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As Well As

Do it
as well as
ever you can

allow others
to do as well as
ever they can

a living interface
is as difficult as
difficult can be

serving self
by serving others
is counter-intuitive

domination
comes easily
as dominion

it’s me
and everything else
a wall never broken

maybe someday
a pale blue dot
may shift walls

until great whenever
our best bet
honors others

no over-functioning
will resolve
favorably

Action

Action on behalf of life transforms both and actor and the recipient. Once any two parts of a system meet, a reciprocity is set up that also affects third and fourth parts because everything is connected even more deeply than gravity.

Such reciprocity requires a feedback loop if it is to lead to any best intention coming to pass. Without such an integrated response system, any action intended for good would be blind to actual consequences. Without feedback, there is only projection to go on. Essentially this projection says, “I intend good, therefore what I do is good.”

If an actor is serious, they engage the character they are going to enflesh. Without a coming to the table or stage to explore the beginning state of their relationship, the most facile of presentations will be declared “genius” by its portrayer. Without an on-going relationship between the actor and character, the play will have a short run. The most engaging character can’t redeem an incurious actor.

This beginning engagement is a step often skipped when the setting is not a drama about a character we empathize with and learn from. Suppose a manager or president is incurious about the health of employees or citizens because their bottom-line requires no brooking of maximum profit in the shortest amount of time. In that case, the physical, emotional, and psychological harm done to flesh-and-blood people by a distant decider will mean the company or nation will have a shorter run than might have been expected.

Sometimes all concerned are initially engaged, but over time feedback becomes irrelevant to those with the most power, even if gasped aloud, “I can’t breathe.” This is the fault of the decision-maker for thinking their knowledge, profit, and decision-making is more important than any other.

This is a good day to consider the limitation of one-sided intention and the humility of receiving feedback. Pay particular attention to the importance of negative feedback that will require energy to again modify your intention according to the reality of the life of another person and the earth—to exchange experiences, to engage basic empathy.

Fantastic

soon it’s going to rain
I can feel it
fantastic

a breeze kicks up
the front arrives
moving

a tip and a tap
on the canopy
polite

we’d like to come in
will you welcome
run

we’ll come anyway
will you stay
brave

a change in the wind
a deluge begins
flood

a moment-ago’s tension
swept aside
reperspectivized

branch bending breaking
root strengthening
both

all things considered
root and branch
yes

face up
storm
thanks

soon it’ll rain again
a soothing mist
fantastic

Let’s Go

Scene: Garden of Gethsemane.
Time: Jesus having prayed multiple times, and 11 disciples roused from sleep.
Context: Judas and arriving crowd

Jesus says to the disciples, “Rise! Let’s go. The one handing me over has arrived.”

Attentive listeners may remember back to Mark, Chapter 1. Jesus has held a healing party hosted by the unnamed mother-in-law of Peter. After the party, the disciples fall asleep and, upon rising, seek out a missing Jesus.

Jesus, found at prayer and implored to go back to Capernaum, says, “Let’s go.” He clarifies that means to travel on to next cities for his Galilean task is to mutter about and model a different authority base for human politicking.

What is less clear in the Jerusalem moment is whether “Let’s go,” is away from Judas (back to the road beyond Galilee) or toward a different destination (finding a way back to Galilee through the leadership of Judas and the decisions of Caiaphas and Pilate – the practical effect of death and resurrection).

The relatively straight-forward direction, “Let’s go,” is far more ambivalent than our tendency to have it only be a call to action—like riding off in all directions at once.

At first, it means, “Let’s go further.” In the end, it means, “Let’s go deeper.”

This distinction can also apply to our current life-stage or state-of-current-affairs.

What does it means to go further than where we’ve come to?
What does it mean to go deeper into the place we are?

Both questions are important. Even more important is which is claiming more of our attention.

Both questions have personal and larger-community/creation components. Both questions dance the other’s response. We don’t go further without first going deeper, and deeper is not open to us without being stretched further. Enjoy and commit to where you are on the dance floor, knowing you’ll soon be changing partners.

Settled Enough

never never
do we know
where meaning
is invested
where we
in turn
will be
called planted
to transform
elements to energy
energy to element
finding larger
heritage horizons
older than DNA
to track
our track
and larger
dream times
newer than new
pointing beyond
false limits
without knowing
good from evil
only within
without taking
for granted
never knowing
always called
always calling
settle enough

Timeline

Today saw progress in a book publishing project. I’ve been working with Julie Todd to revise and print her Ph.D. dissertation. The title will be Struggling with (Non)violence. The strength of the book is its base of interviews with 12 scholar-activists about their experience with movements intended to redeem people facing direct, structural, and cultural violence. 

