The life changing magic of giving up mind control for lent
Hello beloved people,
I offer you a missive in 3 parts.
- Musings on Genesis and duality.
- Giving up mind control has given me life.
- A paragraph on the interiorities of Molly Weasley.
If you wish to receive them in one part, I have made a musical video recording of this ramble that you can access here: https://youtu.be/kArGuZhsQ3g
Part the first: Musings on Genesis and duality
Had a very interesting conversation with Friendell (friend Wendell) the other day in which we went for a walk around my mind and did a gallery walk of things that kept me from doing things I wanted to do. The sap boiled down to this: I am utterly preoccupied with being good. Which, paradoxically, keeps me from doing good.
And this plays all kinds of interesting theological games—if God is everything and God is everywhere and God is also Nothing #aphophatictheology, and God is all knowing and all beneficient and I’m made in God’s image then—well. I’m already there? God (missed an o there, but leaving the typo because it’s interesting)—Good is inevitable.
And so this idea of original sin—this eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, this schism and separation—is kind of the concept of morality itself? Gotta go back and read my bible, but prior to engaging with that tree, things were chill–then desire and curiosity brought about this separation.
And some people bemoan this separation as if it’s some cruel horrible thing, but if we were all just chilling in some unified soup, there would be no stories. So the cost of knowing God is this perpetual cycle of remembering and forgetting, destroying and creating, participating in binaries and soaking up puddles of paradox.
Eventually, it seems, the puddles start turning into oceans and then all of a sudden you’re swimming in the water of life rather than bemoaning having stuck your sock in a water spot on your kitchen floor. And some days you’re in the ocean and you haven’t worn a life jacket, or the sea is stormy, or you forget that you can float, or you feel like you are just keeping your head above water when the cosmic joke is that you are the water, and the moment you loosen up and succumb, you realize that you can never die.
I’m sure someone has had this thought before me, but in my internal jungle gym it’s breaking news, and it is breaking all kinds of new things.
Lately, when I habitually go to label something good/bad (when I’ve had enough sleep and food and general self-compassion to hop the train tracks and break trail on some different mental grooves), I’ve been playing a little different game.
I have this mental dialogue that’s come into being in the last couple years to vibe-check my life choices where I just kind of ask into the void of my heartspace “This?” and I tend to get back a yes/no answer. And as of late, a third option has appeared—“Soften.” Which seems to complete the holy trinity of response, a word which etymologically means “to answer to, to promise in return.”
And thinking of that from a covenant perspective, things get very interesting. Thinking about god as everything, and responding to things in the present moment as covenant, is fascinating. Covenant is a word closely related to convenient, which does some interesting play with things I was listening to Dax Shepard and Tim Ferris talk about on a podcast—both of them have strong mindfulness practices, and notice that their equinimity doesn’t necessarily break in stereotypical crisis–it breaks when things are inconvenient, when things “do not come with,” or when their perception of their moment to moment covenant with present reality{/narrative psychology/god/the universe/your call} breaks.
(Sidebar–I’m lovin’ that one of the names for God is The Word, because I love words, and that makes playing etymology games feel extra fun).
But back to covenant—I also had this realization last night about premarital sex. Right? Again, another thing that traditional church communities villify that creates all kinds of fascinating stigma and pain. We can play word games, though, with premarital. Marriage is a covenant, right? And most people talk about marriage as, ideally, a process of offering perfect love to imperfect people. “Love is patient, love is kind, and all that.”
Concept: Have you married yourself?
Also, re: self marriage and the concepts of good and evil and the life-giving prospect of giving up mind-control, this scene is gold: https://youtu.be/C_pCHO0ZQ7M
Was recently talking with friend-Ollie about their birthday project, which was sending out tiny little cards to their loved ones, asking each of them to send back a note saying one thing they loved about themselves. People sent things back with varying levels of enthusiasm, and some talked about how self-love feels conceited. Conceited used to mean intelligence/wit, and conceit was a verb that meant to conceive, imagine, think. Not to get all Descartes on us–but to imagine ourselves as good, to think ourselves as good, to conceive (with all the valences that holds) ourselves as good, is to be good.
Or at least that’s the flavor of the soup of the day my mind seems to be serving up.
