Speaking on Ordinariness

My letters like those of the apostle Paul, are meant to be read aloud

in entirety, to the masses.

I speak what I write, and 'I write

what I wish I could say'

My tradition is one of tongue—spoken word

and I'm having one hell of a time

raising my voice to the sons of Man.

'Open your ears boy. It is hard to carry what won't be lived’.

As an ‘uncommitted soul’ I have refused to speak,

for to often I bare living words to the graves

of our being, yet like rot and moth ‘word’ lingers.

I leave these shores--residing shores of spiritual stagnation,

and continue to fall like ripened fruit, falling hard from the trees,

As if descent were falling upwards

I move into my failures and my weakness in order to transform,

strengthen, summoning the long dead and the unborn,

those who have ears hear,

to heed the coals of my tongue.

A messenger of fire like the prophet Jeremiah

I beg the Lord to not send me,

I weep, 'I do not know how to speak I am a child.'

'Do not say you are a child', says the Way of Wisdom.

'There!' I put my words in your mouth, see and speak,' says the Barer.

'What do you see?', the Guide asks.

'I see a branch of the Watchful Tree' I answered.

Then the Watchman said, 'Well seen. I too watch over my word to see it fulfilled.'

A second time the Guide spoke to me, asking, 'What do you see?'

'I see a potter at their wheel, shaping and molding a pot,' I answered.

From such dream forth, I have wandered

stumbled through the call of the Watchful Tree.

The coals have branded my tongue

the sign of the 'common ground of existence'

Spiritual life is always about letting go of unnecessary baggage so that we’re prepared for death’s final letting go. That can only happen if we’re willing to know that our protected self-image is not the deepest me. Our passing personas are important and a good part of the journey and they even help us to taste moments of the Great I Am that is God. But there’s so much more than my small self, which is so defended, constricted, and insecure. ~Rohr

Busy you are

knowing where I should go

I wonder

Speak? not to be responded,

maintain a line

if only a mere thread

between you between me

No relative need here

Only lessons of self,

observation of personas

some important, some good

some that could die a final death

rather then be,"...unto Ephraim like a moth,

and to the house of Judah like rottenness"

I let go

I clinch

I hold

my breath, my fist

I release

and once again

expand,

open,

no need,

full

Only fascination

of observation of my personas interaction(s) with the many

personas of all

(re) Significance, (re) Membering, (re) Imagining (re) Linking

Within the movement of Occupy Portland I found minimal acknowledgement of structural positions categorized by attributes (gender, sex, class, race, ability), which operate (presently and historically) as conduits and replicates of oppression. Daily I find myself chocking, in attempt to not swallow the tyrannies of our past and our present. I hold a guarded optimism of believing in the possibility that the people of this movement are willing and wanting to empathetically and humbly address issues of oppression. My guarded optimism in the possibility of a truly egalitarian empathetic body of engagement between the fluid and moving structural positions of power we each hold has much to do with the alienation that continues to happen presently; as well as the injuries of my past that I have experienced as a woman, growing up poor, and as an ally and peer to those of ignored and silenced individuals and collectives living in the shadows and boarderlands.

“There would appear to be a direct link between the experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being (individually or collectively)—that is, the experience of certain forms of unalienated production—and the ability to imagine social (political) alternatives, particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity” (Graber 309).

What is the significant of the action of “making known” the “unknown”? Why is that which is felt, the invisible, the unspoken, important other than, or insofar as, it is an “ongoing commitment to disrupting sedimented oppressive practices”#? My point is that I do not believe it far reaching to state that an active account of Those and What is ignored houses the possibility to create spaces of reconciliation, healing and (re) membering individuals-collectives to their lands, their bodies, their nations, and their persons and knowledges; creating modes of knowledge-experience production and political praxis which are neither intentionally or implicitly oppressive.

Approaching our processes--the way in which we do everything, for I would argue that the way in which we do anything is the way in which we do everything---from positions of pluralism, creativity, complexity, intersectionality, knowing-other-people, and a ‘principles before process’ approach breaks down fundamental assumptions of distance and separation, challenging the “suspicious gaps” and fragmented knowledges-experiences of the dominant culture. Moving beyond contestation and oppositionality I agree with feminist philosopher Lorraine Code that frequently when alternative paradigms/ways of knowing are spoke of, they repeatedly denote and preserve “the dominant mode in its dominance, simply offering “other” and by implication, lesser ways, whereas (we) are working towards an (knowledge-way) of pluralism and diversity, variously sensitive to the requirements of diverse objects of knowledge-experience”.

The point of diverse and different ways of knowing and practice is not to claim a new and “exclusive or hegemonic structure of a true paradigm, nor is it the point of the exercise to find a new and overarching dominant model that would govern all knowledge”.# The consensus mode of decision-making that the Occupy movement has adopted “is built on a principle of compromise and creativity, where one is constantly changing proposals around until one can come up with something everyone can at least live with”. This anarchist-inspired mode of process operates “on the assumption that no one could, or probably should, ever convert another person completely to one’s own point of view, that decision-making structures are ways of managing diversity, and therefore, that one should concentrate instead on maintaining egalitarian process and on considering immediate questions of actions in the present” (graber).

Acknowledging the activity of our structural positions and opinions/beliefs as ‘virtues’ rather ‘absolute certainties’ or ‘truths’, which conceptually distances and separates me from you, us and them, knower and ‘object’, (re) links the webbing of relationships whose effects cannot be separated. This assertion creates a (re) significance and (re) links responsibility and accountability of the ‘knowing of’ and the ‘ignorance of’ individuals and collectives experiences, realities, and tyrannies, making our every process/way intimately personal (embodied).

As we have each experienced in these few weeks together, the power of conceptualizing the world differently, the shifting of our emotional responses, and as our emotions and emotional constitutions change they have the power to stimulate new insights.# Therefore knowing from within, from the perspectives of intimacy and practical engagement, has the possibility to create new models of empathetic and affectionate engagement, which has the potential to illicit us to care for the world and each other (Wirzba) in new and forgotten ways.

Models of practice and process that have the power to hold the tension of complexity and multiple fulcrums, that acknowledges the interdependent, dynamic, and relationship of the pluralism of many knowers, many knowledges, and many experiences challenges us to move to a place of continual creativity, self-reflection and (all levels of) compromise, and critical examination of our sociopolitical location, actions, assumptions, values, perceptions and emotions. This process of continual “coming back” to process in the spirit of achieving consensus, calls/demands/supplicates/begs us to a space of non-linear (spiral-helix) thinking and being.

What I have found in this new/different way of being is persons feeling uncomfortable, impatient, and doubtful (of the uncertainity, meta-experience), yet some how radically and indelibly marked, inspired, and cautiously hopeful (given life). We have created for ourselves a way of (re) membering ourselves individual and collectively, in this peculiar pattern of spiral (helix), “border struggle,” and tension, with oneself, individually and collectively. I believe that this space has a capacity/potential for producing space of radical inclusively and diversity, celebrating our difference. Invoking the words of Audre Lorde I believe that,

“Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreathening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are not charters.”

Challenging and subverting the “propositions, presuppositions, prejudgments and prejudices” of the logic of dominate orderings, calls us to move beyond compartmentalized-sectoral “tolerance” and “concessional” diversity. Enabling us to heal weakened relations (collective integrity), "dilemmas" and "issues" we face each day from ethics, morality, hierarchical structures, incredulity, silence, doubt, mistrust.