Making a Better Circus

Lately, it feels like I’m crawling out from under a rock, looking into a blinding, bewildering chaos replete with great suffering.  

I spent most of last year deeply immersed in a challenging leadership development project and an aerial highwire act within an annihilating love affair. 

As I pivoted out of the fog of 2024, I started to see glimmers of an ‘escape from Alcatraz,’ those darker hell realms of my own psyche.  My soul finally bleated out like an angry goat , ‘That’s enough!  Take off all those ill-fitting clothes! Whose idea was it to dress in ropes and compression bandages anyway?  I can’t breathe!” 

 And so, with no small amount of trepidation, I started to redirect my passion for communication and relationship from the tighter, linear spaces of the written word and into the open, fluid world of music, song…and jestering, of course. 

I picked up a guitar and started writing songs.  After 20 years of encouraging others to “Make Art Anyway,” I allowed myself to heed the same advice.  Now I see with great precision why art making is equal to scientific exploration.  We are lost without this capacity for rendering our soul’s expression into novel forms.  It may be our truest form of redemption.  I am only here now, of sounder heart and mind, because of a stringed instrument disguised as Cupid’s arrow. 

The other stabilizing wisdom that’s emerged from this year’s pummeling is the belief that the only way out of this madness, is through it.  Through the wars, the power grabs, the name calling, the desecration, the dis-membering and the boundary violations that happen inside of us.  If we focus too much on the madding circus we observe in our politics, our institutions, and our anointed leaders, we lose sight of the source from whence it all arises—our own inner reality. 

 So I have taken up the mantle to nourish the healthiest version of the circus that jostles around inside.  My attempts at explanation fall short. This constricted, restless soul of mine will be patient no longer.  She exhorts me to tend to those things that bring delight, healing and humor even in the darkest places.  I trust it will make me a better advisor, facilitator and coach.

 Thusly, you’ll find me mostly here.  Raw, improvisational, unplugged.  As always, I welcome my fellow clowns, chanteurs, lion-tamers, magicians, and aerialists of the heart.  Wherever ever you are, I want to hear your song.  Maybe there is a circus to create together. 

The Unmaking of Heresy

In the ‘before times,’ I tried to watch the 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc.  While it’s not exactly a horror movie, the twisted, derisive faces of the clerics who interrogate our awe-struck protagonist made my blood run cold and I could only watch parts of it.  The actor who played Joan, Renee Maria Falconetti, never acted again.  Perhaps it was also too much for her.  I imagine being swallowed whole by the archetypal energies of ‘dangerous heretic’ that Joan of Arc’s story must have opened up in her. 

In the early 15th century, a 19-year-old woman’s personal relationship to God is so threatening to the official powers’ edifice of truth that burning her at the stake is required to condemn her soul and silence such heretical thought.  Six hundred years later, on this progressive lip of the 21st century, differences in thought or opinion are still so intolerable that we find ourselves in perpetual reenactment of these witch trials of yore.

Witness what can happen when you express a controversial opinion in today’s public square.  Consider JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books.  In my quest to understand the ‘witch’ at the heart of the current raging war about gender, I listened to all eight episodes of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling.  It’s an extended interview with the writer as well as with many other cultural critics and activists from many sides of this explosive territory. 

Whatever opinion you hold of JK Rowling, even if you see her as the ‘righteous intolerant’ vs the victimized ‘heretic witch,’ listening to this series will certainly remind you of her essential humanity and the truth of the circumstances that shaped her.  In the more beautiful world I imagine as possible, we’d spend less time assailing the ‘villains’ and more time listening to stories like Rowlings’, as well as those of the many people challenging her.

First, after the publication of the first few Harry Potter books, Rowling was accused of cavorting with the devil by Christian Church leaders.  Parents tried to eliminate her books from school libraries.  They were believed to be teaching children witchcraft and devil worship.

Years later, she expressed her support for a woman questioning a new British law that would allow people to assign themselves any gender without proof of gender transition.  Her fear and fury for what felt like the silencing of biological women’s safety concerns were met with another call for her excision.  Scathing social media posts from the time play the ‘ding dong..the witch is dead’ song clip from the Wizard of Oz as if casting a spell from a manual on the dark arts written by Severus Snape.

So why are ‘witch trials’ so in vogue?  Why do we so quickly forget what it feels like to be the outcast when we join the righteous throng?  And why does it feel so unsafe to express ideas that fall outside of what feels like a narrower and narrower script? 

The endless finger pointing we can gorge upon, both in private and across most media, fully saturates our human theatre.  If this were a disease, we had a bad case, but after November 2016, we seemed to have entered an acute phase.  Public figures are always at risk.  Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton became each side’s heinous ‘other’ and our fixations on vanquishing them transformed into derangement.  In our derangement, we lost our ability to think clearly, to value nuance, or find the grounding reality check that is humility.

Obviously, we’re not all deranged, but the constant ad hominem and the increasing intolerance for diversity of thought in our culture reveals a collective madness. 

Even outside the public sphere, within our most intimate relationships, to challenge the assumptions a relationship is built upon can become a heresy to the challenged.  It can be terrifying to speak up for ourselves, to set boundaries, to be vulnerable within a culture of stoicism and ‘keep on truckin.’  So we silence ourselves, until we go ‘mad’ one way (flight, emotional purge) or another (depression, despair). 

A path to more sanity?  One idea is to explore the ‘heretic witch’ and ‘righteous intolerant’ that live inside us and see if we can broker a peace deal.  Without meeting these two aspects in ourselves, we’ll just keep projecting them out onto the ‘bad people behaving badly’’ and sustain this exhausting witch drama ‘til we’ve burned the whole damn thing to the ground.   

Lest I sound like I’m sitting on some high horse, meet my ‘righteous intolerant,’ since everyone else who’s close to me already has.  In my early 20s, I favored the death penalty, no matter the fact that our flawed justice system kills innocent people, because it seemed so ‘obvious’ that we should follow the principle of an eye for an eye.  Even today, I watch how self-righteousness I can be about who are the good guys and who are the idiots.  Even though I’ve softened the harshest edges of this character, in her heyday, she was a relentless didact and occasionally a cruel fascist. 

When George W. Bush Jr. was reelected in 2004, I fell into my own kind of aggrieved derangement.  Besides the whole WMD fiasco, it seemed insane that anyone would vote for someone who could not string an intelligent thought together.  One of my cousins, who’s like a brother to me, readily admitted he voted for Dubya and my ‘righteous intolerant’ took over.  I accused him of sacrificing future generations and of many other things too hyperbolic to mention. 

Then I played out his excommunication and didn’t talk to him for a long time.  I doubled down when Trump was elected and banished him again.  In this ideological war I was in, it was I who chose to make his political opinions heretical to my worldview, losing connection with one of my most cherished friends.

A few years later, I had the masochistic pleasure of switching roles to play the ‘heretic witch.’

My first public heresy was when I sent an email to my Seattle contact list explaining why I was supporting Cary Moon for Mayor.  Cary Moon appealed to me for many reasons, but when I wrote that it was Cary’s projection of a more feminine leadership style that set her apart from the competing candidate Jenny Durkan, an assertive prosecutor who also happens to be a lesbian, I was called out as a bigot.  No matter my intent or others’ misinterpretation, the language I used was hurtful and a problem.

This was still early on in the gender wars but my comments were so inflammatory that they printed an article about the controversy in Seattle Gay and Lesbian News and the Durkan campaign used the ‘news’ that Moon supporters were homophobic to leverage fundraising efforts at the national level. 

For weeks afterwards, I sought to understand my offense. Though after a while, I stopped trying because the shame of the public outrage piled on top of the shame I already felt for my supposed homophobia cut off my desire to learn, which is the problem with shaming in general. I do now have much more clarity about why my comments were so triggering, but I still get confused within the current cultural debates around gender and sexuality. In the end, I found myself retreating from local politics altogether after having been active in them since I moved to Seattle 30 years ago.      

And now to an accounting of my most recent heresy starting in 2020.  The year that marked the end of the ‘before times’ for me.  When Covid became the great egregor of our collective fears, my fear response was at first to freeze.  Like the rabbits in my neighborhood who stand like statues when my German Shepard and I walk by--the prey becomes invisible and the predator and I just plod along without notice.

