HeartPrints

Hola mi Gente,
As I was sitting down to post this, I found out that actor Carrie Fisher passed away. RIP sweetheart and thanks for all the beauty… 

Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being, to return to Eden, make friends with the snake and set up our computers among the wild apple trees.
 -- Tom Robbins, WildDucks Flying Backwards

Deep down we all intuitively know that our true calling is in reality a form of spiritual evolution. An integration of the Universal Principle, The Godhead, of Love, a collective unconscious -- whatever the fuck you want to call it.

Yet we spend an enormous amount of energy suppressing that awareness because to make it conscious is to recognize that most of our manipulations, our religious dogmas, our personal ambitions and dramas, and financial grabs are not merely counterproductive, but most likely insignificant. In some real way, our lives are a series of acts adding insult to injury. Our mission, whether we recognize it or not, is to do away with the trivial pursuits and take on the responsibility of an infinite, hard-won joy that comes from a psycho-spiritual integration. Or, at the very least, get to taste the perfect slice of pizza before we “transition.”

We are now living at a point in time in which the collective choices we make will either lead us to certain self-destruction on one side or toward a miraculous evolutionary quantum leap on the other. Sometimes my posts on personal liberation -- what I like to call conscious evolution -- seem to me self-indulgent. It’s Winter in America (again) and in this prolonged season of violence and war at every level, perhaps concentrating on self-improvement seems a wee bit trivial. But just maybe, taking a step back and looking at the world we have created with a light heart can help us see it more clearly. Perhaps with fresh eyes we can learn to respond more wisely to the crucial choices we have before us.

Do we continue our individual dramas, or choose to take on the primal and all-important task of sowing the seeds of joy and peace in our hearts? Do we use our uniquely human gift of reason to come up with meaningful solutions to the challenges that face us, acting with wisdom to change a global climate bereft of love and compassion? And in case you haven’t noticed, our previous choices have placed us on the ever-increasing endangered species list.

Sure, I know many of you are saying that you would love to have or do all these things. As any well-trained beauty contestant would tell it, you want world peace (or at least a safer world) and you want to prevent our world from turning into ash. You might be saying however, that sure, you want world peace, but so what? You might tell me that the problems we face are too large and that nothing you do will make a difference.

And my answer to you is, damn skippy.

I know how that feels. I know the despair that sometimes comes from trying to make a difference. But I’m dense, I will fight to the last, and even if I knew my struggle is doomed and it will not make a difference, I refuse to accept the way things are without a fight.

Perhaps it would be useful if we start where we are… 

The first thing we have to grapple with is the possibility that our ideas about money, power, and dogma have outgrown their usefulness. In fact, all this competitiveness, self-righteous warring, in combination with technological advances used in the service to strengthen our status and satisfy our material desires, just might be making matters worse. Interestingly, some have observed that in spite of tremendous poverty and disease, peoplein developing nations seem happier, more peaceful, less stressed out, and less anxiety-ridden than those more fortunate citizens of the developed countries.

I can say from my experience that this seems true of poor people, or people who I’ve known who were raised in poverty (as I was). We didn’t have depression and we didn’t feel isolated or alienated. There were times we were hungry, but our lives were full of the things that really matter -- love, family, connection -- even as we struggled mightily to preserve those values.

Perhaps this is a sign that we should be looking for another way of being and doing.

I think the crucial question is, “How am I personally contributing to co-creating the world we live in.” As a mental health practitioner and social activist, I know too well true healing comes from a sense of personal empowerment. The key to personal transformation comes from a self-responsibility that embraces a vitally human connection to the world. In this, we can take our cue from the environmentalists. In response to the climate crisis, environmentalists are asking us to re-assess our “carbon footprints,” by living differently and working toward making that footprint shrink.

And this is where the concept of a “heartprint” can help us find answers to our questions or a path from the alienation that marks too much of contemporary life. What is a heartprint? According to Karen Trueheart, a heartprint is the impression made by every feeling, thought, word, and deed.

At every moment, we are generating heartprints. Anger, fear, ignorance, and hatred create heartprints. They literally leave their mark within us and are picked up by mirror neurons in others and oftentimes acted out unconsciously. They create a ripple effect expanding in ever widening circles. If we don’t take care to feel these destructive emotions deeply and mindfully, and using their energy wisely, these heartprints cause much of the world’s pain and suffering, resulting the poisoned emotional climate we live in. On the other hand, heartprints generated by love, compassion, and kindness, and understanding affect our inner and outer climate, and we create those too.

