In one image a winged bird flaps her wings but remains rooted to the ground. In another a fork-headed monster rushes by, a small bird fluttering at its heart. Nearby a masked bundle of writing appears to be stuck in a toilet bowl.
These are just a few of the uncanny creatures that emerged three years ago when some friends and I started playing “exquisite corpse,” a collaborative drawing game invented by surrealists in the 1920s.
So many of the drawings evoke unexpected scenes of constraint. The creatures are tangled up in themselves. They’re tangled up in each other. They’re tangled up in the surrounding environment. But unlike most images of constraint in pop culture today, most of the drawings portray structural constraints (such as the bird’s physical rootedness in the ground) rather than overt scenes of domination. Many of the surrealist creatures seem oddly joyful and calm despite their limitations.
The subtle entanglements in these pictures are not unlike the constraints that global political, social, and economic forces exert on radical efforts to build a more just and caring world.
A doomsday budget plan offered by New York City's transit agency would leave pupils without free rides to public schools, ending a 60-year policy in the nation's largest school district. Tiger, you could easily afford to foot that bill. How about it?
Tiger Woods’ confession seems to have placated his public and perhaps his sponsors as well. He seemed so sincere. According to the reputable Golf Digest, Tiger Woods amassed approximately a billion dollars in his 13 years as a clean-cut, all American, star athlete. That billion was made from pitching products rather than hitting golf balls. Ten percent of his income was garnered from winnings. Ninety percent was from endorsements. Nike’s alone was worth about one hundred million dollars over five years. Gatorade – Pepsi co was negotiating a similar deal when the scandal erupted. At the same time Woods had endorsement deals with Gillette, ATT, Tag Heuer, and his own lucrative firm, Tiger Woods Design which gives its name to golf course developments from Dubai to North Carolina.
Like other wealthy confessors such as Elliot Spitzer, John Edwards and Senator Mark Sanford, statements of owing the public better behavior were like other political promises. There was no commitment to back them with payment.
Despite years of knowing that gratitude contributes to life, and suggesting to people in my workshops to start a gratitude practice in their lives, it is only in the last couple of months that I was finally able to start my own practice. In the past, using gratitude as a PRACTICE instead of just when it arose spontaneously (which I am blessed to have happen often) just wasn’t working for me. But the times were hard enough in my life, and the draw strong enough that I started.
So, for a couple of months now, during a period that included some of the most challenging times in many years, I end each day lying in bed, breathing fully and slowly, and reviewing my day, looking for everything that could possibly be a source of gratitude. Not as a check list, but really pausing with each one, putting my attention again and again on the mystery, wonder, magic, and awe that is the experience of whatever happened, whoever contributed to it. My primary focus is on the people who contribute to my life. It could be something really small, or it could be something extensive. Regardless, I focus my attention and my heart on really taking in that there was no reason for this person to do what they did, they didn’t really have to do it, they only did it because they are human and we humans do things for each other. Sometimes without even intending to. On a few occasions my focus has been on people I don’t even know, who produced something I was consuming on that day. Slowly, I attempt to open my heart to this person, as if I am trying to BE that person and feel what it’s like to have done what they did that contributed to my life. I find enormous beauty in doing this. I go to sleep more peaceful. I also have an inkling that this practice may have been part of what shifted the inner experience I have into more softness, less anguish, despite the fact that so many challenges remain in my life.
I have started a new blog, The Fearless Heart, and am going to crosspost to Tikkun Daily. This is my introduction.
One of the biggest treasures I have is a diary that my mother kept about me when I was a child. Most of the entries are from when I was about 5. I love it, in large part, because I so completely recognize myself in that girl. One of the entries describes a conversation I had with my mother in which I wanted to bring together all the prime ministers of the world so as to stop war. I couldn’t understand why war continued. In another entry, I asked my mother why we had to pay money to get our groceries; why wouldn’t everyone just be able to go to the store and get what they need.
The questions related to these two stories continue to reverberate throughout my life, along with others. I have enormous passion for finding ways to transform how we live on this planet to reduce and transform violence; to create a world that works for all; to have relationships that nourish us; to have workplaces where workers, bosses, and communities thrive. The list goes on and on. And I know that I am not alone in wanting to create this change.