After a few weeks in freeze mode, I set about to understand the landscape.  I read as much as I could and came across some research from John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, epidemiology and population health at Stanford.  His analysis showed that the infection fatality rate for Covid was much lower than we were projecting, especially for people under 70.  I started to thaw a bit from my rabbit’s crouch but soon realized that his work was being mostly ignored.  In fact, a lot of medical and health experts with diverse opinions were unable to enter the conversation or were quickly maligned as Trump supporters, another heresy among liberals.  The collective fear, and the corrosive effect of Trump derangement syndrome, had shut down questions and dialogue almost completely.  

It's probably an understatement to say that living in Seattle with a more nuanced view of the Covid situation put me in the minority.  To admit I had questions about anything—the economic and public health impacts of lockdowns, the massive transfer of wealth that was happening in front of our eyes, the many inherent contradictions of the various public health recommendations, the concerns about a drug made at ‘warp speed’—was terrifying.  People would accuse me of being a Trump supporter, which felt jarring and wrong given my life’s work and publicly stated values.  

What about the healthy and boisterous debates the academic institutions I’d so diligently studied within had long promoted?  What about the dangers of a single story which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke to so eloquently in 2009?   What about the more urgent need to stick together in a crisis, even if what scares us may be radically different, something I tried to write about as a way to spark conversation in late 2021? 

No, there was no room for any of this.  So, I stayed silent, except in private with the few others who were raising similar questions. 

When the vaccine became available, I had a very visceral ‘no.’  Not because I’m uninformed, anti-vax or listen to Fox News, for none of these things are true.  But because I had a history of being in the ‘very small percentage of people my age who’ -- develop breast cancer at 31, lymphedema from radiation treatments at 32, a hip replacement at 50.  My calculation of the risk from a vaccine that didn’t appear to stop transmission and did have some adverse effects vs. the risk from getting Covid was clear.  To me anyway.    

But my personal health decisions related to what I put in my body didn’t matter to most people.  A few of my closest friends sought to understand.  Some finally did and some may never.   Someone said they would never forgive me.  Without knowing that I was unvaccinated, a dear friend intimated that he hoped that all the unvaccinated people would get sick and be refused care.  Another colleague who wasn’t aware of my vaccine status said, while sitting next me, that he believed people who did not get the vaccine were essentially ‘abhorrent.’   

Abhorrent.  A word found among a family of words like abominable, loathsome, vile, and evil.  There it was.  Orthodox clerics rooting out the heretics.  Burn the Witch. 

Yet like grace, when it befalls us, or like the sudden liberation we feel upon waking out of a nightmare, more humility started to blossom within me. 

When confronted by other people’s radically different viewpoints, I couldn’t sustain my kneejerk, derisive critiques and tried instead to understand what shaped them.  It was more difficult not to see the truth of other people’s humanity, no matter how hard they made it.  And aggrieved righteousness hasn’t come as easy ever since.  Yes, I still get revved up about atrocities and the people who appear to be enacting them, but by becoming the ‘dehumanized,’ I was learning more humility on a very fast track.

Sitting in this soup of others’ condemnation for my heretical moments, I felt deeply humbled and ashamed for my past intolerance.  I reached out to my cousin to share what I’d learned from being on the receiving end of public abhorrence and offered my humble apologies.  In Hawaiian cosmology, this kind of peace offering is called making things ‘pono’ or bringing things into balance.  The Ho’oponopono prayer can be condensed into “I love you, I’m sorry, thank you, please forgive me.”  There is certainly much more of this I need to do. 

But at the societal level, it’s still not entirely clear what’s behind all this blaming and shaming.  Why are modern ‘witch trials’ infusing every aspect of our culture, even our intimate lives?  

One explanation is based on my own experience with fear.  The more fearful I am, the more likely I am to see the world as a threatening place with indecipherable ‘villains’ planning our demise.  My protection is to hold more tightly to my point of view, to become orthodox in my thinking.  And I am safer still when surrounded by others who hold those same points of view, thus creating a collective orthodoxy.  To create an orthodoxy at scale, a set of beliefs framed as ‘right,’ while others are fundamentally ‘wrong,’ is to also create the heretics we so long to convert or eliminate.  

Orthodoxy creates heresy.  It’s just a mirror, a reflection.  A physical law as it relates to polarities.  Adjacent one another like ‘hand in glove.’ 

If either of these polarities—rigid, controlling narratives or challenging, rebellious ones—has become a fixation, the real work is to look at our fear.  Because fear has so many of us by the short hairs whether we are consciously aware of it or not.  Sometimes the fear is hard to pin down.  For me, koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word meaning ‘chaotic life out of balance,’ and also a haunting film by Godfrey Reggio, helps to give it form.  It’s as if we know we’ve reached such an extreme imbalance that passing through these times of great chaos and loss seems inevitable. 

Who’s immune to such visceral knowing?  I wager few to none.  Though some of us can and do insulate ourselves with comforts, distractions, and false certainties if we have the resources to do so.  Regardless of resources, all of us will reach for whatever we can to avoid or suppress the fear.  Reaching becomes dependency, dependency becomes addiction.  And by following our addictions, we travel far, far away from ourselves, ironically the safest, most inviolable home there is. 

I’ve spent a long time away from this hallowed inner home, exploring the world outside me through acquisition and creation of knowledge, resources, achievements, lineage, identities, experiences.  Doing and becoming!  By comparison I’ve spent very little time exploring the world inside me, listening, witnessing, feeling, wondering, breathing, accepting ’what is.’  Just being and allowing. 

If this is also a collective phenomenon as I believe it is, it’s no wonder the world outside us is so despairingly out of balance.  In our quest to experience so much ‘doing and becoming,’ we humans forgot almost entirely about the other half of existence -- the ‘being and allowing’-- to bring balance. 

Doing yields to Being. Becoming yields to Allowing. And back again, within an infinite cycle.

Central to the Taoist cosmology of Chinese culture is seeing life as constant cycles propelled by the tension between polarities and their innate drive towards harmony and balance. The related ancient oracle of the I Ching was designed to guide us to become more aware of these cycles so our choices reflect that balance. In a recent evolution of the I Ching, Spring Cheng and her partners have mapped the polarities of doing, becoming, being and allowing, as four quadrants pointing to our inner domain, as described in their research The Resonance Code.

While these teachings have definitely been part of my path, there’s an endless array of ways into and through the forest to return to ourselves and come back home.  As many ways, in fact, as there are people. But playing the parts of ‘righteous intolerant’ and ‘heretic witch’ was potent medicine and carried me much farther along that path than I could have imagined, even if it was damn uncomfortable.

Some of you may be reading this and thinking, why in the world would she want to dig up things from her past that might bring even more criticism and rekindle old shame?  Some of you may have stopped reading a while ago because I became, from your view, a heretic. 

Well…I wrote this piece for several reasons. 

Predominantly because I believe if more of us chose to consider our orthodoxies and the fear that generates them, we’d have less need for heresies.  With less of both, we have a chance of tempering the relentless suffering we’re inflicting on ourselves and bring things more into balance. 

But also because I thought my story of finding more humility might inspire others.  Inspiration has always been my greatest motivator to move past sluggish resistance and embrace novelty.   And if humility were running for president, I’d vote for her.    

Finally, because writing this piece, something that’s taken much longer to craft than I thought it would, has been a powerful way to bear witness to some neglected parts of myself, parts I didn’t think I had the courage to witness, much less reveal to others.  Yet by witnessing them, we -- me and my parts — have been rendered more whole.  And together, jostling about inside this resilient 56-year-old human form, we have a much better chance of finding our way home. 

Gathering….Again

Friends Gathering

Two and a half years ago, I wrote a piece about Michael Lerner’s newest book Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform The World.  I had gone to hear him speak at Town Hall, he was on a tour to promote the book.  Walking home that night I realized that hiding under my growing cynicism about politics remained a seed or two of hope. 

Lerner was calling for a ‘Love&Justice’ movement that would help create “a society that constantly nurtures our ethical and spiritual capacities to care for each other and the planet and that facilitates our ability to give meaning to our lives that transcends material satisfactions.”  

He said a lot of things that struck a deep chord, like needing an alternative to endless material growth, public policies that ‘operationalize’ transparency and mutuality, and a new way to play the game of politics that didn’t follow the same tired rules of ‘winner takes all’ and ‘the ends justify the means.’  His assessment regarding the current game of politics very much matched my own.  

I’d been working in and around politics for 30 years and I could see the way that game was played was inherently destructive and dehumanizing.  Whether I was working for an elected official I believed in or for a public agency as a leadership consultant, knowing how to play the game is essential.  The number one rule is to manage (control) perception by always crafting the message to one’s advantage.  Which means there is an abundance of ‘hiding the ball’ and straight-up manipulation.   