Trueheart taught that what we need is an emotional climate change, a shift in the emotional atmosphere. This doesn’t mean we become emotional Nazis attempting to stamp out feelings we see as “negative.” In fact, the opposite is true: if we consciously and mindfully experience all our inner emotions, even those we feel ashamed of, we are confronted with the potential of transforming even the negative. Those that garden know too well that we can turn weeds into mulch. Farmers take refuse and use it to grow life-sustaining crops. It’s the same with feelings. By feeling deeply, thinking clearly, and acting wisely, we can create heartprints for humanity and all life on earth. I realize this might sound like too much for all you beautiful too-cool-to-care motherfuckers. I realize for those who have learned helplessness at a deep level, this may even sound impossible.

Maybe not. Try to let go of the dogma and all the trivial shit for just a moment. Act as if it’s all not hopeless. Perhaps you have heard of the Butterfly Effect. In scientific Chaos theory, a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can potentially affect the weather in New York City. Chaos theory led to a powerful insight about the way nature works: small changes can have large consequences. It recognizes the profound interconnectedness inherent in all existence -- a very real connectedness on a global scale. In addition, current scientific findings on the neurological basis of social intelligence reveals there is an emotional equivalent that is called The Heartprint Effect.

Climatologists have used the Butterfly Effect to help us understand our participation in global warming and have shown us how to understand our behavior. By understanding the Butterfly Effect, we can see how small actions like planting a tree, changing a light bulb, or dialing back our thermostats even a little really do make a difference.

Similarly, by understanding the Heartprint Effect, we can begin to internalize our importance in a movement that creates a more peaceful and sustainable world. We can generate our inner light to change our internal climate. And this in turn creates the psychological spaces that can help others do the same. In other words, drop the Jesus talk and be like Jesus. Be the change you want to see in the world, Gandhi said. Understanding The Heartprint Effect could take something that seems impossible and help make it easier, or at least “doable.”

Think of it, with every movement of our hearts and minds, we contribute to the biological, emotional, and mental climate of the world. If you can take this premise as true, then you can make a difference for the better. If our mission is to do away with the trivial in favor of psycho-spiritual integration, then the Heartprint Effect lets us know that even a simple act of kindness contributes to global change. 

For those looking to act, just look around. We live ina time of crisis and crisis abounds with opportunity for social change. I’ll leave you with the following the illustration of the power of this approach. Read the story of anonymous donors paying off lay-away accounts across the nation (here). Read it and pay attention to what simply reading about these acts do to your internal emotional climate. What does the story do to your hope about humanity? Notice what brings you true joy and fills you with peace. Then notice how when you feel this way, your way of relating to the world changes.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

The Aristrocracy of Rebellion

Hola mi gente,
I have to say that one of the consequences of being unemployed is the tremendous amount of stress. Stress kills and right now, I’m at the tipping point. This in spite of the fact that I meditate on a daily basis, am vigilant regarding the few principles I do value (so as not to add to the mess), and try to maintain an awareness of my frame of mind. Not working just saps me of energy.

It also impacts my passion, which in turn impacts my writing. For better or worse, in order for me to be an effective writer, I have to be feeling it. Stress just kills it for me. For example, I have an unfinished piece on Hillary Clinton’s email transgressions and I don’t have the energy to shape it up… Instead, I was feeling the following.

Why I Fight

Dorli Rainey, age 84, reacts after being hit with pepper spray during a protest

Standing for equality and a just society is hard work. In fact, it’s not only hard, but oftentimes not every rewarding. It certainly isn’t rewarding in the economic sense, that’s for sure. I will very likely die before I see a country where children won’t starve needlessly, for example. I probably will not live to see an economic system that works for the majority of the people and not the few. But, as Alice Walker said, “Activism is my rent for living on the planet.”

I might not even live to see meaningful electoral reform, or elections that aren’t won or lost by how much money a candidate can amass from the richest 1%.

Shit, I probably won’t live to see a time where we will all get together as a nation and have a real heart-to-heart on race and inequality. But yet, these are some of the things that I have stood for -- for a long time. Oftentimes with little support. Until very recently, in fact, people like me operated in silos -- disconnected from one another, doing impossible work with little resources and only reasoned passion to sustain us.

When people ask me why I bother to fight, I tell them the following true story. The thing is, as powerful as the story is, I almost forgot it. So I write this down so I will never forget. I write it down to honor the fact that I am part of a long and storied lineage of resistance and rebellion. I write it down so you can put it in your heart:

I was once marching in DC with tens of thousands of other protestors and on that particular day, I really wasn’t feeling it. I was tired. And what I mean by tired, was a bone-weary fatigue that was physical, psychological, and spiritual. I was there, marching and seriously reconsidering the whole mess. What's the use, I thought to myself. We’ll protest and tomorrow things will go back to normal. And the people who should be out here with pitchforks and torches will be watching reality TV or some such nonsense.

