Increasing the Light at the Winter Solstice

The Winter Solstice.

A time humans have been celebrating for thousands and thousands of years. The time of year when nights get their darkest and their longest. The time when things look and feel their bleakest.

You can call it Christmas, you can call it Hanukkah, you can call it Kwanzaa, you can call it the remnants of a pagan festival if you want to. But whatever you call it, the darkest days of the year bring out the human need to give, share, sing, gather, and generally light up the darkness in any way we can.

And there is a lot of darkness today. No doubt about it. We're in the midst of big changes -- religious, social, political, in consciousness -- and human beings tend to take change pretty hard. We don't tend to "go gentle into that good night," we tend to fear the worst and fall apart. We tend to go kicking and screaming into that good night, fiercely defending turf we don't need, can't use, and could have started sharing ages ago.

The only way to increase the amount of light we've got is to take some responsibility for the amount of darkness we produce.

To try to become aware of when we're merely projecting our own fears and inadequacies onto others. To try to figure out how much of the evil we see out in the world is actually coming from within our own hearts, our own actions, and our own attitudes.

The amount of human darkness increasingly exponentially around the world isn't coming from "them" -- it's coming from "us."

A good thing to ponder during the Winter Solstice.

The Pot Calls the Kettle Black

Why do we hear so much ranting and raving over the airways? Why is it so easy for us to get all hot and bothered by what someone else is doing? How come we just can't get off of certain subjects?

It's pretty simply, really. We dwell on what others are doing so we don't have time to think about what we're doing ourselves.

It's called projection, in psychological terms, and it happens all the time. It starts with denial, and ends in blame. We take some part of ourselves we don't like--or are ashamed of, or don't want to think about, or can't bring ourselves to deal with--and project it out onto another person, where we can see it. Imagine a movie projector. You would be the projector whirring in that little room up in the back of the theater, and the other person would be the big screen down in front. You're creating the image, the image is actually coming from you, but the other person is the only place where you can see the image. Thus we can develop a rich and satisfying hatred for the other person while remaining steadfastly in love with ourselves and not having to change a thing personally. "I don't have a bad temper. What are you talking about, you asshole? You have a terrible temper!!"

This cycle, denial--projection--blame, is a basic psychological mechanism. It's a description of what went on at your dinner table last night. It's a description of what we each do all day long every day unless we're making a sincere effort not to do so, and probably a good 78.87% of the time even then.

There's no getting around the fact that humans are now using their intelligence to project whatever they don't like about themselves onto other people, rather than using their intelligence to correct whatever it is about themselves they don't like. Shoot--we're taught to project whatever we don't like about ourselves onto others. Children hear their parents and teachers and leaders do it every day. Hang out in any schoolyard, anywhere in the world, for one whole recess period, and count how many times one kid blames another kid for what he or she just did.

Where do they learn that?

Halloween Shadows

It's fall, isn't it? All about shorter days, longer nights, turning colors, and the stirrings of evil spirits, both within and without.

An excellent time to read an illustrated book on the human shadow...

My "Little" Shadow

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow--
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow,
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes goes so little that there's none of him at all.

He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close behind me, he's a coward you can see;
I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

--Robert Louis Stevenson
(who, of course, also wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)

A Possible Reason for the Meanness of Conservatives

A Possible Reason for the Meanness of Conservatives


Talking to Claire yesterday:

about those times when you find yourself
face to face with a wealthy person who starts to foam at the mouth
about the remote possibility that illegal immigrants—who do the dirty work while the rest of us look away or go on vacation—might receive a bit of basic health care while in this country.



And then this morning:

stopping in mid-stride for no logical reason whatsoever,
while actually on my way out the door to do something logical,
dropping down on my hands and knees in front of the art file,
rifling through, pulling out whatever spoke to my heart
and slapping it up all over the refrigerator.
Ah…
Much better.


Could it be a lack of wildness that drives conservatives to meanness?

A fear of being different, of not looking successful enough,
Of not doing the right thing—does my tie look OK?
Is my lawn smooth enough?
The bland sappy art and the elevator music,
the white walls and the beige carpets,
the high ceilings in big chilly houses with faux stone fronts,
the church services where thousands chant the same words in unison,
the same restaurants with the same food
—none of it nourishing—
appearing every few minutes
along otherwise featureless suburban freeways?


