Repost: We cannot go backward

Photo by Todd Robertson

Update: 5 years after this post, after Charlottesville, and hate still rises, ugly and foul. I still hold the question: what is my role in helping to end this virus of hate?

I came of age on the edge of darkness. My senior year in high school was spent in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where I saw “whites only” drinking fountains and there were no black faces in my school. I went to college in Oklahoma and heard tales of black students having to sit in a roped off area of the law school classes. In the dorms, we had long conversations about whether or not we would want to swim in the same pool with “them." At my first "real" job, I was shunned because I went to break with the only black person in the all-women department, supervised by, of course, a man.

I didn’t grow up in a particularly progressive family, but it wasn’t filled with hate. When I looked at the photos from the Charlottesville rally, what struck me was the angry hate that filled the faces of the young, white men. What happened to them? How did they get to a place of such deep hatred, teetering on the edge of violence?

It reminded me of a time in the early 1990s when I visited the compound of the Aryan Nations, a white supremacist group led by Richard Butler from his compound outside Hayden, Idaho. I was writing a novel about white supremacists and, at the time, the Aryan Nations was a well-known terrorist group. I wanted to see for myself what they looked like and what they said in a one-to-one conversation. I was surprised when they granted me an interview. I was a nobody from no where.

When I drove into the compound in my tiny rental car, two old dogs came up to the car, tails wagging, which somewhat relieved the pounding of my heart. At least the dogs were friendly.

The compound had a rural, run down look: worn wooden buildings, people sitting in chairs on a long front porch. I noticed two, tow-headed children coloring on the porch steps. I could have been visiting my grandparents.

Butler’s office was a make-do metal building overflowing with papers, pictures of Hitler, swastikas and t-shirts for the believers. Butler was in his mid-70s and was kindly enough as he began to spew a well-rehearsed stream of how white people are threatened and have to stand up for themselves. He had heard all of my questions before. His answers were ready and pat so he didn't mind that I was recording them.

After about an hour of his disturbing monologue, I left. As I walked to my car, I glanced over at the children and could see what they were coloring: swastikas. That image of those young, innocent children coloring a symbol of hate shocked my system. I managed to get my car started and leave property, then stopped and wept and still tear up thinking about them. That was about 25 years ago. Were they part of the torch-carrying crowd in Charlottesville? 

When Jimmy Fallon said in his powerful message, “We cannot go backward,” it made me weep again. Weep for the hard-earned progress made over the past few decades, when all it took was one man with no moral compass to puncture the apparently unhealed wound underlying that progress.

We have much work to do. We cannot go backwards. However, those of us who believe in love, have to find a way to connect with those who hate. It reminds me of Edward Markham's poem Outwitted:

He drew a circle that shut me out,

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But, love and I had the wit to win.

We drew a circle and took him in!

We cannot go backwards. We have to draw a bigger circle. Each one of us who believes in love has to try to pass that love along to those who may have literally spent their childhoods amidst hate. Last year's election separated us into camps, divided friends and families as we drew a line in the sand and defended our positions, creating "them" and "us."

We cannot go backwards. Gandhi said, "We have to be the change we want to see in the world." We must have the "wit to win."

If we want to see a world of love, we have to BE love. Maybe it's time to refriend the people we've unfriended on Facebook. Maybe we can't understand their political position, but each one of them is a person: a mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son. Each of them is carrying wounds that cannot be seen, facing fears that darken their days.

If we can't love them, how can we expect those young men in Charlottesville to put down their torches?

We cannot go backwards.

Many years ago I was at a spirituality in business conference in Puerto Vallarta. During a break I was walking down the sidewalk and a young man was walking toward me focused on something in his hands. The sidewalk was narrow and we were on a collision course. Suddenly, the thought came to me: He with the most awareness has to be the one that moves. Of course, I just stepped aside and he moved on unaware of the life lesson he had just provided.

Those of us who know and believe in love are aware of its importance and power. We have to be the ones making the first move. We don't have to accept or condone their hatred or positions, but we do need to love the person.

We cannot go backwards.

