On Genius, Enlightenment and The Voices

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Seonaid

There is a Buddhist fable about a traveller who arrives at an enlightened sage. “Please, master,” he says. “Please. I want to know how to become enlightened.”

“Are you sure?” asks the sage.

“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

“Are you willing to go through whatever it takes?”

“Anything. I’ll do anything.”

The sage looked him in the eye, decided that it was called for, and immediately turned into a demon. For the rest of the man’s days he was pursued by this demon, who hit him incessantly with a stick and screamed, “NOW! NOW! NOW!”

I came across an article this week on Alexandra Franzen’s fabulous blog, Unicorns for Socialism. In this piece, she takes on the idea of genius as something you are, and reframes it (with reference to Malcolm Gladwell) as a state of being passionately in love with something.

This reminded me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk (in which she described the success of Eat, Pray, Love as “freakish”, and admitted that it left her terrified, because, hey, what do you do for an encore???) She suggested that we would be better off thinking of genius as the Romans did, not as something you are, but as something you have. The Genius, The Daemon, The Muse. That thing outside yourself, and also inside, that grabs your consciousness and demands that you write, make art, pursue your question until all hours of the day and night, sometimes at the cost of family, friendships, and your physical needs. Do THIS. it demands, and you do. Maybe kicking and screaming, maybe resentfully, maybe with a loud rational voice questioning the wisdom of quitting your 6-figure job to become an elementary school teacher, but you DO it.

I have one of those.

It feels a lot like that demon in the first story. It is very concerned with ethics, impact, and honesty. It is not forgiving of transgressions. It shakes me awake at 3 in the morning and says, “Get up! Write this down. Now!”

“Oh,” I mumble. “It’s late. I’m tired. I’ll do it in the morning.”

“No, you’ll forget! Get up! Get up! Do it, NOW!”

So I do. Because it has never been wrong. Yes, I will forget by morning. Yes, they are always the thoughts I didn’t know were kicking around in there, like they have gelled in my sleep. (1) And yes, when I get up the next morning, I am always surprised by what I wrote, and glad I did it… although tired. So, so tired. The last month has been like that a lot. Pulling over to the side of the road to scratch things down, calling people to ask them questions when it strikes me so that I don’t forget, and falling into bed at the end of the day, exhausted, at 9 p.m.

There’s another voice, though, and it is sinister. It sounds similar, worries about the same things, concerns itself with my accomplishments, but it does so with a nasty little twist. Whereas the one is merely unconcerned with trivialities like food, water, and sleep, the other has that oily tone to its “encouragement”. “Do this… or you will be a complete and utter failure.” It holds me back (“Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say! Just go get a job like everybody else does. What makes you think you’re so special?”) and then blames me for listening to it (“Oh, you see. You were thinking about that 10 years ago, and now it’s a New York Times bestseller, and what have you done with the last 10 years?!?”) It is absolutely and utterly incoherent, and seems to exist for the sole purpose of destroying me.

Why do we even have that voice?

What could possibly be the evolutionary benefit of a part of consciousness that makes you sick with self-loathing?

Yes, I know the solution: stop listening to that voice/those voices. They don’t even make any sense. But this is so much easier said than done. One teacher taught us to personify them and address them directly, calling them The Inner Critic. (“How,” I ask rhetorically, “did I wind up with an anarcho-capitalist in my suite of inner critics?”) Another calls them The Monsters and suggests that we recognize that they are trying to protect us (from humiliation, from rejection, from making mistakes). I sit in meditation, learning to disidentify. “I am not my thoughts. They do not mean anything. They are not the real world, they are an inaccurate story about the real world. I do not know the future, or what will happen if I take this action.”

The trick, I think, is to learn to tell these two apart. The Genius, although caring little for my creature comforts, personal goals, or professional success, does nothing to undermine me. “She” (because it is always my own voice that I hear, regardless of what it is saying) merely wants me to do it all, do it now, and get it done. The task itself is the driving force. Those other voices want… Well, they don’t really want much of anything. They just want me not to do whatever it is. They are the anti-genius. They are the voices of silence, conformity, placid enoughness, and they want, more than anything, for me to Just Shut Up. Be Invisible. Stay Down Where Nobody Can See You. Draw No Attention. And if they have to resort to reminding me of all the times that I listened to them in the past, and use that as proof that I’m meant to Stay Down and Shut Up, so be it. Coherence is not one of their strong suits.

