yet, and I have so much to do!)... so I've been approaching it this time as a form of physical meditation, where the "point" is not to "feel the burn," but to settle into a refreshed and awake state of mind. That seems to be helping tremendously; it's good to get up and get active early in the morning, doing a simple exercise that is more about the movement itself than about improving at something (like strength, or weight loss). I also ordered a book on the spiritual and energetic aspects of tai chi, and that should be arriving today at some point. It's just a shame that tai chi is seen mostly as a trendy exercise for old people in this country. I'm really intrigued by its relationship to Taoism as a spiritual path, but it's hard to find much information on that.
2. Cu talks to birds.
Really, just Cu in general. He is such an awesome cat. Just now, he came over to the windowsill and sat chirping at a bird (possibly a robin?) perched on the roof of the apartment building across the street. Most mornings now, he'll come and just sit staring at me until I get up and feed him, and if Jeff's already fed him, then he'll just come and hang out with me until I get up. During the day, he'll wander about the house, finding a spot in whatever room he happens to like -- but when I'm in bed, it's like he has to be in the same room as me, on eye level, so that whenever I open my eyes... there he is. (Okay, it sounds creepier than it is. It's actually adorable.)
3. Metaphors We Live By
I've been reading Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By, and Sarah Allan's book, The Way of Water, in which she applies Lakoff's linguistic theories to examine the root metaphors of Taoism and ancient Chinese religion more generally. Last weekend, Jeff and I spent hours discussing how Lakoff's ideas apply to the concept of "nature worship" in a Pagan context, and we even planned an outline and took extensive notes -- we seriously might have enough material for a short book on the topic. It might sound silly, but I really enjoyed working with him through these ideas, bringing together his knowledge of linguistics with my background in religious studies (and ecology, to a lesser extent). It was the kind of in-depth, detailed conversation I used to have in college, and it just reaffirms for me the fact that I'm not kidding myself when I say that I really love people who know more than I do. There's a special kind of pleasure in being able to collaborate with someone who can keep up with you intellectually, who gets excited by ideas the way you do, and whose area(s) of expertise don't always overlap with yours. Awesome. Somehow, this turned into a discussion of why Jeff rocks so hard.
4. Lists that work.
Okay. So I couldn't come up with a fourth thing to complete my list (or maybe I'm just lazy), but I'm already in a better mood than when I started this post, feeling much more energized and enthusiastic than when I was bitching in my head about people being stupid on the internet. So, yay for focusing on the good stuff in life and staying centered in gratitude and appreciation!
Things Currently Annoying Me
1. Double-standards for history.
Prompted by someone on Twitter sharing a link to a youtube video by a professor of early Christian history explaining that "Christians weren't persecuted" during the first three centuries CE. Her statement is, in fact, that Christians weren't systematically persecuted for refusing to deny Christ, that stories of this persecution were later exaggerated and embellished, and that holding to a literalist view of there having been mass systematic persecution is harmful for today's society. Now, I'm totally down with the last point, and anyone who isn't aware that accounts of persecution were exaggerated is simply not aware of the process of myth-making that goes on in every religion as they seek to establish legitimacy and moral authority. But saying that there was not systematic persecution of Christians for the specific reason they claimed is a long way from saying "Christians weren't persecuted." There is documented historical evidence that some Christians refused to participate in certain political activities because of their religious beliefs, and they were punished accordingly (at times being put to death). No, this was not "systematic." And while the Christians believed that participating in specific activities would have been a "denial of Christ," those in power would not have necessarily seen it that way but would have seen it as an act of political rebellion. In our society today, we uphold the freedom of religion, which includes the right to abstain from political activities (like serving in the military or pledging to the flag) for religious reasons, or even simply as a matter of conscience if the issue holds a place of importance for the person equal to a religious conviction (believe me, as a pacifist, I have looked into this, and there are plenty of people who would like to make conscientious objection a crime on par with treason, an offense punishable by death -- so the issue of being killed for one's religious beliefs is still alive and well today). If someone today were put to death for refusing to comply with their government based on religious convictions (especially when their refusal did not result in any direct harm to anyone else), we would describe that as religious persecution. So yes, the stories were exaggerated, and yes, subscribing to a myth of mass victimization is definitely unhealthy. But only by holding some kind of weird double-standard can we come to the conclusion that therefore what happened to some Christians in the past somehow "doesn't count" as religious persecution.
This also goes for ancient Greek society. I've been seeing this claim popping up here and there that the view of ancient Greek society as patriarchal and sexist is incorrect and was the result of modern scholars discounting the role of women in that society as being inherently less important simply because they were women. This claim insists that, in fact, the role of women in the household and in private life was just as vital and important to society as the role of men in the public and political sphere, and that therefore ancient Greek society was not inherently sexist. But this claim overlooks a couple of serious issues: First, the activities of half of the population will be an important influence on a given society no matter what those activities include -- this is kind of a no-shit-Sherlock moment. Determining whether or not there is systemic sexism in a given culture is not a matter of determining how much influence women have, but what is the nature of that influence and what are the social and political forces acting on it, shaping it and restricting it. Second, the fact remains that a woman born in ancient Greek society had only very specific options available to her, and that these options were determined by her sex. Last time I checked, we had agreed that the "separate but equal" argument wasn't going to fly (in part because it's mostly an impossibility), and that it was still inherently unjust to restrict someone's lifestyle and choices according to race or sex. Were modern scholars biased in their claims? Maybe. But that doesn't mean that ancient Greek society wasn't sexist. By modern standards, I find it hard to argue that it wasn't.
2. Shitting on "nice" people.
I have never really understood why people feel like they're allowed to shit on other people for being nice. Calling people out (respectfully and constructively) for hypocrisy, duplicity, enabling and insensitivity or bullying in the guise of "caring" -- sure. But I think we're on dangerous ground (and living in a deeply cynical age) when the mere fact that someone seems pleasant and friendly is grounds to attack them. Knowing whether or not someone is being hypocritical or enabling requires a certain amount of familiarity with the context of that person's "niceness." It's worrying to me when people feel like they can presume that kind of insight into others based on stereotypes and broad generalizations.
"Nice" is an easy and fairly neutral word in most contexts; it's a word that a lot of people use to indicate a lack of familiarity, or a first impression. ("I only just met her, but she seemed nice," or "My coworker picked me up a coffee during their lunch break -- that was nice of them.") Last time I checked, it was generally a bad idea to go about disparaging people because of first impressions and a lack of information, assuming all sorts of nefarious schemes and ulterior motives behind a person's congenial attitude.
I think it's especially telling that the people who seem most eager to shit on "nice" people are people who tend to be somewhat caustic in how they relate to others. I wonder how often they themselves have been told that they aren't "all that nice." And I wonder how often the person telling them that was trying to communicate that they were in fact being rude, arrogant, defensive, disrespectful, or simply creating a hostile environment not conducive to real communication. (I wonder how often they were told directly and clearly that they were being disrespectful or defensive, and they chose to hear it as an accusation of not being "nice" instead of confronting the actual substance of the complaint.) But I guess being provocatively self-righteous about our bad attitudes is way easier than doing the hard work of learning how to communicate with others effectively and treating people with respect.
Things That Make The World Awesome
1. Exercise as meditation.
I've been doing yoga and tai chi in the mornings regularly for a little more than a week now. I tend to burn out on exercise precisely because I try to be too intense about it (and there's always an excuse about why I don't have time to devote an hour of intense exercise, followed by a cool down and a shower... and before you know it, it's been two hours and I haven't gotten to work yet, and I have so much to do!)... so I've been approaching it this time as a form of physical meditation, where the "point" is not to "feel the burn," but to settle into a refreshed and awake state of mind. That seems to be helping tremendously; it's good to get up and get active early in the morning, doing a simple exercise that is more about the movement itself than about improving at something (like strength, or weight loss). I also ordered a book on the spiritual and energetic aspects of tai chi, and that should be arriving today at some point. It's just a shame that tai chi is seen mostly as a trendy exercise for old people in this country. I'm really intrigued by its relationship to Taoism as a spiritual path, but it's hard to find much information on that.
2. Cu talks to birds.
Really, just Cu in general. He is such an awesome cat. Just now, he came over to the windowsill and sat chirping at a bird (possibly a robin?) perched on the roof of the apartment building across the street. Most mornings now, he'll come and just sit staring at me until I get up and feed him, and if Jeff's already fed him, then he'll just come and hang out with me until I get up. During the day, he'll wander about the house, finding a spot in whatever room he happens to like -- but when I'm in bed, it's like he has to be in the same room as me, on eye level, so that whenever I open my eyes... there he is. (Okay, it sounds creepier than it is. It's actually adorable.)
3. Metaphors We Live By
I've been reading Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By, and Sarah Allan's book, The Way of Water, in which she applies Lakoff's linguistic theories to examine the root metaphors of Taoism and ancient Chinese religion more generally. Last weekend, Jeff and I spent hours discussing how Lakoff's ideas apply to the concept of "nature worship" in a Pagan context, and we even planned an outline and took extensive notes -- we seriously might have enough material for a short book on the topic. It might sound silly, but I really enjoyed working with him through these ideas, bringing together his knowledge of linguistics with my background in religious studies (and ecology, to a lesser extent). It was the kind of in-depth, detailed conversation I used to have in college, and it just reaffirms for me the fact that I'm not kidding myself when I say that I really love people who know more than I do. There's a special kind of pleasure in being able to collaborate with someone who can keep up with you intellectually, who gets excited by ideas the way you do, and whose area(s) of expertise don't always overlap with yours. Awesome. Somehow, this turned into a discussion of why Jeff rocks so hard.
4. Lists that work.
Okay. So I couldn't come up with a fourth thing to complete my list (or maybe I'm just lazy), but I'm already in a better mood than when I started this post, feeling much more energized and enthusiastic than when I was bitching in my head about people being stupid on the internet. So, yay for focusing on the good stuff in life and staying centered in gratitude and appreciation!
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Meeting the Gods
One of the many things that I need to mention in an update is that Jeff and I have been working through a book on ritual and magic together for the past couple weeks. We realized that we tended to want to just hang out and relax together in the evenings, but our primary way of doing that was watching television, which wasn't great. Since he and I are so similar in our hobbies, most of which are solitary pursuits like writing, we spent some time brainstorming what we might do together in the evenings when we just wanted to relax a bit. When we first began dating, we did regular meditative work together (following along with Emma Restall Orr's Living Druidry course), spending time hillwalking in the local park and then sitting in meditation on a particular theme, with discussion afterwards. I have fond memories of that work, and I've been feeling a revitalizing interest in more formal ritual practice now that my mundane life has calmed somewhat and we're fairly well grounded and established out here in Seattle. So we thought returning to that kind of work might be fruitful.
