Day 10 of 30: Reflection & Prospection
30 days of one article per weekday — that is my summer commitment. Six weeks of taking the stuff that’s been brewing in my brain, some of it for decades, and just putting it out there. Six weeks of developing a discipline of daily writing — some people do this as a journal. For some the privacy facilitates openness and honesty, for me, the audience (or prospect of an audience) catalyzes hard processing. When I imagine you sitting across from me or reading this on your device, I believe that I owe you something. I owe you an honest report of my mostly internal struggles, I owe you care and collegiality and company and collaboration, I owe you something worth reading — something that might open up a crack in calcified things, the way that other authors have done for me. It seems to me that one of the things most broken about our current U.S. culture, perhaps western culture more broadly, is the way we keep trying to get OUT of being indebted. “I don’t owe nobody, nothing!” That’s what the tough-guys in the movies say, right? Rugged individualism, rough and ready self-reliance, true independence!! Total bullshit, more like. I mean, really, come on. You didn’t have a mother or a father or an aunt or uncle or grandparent or older sibling or adopted caretaker or amazing kindergarten teacher or coach or… Look, if you made it far enough in this life to be reading this article, you know that you’ve been blessed — you’ve been ‘on the take’ from those who have freely and willingly given you what they had to give — love, attention, support, sustenance, you name it. It is an obligation you can never fully repay — and it is absolutely right and proper that you should spend — and I MEAN spend — your life trying to repay it anyway, not by paying it back — but by paying it forward.
I’ve got to side channel some gratitude: I had coffee last month with Pamela Benson Owens — a leader in the Austin community — and her time and attention and encouragement means a great deal to me, already. After just 90 minutes together talking, she told me I needed to do this (or something like it) and I trust her judgement and I already owe her a debt that cannot be repaid, one that I will spend my life paying forward. Another shout goes out to Amy Averett a friend of 20 years (longer for my wife) who recently made a career shift as an end of life doula and (when my younger sister died last year) recommended Stephen Jenkinson’s book Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul — I stole that “and I MEAN spend” line above straight from him! His work and the work of Martín Prechtel, Martin Shaw, and James Hillman, to whom his work introduced me has been a transformative catalyst for many of the things I’ve been pondering. And to bring it back to Amy — she defines family-friend to me and I’m grateful to her in general. To my book group of almost twenty years: Don Tucker, Trevor Pearson, Mitch Austin, Scott Browning, Seamus Rail, Terry Humphries, Robby Brewer, and Dallas Dickinson — for picking so many books I never would have read and for steadfastly forcing me to verbally make sense of the random connections in my head, thanks and I look forward to another 20 (at least). To my dead mother, Cheri Baker O’Brien (52), and my dead sister, Kelly Hepburn Cole (39)… it is because of you and my love for you that I don’t and can’t turn away when people wiser than me ask the question, “…and what is it that we owe our dead?” Your unfulfilled dreams and broken hearts are carried in my chest, they are part of the work. Two authors also stand out whom I may never meet but whose work has shaped me: Eckhart Tolle and Brené Brown. From Eckhart I first learned of the possibility of slowing down and quieting my mind — the idea then and the practice now of remembering that what I think is not who I am — that the mind, in that sense, is a tool at my disposal, not the definition of who I am. I have read all of Brené Brown’s books and listened to every podcast episode — my wife teases me that I have a crush. It is like that, in a way, but at a soul level, without wanting… As a transracial adoptive parent of a black son, Brené Brown has been my unintentional white sherpa through Black Lives Matter. As she has struggled through it publicly in her podcast, I have followed every rabbit hole and then some:
- Tarana Burke’s You Are Your Best Thing & Unbound
- Dr. Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed
- Isabelle Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
- adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy
- Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist
- Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
- Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us
- Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
- Elizabeth Lesser’s Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes
- Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: The Bloodline of Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts
- Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
- Anand Giridharadas’ The Persuaders & Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
- Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
- Chip & Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments
- Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History & Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
- bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress
- David Wengrow & David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
I think that’s about a third of the impactful stuff I’ve read since I left The University of Texas at Austin after 21 years of service in 2019… Sincere apologies to those authors and works left out — my memory isn’t what it was & my propensity for recordkeeping never was much. What I have retained, I hope, is the strongest parts of each of these, and the others unnamed, and held them as strands to be woven into a more holistic understanding of ourselves and these moments we inhabit together…
Now where were we, oh yes, gratitude — last but not least in this round, to my wife Christie and my son Simon for being my tribe. You are each indispensable to me, together we are even more.
