i have always lived a pretty public life. If you had the opportunity to sit next to me for any length of time most likely you would get to hear a fairly candid assessment of who, what, where, why and how i am.
Over the years, friends have grown tentative in how they greet me knowing that my response to "How are you?" might mean a 15 minute analytic self-reflective diatribe or a constellation of koan-like aphorisms. i most always took the question seriously.
There is a difference between being open and honest with friends and strangers and being public. Being public means saying things out loud or in print that is to enter into the general discourse of civil society. For example, it might mean being at a meeting of some kind and when asked for my thoughts i would say something like. "Well as a white person my words might be heard to mean...... but as a queer person i have this view..... and as a person with "learning differences" i can appreciate ...... and as an anarchist my vision is molded by...." There were many "hats" i would employ to help others orient themselves to the intentions of my words. i would juggle these 'hats" and choose as purposefully as i could to allow my presence to be of significance while hopefully allowing others' voices and words and presences to be better acknowledged and appreciated. i was acutely aware of how my privileges could be utilized so that others would have less of a challenge in confronting the various oppressive dynamics that pervade our society.
i write these things in the past tense in the similar way some Sex Workers speak of themselves as "former Sex Workers" in order to protect themselves. i am only as good as i do going forward.
Also, looking back one can pick and choose and condense and edit. My intentions were quite often poorly articulated and executed. The feed back loop of theory and action is praxis. We learn. How do we go about applying what we learn to our being and doing? There is this vision i have of The Puzzlement Laboratory. A place where i can connect and blend my 20+ years of radical social change experience with my life long pastimes i call my Mental Health Handicrafts. Currently the efforts to manifest this Puzzlement Laboratory is being cast under the rubric of what i call Social Permaculture and Natural Community Building.
Social Permaculture is how to apply the principles of Permaculture to Human Social Dynamics and Natural Community Building is similar and maybe simply stated as "Building Community As We Build The Buildings For Community".
My Mental Health Handicrafts are the doing of the making of things. When i have a problem that stymies me i quite often take a break from active deciphering to picking up a handicraft such as knitting, or origami, or making a giant 3D male genitalia puzzle out of paper mache or baking. In concentrating on this hands-on process, quite often it allows for things in the background of the mind to move around and allow a different perspective to be achieved that may not resolve the "problem" but allows it to be appreciated and learned from in new ways. Quite often we try to solve our problems without appreciating them. Or others see us struggling with a problem and they come in and chop chop chop solve it for us. This is a great disservice. If we don't come to an appreciation and understanding of our problems they will just return in the same or related form.
The mathematician and poet and artist Piet Hein stated writing aphorism called Grooks as a form of resistance and hope during the occupation of Denmark during WWII. One of the best known and for me inspirational ones goes like this:
Problems worthy of Attack
Prove their Worth
By hitting Back.
As i struggle with my particular experience in this particular reality i find myself in, i am choosing to now put myself OUT THERE by creating more open access points beyond my comfort zone of what ever privileges i might have and attempt to seduce and cajole the "public" into community and to abase myself before my problems so that they might deign to offer up their secrets and mysteries.
Bear with my waxing poetic.... i am learning one day, one moment at a time.
Blessed Be and Divinely Doo-doo.
with pleasure in the struggle
xtn~ Ask Nicely~ christian
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