2. Giving up mind control for lent.
While time is stretchy, and stretchier than ever in pandemical times, I know enough about seasons to know that it is, within the Roman Catholic Chuch, currently lent—a time of giving up things to get closer to and reconcile with god before we celebrate killing off The Lord in human form and having him bounce back nearly unscathed three days later. (Although honestly I think he was just playin DnD with some angels in the cave for a couple days–I think he was probably done playing dead within a few restful hours of laying in the tomb. Do I have textual evidence for this? Not right now. It’s just a hunch).
I don’t normally participate in lent. The music gets durgy and weird. We put all the letters of hallelujah in a shoebox in catholic school, and didn’t sing any of the fun hallelujah songs with the hand dancing until Easter came. And like–the human experience of loss aversion is strong.
It’s easy to forget the value of space. Nothingness has substance. And loss and forgoing things creates lovely vacuums for the powers that be to play with and refill.
Those who have payed any attention to the self-help literature scene will have noticed my nod to Marie Kondo in my subject line, and I think her work gets here by accident—she replaced right/wrong home organizing and life-prioritizing tips with a sense of aesthetics connected to embodied joy (she didn’t do too much explaining about how to feel/notice that embodied joy, but for those who can get that far, the book does some real cool shit tm).
And um–my mind control habit–it no longer sparks joy.
You see–there’s a difference between liking what something gets you, and liking the thing itself.
Me? I like attention. I like warmth. I like people saying nice things about things I make. I like good food. I like having a home filled with stuff I’ve picked out. I like quiet, and trees, and interesting stuff on the internet. I like to laugh.
And so I’ve learned to play some games to help those things happen.
Pay attention to your motivations for doing and speaking over the course of even 20 minutes.
Ask yourself some fun questions (borrowed from Robin Rice via Wendell): “What are you doing” then answer. Then “What are you really doing. And you may find that “trying to make {Insert person here} feel/think {insert thing here} about {insert additional thing here}.
Good lord.
Do you have that kind of power? Because I for one do not. Or if I do, it is a costly and partial power. Through studying and having a sense of people’s patterns, I can try to predict and problem solve for crises that haven’t happened yet, but that pulls me out of a sense of response–I am no longer in covenant with reality, no longer present, no longer hearing or listening.
Here’s a thing to experiment with: Do you offer people things they do not ask for? Like–do you, like me, hear someone talk about a problem, and instead of thinking “huh they must have wanted to talk about their problem,” thought “huh they must really want me to go off on a tangent about the 12 Cool Ways I think they could solve their problem, or the 14 Hot Tricks for Experienceing Change Based on my Own Lived Experience.”
Because oh BOY do I do that. It takes so much time and energy to maintain all those lists and most of the time people aren’t all that interested.
I’ve started doing a very radical (etym: rooted) thing, which is to respond to literally what people are saying, which can often be silence if they didn’t ask me a question. Often a pause in conversation has been becoming a “Soften.” Because unless there’s some inspired response that feels easy, that I can subject to the yes/no test, softening is the only answer available unless I want to force out a “huh!” or a “nice” or a “{insert random story/noticement about a thing to fill a perceived void in conversational space}”
This is not to say that these speech and interaction patterns are bad. They can be great for maintaining flow of conversation and establishing shared reality. Like, I have a dawning appreciation for discussion of the weather. In a world that is so strange and confusing, a mutual agreement that it is, indeed, chilly out today, can feel like a life raft in a storm of sensation, and a nice bouquet of flowers from a passing stranger.
I’m just saying that there’s another option. Another way to orient your conversational compass. You can take Brené Brown’s axiom that “everyone is always doing the best they can do,” and marvel at their efforts if you can, give them grace if you can, or walk away. And if they’re asking you to not walk away–you can still do it anyway, with the knowledge that in the grand scheme, that trueness to desire is an option.
It’s a radical freedom.
And if I had tried it, and found that the consequences were causing a net-unfun-time, I wouldn’t be sliding you this particular stack of cue cards, but instead, I have more and more relationships that are based on request and willing reciprocity rather than demand and expectation.
And if request/demand aren’t separate in your head, I tease them apart by thinking of requests as things people can refuse and you maintain equinimity, and demands as things where you expect a yes, or there will be unfortunate consequences for the no sayer—maybe you withdraw, maybe you say something petty back, etc.
It’s not a perfect game—but that’s not the point. It’s an option, and one that feels good and interesting right now.