So we're working through Penczak's book, The Outer Temple of Witchcraft, which was one of the early books I bought years ago when I was first looking into ritual and magic in a Pagan context. I remembered this book as being a lot about the creative, aesthetic work of crafting personal rituals.... but it's definitely interesting revisiting it now that I have nearly a decade of Pagan practice under my belt (the tenth anniversary of my first Pagan ritual is coming up this summer solstice, if you can believe it!). For one thing, I don't remember the book being nearly as logically inconsistent as it actually is. Or, I should say, maybe just poorly articulated. Many of the theological ideas mentioned in the book are simplistic, but then it is meant to be a kind of "Pagan 101" type of book. On the other hand, it's been so long since I read this kind of book that it gives me a new appreciation of the hard polytheists' complaints about "soft polytheism." It also gives me new ire at being lumped in with so-called "soft polytheism," since the polytheism as it appears in Peczack's book isn't very different from my own theology. The biggest thing the book has going for it is that it includes lots of practical exercises. Maybe that's ironic, considering the usual defense of somewhat sloppy theology in modern Paganism is that it's more focused on praxis than doctrine. Many of the practices seem to be helpful and to at least have the potential to lead to real spiritual authenticity and insight. I suspect half the problem is that Chris might just not be very good at articulating some of the deeper complexities involved in a nuanced polytheistic view. It might be that on the whole, he's not even all that interested in the theological aspect, but holds lightly to just enough belief to explain why his practices are meaningful. I've always been the kind of person who needs more, who needs to engage intellectually with my practices and beliefs as well as emotionally and physically through ritual. On the other hand, I feel kind of laissez-faire about Penczak. He was obviously articulate enough to give me a viable way into a new religion back when I needed it (even though he is also probably a big reason why Wicca/Witchcraft never really resonated with me), and on the whole his sloppiness might be relatively harmless so long as it doesn't become dogmatic sloppiness used to abuse or manipulate or exploit.
After working through the introduction and doing a few basic exercises in meditation and visualization just to "get back to basics," Jeff and I moved onto the chapter on the gods (or, in the Wiccan approach, the God and Goddess and their many different manifestations). This chapter wasn't of much value in terms of its content, since Penczak spends a lot of time discussing how the various deities from different cultures fit into a broader scheme of archetypes. It might be of some interest if done carefully with a mind to comparative religion or mythology (I'm not ready to just throw my hands up and declare that there aren't any meaningful patterns among the deities of different cultures), but Penczak doesn't have the expertise to do that and in any case that would have been a book all its own. Instead, he gives a list-like run down of a bunch of different gods and goddesses, each with a paragraph or two explaining their associations within their respective culture. Much of this is perfectly fine, if a bit simplified; but there are also enough examples of him getting specifics wrong or applying his system of categorization in ways that obscure the particularities of a given deity in cultural context that, in general, it's not exactly a resource I would turn to for reliable information.
What it was valuable for, though, was prompting me to think more about how we get to know deities in general. As sloppy as Penczak's approach seems, there's something to be said for diving in and getting to know a deity personally before (or along with) doing the academic research. I realized that I tend to be a bit of a god-stalker. To use the metaphor of personal relationships with people, there's something to be said for first impressions, even if they're incomplete and maybe even false in some ways. Imagine if someone is intrigued by a new acquaintance, and so obsessively tries to memorize all of their personal and family history, scouring public records to find out their likes and dislikes and plumping the local community gossip for details.... And then tries to interact with that person in terms of all of this compiled information, as if that person were a collection of facts instead of an individual. That someone would probably be considered a creepy stalker. And one reason for that would be because they were trying to have complete control over the relationship and dictate its terms, instead of building a relationship as a mutual project with the other person. The point I'm getting at is that, if we take seriously the idea that gods are real (in whatever sense) and individual (again, not necessarily as hard polytheism defines that concept, but at least in a meaningful way) -- then we should trust that building a relationship with deity is a partnership, not a research project, and that it might proceed in an authentic and meaningful way even if we don't know "all" the facts. Knowledge and intimacy are built up between two people over years and years, and aren't necessarily things that can be gleaned from a book on ancient history. We might just have to respect that the gods are going to interact with us on their own terms, and that only aspects of their much deeper and broader realities will ever be shown to us.
This might sound obvious -- and in fact, it sounds very similar to what I've heard some hard polytheists themselves say -- and yet, I don't often see this attitude being upheld through actual behavior, especially when it comes to how people actually talk about and treat their relationships with the gods. This might be yet another place where the term "UPG" does a big disservice to the whole conversation, relegating personal relationship and personal meaning-making to the same category as "fluffy bunny" I-saw-it-in-a-dream kind of stuff and setting it in distinction to (or even in opposition with) scholarly research into "legitimate" primary sources. (The whole issue of what gets counted as legitimate and the fact that the academic world is in no way free of socio-political and personal biases is something I'm not even going to get into now.)
In any case, I'm pretty sure that I god-stalked Brigid, and this was one of the reasons our relationship got a bit stilted for a while. It'd be like getting hung up on whether your new boyfriend likes yams or not, and obsessing about the "deeper meaning" of these types of trivial details instead of focusing on aspects of your relationship that were directly relevant to both of you in the here and now. (Sure, maybe later you come to understand how that boyfriend grew up in the south as a nerdy Buddhist outsider and his dislike of yams maybe gives you some insight into that in some weird way... but without that kind of context, which is only built over time, you could totally ruin a relationship by obsessing over it and trying to "figure him out." Believe me, I know. I once dated an engineer.) I was so busy trying to make all the trivia I could find about her fit into some coherent picture, that I neglected nurturing a real relationship with her more directly.
The irony is that when Artemis showed up, it blew my desire for a Celtic-specific practice out of the water and forced me to deal with the issue of relating to a deity on her own terms. I disliked Ancient Greek culture so much for being misogynistic and patriarchal, that I refused to do the normal obsessive research that I might do otherwise. I didn't really want to totally rework my practice (and my life) in order to make my work with Artemis be culturally contextual. So what ended up happening was that over the last half a year plus, I've spent much more time connecting with her more directly (and supplementing my understanding of her and my relationship with her with research here and there when it's appropriate). And that approach has also influenced my relationship with Brigid, so that it too is getting stronger again. (Though, as I think I've mentioned, stress from the marriage and the move also probably had something to do with that.)
So now that I'm in relationship with not one, but two of the most stereotypically popular goddesses among modern Pagans... I guess the only thing left for me to do is start worshipping the Morrigan, or maybe Odin or Cernnunous, and we'll be all set to hit the fluff bunny trifecta.
~
So it was in that general spirit that I approached last night's ritual/meditative work, an exercise meant to help a new Pagan meet a couple of gods. The guided meditation involved traveling along the World Tree first to the underworld and then to the upperworld, where you would presumably meet a face of the Goddess and the God, respectively (though Penczak does say that you might encounter two goddesses or two gods, since there are deities of both genders associated with both realms). Since Jeff and I work more with the three realms of Land, Sea and Sky than with an underworld/upperworld dualism, we adapted the meditation somewhat to suit our own purposes. But I went into the ritual with the attitude of seeing whatever or whoever might show up, not trying to force any expectation or assume any definitive answers about the identity of the gods or guides or whoever if any did appear. I wanted to hold the work loosely. I also wanted to set aside my general unease with people who want to rush into relationships with as many gods as they can find, as though they were action figures to be collected. Since I tend to be somewhat introverted in my human relationships, I tend to lean towards henotheism in my spiritual life; but lately I've been noticing how I can tend to be a bit one-sided in my life at times, and so I wanted to see this as an opportunity to meet some guides or companions who would be willing to work with me towards a better balance and more "inner" diversity.
The meditation was actually kind of amazing. By the end of it, I felt like I couldn't keep a stupid grin off my face.
To begin, Jeff and I did a simple centering meditation and verbally "cast the circle" as a way of establishing sacred space. Again, I don't agree with all of the theological aspects of Penczak's approach, but in my work I've found it very useful to establish sacred space through ritual and visualization, especially when working in what is normally a mundane space like the den. (I don't do this as thoroughly when we're doing our rituals outside in the woods, and I probably wouldn't feel like it was as necessary in an indoor space established for that purpose either. But I digress because I feel the need to justify why I don't agree with the ADF Core Ritual and I'm still solidly in the Revival Druidry tradition.) Then Jeff and I spent half an hour in silent meditation, with a gentle bell going off every ten minutes so give us some indication of when we should move on to the next of the Three Realms.
I should mention that I am out of practice with visualization during meditation, so even though I'm writing this out as a narrative, the experience was somewhat more jumbled, with images and sensations sometimes repeating themselves while at other times feeling like they were just outside my peripheral vision. I seemed to improve as the meditation went on, but in general I've never been fantastic at visualizing and so when I describe things that the gods said or showed me, it's more like these were things that I was sort of made to understand, and not an experience of actually hearing words or anything.
I began by standing in front of a massive western red cedar as the "World Tree" -- it's a tree I've been to in meditation before, so old that at its base there is a hollow that goes completely through the tree, creating a kind of archway or doorway, with a small space within. I placed my hands on the bark and spoke my intent of traveling to the Three Realms to meet a god or guide to help me in my spiritual work. Then I entered the tree through the archway. To the left was an opening in the inner heartwood of the tree that led down in a spiraling staircase. I traveled down and down until eventually I emerged on a beach.
The shore was rocky, covered with tumbled stones about the size of my fist and all different colors, and the waves were washing up and down the shore, the water trickling down through the rocks here and there. The wind was strong and smelled like the sea, and gulls wheeled in the air, crying out their piercing calls. For a while, there didn't seem to be anyone there at all and I wasn't sure I was going to meet anyone after all. But then, eventually, I seemed to see the figure of a woman out in the water, sort of forming and dissolving again out of the waves and sea foam. She seemed very far away, out on the water, and I wondered if maybe the tide was at an ebb and I would have to wait for it to rise again before she would come closer. But then I got the distinct impression that I was supposed to walk out to see her. So I walked out onto the water, walking across it until I was far out from shore, at which point I kind of sunk down beneath the waves to an underwater city. Even though I was beneath the water, the city itself did not appear to be under water (in other words, it was just a normal city, not like something you'd see in the Little Mermaid or something), and I walked and breathed normally as if I were still on land. I found myself wandering around a great palace full of large rooms, with the female figure always just out of sight but still present and keeping me company. In one room, I came across a hand mirror -- it's surface was silvery and liquid almost like water, and its rim was white and glistening like pearl. It seemed to me to be connected with the moon, especially with the full moon. I couldn't see the female figure, but she was there, and I tried to ask her who she was, which goddess she might be, but I could get no answer from her. Instead, she encouraged me to pay attention to my sensations while I was in that realm and to think about other times that it reminded me of. It felt as though everything was current and flow, and that my boundaries were porous -- as if, because my body was mostly water and my surroundings were mostly water, that my own edges were blurred and in flux. When there was movement in the distance, I felt that movement ripple towards me like a current within my own body, as if everything was connected. The goddess suggested to me that this was what the deep past and the realm of the ancestors and memory was like, all things fluid and moving together, influenced and shaped by that connection; and that it was also like the realm of death, when the body dissolves back into the earth and the sense of self expands to embrace and include within it all things.