Isn’t that what we’re all doing at some level?  Managing other people’s perceptions of us in a thousand different ways?  One relevant question might be ‘to what end?’  Yes, we are doing this much of the time.  Just noticing that we are doing it changes its impact.  There’s a lot more to say here but I digress, thus my use of italics.  Back to the story.  

These ‘artful’ messaging tactics trickle down like stagnant water from busted pipes to all levels of government.  No matter what level of government you play within, the game corrupts. It separates us from a more holistic truth because it depends on leaving out inconvenient truths.  And no matter your political ideology in this game—red, blue or rainbow—everyone is complicit.  You play it cause it’s the game.  Otherwise, you don’t play and then you certainly don’t win.    

Another quick sidebar.  Even people who’ve never worked in government feel its duplicity and incoherence.  Polling shows levels of public trust in institutions, specifically governmental institutions, have been steadily declining for 40 years, and even more rapidly just in the last few.  Trust in Congress is the lowest it’s ever been with just 7% of Americans having high levels of confidence in this icon of representative democracy.  

So yes, I’d grown weary of the game of politics.  I’d been playing it for a long time with the hope that I could persuade enough people inside government that by bringing more authenticity and transparency to the table, and by focusing less on ‘winning’ and more on ‘learning,’ we could turn the ship around.  

Learning.  One of the most expansive and exhilarating aspects of the human experience.  If nature’s 4 billion years of creativity has shown us anything it’s that the greatest good for the greatest number (species, cultures, ideas) depends on learning (fun for all).  But the political system only works because everyone continues to play its primary game of winning (fun for some), and the people inside the system depend on both the system, and its game, for their survival.  

That’s why Lerner’s message back then felt so compelling – it was heralding a new way forward.  Perhaps, I thought at the time, if I convene my fellow activists, artists and allies to discuss these ideas, I might compost all this toxic cynicism of mine and unearth my long-silent passion for birthing things that brought more love and light into the world.  

Thus my attempt to summarize Lerner’s book with an invitation to gather at my home in Seattle to see where these new ideas might take us.  So I invited all 500 people on my mailing list, trusting that just the right handful would show up.  

Twenty-seven people made it out that drizzly night in January 2020.  We sat in a large circle, shoulder to shoulder and talked about what scared us most and when we felt most human.  We ended the night singing “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash -- full throttle in unison.  The evening blew some wind under my sails and opened a peep hole into a new world that I couldn’t quite see but revealed a few cairns along an unfamiliar trail.  

Six weeks later, a virus beset us.  The torrent of it toppled every cairn and that peep hole closed up good and tight.  Since then, I have been mostly silent, save a few despairing missives that read like calls by a lone wolf howling into a fierce wind.  Was it the wind that drowned out her call?  The truth that she’d strayed too far from the pack?  Or just a wolf’s need for wandering solo in the wilderness, like some of us found a way to do.  Whatever the reason, my world grew very quiet and my longing to create something new in politics went underground.  

So here we are, 30 months later trying to stand upright on a world tilted sharply upon a new axis.  During those many months, my work in government continued, though without the spark of hope I’d gone searching for at Town Hall back in 2020.   

Work contracts retreated for a time, but by that first summer, the magic that is online video conferencing promised a world of connection whilst also staying safe and I applied myself to the ongoing task of trying to transform leadership cultures within a two-dimensional realm.   

I’d often describe my mission to change the culture of government as a labor of Sisyphus trying to push a massive boulder uphill.  But now, divorced from any actual human contact, this mission was severely handicapped.  

Without the benefit of physical proximity, which enhances our ability to see our co-workers as fellow humans who also love, worry and weep, trust became harder and harder to build.  Misinterpretations mounted. Factions multiplied.  Conflict intensified.  The chemistry of fear, as it was doing everywhere, took over.   

And cynicism found a purchase in me again, suffocating my decades-long dream of participating in a government that functioned well on behalf of its citizenry.  There were a few pivotal incidents that turned my cynicism dial past the voltage it was designed for.  

The first incident was when I learned about senior public agency leadership negotiating substantial raises for themselves outside of the scheduled compensation process, leaving less money for the rest of the staff.  It felt particularly out of integrity because of their stated value of being so committed to equity and supporting frontline staff who had to work in-person during those first 18 months while executive leadership had the ability to work entirely from home.  

The second tripped fuse happened eight months after the first official covid lockdown.  I was working for a public health agency at the time.  I reached out to one of the directors who had been in the middle of the agency’s covid response to find out what was going on behind the scenes.  She couldn’t say much but she did say she was ‘shocked by how political the covid response was.’  

Given we’d just come off four years of non-stop hand-wringing about Trump and his Republican allies, progressive politicians were making every effort to distance themselves from all things related to his administration, a choice that essentially required outright dismissal of different perspectives and certainly any dissenting voices. 

Yet it’s precisely during a time of crisis, such as the one we were in, when we need different perspectives in the room to improve our ‘sensemaking'.  A global pandemic might be likened to the elephant of the fable in which six blind men are feeling the different parts of the animal and reporting ‘what it is’ in entirely different ways. To actually understand the elephant, we need a very large team of humans, all with only partial views of the situation, who listen and collaborate with each other to learn what is going on and decide together what to do about it. Unfortunately, when decisions become predominately political, the focus is on winning—one team’s ‘rightness’ over another’s—not on learning.       

Finally, an almost imperceptible straw that broke the camel’s back, was a conversation with another public agency director in June of this year who was struggling with persistent conflicts within his leadership team.  As he explained more about the situation, a number of obvious challenges stood out, including the unwieldy size of his 11-member team.  But more startling than anything else was the nonchalance with which he mentioned that his team hadn’t come together in-person ‘since covid’ and they were on track to remain virtual going forward.  

That’s when I knew without a shadow of a doubt that government was probably cooked.  The best decisions happen within teams.  Teams require a foundation of trust.  Trust between humans can’t be sustained exclusively online.    

Ok, I grant you, I do not know just how an institution as deep and wide a Leviathan as government will falter and come unglued.  Nor do I have any sense of how much longer we can expect government to uphold the many functions we’ve placed in its charge.  What I do know, from what I’ve participated in across a decent span of time, is that we’ve become overly dependent on an maladapted, inefficient system led by mostly well-intentioned people who need to play a game that incentivizes manipulation, controlling the message at all costs, and requires an allegiance to the ideology of extractive capitalism, a set of beliefs that are political suicide to challenge and have, thus far, consumed everything in its wake.  

Given my love of creativity and the ridiculous, I find myself asking how in the world could I have stayed so long in such a constrained system?   Besides my obvious need to make a living, why did I keep trying?  

Thirty months after calling community together to talk about how we might infuse more ‘Love&Justice’ into a broken political system, I’ve arrived at a pretty simple answer--what kept me playing the game far past the buzzer, even when my hope for change was out of reach, was a love for and a belief in the human beings inside the system, not the system itself.   It was my fellow humans, in all their frustrating, paradoxical, but also creative and ridiculous, complexity that I was most drawn to.  

While my heart always saw the potential for individual change, my mind had chosen to focus primarily on system change.  Unfortunately, my attempts to revitalize government seem akin to Victor Frankenstein’s quest to impart life to non-living matter and they were costing me my health and my sanity. Given the absurdity of such a quest, it seems fully time for me and the system to part ways.  

But the people?  No, I’m not letting the people go, for the people matter.  I remain ever committed to my fellow humans as we seek to become better, more bountiful versions of ourselves.  Because I believe it’s enlivened humans—humans expressing all of who we are without expecting anything more of the current political system—who have the unique capacity to imagine, to conjure, to dream a very different world built on the most humane expression of ourselves.   And since the system is just a reflection of our collective consciousness, then it will change when enough of us believe and perceive anew.  

So if I were to try again, go back in time, and fetch the essence of my invitation to gather as a community to talk about what’s possible--no longer within the constraints of our aging institutions, but within ourselves--what could I say to inspire you to come?  

I’d say, come back and gather again, whoever you are.  Let’s talk about what we learned these last two and a half years.  

I’d also ask, who are we now?  Who are we becoming?  And how can we turn our attention away from the dystopian inferno that hijacks our amygdalae and narrows our field of perception to the narrowest slits and towards that mostly empty but fertile stage, carrying a few costume trunks and a pile of musical instruments, waiting for us, method actors all, to invent our next theatrical expression called reality?  

