Lately I’ve been so inspired by artists–people putting sounds and words and images and action to the things we feel and know and want to know.  Sometimes things we don’t want to know.  Bobby posted a link to a really amazing performance of Pink’s "Dear Mr. President," and I cried much of the way through.  Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten makes me cry, too–tears that are all about hope and joy and a deep, deep yearning.  Watch a video here.  Or just read the lyrics.

And there’s this artist, in Columbia, making guitar’s out of guns, instruments of destruction into instruments of peace and construction.  "Violence fears love because it is stronger," he says in the interview.  "Violence fears my voice because it goes beyond death."  Gah!  So beautiful.

I could list hundreds and hundreds more.  And these are musicians, but what about painters, sculptors, writers, poets–the host of souls doing the frivolous work of prophecy?  The "not-a-real-job" of waking us up, lifting us up, agitating us toward action? 

Who can say art is an extra in this life, an added film of icing on all the real stuff?  I say art is essential.  Like the heart that keeps our blood alive.

This morning I wandered through a cathedral.  Worship was going on in parts of it, but not all.

I wandered through, looking up at the infinite, vaulted ceiling, around at the artwork, the icons.  I saw the most gorgeous web, and gave thanks.  Leaves of all colors.  I noticed how cold the place had become, how I could see my breath.  The sun making eddies of light. 

I noticed worshippers asleep, awake, wandering with purpose, without it.  Mostly they were few.  Later in the day there would be more of them.  More of them visible.

And there was music.  Ancient tunes.  Later would be modern stuff with it, but now it was only the ancient choir, robed in leaves, feathers, furs.  And me.  My feet, my breath joined their refrain:  “Glory!” (a wordless translation of that).  “Glory!”

Quietly (from where I was) priests presided.  Priests preaching and praying and calling to worship.  Calling the faithful toward powers and gods (only some of them religious).  I hoped I could hear the ones calling toward Life.

The sanctuary began to warm, and I too, wandering, listening, glorying, giving thanks.  Parts of it stayed cold; parts of it were filled with horrors unspeakable, souls starved and turned inward, walls crumbled and painted with signs only youth can understand.  But where I was, the view from where I wandered, filled me up with holy.  It filled me up and sent me home in wonder, a more beautiful, more centered soul.

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them–ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,–seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d–till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.
                                                                                                ~Walt Whitman

I don’t stop searching for places to belong, people to love and be loved by, anchors to build a life on.  I muse, I venture, I throw into oceans of space, “seeking the spheres, to connect them.” This is why I read, why I write, why I take classes and attend lectures and strike up conversations with strangers.  This is why I love friends.

Last night, filament clad, I made my way to a dramatic reading of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  And really, why hasn’t anyone ever told me about this guy?  I was captivated.  The whole time I felt like I had just stepped into a hot bath.  I closed my eyes and just sank down into it, goose bumps and all.

Leaves of Grass, for those of you who don’t know, is an expansive collection of poems that grew and grew over the course of Whitman’s life.  It speaks of nature and humanity and the divine.  It speaks of life and death and the cycles of things.  It challenges sexism, racism, classism, religiosity, body-fear.  It lifts us all up, cosmic things like planets, comets and stars, small things like birds and plants and dung beetles, and everything in between, inviting us to notice.  To notice.  To hallow, while not taking too seriously.  To recognize interconnectedness and unity in everything.  To find a holy spark in even what’s lowly and forgotten.  It’s spiritual, sensual (!), playful, contradictory, prophetic.  Amazing.  Truly.

I’ve found a new friend.  A new bard to help divine the times.  My throwing last night was so not in vain.

P.S.  I’ve often found poetry inaccessible, like it’s written for insiders rather than me.  I’m thinking it’s time I change my view on this and actually do some exploring in the field.  Get my feet wet in it.  Suggestions gratefully welcome (anthologies and otherwise).

So I’ve been sitting (read: nursing, burping, bouncing, bathing, changing, cooing, getting peed upon) with the question I asked myself in the last post – the question about whether there’s something I’m wanting to do that maybe I’m not doing because I’m afraid of getting dirty.  And I’ve come up with something.  But I don’t want to write about that yet.