Could it be that all this blandness squeezes the wildness and fierceness
out of their poor denied animal natures
in fearsome and menacing ways?


Thank heaven that
young people are getting weirder and weirder looking all the time.
It just might save the human race.

Simply Too Much Shadow to Share

Not too current on this blog thing, am I? Afraid my last entry was in January...

Ah, well. I assume you've all had plenty to look at on the internet without any input from me.

Sometimes there's simply too much shadow to talk about. Or write about in public, anyway.

A marriage breaks up, the two people live apart for months, then their marriage reforms with new dynamics. Re-marriage, but with the same two principal characters.

And as that goes on relationships with children -- really, I should think of something else to call them besides children, the youngest is 26, for Christ's sake -- also change and evolve.

I don't know about you, but I can't seem to grow without pain. Like that story where the Worm/Dragon has to peel off 7 different layers of skin in order to become human again. Ouch. It hurts to peel off layers of old persona, old masks, old habits, old kneejerk reactions developed in childhood (complexes, a Jungian would call them).

Even when those old skins are so worn out they no longer keep out the elements, it hurts to pull them off and find out what's underneath.

So please excuse my silence. There's simply been too much shadow to share.

A Revolution of the Spirit

How gratifying to have one's opinion verified by experts first thing in the morning, via the daily paper.

Lately what I've been saying to anyone who'll listen is that the whole premise of our economy is unsound. The GNP is based on all of us selling as many things to one another as we possibly can. Things we usually don't need, that there are already too many of, that the world does not have the resources for us to keep making. How sustainable is that? This system does need a shot in the arm, there's no doubt about it, but beyond that this system needs to fundamentally change its whole underlying idea, its structural vision.

So how pleasant it was to run into Benjamin R. Barber on the editorial page of The Oregonion today (Saturday, January 31. I'll add a link to it as soon as one of my kids tells me how to do so.)

Barber is a senior fellow at Demos, and the author of Jihad vs. Mac World and Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole.

Here's a quote from an essay in today's paper called "A new american revolution?" Rethinking the Soul of Capitalism:

Today we find ourselves in another seminal moment. Will be use it to rethink the meaning of capitalism and the relationship between our material bodies and the spirited psyches they are meant to serve? Between the commodity fetishism and single-minded commercialism that we have allowed to dominate us, and the pluralism, heterogeneity and spiritedness that constitute our professed national character?

I love this question.

What if we didn't spend all our time and money making things we don't need, and started concentrating our resources on making things that benefit us all and enriched our culture?

What if we produced less junk and more soul?

What if we spent our time building and staffing first-rate, engaging schools? What if preschoolers, the elderly, and those too mentally challenged to hold a job, were cared for by well-paid experts in quality facilities?

What is the basis of our society wasn't rampant, unbridled capitalism--the most ruthless economic system ever invented other than outright oppression--but became instead the pursuit of non-material happiness?

The struggle for the soul of capitalism is, then, a struggle between the nation's economic body and its civic soul: a struggle to put capitalism in its proper place, where it serves our nature and needs rather than manipulating and fabricating whims and wants. Saving capitalism means bringing it into harmony with spirit--with prudence, pluralism and those "things of the public" (res publica) that define our civic souls. A revolution of the spirit. Is the new president up to it? Are we?
--Benjamin R. Barber, Rethinking the Soul of Capitalism

What A Difference a Few Months Can Make!

Having been absent from the blogosphere since October due to family difficulties, what a welcome change to return to it only twelve days from the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States.

Unbelievable. Unprecedented. Indescribably delicious.

The USA is about to have a President who understands the concept of the human shadow, although he may not call it that. Who understands that name-calling, fact-twisting, blame-mongering or sending-to-hell will not solve any of our problems, and is, in fact, holding us back.

Who shows a graceful awareness of his country's shortcomings as well as his own, and shows the willingness and the ability to confront both.

Hallelujah.

While you wait for inauguration day, read both of his books, available now in paperback: Dreams from My Father, a clear-sighted and thoughtful memoir, and The Audacity of Hope, a succinct history of how the US got where she is today, and what can be done about it.

That creaking sound you hear, right there at the edge of your hearing, is the sound of the wheel finally starting to turn...