Are we courageous enough to create outside of the seemingly destructive assumptions of limitless growth and technology ‘uber alles’ that this current world is built upon?  And, even more important still, are we willing to take ourselves less seriously, and find the confidence to laugh and to delight again in life, no matter what it appears to throw at us?  

Back in 2020, Michael Lerner said on the night of his talk, “we will never know what is possible until we struggle for what is desirable.”  Today I’d say, “we will never know what’s possible until we remember what we truly desire.”  

As more of us yield to our desires for a new world, connect to others with similar aspirations, and talk, sing and dance them into existence more often, the old world just may give up the ghost. Not overnight and not altogether.  But I can’t see a single downside to trying to bring more delight into the world. 

So while it may be a ways off, and summer is still in full swing, do mark your calendars and join us on Saturday, September 10th for a Gathering Part 2 -- open house style -- to remember the feeling of being in physical proximity, to remember our hearts’ desires and see what kind of creative mischief ensues.  

Where: My home, 522 19th Avenue, between Jefferson and Cherry.  On Metro Transit lines 3 and 4. 

When: Saturday, September 10th, 5-8pm-ish.  

Food:  Light food and drink will be on the scene.  I encourage everyone to bring some of your own to add to the merriment.  

Music: Live music will be happening outside after 7pm.

RSVP:  email @ lisa@creativegroundhq.com or text @ 206-910-4458

Adventure On the High Seas

My dreams lately just cut to the chase.  So bare bones are they that I can almost cast them aside, like a 30 second ad on late night TV. Yet when they’re this spare, that’s when I know the dream is coming for me. She means for me to sit up and listen.  The dream that woke me up this morning is no exception…  

I’m watching a crew of adolescents scrambling around the deck of a tall ship, one of those galleons from the 19th century.  I sense in them a high-pitched terror fueled by darkening skies, torrential rains and mammoth ocean swells.  They are yelling at the storm and each other indiscriminately.  No one seems to be listening to anyone else.  

Suddenly a man, a lone adult, stands among them.  He explains that he cannot help them, only they can help themselves.  He says it’s now or never, this is the moment they learn to dig deep and marshal their group’s will to survive such a ‘perfect storm.’  

Every young crew member pleads with him to take command of the ship and save them.  They grasp at his jacket.  They cry and wail.  They collapse around him.  Their behavior seems to strengthens the man’s resolve to put the power to save them squarely in their own hands.  Yet beneath his clear words and steely countenance, he is considering the real possibility they may not make it.  As he turns to walk away, he looks heavy and full of despair.  

At the end of the dream, I am looking down at the ship from several hundred feet above.  The ship is moving forward with a steady tack.  Just behind it is a massive whirlpool, a dark vortex whose centripetal force they have just outpaced.  I can no longer see the crew from such a distance, but there is a sense they have pulled themselves together and are focused only on the path ahead.  They seem to have no awareness of the gyre of death nipping at their heels.  The ocean is now a becalmed version of herself, nary a ripple in sight, yet the ship moves quickly along as if propelled by a much animated wind.  End of scene. 

I decide to call in my favorite seasoned experts of inquiry.  Fireside and settled into his high-backed chair after a long pull from his pipe, Sherlock asks, “Please explain the symbolism of this dream, my dear Watson.”  

“Well…,” the doctor quietly intones, “we are all the terrified adolescent crew running around with our hair on fire.  The raging storm is the chaos of the world, both in and around us, felt by many these days as a ‘perfect storm.’  We’ve lost our heads and our courage, and are left with only our most manic thoughts and compulsive behaviors.  Instead of circling up to hold hands, calm our nervous systems, and cool our tempers, we’re yelling at the storm and each other.  Worse, we’re still looking around for someone, anyone, in a position of authority to save us.”   

“The adult shows up just long enough to ‘tell us what time it is.’  He says it’s time to grow up, collect ourselves and deal with our individual psychic and spiritual chaos so we can collectively navigate our way through.  This representative of outer authority of all forms – elected officials, the security apparatus, credentialed experts, our metaphorical moms and dads who all seek to create certainty for us in an uncertain world -- proclaims that this taking of responsibility is inevitable.  

In fact, it is probably our species’ long-overdue initiation as passage into adulthood.  He is afraid we aren’t up to the task, that we have let fear get the best of us, and the swirling gyre will most likely overcome our ship.”  

Dr. Watson’s voice intensifies, and with a building baritone, explains, “This yelling we’re doing, at the storm and at each other, this gnashing of teeth, is the brutal othering and dehumanizing, expressed but unclaimed, by all segments and sides of the political spectrum.  It’s the cancel culture that fills every nook and cranny of the airwaves and pollutes our relationships.  It’s the constant fixation on gaining ground and controlling the message always to one’s advantage.  All of this, and so much more, is the fastest way to sink any ship as it so obviously undermines the cohesion of a crew that so desperately needs each other.”  

“The desperate pleading of the crew represents our refusal to take responsibility for ourselves.  We have outsourced the stewardship of our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs for far too long.  We rely on doctors to diagnose our ailments and prescribe atomistic solutions, lawyers to resolve our conflicts, priests to absolve us of our sins, governments to keep us safe, dispense with our wastes, and make all the ‘trains run on time,’ corporations to keep us entertained, with access to anything we want whenever we want it, and mythical relationships that will mirror back to us only what we want to see.”  

“We’ve given the authorities outside us permission, and all the power, to make life comfortable, to promise us less suffering through quick fixes, relentless optimization programs, drugs that numb, the marshaling of minions to deal with our excess.  We’ve asked our intimate others to do our emotional laundry.  And we expect everyone, especially the people around us with more positional authority, to carry our shadows so we can name the villains ‘out there’ vs. the villains lurking ‘in here.’”  

“The bitterest pill of all,” Dr. Watson exhorts, now gripping his chair and speaking with great urgency, “is the escalating danger of handing over so much power and responsibility to others.  First and foremost, these outer authorities are not us, and will never know what is in highest alignment with our hearts, bodies and minds.  They do, however, know what is best, and what is required, for their continued survival including maintaining their concentration of power.  Increasingly, and without any obvious remedy, the Venn diagram of their interests and ours yields an ever narrowing overlap.”   

“Equally threatening, is the truth that these behemoths we’ve created to manage all the hard stuff and make life easy are crumbling under their own weight.  There is now an unbearable surfeit of toxic bureaucracies, perverse incentives and deeply corrupt abuses of power that have poisoned the unwieldy institutions we depend on for just about everything though still, even now, we cling to the idea that they will save us!” Dr. Watson is now standing up, speaking his last few words at full throttle.  

“I see you are shaken, Dr. Watson.”  

Sherlock extends a warm hand and they meet each other’s gaze for a deep pocket of time.  As Dr. Watson’s analysis reverberates through the air, they sit together in uneasy silence. 

Finally Sherlock remembers the last scene of the dream.  “Dear Watson, what make you of the final scene, the one from above with the ship sailing safely away from the gyre of fear that threatens to engulf them?  As we followed the trail of this dark, mysterious tale, it seems we have forgotten the possibility for redemption my friend.”

“Perhaps you, sir, can speak to that,” Dr. Watson asks.  “For I believe I need your courage and wise insight to see ahead.”

“Well…” Sherlock begins.  “Notice that the torrid, frothy sea quieted upon the crew members choice to band together once and for all.  So perhaps the ‘perfect storm’ is directly dependent upon the weather inside us.  If we can accept the man’s injunction to gather ourselves and accept his invitation to initiation, we can begin the process of true self-governance – that is, the demanding, but liberating, inner journey of taking full responsibility for ourselves, our health, our thoughts, our needs, and most importantly, our projections as a starting point to relationship with the outer world.”  

“Perhaps only then, Dr. Watson, will we finally be able to hear one another so that we can authentically and inclusively collaborate on the sailing of this great ship that holds us.  I wager this great ship is, in fact, the Great Mother Ship, our beloved planet earth, who has wisdom to guide us on how to sail well and strong.  Somehow, and most strangely, we forgot that she has always been our preeminent partner on this grand voyage on the high seas.  How else could we make it on such an epic adventure without listening to the knowing voice of the vessel that carries us?  She needs us and we her!  Don’t you see dear Watson, the vortex is already receding!?!

Silence again, but this time, shimmering with heartbreak and longing.

“Thank you Mr. Holmes.  You have found the trail and finished the tale. As you were speaking, I caught sight of an albatross riding the thermals just above the ship.  He carries a seed of nascent hope.”  