Photo Credit: The photo above comes from a newspaper article taken during a Klan march in Gainesville, Ga., by photographer Todd Robertson on Saturday, September 5, 1992.

Love. Nothing else lasts.

Only Love

Maria Shriver in her Sunday Paper, quotes a response from one of her friend/readers to a column she wrote about AI.

"Maria,” Tom wrote, “Many people seek innovations that will change the world (ie. AI). Here is an innovation that will change us: answering ill will with good will, and absorbing pain without passing it on. All our inventing and discovering and experimenting and exploring will lead us back to this: the greatest human achievement is the power of love. No matter what.”

“There is really only one enduring purpose of life, and that’s love,” he continued.

“We can have thousands of paths to love, but we know it means to find a way to remove the hateful thoughts from our heads. It means bringing down the barriers that separate us. It means giving up the identities that pit us against each other. It means seeing the dignity in each human being and letting that divine insight drive the way we organize our systems.

“Love. Nothing else lasts.”

“So, how do we assess ChatGPT?” he asked. “Is it something that helps people achieve love? Can it help spread the effects of love? If not, then it's just the result of the restless mind of humanity, which, when it confronts the deepest riddles and challenges of life, gives up and—lying to itself about the significance of its quest—takes refuge in clever puzzles and cute stunts that do nothing to ease suffering or spread love, but instead give the restless, addictive mind a buzz, which tricks us into thinking we're on the right track.

“So, to the question, will AI replace us? Well, it may displace millions from their work, and that should be a profound concern, but it will not displace a single human being from their true purpose, which is to find a way to break through our divisions and become one with each other in love. Because that original and primordial human challenge is a battle that can only be won in the dark and terrifying chambers of the human mind, where we confront and defeat fear. And ChapGPT is not a tool that can help us in that quest. It’s just another artifact produced by our habit of fleeing the quest."

Review: The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi by Elif Shafak

"Into the Unknown"

Harika!*

Have you ever started a book, which, from the first word, you didn’t want it to end? A book that you wanted to read as slowly as possible, savoring every word? A book that you knew was more than just a story, more than just black words on a white page? This is one of those.

I have to admit the recommendation from my sister-from-another-mother clued me in to the possibilities of this book, but the first words enchanted me and offered me a reflecting pool on my own life. From the beginning I knew reading this book was going to be a journey.

Many long years ago as a sophomore in college, I read a short story. Although the title and author are lost in time, the insight it gave me changed my life. All I remember about the story is that some guys are sitting around a campfire and one of them explains that The Bible could be condensed to one word: Love. That story, that one insight, stripped away my need for religious dogma and political debate and gave me a one-word rudder for my life.

While my skill at wielding this rudder through the journey of my life has been less than expert, I always know what I’m trying to do. I even announced it at the end of a workshop decades ago. When asked to state our after-workshop intention, I stood, and with my introvert-heart pounding, announced that I wanted to “BE love."

But, time and life keep rolling along, picking up sand and pebbles and boulders until it’s a muddy, frothy flow and clarity is lost. Moving to Mexico was like jumping out of the river onto the bank of a small island away from distractions and expectations.

At first it felt wrong to just be sitting on the sideline as the river rushed on without me. How could I just do nothing when there were so many problems and issues, opportunities and possibilities swimming past me? Slowly I found myself breathing deeply, wrapping my arms around my knees and turning my face to the sun, just being alive and unencumbered.

And then, the book arrived. It’s an interesting story by a Turkish writer. An ordinary woman in a tired marriage is assigned a book to review as part of her editing job. The story takes her back centuries, to the time when a highly educated and revered Islamic scholar meets an itinerant dervish, a meeting that breaks open the scholar’s heart, freeing the poet within. It is the story of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz. It is a story of love, the power of love, the mystic power of relationship to break us open.

In my vertigo, in my dizziness, in my drunken haze,

whirling and dancing like a spinning wheel,

I saw myself as the source of existence,

I was there at the beginning and I was the spirit of love.

