Politics unusual

a daily praxis

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Maybe I’ve written this before? It feels like I might have, but I forget almost every word I’ve written as soon as I finish it, so forgive me if I am repeating or plagiarizing myself, it is an old, chemo-brained woman’s prerogative.

It is surprising to me, and sometimes frustrating to me that much of my work, and subjects that interest me, the few discreet areas where I have developed some small amount of facility are so often seen as “out-there” or woo-woo, as accessories, psycho-spiritualized side-dishes – when I see all the different kinds of work I do as an examination of aspects of living that the dominant narrative devalues and erases.

I see my work, every moment of it, as wholly political.

It is also frustrating to me, particularly as I try to engage on some of the post-Twitter social media sites, how quickly Americans frame politics as the simple sorting into one of two political teams, and how fulfilling it seems for so many to simply declare themselves to be Democrats or Republican and how boring and limited this framework feels to me.

This is not because I think I am above politics, or because I don’t think there are real consequences to elections. I do vote regularly, and I consistently vote for the most viable “progressive” options available on any ballot.

But I don’t count “Democrat” as an essential part of my core identity and would never introduce myself as such. Who I vote for feels like the least interesting and least important thing about my politics. I don’t “believe” in the party as an expression of my deepest values, and I don’t pledge my loyalty and I don’t valorize or idealize political candidates or elected officials.  

I don’t imagine that liberation or salvation will emerge from the tug of war between fascism and liberalism. I vote as a harm reduction practice, to protect endangered communities from compounding danger and injustice, and these dangers do not entirely disappear by any means when my preferred candidates win.

Whenever I need something that I can’t find, my grandmother assured me that it will always be in the last place I look – and over time I began to look to the last places first. My political instincts lead me to continuously investigate all the ignored, over-looked, forgotten pathways that the collective dismisses as too challenging, too obscure, too complicated, or simply too silly.

We face unprecedented collective challenges in the form of the climate emergency and all its fronts and facets – rising fascism, nationalism, the hoarding of wealth and resources by the billionaire class, climate injustice, all the isms and phobias targeting marginalized communities, crumbling public institutions, with our justice, educational and healthcare (including mental healthcare) all already bucking under the strain – along the inherent fault lines that are foundational to our national infrastructure and mythologies.

All my work, and all the professional decisions I make are organized around helping people negotiate the realities that are already upon us, and to try to address the one-sidedness and the damage that the dominant narrative imposes on all of us who are included within it, and all those who have been colonized by it.  I try to do whatever I can, even if it is not much, to lift up skills and worldviews that have been abandoned or suppressed.

In a world that paradoxically values both hyper-individuality and conformity, I try to create opportunities for interconnection forging communities that celebrate and respect our differences.  In a world that asserts supremacy and survival of the fittest, I try to empower those who are targeted, sick, or vulnerable or made invisible. I try to remind people who wish to share strength and resources that support circles are not the domain of professionals but belong to all of us. I try to help those who can’t imagine they will die one day, and who project and out-source death to those they imagine are “Other” to confront our shared mortality and temporality and to listen to the erased voices of the dead and dying. I try to support people in the helping professions to consider and incorporate models that reach beyond pathology and privilege, and care for helpers who are exactly as vulnerable and human as those they are trying to care for.  I lead reading groups where we study the psychologies and theologies of liberation, and immerse ourselves in texts that strengthen our souls, clarify our calls to service, and help us to locate the seed of something sacred in everyone.

I work by donation so that my services aren’t only available to those with sufficient or abundant financial resources, but as accessible to those who are in hardship.  I encourage those who are in abundance to help me subsidize those who are struggling.

Let’s focus on dream work and dream studies, the projects that are generally considered the most “woo” and silly: 

I say, and I believe that tending to our dreams is a wholly political project.

In a culture that is too confident in its reasoning capacities I believe that it is necessary to make space for our non-rational, intuitive aspects and responses. Jung calls dreams “the voice of nature within us” and if we don’t value the one area of naturally unfolding phenomena in our psyches how will we ever learn to value the wilderness? Dream work requires encountering the structures of whiteness, colonization, supremacy, domination, and control as they move through the body/psyche. Sitting with the symbols that our dreams produce at night requires forging some comfort with uncertainty, with not knowing anything definitively. It is a process that requires humility as we encounter natural instincts and archetypes that are more ancient and more powerful than our waking egos. It requires confronting all the oppressions that lurk in the back of our brains, and in the psychological and scientific systems of Euro-American studies and systems committed to reductive “knowings” about the function of dreams, or to their outright dismissal as “nonsense.” Dream study requires that we look skeptically at a culture that views non-linear spontaneous symbolically told stories as “boring” or merely the detritus of the day. It demands that we respect indigenous communities around the world who have always seen dreams as part of the way that human beings are inherently and inescapably entangled with each other and with the environments and natural world that we are beholden to.  

To value our dreams appropriately, not too much, not too little, not too concretely, not too grandiosely – is to be reminded of all we know that we didn’t know that we knew, and to discover that all we think we know may be unknowable. It is to contact the parts of our own psyche that are not conforming, controlled, certain, or reifiable. It is to find ourselves connected to each other and differentiated from each other simultaneously as my dreams beget your dreams and your dreams become someone else’s.

I don’t know how effective my labors are, and I spend my greatest effort at confronting all the ways I have internalized the biases that I try to address in our wider culture. But I believe my daily efforts are at least as generative as the votes I cast a few times a year and far more effective than worshiping any political candidate as a personal hero, or yelling at people who see political action as a whole spectrum of labor that incorporates many more colors than merely blue or red.

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Today’s Business:

• I am accpeting applications for both the Friday mid-day and the Thursday evenining Vocation and Discernment Group for Helping Professions who are re-evaluating their relationship to their professional life and models

• The next round of this Dream Workshop will be starting at the end of April on Saturdays 10:00 Pacific, 11:00 Mountain, 12:00 Central and 1:00 Eastern

• There is still time to catch up on the reading and join our Reading Liberation Psychology group

• All my group and individual services as well as my writings are offered by donation. I do accept donations to support this newletter and my low- and no-fee services.

• Finally, I have freed up several additional hours on my schedule for individual consultations. Please visit the home page on my website for more information about the individual services that I offer.