Letting it go

on detachment and ownership

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I dream that I have launched a small community theater – I am bustling about doing the leg work, buying 1x 3’s, muslin, and paint to build flats. While I am working in the wings, a former friend – a relationship destroyed by latent unspoken envy over twenty years ago –walks onto the stage and talks to the cast and crew as if she has founded and built the space. They seem to accept this at face value although she has just arrived.

I watch from the backstage and try to decide how to respond.

I know what I am supposed to do in this ridiculous world. I am supposed to claim what is mine, assert ownership over my idea, my effort, my product. But in the dream, and in waking life entering such a battle seems absurd in the face of an act this brazen.

I didn’t build this dream space, or any similar space in consensual reality, to hang my name above it in gold letters. I built this space because I sensed the community needed a place to come together joyfully.  It will be the community’s work to fight for it, or to hand it over to those who want to claim dominion over it.

It would defeat the purpose entirely to claim it as mine.

I have, a time or two, succumbed to external pressure, summoning up my ego-energies, to “fight for what is mine.” But I always end up losing – because even if I did successfully put down the coup or defeat the interloper – the spoils would – for me – be wholly spoiled.

I don’t build such spaces for myself alone, for admiration, status, or ownership. I create them to share and therefore fighting to keep it defeats the entire purpose.

Although the dream ended ambiguously, my decision not yet made, I know what I would do, what I have almost always done, and what I would do again if it ever came down to it. I would build something beautiful, built with love if not skill, and walk away, to let it survive or fall without me.  The point is that it was created. Not that it is mine.

I know what would happen next in the dream: I would set down my tools, stepping carefully over the rolls of muslin, and the pile of 1 x 3’s and exit quietly out of the loading dock at the back of the theater. I would feel proud of my labors and hopeful that the project would survive without me.  I would hop in the back of my truck  (I don’t have a truck, but in my dreams I almost always still drive the white Toyota pickup truck I bought for myself, brand new, for seven thousand dollars, after dropping out of college) and I would drive away, intact, with myself, enjoying my own company, knowing that  I can see things, I can fill holes, I can seed healthy enough spaces that I will refuse to destroy if someone emerges to claim the harvest for themselves alone.

You can’t be stolen from if you share what you have as freely as possible.

You can’t lose a tug of war if you refuse to pick up the rope.

What comes through me doesn’t feel like mine at its source, nor in its manifestation or outcomes. Although for sure, all the limitations belong to me.  And if I can sniff out little vacuums, overlooked and counterintuitive, that exist in our zeitgeist, and feel compelled to attempt to address them it doesn’t feel that project belongs to me, and I hope I am not the only one to take it up.

If others get confused between their inspirations and identities – imagining that what comes through them is their alone – that is for them to sort out with their own soul.

The persistent story of ownership in the dominant culture is a strange one. A powerful few imagine that they own some fragment of an idea that was bequeathed to them, or that arose in someone else made them hungry, and they transform that free gift into extractive ownership, hoarding all the resources they extract. Others are denied all pathways to ownership, and aspire to it as a right, as a leveling entitlement.

But what if it is all just another game of pretend with dreadfully real consequences?

And considering the fleetingness of our lives, none of us owns anything. True inspiration arises when it is needed (for self and other, never for one or the other) it passes through us, manifests for a time, requires maintenance and produces yield for a season – to be distributed as fairly and widely as possible, and then it retreats, returning to wherever it came from.

And all the rest is just pretend, all the rest is pretend.

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