“Ah yes, I see him too,” says Mr. Holmes.  “Together let’s imagine where he might be taking us.  But first let me refill this pipe and add another log to the fire.  Another great mystery awaits!” 

An Act of Imagination

If you were to ask just about anyone -- whether they be a distraught Trump supporter or a relieved Biden supporter, a lockdown adherent or an advocate for a risk-tiered response to the virus, a back-to-the lander or an urban futurist, families with everyone stuck online all day or families whose wage-earners have lost their jobs – I wager all would say the current moment feels a lot like a nightmare.  A suffocating, primal terror kind of nightmare. 

I remember waking up from nightmares when I was a little girl, and the pattern is still the same even now in my fifties.  In these bleak dreams, an ambiguous evil is always stalking me.  I try to scream but there is no projected sound so I’m stifled until my screaming becomes audible and finally wakes me up.  The nightmare sits close, pulsing into my waking consciousness, waiting for me to slip back into it. I have to sit up, shake it off or wander around the house, before I can let myself fall sleep again, to stop its vortex sucking me back in.

So if it’s true that most everyone experiences the current moment as a kind of nightmare, could our shared experience of profound fear be something that unites us, even if what terrifies us within the nightmare is quite different? 

For instance, I’m terrified of a growing authoritarianism and government mandates related to our health choices.  I have a deep fear of us becoming feedstock for a dehumanizing system run by artificial intelligence.  Most of all I fear our increasing fear of each other.  Not just the old intractable bigotry (fear) of people different than us, but the fear we now have of breathing the same air, of shaking hands, of embracing each other and where all that fear of basic human contact is taking us. 

Maybe you share some of these fears, maybe not. 

Many are terrified of the virus and its ongoing invisible threat and mutations.  Others are filled with dread about what looks like certain ecological collapse in the very near future.  Others still are fearful of those with more positional or social power and their propensity to abuse it, whether it be within a system, a workplace or in a household.   

Many more of us are now terrified of losing the roof over our heads, income to buy food for our children, or access to a doctor when we get sick.  All but a very few of us are scared of dying, death being the most dependable and transformative milestone there is, yet the one we have been seeking to avoid at all costs. 

No matter what we’re scared of, I can’t expect others to fear the things I fear or trust the things I trust.  If I were scared of losing my home or living on the street, things like contracting the virus may feel less scary to me.  I myself have more time to fret about things like an ominous AI takeover, the specter of which someone trying to find stable housing or dealing with a cancer diagnosis may find completely irrelevant.  To be scared of everything within the nightmare would be immobilizing, so each of us trusts in at least a few things, mostly out of necessity.   Our nervous system has to be at ease somewhere or that system will collapse.

What I’m trying to say here is that who or what we fear and who and what we trust is, for each of us, a diverse kaleidoscope influenced by our unique lived experience shaped by many environments.  Given that, I have quit the business of persuading anyone else to fear what I fear, even as most people around me seem to expect us to agree not only on what’s terrifying but what we should do about it. 

It is this expectation for more unanimity, not only on what we fear but also how we should control what scares us, that is keeping us stuck in the nightmare’s vortex.  Because as soon as we step back and look at everyone through that lens of common suffering, all of us sharing the experience of being in a nightmare we can’t seem to wake up from, we find compassion for one another, a much touted concept that few seem able to practice across the explosion of political and ideological fault lines. 

Crazy as it might seem, given my many rants about Donald Trump these last four years, I actually felt the fear of the protesters who stormed the Capitol Building this week on January 6th.  I could feel their fear—without in any way condoning their actions—and this helped me see them as human…and fearful, just like me. 

Our seeming denial of this basic truth—that we cannot make other people fear what we fear or trust what we trust (except through manipulation)—is preventing us from much needed creativity around ‘how to respond.’

And respond we must at a time such as this. 

If there were any group of people who can respond masterfully to whatever is thrown at them, it’s jazz musicians.  Herbie Hancock speaks about the many things he’s learned from Miles Davis.  In this interview, he talks about the time he thought he’d made a glaring mistake while playing one night.  He said Miles didn’t see it as a ‘mistake,’ rather just as something that happened so he responded by playing something that made it work, a fluency for all great improvisors. 

For Herbie, the big take away was essentially this -- “that we can look for the world to be as we would like it to be as individuals—‘make it easy for me’--we can look for that.  But I think the important thing is that we grow.  And the only way we can grow is to have a mind that is open enough to be able to accept situations as they are, to experience situations as they are, and turn them into medicine, to turn poison into medicine, and take whatever situation that you have and make something constructive happen with it.” 

So if we continue to stare astonished and furious at the ‘others’ who don’t see our point of view, who are just as scared as we are, just about different things—especially those things we may in fact trust—then we will definitely stay trapped in this collective dream, forever mired in a boiling chaos. 

Yet if we could broaden our perspective, open up our aperture as wide as we can muster, then we’ll start to see the ‘other’ human being as simply trembling in the middle of the night from dark visions of the unknown.  And then maybe, even for just a moment, we could imagine holding them close as we would a child, reminding them again and again in a kind and gentle way, that they’re not alone, that we’ve been scared too, and through this acknowledgment of common suffering, we just might get through this thing and finally wake up.  Together.

Illustration © David Laskey 2012 

A Fool's Errand

Roberto Benigni and Giorgio Cantarini in the 1998 film Life Is Beautiful

As I stumble for words to write this post, I am the creaky tin man reaching for his oil pump.  Atrophied prose coming through rusty wires.  For much of the last year, my reflections about the world and my place in it were too jumbled and raw.  Why add more discordant noise to the madness.  So I didn’t write at all and I can feel how sluggish my craft has become.

Instead, I have spent too much time staring into the abyss that is the non-stop information deluge coming to a smart device near you.  I experience the dopamine hits as the addictions they are and I’m increasingly uncomfortable with their hold on me.  It’s time to break the pattern, but the ruts are deep and the rocks under my oil pan a near miss.     

When I sit with the discomfort long enough, I see that my addiction to staring into the dark abyss is also an addiction to having a ‘darkness’ to vanquish.  My sense of worth, even my sense of belonging, depends on being the vanquisher.  The darker it gets, the more I feel called to do something about it, but I can’t get off the starting block.  

After a good cry near a couplet of willows that grows at the edge of Lake Washington in Colman Park, my heart remembers Roberto Benigni in the film “Life Is Beautiful.”  The movie came out in 1998, the year I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  It was one of those films that thrust me up on its shoulders and carried me out of the hell realm I was stuck in.  Using one of my smart devices as portal to said abyss, I watch the movie again wondering how it would come through 25 years later.  

The film is about a Jewish Italian father and his 6 year old son who are carted away to a concentration camp towards the end of WWII.  The father, played by Benigni, makes everything wonderful and ridiculous.  Even as they are getting into the crowded train with none of their belongings, he turns the whole thing into a game so his son will see it through a prism of adventure vs one of fear.  

There’s a scene where they have just arrived at the camp and Benigni volunteers to translate the German’s commands into Italian for the new arrivals.  Without knowing German, Benigni translates the fierce rant into silly rules for earning points in this make-believe game, the winner of which will be awarded a real tank!  Throughout their stay in the camp, he masterfully transforms all the horrors they encounter with comedic brilliance, preserving the innocence of his wide-eyed little boy to the bitter end.  

‘Life is Beautiful’ won a slew of film awards that year.  Clearly it made its mark.  After my second viewing, I’m sifting through the message in the hero’s story and wondering if I am willing, even capable, of rotating the prism through which I look out at the world.  Because my prism gears are also rusty and won’t budge.  

What confounds me is how Benigni’s sense of himself -- his ‘why-am-I-here’ -- appears to depend on nothing at all.   From a materialist perspective, he has no striving complex, no grand ambition, and nothing to prove.  He has given up the plague of constant ‘efforting’ and simply chosen to respond to the world with delight, improvisation and bemusement.  

He is a vision of the archetypal fool, the court jester who seems ‘free of all societal encumbrances, without even a path to guide him, yet whose impulsive curiosity urges us on to impossible dreams.’[1]  

Here in my bog of inertia, my dreams are eclipsed.  My doubts intensify.  The question that haunts me, and leaves my body aching and contorted upon waking most mornings, is what the hell good am I if don’t suit up and try to change the trajectory of this dystopian tidal wave swallowing us whole? I have tried to help before, goddamnit, so why not now?!