  -- Rumi

In January, 2011, I did a blog celebration of Rumi with 31 days of Rumi’s poetry as read by Coleman Barks with his incredible voice and deep connection with the spirit of Rumi. (For an index of that series click here: http://www.joycewycoff.com/p/blog-page.html)

Now, this book calls me back to Rumi and to my determination to “Be Love.” Here in this sheltered village on a peaceful lake, maybe I will be guided to discover what that truly means. As this journey opens up, the recent piece of art which I thought was about a young woman entering into the unknown world of adulthood takes on a new meaning. Deep within all of us there is a spirit who is always entering into the unknown, still somewhat hesitant, glancing back, wondering if the watching world will judge us, wondering if we are up to the trials ahead. Are we good enough? Strong enough? Beautiful enough? 

This book reminds me through the forty rules of love that all we truly need is to love enough.

• An amazon.com review of this book from reviewer EEE included this word, which means "wonderful." I have decided to adopt it.

The Tenacious Adventure

Tenacity

As the gentle rain falls, I wonder how many of the world’s great thoughts (as well as the crazy, subversive and slip-shod ones) were born on such days. This morning as I negotiated the territory between what I was supposed to do and what I wanted to do, I blamed the rain when "want" triumphed over "should."  In that space, the following poetic rendition of the recent past was born.

The Missing Piece

I chose to love a pie-shaped man with one piece missing.

His missing piece isn’t so big, I thought.

And the rest of him is sweet.

Together we can blend a new treat.

But my pie-shaped-man-with-one-piece-missing

Saw my own missing piece and thought it two.

Not sweet enough, I heard him say,

Just not enough, as he walked away.

The moral of this tale: Each of us has one piece missing,

Some even more. All of us, alone, alone-ly, incomplete.

To love is an every day choice to make,

Not a one-time, blue-ribbon pie to bake.

***

Shortly after that outpouring, I found solace in one of my favorite places … BrainPickings, a joyful exploration of all things creative. It started with a piece from Erich Fromm’s Art of Loving and then progressed to French philosopher, Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love. It was in Badiou’s piece that I found a profound insight.

He says:

Love… is a quest for truth… truth in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.

We shouldn’t underestimate the power love possesses to slice diagonally through the most powerful oppositions and radical separations. The encounter between two differences is an event, is contingent and disconcerting… On the basis of this event, love can start and flourish. It is the first, absolutely essential point. This surprise unleashes a process that is basically an experience of getting to know the world. Love isn’t simply about two people meeting and their inward-looking relationship: it is a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two.

Love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts. We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.

 I am, perhaps, wont to oversimplify, but, I read this as: it’s only when things get “bad,” that there is the opportunity for real “good." When we can face our differences and come to know and appreciate the person beneath the differences, we develop a new perspective and come into the fullness of Love.

Sounds simple, huh?

Badiou: https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/26/alain-badiou-in-praise-of-love/?mc_cid=f0b586169c&mc_eid=11bb181576

Fromm: https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/29/the-art-of-loving-erich-fromm/

Learning to Live Zygert

My friend Jerry McNellis is dying. Before, he leaves, however, he has started a new school. I thought when I first learned that he had brain cancer that he would teach us more about dying, however, it turns out that what he’s teaching is how to live, live until the moment when life is no longer an option.

Jerry has always been a teacher … his subjects were creativity and collaboration and his students were business teams. In all of his workshops, though, the real lesson was Jerry and his indomitable approach to life. When there were two ways of doing something, he automatically had a third and fourth way; out of black and white, he could summon a rainbow.

Jerry probably came by much of his unique approach naturally; however, the Universe gave him an additional push when he contracted polio as a toddler. When he came home after months in the hospital, his incredible mother told everyone “Don’t pick him up.” She wanted him to be strong and learn to do things for himself. He did. In spite of his distressed body, he played football, climbed trees (and fell out), and made a device that allowed him to ice skate.

He developed a team creativity process known as Compression Planning and taught thousands of people how to work together more effectively. I shouldn’t have been surprised when we talked today … but I was ... to learn that he had invented a new word: zygert, which he defined as "focusing on something I love with someone I love.” His goal is to live zygert until his last breath and I signed up as his always-willing student.

