October 1, 2024: Being-Literacy

A candle never loses any of its light while lighting up another candle.  Rumi

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.  W.E.B. Du Bois

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.  Toni Morrison

Recently I had one of those seminal moments of a very clear, reorganizing experience.  I had been chasing how to rein-in my anger and resentment at making foolish mistakes for many years, kidding myself in the process that self-depreciation was not that harmful if I was comfortable in my own skin, which I thought I mostly was.  In some way I had been resting on my laurels since early adolescence when I stumbled on the still solid sign that God was not at fault for our enemies or our mistakes—it was us, me in my particular case.  But my problem was the slow accumulation of my own self-slights. They had exacted a harmful toll.  And though I did have successful accomplishments, they had become mostly nested in the form of me rather than the essence of me—the latter of which had helped me tremendously in those accomplishments.

However, as I aged, I seemed to become more inattentive in simple follow through.  I expected more of me.  But instead of getting to my essence—a sense of presence rather than an outcome—I focused on changing outcomes.  It didn’t work and the denigrations kept piling up.

I’ve had a number of seminal moments in my life, as we all have.  They changed my path.  But paths get rusty and so the novelty ebbs—the inevitable tides of embodiment.  To not shift is like having a breath that goes in only one direction.  I think we do have the agency to change, but that agency isn’t like simply taking a different turn.  For me it was like a shedding and I could not be where and what I was—like a caterpillar who needs a chrysalis.  Again.

A literacy of being has always been a change-agent as well as an in-one’s-face agent.  Learning form-improvement is like improving status, but then the next better form appears and we can either become laggards or get on the hustle-wagon and try to keep up.  There is nothing inherently wrong in enjoying form, though it is best served as a garnish, not the main dish.

Each life shift, from the simply to the complex, is a nudge towards essence—that which enables us to feel safe, to belong, to love, to know grace, to know just being.  Passing on a shift is to lose distance from essence though the pass might make for more in terms of temporary form.  To know the difference and to choose rightly, however long it takes, is to be learned in the literacy of being. Perhaps the quality of civility can be measured by how many folks are more literate in being than literate in form.  It’s a tough road to use form to get to essence, an easier path to use essence to enjoy form.  Best to not get the two misplaced.

I wonder how much it would have cost to help the South of the 1800s to free itself from an enslavement-based economy (it did eventually happen) as opposed to the cost of the North warring of behalf of morality—however rightly grounded that morality was.  The resentment of individuals and states being forced to give-up their economy still thrives today and remains a cost of warring. Obviously that war had major impact on much more than Southern folk—as distrust has spread far and wide. That resentment is an epidemic of form over essence.  And, like war, many use resentment to fill their own pockets—the modern carpetbaggers seeking shinier forms. It is not fun to find oneself on the wrong side of right, especially when the method of enforcing a correct morality is itself wrong.

Sometimes change happens in no time at all. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. Or longer.  Whether we live again or not, we leave something behind.  Discomfort in solely our own or another’s embodiment is itself a deviate form.  That or any form does not and cannot override essence, but it obviously stinks up our living space and leaves a nasty taste for those that follow.

Death and love and being present are the best advisors. I’m glad when I listen and act, depressed when I do not.  It was good to have listened and acted again, even if it was not planned, though it was surely sought.  Still, it is disheartening to see the us-and-them-it continue, even if I’ve learned something. The ebb and flow continues, but what is the arrow of direction?