Wednesday, November 23, 2011

What Am I Doing Here?

In every situation I've found myself in lately, the question arises in me: "What am I doing here?" It's a valuable question, which calls me to look deeply at the present moment--because to know what I'm doing here requires that I notice where here is; no know what am doing here, requires me to look at what I'm doing.

I'm at the public library in Bellevue (a Nashville neighborhood). What am I doing here? A dozen answers fly to mind, and perhaps it is only the result of the ton of meditation I've been engaged with that I can tell these thoughts to wait their turn while I acknowledge, "I am sitting."

I am also waiting for the message that I can return to the storage unit and clear it out. But that will be the future (or maybe it won't). What am I doing while I am waiting for the future? I wasted some time on the internet, since it is rare that I get to use it. And I finally watched the videos of the incident at UC Davis last week. Our children and grandchildren will be watching those in their history classes.
And, I am blogging. It's been too long... not because of the time that's passed, but because of the number of things I would have written.

- -- --- ---- ----- ---- --- -- -

Another circumstance that has caused me to ask, "What am I doing here?" is my involvement with Occupy Nashville. Being there and experiencing it, I find it easy to understand why I'm there. But almost every conversation I've had since October 29 has dealt with trying to explain why I'm there.
There is, of course, all the talk of the 1% and the 99% and the unfairness of it all. To say that I think these are valid concerns seems unlike me--because I think all concerns are valid. I think that even the concerns of the "1%" are valid. We are all Americans, here, like-it-or-not.

It is because everyone's concerns are valid that I am engaged with the Occupation. Finally, people are tired of jumping through hoops, of playing the system's game, to have our voices [mis]heard. "[If] he wanted something other than the obvious to happen, he would have to do something other than the obvious."* For decades or more, people have been like children saying, "ow, quit it!" and the powers that be have been like the parents, choosing to ignore the children until they just stop fussing.

[and there's the call // later]

Friday, November 11, 2011

Change the World: spider web

We are flies caught in a spider's web. We start from a tangled mess, because there is no other place to start. We cannot start by pretending to stand outside the dissonance of our own experience, for to do so would be a lie. Flies caught in a web of social relations beyond our control, we can only try to free ourselves by hacking at the strands that imprison us. We can only try to emancipate ourselves, to move outwards, negatively, critically, from where we are. It is not because we are maladjusted that we criticize, it is not because we want to be difficult. It is just that the negative situation in which we exist leaves us no option: to live, to think, is to negate in whatever way we can the negativeness of our existence. 'Why so negative?' says the spider to the fly. 'Be objective, forget your prejudices'. But there is no way the fly can be objective, however much she may want to be: 'to look at the web objectively, from the outside - what a dream', muses the fly, 'what an empty, deceptive dream'. For the moment, however, any study of the web that does not start from the fly's entrapment in it is quite simply untrue.

We are unbalanced, unstable. We scream not because we are sitting back in an armchair, but because we are falling over the edge of a cliff. The thinker in the armchair assumes that the world around her is stable, that disruptions of the equilibrium are anomalies to be explained. To speak of someone as unbalanced or unstable is then a pejorative term, a term that disqualifies what they say. For us who are falling off the edge of the cliff (and here 'we' includes all of humanity, perhaps) it is just the opposite: we see all as blurred movement. The world is a world of disequilibrium and it is equilibrium and the assumption of equilibrium that have to be explained.

[from Change the World Without Taking Power by John Holloway]

Wednesday, November 9, 2011