Voices on love, particularity, integrity, gravity, and staying with.

"Sometimes the most radical act is to stay home."

"To bear witness [to know] is not a passive act." 
"It all comes down to relationships" [and having] "a heightened curiosity of other."
"If we don't know who we live among, then when they vanish, there's no one to mourn that loss."
"The challenge is to stay. The challenge is to be present with that pain.
and "making commitments to do the real work, the hard work" [of being in relationship.]

--Terry Tempest Williams



"To love means to stay with.
[...]
to love means to stay with when every cell says 'Run!'"
--Clarissa Pinkola Estes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~




Staying home.
Coming home.
Knowing who we live with.
Knowing them so we can love them, honor them, protect them in their own integrity.
Then we can be in ours.

Standing ground.
Standing tall, in place.
Rising rooted like trees.
Rooted to the earth.
Rooted to each other.
[Tethered in the heart.]
The challenge is to stay.
The challenge is particularity.
To know and be known
truly and fully, and to stand in our own truth with integrity.
To be accountable to ourselves, and each other.
To hold to what is difficult.
To hold to the difficult in relationship
and see it through, to understanding,
acceptance, and love.
To hold to the difficult.
To not abandon each other.
To never abandon each other. 

To never abandon the crying scared child in each other's deepest hearts.
To love each other back to life,
back to truth,
back to wholeness,
and the knowingness that we belong
here,
together. 

"to gather the things within my reach and to protect them." -Will Falk (from his essay To Be a Warrior Poet)

To protect them. The things we are in relationship to. The particularities of our lives.
 
To not enact the violence of indifference and uncaring, that is perpetuated by cultural mindsets of separation, individualism, and interchangeability, hardness, distance, and cold reason.

To feel each other's pain.



Peggy O'Mara:
"Don't stand unmoving outside the door of a crying baby whose only desire is to touch you. Go to your baby. Go to your baby a million times."

Alison Rose Levy:
"Hearing the cries of the world means hearing the cries of a baby whether that baby is one month old or 100 years old and whether that baby is a human, a kitty, or an elephant cub.
This is offered to the people who know what to do, and the people who know but have forgotten. It is offered especially to those who were left crying because someone stood outside the door... either through hesitation, fear, numbness, hardness, or any other agenda or 'reason.'
May those who remember reach out for the millionth time.
May those who know but forget, remember.
For those who hesitate, doubt or fear, listen to the cry and allow it to move you to courageous action, more courageous than what any warrior pose can teach you.
And for those with numbness, hardness, and other agendas and reasons, only by allowing the cry to reach your heart and melt your plans, your agendas, and your reasons into a puddle that runs out the door, down the gutter and into the river, only then will you yourself heal, only then will you become capable of serving as an agent of healing, and only then will the empty space within the many words spoken be filled with the tears of truth.
And for those who cry out for any wrong or grief, any loss, betrayal or hurt, may you find consolation, may you find your natural community of protectors, may you draw to you those capable of deep caring-- and may your consolation become the consolation of the earth. Because as your soul swims softly outward on its outflowing tears and your heart speaks its truth and finds gentle listeners, so you become the bearer of the truth that lives in the heart of all and the one who always listens and answers.
Do you hear the call?"Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
"A tear, heard by anyone of heart, is understood as a cry to come closer."

Alison Rose Levy:
"It's not merely about the newborn either. We all carry that cry and when the duress becomes too great, it emerges. There are those who listen when the sound is no more than a whisper. And there are those who are deaf when a loved one or child is screaming-- or they blame that child. And that is the inhumanity that is upon the land and within many of us in these times."

Alison Rose Levy:
"From the right to know and the duty to inquire flows the obligation to act." You know people say, 'Don't get too involved in this, it's not your problem.' Like we all live in little boxes and what goes on beyond that wall doesn't exist. With enough acreage you can live like an ostrich and feel free while enjoying the view. This is exactly the fragmentation of community that is turning the earth into a hell zone."

Sarah Alexander:
"We are strongly being pulled now to face our shadows squarely, honestly, without shame, in order to understand what is still holding us back and to let it go. It is hard enough to be honest with ourselves; much less with others. But every. single. time. we. take. a. breath. and. speak. truth. we become freer to act in integrity, and thus liberate humanity a little more from bondage."