And what, you may ask, does this have to do with enlightenment?

I’m not sure. But I hear that somewhere along the path, we must learn to stop listening to those voices of the anti-genius.

This is the calling: Keep Showing Up. There are thoughts that need thinking and words that need writing, and paintings that need painting, and songs that need singing.

I know that I am positing a Numinal world here; I know that it is not compatible with my rational scientific training. But it is compatible with my experience. The things I have said and done and written that mattered most, when I opened my mouth and the words poured out, and they were exactly what the person needed to hear at that time, or when I looked at something when I was finished and thought, “Where did that come from?”… those things feel like they came through me, not from me. I cannot make ideas. I can only express them. If they are forming in my mind, unbidden, what part do “I” have in this? Who am I, really? I’m the one with the hands, and the voice, and the body. And there is something in/beside/through me that wants speaking. So I speak it. (2)

Because I could really use a break from this three in the morning stuff.

1. I once learned a difficult quantum mechanics derivation in my sleep. (Time independent perturbation theory. True story.) It is a very strange thing, this brain.
2. And then hit “Publish” even in the agony of self-doubt. And get back to my other job, because dinner ain’t gonna make itself.

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Dancing into the Future

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Seonaid

I don’t know what comes next.

I mean, I really have no idea what I’m going to do. There will be things that I’ve started (raising kids, building the greenhouse, making the beer) that need finishing. (And by “finishing,” I mean, “continued commitment over a period of days-to-months-to-years-to-TheRestOfMyLife without which all previous effort is wasted”)  But when people ask me, “What do you do?”

I just don’t know.

I don’t believe that I can slap on a bunch of identities and pretend that somehow I’ve answered the question, although that is the convenient (and accepted) way of doing things. “Tell me which boxes you fit in, and then I’ll know what to talk to you about.” I tried that. It sucked.

Yet I’ve spent the last several months trying to answer this question, because I am assured that without a valid answer, I will never Make Anything Of Myself. That is to say, I may continue to be somebody’s wife and mother, but nobody will ever pay me for any of the things I already know how to do if I can’t package them up into a nice neat package. With a job title. Or a snappy statement of problem and solution. (I help people who something something… by doing something something… and then their lives are spectacular and they become millionaires! Of course, if I knew how to do that, I would have done it by now. Because sure, money won’t buy happiness… but it would buy me a trip to the Caribbean, and that might be fun. Or solar panels, and that would be cool!) And (They say) if I can’t answer this question, nobody will ever pay me to do anything more interesting than move objects around and occasionally hand them to other people ever again. No pressure.

What I do: I Think. A Lot. I slide from one worldview to another the way that most people change their clothes. I insist that this is a good thing. I refuse, steadfastly, to take a stand without adequate evidence. Sometimes I believe in god, sometimes I believe in gods, and occasionally I even believe in G*d. (But not very often.) And sometimes I don’t. I have moments of complete nihilism, although they are becoming fewer and farther between, being replaced with the ground of a firm agnosticism and meditation practice.  Sometimes I am absolutely convinced that I’ve got it figured out, and that I’ve got something that is worth teaching… which is, I think, how to be comfortable in your life even when you aren’t sure of anything. See how that’s a hard thing to pin down? Slippery, that. Dancing your way through The World As it Is. Even when you don’t know how that world is.

This is the essence of Practice – to hear the music and let it move you. To find your core strength so that you can dance with abandon. To bring yourself into balance again, and again, and again, whether your house is tidy or not, whether your clothes reflect your inner self or not, whether you perceive your body to be what everybody else (the mythic They) wants it to be… or not. Whether you have managed to meet even one of the targets on this month’s women’s magazines, or business magazines, or any of the other ways our society finds to remind you, “Oh, yeah. You suck!” To find joy in embodied consciousness, even when you are waking up with existential angst at 3 in the morning. Perfection in imperfection. Spectacular mediocrity. How to have the best-damn-average life out there and revel in it!

There have been times in my life when I Knew. I always turned out to be wrong. Now, I don’t know… but I have a vague feeling that I might be right for a change.

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After Loch Ness

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Seonaid

I read a short story this week about an utterly conventional and dull fellow who found himself hiking in the “wilds of Scotland” (his complaint, having been forced to go for a walk by his new wife while on their winter honeymoon). At the end of the story, while watching the sun set, they see the Loch Ness monster. And I thought, “Oh, you poor sod. What the hell are you gonna do with that?”

