Tricky Business

It has been an interesting week of noticing the terrible tension in my mind - human minds? - between practicing acceptance of life as it is - right now - and dreaming about what might be possible. This is a very tricky business for all of us, and for me there is the tricky circumstance of finding myself deeply drawn to two challenging ideological/spiritual/material traditions: Buddhism and anarchism. The first teaches radical acceptance and the practice of peace-making through an honest encounter with suffering from the inside out. The second is often utopic and dreamy, often (though not always or necessarily) drawing its power from a spatialization of self in opposition to oppressive forces deemed to cause our suffering. In theory, I am very excited about the places where these teachers intersect, and I am also increasingly aware of how they can both gnaw on my poor mind. My intellect endlessly concretizes and grasps for the possible, imagining potential states of being as places I can construct and control. Yet the life force really comes from the surprising moments of practicing freedom, kindness... moments that we can't really hold up and point to, can't really discuss or describe. Moments of deep interconnection and peace, when we cultivate and celebrate, feeling acceptance and revolution at once. I know I want my life to be a journey of learning to create the conditions for a greater aliveness to these moments, and to do so in mutuality with others. To do so with kindness. I also know I am doing that, small small. And that I probably think too much about it.

So. I have various new models in my mind for future work in the world. I do want to record those, to create a map from which to design the little one can design. I also need to place them within the context I am trying to point to here. My life right now is like that of a less experienced meditator sitting on a cushion. There is mindfulness, yes, but at every stabbing pain she pulls herself away, adjusts a little bit, delighting in the release of pain, not yet having complete faith that another just as bad will soon return. Not yet having complete faith that the painful sensation, however bad, has come with a power to purify and a promise to always leave in the end. My life right now is like that of a fledgling anarchist. Angry at the reality in which she finds herself. Unsure what to do with her surge of urgency. Confident in her radicalism. Brilliant, reactive, and almost certainly mistaking the root of the problem.

I long and grasp for community, yet I rarely rest my hand on my heart.

I keep tinkering with the compass. Why not turn my face to where it points?