mindful heretic: living narrative unplugged
The official blog and website of Sarah Amira de la Garza
A Dress for Emily Dickinson
Sometimes even Emily
must have wanted fewer words
Less iambic pentameter–
a little more free verse–
something to unlock the invisible doors
keeping her in the house, sewing together verses she didn’t put in letters
I’d happily sacrifice a verse or two
for the promise of a trip to Manhattan —
what it would have shown through her eyes
Perhaps she would not have been nobody
Perhaps she would have bought fine paper
Perhaps Emily would have bought a new dress.
On the day before Passover, and as the Easter weekend begins, as almost literally, “all hell is breaking loose” about the literate Pope’s statement concerning hell (that destabilizes all the hegemonic B.S. about hell that has tormented souls for almost 2000 years), here’s an interesting article that was published in 2011 in the Catholic Reporter: https://www.ncronline.org/…/eco-catholic/debunking-myth-hell , that can put out those fires of dismay being set everywhere. This is not news–it’s a repeatedly denied reality, with institutions, cultures, and individuals preferring to believe in the contrived myths.
Holding on to something like this, especially when the record has always held the facts of this highly political religious creation, is insane. We are at a moment in history when people are being made to choose between what is clearly fiction and lies, and the complicated uncomfortable ambiguities of what is truth. We have ,at least for this technologically supported moment, the capacity to investigate and study, to read, and discover things we otherwise would have to spend even years to find. In many ways. The reasons we hold on to dangerous fictions that hurt others are never good.
Live with hell if you wish, but don’t invite the rest of us to join you.
Leaving the narrow spaces.
And from the 17 syllables of haiku I have spent the last month writing each day as a practice to heighten my connection to what I wish to express, to a lengthy contemplation on the idea of resolve.
Rather than make “resolutions,” I ask myself, “At this point in my life, where is my resolve? What strengthens my resolve? To what am I resolute?
The climate in today’s world confronts me with the presence of anger all around and within me. So I’ll start there.
What makes me feel anger? I am a very happy person, feel full of blessings even in the midst of the carnage and vitriol. today. I still feel anger, but it no longer feels virtuous as it did when I was raised and educated and employed in climates where fighting and arguments were the nature of the game. I easily walk away from settings where fomenting a dynamic rooted in anger and desire to control other people is at work. I have absolutely no desire to “win.” And with that, I feel I have learned to celebrate the good every single day…even when awful things are happening. I don’t celebrate defeat but will work with all my spirit and soul and body and mind to bring into being just and fair, ethical and true practices that work to prevent and eliminate cruelty and suffering in this world. That to me is sound living–not a game to “win.”
I have no desire to hate you, or fight you, and I take no pleasure at your misfortune. But do not mistake my mindful awareness of these things with my willingness to let injustice reign. I have learned I do not need to raise my voice, and only say difficult things, or repeat them, to be accused of yelling and fighting. We are a bizarre society that claims to hate fighting but champions it. I speak when I have something to say, and I will say what I have to say, not what has been put in my mouth or culture or gender or profession or training, to say. If I want to be scripted, I perform or act or play; I write and engage in banter for insight–but I won’t script what I really have to say…and find it much more enjoyable. It might make my creative projects much more tedious and eternal, waiting for the words to fit the inspiration, but if it’s my expression, I’ve learned I can’t feign, I can’t pretend, I can’t perform rage or anger that is habitual or rote or a caricature of who I might be thought to be.
My emotions are no more virtuous or pure than anyone else’s. I feel disgust and repulsion and impulses from hell on a regular basis in today’s environment. I am learning that these emotions are not me, but signs of how I have been raised and socialized. I can choose to let them be my master and to govern my speech and actions, or I can use them as “data,” or evidence of what I am facing both inside and outside my “self.” Similarly, others’ emotions are not my master, either, unless I allow them to be. I can choose to whom I will respond, and what will move me to act and sacrifice my time, effort, and resources.
These are my reflections as I spend this beautiful chilly evening considering how emotions are like little psychological strings that have been tied by experience and culture, to pull me this way or that, responding habitually, and using the affective nature of emotion to convince me that somehow I am compelled to respond in certain ways. My emotions and affect are not my master. I repeat this because for many years they have been. And in particular, I allowed the emotional responses of others to greatly determine my choices, sacrificing many options without even realizing I was doing it–that’s how well socialized I was.
What is it that I have held sacred? What have I claimed is most important to me? What answers have I given to these questions without even thinking of what it is to be sacred, or how I would know if it were important to me? Do I have the strength to withstand the emotional responses that changing my answers to those questions will cause? Can I be the master of my emotions, fully feeling them, but not bowing to them as evidence of some truth unless I can calmly articulate it with no sense of silencing my spirit?
