Whatever Lights Up

I’m going to do my best not to let things get too fussy or heady around here.

I’m going to wake up, and see what thoughts are swirling in my head and try to get them connected to what is on my heart, and to transcribe it into words before I am too inhibited to do so freely. I’m just going to try to keep screen-talking instead of writing.

This is going to stay casual and non-perfectionistic. I hope.

I’d like to be less cautious here.

I don’t want to abandon the caution that is spoken of in silly media narratives about the silencing of the privileged. Don’t be worried. That isn’t what I mean. I don’t have any impulse or desire to say anything that would harm, exclude, or devalue anyone.

There are at least two faces of “self-censoring” on social media (probably many more but this is what rises up for the moment). One is the healthy self-reflective and conscious suppression of previously endorsed cultural abuse. Stifling hate is an excellent use of censoring.

The other silencing is a the silence that comes from the need to shield oneself against bad actors and unmodulated aggression. And lets be frank, the dis-inhibiting effects mean that we can all behave with more irritation, demandingness and aggression when we are stressed out of our minds and are hidden behind a screen. This is humanity.

The self-censorship I would like to abandon here has little to do with any notion of free speech. I want to imagine myself writing to a small community of people here who can withstand, and are perhaps actively interested in the actual messy initial complexity of a thought larger than I can express in tweet. I want to write about the psychospiritual conundrums I am working through as I try to protect my heart and head through a dangerous era.

This, for me, means relying on images and archetypes of the Divine Whole - whatever that is or isn’t. Psychoanalytic theories don’t reach far enough for me to continuously repair a heart that is broken over and over again on a daily basis. The only metaphors that are deep and wide enough for me at this time are mythic or religious, or emerge from natural world. Or all three.

I’m am going to write here about how we might try to keep our hearts lush and fertile in the face of daily reinjury. I need access to these bigger “spiritual” images in order to right myself and right-size myself in a world that simultaneously calls on me to give all I can through compounding global crises, while it also demands that I remember exactly how fucking small and temporary individual life is in the age of the Anthropocene.

I can only do a little bit, and yet, I want to do it with my whole heart.

I’ll need access to all of my symbolic languages here so you might have to tolerate some non-theistic Christian-ish language. Christianity is my first and my natal myth - and the only only religious system I am entitled to draw on without inflation or appropriation. Other gods and parables from the stories and scriptures of the wide world mean a great deal to me, but I try to be respectful of what is mine and not mine to make public use of.

I will talk also about what I read here ( I read weird books) and how it stirs into the soup of my daily survival and living.

Joseph Campbell (yes, I think he is problematic too - so many of the lessons I have learned on this earth have been taught to me by profoundly problematic men) in conversation with Alan Watts (same) described his meditation practices this way:

“I underline sentences”

And this is the simplest way I know to describe lexio divina, a contemplative process of reading and watching for a sentence that lights something up inside, stays with you, and frees your mind and heart from a bind you didn’t even know they were tangled in. Twitter at its best does that - scrolling and scrolling through all the shit and toxicity until you stumble on something beautiful or relieving, and something essential lights up in front of you.

So this is a space I’m going to try to preserve for my secular and spontaneous version of scriptio divina, where I want to pull from all the living texts that swirl within me and around me, and write, as faithfully as I can, about whatever lights up.