Tag Archives: diversity

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Imperfect Trinities

I have two adult children
with ADHD
and some disconcerting levels
of unemployable diversity.

They go through each day
with three parts harmony:
I want this,
I want that,
I want this Other Thing.

In this they remind me
of me more than not:
I want food,
I want drink,
I want
either sex,
or a toilet
or a nap,
but not really all three.

That would be way too messy
to prefer
as a rule
for a perfect trinity.

And so we march on
through our not so diverse rounds
of hyperactivity
I want this
then want that
then these Other
feeding and bleeding
restorative Things.

 

 

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Stable Diversity

Nature loves diversity
just as air abhors a vacuum.

Stability lives in staged apposition with diversity
as Yang predicts Yin,
as time moving stably forward
predicts time imagined more diversely
as the history of regeneratively slow-evolving Earth.

Stability, without conjoining diversity,
is a highly subjective attribution
when blanketed across a lifespan,
when covering a generation of interdependent lifespans,
even when defining a genetically stable species
across many re-stabilizing generations.

What is stable within a life
is what is reliably conserved,
like a heart beat,
and breathing,
digesting and eliminating,
consumer and producer functions,
economic and political forms of conserving balance,
cooperative survival of the best interdependence
more than competitive Win/Lose frictions,
or all thoughts and feelings of stability
disappear.

Conserving stability over a lifetime
is a highly subjective attribution,
perhaps too broad and sweeping,
too global and universal
too totalitarian
too elitist biased
to be more microscopically accurate
across any one lifespan.

For example,
the growth rate of an infant
could not be stably conserved
throughout an eight-decade human life span,
nor could the constant two-year old questions, Why?
conserve stability
in a four-decade middle-age climate
of chronic crisis
about half-empty ecopolitical ego-stability.

Adolescent adventures in gender-related competitions
over multigenerational cooperations
could not stably conserve
a marriage
or a nation
or a planet
across a regenerative trans-speciating lifespan
of co-domesticating creolization,
democratization of shared wisdom,
health,
wealth.

I wonder if conserving stability
of bilateral mind,
and centering on stability with diversity body
more likely matriarchal than patriarchal,
oriented toward health and safety
across eight positive WinWin regenerations,
at eight-decades of humane life,
facing immanent individual ego-death,
could already be conservatively stabilizing
in the bicameral mindbody
of an infant child,
or even a stuck in adolescent competitions
patriarchal-dominant
nation?

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Subversive Dance

I hope we can help ourselves
and each other
become quieter,
more leisurely,
generous,
grateful,
graceful dancers of sound
rhythm
pattern
voices of color
to see and hear these quieter vibrations
of wildness.

Wildness
wilderness
relatively untouched forests of mountains
and oceans,
rivers
lakes
ponds
swamps of wildness
for quiet forms of song and Earth dance.

Dance
moving to louder voices of climate pathology
and landscape erosion
decomposition of home and safety,
but also quieter dance
of witness
stalking visual prey
we would not violate with unwanted harming touch,
turning and swirling whorls of joy
quiet
yet also loud tornadoes
hurricanes
tsunamis whirling wildly loud.

Loud dance thrashing
climates of disarray
for smaller subclimates within
remaining wildness of species memory.

Memory of meadow walks
and naked tree climbing
swinging dances with polyphonic gendered nature
nurturing quieter wilderness
teaching slowing leisurely dance
through each day
returning to healthy full moon wealth
of wildness,
ecodancing movement to sound
and pause for silent graced lines
of sight.

Sights of quieter fragrance
and pungent distant fear
remembering mountain
ocean
water and air
fire and Earth’s Wildness
dancing loud pathologies
of Her majesty and awful wonder
reminding me and us
to respect our wise gratitude
for quieter voices and movements of nature
teaching grace as gratitude
for wilderness within
as wisely without you and I.

I hope I can help
grow quieter listeners
of wildness songs sung together
with dancing graceful pause,
wish for wilderness witnessing partners,
mutually stalking copresence
within Earth’s cooperative quiet majesty,
ecodancing drums
too anthro-discentering loud,
yet sometimes refreshingly polypathic quieter journeys
dancing softly hummed,
paused within echoing forests
of bounding binding wonder.

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Singing for Stevie’s Wonder

I remember,
in the early 60s,
our thirty mile drive
from our historic family farm,
in all White rural Michigan,
not counting the Mexican migrant workers
which adults made a point of discounting,
on the first of several shopping trips to Thrifty Acres,
through vibrantly young all Black urban streets
of nearby Lansing.