I came home and told my husband about my reaction, and he asked, “And when did you see the Loch Ness Monster?” I thought of all the times that (as Camus puts it in The Myth of Sisyphus) the set has fallen away, and the absurdity of our lives became apparent. I thought about the night I stayed at the Buddhist Abbey, and the prayer wheel fell off the shelf above me in the middle of the night, causing me to sit straight up in bed with the words, “Wake Up!” at the top of my mind. I thought about the first time that my strict logical positivist viewpoint was challenged, when dealing with constructivism during my B.Ed. (“But!” said I, “What I teach has right and wrong answers!”) I thought about my first encounters with postmodernism, non-violent communication, pagans and meditation, about the day that I finally realized that my physical yoga process mirrored my mind-states, about coming to”know” that knowledge is provisional, and subjective, and mediated by our experiences… when I found out that I don’t really know what I mean when I say, “I love you“…

And I said, “All the time.”

The problem is, after you see Nessie, you come home, and everything is still the same. Chopping wood, carrying water, mending shirts, cooking supper. And it doesn’t take long before you start to doubt.

That moment, it felt different. I felt different. But then I came back, and everything else was still the same.

What is worse, you can’t tell people. And since nobody else can tell people either, Nessie remains unspeakable.

I was raised and trained to be a rational materialist. I was told (and accepted) that the world is strictly what can be measured and described scientifically. I “should” (I suppose) be a devotee of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I find myself embarrassed by the subtleties of the world that I have experienced. I find myself waking up in the night thinking, “How could you tell if consciousness precedes form or form precedes consciousness? If consciousness were an emergent phenomenon, what would that imply to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics? Is the world as it is expressive of some deeper pattern, or is it purely a result of random processes? How could you tell the difference??? And how in the name of god(s) can anybody stand living with me? ” (Since I have started turning on the light to write these things down, this last question is becoming a pressing concern.)

And then I get up, and I need to make sure that the kids have skates for the school trip, lunch money, pants that fit, and supper. Chopping wood, carrying water, musing about the nature of reality. And knowing this, if nothing else… there are things that, once you learn them, change everything. Even though they change nothing.

For the record, I don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster. But I’m willing to be disproved.

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Thinking about Thinking

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Seonaid

When this picture was taken, I was actually thinking about trees. Photo credit: D.J. King, (who does some wonderful portraits and lives in Calgary, if you happen to need such a thing.)

You might not be surprised to hear that I’m big on metacognition. It’s one of my things. It might actually be my thing.

I have struggled with this, because in the academic world I was brought up in, one does not become an expert in process, one becomes an expert in object. The topics in most courses are existing thoughts and models of the world, not where those came from or what to do with them. When we write papers, we are expected to summarize the results of our thought processes, not to expose the thought processes themselves. (This mistake tends to lead to such comments on undergrad papers as, “rambling and incoherent.” This may be true. It might alternatively be, “circuitous and experimental.” One is bad writing, the other art. Avant garde or confused? Sometimes only time will tell. Although usually? It’s just bad writing.)

When I was studying physics, I was interested in the experimental methods, not the outcomes of the experiment. I fear that I didn’t care about the crystal structures of halogenated methanes, although the idea that you could use particular methods on particular materials intrigued me. I liked preparing samples, running experiments, figuring out what experiment might work next… but the main body of the work was in analyzing the data, sitting in front of a computer doing the same thing again, and again, and again.

When I was studying education, I was interested in what claims could be made and how to support them. I like teaching. No, I love teaching. I live for the moment that the eyes light up! But I don’t just want to teach the things I already learned. I want to teach people how to learn. Why are doing this? What’s the point?

When I was working with faculty members to develop their courses, I was interested in (and tasked with) the structure, not the content. I designed a course about designing courses. I’m all about the framework.

Until very, very recently, I have considered this a flaw. A failure in my character. An inability to commit to one line of investigation and see it thought to its conclusion. Occasionally, I have despaired. OK. Frequently, I have despaired. I am a generalist, I have said, in a world that rewards specialization. But it’s not quite true. I have been telling myself a false story, one which is attached to a model of The University as The Place where thinkers go. If I can’t find a place there, I can’t be a thinker. More recently, The Media has supplanted The University. If only I could get something published, if only somebody in a place of judgement would deem my thoughts, my writing, my self worthy, my existence would be justified. It would be OK to be a generalist. I would have value in the world.

