Simply Occult

I was talking with my good friend Joy the other day about the wisdom of stay-at-home parents. She sent me this excerpt from a Wendell Berry Essay:

"Later in her book, Davis speaks of the wisdom of the 'valorous woman' of Proverbs 31 as a 'kind of intelligence bred through generations of work done in particular places, with particular materials, in response to concrete and immediate problems.' This articulate, humble, practical local intelligence is antithetical to imperial rule, and it is the only effective way of resistance:

The logic of empire is the centralization of information and social control; its essential processes are acculturation of local populations and appropriation of goods. Local knowledge, however, is difficult to control, since it is by definition dispersed and relatively autonomous. Nor can it be appropriated from without; [it] can be learned only from inside the community."

What really grabbed me, and I think my friend, was the truth that women, who have traditionally stayed at home and been kept at bay from academia and the wisdom of the professional world, held within them all this time a 'practical and local intelligence'. While society has deemed this state of home-bound living a pitiable weakness and vulnerability, we have the opportunity to reclaim its value, not within the bounds of empire, but as a counter imperium of autonomous rule!

In our ambitions of forming an intentional community, many of our friends have exchanged formal education and master's degrees for hours of personal study trying to reclaim that knowledge that responds to concrete and immediate needs: food, water, shelter, and health. That journey has led many of us to greater intimacy with the world, the seasons, the streams, the plants and predators and prey, new-found brothers and sisters of equal worth and countless wisdom. We seek out the wild places. We study plants and herbs for their healing and nutritional properties. And that's when it hit me: the image of Joy chanting in a tiny little home in the middle of nowhere, or Luke talking to himself or performing ceremonies alone in the woods, or Kate throwing different plants into a pot brewing up some cure for aches and pains...suddenly I saw my group of friends as a coven of witches!

While in the past I have dismissed witches as satanic and scary, I am now drawn to them as symbols of anti-empirical knowledge and feminine power. I am not talking about the religious movement Wicca, though I would not dismiss its aspects of Pantheism. I am talking about a story I have been told since I was a little girl. Look at the definitions of a witch in dictionaries: someone with supernatural powers; an ugly old woman; a seductive young woman; an herbalist. I am talking about a campaign against the greatest threat to the empire: local knowledge. This campaign slanders feminine/local power and wisdom. I am talking about the occult, or knowledge of the 'hidden', as opposed to knowledge of the measurable, or science. I am talking about that which society condemns. It's weird to live in the middle of no where. It's weird to throw plants into a pot and make your own potions. It's weird to join with nature in ceremony. It's weird to live independently of the empire.

And I like it.

A justification for passion

A friend asked me the other day why I like being a social worker and, in typical Renee fashion, I have been mulling over my response for a week now. My initial reply, taken a little aback, was that I like people. After those three words, my answer became awkwardly scripted. Perhaps it’s all the job interviews. I felt like I was giving an answer to my mother, fitting my passions into her expectations. I began to define what I do by success. True, I don’t think there is any field that yields such practical and life changing results as social work. Medicine, sure, they save lives, I guess. But I have created families. I have ended domestic violence. Of course that’s bullshit. But playing any small part in these outcomes fills me with pride. I like people. I remember everyone I have worked with (in my young and very short career). But to justify myself, I talk about what I have done for people. Even though I was talking to my friend, who was putting none of this on me, I was addressing my parents and my culture. I would rather be true to my passions than justify them.

“Success is an ugly thing. (People) are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.”

― Victor Hugo

Violating our own truth

I am going to speak a lot about something I know very little about. There is a movement I sense in my group of friends. I have only let myself sense it very slightly because it hits me as something so contrary to myself and my ambitions that to comprehend it further would incur a great loss. I catch glimpses of it in their intense drive for communal living and sudden interest in foraging, debt-free living, land rights, and unemployment. They feel trapped. And they are trapped. We all are; captives of a narrative we assume occupies a sole possibility. There is some variance to the tale, but in general, we believe in certain inevitabilities or necessities: rents or mortgages, formal education, the allotted currency, employment, etc. We equate them with survival. My friends clearly recognize the charade. I myself have long read Merton’s observation that we wrap experiences around ourselves as if these rags of accomplishments were the only way we could be seen; an invisible essence made real by what is ultimately the unreal (New Seeds of Contemplation). As he says, “If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications, even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily (people) dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrication designed to protect mere fictitious identities – ‘selves’, that is to say, regarded as objects” (Raids on the Unspeakable). So I have some ground for understanding my friend’s philosophy. I am familiar with this basic concept; that we are caught in a senseless stampede with no idea why we are running, but believing or knowing full well that if we stop we will be trampled. What is new to me is the response. Rather than aspiring to run headstrong and straight into the chaos in some act of counter ethos that engages, there seems to be a belief, or a realization, that removing oneself serves our ambition best. The ambition is, of course, to save the world.

My one friend, whose thoughts I respect deeply, described it thusly: you can work in refugee resettlement, teaching English and helping people find jobs (i.e. feeding industry with cheap, disposable labor), or you can remove yourself from consumerism, consequently removing yourself from the equation that a demand for resources = conflict over said resources = people fleeing their lands = refugee resettlement.

Like my friends, I have no intent of accepting the deceptive myth of a realism that confirms the current ‘reality’. Yet I do want to deal with injustice realistically. As attractive as purist pursuits seem, returning to the laws of nature and forgoing domination of the earth or her inhabitants, I fear that path does nothing for the hungry belly now.