Making Stevie Wonder and I,
him singing in all Black city churches
and me in all White rural and small village churches,
harmonic neighbors in my privately humming heart
yet never possible to publicly meet and greet
as this nation and this world were meant to sing
and dance our regenerations not apart.

I didn’t know apartheid by default yet
but I do remember
seeing nearly black as ink skin for the very first time
on a smiling brown-eyed boy
on a chipped white painted bicycle without rims,
and longing to talk and listen with him
and laugh with him about the fresh green smell of freedom from training wheels,
freedom to create our own fast pedaling breeze
across our summer-hot black and white faces and arms,
and knowing that I would touch his dark warm skin
with loving wonder
about what it could be like to become with him,
to grow together,
to smell and feel and fly our satisfying diverse integrity
on a tandem red in-your-face bike,
bright shining all the way back
from Black-streets Lansing
through little White Woodland,
spreading across all Black with White Capital Cities
on out to woodland farmers,
to peddle fly while singing our glad hosanna wonders.

As I reweave
this first drive by encounter with racial diversity
and humane ecstatic curiosity,
I imagine asking Mom to stop,
pull our metallic gold Ford over
so I could ask his thick black-framed glasses name,
which would be Stevie,
and take his hand
to walk his bike back to his home and family
where we would live together
happily and most prosperously ever after.

This was my moment,
too quickly passed,
to know passion’s love at first sight,
these sublime sounds and dark satin skin smells
of Stevie’s Wonder.

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All Roads Lead Home

All love roads toward Home,
if home is Rome,
then all roads lead toward Romish home,
especially when we are in a climatic crisis
and we really do need to be Home
to grow as healthy and safe as can be.

Why can’t Person A’s prickly paradise
become Person B’s gooey quagmire of a nightmare,
until Person B remembers
how and why and when and where
they have co-arose Person A?

Why can’t one person’s genius
be another person’s Wild Card,
and vice versa?

If one person’s technology
can be another person’s magic,
then why can’t one person’s science
be another person’s craft,
and the other way around?

Why can’t one person’s medicine
be another person’s ecotherapy
becoming medicine?

Why can’t one person’s Tipping Point
dialectical ecosystemic theory of time as bilateral function
be another person’s Mythic Earth Creation Story,
and both-and?

Why can’t one person’s fear about pre-climatic critical intervention trends,
as too slow and lethargic and ignorant,
be another person’s just-right ReGenesis Myth?

Why can’t one person’s Gethsemane Garden
be another person’s PermaCulture Sesame Street?
1. Where we first notice what’s goin’ down.
2. Then discover how to improve the flowers
and cull the weedpatch Groutches
into a somewhat better sense of humor
reqarding hygienic therapy
and what is grungy treasure.
3. Co-invest in implementation,
hosting cooperative stone-soup gift-it-forward
Golden Rules of relationship
and transactions,
4. Harvest healthy wealth
like polyculturally organic Cookie Monsters,

Dressed up as Bodisattva Warriors
costumed for WinWin chess
folding and unfolding co-empathic choices
until everybody wins
because no one ever dies alone
or afraid to live together
on Sesame Street,
in mindbody homes,
whether in or beyond Rome.

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Wilderness Home

I prefer my home and family buttoned down
rather than too wild and disorderly,
disheveled and irrational.

I prefer natural order
and shades of color
and dialects
and vocations
and sequential rules of nutrition-producing order,
and yet wonder, too.

I have been hurt by too much wild
struggling against my too much gay
with fear that loss of homophobia,
struggling with fear and anger
about my too-wild sexuality,
might self-recruit toward loving bisexuality,
poly and/or meta-sexuality,
a co-arising co-gravitation
without fear and anger boundaries
might open your pen toward boundless love.

Too wild
these fears and angers scare me,
preferring my home and family
more polyculturally transformed
to optimally button down
our polypathic wild.

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Unholy Sanctity

My fetal alcoholic bipolar:

“sometimes I experience low anxiety
and act like a happy drunk”

“sometimes,
like when entering new places
and situations,
I experience high anxiety
and act like a very bad
and mean-spirited drunk
with immense juvenile curiosity and overload,
near total sensory loss of ego v. eco-boundary,
megalomaniacal tendencies,
also known as pediatrically-challenged
Oppositional Disorder,”

which feels like an understatement some days and nights
of every day
of my life
since she,
now nearly 14,
was five.

daughter Yang and I attempted to visit
Sacred Community last week,
uninvited.