I want to write about a question that helped me get there. 

Why try to do good in the world?  That’s it.  Why try to do good?  Simple enough, right?  Riiight…

I know this can be answered a hundred different ways, but as I’ve pondered some of them, I’ve realized I don’t like a lot of what’s available.

Guilt, for instance.  I know it can be a good catalyst in certain situations.  It isn’t all bad.  But to me it seems life-sucking as a primary motivator.  I think it poisons good with a kind of self-centeredness, an objectification of the people or environments in which the good is done.  Such things become tools, merely, for making the gooder (person doing good) feel better. 

I don’t know how to get completely away from guilt.  My life is privileged, so far as race and family and finances and education and a body that works well are concerned, and I’m well aware that there are lots of the opposites everywhere.  I didn’t ask for what I’ve got, and I’m pretty sure others didn’t either, and yet here we are.  Disparities galore. 

But here’s the rub: Maybe it’s this very thing – this very fact that no one asked for what they’ve got – that makes guilt not make much sense.  You think?

All of life’s disparities could lead to a kind of ethical motivation for doing good, then, I suppose:  good is just the right thing to do.  I, for example, am capable of doing good.  I’ve got a nice bundle of resources to work with (the privilege I talked about).  And let’s face it:  good is needed.  Everywhere.  Why not do it?

Something about this moves too much in the direction of guilt for my liking, though.  At least for now, as I continue detoxifying from the stuff.  It introduces obligation.  And not just obligation, but obligation with a ball and chain attached to it, shaped conspicuously much like an uptight judge.  He waits vigilantly for you to squander your life or talents or money or time, and even when he isn’t officially on your case for something, it feels like he is.  Because the “good” you do is always getting held up next to the million “bad” or selfish things you sometimes (regularly?) do instead.

No, “it’s the right thing to do” isn’t invitational or inspiring or soul-expanding at all for me.  It makes my soul shrink.  And my courage, too.

So I’ve thought a lot about the interconnectedness slant for doing good.  About how doing good for others is really a way of doing good for myself.  And for everyone.  Eastern thought has a lot of great things to say about this.  And physics, too.  And I’m filled with wonder as I consider how true it is, and how magical.  And how it makes me more patient and compassionate where I might not otherwise be.

But I have to admit that, here too, the idea falls flat for me.  Maybe if I spent more time meditating, and got myself more viscerally in touch with my connectedness with everything and everyone, I’d be spontaneously inspired toward positive action.  But until that happens, the idea gets stuck in the logical, unfeeling parts of myself, and doesn’t have the soulful steam of feeling to make my self go anywhere.  As interconnected with everything as I believe myself to be, I just don’t live in awareness of that very often, and the guy begging on the corner and the tree in the next complex over and the dog that yipped at my heals this morning don’t feel like parts of myself at all.  Caring for the earth or for the homeless or for animal rights or any other rights a person might care about because we’re all interconnected all consequently slip into that last category for me, the “because it’s the right thing to do (because we’re all interconnected)” category.  They’re less about genuine care and more about a concern that I’m trying to drum up because an abstract principle in my mind is telling me I really should do that kind of drumming.  Yesterday.  And you know how much I appreciate that kind of judge.

So how about we propose a psychological angle.  What if I try to do good because I want to be a person who does good.  And if I don’t actually do good, then I feel a disconnect between who I am and who I want to be.  Dissonance.  And I don’t fit in very well with the gooders I really want as friends.  I don’t have good gooder stories to tell when I’m with them and I can’t even get on soap boxes or high horses with them, either, because lord knows I was sitting on my couch last night, too, and I’ve never even been tempted to write my congressperson for anything.  Sigh.

No, trying to get rid of dissonance or spin a character or reputation or set of friends to be proud of just don’t feel like compelling reasons for me to do good, either.