It was at this time that I turned to an elderly lady who had made the trip with us that day. She was well-known in her community, having been an elementary school teacher for decades. She was, like, everybody’s teacher, a universal mother archetype. And there she was marching with the help of a walker -- a woman that I knew that had marched in countless protests, from the Civil Rights movements of the late 50s on.

So I turned to her and expressed my doubt. I questioned the validity of protest and dissent. I expressed my uncertainties, my frustrations, and feelings of impotence. “Why do all this, Mrs. Robinson? It doesn’t make a difference.”

She stopped, turned to me and with a light in her eyes, she said, “If you’re a Latino, it’s very likely that you have an ancestor who fought for freedom and died fighting though they knew they would never see the light of a free day in their lifetime. Then she turned to a young woman standing next to me and said, “You probably have a woman in your past who fought against violence against women and for the right to vote, and for women to be treated as equals although she probably paid a great price for that struggle and she did so knowing in her heart that she would ever see the day where women would be treated with respect and as equals.”

She turned to a young white man and said, her soft voice tremulous with a fiery spirituality, “You probably have an ancestor somewhere in your background that got his head busted in by strike breakers for fighting for a fair day’s work and the right to bargain collectively. Then addressing what was now becoming a small crowd, she said, “In fact, you all probably have a long line of ancestors who fought for social justice and freedom though they knew their world would never be like that.”

“And you know why they fought? They didn't fight because they knew for sure they would change the world. They fought because not fighting meant that they would be a party to condemning their children to live enslaved. So when you march today, remember that you honor the sacrifices of those who walked before us. When you march today, remember that you are passing that honorable legacy to the children who come after us.”

Then she took my face in her old, gnarled hands and said, “Even if we never accomplish anything, Eddie, what matters is that we fought and struggled and stood for something, because the ripples of our actions today will reverberate and find seed in the hearts of the children where it will flower as freedom, or a yearning for freedom. It doesn’t matter if these clowns don’t change. What matters is what you stand for. Anything less is slavery.”

Since that day, I have never questioned my mission for social justice and whenever I get tired, I remember my teacher and her plea to honor my ancestors.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Social Action

Hola mi Gente,

I made a promise I would post at least one blog post per day this year. I am in a rush and had written a draft of what I think is a great article, but I don’t have the time. I have to go meet someone about a J-O-B. So, I’m offering some random thoughts…

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Social Action & Social Justice

A couple of years ago, I decided to go on a week-long silent meditation retreat. The retreat followed what is called “noble silence,” no talking, no cellphones, no TV -- I was completely off the grid doing vipassana meditation 12-14 hours a day. 

When the retreat was over, I was waiting for the bus back to NYC when I was confronted by a sight on the large flat screen TV in the waiting area -- Ferguson, Missouri was on fire. I mention this because having been away from the daily deluge of graphic violence, these particular images hit me in the gut. For one, being away from the habituation of media bombardment on my senses had the effect of making Ferguson much more graphic. Secondly, I was reminded that the struggle against state-sanctioned violence, which has existed since before the founding of this nation, is real and often deadly.

Yesterday, it seemed as if social media was lit up with posts regarding Black Lives Matters “victories” in voting recalcitrant prosecutors out of office -- as if it was done by the vote. This is so much unmitigated bullshit. Without the literally hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people acting in concert across the nation, doing direct actions and acting out in civil disobedience, getting arrested, and in many cases, getting their heads bashed, the vote wouldn't have mattered. What matters is challenging the status quo and bringing to light the injustice of racism. What matters is challenging white supremacy.

Believe me, there's no guaranteed “victory” -- that those voted in office will behave differently. In fact, we can be assured that as long as all we do is vote, the system that allows the cold-blooded murder of black and brown lives to go unpunished, state-sanctioned violence against black and brown people will continue. It's the system, stupid. Fuck!

If you look at history, all of the great social justice movements didn’t depend on the vote. The Labor, Civil Rights, Abolishionist movements, for example brought about change by acting outside of the parameters of politics. Within the nonprofit-industrial complex, there is a huge debate regarding the efficacy of electoral reform. My major criticism of those who seek incremental change is that this has become the dominant strategy for social justice change. I am not against incrementalists, nor am I against the franchise (the right to vote). I happen to think these are useful tools that have become the de facto approach to change in if the United States. Voting and legislation geared toward social change have their usefulness, but they were never meant to be the main form of agitating for change. Yet it has been this way for too long. 