At that point, the bell rang and it was time to move on to the next realm, so I thanked the goddess and asked her to show me the way to the next realm, the Sky. She showed me a spiraling staircase that I followed, up and up, climbing a long way. At first the stair case seemed to be made of rough stone and coral, then it turned to smooth stone, then eventually to crystal and then finally, in the upper reaches, to blazing light and air itself. I came to a doorway and stepped through to find myself in a beautiful, sunlit meadow.
The landscape was idyllic, a perfect blend of spring and summer -- flowers were blooming everywhere and the breeze was fresh, but it was warm (not like how it can be a bit chilly still sometimes in the spring) and the grass was lush and the trees, too, had put out young leaves. I noticed that the leaves, and in fact everything, seemed half translucent with light penetrating them like living stained glass. In the meadow were a myriad colorful butterflies and birds flitting everywhere, the birds filling the air with birdsong, and the sky seemed huge, bright blue with huge, puffy clouds drifting through it. High above, I saw the silhouette of a hawk circling and spiraling, and it grew closer and closer to where I was walking through the meadow. Then suddenly, before me was a man with wings -- looking very much like your typical angel -- great huge wings with white feathers sprouting from his shoulder blades behind him, his whole being radiant with sunlight. I was a bit confused, and asked him if he wasn't just an expression of my animus (also feeling a bit miffed at myself for my meditation conforming so neatly to the gender dualism that I'd been trying to avoid when adapting the meditation). He seemed to shake off the question, sort of ignoring it but in a way that seemed to almost suggest that, on the contrary, my animus was more like an expression of him. His wings seemed to fade or be there only intermittently, and the hawk -- a very large hawk with feathers that shimmered golden and bronze in the sunlight -- landed on his shoulder and from then on seemed inseparable from him, so that sometimes it seemed that just the hawk alone was there. Again, I kept trying to ask him who he was, what his name was, which deity he might be, but he seemed to shrug off the questions as somewhat unimportant or besides the point. He encouraged me, like the sea goddess had, to pay close attention to my sensations as I walked through the Sky realm. It seemed like, just as in the realm of the sea, everything were connected, but in a very different way. Instead of feeling submerged and porous in a fluid world of currents, I felt everything with a certain immediacy, as if these connections moved as fast as thought -- I could see a bird in the distance, and as quickly as I spotted it, my understanding was there with it, even within it experiencing the world as it experienced it. Instead of the world being thick with connection, it seemed like the world -- space and time -- were especially thin, sort of (though I don't think that's the best way to describe it). The sky god put it into words for me by making me to understand that, in the Realm of the Sea, all things penetrated you; whereas in the Realm of the Sky, you penetrated all things. Just as the blood in my body moves in currents that I can feel in every part of me, but when I breathe, the air penetrates me, a cool breath that goes deep into my lungs. As quickly as you could recognize your ignorance or your limitations, you could master them or navigate them with ease, so that he was associated with skill and mastery and the height of civilization, as well as insight and wisdom. This reminded me of Lugh of the Long Arm, and I asked him if that was who he was -- I did not get a straight answer from him, but he did present me with a long, bright spear that seemed to be a symbol in the same way that the mirror had. Just as I experienced the movement reflected in the mirror as my own movement, currents within myself and penetrating me, so I experienced the flight of the spear as my own flight, quick and piercing through the air.
Then, the bell rang again and it was time to visit the third realm, so I asked him to show me the way to the realm of the Land. He pointed me to a place that looked at first like a bit of underbrush on the edge of the meadow, but I saw then that it was a cliff and the underbrush was in fact the canopy of a great tree. I began to climb down the tree, branch by branch, until I was back at the base of the same cedar. I walked through the archway created by its trunk, this time passing straight through as if it were a threshold.
On the other side was a lush, wild forest, thick with undergrowth, huge trees, everything teeming with life and covered with a carpet of green in mosses and ferns and mushrooms and the like. I had the sudden, overwhelming sense of movement, and I was running through the forest, bounding past trees, jumping over rocks and fallen logs, with my heart pounding in my chest. I realized at one point that I was running with a pack of hounds, like hunting dogs, though they didn't appear to be hunting but just running in a pack. I thought that maybe here I would meet Artemis, and just as I was wondering this, up ahead, there she was. She wore antlers on her head, though only small ones with one or two prongs, and she was clad in a short leather tunic. She was amazingly slender and quick, and in every way seemed to embody the energy of a deer as she bounded through the forest, her dark hair flying out behind her. For a while, I just ran with her and the dogs, but eventually I felt like if we kept up this running I wouldn't have a chance to really talk to her at all, so I called out to ask if maybe we might pause for a rest for a little while. She stopped so abruptly that I was caught up short, and her whole body was tense and listening, very much like a deer that has heard a sound and freezes, waiting to hear it again. Eventually, she relaxed and turned towards a clearing, where a pool of fresh spring water bubbled up from the earth and babbled away off into the woods as a small stream. She sat by the pool, leaning to sip some of the fresh water, and I swear it was like a Disney movie, with a bunch of animals coming out of the forest to join her. Birds flitted about in the trees, and the hounds lazed about, with a couple of deer only a few yards away leaning down their slender necks to drink. I also saw a bear, like a dark shadow moving among the trees, and this made me think of Artemis' connection with the bear and how, just then, she seemed so different from that aspect, much more like a deer. As if in response to this thought, she got up from where she was sitting, and now instead of the small antlers, she was wearing a kind of cloak made of bearskin, with the head of the bear like a hood pulled up over her hair. She began to dance in the clearing -- at first, putting her hands up like claws and doing a move that looked like it was right out of Michael Jackson's music video for "The Thriller." When I scoffed in surprise and incredulity, she got down on all fours and started dancing and scampering around -- not on hands and knees, but with her hands and feet, so that her backside stuck up ridiculously in the air as she trundled around. The joy and silliness seemed to radiate off of her and she seemed very much to embody a kind of child-like state of wonder and excitement (but in a way that was deeply wise and knowing at the same time). Then I thought of her possible connection with the moon, as well, and I asked her about that, since the sea goddess I had met seemed to be connected more directly to the moon through the silver-and-pearl mirror. Suddenly, I saw the image of the new crescent moon, just past a sliver, when you can just barely see the still-dark sphere of the rest of the moon outlined against the evening sky and the sliver of light seems less like the moon itself than like a crack between two worlds. She snatched up her bow and pulled it taut with an arrow notched, and the bow seemed to be illuminated in the same way -- which, she made me to understand, was why sometimes her bow and arrows were described as silver and sometimes as gold. She said that the realm of the sacred land was a place of liminality and edges, much more so than the other two realms. She said that we tended to think of the physical, material world as the most mundane and easy to comprehend, but it was in fact the most liminal and enchanted of all. She said that the physical world was a world of surfaces -- that we could only know the surface of things in this way, and never the inside of anything, since if we tried to break it open to get at the "inside," what was internal would withdraw and we would find ourself with nothing but just another surface. To demonstrate, she picked up a rock, and then broke it open so that instead of being a smooth, rounded stone, it was now a kind of rough geode along the broken side -- but this, too, was just a new surface now newly exposed to the world and it was still impossible to see the "inner-ness" of the thing. I understood that she was not just talking about the strange mystery of the physical, material world of nature, but also my sense of her playfulness (and pop culture references to Disney and Michael Jackson) as threatening to be somehow shallow or superficial. She was challenging me on this view, intentionally provoking me to see this realm not as superficial, but as liminal and mysterious, interconnected through those very surfaces and the way they rubbed up against all the other surfaces (and yet also withheld something far more intimate than what penetrated or was penetrating in the other two realms).
By the time the final bell rang, her joy and playfulness had become somewhat infectious, and when I thanked her and returned to the World Tree to end my meditation, I found that I couldn't wipe a somewhat goofy grin off my face.
So that experience went very well, and I am intrigued by these two new deities that I seem to have met. I'm looking forward to continuing this work and exploring these new relationships to see where they lead.
So we're working through Penczak's book, The Outer Temple of Witchcraft, which was one of the early books I bought years ago when I was first looking into ritual and magic in a Pagan context. I remembered this book as being a lot about the creative, aesthetic work of crafting personal rituals.... but it's definitely interesting revisiting it now that I have nearly a decade of Pagan practice under my belt (the tenth anniversary of my first Pagan ritual is coming up this summer solstice, if you can believe it!). For one thing, I don't remember the book being nearly as logically inconsistent as it actually is. Or, I should say, maybe just poorly articulated. Many of the theological ideas mentioned in the book are simplistic, but then it is meant to be a kind of "Pagan 101" type of book. On the other hand, it's been so long since I read this kind of book that it gives me a new appreciation of the hard polytheists' complaints about "soft polytheism." It also gives me new ire at being lumped in with so-called "soft polytheism," since the polytheism as it appears in Peczack's book isn't very different from my own theology. The biggest thing the book has going for it is that it includes lots of practical exercises. Maybe that's ironic, considering the usual defense of somewhat sloppy theology in modern Paganism is that it's more focused on praxis than doctrine. Many of the practices seem to be helpful and to at least have the potential to lead to real spiritual authenticity and insight. I suspect half the problem is that Chris might just not be very good at articulating some of the deeper complexities involved in a nuanced polytheistic view. It might be that on the whole, he's not even all that interested in the theological aspect, but holds lightly to just enough belief to explain why his practices are meaningful. I've always been the kind of person who needs more, who needs to engage intellectually with my practices and beliefs as well as emotionally and physically through ritual. On the other hand, I feel kind of laissez-faire about Penczak. He was obviously articulate enough to give me a viable way into a new religion back when I needed it (even though he is also probably a big reason why Wicca/Witchcraft never really resonated with me), and on the whole his sloppiness might be relatively harmless so long as it doesn't become dogmatic sloppiness used to abuse or manipulate or exploit.