The truth is part of me is dying.  I do not know what to do, or even who I am, if I don’t have an injustice to rectify or a dehumanizing world order to defeat.   And my ego is being invited to ‘zero out.’  I know this because I’ve been here before -- more than once faced dissolving careers, relationships and world views.  I also know I’m in the most excruciating part of the passage where there is barely a light visible in the tunnel.  I can’t see anything, much less an ‘impossible dream.’  

In my peripheral vision, however, there is another more radical question I haven’t even allowed myself to consider that is ‘what if there was nothing to fix?’  ‘Impossible!  Absurd!’ says my rational, logical left brain.  ‘Look at the chaos!  The madness!’ 

Yet as I repeat the question and let it be true for the length of an inhale, an exhalation carries off a caravan of chronic pain.  A tendril of light seeps into my psyche’s murky shadows.  And for a moment or two, I look out on to a world that is more wonderful and also more ridiculous.  This radical, ultimately spiritual, question is my tin man’s oil can and the fool has conjured up just the right amount of mind altering magic.

Unfortunately, within a culture that takes material success, credentials, and access to system spoils as central to what we should be doing with our ‘limited time offer’ called life, the fool is considered a sideshow.  Worse, an irrelevance.  There is dismissal even disdain for the child-like antics of the fool, unfit for the serious endeavors of leadership and large institutions.  

And yet the fool is essential and needed, now more than ever.  He brings the beginner’s mind to vexing problems such that we can see them anew.  She speaks without concern for social morays, saying what must be said while everyone else is too self-conscious to do so.   He breaks up the rigid formalities of our overly scripted reality with non-sensical but healing diversions.  And her presence ‘serves for the ruling powers as a constant reminder that the urge to anarchy will always exist in human nature and that it must be taken into account’[2].  

In the film’s story, where Benigni’s fool is tested by unthinkable challenges within one of the worst hell realms in our history, he achieves miracles not possible through our idols of reason and logic.  In fact, reason and logic yield nothing in the face of genocide.  They offer no spiritual relief, no refuge from the suffering.  In such times, it’s the fool who may yet offer a true balm and perhaps even a modest salvation.   

So as we watch the various existential threats close in on us from all sides, let us not forget the power of the fool.  Even as I write this, I hear the cynics retort, thus the title of this piece.  But if we leave the fool relegated to the sidelines, or project him or her only onto the comedians, the children or the mad hatters of our world, we disown our most humanizing guide, uniquely designed for these dark times.  He is guiding me through my own dark wilderness as we speak and, like a muse waiting for our attentions, is poised to befriend us all and liberate our ‘impossible dreams.’ 

Yes, I realize our planetary metrics are in the toilet and the scale of suffering immeasurable.  But the fool would ask are you laughing enough, especially at yourself?  Is your court jester ready and available at a moment’s notice, even in the board room?  Will you rotate your prism to accentuate life’s absurdities for just a few hours?  Can you make more room for the random, the illogical and the inefficient and stop worrying about having everything ‘under control?’  And, for the love of god, as my dog Stella would ask, can we simply ‘play more and bark less?’    

Standing at a precipice where there may be little left to lose, and with no clear way out of an old world crumbling around us, our true folly may be to ignore the innocent fool whose universal language of vulnerability, humility and unlimited imagination has the potential to re-weave us.  And none too soon. 

[1] Nichols, Sallie.  Jung and the Tarot, An Archetypal Journey.  Page 34.  Samuel Weiser, Inc. York Beach, ME.  1980

[2] Nichols, Sallie.  Jung and the Tarot, An Archetypal Journey.  Page 30.  Samuel Weiser, Inc. York Beach, ME.  1980

Remember Your Ruby Slippers

My father passed away last week after a struggle with depression and an indecipherable dementia.  The last day before he died, he stopped speaking yet could still respond through his eyes or gentlest of nods.  I spent most of that day trying to connect, to offer up words that might make any sense to him, given he’d still not looked his dying squarely in the eye.

The whole year before had been a reckoning with his sudden fragility and now his mortality.  After an innocuous hernia surgery, he returned to his solitary life in a cabin by the Yakima River a different person.  He’d lost his desire to cook for himself, he couldn’t remember having slept and was haunted by strange dreams, frightening images of what seemed like long buried parts of his psyche.

My dad was a category 5 stoic.  So, it came as some relief when he admitted he couldn’t take another winter alone, a well-tended woodstove his only company.  That month, a year ago this September, we adjusted our sails and tacked in a new direction that would take us on an epic journey, an odyssey.  This odyssey consisted of four moves in twelve months as we tried to find a place for him to land--to live and be cared for--while his mind frayed and betrayed him. 

But this odyssey also involved slogging through the difficult terrain of our fraught, mostly painful, relationship.  A physical journey and a psychic one.  Both took their toll, though it was the inscrutable terrain of our relationship, the one between a father and his only child, that would ultimately deliver us to a new shore…and a new, liberating vista. 

My dad had left when I was two and I’d spent 50 years trying to dismantle and then rebuild craggy, misshapen walls around a broken heart.  As much as we tried to connect, these walls of mine and his own impenetrable barricades kept us painfully separated from each other when all we wanted was acceptance and a tenderness I sensed we could both imagine but rarely experienced. 

After a failed attempt to live in an apartment on his own, a series of disappearances from an assisted living facility, then a grueling and unexpected week at Harborview after he almost drowned in the middle of the night, we finally arrived at a secure spot that did not require him to reside in memory care.  It was 10 blocks from where I live and I started to develop a routine of sharing a meal with him several times a week.  That lasted about 3 weeks. 

Then COVID hit.  Quarantined to his room, and cut off from any visitors, my dad fell further into depression’s vortex, even as my ridiculous walls started to give way.  Every other day I dropped off flowers, a book he might like, or whatever interesting family photos I could find.  I called often but he was drifting away too fast for me to keep up.  After the third month or so, he started to believe he was a prisoner.  And in many ways, he was. 

Sometime in July, the nursing staff emailed me to say he’d lost another 10 pounds, leaving him with 135 for his 6’ 2” frame.  I was desperate and furious.  I spent a month, along with several other daughters, sons, husbands and wives, pleading for more creative solutions than ongoing isolation.  Miraculously, my dad’s new doctor, an angel of mercy whose ministries shall be enshrined, wrote a prescription for daily walks that I could facilitate.  ‘Doctor’s orders,’ so I was finally able to see him. 

Yet our first walk together was our last.  Two weeks later, he was barely able to stand on his own.  A week after that, he refused any morphine and died a few hours after I’d gone home for the night.  In spite of the year’s relentless labors, it felt like I’d blinked and he was gone.

My dad’s four moves meant he had pared down quite a bit.  Sorting through his handful of western shirts, handmade leather belts, his single bookshelf home to Celtic mythology, 7 bibles, Native American history, the geology of the West and a cedar chest full of wool blankets took only a few days.  But I’m disoriented with exhaustion.  It feels like I’ve just set down a pack twice my weight.  My eye lids get weary by 4 in the afternoon and I crawl out of bed after 12 hours of sleep.  

When my dad’s precipitous decline first announced itself last fall, he called one night and said he needed to tell me some things.  He said he was reeling from regret, about us and about his life.  He said he had not fulfilled the responsibilities he had to me as a father and to the world as a man.  He shared these things in a torrent, and with a kind of honesty he’d never shared with me, before or since.  His words traced directly into my wounded core.  They burned hot and fierce through all my ‘dry tinder’ like a suppressed wildfire.  The moment was surprisingly painful though apparently essential for breaking open those many protected seeds to generate new life. 

Fast forward a year later, and here I remain, my dad now physically gone.  Pictures of us, long tucked away in boxes, now sit on my dresser and hang on my walls.  “Leese...(long pause)...it’s your dad” from many voicemails plays like an old ballad inside my head.    

In spite of the exhaustion, and amidst a fog of grief, there’s been a tectonic shift and I am seeing the world with new eyes. 

The story of my father’s neglect molded a self-belief called ‘inadequacy.’  Neglect, the cause.  Inadequacy, the effect.  But with these new eyes, cause and effect have disappeared.  My story of inadequacy, the one I continued to tell long into adulthood, was a story I narrated.  If I wanted my power back, if I wanted the personal power that comes from feeling whole and worthy, a new story was always mine to tell, just waiting for the storyteller to take the reins. 

