"Is Where You Find It" | by Via Davis, Studio Psycherotica
As Without, So Within Genexhibitionist | Maya Dexter Within the past few weeks I have been confronted with a myriad of social issues. Perhaps the issues have always been there and this is just the first I'm noticing of it, but social injustice has abruptly rolled into the front of my mind like a three-ring circus, and the absolute spectacle of it won't allow me to look away. After a lot of floundering and wandering in darkness, the slow, purple dawn is finally illuminating this gift from the Aquarius eclipse. It's not at all what I expected.
The Leo solar eclipse last August heralded great news of my Self. I explored the workings of my character and rewrote and rehearsed the play until I became more comfortable playing a part I chose, as opposed to just throwing on the costume that someone handed me. I was so proud of me that after the very first scene I was ready to take my bows. But there is so much of the play remaining, the hard part seems to be staying in character; and as, through my explorations, the Leonine me becomes the Aquarian we, the plot thickens.
I often grow frustrated with the process. It was so easy initially: after starving for so long, that first taste of Self is so delicious, so completely sumptuous that one morsel felt like a three-course meal. But rather like heroin, to get the same high I needed greater and greater bites each time. And Spirit, that street pusher, has got me hooked and now I gotta have it. But now I have to work hard for it. That one elusive taste of heaven has me moving toward it's dangling carrot, but it always seems one step ahead.
Still I am compelled to reach for it. Each question I ask and must answer inches my hand through the miles between me and that cosmic carrot: Why does my marriage feel strained?Find the source of your own strainWhy does my body feel tired?Eat betterWhy is everything I eat altered or treated or tainted?Go find out and see what you can do about it.
And so the focus of this exploration moved beyond my Self for the first time; the other characters made their entrance onto my scene. As I begin to look up after staring within for so long, I see anger all around me. It is so tempting to go back under, to hide inside that personal reverie; it's peaceful in there. Nobody argues in a monologue. But the food I eat is poisonous, and my river is sick, and people are killed every day in the name of justice and honor - words often summoned to disguise hate and fear (albeit thinly), people are judged by their outsides instead of what's inside. As long as this continues, I cannot claim to have made much progress in here when there is this tsunami of uncontrolled fear drowning out so much possibility out there.
So what do I do? What can I do? That is the million-dollar question. I have figured out that I can't just ignore it and say, "I don't think that way so it's not my problem". As a member of the human race it is my problem if I want to flourish. And just as it is hard work to keep up with my Self, it is even harder to continually speak my truth to our culture. If I do not tell anyone that discrimination doesn't represent me, then I might as well tell everyone it does. If I don't say that all of this strangeness happening to my food is not okay, I may as well say it is okay. But then to speak your mind is one thing, to follow through with action is the hardest part, and I don't profess to have an answer to how to do that consistently. I think about it a lot, though.
Synchronicity is a sweet sister. When you open up those internal caverns for exploration, synchronicity is almost always right behind you, bearing a light to shed on the darkness. I put this article down for two weeks while I thought and watched and listened for some way to conclude it without sounding trite or insincere. Synchronicity followed me to dance class one night and it all came into focus.
Once a week I attend a tribal dance class through our local community education program. To the sounds of drums I stomp and sway and sweat every week until even my head pulses with eternal rhythm. Our graceful teacher is infinitely patient with us lazy city folks trying to keep up as she guides us through rhythms from Africa and the Caribbean.
At one of our last classes of the session, she brought in a friend, another dancer, and they showed us a dance from Haiti that we learned in pairs. There are a lot of foot movements and hand movements and leaning back and ducking. She told us that if it felt a bit like martial arts, it's because this was a dance to the slaves would do to act out dodging a beating with chains, and escaping the master. My heart stopped.
There I was - this young white woman dancing to African drums and trying to dodge chains. Fear crept in through the soles of my bare feet and shot through every cell of my body. I imagined the pain, the anger, the panic of trying to protect my own being. In that instant of realizing what I was doing I imagined running through a field, hiding in the woods. I imagined I was a deer to make me run faster. In that flash of experience I understood the intense spirituality that many slaves felt, to believe that God would deliver me from this agony would be the only way I could have made it through another day.
I was reluctant to finish the dance, but we practiced it over and over again, my partner's leg swung back and forth over my head as I crouched on the floor and then leapt up to begin the dodging motions again. Moving through this empowering dance connected me like a bolt of lightening to my humiliation for us as a human race. Our ability to so completely separate ourselves from another group is what makes it possible to enslave an entire race, slaughter an entire religion, allow people in our own country (and other countries) to starve and die when there is so much wealth and food in the world.
When I detach from someone's pain I can allow it to happen, but when I feel their pain in spite of my urge to look away I have no other choice but compassion. For a luminous moment I understood what the Buddha must have felt to experience the pain of the world. It's not quite what I thought it would mean, though. In my own experience it was not insurmountable grief. It was something like love, even joy true compassion, I guess. In that blink I felt my Self as a part of all things, and all things a part of me.
Funny how an hour can change your whole life sometimes. I feel so boundlessly blessed that a bunch of women who aren't dancers, gathering in an elementary school hallway once a week could offer me the lesson in understanding that "I don't do that, so it's not my problem" can't be true. As long as hate is happening anywhere it is my problem as a member of our species. As long as someone is suffering as a result of lineage, shape, beliefs, economic status, or anything else, it is my struggle. I don't know how to heal the wounds that still bleed with anger and frustration. All I can do is say that I am regretful that we as humans are capable of such hot, violent fear and offer up my belief in our unity for everyone to see. And if that experience challenges someone to open their heart, their mind, their mouth, then maybe that moment of compassion can become eternal.++
What's New | Contents | April Horoscope | Horoscopes Archive | For the Faithful "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.