After working through the introduction and doing a few basic exercises in meditation and visualization just to "get back to basics," Jeff and I moved onto the chapter on the gods (or, in the Wiccan approach, the God and Goddess and their many different manifestations). This chapter wasn't of much value in terms of its content, since Penczak spends a lot of time discussing how the various deities from different cultures fit into a broader scheme of archetypes. It might be of some interest if done carefully with a mind to comparative religion or mythology (I'm not ready to just throw my hands up and declare that there aren't any meaningful patterns among the deities of different cultures), but Penczak doesn't have the expertise to do that and in any case that would have been a book all its own. Instead, he gives a list-like run down of a bunch of different gods and goddesses, each with a paragraph or two explaining their associations within their respective culture. Much of this is perfectly fine, if a bit simplified; but there are also enough examples of him getting specifics wrong or applying his system of categorization in ways that obscure the particularities of a given deity in cultural context that, in general, it's not exactly a resource I would turn to for reliable information.
What it was valuable for, though, was prompting me to think more about how we get to know deities in general. As sloppy as Penczak's approach seems, there's something to be said for diving in and getting to know a deity personally before (or along with) doing the academic research. I realized that I tend to be a bit of a god-stalker. To use the metaphor of personal relationships with people, there's something to be said for first impressions, even if they're incomplete and maybe even false in some ways. Imagine if someone is intrigued by a new acquaintance, and so obsessively tries to memorize all of their personal and family history, scouring public records to find out their likes and dislikes and plumping the local community gossip for details.... And then tries to interact with that person in terms of all of this compiled information, as if that person were a collection of facts instead of an individual. That someone would probably be considered a creepy stalker. And one reason for that would be because they were trying to have complete control over the relationship and dictate its terms, instead of building a relationship as a mutual project with the other person. The point I'm getting at is that, if we take seriously the idea that gods are real (in whatever sense) and individual (again, not necessarily as hard polytheism defines that concept, but at least in a meaningful way) -- then we should trust that building a relationship with deity is a partnership, not a research project, and that it might proceed in an authentic and meaningful way even if we don't know "all" the facts. Knowledge and intimacy are built up between two people over years and years, and aren't necessarily things that can be gleaned from a book on ancient history. We might just have to respect that the gods are going to interact with us on their own terms, and that only aspects of their much deeper and broader realities will ever be shown to us.
This might sound obvious -- and in fact, it sounds very similar to what I've heard some hard polytheists themselves say -- and yet, I don't often see this attitude being upheld through actual behavior, especially when it comes to how people actually talk about and treat their relationships with the gods. This might be yet another place where the term "UPG" does a big disservice to the whole conversation, relegating personal relationship and personal meaning-making to the same category as "fluffy bunny" I-saw-it-in-a-dream kind of stuff and setting it in distinction to (or even in opposition with) scholarly research into "legitimate" primary sources. (The whole issue of what gets counted as legitimate and the fact that the academic world is in no way free of socio-political and personal biases is something I'm not even going to get into now.)
In any case, I'm pretty sure that I god-stalked Brigid, and this was one of the reasons our relationship got a bit stilted for a while. It'd be like getting hung up on whether your new boyfriend likes yams or not, and obsessing about the "deeper meaning" of these types of trivial details instead of focusing on aspects of your relationship that were directly relevant to both of you in the here and now. (Sure, maybe later you come to understand how that boyfriend grew up in the south as a nerdy Buddhist outsider and his dislike of yams maybe gives you some insight into that in some weird way... but without that kind of context, which is only built over time, you could totally ruin a relationship by obsessing over it and trying to "figure him out." Believe me, I know. I once dated an engineer.) I was so busy trying to make all the trivia I could find about her fit into some coherent picture, that I neglected nurturing a real relationship with her more directly.
The irony is that when Artemis showed up, it blew my desire for a Celtic-specific practice out of the water and forced me to deal with the issue of relating to a deity on her own terms. I disliked Ancient Greek culture so much for being misogynistic and patriarchal, that I refused to do the normal obsessive research that I might do otherwise. I didn't really want to totally rework my practice (and my life) in order to make my work with Artemis be culturally contextual. So what ended up happening was that over the last half a year plus, I've spent much more time connecting with her more directly (and supplementing my understanding of her and my relationship with her with research here and there when it's appropriate). And that approach has also influenced my relationship with Brigid, so that it too is getting stronger again. (Though, as I think I've mentioned, stress from the marriage and the move also probably had something to do with that.)
So now that I'm in relationship with not one, but two of the most stereotypically popular goddesses among modern Pagans... I guess the only thing left for me to do is start worshipping the Morrigan, or maybe Odin or Cernnunous, and we'll be all set to hit the fluff bunny trifecta.
So it was in that general spirit that I approached last night's ritual/meditative work, an exercise meant to help a new Pagan meet a couple of gods. The guided meditation involved traveling along the World Tree first to the underworld and then to the upperworld, where you would presumably meet a face of the Goddess and the God, respectively (though Penczak does say that you might encounter two goddesses or two gods, since there are deities of both genders associated with both realms). Since Jeff and I work more with the three realms of Land, Sea and Sky than with an underworld/upperworld dualism, we adapted the meditation somewhat to suit our own purposes. But I went into the ritual with the attitude of seeing whatever or whoever might show up, not trying to force any expectation or assume any definitive answers about the identity of the gods or guides or whoever if any did appear. I wanted to hold the work loosely. I also wanted to set aside my general unease with people who want to rush into relationships with as many gods as they can find, as though they were action figures to be collected. Since I tend to be somewhat introverted in my human relationships, I tend to lean towards henotheism in my spiritual life; but lately I've been noticing how I can tend to be a bit one-sided in my life at times, and so I wanted to see this as an opportunity to meet some guides or companions who would be willing to work with me towards a better balance and more "inner" diversity.
The meditation was actually kind of amazing. By the end of it, I felt like I couldn't keep a stupid grin off my face.
To begin, Jeff and I did a simple centering meditation and verbally "cast the circle" as a way of establishing sacred space. Again, I don't agree with all of the theological aspects of Penczak's approach, but in my work I've found it very useful to establish sacred space through ritual and visualization, especially when working in what is normally a mundane space like the den. (I don't do this as thoroughly when we're doing our rituals outside in the woods, and I probably wouldn't feel like it was as necessary in an indoor space established for that purpose either. But I digress because I feel the need to justify why I don't agree with the ADF Core Ritual and I'm still solidly in the Revival Druidry tradition.) Then Jeff and I spent half an hour in silent meditation, with a gentle bell going off every ten minutes so give us some indication of when we should move on to the next of the Three Realms.
I should mention that I am out of practice with visualization during meditation, so even though I'm writing this out as a narrative, the experience was somewhat more jumbled, with images and sensations sometimes repeating themselves while at other times feeling like they were just outside my peripheral vision. I seemed to improve as the meditation went on, but in general I've never been fantastic at visualizing and so when I describe things that the gods said or showed me, it's more like these were things that I was sort of made to understand, and not an experience of actually hearing words or anything.
I began by standing in front of a massive western red cedar as the "World Tree" -- it's a tree I've been to in meditation before, so old that at its base there is a hollow that goes completely through the tree, creating a kind of archway or doorway, with a small space within. I placed my hands on the bark and spoke my intent of traveling to the Three Realms to meet a god or guide to help me in my spiritual work. Then I entered the tree through the archway. To the left was an opening in the inner heartwood of the tree that led down in a spiraling staircase. I traveled down and down until eventually I emerged on a beach.
The shore was rocky, covered with tumbled stones about the size of my fist and all different colors, and the waves were washing up and down the shore, the water trickling down through the rocks here and there. The wind was strong and smelled like the sea, and gulls wheeled in the air, crying out their piercing calls. For a while, there didn't seem to be anyone there at all and I wasn't sure I was going to meet anyone after all. But then, eventually, I seemed to see the figure of a woman out in the water, sort of forming and dissolving again out of the waves and sea foam. She seemed very far away, out on the water, and I wondered if maybe the tide was at an ebb and I would have to wait for it to rise again before she would come closer. But then I got the distinct impression that I was supposed to walk out to see her. So I walked out onto the water, walking across it until I was far out from shore, at which point I kind of sunk down beneath the waves to an underwater city. Even though I was beneath the water, the city itself did not appear to be under water (in other words, it was just a normal city, not like something you'd see in the Little Mermaid or something), and I walked and breathed normally as if I were still on land. I found myself wandering around a great palace full of large rooms, with the female figure always just out of sight but still present and keeping me company. In one room, I came across a hand mirror -- it's surface was silvery and liquid almost like water, and its rim was white and glistening like pearl. It seemed to me to be connected with the moon, especially with the full moon. I couldn't see the female figure, but she was there, and I tried to ask her who she was, which goddess she might be, but I could get no answer from her. Instead, she encouraged me to pay attention to my sensations while I was in that realm and to think about other times that it reminded me of. It felt as though everything was current and flow, and that my boundaries were porous -- as if, because my body was mostly water and my surroundings were mostly water, that my own edges were blurred and in flux. When there was movement in the distance, I felt that movement ripple towards me like a current within my own body, as if everything was connected. The goddess suggested to me that this was what the deep past and the realm of the ancestors and memory was like, all things fluid and moving together, influenced and shaped by that connection; and that it was also like the realm of death, when the body dissolves back into the earth and the sense of self expands to embrace and include within it all things.
At that point, the bell rang and it was time to move on to the next realm, so I thanked the goddess and asked her to show me the way to the next realm, the Sky. She showed me a spiraling staircase that I followed, up and up, climbing a long way. At first the stair case seemed to be made of rough stone and coral, then it turned to smooth stone, then eventually to crystal and then finally, in the upper reaches, to blazing light and air itself. I came to a doorway and stepped through to find myself in a beautiful, sunlit meadow.
