In a column I wrote last month for Article 25, I made the case that branding and
marketing run amok (i.e. over-emphasized to the point of near absurdity) drains
our culture of creativity and resilience.
It’s the
“run amok” part I am always seeking to address, the ways that visible trumps
invisible, simplistic trumps complexity, broad trumps deep; short-term trumps
sustainable. You know the drill, and
it’s killin’ us.
Case in
point: last week I was asked to judge a
Poetry Slam, and two days later, judge an essay contest on the topic of bullying.
In both cases, I experienced a frustrated AARGH, that writing, especially
poetry writing, is added to the never-ending list of activities reduced to
winning and losing. I’m quick to
acknowledge that competition has its place, as do branding and marketing! The problem
is it takes up more than its share of the space in our culture. (See: stadium funding vs. school funding)
I get that contests
“call attention” to things which need attention.. But here’s the thing: calling attention takes
on a life of its own too. We think: ok, great, we’ve called attention to
bullying in the schools. We’ve had an
intervention, an event. An expert came and told us how bad it is, and what
research shows will work to stop it. We dust off our hands, move on to
other things which need attention, and wonder why it gets worse instead of
better?! Might it just be that we’ve
used the very tools whose over-use has created the problems in the first
place: attention-getting, competition
for scarce resources, intervention, and listening to one person while the
wisdom of whole has no place to be accessed?
This month,
that of calling attention to the importance of mothers and mothering, I make an
impassioned plea for inclusion of the over-looked Other. The slow, non-attention-getting, invisible,
unable-to-be-measured work of creating spaces in which there is room for every
expression except aggression. People tell me they don’t understand when I talk
about “creating space” or “containers” and I admit I don’t understand their
failure to understand that classrooms, offices, churches, activist and medical teams
must become containers in which winners and also-rans, creatives and plodders,
quiet folk and mover-shakers, janitors and ceo’s share an abundant supply of
respect and inclusion.
I have experienced
in nearly every setting imaginable, the incredible power of writing in
conscious community, to sustain, not
just call attention to what needs
healing in our culture. Sustained attention
heals, as does connection, and not just the easy connection of people on my
team, the ones whose beliefs and behaviors mesh with my own. Sustaining and
maintaining places in which people can safely tell all the truths of our
complex lives changes, if not everything, a lot of what really matters, above
all the understanding that we’re all in this in this together. When I write
without expectation of reward or punishment (no blame/ no praise the Buddhists
say) I move to the core of my being.
When you listen without expectation of needing to reward or punish,
praise or find fault, you are very much less likely to exclude or want to hurt
me. And vice-versa.
I love this
excerpt from “Invisible Work,” by Alison Luterman,
…
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because
I am lonely,
when
all the while
as
the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by
great winds across the sky,
thought
of the invisible work
that
stitches up the world day and night,
the
slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the
way worms in the garden
tunnel
ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and
bees ransack this world into being,
while
owls and poets stalk shadows,
our
loneliest labors under the moon.
There
are mothers
for
everything, and the sea
is
a mother too,
whispering
and whispering to us
long
after we have stopped listening.
I
stopped and let myself lean
a
moment, against the blue
shoulder
of the air. The work
of
my heart
is
the work of the world's heart.
There
is no other art.
“There are
mothers for everything,” says the poet.
Maybe the world needs stage-mothers, and
my-kid-is-better-at-baseball-than-your-kid mothers for some evolutionary reason
invisible to me. But just as an
experiment this month, become the Mother who
says, “On my watch
this whole space I’m responsible for is safe space. Now, let’s
call time out on tests and contests and on-upping, and sit
down together. Take a piece of paper and let your hand with a pen in it move
across the page following the words “I really love…..” If you get stuck, just write “I really love”
again until what you love comes into words.”
After ten minutes or writing together, I’ll ask if you are willing to
read what came out of you. You can read
your whole piece, as little as a sentence, OR, you can choose not to read, and
only to listen to others, which is no small thing, listening.
The world of your heart/ is the work of the
world’s heart.
There is no other art.