Jerry is having the incredible experience of knowing he’s dying but being without pain. He is planning his family and friends reunion (funeral), complete with comic relief, and having deep conversations with people he cares about. As we were talking he explained that he is only interested in zygert conversations and, that if I wanted to talk about California politics, he would have to hang up. Of course, that’s the last thing I wanted to talk about, so we continued.

He described this time as being like standing under Niagra Falls being showered with blessings as he hears from friends from as far back as grade school and gets the chance to tell them how much they have meant to him as well as hearing what he has meant to them. When he asked a noted researcher and pathologist what he would do if he had brain cancer, he said the “expert” said, “I would read all the alternatives, study the journals, talk to the experts … and then I would forget it all and focus on the two or three projects I most cared about and spend time with the people I love being with.” 

"Every morning," Jerry said, “I wake up in gratitude just to be alive one more day to experience all the attention I’m getting. It’s been a time of love to the extreme and it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have cancer. I am actually thankful for this big chunk of cancer in my brain.”

When someone asked Jerry for advice, he said there was just one thing. “There is one thing I wish I had done more of," he said, “I wish I had picked up the phone more often and told people that I really appreciated them. Told them 'I really love you’ … just for the sake of it not because of any holiday or event. I wish I had done a lot more of that."

One of his biggest lessons and challenges, he said, was accepting this outpouring of love and accepting being cared for by family and friends. “At first,” he said, “I had a hard time accepting help … I called it babysitting until I realized it was hurting my children’s feelings when I said that. Now I realize that they are taking care of me because they love me."

“My mom always said, ‘Don’t pick him up.’ Now, I realize it’s time accept help, to let people pick me up."

Jerry’s school of zygert is big enough for all of us … we just need to "focus on something we love with someone we love” and tell more people how much we care about them. It sounds so simple … Jerry reminds us not to forget.

Día de los Vivos

Yesterday a friend left the planet, suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving a new, loving relationship, a large, loving family and a lot of bewildered friends and acquaintances who cared about her. What do you do when someone just ups and leaves without saying goodbye or giving any notice of their departure? No illness, no accident to account for their abrupt departure, no note of intention. Just gone.

My friend, who would actually fall into the category of fond acquaintances, was found yesterday morning sitting in her chair, gone. Perhaps a heart attack. She was a lovely, caring and kind woman. If she had known she was going, she would have left a note or reached out to tell someone what was happening. She must have “died peacefully,” but we don’t know. Her loving partner was sleeping and the rest of us were in our own worlds, unaware of what there was no way to be aware of.

What do you do when someone goes away and you know they won’t be back, that you won’t have a chance to say anything that was left unsaid. What do you do with the hole that their going leaves? How do you avoid feeling like swiss cheese in this time of life when more and more people are leaving? 

Somehow, because I’m in a foreign country connected to the rest of my life by only a thin, electronic string, I am feeling lost and alone. I am too far away to huddle with the people who also cared for this woman. While I am staying in a lovely home with kind, caring people, I don’t really know them and they don’t know me. We can’t gather in this hour of loss.

Here in Mexico, preparations are beginning for one of the biggest events of the year: the Day of the Dead which begins this year on Saturday, November 1 and ends on Sunday, November 2. Traditions connected with this holiday (holy day) include building private altars called ofrendas, honoring the deceased using sugar skulls, marigolds, and the favorite foods and beverages of the departed, and visiting graves with these as gifts. 

I believe it is important to remember and honor the dead and every year, the number of people to be honored grows larger. However, I wonder if the additional purpose of this celebration is to honor the living, to reflect on our own lives to make sure that we are living it to the fullest, to make sure we have said what we wanted to say to everyone who is important in our lives?

Perhaps we need to remember and honor the dead but call it the day of the living, a day for righting old wrongs, telling those we love or those who are important to us how we feel. Perhaps it is a day to honor our own lives and the endless connections to others that make up the web of our lives. Perhaps that would be the best way to honor those we’ve lost.