Integrity. From Integritas, meaning Intact. Whole. Undivided. Sound.

Alison Rose Levy:
"For me, there is just no way of integrity in standing by while harm is happening and being tolerated. And to act far away and not be righteous up close doesn't count for much. Nor does being a warrior for yourself but not on behalf of those you love."

Sandra Steingraber:
"We are not beautiful by how we look but by how we love, not attractive by what we wear but by what we give and not smart in how we talk but in how we act."


Aloofness might just be the worst thing for this world.
It is like floating above, imaginally,
pretending to not be subject to the gravity
of the situation;
pretending that you are not connected to all everything.


It is in relationship that we feel the heavy weight of our connection. It is meant to be heavy. It is meant to be hard. That is how we know what is real. We can't turn away from that.
Gravity is here to hold us to what we belong to.
We can pretend to cast it off with carelessness, coolness, lightness. We can pretend that there is distance, that these particularities don't matter, aren't real. We can pretend that we can fly off easy into other spaces, novel, new, simple. We can try.
But here, now, we are subject to gravity, in all that we do.
We will be held to it. This is true accountability.
This is not something meaninglessly draped over us, weighting us down unnecessarily, keeping us from moving fast enough toward our dreams, or something we can cast off. Our dreams are bound in it, by it. Our dreams of freedom are bound in and by our relationships to each other. We cannot be free without them. We are bound to them, and our freedom is in how we embrace this.
That is gravity's law.
That is the weight, the heaviness, the difficulty of relationship.
And this is to be honored with our attention, with open, feeling hearts. Hearts that are willing to be heavy, willing to be bound, willing to be hurt. 
Hurting. Bleeding.
That is love.
Not easy. Not floating. Not painless. Not free. But bound in one another's lives and love and pain.
Bound in promise.
Promise being the root of "response"
as in responsibility.
as in response-ability.
as in being present.
as in active relating.

as in spontaneous co-arising.
as in true relationship.

Ben Garrison: 
"A choice to live sacred And because love would lead us to believe that we all belong to the earth and to each other.with hope and desire. bound to a future." [together.]


If we act as though everything is passing, and can pass without impact or float by without pain; if we act as thought we can float, unscathed, in a world of sharp edges trying to meet and fit in a better way; if we do not love particularly; if our love isn't heavy and doesn't hurt to hold some times...
then we are just kidding ourselves. What is any of that worth?

No. Gravity, heaviness, being bound together, that is what makes us creatures worthy and capable of love.
That we can hurt and love.
That we can love and hurt.
That we can love in spite of hurt
not in lieu of it.
Yes.
That we can love in spite of hurt, not in lieu of it.
And that we are bound to do so.
And that we then bind to each other.
And that we then, inevitably, hurt.
And that we then, still, again, hold to love, and hold to each other, despite.
And that we then understand and remember our responsibility to honor that love with our actions.



That is embracing gravity.
That is integrity.

That is love.



"The weight of the world
is love.

--Alan Ginsberg

Intimacy

I spend my days
barefoot
walking spinning
weeding.
It's intimate
to pull up roots that lay
so lightly just beneath
the surface of mulch
O Horizon.
Oh horizon I watch
the mountains in the distance
dreaming of you
for almost two weeks
I am good.
And not just good--humble
noble--am I?
I walk outside
barefooted night
barefooted sky
baring my skin my soul
to the stars on high
to the trees whose roots lie
so solid beneath
the surface. And yet
for four days I crouch
crawl sit and think
I am good
for pulling up the roots of another thing
and calling it a weed--
diligent in digging
each piece and snatching up every heart-
shaped leaf of morning glory
[bindweed]
Morning Glory.
I am good.

I am good.
Revitalizing, renewing this place
but it's the destroying that follows
me into my dreams as obsession--
beetles
displaced, spiders
scattering.
I can hardly escape it
under the stars.
A possession.
An intimacy.
What am I?
Am I good?

The hearts follow me
into the forest and my eyes are frantic
for the row of green hearts
up, up, up,
like an embroidered pattern
on 90's preteen jeans
--something I want to erase. But these,
they follow me into the woods
and I only see things
to pluck and pull,
and tame

What is wild?
What am I?
Am I good?

