Succession Of Evolution

I just finished a complicated conversation with my friends Abby and John. I'm not sure if it was exhausing or invigorating. I do know that pedalling my way home, I couldn't get it out of my head, and that it took riding into a snowbank to bring me back to the moment right in front of me. I have had a hard time in the past staying calm when anger gets involved in a conversation. I feel like I'm being attacked and my natural response is to fight back. Today I still felt those things, but I tried my best to stay grounded and not take offense, as I know that will only close down the conversation instead of building the bridges I so desire. Instead I wonder where the other person's anger is coming from, where the impulse to dismiss my ideas comes from. Is it fear? If so, then what are they afraid of? Probably the same things I am. Sometimes when I ask why the person is getting angry, they say they're not angry, just passionate about the issue. Disclaimer--This does not apply to my friends I mentioned earlier in the post because I did not ask them these things.

A part of me thinks that anyone that is yelling at someone is more than passionate, they are angry, maybe in ways that they aren't aware of. I also recognize that righteous anger can encourage people to make changes in their personal lives and in the world. Inner, outer, above, below--everything is connected. As my friend Maria said today when I mentioned how good it felt to be thinking about the world's problems more than my own, it's ok to think about yourself, you're part of the world, too. The danger, it seems to me, is when one doesn't make the transformations, whether inner or outer, that the anger is asking us to make. Also, that if we do make the changes without letting go of the anger, we will become like the person or system that was making us angry in the first place. Starhawk presents the case for this belief so well in The Fifth Sacred Thing. This is why I am committed to non-violence. I do not want to become like the war machine that governs our world, which leads me to the gist of the debate that John and Abby and I had. It began with me saying that I believed that all people should be paid the same amount, no matter what they did. I made a mistake by using the vocabulary of the system I don't believe in. I should have said that I believed all work should be valued equally as an essential part of society, and that the value of work should be measured in some other way. For me this would be something that is both less abstract, and less tangible than the dollar. (Funny that the dollar has such tangible weight since if judged by its material components it is actually worth so very little!) Without going into the details, (feel free to post them if you want John), John disagreed, saying he thought my ideas were totally unrealistic and too idealistic too implement in the real world. I said that I didn't believe they were too idealistic at all, and that even if they are, I didn't really care, that what I have dedicated my life to is creating a vision to aspire to, something I can do as a writer, by disseminating ideas in conversation with people who are kind enough to talk to me, and most importantly, in the way that I live my life. I have a way to go as far as how I live my life, but I can see now that many of the choices I have made which have kept me on the fringe of mainstream society may have actually come from my instinctual nature. For example, I hardly own anything. I thought it was because I couldn't afford things, but when I think about it, not owning things is really more in accord with the vision I see--a cooperative society based on reverence of the four sacred things--earth, air, fire, and water. I used to always think that the way the system was set up now I could never own a home, now I'm not sure I want to. While I see the independence that owning your own property can buy, I am not sure that I want to pay the price. However, it is necessary right now for some of those who want to change the current system to own land, otherwise they wouldn't be able to demonstrate to others how to live sustainably. This creates a quandary, because the intentional communites living cooperatively run the risk of becoming like the society they are resisting. Although I have never lived in one, I imagine constant vigilance is necessary.

The important thing for me is to live my truth to the best of my abilities, and this is all I want for everybody. I didn't set up this blog to make judgments, although I am going to show my weaknesses as they appear because I want this to be an honest record of my journey. Live your truth to the best of your abilities. John is a firm believer in the righteousness of the U.S. Constitution and an admirer of The Founding Fathers. Abby pointed out that the founding fathers were radicals who were idealistic themselves, also that they left a lot of loopholes in the Constitution because they couldn't figure out how to deal with them. It could be argued, that they planned our nation according to the permaculture principle called sucession of evolution, that they planted the Constitution in such a way to prepare for ideas that could only come to fruition in the future, that perhaps they believed that the timing was not right for some of the ideas they may have wanted to include, like outlawing slavery and allowing women to vote. I don't know, as I am not familiar with the backstory of the writing of the Constitution,perhaps Abby could fill us in here. As the conversation continued, I pointed out that Jefferson, the primary author of the Constitution, owned slaves, whom he didn't free until he could no longer support them. John pointed out that The Constitution had a system of checks and balances written into it so that the different branches couldn't become corrupt, and that the problem now is that they were corrupt, which is the source of his righteous indignation. Abby pointed out that in the original wording, Jefferson adapted the words of John Locke to say that our God-given rights were life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, and that this was amended to the pursuit of happiness that we are guaranteed now. I should have pointed out that no one consulted the Founding Mothers, but I can now. Indeed, the Founding Mothers weren't given a voice in the Constitution. Women didn't receive the right to vote until the 1920s. After the Civil War, I believe that black male Americans could vote, but only if they owned a certain amount of property. Correct me on this if I am wrong. I did point out that I thought our government based on the Founding Father's Constitution was corrupt because it was founded on the assumption that ownership of property was also a fundamental right, and also because the Founding Fathers, as we so often hear, included the words "the right to bear arms" within it. Our nation was founded when a group of people who had wrested the land from the original inhabitants (who could have taken it from someone else, I don't know, but who if while not living in total harmony with each other, appeared to be living in harmony with the earth. They certainly weren't generating landfills and dumping their garbage from barges into the ocean). As I was saying, our nation was founded when the colonists fought a bloody war for "independence" from the British. I put quotation marks around the word independence, because how can anyone say we live in a free nation if we are caught up in an unending cycle of violence? However! Just because the Founding Fathers couldn't live their truths, doesn't mean that we can't either. I ask everyone who reads these words to look in their hearts and see what lives there, and share it if you choose. What's idealistic about that? Who knows, maybe Jefferson would be glad to see us abandon the Constitution as a document that no longer reflects our current needs and, in the spirit of the succession of evolution, help us write a new one. After all he, like Jesus, was a revolutionary in his time.

This was an amazing and exciting conversation, which I've decided was more invigorating than exhausting after clarifying my ideas here. John and Abby, thanks for taking the time to engage with me.

To finish, I would like to quote from Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing.

"We believe there are Four Sacred Things that can't be owned," Bird said. "Water is one of them. The others are earth and air and fire. They can't be owned because they belong to everybody, because everybody's life depends on them."

"But that would make them the best kind of things to own," Littlejohn said. "Because if your life depends on it, you've got to have it. You'll pay any price for it. You'll steal or lie or kill to get."

"That's why we don't let anybody own them," Bird said.