So here’s a different story for me to consider: I am an expert in metacognition. What have I done for 10,000 hours? I have investigated my own thought processes, the nature of thought, the support of truth claims, the structure of disciplinary knowledge, the construction of coherent models, and the ways in which teachers and students communicate their models to one another. I have constructed and torn down so many possible ways of knowing inside my own head that it’s a constant renovation project. I have thought deeply about thinking. I have been reluctant to make these claims, because they are the landscape of the philosopher, the professor, the specialist in the discipline. I tend to believe that I’m not entitled to form a critique of something until I have succeeded at it, and my strongest critique is of the structures in the education system, particularly the post-secondary education system. And then I think, “Well, maybe I’m just bitter?” I ponder, construct, deconstruct, consider, philosophize… and come back again and again and again to, “People are going to say that I’m just bitter because I couldn’t make it as an academic.”

I still love the university! It has libraries, and theatres, and people to talk to, and frankly, it pays the bills. (“Many of my dearest friends are professors,” she protested feebly.) But honestly? There’s some truth there. I’m a little bitter. I’m a little frustrated that I have never found my path, that I’ve never had a full time permanent job, that I have become an expert in something that everybody says is so valued in our society, but that I can’t seem to find a way of turning it into gainful employment other than by trimming off the majority of the skill and finding a market for the portion that is left. I happen to think that it is wasteful to have me working at a job that only requires a high school diploma. I find myself apologizing for my education, which is both too much and inadequate, depending on where I stand.

Well, no more, I say! I’m thinking about thinking, and I’m proud! My next two posts are going to be titled, “I see your Levinas and raise you a Wittgenstein” (which is about internet comments and the limits of knowledge. I promise it requires no knowledge of either Levinas or Wittgenstein.) and “Why are we here, anyway?” (which is, tangentially, also about internet comments). There will also be, as time goes on, “Writing about Writing”.

All of which is an elaborate precursor to saying that I’m back, and that I’m in transition to taking my own writing seriously as a tool of engagement with the world. I’m willing to be subjective because I’m a subject! I have a position. And part of my position is that we generalists need to find a different way of being in the world, one that doesn’t require us to leave behind, immerse, drown, or amputate parts of our selves. When we judge ourselves by the same standards by which we are judged, those of the specialist and the expert, of course we are found wanting. We can’t change that part of the world, but we don’t have to subject ourselves to it. (See what I did there? Subject/subject. Noun/verb. Actor/acted upon? Oooh! I love when words do that.)

And then we need to find new ways of making a living. Because waiting for the path to appear? That way madness lies.

(I know. I’ve thought about it.)

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Gender Inclusive Language

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Seonaid

This falls into the “tidbits from my notebook” category:

“Our most important stories are silent, woven into the fabric of our language. (This is not a novel idea. There are no novel ideas, but paradoxically, each particular combination is unique.) “Everybody knows that ‘he’ includes women,” is only even available as a thought because somebody noticed it, and questioned it. Language evolves, and as it does so, the use of the words themselves constitute narrative. The fact that we hold fast to that idea indicates that at a very fundamental level, we care more about our grammar than [we care about] our daughters.”

(To this I will add that while I was in science and engineering, I tended to accept the idea “Everybody knows that ‘he’ includes women.” The day I learned to question that was at a meeting of scientists in which we were talking about the future executive of the organization, and the hypothetical president. I was the only woman in the room, and the conversation went, “Well, he would have to …” for some time, until one of the younger men said, “He or she would…” and I realized that I never, in fact, pictured a woman, not even myself, when confronted with that construction.)

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Slowing Down

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Seonaid

As I may have mentioned, I have been working on some writing about nuclear power. It started out as a post, and then it turned into a series of posts, but I think it is turning into an e-book in the end, because it is just too large. What I set out to write was a primer for people who were engaging in the nuclear power debate, questions to ask, values to consider. I tried to use my scientific background to be “objective”. Hah. The further I dug, and the more I found out, the worse an idea I found it to be. It turns out (for very well-substantiated reasons) to be a precise recipe for replicating the situation we are now in, 75 years down the road, only worse, because nuclear toxic waste is much, much more toxic than fossil fuel toxic waste. Since I set out with the premise, “I think that the technologies exist to make nuclear power safe, but there are other questions to be addressed, and I will document them,” this is a bleak conclusion, indeed.