And where do we find ourselves today? We have a labor movement in shambles, a mere stepchild to a democratic party ruled by neoliberals. Today we have more black people in cages than we had slaves in 1840, right before the Civil War. We have a representative democracy in tatters, with some respected social scientists saying our society now more closely resemble an oligarchy than a democracy.

Voting? Let’s conveniently ignore the fact that millions of people of color have lost their right to vote, or are languishing in prisons. Let’s forget for one moment the nation-wide movement to stop people of color through voter registration laws that serve to stop huge blocs of us from voting. Yes, let us ignore all of this and I say even if these obstructions didn’t exist, the system will never change through the vote alone. It never has and never will.

I think it is beyond condescending to ignore the many mostly young people of color who fought and paid a price to bring to light the atrocities of state-sanctioned violence to the rest of the nation and were often marginalized and ridiculed for it. The prosecutors in Cleveland and Chicago weren’t merely voted out, they were challenged by thousands, maybe millions of people fighting the good fuckin fight. I know because I am one of them. 

As Glen Ford wrote today, “The great task of independent Black politics is to pry Black folks loose from the Democratic Party’s lethal embrace. For that, we need a movement in the streets.” I would add that this is the task of all marginalized people.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Creative Writing and Social Action

Hola mi Gente,

Reading through an anthology on writing and social action, Fire and Ink (here), I came across the following. It’s a reminder that writing from the heart first requires us to learn how to listen, how to hear other truths, to learn to hear the vulnerable honesty of those who “take your word” that you want to stand with them and bear witness. The truth in this piece is powerful, and it reminded me of the work I am fortunate enough to engage.

If this doesn’t touch you, you have no soul.

* * *

You Gotta Be Ready for Some Serious Truth to Be Spoken

-- by Debra Busman

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for some serious truth to be spoken. When you ask students to break silence, to bear witness, to connect the meaning of their own personal lives within the larger societal frame, you gotta be ready for the truths that fly out, crawl out, peep out, and scream out from underneath the thick walls of practiced silence. You gotta be ready for stories of border crossings, coyotes and cops, night beatings, wife beatings, baby beatings, date rapes, daddy rapes, gunshots and chemo, pesticides, HIV, AZT, protease inhibitors, and the pink-cheeked 19-year-old who says, “Hey, next Tuesday I’ll have five years clean and sober; can we have cake in class?” You gotta be ready for stories that start out, “Ese pinche Columbus didn’t have no stinkin’ green card.” You gotta be ready for the straight A student who has to leave school because her INS paperwork hasn’t come through yet, and the social security number she gave at registration was the first nine numbers that came to her mind, and she cannot get financial aid because she is “illegal.”

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for all the stories, whether you want to hear them or not. When you ask students to speak the truths of their lives, you gotta be ready for the Stanford-bound future teacher of America who writes about being kicked out of the Navy for being too racist. You gotta be ready for the sweet-faced, curly-haired lover of Jesus who writes stories of his days as a violent skinhead, beating up Blacks, Jews, and queers. You gotta be ready for the stories the young man cannot share in class, scribbles slid under your office door, 4:30 a.m. emails, telling of his father’s rage, the belt, the whiskey, the steel pipe slammed down hard on the thin nine-year-old boy body. The father’s last words, before he left the child cowering in the corner, his back broken in two places: “Be a man, you pussy. I better not see you cry.”

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for war stories quite unlike those CNN sound bites of “precision bombs” and “surgical air strikes” spoon fed into the comfort of our living room TV sets during Desert Storm. You gotta be ready for the glassy-eyed, refer-smoking closeted ex-GI to suddenly bust out with long held stories of ‘friendly fire’ and ‘collateral damage,’ stories told through choked sobs about retrieving the remains of his eight buddies, all under 20 years old, from their burned out carcass of a tank, bombed the night before by ‘an American mistake.’ You gotta be ready when he tells the class, “Man, you guys gotta know, war is not the fuckin’ video game you think it is,” when he tells stories of standing guard duty with no ammunition, stories of surrendering Iraqi soldiers shot en masse, thumbs and ears cut off for souvenirs, bodies bulldozed into shallow sand graves.

