Questions on My Political Life After Children
making "I" statements on instagram and beyond, literally and spiritually
I’m in such a state of confusion around how I want to show up politically and spiritually on instagram. This mirrors my confusion about how I want to show up in my life, but interacting with instagram reflects my confusion to me in a more acute way.
I feel the urge to repost a lot of things about the genocide in Palestine as a way of sharing my own horror. I do sometimes but mostly I don't lately. I want to speak from a personal lens in my writing more and more because it keeps me in my scope. By this I mean, on a language level, using “I” instead of “we” or “you.” Sometimes I feel that reposting things is a way of sort of indirectly saying “we” or “you” It’s not that I think saying “we” or “you” is bad, in plenty of contexts it is useful and necessary. It’s just that especially in dharma / spiritual circles, when we’re talking about spiritual things, I’ve noticed a habit of western dharma teachers talking generally about “we” as a way of, at best, trying to speak to people in a general sense, and at worst, avoiding revealing their own un-evolved parts, their specific messes. In most of the terrain I’m writing and speaking, I want to stay in my own perspective because it’s the most honest thing I have to offer and it keeps me grounded, which is especially important when I’m talking about spiritual stuff. Speaking from this place reveals the limits to what I can see! Which feels so important because if I don’t reveal the limits of what I can see, I won’t ever realize what I’m not seeing! It’s also essential for my own integrity and out of respect for you, to present myself to you as accurately as possible. At the same time I realize “self” and “accurate” are very difficult to place together.
Something that comes up for me is judgment - that feels so small and maybe even annoying to say I feel devastated by this genocide. It feels annoying because there’s this thought, who cares about my perspective on it, it’s so outside of my life in a way, there are so many people more qualified to speak on it. In another way, it’s not outside my life at all. Everything that is happening to other beings on earth, especially my species, is my business and even more so things being funded by the country I live in. I've been asking myself questions about what is in my scope, what is not. Which is an always evolving thing so I will likely be asking this forever.
A huge swath of my political life is a spiritual practice of confronting and grieving my impotence on the world stage. It's living with the spirit-deflating incoherence that is our modern way - seeing atrocities happening all over, seeing how they are connected to and a result of things the USA is supposedly doing in my name, and having very little control of changing that. The grieving of this is so important so that I really face the ways I don’t have power.
I think facing my powerlessness opens up space for another part of my spiritual/political life, which is finding the places I can and do have power and contribute. In this season of my life, so many days I'm completely maxed by my own caregiving responsibilities at home. As humbling or embarrassing as that is, it has never proven productive for me to deny the personal reality of my life (I have tried plenty over the years) even if the scale of my own challenge feels brutally out of balance with so many others in the world - billions of humans on earth without drinking water, for example. I am sure you can list thousands of other scale-breaking, mind-breaking facts about the differences in how we are living on this planet.
The social media experience is very convincing / compelling, it can make it feel like I'm doing more than I am when I talk about something. And yet talking about it is not doing nothing, many things shift when a lot of people talk relentlessly about something. So I want to participate in that way, I want to say I am with people horrified by this violence. I’m not sure if others really need to hear this from me specifically. Or like, what number of people saying it, or way people are consuming that number of people saying it, contributes to total numbing out? I don't know. I know right now I feel a need to share this feeling of outrage and grief specifically, for some reason. To feel communion at the rage of it all, especially at the particulars of the US political machine of profit at the expense of Every. Single. Sacred. Life. On. Earth.
These are some of my cycles of thought. Maybe you have some of the same…. I don’t really have a sense I’ll land anywhere in particular on all of this. But this month's parenting circle's theme will be around how we show up politically in our own particular season as parents. (I don’t mean politically as in government and elections although that can certainly be included, I mean it a broader sense, how one lives one’s politics.) Because it's been a question I've been holding for these years of my kids' early lives and I want to ask it with you. What's the balance we need to strike between caring for our immediate people and our larger and larger circles, to feel like we can breathe? How does this change over time, in different seasons? What do we owe ourselves, our children, other beings on this planet? We'll ask ourselves about this in our parenting circle. We'll see if we can help each other mourn our impotence and find our potencies, our whole-hearted participations wherever they might be best lived right now. Will you have this conversation with me? I do hope so!
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Peace be with you.
-sarah