If you want a whole stack of primary research documents to work along with me, I can recommend Mark Jacobson’s extensive list of papers. They are not all about nuclear, but a large fraction of them have considered the implications of a range of different energy options. For a weighty and comprehensive summary, you may want his 26 page “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security.” (Link to page on which the PDF and supplemental material, including his 9-page Scientific American article (pdf), can be obtained.)

If you would rather wait a few weeks, I should have something that summarizes only the nuclear components by the end of May.

***

In the meantime, I would like to propose a non-technological solution to much of our energy crisis: slowing down. This is not merely radical in our culture; it is heretical. The entire economy is built upon growth, and, by extension, speeding up. We must earn more, spend more, go faster, because we could be overtaken by the competition at any time. If you aren’t available to answer your email at 10 at night, you just might be replaced by somebody who is. You need that Blackberry, cell phone, iPad, daytimer, second car, bigger house, nicer clothes, more money than you made last year because if you don’t keep going forward, further, faster, you will be left behind. And we know what happens to the left behind; they become poor, and left out, and die friendless and alone under a bridge… come up gasping for air after that breathless rush from success to homelessness, and vow to work more, and harder, and longer, and anything just to keep from falling behind!

Or take a deep breath and pause. Maybe something else is possible. Maybe, just maybe, this isn’t the only story. Maybe, just maybe, there are other possibilities. Maybe there are other people, making different choices, making something other than speed their highest calling. Maybe. Look around.

Maybe somebody builds a bicycle car, and maybe some people use it to commute to work. Maybe people have purchased smaller houses, scaled back intentionally, moved to the country, or the suburbs, or the city, and started growing food. Maybe some people are choosing to slow down. Maybe you could too.

And even, maybe, if a bunch of us did it together, it would be safe to drive our bicycle cars on the roads, because the roads would slow down, people would drive less, and we would use less energy. Maybe we wouldn’t need as many gadgets to manage our time, because we would have more time in which to manage. Maybe we could stop over-programming our children because we wouldn’t be afraid that they would be left behind before they even got out of elementary school. And maybe, if a lot of us slowed down all together, instead of races (to the top, or the bottom) we could have lives.

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Beauty All the Way Down

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Seonaid

This is a post about structures. It is a post about illusions. It is a post about what lies beneath the apparent beauty of our privileged culture, and what else might be possible. It is a post about beauty as a way out of our current crises.

By Hamachidori (Own work) via Wikimedia commons

What is in a rose? This flower that we give as a sign of our love is now grown in hothouses all around the world, sprayed with toxic chemicals, and flown in for Valentine’s day through a vast network of night-flights. There is beauty in the action, there is beauty in the flower, but the beauty is tainted by the structure it rests on. Beneath the rose, there is something not-beautiful.

In the society we live in today, this is the nature of beauty: it is on the surface, and we have been taught to look away, not to consider what lies beneath. Consider the traditional family dinner: the roast on the table, potatoes, a starchy vegetable of some sort, and a lovely rich dessert. What could be a more pure offering of love? Except that over the years in the pursuit of efficiency, all the paths to our table have become contaminated with compromises made on our behalf that add up to a situation we would not have chosen. Did we choose cows standing shoulder to shoulder, fed grain instead of grass, leading to zoonotic diseases, antibiotic resistance, and e-coli 0157? Did we choose salmonella in our greens,  persistent organic pollutants in our breast milk, early puberty, and poverty-stricken migrant labourers kept in locked compounds between shifts? Or are we just trying to feed our families, have a good dinner conversation, and enjoy something wonderful for dessert, possibly with a nice glass of wine or cup of coffee?

It shouldn’t be this hard. We shouldn’t have to look away from reality to be comfortable with our lives. And we shouldn’t have to bow out of society to be able to do the right thing.

Now and again (a couple of times a week) I see somebody triumphantly mocking a blogger or writer who is trying to live a more ethical or greener lifestyle: “Ha! Do you still drive a car? Did you purchase your shoes? Then you’re entirely enmeshed in this structure, you hypocrite! Give up, there is no other way. Plastics rule the world! Bow to our corporate overlords!” (or something to that effect… the most recent one was a relatively mild explanation of how litterers provide employment for the people who have to clean up after them, so they shouldn’t be considered a problem.)