The hearts follow me.
Be noble
Be noble
Be noble
each successive one tells me as it winds up
the precious trees I try to protect,
try to
control this wild virus.
It won't stop. Winding. Spinning.
Up. up. up.

And then I spin
and I spin and dance with other people
to the tune of explosions, and the black smoke
from the marina, rising, dances too.
What is good?
Watching those flames engulf and rise and spread and
die enlivens me, and I dance
and I spin and I fall.
And I fall and fall
from grace
for you, from you, with you,
with him.

What am I
but happy to see him in the morning's glory?
We start (and end) our day with embrace
and I don't know why
but my heart flutters
up, up, up
when I see his smile.

The clouds cover the mountains.
A storm brews around them
and I wonder
[where you are, what this is]
at the intimacy of standing
side-by-side silent
awkward as we learn
how to stand in place nobly,
humbly,
tall and strong, in self
in place,
together.

Our roots intertwine
and who am I
to pluck them from their place
these hearts
growing together
up, up, up
binding, spinning, winding
up
until...

my head spins
drunk//tilting
horizon cloud-
cover my eyes
blindness engulfing

I sit at the bar brain spinning
and the heart vines winding
climb the stool beneath
entangle my legs
my belly my
heart with hearts.
I stumble
spinning.

~~~

Just now
I remember that book.
It said to pluck the weeds
before they dig in deep.
I try
to extract, try
to control, but just one clip
and it will grow
again.

~~~

For almost two weeks I am good.
[What is good?]
For four days
I clear-cut a whole forest
of weeds. And now
they trail behind me in my dreams
leaving seeds; taking root in my
bare feet and string along
strewing hearts, stringing hearts
as I go on.

What is good? What am I? Why?

He drives me home,
not my own, but home
of one who held me on
before.
I wonder and the green hearts
bind in my stomach
in my chest, my arms,
in his green car as my head spins.
are lifted up to him
and pull him in.
He pulls me in
embrace. I collapse
safe.
It feels good. So good. What is good?

I don't care.
I rest, chest on chest
head on shoulder. Hand to neck.
Heart to heart.

I try to let go
but my tendrils have hold
and he is holding me
up
up
up
for now.

And then
I breath
I breath, and carefully
unfurl my arms uncurl my fingers
so carefully so not to drop
any leaves.
And I smile say goodbye
and--oh [my heart]
I leave [leaves].

~~~

Some call it bind weed
but I still prefer morning glory
and it will come back surely.
Do I pluck it
or let it grow?

~~~

I spend my days barefooted
walking
spinning
weeding.
It is intimate.

hard lessons in fidelity, membership, and social change.

I came back here because I believed this place needed me. And perhaps I still believe that it does in some sense, whatever that means... "need."

I came back here because, while I feel more comfortable in the culture of Olympia, I thought my energy would be best used in a place where so much social/environmental change and justice work wasn't already going on or being engaged with. I wanted to bring that somewhere else, somewhere I could introduce it and where it could make a bigger change. I wanted to bring it home. Home. Where is that? Well I thought it was here. And it is here, in many ways. I feel at home here, with my loving parents, in my cozy room, in this place I have spent so much of my life, under the faithful mountain Si, in this valley, nestled against the Cascades; in various places around town, in the woods, by the river near my house, and in the memories these places hold. It is home. It has been home. It has held me sweetly. It has loved me well. I owe much to this place. I owe it my love, surely.

I came back here to share my love with it. At one point, when I was trying to writing my final evaluation and academic statement for Evergreen, I compared my college experience to a vision quest, or a series of them--characterized by separation, initiation, and return. The separation is a leaving, the initiation is a learning, and the return is carrying your learning home with you and sharing it with your tribe. My separation was hard. My initiation even more difficult. And my return, I am realizing, is perhaps the most trying of all. One of my final projects at Evergreen was based around this valley and the possibilities for it (Transition Town work, potentially a food co-op, and physical interventions that would influence the social, economic, political, environmental context). I thought I was returning with new truth and vision that I could share. I thought it would be received, that my tribe or community would accept it, embrace it, and move forward with it. I wasn't completely wrong. I brought many learnings back that have been embraced and have taken hold here, to some extent, especially in my immediate family, where we started growing some of our food, building soil, and eating better/more responsibly in general. In the wider community I started a buying club (which eventually broke down) and built community around food (which will hopefully persist in some manifestations), and I helped forward the local transition initiative (if only in a small way). I guess that these changes just haven't happened to the extent that I had hoped. And also, I am now seeing that through my time here (almost a year now, since I have moved home) I have both deepened my relationship to this place and love for it, and I have also slowly come to terms with a growing distance from it.

