social justice: September 2008 Archives

Some days are just quiet.

I decided to play tourist and went looking for a museum and a recommended bookshop. I found a church! (Make of it what you will!) Street names here change every few blocks, requiring navigational vigilance.

Some time thereafter, I stumbled upon a square, Mechelse Plain, in full preparations for an art opening, featuring the photography of a Belgian artist who died last year, Patrick De Spiegelaere.

A coalition of NGOs hosted the event, Wereldbeelden (World Images). There were some speeches, improv, and then live music. Perhaps folks got to dancing, eventually? It seemed everyone was enjoying mingling. The improv artists promised me a word in English - I suppose I did not wave vigorously enough from the audience but it was a bit tough (!) to gauge timing given my three phrase Dutch vocabulary ("ja," "nee," and "dank u"). The audience did provide a few words I could recognize: macaroni, John Lennon, and eyeliner are the ones I recall. :-)

Belgian NGOs are "debating development" this year, in concert with initiatives agreed upon by the World Social Forum.

Some thirty stalwart spirits braved the edge of Hurricane Hannah to begin building "Belchertown's own pyramid." Sailing knots secured the tarp which - propped up by two ladders - withstood the night, protecting us from the downpour and thrilling us with sounds of rain and wind as we christened the cairn near midnight with Wrongo Dongo. Howls mixed with cheers in a cacophony of exuberance as we embraced the spirit of ritual, blending our voices with nature's infinite chanting. I was asked for a convocation (see "Other Use"); all I could muster was Thank You. I felt calm and peaceful in our candlelit circle, humbled by and proud of my friends.

In all important respects, we gathered as we always do - indulging delicious food, drinking comfortably, talking, dancing, teasing, touching, teaching and calling each other into being. I learned so much, as I always do. :-) Everyone oriented to the ceremonial element in their own way. Some recalled significant moments of shared interpersonal interaction, acknowledged difficult aspects of private histories and/or future challenges, and speculated on the symbolism of our individually swirling energies encapsulated by nature's capacity for storm. Others lost themselves in dance, told tall tales, lampooned themselves and others, played tricks and carefully watched for the precise moment to deliver a perfect pun. Most of us did some of everything. We take our fun seriously, without letting fun completely overtake the serious.

There was power in our utterances last night and this morning. Dorothee educated me on linguistic minorities in France and the Belgian Flemish/French controversy (more on these later!), and Nick proposed jazz as a uniquely unreproducible medium. The confluence of these topics with my upcoming research woke me right up (or was it the Turkish coffee?!)

"Oh yea, that was in quotes," Don said, walking by a few minutes later as Nick explained, "I don't want my life to be an open book, I want people to question me." We were talking about how online social networking could remove mystery from our lives by producing a vast field of ambient awareness (another longer-term side effect of ambient awareness could be the evolutionary loss of certain cognitive skills associated with fact-based memory). An iPhone provided entertainment for awhile, its accelerometer on display with Newton's Cradle . This put me in mind of the results of a recent "mind map" of local and global trends affecting a particular organization's anti-racism and social justice activities, in which nearly all trends were described in terms of increase (more more more and faster) instead of decrease.

How did we get from the accelerometer to air-conditioning? I cannot recall, but the comment reminded me of Christopher Dickey's claim:

as air conditioning conquered the lethargy-inducing climate and Northerners by the millions abandoned the rust belt for the sun belt, the past wasn't forgotten or forgiven so much as put aside while people got on with their lives and their business.

Somehow nostalgia for the "old days" of answering machines (when you received your telephone messages only when you got home at the end of the day) got intertwined with the luxuries of heating and cooling . . . The Chosen One mused, "we've had heat for a long time, it's harder to make cold." Indeed, air-conditioning as we know it today is a phenomenon of only the last century: for millenia humans have known how to keep ourselves warm, but only "yesterday" have we figured out how to make ourselves cool. (Uh oh. Global warming is here, now.)

When Brandon left is when it hit me. Some of these people I really may not see again. Dhara reminisced about meeting me at bowling her first year here. She and Henk had been the ones to unveil the group present. (Rumor Mill: going viral. First batch original orders for t-shirts and bumperstickers should be placed here.)

The Nepalese mantra gracing the cairn is, as best I understand it to date, a kind of paean to precious knowledge and pure beauty. We have created physical evidence of passing this way; and less tangibly we have left our marks upon each other - bits of spirit inspiring compelling turning and calling us on, always with the invitation to return. "It's good," Franz said today, "to be a little bit bothered by each other." Yes - such is the evidence of communal connections: they persist!

There is always so much going on.

Too much?

I've been trying to sort out some distinctions between "being spiritual" and "being religious" (after being tag-teamed by an Eastern European cynic and an Undertaker from India for the past six years, it seems I've finally cracked). ;-) I know I become overwhelmed, often, trying to make sense of the whole - yet . . . the alternative doesn't appeal. If we give up trying to grasp the whole, then what? Well, people carve out a niche for themselves, making intellectual, emotional, aesthetic choices and compromises and doing the best they can. Meanwhile, social forces twist and buckle the fabric of communities and our cross-cultural relations with each other.

When, I wonder, do we decide it is time to work together? And on what basis? At a community meeting yesterday, someone raised a concern with the erosion of constitutional rights, and someone else objected to the extremity of the claim. But world-class journalists are not supposed to get arrested in America. This occurred at the Republican National Convention, where riot police are keeping protesters as far as possible from the convention center. Since when did protests become such a problem in the land of free speech, the home of originary revolution?

Speaking of which, can you imagine the conversation in Governor Palin's family? "Uh, mom, it's great you just got selected to be the next Vice-President of the United States, but, uh, I've got to tell you something." When does the generosity and understanding that we give our own children extend to other kids' parents?

I was recently at a yoga center where hundreds of earnest persons went about their spiritual work. "Practice," I thought to myself, "for being soon in another country." All the anonymous people were nice enough: polite and indifferent. Don't get me wrong, I was the same way: there to do what I came to do for me, open to engagement if it happened but not seeking interpersonal connection. It was a mild form of alienation. I "belonged" there as much as anyone else who had paid the fee. I look like 95% of the people who were there, and I behave similarly in culturally substantial ways. But I was bothered - it's a commercial place from which collaborative social action might grow but (it seems) only on the basis of similarity.

In the U.S. (the one that I grew up in, have been shaped by, and currently worry about), the emphasis on individuality leads to the massive reproduction of independent spiritualists who - typically, usually - fail to commit to work together for any coherent social action. Even if people are atheists, that identity is defined in opposition to the notion of some kind of spiritual center. With secular yoga, the body has replaced god as the object of worship. In politics, the body is also central: "what" one looks like, and "how" one sounds become the basis for argumentation and persuasion.

Still . . . it is a measure of how far America has come that both candidates for President of the United States are members of multiracial families. (This point was also raised by a participant during that community meeting.) In my opinion, the most important thing Senator Obama said during the Democratic National Convention (quoted from memory) was to assert

We can continue to live as Americans without a common "religion," or as Americans whose religion has become a narrowly-defined nationality, or we can find ways to build common cause with the very material of difference itself.

"This" - all of it - is about us. All of us.