"Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone."[from Never Eat Alone] - Margaret J. WheatleyMargaret J. Wheatley (commonly Meg Wheatley) is a writer and management consultant who studies organizational behavior. Her approach includes systems thinking, theories of change, chaos theory, leadership and the learning organization: particularly its capacity to self-organize. Her work is often compared to that of Donella Meadows and Dee Hock. She describes her work as opposing "highly controlled mechanistic systems that only create robotic behaviors."
Christopher says: Meg has stated the Buddhist law of interdependence here in her own way. That we tend to think of ourselves is distinct and separate is one main source of the illusions that hamper our spiritual development.
"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned." - Antonio GramsciAntonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937) was a leading Italian Marxist. He was an intellectual, a journalist and a major theorist who spent his last eleven years in Mussolini’s prisons.
I am really, really stubborn. This is not good. :)
Maybe I Should Stop This
I said, give me signs.
You said you did, gave me sores
on my dreams of hope,
a pox on my heart,
the grinding walk, stone on stone
and me between them,
lost and losing more.
You said all my pains show me
that I don't know shit,
that I don't think straight,
that I still persist, insist;
I want my own way.
February 9, 2009 11:07 AM
revised February 19, 2011.
It's a joke, okay?
Sort of.
First published, August 30,2009
awe, thanks Christopher, but at this point... they don't want me for neither the president in 6 years nor do they want me to impregnate todays virgin Mary.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I would even fetch one halfth the going rate for as an obedient service husband for any woman in power that may need one to thwart tedious questions or well meaning friends playing cupid.
*deep breathe*
*loud sigh*
you wouldn't know how long sticking me head in the oven is supposed to take do you? I have been here for going on 6 hours and it's set on high.
Nothing! my back hurts from leaning over and I have a head ache from the beeping of the buzzer and the flashing light that says "door"
do you know of any quicker ways to do this (that are relatively painless?)
destiny, the quicker ways have nothing to do with walking off piers, leaping off mountains, doing mountains of white powder, falling out of airplanes, shooting out the back of your head (if you don't flinch), hitting the bridge, or sitting (even still) in the middle of autoerotic fires.
ReplyDeleteIn fact the shortcut isn't really short except by measuring from the longest haul. It does exist, but calls for a kind of discipline that few of us are willing to try.
i have very few but seemingly refined moments of i could go or i should go and you know what? when they are genuine, there is no struggle to them.
ReplyDeletebut we are all interconnected and so he owe something to one another, don't we? don't we owe that love? in terms of empathy, i can't imagine putting that pain on anyone else, the pain of loss and having to endure through that loss. perhaps if someday, even with empathy it would make sense, well then, i don't know. it's hard to imagine i might be there, but then it is so hard to imagine one moment to the next.
You said all my pains show me
that I don't know shit. If we lived in true acceptance would that pain then become something else?
we're here. you help me through my days. i send love to you.
xo
erin
Erin, I consider that there is pain and even mortal agony as they call it, of, for example, the disembowled. There is something else as well. For convenience let us call that misery. Misery is the way we can enhance pain for ourselves and even for others by loading that pain up with other emotional packages.
ReplyDeleteI am losing you, for example, and I love you beyond any easy belief. I may well have difficulty letting go, no matter how natural it is that you are going. This difficulty is the misery quotient and it is always self created if not by me then by my acceptance of your rules.
If we lived in a world absent the misery, it would be a different world and for some of us a radically different world.
Releasing the misery is possible and involves a kind of surprising relaxation. I say surprising because once you really get it you will be surprised at how hard it is to do such a simple thing but how easy it is to have done it. Unfortunately it always seems to have that same quality. You never get used to it and it is easy to "forget" how to do it.
There is no way however to escape the basics, the true pain of life. There is only opening as wide as possible and accepting pain's flow with as smooth sides to the channel as possible, to disturb the flow as little as possible.
Pain is that strange gift of presence, that thing that comes into the world with absolute certainty for the one who feels it, and with equal amounts of doubt for those who, at the same moment, are wondering if the one feeling it is really feeling it....
ReplyDeleteraw and real; sometimes, i think pain is when i am at my most human.
a powerful meditation, even if it is sort of a joke...
It matters very much how big the pain is and how long it persists. I watched my wife in pain over my whole life with her. There were very few days when she was absent some kind of specific and overt suffering. It was spooky. It floated in and out and around. Finally it exploded and forced her to attempt solutions. Every last one failed. In the end her suffering was amazingly large and unrelenting.
ReplyDeleteThere were moments of mortal agony. They were obvious. The difference was not how big the pain was - that was maxed out. The difference turned out to be how integrated a person she was. In other words the biggest pain deconstructs personhood. That's the bad news. You stop being human in some essential way. The good news is, if I am no longer a person, there is no longer a memory. So you suffer, but you will not remember very well. That was the key, how I figured this out. She would approach that extreme point of suffering over and over, and I couldn't fathom it until I realized that she experienced these places but had no memory of them. Each time was the first time.
In other words, the biggest pain is a complete and total failure as a teaching device and points out how flawed the idea is that suffering will teach people something. There is no way from person to person and moment to moment to guess whether the learning capacity is fractured under suffering or not. This leads to paradoxical results in some cases and no results in others.
ReplyDeleteIn "ideal conditions" we can teach through punishment and humiliation, but it will always be risky and uncontrolled in outcome. Using pain and humiliation is always inhumane.
thank you for being understanding Christopher. Even if part of your poem is sort of a joke, my comment wasn't funny.
ReplyDeleteI didn't intend for it to post, but typed it in without the word verify thinking that what was typed would still be retrieved and read by a person who could view the data sent, but rejected for posting without the correct word verifier.
you are a good person Christopher to respond in the way did.
thank you
who, you are remarkably complicated. I hope you have some area, close to your heart, where simplicity still rules.
ReplyDeleteIt is remarkably easy for us to lose the way if we persist in too much complexity. That is one of the first things taught in recovery circles, that we can often see people too smart, too complicated to recover, but seldom find people too stupid or too simple to recover. This does not vary but holds throughout all forms of human dysfunction and malfunction.
This does not mean we must stop being complex (how in hell would we do that?) but that we must learn how to exercise the discipline of return to the simple on a regular basis. It is helpful to place simplicity somewhere very close to your heart.