A sole positive outcome
from this 9:20 AM Sunday rather-early morning visit,
is to have set the bar for achieving more positive outcomes
very low indeed.

At the same time,
Yang seems motivated to be included
and to establish new positive-healthy relationships
with peers
and within a familial-participatory
multigenerational community.

What Yang and I might be able to bring,
in co-redemptive return for inclusion
as invited, greeted, welcomed members

(also the threshold for my African-American
also-gay-male husband
to bring YinYin,
my youngest of three sons,
with paraplegic palsy and cortical/bielliptical blindness,
with great roaring delight preference for pipe organs
and human singing voices)

Perhaps I could
cooperatively partner with you and/or other
interested and invested members
who may already have one or more family members
not able to join your community
as a complete family
or household tribe
due to boundary issues
between this UU community’s
cooperatively intended culture
and the often less mutual, much less cooperative, intentions
of some neutrally/neurally challenged cultures,
Interior Landscapes of Not-So-Permacultured Design.

Perhaps we could talk together
our mutual needs to optimize
each family’s and community’s inclusion of diverse truths trend.

Perhaps we could find
or create
a low-stim focus,
exercise,
stretching and breathing and balanced-walking meditation,
song and dance liturgical space
for these mutually messed-up folks
of all generations
to practice a more cooperative spirituality
of being with each other
in safe and healthy ways,
and fun; humor and mutual-performance entertainment count,
with big positives,
like writing narrative poetry
to communities you have seldom met.
“What would you say
if you dared be true?”

Perhaps we could then form a child-care cooperative
and any care-givers not needed each Sunday
could attend regular services,
where I would love to sing tenor in your choir.

I can also do male soprano voice,
as needed or wanted,
and preferably both.

I would love to be part of your Green Sanctuary process,
leading to cooperative community economic
and ecological leadership
in climate change responsive
and responsible (informed, balanced, polyculturally decomposed and analyzed together)
Earth Rights advocacy;
including some reconnecting experience
with Joanna Macy’s “Work That Reconnects.”

Perhaps I could also meet other poets
or narrative-essay writers,
or even homily writers,
or fiction writers,
playwrites,
music writers and lyricists,
to self-organize “Everything Slams Universally-Unitarian”
liturgical themes.

Perhaps we would find and enjoy and amuse each other,
amongst our multisystemic and paradigmatic ideas,
while applying Permacultured Design and Development
to both the Interior and Exterior Landscapes
of evolving organic systems,
like individuals,
and even more universal formation systems,
trying to balance their unitarian flow,
from faith communities to political parties,
from economic to ecological policy platforms
for optimizing health as wealthy abundant life,
Beloved UU (All Souls Inclusive)
“just a little bit Taoist leaning”
Community.

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Cooperative Philanthropy

The day our United Way

slurps some Reality Stew

we will change this name

to The Competition Way;

competing for community support with the same constituency

we are teaching to compete with each other

for both community support and service.

Our United Way systemically grows

a Divided Fail.

 

The day our Philanthropic Foundation

absorbs some permaculturing compost,

we will learn to ask whose foundation is this really?

Are we a Foundation of inclusive cooperation?

A Foundation with Golden Rule

applied to all species living now

and in our global future,

incarnated by our Elder species

for this regenerative purpose?

 

Are we a Philanthropic Foundation

created by people

who deeply cared about sustaining life’s integrity

for seven generations?

Are we more a Foundation of confusing competition

for scarce resources,

or a Foundation for regenerating abundant contentment,

goodness,

beauty,

wisdom,

optimized economic policies for cooperative

ecological systems of health and well-being;

for minimizing suffering and exploitive competition,

economic commodification of Earth’s natural elements and systems,

a Commons that includes the lives of human

racing to win before losing our dreams

of teleological faith?

 

Could we become a Foundation for optimizing public policies

for mutually cooperative mentoring

of vocational choice,

of permaculturally,

organically,

integrally,

multisystemically functional, maybe even deeply creative, families

and thereby communities?

 

We stand within this permacultural Foundation

for cooperative mutual-investment guilds,

and networks,

and Climax Communities

for growing global consciousness of eco-identity,

Earth Care as Self and Other Care,

designing our ReGenesis Foundation,

with both interior and exterior landscape applications,

both YinTime and YangSpace information eco-metrics,

mutually mentoring Earth’s polyculturally cooperative eco-logic.

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Stalking Sacred Space

My new grey hiking shoes

thick soled,

tread too loudly

to celebrate a homing invitation

to hear and see hidden diversity

within this wooded ridge.