Truer still, my father never took anything from me that I didn’t give to him.  I was the ‘creative agent’ and I had chosen the ancient, blinding and disempowering story of me as victim and he as villain.  In fact, the reverse was true.  In this great odyssey we took together, me walking alongside him holding all the pieces together, he’d given me, and I’d earned, my ‘daughter’ wings.  I had become the daughter I always wanted to be without him needing to become the father I always wanted him to be.  

If this is wisdom, I’ll take it.  Even more, I’ll share it. 

Consider, as you’re reading this, who or what you tend to point a blaming finger towards. 

One worthy ‘villain’ story is the one about the massive disparities and harm faced by billions of us, of any species, resulting from ‘villainous’ people and institutions maintaining extractive capitalism at all costs.  

Or the one about the ‘villain’ in the white house.  Many of us have been so tightly wrapped around the Trump axle that the man’s become an exquisite parody. 

Or the one about the ‘villain’ virus and the many ‘villain’ people who may be carrying it.  The one where we give all our power and attention to a single virus, and to authorities who promise they can control it, while paying scant attention to what’s undermining the only real protection we have, that of our personal health, our indigenous biome and our regenerative immune systems. 

Or the ones all of us can tell about individuals in our lives who frustrate us, who’ve disappointed, hurt or abused us, that we still allow to shape the story we tell about ourselves. 

I’m not saying these stories aren’t true.  The facts tell a compelling story.  But they are only partially true.  By accepting these villain stories, we’re giving said villains a lot of power, especially the power to choose who we are going to be in spite of who they are or what they are doing. 

My question to us is why wait for others to offer us a healing narrative?  Why depend on anyone or anything outside us to authorize us to live fully into who we want to be?

I’ll never know my dad’s soul story--the story of his suffering, the walls he put around his heart, his estrangement from the world--because he never found the courage while he was alive to share it with me, to simply share more deeply from his heart.  What a troubling human ailment.  So much goes unsaid between people who purport to love each other.  But here we are, working with what is. 

What’s clear as day from this new view is this:  I don’t want to spend any more time wishing my father, my friends, Trump, the virus, or anything outside me was different than they are.  Here on the heels of my father’s death, I see that pursuit as a kind of folly.  It’s not that I don’t care, or that I won’t make every choice to affirm more life and beauty.  What I do want is to spend my last few decades relinquishing the boring, disempowering villain stories and becoming who I want to be.  I want to trust that is enough to have a real and sustained impact on the world.  I already feel myself more whole, more at home, which is empowering my work and my relationships at every turn. 

It seems, by now, that “Remember Your Ruby Slippers” should require no further explanation.  Even for those few generations today not shaped by the Wizard of Oz and its myriad metaphors, I find myself wanting to leave it well enough alone.  If you don’t know the story, take it as a mystery to unpack.  I will say it’s humbling, and not just a little painful, to realize I’ve been wearing those ruby slippers--no heels thank you--the whole damn time.  No wicked witch or flying monkeys ever tried to steal them from me (even though it made for a great story) and no one ever could. 

Grant me this one favor: over the next few days, stop reading the endless villain stories in most forms of media and notice instead those beautiful ruby slippers you’re wearing, whether they be size 5 or 15.  Tell some new stories that enliven you and your children about who we are and what we’re capable of.  Use that elegant power of imagination that is innate and indelible in all of us to shape new stories about our wholeness.  And trust it long enough to see what happens. 

Dear Fellow Americans...

It was the fog of early morning when I caught the edge of a headline.  ‘Trump Announces National Apology for America’s Legacy of Slavery.’  In that liminal zone between sleeping and waking, I thought I read an official letter printed as a full-page ad in papers across the country….    

Dear Fellow Americans,

I write to you today, your 45th President representing the institution of our governing democracy, which, in turn, represents all of us.  May this letter mark the start of a long and essential conversation we must commit to, now and into our future, as a nation. 

I have been sitting for many days (in my bunker) with a heavy heart watching the urgent cries for love, justice and accountability in every aspect of our society and the systems that support it. People of all ages and races have gathered in our streets, day after day and in solidarity, asking for the many institutions intended to protect us, finally and without hesitation, to change.  Not tomorrow, not next week, but now. 

In truth, we have failed to meet these basic principles of love, justice and accountability. In spite of the vision of this country’s framers to create a society where ‘all men (and women) are created equal,’ we have allowed ourselves to live with an embedded hypocrisy for over 200 years.  As abolitionist Thomas Day wrote in 1776 in response to the removal of the anti-slavery language in the final version of the Declaration of Independence,  "If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves."

On behalf of this federal government, we offer the highest level apology for this country’s inability to face the truth of our crimes against humanity, starting with our failure to recognize the rights and sovereignty of the indigenous people of this land, followed quickly by at least 250 years of the relentless enslavement of native peoples from Africa, followed still by decades of officially sanctioned discrimination, imprisonment and isolation of so many of our citizens with a darker skin color.  Ours has been a grim history of painful racism and this shadow, through our neglect and denial, demands full witness and accountability.    

We recognize no written word can possibly account for the harms this nation must fully own.  Though it can, and must start with such an attempt.  For there is no future for us as a country without a clear and committed apology, starting first to our Black American brothers and sisters.  

Every Black American must know that this country -- a country they and their ancestors imagined, built and cared for -- acknowledges an immeasurable debt.  Every Black American must know that while this country may have abolished slavery over 150 years ago, we fully acknowledge that we have continued to marginalize, disempower, disenfranchise, abuse and murder without cause people of African descent.  And every Black American must know that the trauma this history has left behind is not theirs alone to carry, but must be carried by each and every one of us. 

When we, as a country, heal and reconcile the harms we carry from such a legacy and see our thriving as dependent on that of our Black American neighbors, friends, and family, we may finally have a chance to rebuild as a society of care, regardless of any superficial differentiation amongst us.  Beneath these skins, all of us warm-blooded creatures, we love our children, cannot survive without physical touch and connection, and want to live a life of purpose. 

So let this letter written here in (underneath) the Oval Office, this 2nd day of June 2020, launch a movement across our states, cities, and towns to embrace this national apology and explore where it might take us next.  There is so much work to do. And yet, we must begin it here, with the simplest and clearest of acts. 

 Yours Truly, 

Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America. 

However unlikely these words may sound coming from our orange-tinged POTUS, may they be planted in our (and his!) consciousness and watch what happens.

Love, Lisa 

Leading From the Inside Out

A Seattle Times op-ed this week calls on citizens who are “enlightened leaders with foresight, not extremist ideologues” to stand up and run for public office.  I agree! But what characterizes enlightened leaders with foresight?  Bodhisattvas with vision?  I’m not sure that clarifies what’s needed.  Let’s give it more substance.  I have a perspective on the leaders we, most urgently and whether we run for public office or not, need to be. 

To start, let’s explore the opposite of ‘enlightened.’  

I have easily surpassed the 10,000 hours mark for sitting in meetings with other people trying to work through hard problems.  I’ve been inside of private, public and non-profit institutions, sometimes at the low end of the pecking order and sometimes higher up.  And for the last 10 years, I’ve kept a roof over my head by suggesting new ways to solve problems together by focusing on organizational culture. 

My biggest take-away after 30 years of observation is that how a group comes together to frame issues, deliberate and develop a path of action is the greatest determinant of that path’s quality, creativity and impact.  If there is ever a time we need all hands on deck to create clear-headed, truly innovative paths of action, it’s now. 

We all feel the ‘unenlightened’ group dynamics in a room: we cringe at bullying behaviors, tune out when someone runs the same endless script, work around palpable but unstated anger, grow weary of fixed positions, ruminate about others judgmentally, and say more about what we really think only after the meeting. 

Please raise your hand if you’ve had some of these experiences while meeting with a group of people attempting to solve problems together.   Lemme count…..1, 2, 3, 4...7,500,000,000….ok, that’s everybody. 

Meetings dynamics are the direct result of the inner work of the individuals sitting around the table.  If someone has a deep-seated fear of being wrong, a driving needing for certainty, a simmering urge for external approval, or any other universal, very human, but often unexamined need or fear, then they will carry that into any room where two or more are gathered.  Guaranteed. 

Worse, when those fears or needs aren’t conscious, when people haven’t invested much time in self-reflection, the energy of those unmet needs takes up all the air in the room, especially when those people have the most positional authority.  Of the umpteen organizational development books I’ve read, every one reiterates that it’s the internal climate of the highest positional leader that has the greatest effect on the climate (aka culture) of an organization. 