Reflection & Prospection
We’ve, in the last 9 articles, begun to scratch the surface of some interesting thoughts about dehumanization and nonviolence, about race and class and wealth, about psycho-social-spiritual development, about earnestness and change and how we deserve to be treated and are therefore obligated to treat others. We’ve made a decent start. So, we’ll continue on — I’ll take this weekend to regather my strength and my wits — and on Monday morning I’ll sit down and do my best to surrender to the torrent of healing energies that wish to use me as a conduit. I implied above that I am holding the strands — that’s a bit off, I am trying to grok what I’m writing, but writing this stuff is a spiritual practice — it is an act of flow and surrender. All that reading, that was breathing in. All this writing, this is breathing out. Just like breathing — I’m more of a witness than an actor. When I attend to the writing it is much like attending to breath, if I am faithful and undistracted I can watch it flow in and out, part of it but mostly a consciousness observing. Have you read The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers? (If you haven’t put it on your list.) The world is trying desperately to talk to us — call it God or Gaia, call it Life or Love, call it what you will, it can feel how close we are to the next big breakthrough on our evolutionary journey. Like all precipices, like all transitional moments, this one is laced aplenty with danger and tension and the real threat of things going badly… and I don’t think that a positive outcome is guaranteed, but I do think it is possible — perhaps as Gandalf says, “It only ever was a fool’s hope.” So, we’ll be talking more about nonviolence — about how militarization teaches our children that might-makes-right whether we want that to be the lesson or not. We’ll be talking about terraforming — about how our best chances for mastering that art are right here on Earth, this is where we need to practice our planet-building and planet-sustaining skills… the other ones, they’re going to be much tougher. We’ll be talking more about psych-social-spiritual evolution and embodiment — shout out to those bringing embodiment into the conversation, thank you. We’ll be talking about ecological and social justice — about whether right livelihood is a practice we can truly adopt. We’ll be talking about reproductive justice… whew, I’ve been on many sides of that one — praying for no pregnancy, praying for pregnancy, adoption, infertility, abortion, clinic defense when people were getting murdered… On that note, I’m going to end today with a quote from Stephen Jenkinson (Die Wise pp. 106–7):
You can get a lot of strong feeling going on this question of children’s death. That is because children dying seems to focus our deepest convictions about whether life is fair or just or purposeful. Dying children are ground zero for our beliefs about most of the Big Things. They activate our convictions about Supposed To. Having children, and having them meet and exceed their peers, those are high on our list of natural inevitable-if-the-world-is-halfway-just entitlements. When it happens otherwise, the first casualty is the willingness of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents and godparents, and beyond to continue believing, if they ever did, that there is a natural order of things, that it is good that there is, and that the natural order of things now includes the dying of the young person they love and counted on to outlive them. People will say as if they are reading from Leviticus or Luke or some other book: It isn’t right. In a place that doesn’t believe in dying and uses the death of children to fight it, just as every children’s hospital uses the idea of — and the fear of — dying children to raise money, dying children mean the end of justice. The dying of children is the place where the domesticated life fair to humans gives way ot the bloodied, aloof, Godless life of chance and chaos, where what is just is beggared by what is so.
I don’t want children to die, here or anywhere, and there are places in me that are wrecked by the thought and the work experience of children dying on my watch. I had spinal meningitis as a child in the 1950’s. I am a grown, dying child who didn’t die, amen. My own children, those born, have lived to see their twenties, praise everything holy, and when they were younger I would have done — and did do — what I could to steer them from their deaths. I wanted them to live, and to live beyond me, and so far they have. And I want the same for you, and for you who did not have it go that way I want that you can rise up somehow and try again to love life. But what I want for my children and for you, natural though it might be, is of little consequence in the nature of things. Or you could say, it is a small, understandable part of the nature of things. The nature of things just isn’t the same as human nature.