At our recent conference I got talking to an older African American man with a kind face and philosophical look. He told me about a memoir he has written, Ticket to Exile. I was highly intrigued by his story and asked him to write something for me to put up here.
By Adam David Miller
I hurt. I had said it. I had sliced open an internal storm.
With these two words at the age of 76 I finally probed an event in my life that had lain closed for fifty-seven years. I had nibbled around the edges before, tried through dramatic sketches to speculate what might be the result of my returning to the scene of the event, on how the principals would receive me, what sort of treatment I might expect. These dramatic sketches, while providing temporary relief, were ultimately unsatisfying. Some ingredient in them was lacking, an ingredient that only a direct facing of the event would fulfill.
As a nineteen year old shoe repair apprentice in Orangeburg, South Carolina, 1942, I had written a seven word note to one of our customers, a dime store clerk my age that read: “I would like to know you better.” We had talked briefly several times about our dissatisfaction with our lives when we were alone in the shop while she had some minor repair, a pair of lifts or a shine. She summed up her feelings: “I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life fondling lingerie and folding baby didies, that’s for darn sure.” And I was restless, wanting something different from what I was being offered. In another time and place we could have advanced our acquaintance. In the pre-Civil Rights era U.S. South, such was not allowed: I was black she was white.
This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.:
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads to the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
On Abercrombie & Fitch’s web site, they say “At Abercrombie & Fitch we are committed to increasing and leveraging the diversity of our associates and management across the organization. Those differences will be supported by a culture of inclusion, so that we better understand our customers, enhance our organizational effectiveness, capitalize on the talents of our workforce and represent the communities in which we do business.”
If that’s true, how could one of their management team have fired a Muslim for wearing a head scarf? I’ve sent the following message to the Diversity Department at Abercrombie & Fitch, and have yet to hear back from them.
“You’re either with us or against us.” – from Matthew 12:30
“Language is the perfect instrument of empire.”- Antonia De Nebrija
I recommend checking out the latest booklet from Paul Kivel called “The Language of Dominant Christianity” (available as a downloadable PDF for only $3.50 or as a book for $4.95.) It is a short (85 page) A-Z dictionary of common vocabulary words in the English language that reveal how Christianity has influenced our thinking. In addition to defining a comprehensive list of words (64 pages) Kivel provides a section on “word groups” and points out how certain terms are found within our criminal/legal system, notions of morality, racial understandings, educational ideals and political ideology. And in the first part Kivel provides the context of why it is important to analyze and examine the Christian roots of our language.
This booklet is one part of Kivel’s latest project to name Christian dominance as one of the many systems of oppression. Kivel is a well respected violence prevention educator who wrote “Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Social Justice” among many other books on oppression. If you haven’t heard of him or want to know more about Paul’s work including his videos and interviews you can visit his website.
And in the spirit of my post last week where I pointed out how atheists are studying to be religious leaders at Starr King I want to emphasize that there are Christians who are equally concerned about Christian hegemony and are dedicating time and resources to ending it.
I define Christian hegemony as the everyday, pervasive, and systematic set of Christian values and beliefs, individuals and institutions that dominate all aspects of our society through the social, political, economic, and cultural power they wield. Nothing is unaffected by Christian hegemony (whether we are Christian or not) including our personal beliefs and values, our relationships to other people and to the natural environment, and our economic, political, education, health care, criminal/legal, housing, and other social systems.
Christian hegemony as a system of domination is complex, shifting, and operates through the agency of individuals, families, church communities, denominations, parachurch organizations, civil institutions, and through decisions made by members of the ruling class and power elite.
The top story at Huffington Post at this moment, is that Harry Reid walked out of a meeting with corporate titans in a huff, because he thought they were telling him to focus on them instead of on small businesses. One line in that story, however, was the big news for me. “At one point, Democrats in the room reached out to the corporate heads for help finishing health care reform and were met with silence.”
This is something I just don’t understand! The United States spends twice as much on health care than any other industrialized nation. If we fixed our health care system we could save literally trillions of dollars. Corporations could save billions every year on premiums. Why aren’t corporations working to make health care reform happen?