 

I stop to break from sacrilegious

pounding plodding reverberating echoes

through ears attuned for inside

languaged voices and recreation,

amusements excluded from wild nature’s

cathedral voices

breathing impassioned pauses  for mutual gratitude,

co-listening,

hoping for mindful human steps

taken to conjoin this woodland,

enfolding time’s whisper shy adventure.

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Ordained Life

I learned the other day that my immune system is gone. She just up and left. No goodbye, no Dear Jerry letter, no flowers, not even an email to let me know; hoping I wouldn’t notice why systemic failure grows more prominent.

My doctor told me about this sly exodus. She is this vibrant buxom Russian immigrant with long wavy auburn hair, and the sturdy solid nature of totalitarian atheistic culture, and the bedside manner of Attila the Hun. Still, she tries her best to break dark news, reaching for anything she might recall to work with human feelings, other than  pain and suffering. Pain she understands, and believes we should all be much more tolerant of our petty, relentless, agonizing Teachers, like not being able to bear weight on my left foot, for example. Her best medical advice was stay off your foot. Teach my kids how to feed and care for each other. Take a nap.

Anyway, she breezes into the examining room where I am sitting, mostly clothed, perched on the edge of the exam table with naked feet anxiously touching the pull-out steel footrest. Waving my not very thick file in her dominant left hand, before the door slams shut behind her, she asks me if I know that I am Positive.

Her radiant smile did not seem to be begging me to tell her I already knew so she was not in the position of actually having to think about how to be kind.

I didn’t know what was the right best answer:

Yes, thank you, and I’ve always found you to be a positive person too?…

No, in fact I hope my husband of the last twenty years will be surprised to hear this as well….

Well, I have been getting sick a lot lately, coming down with weird stuff normal people don’t usually have a problem with, like breaking out in hives in my armpits, so it does cross my mind, now that you so generously mention it, that maybe my immunity guards have departed without giving notice, or even closing the door of vulnerability on their way out….

But, instead, I just say No, quietly, in awe of this strangely-shared boundary moment.

So she hesitantly touches my forearm, and valiantly tries to continue smiling, to reassure me that it will be OK, not a death sentence, her extractive words.

Well, that was good to know, especially because I hadn’t even realized I was waiting for sentencing. I wasn’t even aware of my charges or my trial, my judge, or my apparently merciful jury.

But, I had been feeling vulnerable, and learning I am vulnerable to all the cooties and disease and suffering and pain in this world, on this Earth, within this EarthTribe, leaves me feeling mushy and rotten, old and used up, or at least overripe for decay, inside, then outside.

Vulnerable.

Wide open to whatever comes along, available, accessible, for good and bad.

An open vortex for anyone or anything to use as even my own defenses have evaporated, not like a sunset over the ocean, when that last radiant arcing flash says goodbye until tomorrow. Rather, the loss of immunity, the ache of endlessly inclusive vulnerability, uncovers a quietly creeping dawn, except instead of Earth gradually emerging until I must open glad eyes to discover Her visible presence once again, one more time, this time, her sobbing and singing, dancing, lavishly beautiful Time, my Interior Landscaped self-consciousness gradually purges to uncertain self-identity, and less concern about where you begin and where I end, because my ending is already predicted by lack of self-defense.

A well-fired strength lurks within this deep ecology of grateful emptiness. Creating a winterish listening place for all nutrients and toxins around and within me, a place, a jump in, the water’s warm recreating safe-space where each can be heard, embraced, have a say about our future together. How long we may or may not sustain our interdependent web of life.

Without capacity, perhaps even the desire, to exclude often dissonant nutrients and voices, tastes and smells, feelings and awareness, difficult and insane immigrants, I invest this sacred listening mountain in regenerating new connections, new ways of seeing appositional, dialectical rationality, rather than oppositional polarity.

I learn to long for ways we might survive together that would be in your best interest as my self-interest dissipates into a dark vortex of Yin openness. If our shared values for diversely nutritional compost disappear, then I have no hope to grow my own.

Finding harmony within this apparent dissonance and disease and suffering and insanity is the only vocation left to this EarthTribe Identity, softly individuating within Earth’s resilient resonance, my boundaries of immunity to you removed. All remaining for me is my subsidiarity to Earth’s well-being, for here we all return, generative memory seeds of language and code, capturing voices stringing songs back, back to stardust Elders.

We are Earth’s Tribe dying to remember to fly together like the stars from which we emerged, the Earth which we reincarnate; and trying to not fly apart quite so awfully much.

 

 

 

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