The landscape was idyllic, a perfect blend of spring and summer -- flowers were blooming everywhere and the breeze was fresh, but it was warm (not like how it can be a bit chilly still sometimes in the spring) and the grass was lush and the trees, too, had put out young leaves. I noticed that the leaves, and in fact everything, seemed half translucent with light penetrating them like living stained glass. In the meadow were a myriad colorful butterflies and birds flitting everywhere, the birds filling the air with birdsong, and the sky seemed huge, bright blue with huge, puffy clouds drifting through it. High above, I saw the silhouette of a hawk circling and spiraling, and it grew closer and closer to where I was walking through the meadow. Then suddenly, before me was a man with wings -- looking very much like your typical angel -- great huge wings with white feathers sprouting from his shoulder blades behind him, his whole being radiant with sunlight. I was a bit confused, and asked him if he wasn't just an expression of my animus (also feeling a bit miffed at myself for my meditation conforming so neatly to the gender dualism that I'd been trying to avoid when adapting the meditation). He seemed to shake off the question, sort of ignoring it but in a way that seemed to almost suggest that, on the contrary, my animus was more like an expression of him. His wings seemed to fade or be there only intermittently, and the hawk -- a very large hawk with feathers that shimmered golden and bronze in the sunlight -- landed on his shoulder and from then on seemed inseparable from him, so that sometimes it seemed that just the hawk alone was there. Again, I kept trying to ask him who he was, what his name was, which deity he might be, but he seemed to shrug off the questions as somewhat unimportant or besides the point. He encouraged me, like the sea goddess had, to pay close attention to my sensations as I walked through the Sky realm. It seemed like, just as in the realm of the sea, everything were connected, but in a very different way. Instead of feeling submerged and porous in a fluid world of currents, I felt everything with a certain immediacy, as if these connections moved as fast as thought -- I could see a bird in the distance, and as quickly as I spotted it, my understanding was there with it, even within it experiencing the world as it experienced it. Instead of the world being thick with connection, it seemed like the world -- space and time -- were especially thin, sort of (though I don't think that's the best way to describe it). The sky god put it into words for me by making me to understand that, in the Realm of the Sea, all things penetrated you; whereas in the Realm of the Sky, you penetrated all things. Just as the blood in my body moves in currents that I can feel in every part of me, but when I breathe, the air penetrates me, a cool breath that goes deep into my lungs. As quickly as you could recognize your ignorance or your limitations, you could master them or navigate them with ease, so that he was associated with skill and mastery and the height of civilization, as well as insight and wisdom. This reminded me of Lugh of the Long Arm, and I asked him if that was who he was -- I did not get a straight answer from him, but he did present me with a long, bright spear that seemed to be a symbol in the same way that the mirror had. Just as I experienced the movement reflected in the mirror as my own movement, currents within myself and penetrating me, so I experienced the flight of the spear as my own flight, quick and piercing through the air.
Then, the bell rang again and it was time to visit the third realm, so I asked him to show me the way to the realm of the Land. He pointed me to a place that looked at first like a bit of underbrush on the edge of the meadow, but I saw then that it was a cliff and the underbrush was in fact the canopy of a great tree. I began to climb down the tree, branch by branch, until I was back at the base of the same cedar. I walked through the archway created by its trunk, this time passing straight through as if it were a threshold.
On the other side was a lush, wild forest, thick with undergrowth, huge trees, everything teeming with life and covered with a carpet of green in mosses and ferns and mushrooms and the like. I had the sudden, overwhelming sense of movement, and I was running through the forest, bounding past trees, jumping over rocks and fallen logs, with my heart pounding in my chest. I realized at one point that I was running with a pack of hounds, like hunting dogs, though they didn't appear to be hunting but just running in a pack. I thought that maybe here I would meet Artemis, and just as I was wondering this, up ahead, there she was. She wore antlers on her head, though only small ones with one or two prongs, and she was clad in a short leather tunic. She was amazingly slender and quick, and in every way seemed to embody the energy of a deer as she bounded through the forest, her dark hair flying out behind her. For a while, I just ran with her and the dogs, but eventually I felt like if we kept up this running I wouldn't have a chance to really talk to her at all, so I called out to ask if maybe we might pause for a rest for a little while. She stopped so abruptly that I was caught up short, and her whole body was tense and listening, very much like a deer that has heard a sound and freezes, waiting to hear it again. Eventually, she relaxed and turned towards a clearing, where a pool of fresh spring water bubbled up from the earth and babbled away off into the woods as a small stream. She sat by the pool, leaning to sip some of the fresh water, and I swear it was like a Disney movie, with a bunch of animals coming out of the forest to join her. Birds flitted about in the trees, and the hounds lazed about, with a couple of deer only a few yards away leaning down their slender necks to drink. I also saw a bear, like a dark shadow moving among the trees, and this made me think of Artemis' connection with the bear and how, just then, she seemed so different from that aspect, much more like a deer. As if in response to this thought, she got up from where she was sitting, and now instead of the small antlers, she was wearing a kind of cloak made of bearskin, with the head of the bear like a hood pulled up over her hair. She began to dance in the clearing -- at first, putting her hands up like claws and doing a move that looked like it was right out of Michael Jackson's music video for "The Thriller." When I scoffed in surprise and incredulity, she got down on all fours and started dancing and scampering around -- not on hands and knees, but with her hands and feet, so that her backside stuck up ridiculously in the air as she trundled around. The joy and silliness seemed to radiate off of her and she seemed very much to embody a kind of child-like state of wonder and excitement (but in a way that was deeply wise and knowing at the same time). Then I thought of her possible connection with the moon, as well, and I asked her about that, since the sea goddess I had met seemed to be connected more directly to the moon through the silver-and-pearl mirror. Suddenly, I saw the image of the new crescent moon, just past a sliver, when you can just barely see the still-dark sphere of the rest of the moon outlined against the evening sky and the sliver of light seems less like the moon itself than like a crack between two worlds. She snatched up her bow and pulled it taut with an arrow notched, and the bow seemed to be illuminated in the same way -- which, she made me to understand, was why sometimes her bow and arrows were described as silver and sometimes as gold. She said that the realm of the sacred land was a place of liminality and edges, much more so than the other two realms. She said that we tended to think of the physical, material world as the most mundane and easy to comprehend, but it was in fact the most liminal and enchanted of all. She said that the physical world was a world of surfaces -- that we could only know the surface of things in this way, and never the inside of anything, since if we tried to break it open to get at the "inside," what was internal would withdraw and we would find ourself with nothing but just another surface. To demonstrate, she picked up a rock, and then broke it open so that instead of being a smooth, rounded stone, it was now a kind of rough geode along the broken side -- but this, too, was just a new surface now newly exposed to the world and it was still impossible to see the "inner-ness" of the thing. I understood that she was not just talking about the strange mystery of the physical, material world of nature, but also my sense of her playfulness (and pop culture references to Disney and Michael Jackson) as threatening to be somehow shallow or superficial. She was challenging me on this view, intentionally provoking me to see this realm not as superficial, but as liminal and mysterious, interconnected through those very surfaces and the way they rubbed up against all the other surfaces (and yet also withheld something far more intimate than what penetrated or was penetrating in the other two realms).
By the time the final bell rang, her joy and playfulness had become somewhat infectious, and when I thanked her and returned to the World Tree to end my meditation, I found that I couldn't wipe a somewhat goofy grin off my face.
So that experience went very well, and I am intrigued by these two new deities that I seem to have met. I'm looking forward to continuing this work and exploring these new relationships to see where they lead.
Friday, February 22, 2013
People. What a bunch of bastards.
Brendan wrote a post criticizing deep ecologists and environmentalists for being misanthropes. Sigh. This was my response:
Seriously, though. Who takes potshots at John Muir or Arne Naess? Naess spent the end of his life basically living in a hut on a mountain -- hardly an example of extravagant living at the expense of exploited developing countries. And Muir actively worked to establish a national parks system that would preserve natural wilderness environments all over the country and make them available for free (or almost free) to everyone. There are way better targets than these guys if you want to complain about classism and racism in modern Western society.
Thanks for this post, Brendan. I see where you're coming from, and you're definitely not the first person to accuse ecologists and environmentalists of being misanthropic or anti-human. But I do have a few problems with your characterization of the deep ecologist's position on this.
First of all, I've never heard any environmentalist or deep ecologist seriously propose killing or sterilizing individuals as a solution to the population crisis. (Except maybe out of frustration or despair, speaking in an emotional and intentionally hyperbolic way. Do you have any citations for where you've seen this claim being made as a serious proposal?) There's one very good reason for this: the study of population dynamics in the science of ecology clearly links population growth to resource availability. This applies to humans as well. In other words, the problem of human over-population is directly related to our ability to, and even our obsession with, extracting increasing value out of our available resources. An organized campaign to kill or sterilize humans in order to decrease our numbers would be just as ineffective as similar attempts to control animal and plant populations through limited hunting or harvesting (in other words, not very effective at all).
Second of all, as Naess says in his principles of deep ecology, the flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. Since no one seriously believes that a society that sanctions organized killing or forced sterilization of individuals could be considered a flourishing culture in any respect (and, by definition, human life cannot flourish if it is prevented or prematurely ended), this to me immediately suggests that Naess has in mind some other solution than the one you ascribe to him. (In fact, your claim that he is a misanthrope is directly contradicted by his very first principle, which affirms that human life and well-being have value in and of themselves.) He talks at length about what this alternate solution is, namely a fundamental change in our worldview from one that sees resource extraction and endless growth as the primary goal of human society, to one that sees the natural world as valuable in its own right and emphasizes quality of life over quantitative measures of "progress." He is explicitly concerned for the quality of life for humans as well as nonhuman beings and believes that the quality of human life can be greatly improved by adopting principles of deep ecology; that by adopting these principles, the human population will naturally bring itself into proper balance with its supporting environments (just as happens with every other species on the planet). This does not sound like misanthropy to me, unless we assume that misanthropy means promoting a philosophy or worldview that happens to be at odds with the one that is currently held by the mainstream. In other words, if this is misanthropy, then we might as well say that refusing to let a child have ice cream every night for dinner is child abuse.
Thirdly, you rightly say that "the idea that curbing or reversing population growth, is all we have to do to fix global warming, species extinction, and climate change, is pure misanthropy." But you yourself point out that, among those ecologists and environmentalists you quote, over-population is only one concern among many and that curbing over-population is only one of several different suggested changes that need to be made. Naess, for instance, lists changes to "policies [that] affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures" in his sixth principle. Foreman mentions the problem of over-population only once among his sixteen principles, and even when he does so he does not make any explicit suggestion about how this problem should be dealt with, only that it must be acknowledged to be a problem. So again, I am not sure who you are referring to, other than a straw man, when you argue that we can't reduce all environmental issues to the problem of over-population. I'm not aware of anyone who says that we can or should. Even your very first quote, from Ehrlich, does not suggest that all of these various problems, which can be traced back to over-population, therefore have only one single solution -- rather, he is pointing out what he sees as being a common cause. To use another emotionally charged metaphor, this would be like saying that because we can trace STDs, unwanted pregnancies and rape back to sex, that sex is therefore inherently bad and the "only solution" to all of these problems is abstinence-only education. We know that this kind of simplistic thinking does not work. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge a common thread that runs through all of these related issues; in fact, acknowledging what these problems have in common can give us the perspective necessary to approach these related problems in more practical ways.