Just like giving up chocolate for lent, it’s not about never eating chocolate again, it’s about experiencing life without it, and making a concious choice, after Jesus has woken back up, about whether, when, and how to start eating it again.
3. A paragraph about the interiorities of Molly Weasley.
I do not want to write this paragraph. Or at least, parts of me don’t. Others do.
Was talking about Parenthood and leadership with Friendell, and amidst an atypically long silence in which I only chuckled nervously a couple of times (new record, go me), I started playing a very fascinating game that I’d played the night before with friend Nicholas. Which is the “Your face is my face” game.
Now. This is some strange sauce, at first, but with the process of actually starting to like myself quite a bit–the imaginative process of conceit–I find that I start to like other people more. I can meet people’s eyes when I pass them on the street. I talk more with strangers. People have become more beautiful and sweeter. It’s especially easy to drop into this game with people I already love. It’s hardest to drop into this game with people who don’t want to be seen–and the more parts of myself I’m willing to look at, the more people seem to be willing to be seen by me, and the more I am willing to look at them.
Eye contact has been excruciating. If eyes are the windows to the soul, my flinch, my nervous laughter, has been one of “Don’t touch that. I certainly don’t want to. I certainly haven’t. I’m convinced it would kill me if I did. Step back from the cliff. It is dangerous here.”
I went to a talk Zhenevere Sophia Dao gave last weekend about the idea of queering daoism, and inherited notions of gender. She spoke of yin, the archetypically feminine principle, as capacious, large, bloody, muddy, cthonic, motherly and dangerous. Of the yin field, she said that when we are there, when we are working from that space, it is a perpetual question of “am I going to make love to you, or eat you alive?”
She talked on about the idea of motherhood as utter safety, proceeded by the utter danger and bereftness that comes from reckoning with what it is to be born, what it is to grow up, what it is to reckon with the abandonment of mothers reclaiming their own desires. This promise of consistency and care, followed by its rending. A now that bleeds into expected eternity and the inevitable massacre of expectations. She spoke another time of messiness in relationship, and how there is no sense in avoiding the mess. From the first of any love, the heartbreak is baked in.
What does this have to do with Molly Weasley, you ask?
What does Molly Weasley want?
I can’t tell you. Grass and sun and ballads and a clean kitchen and safe children and she is wedded to a man of innocent and accidental danger, of risk, of the magicking of ordinary things. She has had a brood of children with this man, in a cobbled together house. I can’t tell you which house she was in–I’d figure Griffendor. I know she killed Belatrix Lestrange–what does it say that she killed a woman named “Female Warrior, Foreigner/Outsider https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=lestrange” neé Black–which has all sorts of associations with void and evil. Lestrange was a french nickname for someone who is a newcomer to an area. What does it mean to kill the woman warrior newcomer? Is to kill a warrior to become one?
And that word–“bitch”–that Molly foists upon Belatrix. We can read it as insult, or we can read it as recognition. https://youtu.be/6_c4sxxtbp0
This scene from the movies can be read like a book–there is doubt here, fear followed by determination and a sense of collectivity. In her talk, Zhenevere spoke of yang principles that “the soft hand is the only hand that can become martial” and that yang energy is “almost desparate, completely vulnerable, and yet keeps going” with a willingness to risk a self that comes through not knowing who the self is anymore. Yang, then, is not about certainty, hardness, or edge. True yang bewilderment, abjectness, surrender, and the fierceness and confidence to encounter true risk.
“Not my daughter, you bitch.”
And what would it mean to look at Bellatrix’s response with a careful eye—laughter amidst certainty, and shock upon being paralyzed and hung in mid-air. Shock to be caught. Shock to be disintegrated.
Is it a story about the value of fear, which tells us all we do not know, offers us a chance to listen in to our humility, our right-sized-ness, as a former acting professor of mine once described it—and to find that we are infinite?
“Longing has to come from that power, or it is not trustworthy.” “I don’t have this at all, but I’m doing it anyway.” “Essence is that which transforms itself through time.” “What if arousal had as much to do with prayer as confidence.” ^ These are all words that stepped out of that talk with Zhenevere. If you want to hang out with her, she’s teaching more things, and you can find her work here: https://www.mogadaoinstitute.com/
I can’t tell you where exactly I’m going with all this.
I don’t have this at all, and I’m offering it anyway.
I wish you beautiful days, and interesting thoughts.
Ramblingly yours,
Alex