And here’s what really trips me up:  I’m not convinced you can clearly define good anyway.  Snap shots can make good and bad appear simplistically separate, simplistically clear, but really, aren’t the two more often mixed up?  Sometimes it’s the most awful things, the most ugly or evil or extraordinarily pathetic, that lead to positive action.  Don’t they? Like figuring out tough class or race-related things in Katrina’s aftermath.  Like wounded people turning into healers.  Some of history’s biggest embarrassments have been the reason why myriad smaller tragedies haven’t happened, or have actually gotten cared about. 

And sometimes it’s the most well-intentioned things ever – the ones dreamed up by people doggedly committed to making the world a better place – that really, really screw things up.  Think manifest destiny.  Think over-protective parenting. Think any number of technological “advances,” and the Hiroshimas and global warmings and massive oil spills pluming in their wakes.

So.  What does it mean for me to “try to do good”?  What do I presuppose in even asking such a question?

While I won’t try answering that, I will give my conclusion.  You ready?

I know that “good” and “bad” are difficult to separate sometimes, and that the “good” I try to do may actually harm someone, or mess up something better.  But I’m thinking that’s par for this messy life-course.  And I’m certainly not excited about doing nothing because I convince myself that no matter what I do (or don’t do, as the case may be) is part of life’s yin and yang.

So my conclusion?  I want to try to do good in the world because that’s what I like to do.  I like it. It makes me hopeful.  I like it better than doing nothing, and I like it better than knowingly doing bad.  And heck if I understand my complex mix of motives better than that.

I just like it.  [And I’m looking forward to diving into the fray so I won’t have time for this kind of reflection. :)]

But how about you?  Why do you do good?  I’m genuinely curious.

So here are some skeletal conclusions I take from the last conversation:

·        Nothing is perfectly clean – no movement, no institution, no set of relationships.  This is true of spicy and boring lives.  Why not choose spicy?

·        Process matters.  How we work for change is important, and has a lot to do with the kind of change that gets accomplished…and how long-lasting the change turns out to be.  But process isn’t all that matters.  Sometimes messy processes – ones that leave hands and hearts a little dirty for a while – are worth it.  Dark and light are sometimes inextricably mixed.

·        There are instances where a person needs to distance him/herself from a particular group or movement.  Distance can be an important part of a person’s personal growth or healing, but can also be necessary for broader goals to have any chance of getting met.  Gaining trust with a group of disgruntled teens, for example, may necessitate distancing relations with teachers, parents, or police…even when said relations might further some other kind of good.

·        Sometimes, as in the example above, reputation really matters.  It isn’t a gimme that it’s better, as a rule, to care not a lick for how we’re perceived.  Sometimes, though, reputation needs to matter little.  If everyone involved in civil or women’s or gay rights movements cared what society thought of them, important strides forward or up or out would never get made.  I’m guessing smaller-scale, personal examples could be found of this being true as well…maybe cases where no one would know if you chose your reputation over kindness or forgiveness.  Or over getting dirty, but in so doing, participating in something really worthwhile.

·        Life is complicated.  For me right now, what all of this boils down to is being mindful and thoughtful and as awake as I can be in specific instances, rather than abstracting like this forever.  My question to myself becomes:  Is there some specific action I want to take in my life right now where I’m concerned about my own or others’ “cleanliness” – in terms of reputation?  process?  otherwise?  This is a question I need to sit with today.  Or more realistically, this week (can anyone say, “I don’t get very much done in a day – intellectually or otherwise – while caring for an infant”?).

What do you all think of these things?  I’d love to hear examples, like the one Chandra gave, of stuff like this in action – times when it seems worth staying clean or protecting one’s principles or reputation, and times when messiness seems far more worth it.

A couple great "responses" to the issues raised in my last post:

‘"I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.’  Armistead Maupin said this, wishing that he had "come out" as gay earlier in his life. But the comment might apply just as easily to lots of us who conduct our lives in fear of what other people think. Life is short, and then you die. No rehearsals."

via Maggi Dawn and

"No one should abandon duties
because he sees defects in them.
Every action, every activity, is surrounded
by defects as a fire is surrounded by smoke."

(Bhagavad Gita, I8.47)

via Cindy Lawson.