Fourthly, in general I think that the accusation that nature writers in the American tradition are "anti-civilization" is problematic because it takes for granted that American society is the prototype of civilization. It's important to place these writers in context and realize that they were critiquing the society in which they lived, and not necessarily "civilization" as a whole in all its possible forms. Many of them were in fact challenging their contemporaries to work towards new ways of living in society. Again, Naess explicitly points this out in his principles of deep ecology by stating that we need to rework the way we imagine human culture and that, if we are successful, society will look very different from how it does today. I tend to give these writers and thinkers at least enough credit to believe they are intelligent enough to recognize they are writing from a particular perspective and in a particular context. I also happen to agree with many of them that we should be critical of certain aspects of our current society. Again, this is only misanthropy if we assume that criticizing the way humans currently live in some cultures (namely, Western industrialized cultures) is equivalent to rejecting all possible forms of human society.
I agree with you that there are underlying class and race issues here, and that the problem is not how many of us there are, but how resources are distributed. I find it kind of weird that you are criticizing some of the very writers who have put principles of simple living and voluntary poverty at the center of their critiques of current society, for the very sake of emphasizing a better quality of life for everyone. (There are some people who would claim that simple living is itself misanthropic, because it represents a withdrawal from society and a refusal to engage in relationships of trade via the market economy that dominates most social interactions today. Needless to say, I think those people are full of shit.) There's plenty of evidence that principles of simple living, coupled with access to education and equal opportunities (especially for women) along with adequate medical care, play a very big role in decreasing population growth naturally. In fact, projections of population growth have repeatedly over-estimated -- back in the 1980s, for instance, it was believed that we were going to hit 10 billion people three years ago. It turns out that providing for the health and well-being of humans is a far more effective curb on population growth than any campaign of killing or sterilization. (And this is true among other animals as well -- for instance, the hunting of cougars in the Pacific Northwest in order to curb the population actually resulted in an increase in injuries and deaths during human-cougar encounters because such hunting destabilized familial and territorial relationships, whereas when the cougar population was left to regulate itself without the interference of human hunters, the result was an increase in the cougar population but a decrease in human-cougar encounters because there were fewer "rogue" young male cougars wandering into suburban neighborhoods in search of new territory.)
Jeff tells me that I really need to end this comment by emphasizing that I value our friendship and that your blog is one of the only ones I actually still read these days. :) Seriously. Sorry for the comment-dump. It's just, deep ecology has been a bit of an obsession for me over the past few years, and it seems to me that accusations of misanthropy leveled at environmentalists outnumber actual instances of misanthropy among environmentalists by at least 100 to 1 (but probably closer to 10,000 to 1 or maybe even 1 million to 1). So.... it made me a little sad to see you doing it. :( Again, I value our friendship. Please don't be mad at me.
Seriously, though. Who takes potshots at John Muir or Arne Naess? Naess spent the end of his life basically living in a hut on a mountain -- hardly an example of extravagant living at the expense of exploited developing countries. And Muir actively worked to establish a national parks system that would preserve natural wilderness environments all over the country and make them available for free (or almost free) to everyone. There are way better targets than these guys if you want to complain about classism and racism in modern Western society.
Into the Mountains
A lot has happened over the past week or so that I should really at least jot down here, but things keep coming up (like the fact that my webpage database got corrupted and restoring it is going to take a lot of time and energy away from things I'd rather be doing).
Jeff and I were supposed to attend Pantheacon over President's Day weekend, but I was struggling with migraines the week leading up to it and, considering that it cost a huge amount of money for the travel and hotel, we decided to cancel the trip and use our days off to spend some time in wilderness retreat instead. This plan backfired somewhat because the local hotel we booked for a few days just to get away from the house and change up our routine ended up having terrible mattresses and I had to sleep on the floor for two nights on a pile of blankets before we decided to check out early and just go home. But they did give us half of our money back, so... yay?
We spent most of our time exploring the area near North Bend and Snoqualmie, including Mount Si. Hiking and fresh air made a huge difference with my headaches, but since coming home again they've started to come back. I've narrowed it down to environmental and/or stress-induced causes, or maybe a bit of both. I've been meditating and exercising regularly in the mornings, which seems to have a small effect, but by the afternoon the headaches return, so I'm getting in half-days of work at best. I'm getting more and more frustrated, since the pain seriously impacts by ability to concentrate for long periods of time. Not only have I not been able to get back to podcasting stuff at all, but now even my writing is starting to be effected. (But who cares? It's not like I have a functional webpage at the moment anyway... ::sigh::)
So at this point, I'm sorely tempted to just take a permanent vacation in the mountains and not come back until it's well and truly spring. Jeff is supposed to start teaching me how to drive again; I don't know how quickly it'll come back (considering I only ever drove a minivan and the last time I was behind a wheel was more than a decade ago). For now, I'm kinda stuck.
So here are some pictures from our weekend in the mountains.
Jeff and I were supposed to attend Pantheacon over President's Day weekend, but I was struggling with migraines the week leading up to it and, considering that it cost a huge amount of money for the travel and hotel, we decided to cancel the trip and use our days off to spend some time in wilderness retreat instead. This plan backfired somewhat because the local hotel we booked for a few days just to get away from the house and change up our routine ended up having terrible mattresses and I had to sleep on the floor for two nights on a pile of blankets before we decided to check out early and just go home. But they did give us half of our money back, so... yay?
We spent most of our time exploring the area near North Bend and Snoqualmie, including Mount Si. Hiking and fresh air made a huge difference with my headaches, but since coming home again they've started to come back. I've narrowed it down to environmental and/or stress-induced causes, or maybe a bit of both. I've been meditating and exercising regularly in the mornings, which seems to have a small effect, but by the afternoon the headaches return, so I'm getting in half-days of work at best. I'm getting more and more frustrated, since the pain seriously impacts by ability to concentrate for long periods of time. Not only have I not been able to get back to podcasting stuff at all, but now even my writing is starting to be effected. (But who cares? It's not like I have a functional webpage at the moment anyway... ::sigh::)
So at this point, I'm sorely tempted to just take a permanent vacation in the mountains and not come back until it's well and truly spring. Jeff is supposed to start teaching me how to drive again; I don't know how quickly it'll come back (considering I only ever drove a minivan and the last time I was behind a wheel was more than a decade ago). For now, I'm kinda stuck.
So here are some pictures from our weekend in the mountains.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Imbolc Celebration and Life Balance Work
This past week I spent some time working on some discernment when it comes to my life goals and finding balance. I had a bit of a rough week, with major writer's block for several of my projects (including my columns for SageWoman and Aontacht coming up) — and on top of typical health stuff, I was left feeling restless, frustrated and somewhat directionless. I was also disappointed that my Imbolc detox diet seemed to have the opposite effect as usual. Usually when I switch to a raw vegan diet for a couple weeks, I feel more energetic and kind of "cleared out." This time, I just spent most of the time feeling rather weak and stuck, and my self-discipline gave out somewhat earlier than usual. That, of course, just frustrated me even more. It was, all told, a pretty shitty couple weeks, with the exception of Sunday itself, when we spent the day in the woods hiking and celebrated Imbolc with a very simple ritual.
I'd originally hoped to do a steampunk-inspired ritual for Imbolc, but the more I planned it, the more I realized there were certain ritual tools and such that we didn't have that we'd need to get first (like, of course, a dedicated ceremonial cast iron teapot — the water, tealight warmer and the loose herbal tea symbolizing the three Druidic elements and the three realms, with the teapot itself a symbolic reinterpretation of the Cauldron of inspiration and transformation.... except that we don't have an appropriate teapot that we could use). We tend to do very minimalist, simple rituals, since almost always we do them outside in the woods after a day of hiking, so usually all of our ritual tools and altar objects are practical and easily transportable. But the steampunk aesthetic is much more Victorian and elaborate in a lot of ways, and seems more suited to high/ceremonial magic (think: Golden Dawn and theosophy, both of which have their roots in the spiritualism of Victorian times).... So a steampunk ritual is really, by necessity, the exact opposite of minimalist. Jeff and I have been talking about slowly collecting items to create a specifically steampunk altar, and here and there we've made some progress (like the steampunk pacific tree frog I made recently, which is currently sitting on my naturalist/deep ecology altar), but by and large we still don't have the kind of tools necessary to pull off a steampunk ritual in style.
In any case, the ritual itself was lovely (and I wrote about it a bit here), but for the most part the past couple weeks have been less than stellar. In general, I felt that kind of listless feeling that leaves you dissatisfied but without being able to put your finger on exactly what's wrong. I felt bored and stuck, but no particular project or activity struck me as interesting enough to shake me out of it. So I decided to spend some time in discernment trying to figure out what it is that I actually want, to give me a clearer picture of where this sense of lack and ennui was coming from. I was inspired by Plotkin and his idea of the soul as our "ultimate place" in the world to look back at the placemaking diagram from PPS, which provides a kind of visual formula that helps to pinpoint weakness and areas of improvement when trying to craft a public or shared community space.
I thought it might be useful to tweak this diagram so that it would be more relevant to "soul-making." I liked the basic structure, with key attributes in the center and concentric circles beyond those for intangible qualities and tangible expressions or outcomes. I'm not sure how PPS determined the four quadrants for their placemaking diagram, but I decided to go ahead and use the four classic elements of earth, air, fire and water for mine, representing (respectively) the physical, mental, energetic and emotional aspects of my life. I rotated the quadrants somewhat so that each quadrant aligned with a cardinal direction.
I began by trying to imagine an ideal life in which I felt fulfilled and balanced in all of these different aspects — and I asked myself, what were the tangible, outward signs of this ideal life (or, ideal self)? This process of trying to articulate my goals and desires was itself incredibly helpful, since I found some goals much easier to identify than others. For instance, when it came to the physical aspects of my ideal life, it was easier for me to note right away that I wanted a healthy body, a good diet of food that was healthy for both me and the environment, access to nature and the outdoors, a beautiful and comfortable home, etc. When it came to the mental or intellectual aspects of my ideal life, though, I suddenly found that my goals were much less concrete — they were more abstract and intangible. That sent up a warning flag for me, since part of my frustration I think comes from feeling bored, not challenged or stimulated intellectually. Unfortunately, I tend to sublimate this boredom by doing things like eating or watching television... which only serves to undermine some of my other goals (like health and exercise). So simply by trying to organize my goals and my idea about what an ideal life/self would look like, I was able to identify areas where I was undermining myself without realizing it. I spent a few hours drawing up lists of intangible qualities that I wanted to invite into my life, and the tangible results or expressions of those qualities, or the kind of work or activity that would help me embody them. After doing these for all four quadrants, I turned my attention to the "key attributes" and tried to distill all of the different aspects of these four areas into a single word that seemed to encapsulate the attitude or attribute from which both the intangibles and tangibles arose. Below is the diagram that I eventually came up with:
Since the writing may be difficult to read (I wanted to make this a hands-on activity, so I used colored pencils instead of just making the diagram on the computer), here's a typed out list for each of the quadrants.