And I find myself thinking, “That. Right there. That’s the problem.” It is not whether we should eat vegan or omnivore, or whether we should dress in new organic cotton (which displaced food crops in a food-insecure part of the world) or recycled synthetics (which are plastic). It is not that we have to choose between organic and local, stainless steel or glass, low VOC or milk paint. It is that the very idea of “choice” that is supposed to be part of this imaginary free market is ludicrous: in so many cases, we have nothing to choose amongst but “less bad” offerings. The system itself is the problem, not the individual components of it, and certainly not the choices we make in good conscience, trying to do the best we can. We need a new system. And the new system has to include a different aesthetic. It has to hold up to scrutiny. It has to be something that we wouldn’t be embarrassed to explain to our children.

Make no mistake: efficiency is an aesthetic choice. We have made efficiency our highest priority, and have allowed it to trump kindness, adequate nutrition, meaningful work, clean air and water, peace, and beauty. It is the foundation of our system, and it leads logically to exactly the crises we are in. We do not have economies of scale; we passed those long ago, probably around the time that our fields became so big that the bees couldn’t fly to the middle of them. What we have instead are economies of externalization. Things are not affordable (for us) because they are cheap to produce in such massive quantities. They are affordable because somebody else is picking up the tab. Whether it is the farmer who takes all the risk and barely squeaks out a profit from 500 dairy cows, or the dead zone off the coast from the river runoff, and the fishers who can no longer fish there, the urban peasant who moved to a slum for a better life because their land was sold off to grow cash crops, or the species of orchid that went extinct when that towering giant in the rainforest was cut: the costs are there. We just aren’t paying them. Except in the dis-ease that we must live with every moment of our lives, because we know that we must never, never look beneath the covers, for fear of what we must find there.

So. I call for a new aesthetic. One in which our decisions are checked against their consequences by the system as a whole, not by each of us struggling to make good choices in the face of impossible, misleading, or absent information. One in which I can put things on my table, and on my walls, without having to lie to my children about who suffered to bring it to us. One in which I can point to beauty, all the way down.

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A Litany for Agnostics

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Seonaid

In the beginning…

We start as a DNA blueprint, a set of instructions for how to construct the magic of consciousness from nothing more than the molecules that surround us.

The environment is not just a soup that we swim in. It’s what we are made of. We are built entirely from materials that we eat, drink, and breathe. There is no world Out There, and In Here, because we are entirely permeable. The environment flows through us, day after day, for as long as we live.

***

Once upon a time, there were not so many people. There were… oh… tens of millions of us. And when our communities were small and local, we could get away with things. If we overfished in a particular place, we could move somewhere else. The rivers carried our wastes away, and we never had to worry about it again. If the soil became depleted we could till new soil; hard work, but feasible. And our impact was limited by the hours in the day, the years in a lifetime, and the muscles on our backs. Life may have been nasty, brutish, and short (although there is still some debate about that), but we lived in the world as a part of it. And when we didn’t, or when the world around us was no longer able to support us for reasons of its own, there was resilience, migration, and hard work. Or extirpation.

Eventually, we grew, and we grew, and we covered most of the surface of the earth. And there were, for a long time, hundreds of millions of us. And our communities were still small (ish) and local (ish), and we could still get away with things, but not as much. If we overfished, or depleted our soil, or rendered our drinking water unsafe, there weren’t so many options. To move somewhere else, we had to displace or conquer somebody who was there already. And it didn’t always work. And sometimes civilizations collapsed under the weight of their own effluent, and sometimes they simply lost out to a change in the weather that didn’t leave them an escape path, and sometimes they expanded and expanded and expanded until they took over vast swathes of the world that had already been in use by other civilizations. And the process was horrific, and innumerable lives were lost in the pursuit of this goal, and stories were erased, and libraries were burned, and species vanished before they were even described.

