Lest Occasion Be Given

Add Band Parent to my identity

It will take a lot of time

And possibly be rewarding

Or maybe just overwhelming

But it is for Her, so I will

Do it.

This story starts. It starts but the middle and end are not known. Those things have yet to materialize from the fog of future creativity. This story may not be able to end cleanly, or at least not with any ties to reality, but unless a new story is imagined the current systems of power remain. And as they remain they gain more and more power.

The system oppresses. It oppresses some more than others. I am an agent of the oppression of others because I do not want the powerful/wealthy to take away what I already have. What I have is enough to sustain myself for life within the system. Unless I can have creativity and reach I will remain a fearful agent of oppression of others. I am a member of the unofficial army that ensures the wealthy and powerful continue to grow in wealth and power. I am rewarded with the ability to oppress others who have been designated as my “lessers” with no foundation for that designation in anything other than past oppression.

I was educated but I never learned what I truly needed to know. That was by design. The powerful know that learning things leads to knowing things and knowing things leads to action. The worst kind of action for them is collective action. We are playing a part in the play they wrote. We truly do not have the ability to walk off stage as individuals because all the rest are there to ensure that the show must go on. But they would have no show to watch if all of or most of the players walked off stage at once.

But we are scared. We have been taught to have a “healthy” skepticism of other people. We have been taught that conflict is dangerous so we MUST keep the peace (repress ourselves) in order to keep ourselves safe. That is tantamount to agreeing to stay in a cage with no real door, just fear keeping us inside. We expect the powerful and wealthy to care for us in an emergency but then they don’t (or barely do) and and yet we still worry about losing what little we get.

Imagination can lead the way if we can find pockets of time and energy to practice imagination. What can be done that we have not thought of yet? How can I take my small pockets of free time and energy and use them to start a fire of thought and action that makes things better- much much better- for mother earth and all her inhabitants?

Would we find a new and deeper peace if we knew oppression did not exist anywhere anymore? Have we all always known all along that oppression of anyone (small group) is not good for anyone (big group) and we have felt that uneasy tension daily?

Or is aggression and competition a natural living attribute that I just do not understand due to my unique constitution? Is it hubris to think that my ways of sensitivity and collaboration (1) could be practiced by everyone and (2) should be practiced by everyone?

With these questions and more, I sit.

Like many others I have read a bunch of self-help books over the years. But what if the problem was never me as much as the system I was in? Where are the books we can read about how to help ourselves critique and analyze the systems that we were born into as a society? How can we discuss what we once thought were individual challenges and test the hypothesis that the system was the problem all along?

What if all the self help work many of us have done have made us great and now we need to change the systems? How can we go about doing that?

I begin.

Tender heart

Misunderstood

Someone is harsh

Yet I can make it through

Pain is hard to bear all alone.

Are you truly loved if you can be in pain and someone who says they love you does not take your pain seriously?

Life is suffering sometimes and there are ways through every pain if you don’t resist the lesson the pain is there to teach.

But it is hard hard hard to be in pain and try to find relief through connection but you cannot find the person who will connect with you and be with you through it.

That person does not exist. At least that person cannot be found as I cast about.

Loving, eager, hopeful for love’s return. Slammed door in face. Other people more important than me.

Always other people more important than me. I want to change that, just have not yet. Will stay optimistic. Will keep believing it is possible and I just have not found it yet. I might be that important to someone, someday. I have to believe. For now I can only get comfort in the belief that it might happen, not that it has happened yet.

Here are the possibilities. Visual art both acrylic and watercolor. Play the violin, ukelele, and keyboard. Read about critical theory. Caliban and the Witches for one. Paint a mural in the kitchen. Paint the living room purple. Write on the LOBG.

I am continuing to read the book The West, A New History in Fourteen Lives by Naoíse Mac Sweeney and it is still so good. Right now I am on chapter 9 which is talking about Njinga of Angola, a smart and powerful albeit ruthlessly savage West African leader who negotiated against Portuguese colonialism and stayed strong. There is an additional narrative about her converting to Catholicism, but it is unclear whether her doing so is a story written by a Catholic to serve the Catholic narrative.

My other book is Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk, and it is surprisingly atmospheric, engaging, and relatable. It involves the politics of the Turkish/Greek world in the early 1900’s and it appears to give some human perspective for both the Orthodox Christians and the Muslims of that time.

The first book is The West, A New History in Fourteen Lives by Naoise Mac Sweeney. From the jacket:

“The concept of “the West” is present in every daily interaction you have, from entertainment and politics to world markets and world history. This engagingly intimate history will reshape the way you see the world around you. At this moment of civilizational redefinition, if we are to chart a future for the West, we must properly understand its past.

From Herodotus, a mixed-race migrant, to Phillis Wheatley, and enslaves African American who became a literary sensation; and from William Ewart Gladstone, with a private passion for epic poetry, to the medieval Arab scholar Al-Kindi, Mac Sweeney’s chosen subjects are a mind-expanding blend of unsungh heroes and familiar faces viewed afresh. These characters span the millennia and the continents, representing different religions, varying levels of wealth and education, diverse traditions and nationalities. Each life tells us something unexpected about the age in which it was lived and offers us a piece of the puzzle of how the modern idea of the West developed- and why we’ve misunderstood it for too long.

An urgently needed emergent voice in big history, in her groundbreaking retelling of the human narrative, Naoise Mac Sweeney debunks the myths and origin stories that underpin the history we thought we knew.”