North - Physical
Tangibles:- healthy body
- good diet
- regular exercise
- beautiful, comfortable home
- access to the outdoors/natural world
- financial security
Intangibles:
- stability
- balance
- strength
- endurance
- comfort
- rest
- health
- sensuality
- physical pleasure and enjoyment
Keyword:
- Enchantment
East - Mental
Tangibles:- opportunities to teach
- opportunities to learn new things
- time to read carefully and think deeply
- conversations with people who respect and challenge me
Intangibles:
- perspective
- clarity
- challenge
- engagement
- growth
- patience
- persistence
- understanding and wisdom
- respect
- acknowledgement
Keyword:
- Insight
South - Energetic
Tangibles:- regular creative writing (fiction, poetry, creative nonfic, spiritual/nature writing)
- expression through visual arts (drawing, photography)
- enjoyment in playing music (guitar, flute)
- time to relax and have fun
- crafting projects (beading, wood burning, clay)
- energy
- motivation
- creativity
- self-discipline
- exploration
- freedom
- experimentation
- consistency
- Inspiration
West - Emotional
Tangibles:- supportive community of smart, creative friends
- romance and surprise in marriage with Jeff
- regular get-togethers for fun and relaxation
- solitude in nature
- awareness and appreciation of beauty
- sense of humor
- fun
- support
- engagement
- respect
- encouragement
- appreciation
- peace
- gratitude
- generosity
- Intimacy
I intentionally left out "spiritual" as one of the quadrants, for a couple of reasons. First, because I tend to associate the south and fire with energy, passion and creative activity, and although that can be very spiritual, I think the belief that it is somehow inherently more spiritual than any of the other quadrants is a kind of bias against the many other ways that spirit can manifest. The other reason was that I wanted to kind of "build up" my spiritual goals from the key attributes and attitudes of the other four quadrants, so that they were supported and shaped by those attributes. So that's what I ended up doing, including the keywords from the first four quadrants as "intangibles" (along with some others that are more specifically "spiritual") and then imagining what kinds of tangible outcomes or expressions would naturally follow from them in the area of religious or spiritual work in my life. From there, I then sought for what keyword or key attribute might speak to all of those things. This was what I came up with:
Center - Spiritual
Tangibles:- regular meditation
- regular ritual as poetry/creative expression
- shared ritual with community
- simple daily rituals of routine, sacred in the ordinary
- opportunities for deepening theology
- crafting altar/shrines as aesthetic space
- connection with the gods through prayer
- sense of place/deep ecology (sense of belonging in and to the world)
- sharing sense of wonder/gratitude with others through spiritual work
- enchantment
- insight
- inspiration
- intimacy
- groundedness and centeredness
- connection
- mystery
- love
- joy
- gratitude
- peace
- belonging
- balance
- Love
- Wonder
Since I have been doing more work with the tarot and delving back into some more "witchy" and ceremonial aspects of magic, I've been playing more recently with the pentagram as a symbol. I've always been intrigued by the Feri Tradition's use of the Iron and Pearl Pentacle meditations, though I haven't actually practiced them myself, not being Feri. I'm pretty sure that the basic concept of embodying the pentagram physically in yourself, with points corresponding to your crown and four limbs, is found in many different traditions, though the Feri Tradition's use of this technique is the one I'm most familiar with. In any case, I'm playing with the idea of using this Life Balance/Soul-Centric Self work to craft a personal pentacle meditation that will help me ground in these key attributes and invite them more deliberately into my life. So I spent some time drawing a simple pentacle diagram with the keywords at each of the points.
Needless to say, this plunged me into the complex issue of which elements/aspects correspond to which points, and why. Turns out, this question is weirdly complicated. I don't feel like I know enough about it at the moment, and it may take some experimentation on my part to figure out which version I like best. But for now, I just went with the most common correspondences (which I'm pretty sure derive originally from the Golden Dawn).
So that's where I'm at.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Social Justice on the Interwebs
Apparently, I'm becoming one of those feminists who thinks the younger generation of up-and-coming feminists are really screwing the pooch.
Not because they want to dress too provocatively or do "girly" things that put them right back in traditional roles of subservience (though in the Pagan community, I still have to question the frequency with which females -- much more than males -- describe their relationships with gods in terms of bondage, slavery or servitude, and I'd really like to see an intelligent discussion of why this is, instead of a knee-jerk defensiveness that says, "If it's okay in BDSM among humans, it must therefore be completely healthy in a relationship with deity".... but I'm getting off my point, if only just).
I'm annoyed with them because they are so completely clueless about how to do effective social justice work. Nobody's educating them on the difference between heuristics that work in the context of a university classroom, and what works in the real world when you're actually having to engage with people who don't already agree with you and who might be very invested in and maybe even reliant on the current system that you're trying to challenge. On top of that, we have all these new tools now, through social networking and online media. As a culture, we're pretty terrible at using these tools for effective, respectful communication even on a normal basis to talk to friends, and we've been abysmal failures at using it for the more difficult work of social justice.
That's what had me going last night, talking to Jeff after dinner. The result when you take people who have no education or experience in what makes effective social justice work, and who haven't bothered to study or take seriously the successes of the people who came before them and figure out what works and what doesn't... and then those folks run wild on social media, where all of our vices get compounded and miscommunication is even harder to avoid and everybody is much more prone to projections and assumptions about others.... and it's no wonder that what you end up with is not social justice work at all, but LIBERAL BULLIES AND TROLLS.
Maybe I'm old-school. I obsessively studied the writings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, both of whom sustained successful social justice campaigns in a large population for years and made substantial, lasting change for the better in their communities. Their techniques and insights are still being applied worldwide, and in other countries social media is even helping to enhance those techniques by effectively connecting people and helping them coordinate protests and sit-ins and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience. You can see why these approaches are effective, and a recent survey of violent versus nonviolent revolutions showed that nonviolent ones were twice as likely to "stick" and make real, lasting change. Because violence provokes further violence.
And this is true online as well, where trolling and bullying behavior tends to escalate. This is basic social justice stuff, here. It quite literally doesn't matter what side you're on or what ideology you're trying to promote. If you do it through bullying and using physically or emotionally aggressive or abusive techniques, you will succeed in provoking further violence. And provoking further violence will almost always lead people to hunker down and invest further in the current system. Again, this is regardless of what your ideology is or what system you're trying to change. When people feel threatened, they cling to the familiar. Shouting at them won't change their minds, it only serves to polarize people, causing them to cling more deeply to whatever beliefs they already hold. And even if you are successful in overthrowing a system temporarily by force, the use of force on your part only serves to justify, in the minds of the people you have deposed, that you are a dangerous element who needs to be put down quickly and the previous order restored.
This is why people like Gandhi and King had two basic techniques that they always used, no matter what:
(a) In-person gatherings of nonviolent citizens participating in acts of civil disobedience by passively resisting unjust laws (which meant, very often, allowing themselves to be jailed for breaking those laws -- but not fighting back, resisting arrest or responding with violence, physical, verbal or emotional).
(b) Mutual respect. Gandhi was so well known for his adherence to the spiritual principle of mutual respect that he often ended up being friends with the police officers and prison guards who were supposed to be his oppressors. He refused to respond to their attempts to demean and dehumanize him by doing the same to them, and it worked. People who complain that of course Gandhi was able to work with the British to secure India's independence, because the British liked him so much, are totally missing the point that this was exactly the goal of the techniques Gandhi used -- a way of ensuring that nobody was the "enemy" and nobody "lost," but that a peaceful resolution could be reached that satisfied everyone.
I've used this technique myself, many times, during protests in college and afterwards. Even during times that had nothing to do with social justice but just involved people getting into fights and nearly coming to blows. More than once, I stepped between two people who were bigger and stronger than me, who had their fists clenched and were ready to starting punching, and I was able to de-escalate the situation using techniques of nonviolence and satyagraha.
But what nonviolent social justice work does not involve is mob-mentality harassment and bullying of individuals because we don't like something they did or said. And that's where I think younger feminists and social justice advocates online are really fucking up. Too often, what happens online is not mutual respect, it's not even "speaking truth to power." It's bitching about the powerful amongst ourselves, and then ganging up and harassing those whom we see as powerful out of some warped belief that people in power are not individuals (especially when they're online) but representatives of the systems that we disagree with.
In the real world, this kind of behavior has failed over and over again to accomplish any real, lasting change towards social justice. It's about as effective as a group of people drinking beer and riling each other up in the local pub before grabbing pitchforks and torches and marching off to mob the gates of the local rich man's castle. That is pretty much the definition of violent rebellion, rather than nonviolent revolution, and it violates both of the fundamental techniques that made Gandhi and King so successful.
The internet affords us so many opportunities to speak out and have our voices heard. Yes, there are still gatekeepers and large-scale aggregators who determine what gets promoted and what doesn't -- the irony is that most of those choices are being made behind-the-scenes by computer algorithms now, which tend to favor what is already popular, helping to reinforce the disparity between celebrity and non-celebrity and leaving some people feeling ignored or oppressed without really even being able to pinpoint why or who is doing the oppressing. Everybody is struggling to figure out how to effectively use this technology to both promote communication and community involvement and carve out safe, personal spaces online for themselves.
We have to stop thinking of online space as just one big empty public square where we have the right to go up to anyone in any medium and knock them around because we're angry at them for what they represent. I am not comfortable with online campaigns of harassment and bullying -- even in the name of liberal causes -- because we already know those techniques don't work. I am really against them when they're directed at individuals, but I think they can be problematic even when directed against corporations. Why? Because even a corporation's Facebook page or Twitter feed is maintained by somebody, an individual, and I will bet you any amount of money that the individual on the receiving end of harassing messages and emails is not directly responsible for the injustice that their company is perpetrating. Now, they might be a jerk anyway, they might really believe in what their company is doing and justify it.... but one thing's for sure: you don't know who they are, but you do know that their livelihood is dependent upon the company that you're attacking and barraging with hate-mail. Which means they are much more likely to respond by hunkering down and defending the company all the more resolutely in the face of violence. Which means you just lost a potential ally.