And still we grew. And as we grew, we became clever in the ways of making life more comfortable. We learned to burn things, and mine things, and build things, and more things, and cheaper things, and things that didn’t need hands to touch them at all. We didn’t want to go back to nasty, brutish, and short, and we didn’t want our civilization to be overrun by another, and we (who had expanded and expanded and expanded) built technologies to ensure that we would never again have to contract, and we considered contraction a mark of failure, and we have been breathing in and growing and growing for generations…

And now, there is nowhere to go. There is no downriver to send things, because there is somebody upriver, and there are somebodies downriver, and there is an ocean and even the ocean cannot absorb the river of toxins we have learned to loose upon the world. And still we grow. And even though the message has been floating around as an undercurrent in the culture for generations, now… we don’t know how to stop.

***

In the Norse legends, there is a wolf named Fenrir. The Fenris wolf of prophesy is destined to consume the world. Because of this, and for the safety of all, the wolf was bound, through trickery and sacrifice of the gods.

In my nightmares, I fear that this prophesy, as all prophecies in all stories through time, cannot be escaped… that this myth, like all others, contains seeds of truth, wisdom cloaked in metaphor and mystery, but lost in translation. I fear (in my dark times) that he has slipped his bounds, unnoticed, and wanders the world whispering of want, of hopelessness, of personal misery. That his great accomplishment is to keep us separate from the world around us, to maintain the illusion that we can keep ourselves safe while destroying the very fabric of life itself.

And then I think, “Poor wolf, in a cattle culture, to be forced to bear our fears of appetite and hunger.”

***

We, who are caught up in the dominant narrative, need to tell a different story. We need to learn new ways of being in the world, ways that allow us to be a part of, not separate from. Each of us individually has our part to play, but it is the story itself that needs retelling. Some things need to become inconceivable, unfathomable, products of a bygone age when we were able to think of ourselves as purely mechanical, as baffling as raw sewage in the streets of London. Some other things need to become second nature, relearned after generations of forgetting, reintegrated into our practices: Keep an eye on the weather, and the light, and the seasons. Don’t poison the water source. Save the best seed for planting. Clean up after yourself. Don’t take more than your share. Be kind to your neighbours, even the green ones, even the ones with scales, and even the creepy-crawlies. They are part of the great making.

But this, most of all, we need to remember: We are made of the earth, and the air, and the water. We are the stuff of stars, and will someday rejoin them. Oh, pattern of consciousness, preserve this gift for the future. It is billions of years in the making, and not ours to throw away in fear.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: , , , , | 7 Comments »

Morning with The Dilettante

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Seonaid

I am gazing out the window at my cat. He is doing something in the snow. Sniffing, investigating. He sits and stares across the river. I wonder. How does he decide what to do next? How does he choose which scent to indulge, follow, investigate? Can he be said to have will?

I turn to my husband and we both start speaking at once:

“The real tragedy of consciousness…” I begin.

“Do you want me to…” he starts.

“Sorry, what?”

“Eggs. Do you want some?”

“Oh. No, thanks.”

“What were you saying?”

“I said, the real tragedy of consciousness is…” He interrupts.

“Have you been reading German philosophers again?!?”

I look down, contrite. “Schopenhauer,” I confess.

“Well, stop it!”

There is a pause. I put forth the subject once more: “Can I at least tell you about the tragedy of consciousness and why I can’t be my cat?”

“Oh, I suppose,” he says. ” But I think you should drink your coffee first.”

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: , , | 9 Comments »

Ten Fundamentals

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Seonaid

Welcome to the March Carnival of Natural Parenting: Natural Parenting Top 10 Lists

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have shared Top 10 lists on a wide variety of aspects of attachment parenting and natural living. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

***


I have a friend who asks me hard questions. It’s part of what ties our friendship together across the years and the miles: we go on long drives and she asks me hard questions. What is fundamental? How do you know what is true? What do you know? It’s great to have a friend like that, because it keeps me honest.

Being childfree herself, she is fiercely committed to my children, who are part of her hope for the future. So, partly in the vein of Extreme Philosophy, partly to feed the Meta Monster, and partly for CL, here is my list of ten things I want my children to believe about the world that are the foundation of why I parent live this way.