Well, after 24 hours of antibiotics, my fever is gone and I feel almost back to normal.  I was in bed most of the day yesterday (N tending to the baby), and that helped so much.  I feel like a new woman.

So I’m going to try to put into words some of the rumblings I’ve been feeling inside.  Apologies for any lack of coherence.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve watched two really great documentaries:  The Corporation (about the sicknesses inherent to corporate America and beyond), and You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train (about Howard Zinn and the social causes with which he’s been involved).  I left both so energized.  Like someone had nudged me awake, and I was seeing life anew.

I’ve long self-identified as one concerned with social justice.  Before moving to the Bay, my husband’s line of work (community organizing) and the neighborhood in which we lived were daily reminders of racial/social/educational/economic inequities.  These were ever in my face.

But here we are in a different season.  My husband is in school, and I’m writing.  We’re both caring for our son.  And we live in an area where it costs boatloads of money to live.  (Can anyone say “enormous student debt”?)  The streets are all clean and in good repair.  The grocery stores don’t have guards.  Very few cars were made before the year 2000.  Really, the economic diversity in the area has mainly two categories:  a) students and b) millionaires.

So it’s easy for society’s inequities to fade into distant memory.  It’s easy to feel the gentle sunlight and afternoon breeze (it’s sunny and between 60 and 80 degrees here nearly year-round) and feel as though all is well with the world.  To feel that all is well, and, frankly, a little boring.

But these movies…they woke me up again.  They gave me permission to do something other than focus on my little life in my little household.  They gave different images and role models than much in the media today, all of which inspire engagement with a world where all is not well.  So very not.

So I’ve once again been dreaming of what I can do with who I am and the kinds of things that stir my soul, to lead a more spicy life.  A life of greater engagement with the world’s unwellness. 

But here’s what happens in my dreams.  I get tripped up on the fact that most social causes a person can participate in involve demonizing someone.  An individual.  A group.  A stratum of society.  And all I’ve learned and contemplated of the human psyche, and the social and environmental factors involved in any social ill, makes me unable to comfortably do that.  As far as I can tell, we’re all of us caught up in systems.  Systems that make some of us mean and some of us nice.  Some of us conscientious and some self-absorbed.  Some bitter, some arrogant, some fearful or ashamed.  It’s systems that form our politicians, systems that make rich people rich and poor people poor, systems that cause some from each category to move up or down that ladder.  Who isn’t shaped by their environment?  By their joys and wounds…by the joys and wounds of others?

I can’t comfortably point at any group or individual and say, “You!  The crap is all your fault.  You’re completely to blame.”

Can I join with others to address society’s ills when such others might be saying these very things?

And this leads me to my next thought:  I think I’m too principled.  I think I care too much about being genuine.  Is that possible?  I care too much about never participating in things that I can’t fully, consistently back.  I’m wondering these days whether there isn’t a healthy place for lowering one’s principles.  Lowering them for the sake of doing things in the world.  Working for social change.  Connecting with others.  Participating in religion, even.

What would it look like for me to not fear the wrath of the authenticity police, those boogie men who crouch and watch for me to say or do anything contrary to my convictions?  I’m sure there are some who could really use a dose of that wrath.  But there are those of us on the opposite extreme, who need to stop fearing it.  Whose fear of it, oh so ironically, actually keeps us from doing much at all about all our “authentic convictions.”

I’m not about a guilt-based life, but I am about a spicy one, where I’m not asleep to the spectrum of light and dark in our world…where I’m satisfyingly involved in the spreading of the light, and containment of the dark.  As tempting as it is to let my environment lull me back to sleep, I want to shake that.  I want to be awake and alive in the best sense of that word, and, though getting a little dirty in the process, try to care a little less about being 100% principled all the time.

What do you think?

There is much to mourn in this world, much that deserves seriousness.  But you know, I think the opposite is true, too.  Like this, for example.  I love it.

Here’s something I’d like to know:  How many people don’t feel on the outside of something?  I mean something they wish they could be a part of.  Cause if the answer is nobody, I think something could change for the better in me.