I’m an organic farmer up here on the North Coast of Maine, also political & environmental activist for over 40 years (yikes!) now. We have to come up with solutions as to how people can survive these manipulated economic crises – my response is on my website http://www.cleanearth.net.
When working families lose their jobs, and then lose their homes, how can they stay afloat as a family, given that living in one’s vehicle is not acceptable?
Maine has plenty of land and water, making us ideal for farming…
Here’s the basic concept: we locate a nice, high-ground site of at least 100 acres, build extremely energy-efficient multiple housing units which use virtually no fossil fuels, install greenhouses along South side as part of living space to absorb sun’s rays in winter to help heat housing, and invite out-of-work workers who’ve lost their homes to live there while they learn new/old skills needed to survive hard times, and they can then start their own small farms or businesses.
I got locked up once when I was in seminary. It was the dead of winter, and for some months a group of Christian peacemakers in North Carolina had been organizing civil disobedience to public executions at the state prison in Raleigh. Four or five times they had arrested and booked us, then let us out in the night on a promise to appear in court. Finally, the DA had enough. He asked the magistrate to set our bonds at $5,000 each. We put on the orange jumpsuits and got processed into the general population.
I’ll never forget the morning I walked onto the overcrowded fourth floor of the Wake County Jail. With my newly issued mat in hand (they didn’t have any bunks left), I looked for a place on the floor. I found one beside a fellow who was glad to talk.
“What you in for?” he asked. I asked if he’d seen the execution on the news the night before. “Yeah,” he said. I told him I’d been arrested for trying to stop it.
Tiger Woods’ scripted apology for cheating on his wife has been a riveting topic for the US media. On the newsstands on February 20, 2010, every US newspaper carried stories of Tiger Woods’ confession. It was a bold full-page headline in the Post, and Daily News. It appeared on the cover of The Wall Street Journal that carried three stories and front-page photos. The New York Times alone did not post the confession as front-page news but carried two stories and photos on the cover of their Sports Section. Why is this so riveting? In many ways this post continues the theme of my last post, “Morality- It’s Strictly Personal.” Hopefully, this provides new insights.
As many of my readers know, I feel incredibly lucky to live in Madison, where wild birds and animals are plentiful. In fact, my first post on this blogsite last summer concerned a mink I saw in my backyard. Lately I’ve been enjoying a gaggle of turkeys in our neighborhood (or a covey or flock — whatever it’s called).They sleep in the trees close to our house and feed on the nearby golf course during the day. I’ve never had any trouble with them, but some folks have recently found them aggressive. Four people out walking were chased by several, and a child walking to and from school was harassed as well. When a bird reaches the height of four feet with a six-foot wingspan, they can appear quite menacing. And since turkeys can run up to 25 mph and fly at 55 mph, they’re a force to be reckoned with.
One of the reasons for this problem is that some of my neighbors have been feeding them. This is always a mistake when it comes to wild animals. It’s not that they become domesticated; they just become dependent on our handouts, and lose their natural fear of humans, simultaneously becoming more belligerent. If people want to help turkeys survive our difficult Wisconsin winters, their best bet is to create sustainable habitats for them. When you think about it, this makes sense, since wild turkeys existed in the north woods way before people could think of feeding these birds in winter. In fact, research by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources indicates that even the toughest winter we’ve had in recent years (1995-1996) had a negligible effect on the turkey population. They add:
Turkeys can remain in roosting areas for up to two weeks during especially severe weather and can lose up to forty percent of their body weight before dying of starvation.
by: Dave Belden on February 22nd, 2010 | Comments Off
The year before I left small town New York for this job at Tikkun, a few of us in our Network of Spiritual Progressives chapter got together to reduce our carbon footprint. We used a workbook by David Gershon called Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds.
It was interesting to me how different the small group experience was from just reading about the need to do various things. I already knew much of what the book said, but in our regular group meetings we discussed the details of how difficult or easy it was for each of us to implement the necessary changes. We became better friends and we developed a sense of upbeat possibility: “I’m really going to do this” turned into “I’m doing it!” Instead of being a chore it became fun. It was a nice step towards greater community, to feel we were doing our best together. When I got to Tikkun it was second nature to me to make various suggestions that our already carbon conscious team hadn’t thought of. I’m no paragon of virtue on this issue, but I really recommend this approach.