Ten Things I Want My Children to Believe

  1. That the world is basically safe
    I know that this is not true for all places and all times. But where we live, you can drink the tap water, you can play in the yard, you can go for a walk. There are germs, but they are not lurking under every passing bush or on every surface of every public space. There are coyotes and foxes in the forest, and there is a river at the end of the driveway. There are cars to be avoided. But these are not reasons to stay inside, and they are not things to fear. They are risks to be mitigated.
  2. That people can be trusted
    “People” starts with their parents. This means that I need to become a trustworthy person, and keep working on my own stuff. It also means that I surround them with trustworthy and healthy people who will reinforce their strengths. This has partly meant seeking out the natural parenting community here, but it has also meant maintaining strong friendships with chosen family, those people who care for my children as if they were blood. Once again, I’m not naive. I know that not all people are worthy of trust, and I am teaching my children about boundaries and autonomy. I’m just avoiding that “dog eat dog” worldview that holds us back from cooperating enough to accomplish necessary change.
  3. That they are capable
    Human beings learn stuff. That’s what they do. Kids will become fully functional adults, with talents, and skills, and knowledge, and the ability to get through the world, as long as we don’t get in their way. My job is to make sure that they have access to the opportunities and resources that they need. Sometimes that involves classes, sometimes it involves reminders to practice things that they care about, and sometimes it involves giving them enough help that they can dig themselves out of a hole. But I can’t rescue them; they need to learn to rescue themselves, because I won’t always be there. And I can’t push them to reach their greatest potential, because I’m outside them, and I don’t actually know what that is. But they do, somewhere deep inside, and I want them to learn to trust that.
  4. The world is sacred and life is precious
    Sometimes, I am overwhelmed by this one, because it seems to be at odds with everything our culture holds to be true. I can’t make sense of most of the choices our systems lead to, but if we don’t reintegrate this, we will never make changes.
  5. That other people are as important as they are
    When I was calling this list out to my husband, our son came past and said, “You mean each person, right. Not all 7 billion other people are as important as me. Because that would be pretty silly, dividing my worth among 7 billion other people.” So I’ll let him have the word on this one.
  6. That they are as important as other people
    It would be very easy to let the needs of 7 billion other people overwhelm you. But you aren’t really dealing with 7 billion other people. You are always dealing with one other person. And so I try to help them deal with the world one human interaction at a time.
  7. Feminism is still necessary
    OK. My daughter wants to be a Mom when she grows up. And my youngest son trashes things just by picking them up too forcefully. And maybe I abandoned my career just when it was starting to look promising. Twice. I’m still not going to entertain any worldview that assumes that I am lesser because I happened to be born with a uterus. Nor am I willing to accept that mothering is less important work just because it is ubiquitous.
  8. It’s OK to ask for what you want
    Not only that, it is encouraged. Articulate. Be clear. Please, please, don’t ask me to guess why you are standing in front of me twisting your hands and murmuring “um…” Tell me what it is that you are after, because everything flows better when the communication is clear. Also, if you don’t ask for what you want, you are not as likely to get it.
  9. Nobody owes you a yes
    Oh, this was hard. Early on, we were working on not screaming, calming down, and asking politely. Then one night, my (then) 18-month old child, who was precociously verbal, said, “I calmed down. I calmed down.” And I almost cried, because I had to say to him, “Oh, sweetie. You worked so hard at calming down. But I still can’t give you what you asked for. Sometimes the answer is just No.” I felt awful. I don’t remember what it was, and I don’t remember the reason (I think we were in the car and he wanted something that was at home) but I remember the feeling that I had betrayed him. It wasn’t because the answer was no. It was because I hadn’t thought about that possibility. In retrospect, I can say that I was being unfair to myself, since he was about a year ahead of schedule and I hadn’t prepared myself for that possibility, either.
  10. Life is better when it is generously peppered with laughter
    Reading this list, it would be easy to imagine that our house was earnest beyond all belief. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We find ourselves laughing until the tears stream down our faces, gasping for breath. We get great pleasure from the world around us, the music we make with friends, and the food we grow and share. But it is the laughter that carries us through when I don’t believe.

Most of the things on this list are things that I only “think.” I haven’t integrated them into my core, and I still have to check my responses. I still have fears of things that I know rationally are not all that dangerous. I still want the people I love to conform to my expectations so that I don’t have to deal with disappointment. I still hiss at my children when I am frustrated, and scream when I get angry, and cry over the state of the world. But what I do believe is that the world will only get better if the next generation expects it to. So I am doing what I can to contribute to that.

And this is why.

***

Carnival of Natural Parenting -- Hobo Mama and Code Name: MamaVisit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!

Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

Filed under: Family, WorldView | Tagged: , , , , | 21 Comments »

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