Last night I had a minor meltdown.  I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say they pertain to a potent little box of issues I like to keep hidden way back in the furthest corner of my inner closet.  I like to forget it’s there.  I like to live blissfully unconscious of the ways it sat open on my lap most of my life, tormenting the heaven out of me.  “You’re ugly,” it liked to say.  “You’re way too tall.  You don’t look like a woman.  You’re laughable, actually.  If your friends weren’t so nice, they’d probably point and laugh at you.”  That kind of thing.  And much, much more.

Well, the box got dislodged last night and spilled all over the place, and today I have the pleasant task of cleaning up the mess.  I have enough distance from the issues to be able to recognize their “truths” as bullshit, and their voices as far more to do with some twisted kind of self-protection than any accurate portrayal of my beauty or worth.  But that doesn’t keep me from feeling their weight, and the weight of the effects they’ve had on so much of my life.  They’ve made me feel like a pitiful outsider.

They’ve made me feel like an outsider of some desirable club of people who are beautiful and confident and clever and outgoing and world-wise and SHORT.  People who know how to dance and dress stylishly and say just the right things.  People who look good without a shower, who’ve read the right books and somehow know all the people I don’t.  And they like to travel.  They like to travel and they actually do it, and they’re completely unintimidated by new situations and cultures and people.  They thrive on such things.  They don’t have very much they need to hide.  They’re good with a camera.  They always have close friends available to hang out with them and when they get together they sip on wine that they didn’t pick just because the bottle was pretty.

Oh, I could go on.  And isn’t this what’s laughable, really?  Who belongs to this club?  How many people?  Any at all?

I have this hunch that if it could sink deep into my bones that we’re all feeling like we’re not in the club, I’d actually feel…part of it.  Does that make sense?  I’d feel like I’m on level playing ground, finally, with everyone.

So tell me the truth:  is there anyone who feels like they’re actually on the inside?  And if so, have you discovered their secret?

Thursday nights I’m taking a class on Buddhist ritual at the local university.  I’ve enjoyed a lot about it, not the least of which have been my classmates.  The first night we had a chance to introduce ourselves and say why we were there, and I left all warm inside.  Such a diverse and good-hearted group, coming from many traditions and there for a mix of soulful reasons.

But last night…

Last night was very bad.  Each week a different practitioner comes to share about a different ritual, and this week was meditation.  Meditation:  fine enough. 

But the instructor turned out to be a very prestigious fellow…with a very jaded persona.  As he lectured and answered questions, he stomped all over things that many in the room hold sacred.  He tore down meaning from a variety of religious traditions and spiritual practices (including his own).  He said he doesn’t believe any of it, and couldn’t give a reason for why he personally meditates, for why he converted from atheism to Zen.  He left us with only an empty skeleton of theory to stand on, and the bitterness of nihilism in our throats.

I have many thoughts as I leave that experience.  One is how deadening and disheartening it is to be in the presence of a soul like that.  I’m not a stranger to anomie, to cynicism, to a jadedness that masks a roiling rage, or a wrenching well of grief inside.  I will not say to anyone “just be happy.”  I will, however, suggest that the souls around us are immensely worth protecting, and too the fragile hope that many of us work hard to maintain:  that life is holy, that there is wonder in the world, that sacred ritual nourishes important parts of us, that there is meaning and joy to be discovered, even in unlikely places.  When our darkness grows big enough that we can’t contain it, that we can’t keep from trampling those around us, I think we have no business leading.  We have no business being people who teach and are imitated.

Our instructor should not have been with us last night.

Nourishing hope and joy and a sense that life is good are some of the noblest and most courageous acts we can do in a world like ours.  And I think it’s quite alright that we can’t always get there – even that many of us will never get there.  But when possible, when we know ourselves or those around us well enough to recognize when hope is being killed, I think standing up with a guttural NO is what’s needed – a “NO, I will not sit back and let important things die.  I will not sit passive as I or those around me spread death.”

Mama bears are what we need sometimes, even coming from within to deal with parts of our own selves.  Mama bears that rear up and roar and then know when softness is needed again.