Gandhi and King understood that every place of interface between the oppressive system and the people being oppressed was an opportunity to make an ally. The police officers who beat you and imprisoned you could be won over through mutual respect even in the face of brutality -- and now you have an ally and you're making headway. The individual waitresses who serve the coffee at the whites-only café might not have a horse in the segregation race -- so you sit there breaking the law by not being white, but you treat them with respect and understanding, and now you have an ally. Now the people who have feet on the ground, who are actually the people most directly involved in enacting and enforcing the injustices, can see that you're actually not the enemy, you're a good person trying to do the right thing, just like they are. Winning over the people on the frontlines of an oppressive system is the first step to dismantling that system. This works, and we know it works.
What doesn't work is sending anonymous or pseudonymous hate-mail to figureheads. What doesn't work is showing up at someone's house to throw rocks through their windows -- even if those rocks have "social justice" and "peace" written on them. And when you organize an online campaign to bombard an individual with hate-mail or spam their Facebook walls or Twitter feeds with trollish rants... you are effectively throwing rocks through that person's window. And they have every right to make their profile private and/or block you. Just like they would have the right to call the police because you're throwing rocks at their house, even if you were doing it "for a good cause."
Civil disobedience is about breaking the laws that matter, not breaking whatever laws you feel like because your anger has overruled your better judgement. Don't break laws -- or basic guidelines of respectful engagement -- just because you're angry and want to hurt someone, break them because the laws themselves are unjust. And respect the consequences of breaking laws or violating civil rules of social engagement when you do it. Don't turn around and whine about how unfair it is that everyone doesn't have the right to go around throwing rocks at whomever they want. Do you really want to live in a world where everybody feels justified throwing rocks at each other whenever they get angry? Is that the precedent you want to set, knowing full well that there are people out there with way bigger rocks than you?
I'm not the only one who feels this way. Maybe we can start having a conversation about how to engage in effective social justice work online at some point. I'm trying to be patient.
~
ETA: I think maybe one of the key insights here is that, as feminists have long pointed out, "the personal is the political." And so, as a corollary, you can't expect to make the world a better place unless you yourself become a better person. If you allow your desire to remake the world to become an end that justifies harmful or violent means... you're no better than the people you're trying to fight. ("And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?")
Not because they want to dress too provocatively or do "girly" things that put them right back in traditional roles of subservience (though in the Pagan community, I still have to question the frequency with which females -- much more than males -- describe their relationships with gods in terms of bondage, slavery or servitude, and I'd really like to see an intelligent discussion of why this is, instead of a knee-jerk defensiveness that says, "If it's okay in BDSM among humans, it must therefore be completely healthy in a relationship with deity".... but I'm getting off my point, if only just).
I'm annoyed with them because they are so completely clueless about how to do effective social justice work. Nobody's educating them on the difference between heuristics that work in the context of a university classroom, and what works in the real world when you're actually having to engage with people who don't already agree with you and who might be very invested in and maybe even reliant on the current system that you're trying to challenge. On top of that, we have all these new tools now, through social networking and online media. As a culture, we're pretty terrible at using these tools for effective, respectful communication even on a normal basis to talk to friends, and we've been abysmal failures at using it for the more difficult work of social justice.
That's what had me going last night, talking to Jeff after dinner. The result when you take people who have no education or experience in what makes effective social justice work, and who haven't bothered to study or take seriously the successes of the people who came before them and figure out what works and what doesn't... and then those folks run wild on social media, where all of our vices get compounded and miscommunication is even harder to avoid and everybody is much more prone to projections and assumptions about others.... and it's no wonder that what you end up with is not social justice work at all, but LIBERAL BULLIES AND TROLLS.
Maybe I'm old-school. I obsessively studied the writings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, both of whom sustained successful social justice campaigns in a large population for years and made substantial, lasting change for the better in their communities. Their techniques and insights are still being applied worldwide, and in other countries social media is even helping to enhance those techniques by effectively connecting people and helping them coordinate protests and sit-ins and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience. You can see why these approaches are effective, and a recent survey of violent versus nonviolent revolutions showed that nonviolent ones were twice as likely to "stick" and make real, lasting change. Because violence provokes further violence.
And this is true online as well, where trolling and bullying behavior tends to escalate. This is basic social justice stuff, here. It quite literally doesn't matter what side you're on or what ideology you're trying to promote. If you do it through bullying and using physically or emotionally aggressive or abusive techniques, you will succeed in provoking further violence. And provoking further violence will almost always lead people to hunker down and invest further in the current system. Again, this is regardless of what your ideology is or what system you're trying to change. When people feel threatened, they cling to the familiar. Shouting at them won't change their minds, it only serves to polarize people, causing them to cling more deeply to whatever beliefs they already hold. And even if you are successful in overthrowing a system temporarily by force, the use of force on your part only serves to justify, in the minds of the people you have deposed, that you are a dangerous element who needs to be put down quickly and the previous order restored.
This is why people like Gandhi and King had two basic techniques that they always used, no matter what:
(a) In-person gatherings of nonviolent citizens participating in acts of civil disobedience by passively resisting unjust laws (which meant, very often, allowing themselves to be jailed for breaking those laws -- but not fighting back, resisting arrest or responding with violence, physical, verbal or emotional).
(b) Mutual respect. Gandhi was so well known for his adherence to the spiritual principle of mutual respect that he often ended up being friends with the police officers and prison guards who were supposed to be his oppressors. He refused to respond to their attempts to demean and dehumanize him by doing the same to them, and it worked. People who complain that of course Gandhi was able to work with the British to secure India's independence, because the British liked him so much, are totally missing the point that this was exactly the goal of the techniques Gandhi used -- a way of ensuring that nobody was the "enemy" and nobody "lost," but that a peaceful resolution could be reached that satisfied everyone.
I've used this technique myself, many times, during protests in college and afterwards. Even during times that had nothing to do with social justice but just involved people getting into fights and nearly coming to blows. More than once, I stepped between two people who were bigger and stronger than me, who had their fists clenched and were ready to starting punching, and I was able to de-escalate the situation using techniques of nonviolence and satyagraha.
But what nonviolent social justice work does not involve is mob-mentality harassment and bullying of individuals because we don't like something they did or said. And that's where I think younger feminists and social justice advocates online are really fucking up. Too often, what happens online is not mutual respect, it's not even "speaking truth to power." It's bitching about the powerful amongst ourselves, and then ganging up and harassing those whom we see as powerful out of some warped belief that people in power are not individuals (especially when they're online) but representatives of the systems that we disagree with.
In the real world, this kind of behavior has failed over and over again to accomplish any real, lasting change towards social justice. It's about as effective as a group of people drinking beer and riling each other up in the local pub before grabbing pitchforks and torches and marching off to mob the gates of the local rich man's castle. That is pretty much the definition of violent rebellion, rather than nonviolent revolution, and it violates both of the fundamental techniques that made Gandhi and King so successful.
The internet affords us so many opportunities to speak out and have our voices heard. Yes, there are still gatekeepers and large-scale aggregators who determine what gets promoted and what doesn't -- the irony is that most of those choices are being made behind-the-scenes by computer algorithms now, which tend to favor what is already popular, helping to reinforce the disparity between celebrity and non-celebrity and leaving some people feeling ignored or oppressed without really even being able to pinpoint why or who is doing the oppressing. Everybody is struggling to figure out how to effectively use this technology to both promote communication and community involvement and carve out safe, personal spaces online for themselves.
We have to stop thinking of online space as just one big empty public square where we have the right to go up to anyone in any medium and knock them around because we're angry at them for what they represent. I am not comfortable with online campaigns of harassment and bullying -- even in the name of liberal causes -- because we already know those techniques don't work. I am really against them when they're directed at individuals, but I think they can be problematic even when directed against corporations. Why? Because even a corporation's Facebook page or Twitter feed is maintained by somebody, an individual, and I will bet you any amount of money that the individual on the receiving end of harassing messages and emails is not directly responsible for the injustice that their company is perpetrating. Now, they might be a jerk anyway, they might really believe in what their company is doing and justify it.... but one thing's for sure: you don't know who they are, but you do know that their livelihood is dependent upon the company that you're attacking and barraging with hate-mail. Which means they are much more likely to respond by hunkering down and defending the company all the more resolutely in the face of violence. Which means you just lost a potential ally.
Gandhi and King understood that every place of interface between the oppressive system and the people being oppressed was an opportunity to make an ally. The police officers who beat you and imprisoned you could be won over through mutual respect even in the face of brutality -- and now you have an ally and you're making headway. The individual waitresses who serve the coffee at the whites-only café might not have a horse in the segregation race -- so you sit there breaking the law by not being white, but you treat them with respect and understanding, and now you have an ally. Now the people who have feet on the ground, who are actually the people most directly involved in enacting and enforcing the injustices, can see that you're actually not the enemy, you're a good person trying to do the right thing, just like they are. Winning over the people on the frontlines of an oppressive system is the first step to dismantling that system. This works, and we know it works.
What doesn't work is sending anonymous or pseudonymous hate-mail to figureheads. What doesn't work is showing up at someone's house to throw rocks through their windows -- even if those rocks have "social justice" and "peace" written on them. And when you organize an online campaign to bombard an individual with hate-mail or spam their Facebook walls or Twitter feeds with trollish rants... you are effectively throwing rocks through that person's window. And they have every right to make their profile private and/or block you. Just like they would have the right to call the police because you're throwing rocks at their house, even if you were doing it "for a good cause."
Civil disobedience is about breaking the laws that matter, not breaking whatever laws you feel like because your anger has overruled your better judgement. Don't break laws -- or basic guidelines of respectful engagement -- just because you're angry and want to hurt someone, break them because the laws themselves are unjust. And respect the consequences of breaking laws or violating civil rules of social engagement when you do it. Don't turn around and whine about how unfair it is that everyone doesn't have the right to go around throwing rocks at whomever they want. Do you really want to live in a world where everybody feels justified throwing rocks at each other whenever they get angry? Is that the precedent you want to set, knowing full well that there are people out there with way bigger rocks than you?
I'm not the only one who feels this way. Maybe we can start having a conversation about how to engage in effective social justice work online at some point. I'm trying to be patient.
ETA: I think maybe one of the key insights here is that, as feminists have long pointed out, "the personal is the political." And so, as a corollary, you can't expect to make the world a better place unless you yourself become a better person. If you allow your desire to remake the world to become an end that justifies harmful or violent means... you're no better than the people you're trying to fight. ("And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?")
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