May We Molt
Systemic problems can only be dissolved by systemic solutions rooted in love. We must shed the old and together lovingly imagine and build something new.
We are burdened with so many massive systemic problems right now: racism, global warming, pandemic, patriarchy, lack of clean water, hunger, homelessness, addiction, obesity, loneliness, colonization, pollution, extinction...it’s a long, impossibly heavy list that just keeps going.
The thing is, it might be impossible to “solve” any of these problems in isolation. But the good news is that redesigning whole systems, while it is a big task, has the potential to dissolve most of these problems at once.
We can see so many broken parts of our world. We have an understandable impulse to hold up the often bloody shards and shrapnel we find at our feet or in our own flesh and shout or weep, “This is broken! We have to fix this!”
The problem is when we hurriedly try to glue the pieces back together.
We live in a computer/machine age. We tend to think of things as non-living computers and machines that we can build and repair. There’s a break? Add enough heat to bring it to its melting point and force it back together. Rip out the broken wires and replace them. Bring in a specialist who can use the right tools to replace the broken glass.
But what if we’ve been looking at this with the wrong lens? What if our world is made up of living organisms at every scale?
What if, instead of rushing to try to melt, wire, and glue every corpse back together, holding onto its decayed flesh as long as possible, what if we could accept the life and death of systems? I’m all for fighting for life and healing broken systems whenever possible. But at a certain point, when all the king's horses and all the king's men can’t put Humpty back together again… What if we see what the peasants and women have to say?
Many of those of us who are not in positions of contemporary power (i.e., dominance, mechanical force) have had to learn to accept the reality of life and of death. We have had to learn how to live without believing that we are the ones in control. This position can gift a different kind of power. A peace. A comfort in accepting both one’s smallness in one’s place in the world and at the same time, the importance and capacity of the difference one can make in one great life.
Good systems are living systems. When a system is no longer characterized by life: growth, loving exchanges of information, reproduction, diversification, stability, adaptation, progressing, and evolving with an individuated spirit...it’s dying or has died.
Death however is not an end. In the natural world, death is necessary for life. With time, the forest floor breaks down even the largest trees and dissolves them into nutrients for the next generation. The forest is healthiest when small fires regularly burn through to clear out weak parts and convert them into ash for fertilization.
We can embrace the death of great and weak things. We can use our collective discernment to decide which particles are worth feeding the next generation. We can be grateful for the good in a system that has died and grieve it’s passing. We can be grateful, too, for the things it showed us we don’t want. We can grieve the pain it left and transform unwanted forms into something better.
And in the moments we find ourselves like the caterpillar, our structure completely liquified in our own cocoon, let us not panic and try to force ourselves backward into our last known system. Let us accept the forward evolution of life. Give ourselves the time to completely dissolve all that needs to be dissolved. Lovingly exchange with one another to discern what kind of new, previously unimaginable shape will let us fly.
If we can embrace the patterns of life, growing, adapting, sharing ideas, and start imagining new structures that take more of the Jobs-to-be-Done approach, I believe we can design systems that resolve most if not all of the biggest problems all at once. If we can lovingly ask ourselves and our neighbors (at every scale)...
What do the people here need to flourish?
What does the land here need to flourish?
How can we design systems that get the entire job done?
...we can co-create and evolve a diversity of new systems, each with their own appropriately individuated spirits, that move life forward.
I think it will require totally different ways of approaching the built environment (including agricultural practices). As the literal, physical structure of our culture, our built environments are the embodiment of our current ways of thinking. They tend to be minimally examined accretions manifesting our subconscious and are massively responsible for the pollution, extraction, and isolation we suffer and that causes so many more problems.
How can we move past racism while redlining, systemic poverty, and white flight remain? While here in the South, our identity of “Southern” architecture still looks like a set of Gone with the Wind, complete with people of color cleaning up and tending the grounds? How do we have opportunities to get to know and love our neighbors when we spend most of our lives in isolation moving our soft selves between shells of cars, garages, and homes of suburbia or fearfully out in the unnamed masses of city life? How do we heal our bodies and planet when our meals are depleted, genetically modified, processed, and shipped from across the planet? How do we listen to women and people of color when the system is set up to only function when they do what’s expected of them with little to no compensation. We live in system after system of isolation, domination, and extraction.
But as Alain de Button observed in The Architecture of Happiness, the opposite can also be true: “We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need—but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need—within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings, and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.”
These same exoskeletons we inherited (and perpetuate) can also be a key to consciously creating systemic healing and evolution because it is here where our collective values take form. Together, ideas, spirit, and body, can be living.
There is so much potential to heal and create living systems that connect us with ourselves, each other, and the natural world. When the very structure of our society holds us to this kind of connection, it becomes much harder to pollute. Much harder to take advantage of another. Harder to ignore the hurting.
Our old wineskins are bursting with today’s new wine.