Today, I remember my friend and all her goodness. I grieve the loss for her family and the large circle of friends that held her dear and for myself and the acquaintanceship that never had the opportunity to flourish into friendship. I also give thanks for all the love and friendships that makes my life rich and provides the foundation of my being.

Idylling About ...

Reflections

Sometimes change comes in demitasse cups … sometimes it floods your world with Big Gulps.  The past several months have been of the Big Gulp variety as a new love entered my life, I sold my home in Arroyo Grande and began to live on the edge of a breeze, drifting here and there like a milkweed seed.  In between the lovely, weightless moments have been surges of terror, insecurity and a mad grasping for something … anything … that would make me feel some sense of control.

Gradually, I'm settling down, releasing the need to know what's coming next, letting go of expectations and thoughts of what life *should* be like.  At my age, there's no longer time to worry about what the world thinks, what the world expects, what the world deems "right."  The new love in my life handed me a platter of possibilities and said pick what you want … what you really want.  It's frustrating to realize that I'm not sure I know.  Even now … here in my seventh decade ... I still have to stop and think: do I really want this (whatever it is) or am I just operating on past conditioning?

My life no longer looks "normal." I don't have a "home" in the standard sense. I'm not married, employed, working to make the world a better place or even baking cookies for my grandchildren. I have almost nothing to hang my ego and identity on. If someone should ask me what I do, I'd stammer helplessly for an answer.  For the first time in my life I may be more of a "being" and less of a "doing."

In two weeks I will head off to Mexico to fulfill a dream I've had for most of my adult life … to learn Spanish.  It's a dream I've launched in fits and starts, taking Spanish 1 probably a dozen times or more, always convincing myself that I would never be really good at a second language so it was pointless to try.  Now, I've decided I don't care where I wind up, I just want to revel in a new language.  So, for seven weeks, I'll be in an intensive language course … four weeks in San Miguel de Allende (an art community in central Mexico), then three weeks in Playa del Carmen (on the beach in the Yucatan).  And, then, just for good measure a week in Merida, the capital of the Yucatan where wandering the streets will be my classroom.

As I've been thinking about this trip, I knew I wanted to blog about this adventure … therefore, I started looking for a new blog title and came up with Idylling About... with the idea of wandering about with little direction in a peaceful, joyful manner. A merger of "idle" and "idyll" building on the dictionary definition of idyll as a noun meaning an extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque episode or scene.

Turning that noun into action yielded "idylling" -  joyfully living with little structure and forethought while wandering through art, love, imagination, spirit, peace, transformation, poetry, metaphor, connection and conversation. 

You're invited to join me and add your comment about how you are idylling through life. 

The Scientific Method and Love: A Fable

Recently love knocked on the door and said, "Surprise! I'm back!"

While shocked and delighted to see my old friend, I was just a little wary.  I wanted to ask, "Where have you been?" and "Why did you go away?" and "Are you here to stay?"  But, I knew this slippery creature would only wriggle out of answering.  No pinning him down on a black and white chart, no cornering him in the square box of logic and reason.  

So I invited him in to tea and in a conversation that hopped from Einstein's Dreams to varieties of bamboo, from the Big Bang to the universal theory of toenail cells and from small towns to big art, a new thought was born.  All things being connected, love and science are not frenemies but soul mates on the same spiraling dance toward the universal.  

"It's all about the scientific method," my chipper friend offered.

When I asked, "How's that?" he only grinned, grabbed his hat and called, "Later gator."

Curious, but now forced to fall back on my old resources, I headed to Wikipedia and read:

"The chief characteristic which distinguishes a scientific method of inquiry from other methods of acquiring knowledge is that scientists seek to let reality speak for itself, supporting a theory when a theory's predictions are confirmed and challenging a theory when its predictions prove false."