As this year ends, I release the relationships, roles, and traditions of behavior that have ruled me since my childhood. This is many years coming, not sudden. But it is time. And I am ever so grateful for my practice, my prayer, my dearest friends and loved ones, whose steady presence in my life will be my steady flame on which to focus my gaze as all hell breaks loose as it might well–as it so often does, when one dares to cut those strings. You see, they were tied to something, and often, it’s not just about us. May I have the wisdom and compassion to mind my words and actions, aware of this fact.
Blessings, everyone. Be of good heart, and may your resolve be clear and life-giving as we end this year.
-Amira
Phoenix, AZ, December 24, 2017
Those who have known me since high school in the 1970s will know that pursuing the spiritual is not something I chose later in life or as a turn after a crisis. Even as a child in the mid-1960s, my favorite season of the year was Lent, because it was structured by prayers and spiritual practice. When I was interviewed at ASU in 1991 and was asked by then university president, Lattie Coor, what motivated me to do my work (if indeed it was true that the tenure & promotion system did NOT), my answer to him was that it was my spiritual life that motivated me. I have always appreciated how he was able to hear and accept that response.
In 1947, it was considered illegal to simply stand near the local springs in my home town and look at the water if one was of “Latin American descent.” It was also illegal to swim in it, or drink water from the springs.
Fortunately, my grandfather, M.R. González, Sr., knew the value of protest and went and stood atop an elevated piece of land nearby with my then pregnant grandmother, Carmelita, until they were forced to leave by a local “non-Latin” (read: non-Mexican) citizen of the town who, as my grandfather told me in the last conversation I had with him before he died in 1985, said to him, “Now, M.R., you know you shouldn’t be standing here…” That was before he grabbed my grandmother by the arm to force her to move, and invoking in my grandfather the ire and conviction that was his trademark, and responsible for his lifelong commitment to justice, political action, and protest.
The protest was not just about the prejudicial discriminatory law about the water at Comanche Springs; it was about the fact that at the time, in addition to being forbidden to swim, drink, or ostensibly even *look* at the water, if a “Mexican” wanted to get an accredited high school diploma and go to college, s/he needed to be allowed to go to the then whites-only Fort Stockton High School (whites then were simply referred to as Anglo–in Texas, the labels then had to do with the language that was spoken, providing insight into the history that led to these circumstances).
This protest was joined and collaboratively led by many of our town’s most courageous and virtuous Mexican-American elders who have all since passed on. My grandfather was the target of three different attempts to murder him, the final time an apparent plan to lynch/execute him, had he not been in hiding when they came for him at his home, with burlap sack and rifles ready for him. You see, protest makes those who are benefitting from unjust laws and ‘the way we do things around here’ very uncomfortable.
To have the right to go to school, to be educated, to look at the water that nourished your ancestors, to live on whatever side of town you wanted to…these were what was equated with living in the U.S.A., and my grandfather and those like him, protested for those rights. From where I’m standing, to be protesting against the flag right now is not so much an act of hate, as an act of grief and desperation–to be held in the sort of turmoil that leads one to say that this flag has been sullied, and we are not supposed to hang and honor a dirtied flag.
Nothing like a little religious certainty to make them throw out the golden rule. And I’m sure many members of the American Congress believe that God helped them write that bill to get rid of health care for the poorest and most ill, the aged and frail…just like God wanted the inquisition, hunting down midwives as witches, torturing of indigenous peoples, slaughtering of infidels, hoarding of treasures of the victims of genocide… ever think perhaps there’s something flawed to the model of faith that causes one to violate every ethic of decency in which they “believe?” Tribalism is just too strong an impulse. That, greed, and a historically recurring sadistic sense of superiority, an equal opportunity human inclination.
Then again, maybe they thought the protagonist was Herod.
Today I realized how different it is to be exhausted from doing the work I’m meant to do and being exhausted from work I’m told, or have been led to believe, is important. The latter fatigue is dangerous to my health, to my well-being, to my sanity. The former is paradoxically life-affirming and healing.
I am so grateful for the wonder of students who find inspiration in learning activities so much that they dedicated their Friday nights for five weeks, countless hours at home and on weekends, and their creative energies to make the role-playing game, “DiGlossia,” for our intercultural communication classes.
And in class today, as we began the two-day playing of the game, I watched these silent Gen-Z students active, engaged, interacting, and having an incredibly good time as they realized they were role-playing scenes right out of the things we’ve covered in class. And the students who had opted “out” of role-playing…? Well, I realized that to be a more realistic game that involved the idea of immigrants and refugees, that the island and its multiple regions where they were traveling towards their dream city needed to have a host population of allies. Every one of them wound up actively engaged, watching the experiences of the others until they could determine the best moments at which to give of their resources to help them make progress on their journeys. Still others, whose characters had been privileged prior to emigrating, found themselves frustrated that many of their skills and powers no longer served them when what they needed most was food, transportation, or a place to sleep.
They will continue the game on Thursday, and two honors students will be working with me to document the process, in a paper they will co-author with me. Another student has asked to be my apprentice in the fall to continue working on the project.
Meanwhile, two students have been hired by the university to work on social media updating of campus life because of their involvement in the Humans of ASU project we completed this semester (and will continue in the fall).