I miss direction most

I remember being traumatized by images of WWII’s concentration camps in elementary school. I literally felt my innocence burning away as my face would tingle with discomfort and rage. I’ve lost that physical reaction against human cruelty and have, in some ways, grown accustomed to the existence of hunger, violence, and overt injustice. Imbalance. I wish I still felt that utter horror at the concept, but I do not. All I have is some intellectual or spiritual aversion to the current reality. Maybe that’s enough. Rather than slowly watch that flutter away as well, maybe I can choose to engage.

I have started applying for jobs again. I am restless. Maybe it’s discontentment. Is it healthy?

Children endure horrific abuse daily. I have seen the rows upon rows of filing cabinets documenting the discovered cases of abuse. I have also seen children taken from the care of their families because the definition of neglect is nearly inseparable from the definition of poverty. People in my city are hungry. I have seen the anger of people who show up to food lines and leave unsatisfied. It’s real, and it’s close, and it only seems to get worse. (Cue Music)

Sometimes I think social work holds no answers to these problems. And as a social worker, I have felt myself becoming cynical trying to create change amidst competition, manipulation, aggression and other coping mechanisms that originated in people, communities, and organizations from some line of injustice or imbalance that seems to me inescapably cyclical. Which might be why I cannot see my friend community’s desire to farm land and live relatively isolated from the world as anything but escapism. I want that. I want to walk away from the cities and the islands of rural towns and find a place to hide. I want to tend to the land and my own spirit; the things I can more easily control.

But

I feel as though, at some point, despite the hurt and rage and nonsense of humanity, you have to be willing to say, “Ok, I’ll be part of this world”. Not only because it’s an illusion to assume you are not, but also because, in engaging, I have also seen the hope. I have seen strength and trust and empowerment and self-discovery and balance. It is much like the food line: I resonate with the feeling of being fed but unsatisfied. It's a frustration to hope. But watching the slow unraveling of a very complicated knot, you sometimes witness it break open in a burst of freedom. And it is freedom for us all.

"Although the world is full of suffering,

it is also full of the overcoming of it."

-Helen Keller

The stuff that dreams are made of

I have taken an interest in dreams. People spend eight hours a day sleeping (at least as I approach 30, that seems more reasonable), and I have to believe more comes from that time than rest and drool. I take it to be my most genuine processing time, free from pretense or deceit. By paying attention to my dreams, I awake to a part of myself too often clouded by daily drama, preoccupation, or pride.

I remember two dreams from the other night. In the first, I was plastering a cob house wall in a business suit. As explored in my last entry, I feel torn between upcoming career and life choices. Both the cob walls and fancy pants are a means to and end. I want to reform foster care and, by golly, business suits just might do the trick. I want to live intimately with friends, and as we all know, 'if you build it, they will come'. And yet, these two things seem at odds. I was getting plaster all over my outfit, and in an attempt to avoid dirtying my suit, I was doing a horrible job plastering the wall! Each precluded the other.

Dream #2: I had a bloody nose. That's about it. I looked it up on a website I'm a little embarassed to admit I frequent. This dream dictionary suggested that a bloody nose warns the dreamer of becoming overly involved in other's fights. The application of this wise counsel is astoundingly broad. I have been picking fights for my past self and my future self. I have been mediating arguments, unprompted, on behalf of my husband, my sisters, and my parents. Not to mention my recent meddling in the love-lives of others. Sometimes I am attempting to fill my long-standing role as peace keeper. Other times I am trying to explore new conflict styles. In either case, I feel 'beat up', leaving no relationship better than before.

Dabbling in Determinism

After two set years in grad school, glued to one region of the world and one main task, it is strange to come upon another fork in the road. I think about all the people I might have been. This is a very real consideration to me. As I see it, the roads I have taken have lead me to a very specific identity (or, at least, some very specific roles). A career. A last name. Maybe I would have been "Mrs. Smith, MSW" regardless. If the nature of time is fixed, as we understand it to be in the past, then I'm willing to see the future in a similar fashion. But my perception is that I have a lot of choices coming up. I could work clinically, leading to an LCSW and growing a certain set of skills. Or I could work in the macro-level, collecting and analyzing data, influencing policy, and growing a completely different set of skills. Both are within me. Another split: I could return to Thailand or Guatemala and really solidify a second language, feel that constant challenge and self reflection offered by a cross-cultural vantage, and really begin to align myself with those fighting poverty and oppression. Not to mention, I might eventually be able to eat spicy food without crying through my nose. Or, following another path, I could live with nine close friends in the mountains of West Virginia, tending to my own physical, psychological, and social health, making a positive impact on the world by having intentional relationships with the land and people, and being perfectly content to smell like butter the rest of my life (as I am told those of us from the US do). I am discouraged to consider the inability to do both. I am relieved to remember that some choices are not mine. If my husband's contract is renewed, we probably wont go to Guatemala. If I don't get a macro-level job, I'll probably work clinically, and vice versa. And I balance my (un)controllables with those of a million other people, towards a collective future yet unseen.

I know this - what I do now, in this moment, to grow mindfulness or relationship or integrity or discipline or learning or self-acceptance or joy, will follow me in whatever role I fill, and whatever future (fated or yielding) I live.