I read a retrospective piece about Hillary Clinton a year after the 2016 elections.  The writer asked whether she’d ever turned to counseling or therapy for support, a reasonable question given everything she’s lived through personally and professionally.  She said she hadn’t.  It’s “not how I deal with stuff.” I wondered if she also thought the risk of looking like there is something wrong with her as a woman trying to succeed within a patriarchy was too great.  All true enough, but I was shocked. 

And then I just felt despair for the tragicomedy that is our culture -- a culture that stigmatizes psychological analysis and intentional self-reflection as some kind of worthless navel gazing.   Or a culture that prizes relentless avoidance of anything that looks or smells like vulnerability.  The thought that a woman her age, who has attempted more hard stuff in a week than most people do in a lifetime, would avoid the most important investment a leader can make to lead well was devastating. Worse, and ironically, it seemed like a kind of insanity. 

But I’ve gotten slightly off course.  Let me clarify my primary hypothesis.  

I believe the only way to address the dysfunctional, time-consuming, inefficient, creativity suppressing, quality eroding group dynamics inherent to any collaborative endeavor requiring groups of humans is to ask the individuals participating to sort through their chaotic inner wilderness, claim their personal wounds that color every interaction whether they are aware of it or not, and bring as much humility and curiosity into the room as they can muster. 

I have sat with hundreds of individuals, leaders all, tasked with governing—that is, effectively convening staff and citizens to create pathways to equitable, compassionate action in the midst of what can feel like intractable problems.  And I have watched the ‘unenlightened’ wasting of intelligence, skills, and potential because we were afraid to name the elephants in the room, because someone’s unclaimed anger shut everyone else down or because most around the table felt unsafe to share a minority perspective or speak their truth.  

If we continue to lead with this massive handicap, inside of government in particular, we have absolutely no hope of excavating our way out of this rubble and finding as-yet-unseen solutions to the never-before experienced challenges we now face. 

In 1999 Desmond Tutu published No Future Without Forgiveness.  After winning South Africa’s first democratically-held elections and to heal from apartheid’s atrocities, Nelson Mandela asked Tutu to lead a Truth & Reconciliation Commission.  The Commission adopted what was called ‘the third way,’ which was a compromise between the extremes of the Nuremberg trials and blanket amnesty.  The third way would ‘grant amnesty to individuals in exchange for a full disclosure relating  to the crime for which the amnesty was being sought.’  Tutu, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1984, knew South Africa must find a way to forgive each other to create a country together. 

I believe we have a similar path to forge around forgiveness, but the starting point this time is ourselves.  We, each of us, has come into a life of suffering and loss.  We, each of us, has tried to navigate a discordant world the best we can.  Along the way, in a culture allergic to vulnerability, we needed to hide or deny our deepest wounds.  There was no ‘crime’ in this, it was just our survival response. Yet the global crisis, and the exponential fear it has generated, has pulled our wounds to the surface.  We feel them in our sleepless nights, in our painful relationships, in the acrimonious conflict everywhere, in our inability to see a way forward.  These wounds need us to see them, feel them and tend to them.

I see a way forward that starts with forgiving ourselves for being like every other human and mindfully tending to what hurts on the inside.  From this place, and only from this place, can we sit in rooms (or zooms) together and lead as ‘enlightened leaders with foresight’ and perhaps, if we’re lucky, weave our society together again in a way that is inherently life-giving, not just for some and not just for now, but for all and for the long-term. 

Upended

Upended we are. 

It’s the feeling of being in a small craft in big swells and then suddenly we’re all in the water.  The boat we were in had given us the semblance of safety – we were still somewhat dry, oars helped us navigate.  And then we’re fully immersed in open water with an instant realization that what we need to survive is now completely different. 

We can play this metaphor out a thousand ways.  A friend asked me this week what kind of boat did I have.  If the very wealthy were cruising around in large yachts with plenty of comforts, maybe she was in a trim sail boat requiring mastery of the wind to navigate.  We both worried about those of us who may just have a raft like the one Tom Hanks made to leave his island in Cast Away.  Or those of us who depend on an errant log to keep afloat. 

No matter the craft, all of us have been tossed into the big blue wobbly thing.    And making our way in this new medium requires entirely different skills applied very quickly.  The good news is these skills are innate to us – they’re part of an evolutionary intelligence encoded in our DNA.  We’ve been here before. So the work right now is simply to remember. 

The first thing to remember is we’re in salt water, a metaphor for life’s inherent abundance,  which supports us naturally.  We remember to fill our lungs with deep breaths, and to move slowly and gently to conserve energy so we don’t exhaust ourselves.  We also remember the careful dance we must do with the fear.  It’s there.  There is no running from it.  But survival depends on accessing the same amount of trust in ourselves to temper the fear, to balance it out.  

Yes, the ocean is a completely new environment with unfamiliar and shadowy creatures swimming about.  But we can choose to see them as monsters or as allies.  It’s clear which choice keeps us whole. 

Last year a drone captured footage of a woman swimming off the beach in New Zealand being approached by a small pod of orca whales.  At one point the largest ‘killer whale’ swam behind the woman nudging at her feet.  Of course her first reaction was great fear, but she felt instead their companionship and continued swimming with them even when she had the opportunity to swim away.  Some part of her was able to transform the fear and experience the moment’s profound beauty.  This is possible for any of us when fears in the form of monsters appear.

We also remember to look around and see so many others in the water with us.  Soon we come together (virtually in our case) in small groups to bolster our spirits and remind each other we are not alone.  We offer each other love and much kindness.  We witness each other’s immediate vulnerability and also our strength.  We speak the truth to each other because there’s nothing left to hide. 

The strongest of us remain as calm and clear as possible because our calm is contagious and essential.  We trade off hanging on to the few objects we have in the water for respite.  We know that if we think only of ourselves and horde the finite resources we have available, more of us will suffer and more of us will die.  So we share and share and share again, a sharing that blossoms from the undeniable truth of our shared fate.

We focus on the simplest things.  The changing light, the infinite sky, the connection between us.  These hold the symbolism, the sacred.  And we ‘love the one you’re with’ because family and friends are now spread out and over beyond some distant swell. 

The startling new oceanic world we’re swimming in forces us to drop all our plans, those ‘maps and navigation charts’ that were so important to us while in boats.  Those well-made plans that gave us so much certainty in an uncertain universe are no longer helpful.  Instead, staying awake and aware moment-to-moment becomes our primary attention. 

Clearly, in this pandemic world we’re now swimming in, many people still have to plan -- to build new hospitals, to maintain the supply chain, to arrange child care.  And still, planning will require maximum adaptability to changing circumstances and an ability to let go of everything we thought we knew and stay open to what’s needed now.  Or tomorrow.  Or next week. 

In his book The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle describes the essential training of the Navy Seals in just this way.  They develop their listening skills, to the outer world, to themselves and to each other, into a high art.  That keen listening guides them when they must ditch every pre-imagined scenario and respond to the unexpected.  This acute listening keeps them, and those they are sworn to protect, safe.

Yes, it’s true, we’ve gone ‘soft’ with so many instant comforts.  This evolutionary intelligence may indeed be atrophied.  But we can remember these skills, we can commit ourselves to practice them and in so doing we can stay afloat for much longer than we realize. 

I’ve been waking up every morning trying to articulate a prayer.  One that I can remember to speak or sing into dawn’s light to keep me grounded and contribute to the light.  Writing this now, I see the prayer is just a memory of what we already know how to do, and how to be, while swimming together in an expansive and sometimes unforgiving ocean when we’ve lost our craft. 

This time, the ocean is not as stormy as it might have been.  This virus’ fatality rate is lower than the experts say is possible with more virulent strains.  We’re also coming out of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and the warmer temperatures are on our side.  What a blessing it is we have a chance to practice being here without all the protections we’re used to. 

Like a gift disguised as a nightmare, we discover ourselves alive and awake within the premier training ground for re-learning the ancient ways life has always known for surviving and landing back on shore deeply humbled and forever changed. 

So I offer up this metaphor as a prayer to any and all.  And extend my heart and my courage to meet your own.

Speaking of courage, and to remember what courage looks like in all its creative splendor, tune into Arts Corps 20th Anniversary Festa.  Rather than coming together as we have every spring for 20 years to celebrate the voices, beauty and confidence of our young people, Arts Corps is livestreaming these performances this Friday the 20th at 7pm (PST).  Here’s the streaming link and here’s a way to register for a free ticket.  Registration isn’t required, though it gives Arts Corps a way for us to contribute that night if we feel so inspired. 

Love, Lisa