"Great!" I thought.  And how is one supposed to confirm or challenge something as misty as smoke … as ephemeral as this thing called love?   A dream offered a metaphorical way in … I saw a thousand tiny doors opening in my heart and through each door breathed an invitation, "Come … explore … share."  Following the trail of that metaphor, I created the following hypothesis … the starting point of "letting reality speak for itself" …

In the beginning, when two hearts connect, hundreds of tiny doors open allowing energy to flow back and forth.  A conversation of sight and sound is born, sometimes opening more doors as stories reveal shared connections, sometimes closing doors when the energy isn't strong enough to leap the gap from the doors of one heart to the doors of the other.   

As more doors open and the flow of energy brightens, touch flips a switch and a thousand more doors open and the flow of energetic connection becomes a two-way stream with the strength to carry hopes and dreams, secrets and fears.  Love strolls in and asks, "Shall we dance?" 

Sometimes we accept and more doors open as taste and smell amp up the conversation creating a bright, nourishing glow called "being in love."  Sometimes boulders in the stream divert the flow and it loses the strength to carry the energy both ways and doors begin to close, the stream slows, weakens and may even become a dry creek bed nourishing nothing. The connecting energy of love disappears.   

In the bright afternoon of the conversation, shadows often appear at one of the doors, pulling it closed and then charging around trying to shut the others in a fear-filled scramble of self-protection.  As the doors on one side shut, energy is lost, the conversation stutters.  Love gets stuck sitting on the bank and two hearts break.   

Unless … the stream is strong enough and it has been carefully cleared of rocks and boulders.   

Unless ... the conversation of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell has woven a tapestry of intimacy with golden threads of stories, laughter, shared values, hopes and dreams, acceptance of secrets and fears … a tapestry of safety and unconditional embrace that can be wrapped around the shadow.   

When that happens, love smiles and says, "until death parts us."

Later, my hoppy friend returned and asked, "Is there more tea?  With mint this time, please."

I told him my hypothesis and asked, "Is this how it works?"

He said, in his maddeningly mysterious way, "I guess you just have to try it out.  Have the conversation.  Remove the rocks and boulders.  Weave the tapestry.  See if it holds."

I just shook my head and passed the cookies.

Light and Love

I'm in Aspen-Snowmass for the balloon festival and it is a perfect fall day ... bright, saturated blue skies with puffy white clouds, warm sun and cool breezes. Stopped for lunch at Rio Grande Park which had dozens of kids and dogs to watch play across the perfect green grass. After lunch I walked along the trail that led off in a myriad of directions and wound up at the Aspen Art Museum and wandering through the rocks in the John Denver Sanctuary reading lyrics and hearing John's voice in my head.

I was also looking for pictures of "light" since Diane Walker and I are continuing our Miksang photography journey and "light" is the focus this week. I am having trouble with this focus since all photographs are actually images of light. How to separate out just light and follow my intention to see the play of light is the challenge. But light seems to be the topic since I picked up John O'Donohue's Anam Cara which both Diane and I are reading and his focus was on light also. Here are some of his words:

"We are always on a journey from darkness into light. At first, we are children of the darkness. Your body and your face were formed first in the kind darkness of your mother's womb."

"Each day is a journey. We come out of the night into the day. All creativity awakens at this primal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other."

"Ultimately, light is the mother of life. Where there is no light, there can be no life. Light is the secret presence of the divine. It keeps life awake."

It was interesting for me to connect these words with my relationship that just ended where our main issue was over light ... his need for dark and for controlling the number of lights on at any one time and my need for light and resistance to being so controlled. There was no light and the relationship had no life. It was a metaphor made manifest and O'Donohue also connects the metaphor of light with love and offers this statement:

"When the human mind began to consider the next greatest mystery to life, the mystery of love, light was also always used as a metaphor for it's power and presence. When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you. Where before there was anonymity, now there is intimacy; where before there was fear, now there is courage; where before in your life there was awkwardness, now there is a rhythm of grace and gracefulness; where before you were jagged, now you are elegant and in rhythm with your self. When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning."

The synchronicity of reading this message at lunch and then walking into John Denver's sanctuary where his lyrics to "Perhaps Love" are chiseled in stone seemed like life is again chuckling at me or maybe with me. Light and Love ... something to think about.