Recently (today maybe) I realized that the distance I was feeling was creating a scenario for my vision and engagement that was suddenly not as healthy or beneficial as I have long believed it must be. Because I am no longer embedded in the community (if there can be said to be one here) and culture of this place, I am--in some sense--an outsider...a foreigner. And I am bringing my own cultural assumptions and beliefs to this place that already has its own cultural assumptions and beliefs (though I realize that they are widely diverse and not set in stone due to globalization and a general fracturing of community/culture). I guess what struck me was the similarity between the mindset I was having about this place, and a colonialist mindset. It is the mindset I admonish in foreign-aid/relief organizations, missions, unenlightened social services, and colonial empires--the mindset that I have something to bring to these people that will assuredly improve their lives (recently heard the term "philanthropic colonialism," which feels about right); the mindset that I can "help" or "empower" someone else or a community, rather than getting out of the way and letting them empower themselves.

Maybe I do believe that (that I have something to offer), but what right does that give me to insert myself into this place and try to change it? Perhaps I am being too hard on myself. I do believe I have some right to have a say in the fate of this place. I love this place. This place has been my home. I want to give back to this place. I care about the people of this place (even though they anger me and discourage me to no end). Yes. It does come down to that: I care. I love.

So what do I do?

I think my experience in Peru, and my reflections of that trip, remind me that I can love a place and want to change/fix/help it, but I need to step back and see what that would actually look like or mean. And furthermore that I need to be honest about whether what I see as the best thing for this place, is actually what the people of this place desire for themselves and believe is best for themselves. If I ask the question: what would actually help this place? I don't really know. I think I do, but what does that mean? And if I impose something without truly understanding the values of a people and their place, then whatever I impose will likely not be sustained anyway, and may actually cause an unnecessary and harmful dependency.
In Pisco, for example, I can say I believe that having foreigners building individual houses with no windows, one-by-one, out of reinforced concrete masonry, in the sand, in an active earthquake zone, for families that are living in shacks (or worse) is probably actually not helpful in the long-term. It breaks my heart to say that. I saw the conditions: People living on mattresses in the dirt, with astera walls, or maybe cardboard, or maybe newspaper. It seems obvious that a concrete floor would be better, right? But not when the next earthquake comes; and not when it creates dissent and jealousy because one family was gifted the materials and labor for a house and another wasn't; and not when the materials are imported and expensive and unaffordable to most people; and not when the individuals and families and local people are once more deprived of the tools/knowledge/skills to take care of themselves, and their reliance on foreign aid/product/labor increases, and their self-sufficiency decreases. It is hard. I love PSF, and I love how much energy and enthusiasm and love volunteers would pour into these projects, but I don't necessarily believe that all they/we are doing is truly of benefit, because it wasn't truly sustainable (sustainable in the sense of "the ability to be sustained over time"). And then, after all of that reasoning and logic, getting those houses built is still what the people of Pisco seemed to want for themselves, and who am I to deny them that? I could argue that they only want it because the globalized industrial economy and media tells them it is what they want because it will supposedly bring them a better quality of life, but that opinion would still be an imposition. It is so difficult to know what to do. This is why I came back to the states. I didn't want my "privileged" perspective to be imposed on the landscape. So instead I thought I could help change the status quo here, in America, so people/countries who happen to want to adopt the American lifestyle might have something thoughtful and effective to adopt.

