Tag: transformation

A small flower with new leaves booms on a bare branch

Birthing a New Era

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How much of life needs to break down
at first slowly
then in ways, unimaginable.
And not only here,
but here
and here
and here…

How much needs to be turned inside out
make no sense
as day after day
familiar routines fade into memory
and fate makes folly, once, and again, of my plans.

How much of this happens
before I, too, begin to see that, even I,
am changing.
That I am not the person I have come to know myself to be.

I have tied my identity
my ambitions and my future
to mainstays and certainties now upended,
security replaced in these dark days
with fear
and the gnawing desire
to escape it.

I see from here, just how much I have taken for granted.
How much I thought essential to my life,
has fallen away
as I adapt
to less.

As the anxious knots,
and the drowning of them
in Netflix and wine and patience and restlessness
wear thin,
such temporary pleasures give way
to the only question standing
beside all those with no answers:

What ‘less’ in my life, has now become ‘more’?

What really mattered when everything else was falling
and yet the sun still rose each morning
unphased in its stalwart loyalty to the earth?

What really mattered when my life as I knew it was laid bare
and the stories faltered
and the savings dried up
but …
we found our way.
What, when we return again to life,
will we bring from these quiet, fear-filled and solitary times?

Perhaps instead of nonsense and chaos,
this has all been a divine intervention,
with plagues and wildfires
of biblical proportion.
And what if the darkness we have lived through
isn’t “the darkness of the tomb,
but the darkness of a womb.”*
And if — in this new year —
a new sun rises
and standing beneath it
on this earth
we double down now,
for the birth.

With the blessings, then,
of this shared darkness
lighting our way
– changed as we are by a changed world –
what steps will we choose to take forward,
birthing ourselves
and our world
towards a truly new day?

*Gratitude to Valerie Kaur’s visionary metaphor and her work at Revolutionary Love

A red-furred bat hangs upside down from a slender branch, eyes open and looking into the camera

Pandemic Diaries / 2

Published on by karin swann-rubenstein2 Comments

The Great Invitation: On Learning to Listen to Bats and Pangolins

It is a full eleven days since we arrived at our sanctuary ‘shelter’ in the California hills. In eleven days our business — a nature-based retreat center serving non-profits, yogis and nuptials — has nosedived. The first wave of cancellations was followed by a second, then the third. Within four days, almost a third of our annual revenue had disappeared and my husband, Jon, after no small amount of hand-wringing, shuttered the business. In a matter of days, reality as we knew it had come to a grinding halt. Continue reading “Pandemic Diaries / 2” →

A heart-shaped stone with surface crackled like a molasses cookie.

PART TWO: Power – The Essence of Hatred (4 of 5)

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If you inquire into hatred, itself, it transforms into power. You want to feel hatred, be open to it, welcome it, see what it is about. Where did it come from? What is it trying to do? …That, by itself, unfolds it to reveal the truth lying within. – Hameed Ali, Diamond Approach, Spacecruiser Inquiry

These days, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the hatred coursing through American’s political landscape. Progressives and Democrats are the first to point it out in the raucous, contemptuous, racist chants at Trump’s rallies or in his daily twitter missives aimed at the opposition. Around my progressive hometown, posters are scattered in front yards and on main street store windows with the words: “We Stand United Against Hate.” When we look at the damage and cruelty being wielded by so much of the hateful rhetoric today no doubt all this concern with hatred is more than understandable.

However, the moral stance against hatred needs to be met with a strong degree of self-honestly from those of us who are quick to vilify it. Many of us, many, are lugging around boatloads of righteous hatred ourselves. In fact, that’s one of the things the right tends to hate about us – our hypocrisy about hate.

I’ve always thought of hatred as born in the moments of utter heartache where anger, pushed to its furthest limits, is thwarted and gives up. Hatred isn’t the negation of anger, it’s high-octane, compressed anger, the combustible, incinerating power of the darkest, blackest coal. Rather than quickly hot, however, hate has an air of coolness and restraint about it, just like a deceivingly innocent piece of coal that takes time to reveal its real capacity to char the crap out of something. In this way, hatred hides in thoughts and projections that appear harmless but can crush another’s subjectivity with one, seemingly simple ‘idea’ (witness racist ideology). As such, hatred can be a wicked weapon and one that has devastating capacity when linked with mechanisms of power that seem innocuous but can have a devastating impact on people’s physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

But back to the troubling hypocrisy among liberals… hatred can live quite comfortably in the people who hate the haters – people whose hateful parts would – in all honestly – wipe those powerful hating assholes out in a heartbeat if they could without consequence. Hatred can operate in slick ways like this; hiding in a sense of pride and victim entitlement and, unlike anger, can more easily live outside our awareness. Like a sleeping giant, it sneaks out when we issue utterance about someone despicable who disgusts us. Before it becomes action, however, hatred is a feeling. It is not a bad feeling, but an all-too-human feeling, one that may cause more trouble when we forbid it, or act it out, than it would if we found the space and support in our lives to actually feel and explore it. Continue reading “PART TWO: Power – The Essence of Hatred (4 of 5)” →