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for these stories to share classroom space with the one by the retired prison guard, now a minister and a college student, who writes of his experience as a young African American police officer on the scene with five white sheriffs in 1960s rural Mississippi when a 17-year old gas station robbery suspect, a young Black man whose family he knew, was thrown in the back of a squad car, handcuffed, and locked inside with a 120-pound German Shepherd police dog that was ordered to attack. Then, when the writer describes the ensuing screams, beer bellies, spit, and cigars, the white laughter, the blood, the horrific carnage told 40 years later with such immediacy and precision, you can only hold your heart and say, “Oh good lord, why did I ever stress the importance of using sensory details, concrete language, and vivid imagery?”

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready to hear the stories held in private silence the past four years by a young woman working in the local Rape Crisis Center, stories about rape, domestic violence, child sexual abuse -- things she says she didn’t think you were “supposed to talk about in college,” at least not until she took a women’s studies class and Intro to Creative Writing. It means you gotta be ready for the young Japanese-American student who kind of drifts through class, quiet and respectful, suddenly shocked into consciousness by the poetry of Janice Mirikitani, suddenly alive and angry and writing poem after poem about Executive Order 9066, model minorities, identity, resistance and rice, practically busting down your office door one day in excitement to tell you he finally realized what he would write his senior paper on. “The camps.” he says. “I’m going to write about the camps. Both my grandmothers were sent to internment camps. I’m going to interview them over break, get their stories, get the truth of my history.” Then you gotta be ready when he slumps in your office following spring break, crestfallen. “They wouldn’t talk about it,” he says. “They told me everything else, all about their lives before the war, how they decorated their houses, how they fell in love with their husbands; they told me all about my parents when they were babies, about their family businesses. But they wouldn’t talk about the camps. They just shut up, looked at me funny, and said, ‘There is nothing to say.’ It’s weird, it scared me. Like whenever I brought it up, they just turned into other people, like they weren’t my grandmas anymore. They are 80 years-old. I don’t want to hurt them, so I had to stop asking. What am I going to do? My project is ruined. I have no stories.” And I have to tell him, “No, your project is not ruined. There are worlds within those silences. Your story is just beginning.”

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for the young blonde girl from a private high school in Sacramento’s suburbs who rolls her Mabeline eyes the first day of class and says, “Is this going to be one of those courses where they try that multicultural crap down your throat?” the same girl who, weeks later sits weeping in class, heart and mind open, listening to shared stories of INS thugs and deported grandfathers and pesticide-poisoned baby boomers, wheezing from asthma. Stories about cousins orphaned by police bombs dropped on fellow family MOVE members, seven- and nine-year-old brother and sister taken from their home, sitting in the Philadelphia police station, surrounded by cops watching the bombing live and in color on TV news, laughing, telling the children, “See those flames. See those tanks. That’s your daddy inside there. That’s your daddy we finally got right where he belongs.” And the young, blonde, private-high-school student, who truly believed California always belonged to the United States and that racism ended with the abolition of slavery, or at the very least after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, turns her face to the class, Mabeline running down her cheeks, and says, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. They never taught me about any of this. I’m so sorry. I just never knew.” And her workshop buddy, Aisha, the self-described Pan Africanist revolutionary, takes the girl in her arms, rocks her softly. And Carlos, sitting in the back, can’t help but shake his head, muttering: “Damn. And they got the nerve to tell me that my people are ‘under-prepared’ for college.”

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for the student who, having just listened to your best rap on the wonders of metaphoric imagery, says, “You know, Professor Busman, I mean I don’t mean no disrespect or nothing, but, you know, all that stuff you been saying about metaphors and similes and shit, I mean, it’s cool and everything, and I can see it working good in some poems, but my poem, you know, when I talk about that cop smashing the side of Bobby’s skull with his stick, well, I don’t want people to think that that noise sounds like anything other than the sound of a motherfuckin’ pig’s billy club crackin’ up against the side of brother’s head. I mean that’s the sound. It don’t sound like nothing else. I don’t want people thinking it sounds like something else. And, that line where I put my fist into that concrete wall out behind County General, I don’t want people thinking that that feels like anything other than a fist into a concrete wall. Sometimes things ain’t ‘like’ anything else; they just are what they are and the reader just gonna have to deal with it. You know what I’m saying?”

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means that you gotta be ready to learn at least fifteen times more than whatever it is you think you have to teach. It means you gotta be ready to accept the fact that you can never really be ready for all the confusion, the grief, and the wonder that enters the classroom when students take you at your word and believe you really do want to hear the full and messy truths of all their “wild and precious” lives.

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My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

References

Adler, F. P., Busman, D., & García, D. (2009). Fire and ink: An anthology of social action writing. Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Labels: creative writing, pedagogy, social action