Yet another student from prior semesters in my Intersections of Race and Culture class, will be working with us to create a documentary podcast.
I LOVE MY STUDENTS, and I LOVE MY WORK, and I AM SO HUMBLED by the power of letting the students show me how to teach them.
“If you really want to make a friend, go to someone’s house and eat with him…The people who give you their food give you their heart.”
—Cesar Chavez
¡Feliz cumpleaños, César Chávez! Our greatest power is in our connection to the heart, to the earth, and to the humility in our ways of living. César Chávez was born over 20 years after my grandfather, but my Papa M.R. was cut from the same cloth. As Latin@s, we must honor our leaders and not hold back from acknowledging that our strength has never been measured by how much we conform to the dominant ways of living in a materialistic, individualistic, competitive, and harshly discriminating society. The socially coercive power of these values and practices is evident in the number of our community who learn either to fear speaking out, or to emulate the people and the ways of those who value our tequila and tourism value, and our hard labor, but who all but erase us from the discourse on diversity in this country, choosing to rely on stubborn stereotypes of our roles and personalities. It is people like César Chávez who did not just create a cliché phrase with “Si se puede,” but who MEANT it, and never swayed from insisting on that truth. César Chávez taught me that sacrifice for our people is no sacrifice. Forgetting our people is a far greater loss. I would rather lose all “honor” than silence the truth that our people largely live in situations of struggle and cultural conflict which must be addressed as our numbers continue to grow and our lovely cultural ways offer promise to be more widespread and common if we can remember the dignity that is our legacy in our personal resilience and persistence. SI SE PUEDE. Para siempre.
Feliz dia, Don César.
This morning as I walked, I saw a truck with a Trump sticker on it. I’ve seen it several times when I walk the dogs. And each time, I noticed the impulse that rose within me to “do something to it.” I then noticed the little “proper” voice within me begin to pump me up with pseudo-virtue regarding the decision not to. Eventually, if I pay attention enough, I also heard the internal response that acknowledged a slight fear that I would be caught and that someone with a Trump sticker might be moved to “do something” to ME.
This morning, this is when I realized that the reaction to “do something” to eliminate or change the nature of what makes me uncomfortable is in these types of situations rooted in the very same intolerant seeds that have flourished in others. We are all related–the actions of others, virtuous or evil, speak to my own potential. I remembered the words of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., about the violent nature of the existence of “hatred in one’s heart.” I considered how Gandhi’s early history of racist bigotry might have informed his eventual awareness of how violence begins internally, often in the guise of the absence of outright aggressive violence.
The impulse to eliminate, convert, insult, belittle, joke, or otherwise “do something” to that which makes me uncomfortable or frightens me; which challenges the boundaries for what I’ve learned or decided is sacred, holy, or right; or which triggers me in areas where I’ve been traumatized and moves me to hyper-vigilant defensiveness—these are seeds which can be nurtured to become violent, judgmental, intolerant…or can be repotted in a soil that nurtures my own capacity for understanding and compassion.
Out of that “repotting,” dialogue and mindful expression of my own experience and critically-rooted reflection can inform my speech and actions so that my responses are not disempowered or made bland, but are no longer distorted by a veiled desire to “do something to it.”
Colonialism in the Americas and religious “holy” imperialism in Europe and elsewhere has given us a legacy that can feed these seeds with the impulse to convert and perceive the world with an inquisitional zeal and desire to forcefully or manipulatively, mold others into shapes and scripts that match ours. Agreement feels good, and we’ve learned that power is the ability to influence.
But today I am mindful of how easily I could flip or switch, and how the seeds for violence are the same as those for mindful, compassionate, inquisitive, and engaged discourse/conversation.
I have been a religious education teacher, a youth minister, retreat coordinator, professor of spirituality and Dean of a graduate program in spirituality headed by a prominent theologian.i am a yogini, with 38 years of practice and moderate experience teaching. I have been repeatedly drawn to a life of spiritual practice and yearn, often, for life in a religious or spiritual community. But I have never been able to find comfort within the often passively harsh control that is disguised as holy or driven by a religious mandate. What I have learned is how the sword of kindness and religion can often be a sword of intolerance, an attempt to silence or stop the expression of views or positions that make one uncomfortable. It’s passive aggression, micro-aggression, and hard to address because it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
As a teacher and, a woman committed to justice and human rights, I cannot remain silent, nor distort through critique if I wish to address imbalance both outside of and within me. I must strive to be vigilant about what I’m actually trying to accomplish when I speak or act. And if there’s even a tad of a desire to feed my fear or seeds of righteous intolerance and vengeance or hate…I must recognize that these are seeds of violence. And I aim to prevent myself from acting or speaking, while correcting the way I’m addressing or feeding the seeds within me.
I must be transparent and not strategic. And willing to “take back” my words, to apologize. I must be, not “do.”
mindful heretic: living narrative unplugged 