Can right wing over-exuberance in the face of their Massachusetts victory have spurred the sudden and vibrant revival of healthcare reform? It has risen unexpectedly, like the miraculous victim of a head injury, from its seemingly permanent coma.
But the best part of the story is the identity of the doctor restoring HCR to life: Anthem Blue Cross! Who says insurance companies can’t fix healthcare?
Last week I received one of those annoying phone calls, the kind I figure comes from some mega-complex of phone banks, probably from the plains of Nebraska. Because the caller ID showed an area code with which I was unfamiliar, I hesitantly picked up the phone and heard that split second of dead space, letting me know I was going to be solicited for money. I mentally kicked myself for this moment of trust.
Imagine my relief when I found myself talking to a woman calling on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), an organization to which I had actually donated money. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to tell her about my frustration with a do-nothing Democratic White House and congress regarding financial industry regulation and true health care reform.
I let her talk for a minute then finally interrupted her.
You may have heard that The Obama administration has approved a $8 billion loan guarantee to support the construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia. If the project goes forward, the plants would be the first built in the United States since the 1970s. Conrad Miller, who wrote “Energy Generation in the Obama Years (No, Nuclear Power Is Not “Safe and Clean”)” for Tikkun last summer, has drawn our attention to what sounds very much like a promise by Obama on campaign that he would not promote nuclear energy until safety issues had been dealt with. Wednesday’s New York Times article on environmentalists’ disappointment with Obama stated that
Mr. Obama has long supported nuclear power, as a senator and as a candidate for president. Employees of the Exelon Corporation, the Chicago-based utility that is the largest operator of nuclear plants in the United States, have been among Mr. Obama’s biggest campaign donors, giving more than $330,000 over his career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
That’s not exactly the impression given in this video from the campaign trail:
What if you could spend unlimited money to destroy a candidate, and keep your identity secret?
What if my little peace and social justice learning company, Reach And Teach, put a “product” on our web site and called it “Throw John Boehner Out of Congress.” Folks could purchase a downloadable PDF listing everything we don’t like about the Republican Minority Leader for, let’s say anywhere from $10 to $50,000. We could raise tens of millions or even billions of dollars and then, Reach And Teach could spend every penny running really nasty ads against Boehner in the two weeks before election day. If the public or government wanted to know who had paid for the ad, we’d tell them to pound sand, protecting our customer’s privacy. Sound like a good idea? The “Tea Partiers” think so!
The idea “to be religious is to be a theist” as Christopher Hitchens stated in his debate with Lorenzo Albacete is a quite ethnocentric claim. It is true that in the West we have often associated a theistic God with religion, but this neglects Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism and numerous religious traditions which have adopted a deistic, pantheistic, panentheistic or other understanding of God. And as I pointed out in my critique of Hitchens last week, Unitarian Universalism contains 19% of people who identify as atheist/agnostic.
In the over 140 comments I received from my post “Christopher Hitchens: The Orthodox Protestant Atheist” both on the Tikkun site and in the version crossposted on Alternet.org there was both surprise and disbelief that atheists could be religious leaders. I described how I am in seminary at Starr King School for the Minstry studying alongside atheists and agnostics who are in training to become religious leaders and ministers. This seemed to be an oxymoron as for some of the respondents all religion is evil and always associated with God. So I thought it would be helpful to include a few statements from atheist students in seminary studying to be religious leaders.
From a fellow atheist seminarian at Starr King:
First, I think there is a difference between being an atheist and being anti-religious. They are orthogonal. There is also a difference between being anti-religious and being opposed to the effects of particular religious traditions. These terms should not be conflated. Since when did not believing in God mean that you are opposed to other people believing in God and or practicing religion regardless of whether they believe? I am an atheist. Just to be clear, by that I mean I don’t believe that there is a god, a higher consciousness, or a spirit. I am also opposed to the effects of certain religious traditions. But I am not by any means anti-religious. I don’t deny the value that religion or religious practice, (whether actual belief in god and the afterlife, or simply liking the pretty candles at mass and multiple opportunities for community) brings to people including myself. Religion has a lot to offer and to deny that is to deny the complexity of the human condition.
(To see more collaborative drawings, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)