May we not panic as the old wineskins are bursting right now. May we let go of the old. And together generate new and flexible structures, containers, and systems to hold ourselves in a better iteration. Systems born of loving exchanges with one another. Asking how we might meet our needs and that of the planet and other living organisms. Structures that will hold us in the shape of the most beautiful world we can imagine. Remembering that when even one of us loses, we all lose.
Meditating
Photo by Tim Walker for British Vogue. (And if you’re not immediately picking up on the cheetah reference, go read or better yet, listen to Glennon Doyle Melton’s new book, Untamed.)
I’ve been practicing meditation for about a year and a half now and I think I’m finally starting to get it.
Here’s my current understanding in my own words, in case it’s helpful for you.
Meditating is like taking a gentle, intentional time out from your mind.
In our culture and age, the message we tend to receive/believe is that we are what’s happening in our mind. That we can’t separate ourselves from our mind. In fact, we believe that if we did we’d be losing our minds—a psychotic break!—which is a terrifying thought and something we want to avoid at all costs.
But that’s just a story we believe.
Because actually, we are not our minds. Our minds are just one part of us.
Our minds are the part of us we tend to give the most attention to and tend to be the loudest. I wonder if that’s mostly because of the time and place we live in. It may be that squeaky wheel always getting the grease.
Imagine you’re at a big party in a house or...let’s say hypothetically, quarantined in a house with four kids. I’m the kind of person (introvert and a highly sensitive person so my nervous system needs a lot of alone, quiet time to operate well) who can love the party, love the four kids in the house AND want to step outside sometimes where it’s quiet and give myself an opportunity to metabolize all that I’ve taken in.
Meditation is the conscious time out from the party/quarantined house of your mind for a minute (or twenty).
When you step outside, you can focus on your breath as a starting point. You can try to calm and slow it down or you can just notice how you happen to be breathing at that moment (which usually calms it down because you start detaching from it as you notice it).
But then what?
When you go outside the party or hypothetically—let’s just say:
You are quarantined in a little apartment with four kids and it’s been raining for days. You’re getting to the edge of your sanity and you tell your kids, “Ok, I’m going to have a little time out in my room for a few minutes.” What do you think happens next? Do you find peace and bliss in your room? Not exactly. You still hear the chaos through the wall. You hear the Beyblades battling, the dog that wants to go out, your seven-year-old knocks on the door to say he’s hungry, and your eight-year-old comes to give you a hug.
When you step outside your mind, notice your breath, you’ll find that your thoughts are still very loud and some may even try to come out and try to pull you back into the fray. Here’s the trick though…you can learn to non-anxiously notice the thought or feeling long enough to be able to name it and then not worry about it anymore—just for those twenty minutes. The point is not to fix anything or even judge anything during those twenty minutes. You’re just kind of…taking a census or inventory as you’re taking a break. It’s like, “Ok, I see you anxiety. I see you grief. I see you love. I see you gratitude. Make yourself a banana sandwich, I’m taking a break right now.”
The magic of this is that when we can name the thoughts that ask for our attention, it starts to create enough distance that they’re beginning to not consume us. With enough practice, none of them are all that scary or demanding anymore. What may have once been a terrifying monster in the closet comes to be more like Mike and Sully from Monsters Inc.
And then some more magic happens. You discover YOU are not quarantined to your mind. You realize your mind is one source of information but you can also walk down the road to another house, your heart, and take stock of what it’s trying to tell you. Again, you don’t have to be consumed by the feelings you find there. Notice them, name them, find out what they need.
When you start all this, you might feel overwhelmed and disoriented. But just like brushing your seven-year-old boy’s shoulder-length hair for the first time in a week, take a deep breath, accept that it’s going to take more than 30 seconds, and start working out the tangles.
You’re going to be like Adam and Eve naming all the animals. It’s going to be chaos to you at first. Resist the urge to put all the animals in a zoo, in cages. Just observe them, name them, find out what they need in the wild. Learn from them, where they live (your mind, your heart, your body are some of the basic habitats).
Sometimes when you meditate, you will notice the elephants or the starfish are all worked up. Now, this can get dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing and who you’re working with. An upset starfish is different from an upset elephant (or tiger or alligator). And what kind of worked up are they? Are they hurt, hungry, happy? My suggestion is to observe at a safe distance until you have a pretty good idea of what’s going on and how to truly care for the situation.
You can also use it as a time out to practice the thoughts, feelings, and actions you want to cultivate. So you could say, “Anxiety, you’re not welcome here right now, I’m practicing Peace right now.” Some anxiety is good and important to caution us to potential threats. But when Anxiety overtakes the garden...not so helpful. You may need to spend some more intentional time cultivating Peace (I subconsciously typed “peach” instead of peace there, that kind of works :) ) for a while to get your garden back into a healthier state.
Overall, I love the approach of Jungian/Depth psychology that asks us to observe what arises (rather than trying to force changes in our behavior) and ask:
What is it there for?
What is it trying to tell us?
What is it asking of us?
Ok, I realize there are so many mixed metaphors here but apparently this is how my brain works. If some of it helps some of you, it’s worth sharing. :)