I look forward to announcing the book’s availability before the end of the month.

I usually treat myself to a new fountain pen at the end of a major project such as this one. After much deliberation, it came down to two pens calling me to choose them. With much hemming and hawing, I decided on a wine-red President from my usual Japanese pen company, Platinum. The best price was by a reputable eBay seller who had several. Last week I noted they were down to one and so I ordered it ahead of project completion. The dealer was in Japan, and they advertised the pen would arrive by September 3. That was after the expected book release days, so I ordered it on Wednesday of last week. 

The next day I received a notice that delivery was expected in only two weeks, instead of a month.

The next day after that, Friday, I received an email that indicated the pen would be delivered by the end of that day.

In 48 hours, I went from a vague sense a desired pen would arrive in a leisurely time, appropriate to the completion of the book project, to now writing with the pen inked with Monteverde Napa Burgundy.

Pandemics upset social relationships. Current federal politics upset social contracts. Jet travel upsets personal timelines.

Now it is time to double down on slow breathing and support of social movements that include rather than exclude. If a pen can arrive in Wisconsin from Japan in 2 days, we can provide basic care for people!

Puzzled

room by room
a mind’s archive
is searched

in vain it seems
that niggling bit
has hidden well

in the end
the search ends
we look around

what a treasure
has accumulated
without an accounting

rooms float by
entering us
not us them

we note motes
of dusty memory
and smile

when from nowhere
to our wandering eye
appears our bit

bigger than life
yearning for us
as we for it

together again
we dance
a puzzle together

Generally Speaking

Of course, the course of human events is uneven. Simply consider the course of any life, yours, for example, or mine. Review any picture from your babyhood, youth, or adolescence. What was their top joy? Their greatest fear? What were they learning that they never were able to articulate?

The distance between then and now is significant. In most ways, there is no bridging it. Then is still then – as implacably as now is still now. It is not that linkages are missing, but the fullness of the context and the limit of apprehending it.

What it meant, once upon a time, to establish a “common defense” alongside a “general welfare” has unraveled. Who were we when “man” meant all people? In an inflated context, with a restricted ability to engage it, we thought our rebalanced revolution would survive its time—that language would not change; that denotation would forever carry the same order of connotation we found so obvious.

Today we can no more even see the printed tension holding defense and welfare in an ongoing marriage dance than we can intuit a day in the life of our 6-year-old ancestor.

In terms of the words, our blindness comes not at the level of “defense” and “welfare.” We know them both in their individuality but not in their relationship to one another. Today they stand in opposition to one another. This distancing is not something inherent in them but because their descriptors have been left behind.

“Common” defense has become a defense of capital and those who have the most of it. “General” no longer speaks of interdependence between all the different gifts people hold, but the independence of what is best for me. What is best for others is received as an intolerable restrain on what is available for me. I must put up a defense against their welfare.

The current revolution needs to establish a defense against capitalism and a concern for the welfare of those it leaves behind.

Speaking-for

Speaking for the trees is a Lorax’s joy.

The speaking, itself, is not a joy. Here there are some magical moments of inspired phrases filled with internal rhyme. When they fall out of our mouth and into our ear, we are encouraged. What might be our best conversional line is, first and foremost, energy to continue speaking. It is food for the movement when sustaining responses are few and far between. Without this gratification, our eyes cloud over and our ears are drawn to entertainment—we lose vision and understanding and fade away.

Speaking-for is difficult because it calls us to listen even more deeply, lest we begin to speak “as” rather than “for.” That small shift in orientation is critical, for we are a mistake-ready-to-be-made when we slide into the hypocritical space of mistaking ourself to be other than we are.

Speaking-for not only brings a reliance on only speaking what we know, devoid of the temptation to speculate just a wee bit. Sticking to fact and truth is work, for we so want to gossip and present ourselves as a hero (inclusively, he-ro and her-o). A proof is still a proof, and all work needs to be shown. Diligence is not usually included in the first-line virtues.

Speaking-for puts us in conflictual settings. There is no way to reliably confront those who speak so assuredly about their supposition of the reality of another’s life. Yet, speaking-for is a vocation ready to be in danger-territory by overstimulating those with kneed-jerk answers to questions life doesn’t ask. Speaking-for increases our vulnerability. Trolls abound, and executioners may weep, but they execute, nonetheless.

Speaking-for trees is Lorax work. At question is who and what I am speaking-for, you are speaking-for. To be effective, it is helpful for most folks to not speak-for more than two specifics. Blessings on discerning which voice to follow by putting it in your mouth.