A person is screaming. The face is covered with cracking mud, and the person's fists are pressing in one each side of their head

PART TWO: Strength – The Essence of Anger (3 of 5)

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She’s mad but she’s magic. There is no lie in her fire. – Charles Bukowski

On January 21st, 2017 between 3-5 million American women walked out their front door and onto the streets for the largest single-day protest the country had ever seen. One day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Women’s March proved a preamble to the foment of the unprecedented impact of the #MeToo movement that followed. There was more than enough evidence that a groundswell of American women were done with being “nice” and had simply had enough. Books released in 2018, like Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad, or Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her, brought laser focus to this reality, exploring the history of accomplishments attributable to women’s ferocity in taking action around circumstances that were simply no longer acceptable. In the days after the women’s march a conversation was mounting about women taking off in our country, reflecting, perhaps, the Dalai Lama’s prophecy that “the world will be saved by Western women.”

This broad display of angry, defiant women is progress, no doubt. The record level women and minorities elected during the mid-terms reflected this. It was something feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow Wallaper, written in 1892, could hardly have imagined during that early period of first wave feminism. Gilman’s character had found a kind of liberation through a ‘crazy’-madness where she began to challenge the status quo around her, but herein was a different kind of mad: angry mad, publicly angry mad, mad by the millions!

However, just as statistics about a rise in anxiety during the Trump presidency don’t tell the personal story of people’s experience of that anxiety, how it has changed them for better or worse, nor do statistics about the number of women (and their allies) who took to the streets tell the story of how women across America have experienced their anger, fed-up-ness and outrage. How it has over the last several years perhaps deepened their cynicism or, potentially, spawned a new level of empowerment and vision. This is the inside story. Continue reading “PART TWO: Strength – The Essence of Anger (3 of 5)” →

'Girl With Balloon' wall stencil by the artist Banksy showing a girl in black with her hand outstretched towards a a heart-shaped balloon flying just out of reach.

PART TWO: Separation and Reconnection (2 of 5)

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Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation. ― Charles Eisenstein

I start on the screen of my choosing. I am on a zoom call, Dec. 6, 2017. Here, in encountering my isolation I forge two new relationships. The first was with the woman on the screen, a therapist and member of what Glennon Doyle in her best-selling memoir Love Warrior refers to as “the universal underground of sisterhood.” The screen is a compromise on our being together in physical presence, but this does not stop something memorable from happening that day because this is where it started. This is where the second relationship was born with the part of myself that had been trapped in the wallpaper of my own life for decades. Continue reading “PART TWO: Separation and Reconnection (2 of 5)” →

PART TWO: The Inward Turn – Exploring the Soul of Citizenship In The Trump Era (1 of 5)

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Madness in Mad Times

In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a short story titled The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilman’s female protagonist was relegated to an upstairs room by her husband, a doctor, for a ‘rest cure’ to address her ‘nervous depression, despair, and hysteria.’ (Gilman had been given this “treatment” for depression herself, by a Dr. Silas Mitchell).

Enclosed, trapped, powerless, and pathologized (gaslighted), Gilman’s character became intoxicated by the wallpaper in the room. In the first third of the story, we find her in what seems like a petty preoccupation with the wallpaper, irritated and angered by the pattern in it, the sallow, yellow color, the sheer incongruence of the design. But as the pages turn, her intrigue with the wallpaper grows, over time ‘finding’ a woman trapped within its patterned contours.

The story continues to chronicle the protagonist’s building ‘madness,’ as she alternates between self-doubt and engagement with the woman (sometimes women) she is able to discern in the wallpaper. The protagonist refers to the guidance of those who are taking care of her, guidance she originally obliges but comes over time to question, then confront. Before long, you can’t help but join in her mounting irritation with the way they dismiss and minimize her distress and coddling her into ‘recovery.’ Over the course of the story, Gilman’s character builds the capacity (in a kind of defiant, madness) to dismiss these ‘caretakers’ who pity her condition (again, gaslighting). She finds an intimacy with her direct experience, learning to trust what she is seeing, feeling, discovering in a conscious awakening to a self-authorized reality of her own.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life. – Virginia Woolf

Gilman’s story culminates with the protagonist successfully stripping the wallpaper off the walls setting free, to her great satisfaction, the woman she sees caught there. When her husband opens the door in the final passage, he finds his wife proclaiming in delight: “I got out at last, I got out at last!” Said husband then faints and we are left with the image of a woman crawling in circles around him in the room, ‘mad’ and elated. We are also left with a disturbing but strangely intoxicating paradox about the relationship between a woman’s madness and her liberation. Continue reading “PART TWO: The Inward Turn – Exploring the Soul of Citizenship In The Trump Era (1 of 5)” →