A Hymn To Agency
What to write?
Morning dawns in majesty, sun on the horizon as a god, blazing with light and life. A retention pond at the rear of Starbucks where I customarily begin each day, is stunning in reflective stillness. The sky is brought down to earth: heaven & earth. There’s a white egret who sometimes feeds by the drainage pipe directly across the pond from my view through the rear glass door here at Starbucks.
A few minutes were spent to finish a newsletter received via email from Rob Brezsny. He is a veteran writer that I respect. The August 18 missive is entitled Picking our Battles – A Manifesto of Sacred Discernment. The language of the title makes clear that Brezsny writes with edge, a flair for social and self criticism. The essay identifies eight major issues the writer aspires to contend for.
Why not paraphrase his words, some of the points made… Here goes!
…the work of liberation [is to] be infused with imagination, eros, humor, and supple moral reasoning rather than rigid dogma.
A politics that can’t laugh or bear complexity is half-dead. At best, it will build a marginally bigger version of the cage it claims to be breaking. I want justice and delight. I want moral fervor and flexibility. I refuse to believe we must amputate the soul to win the world.
Cynicism is the cheapest sophistication there is. [that is] the flattening, literalist, nothing-really-matters posture that flatters itself as realism while surrendering the future.
I push back against it without inhibition. I want to show anyone who listens to me that enchantment can coexist with harsh realism about suffering and loss. Reverence, curiosity, amazement, and awe are medicines that keep us thriving in the fight.
[to] challenge fundamentalist religion and hyper-rationalist contempt for the spiritual life with equal energy, because both are forms of foreclosure. One locks the mystery in a single creed and the other denies that the mystery exists at all.
Soul work and ritual belong in public culture.
[to] protect nuance in an age addicted to absolutes: the right to hold conflicting truths and to see shadow in everything. This means critiquing my own side and myself.
[to be] willing to risk being misunderstood in order to model non-binary thinking. I refuse the easy all-good / all-bad story,…
…for a world where women’s agency, queer and trans embodiment, and the full spectrum of gender expression are treated as sacred and politically non-negotiable. They’re never “issues” to be debated for sport by people whose own lives aren’t on the line.
Eros, care, freedom, and pleasure are central to justice, and an attack on them is an attack on democracy.
The United States was assembled out of two ongoing crimes: the seizure of a continent from the nations who had tended it for thousands of years, and the enslavement of kidnapped Africans to make that seized ground profitable. Neither crime is finished. They have continued in different forms under different names.
White supremacy mixed with fundamentalist Christianity is a putrid religion decimating and harming the world NOW. It has a creation myth, a priesthood, sacraments of violence, and a promise of salvation to poor white people who are offered a superiority they can swallow in place of a life they can live.
These segments are sufficient to convey the point of view, a distinct flavor of resisting the endemic violence with a love-of-life. Perhaps you’d enjoy reading the newsletter? CLICK HERE