Since then I have been reminded again and again that in this time, and especially in this country, there are so many different, divergent, overlapping, intersecting, opposing cultures and subcultures and countercultures. But it is the dominant culture that the other countries are really experiencing/being fed/seeing, though subculture/counterculture seems to be the actual culture, and the new scale of community in reality (is this true?). Everyone craves membership, and our society has adapted to a lack place-based living (where culture and community would be predominantly shaped by place and physical/otherwise relationships to it and the other people/beings in it) by developing these subcultures of belief, activity, interest, or whatever else. So I am, perhaps, being stubborn or idealistic or both when I pretty much demand a return to place-based community (at least, for myself), because if I think about cities, there is no singular culture in a city. There is the dominant culture that is fairly pervasive, but the subcultures or countercultures make up the city too, and they challenge the dominant culture (to some degree), and even change it, over time. The people in the subcultures didn't (necessarily) up and leave the city to establish their own culture, they just did it by rallying around a common belief, cause, lifestyle, etc. And they are still largely embedded in the dominant culture--are influenced by it and influence it. So, anyway, I am not saying I don't want to challenge the status quo. I do. But I think I am realizing that I might be more influential if I am not alone in what I believe when I try to do so, but am close to others who will inspire me in my beliefs and work with me to push boundaries (within our own mini-culture, and in conversation with the larger culture we are, perhaps inevitably, a part of).

For the co-op project I keep asking: what is this community ready for? What do the people who live here want? I really tried to stay faithful to that. One answer that seems feasible at this point is that the community of North Bend/Sno-Valley isn't ready for the co-op. That it is not what people want right now. If it was what people wanted, wouldn't they being rallying around it and making it happen? Isn't that what a co-op is, at its root? Though Melissa had a good point today when I told her that: often things do need to endure past a difficult beginning/period, and need to be pushed hard to actually get rolling. I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I am not giving up on the idea or the project, but am conceding that perhaps it just needs to incubate for a bit, until the conditions are right for it to grow. (I planted a seed. And maybe it is just that I won't be the one to see it through to its fruiting this time--does that make me unfaithful? *Sigh* I think I can actually say "No.").

My logical conclusion is this: that I can leave North Bend and not feel bad about it.
But my heart persists in saying otherwise, because it keeps breaking every time I drive past that fucking Bartell's drugstore without blowing it up (oop, I mean... what?), every time I go into Wood River after they have destroyed Miner's Ridge (not that I have totally accepted/conceded that it will happen), and every time I think of the wildness of those waterfalls at the Devil's Cauldron and the fact that Wayerhaeuser is gonna develop right over them without a hint of remorse (ugg). And it's painful to know that the people of this city either don't know enough or don't care enough to do much of anything about it, and that they won't even have an "activist living on 'their' street" anymore to at least remind them of what they don't know or care enough about.

So after all of this musing and processing, I am still left confounded at what to do. But at least I am clearer about what I  want, and perhaps, what I need to do to maintain some semblance of sanity, and even happiness and sense of purpose and effectiveness.

So here it is, my best idea of what I am looking for right now: I want to find a place where I can root down and be nourished; where I can bring life and receive love and give love and be filled with life. I want to find a place where my vision is embraced. But I also want my vision to be challenging, and challenged. I want to push a place, but not force it; blend with it and change it through the colors and textures I bring by weaving into it, not by imposing myself on it like a stain. Not be "the activist living on our street." Not be discluded or rejected from it, for speaking out or being in tension with some part of it.

I am also thinking that maybe if I am part of a more progressive community I can more realistically bring legitimately radical beliefs (like the idea of civilization being inherently unsustainable and destructive) and have such thoughts be heard without being outcast, and push that boundary a bit. Here in North Bend there is such a huge gap between the realities I am living and those that the people around me are living, and I could relieve myself of a lot of pressure by living in a place with people who at least are closer to me on the spectrum of beliefs so I can be a member and still push boundaries.

Hmm, now what I just said made me wonder why pushing boundaries is such a focus. I remember Derrick Jenson saying that breaking through boundaries is one of the defining characteristics of our culture's perception/perpetuation of masculinity, and thus we live in a rape culture (a culture where everything, every boundary, must be violated). I wonder if my drive for change in this way is influenced by my socialization to that idea, or if it is purely just a passionate reaction to my understanding of what is going on in the world. I have a sense that socialization does have a role there, at least in my initial reactions to things, but I can't quite get my head around that right now.