Hi y’all,
I woke early this morning and was greeted by sunrise and moonset simultaneously. The moon captivated my attention, glowing soft white against a fuchsia-swirled sky. She whispered fading dream fragments back to me on her slow descent.
I greet you today with a moment to check in: how was your sleep? Do you remember any dreams? Perhaps you can pause now and simply take a moment to feel breath pulsing your lungs rhythmically.
Last week I enthusiastically celebrated a release from covid, but the truth is this virus is still working on me in subtle ways. Occasional chest tightness and lingering brain fog, amongst other barely traceable yet distinct symptoms remain. I am more conscious of my breath – a good thing. I am grateful for my body's continual gestures of recovery and return to balance. I am in trust.
I want to surface two quick things from last week in case you missed them:
For those of us in the states, it's likely that at least some of your produce is sourced in California. No matter where you live, labor wins locally facilitate them globally. Support California farmworkers delivering sustenance to your supper by signing this petition on the Labor Relations Voting Choice Act (AB 2183).
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Alright, let's get into it. This week I'm sharing one of two posts offering perspectives that smoothed the high-velocity waves of this moment into a calm current, carrying me forward with both revived energy and re-settled spirit. I hope they meet you supportively.
With care,
Rachel
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"Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future. A small group of people have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, and they have no vision, no strategy, no plan... What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight."
“There will be moments when we feel unsafe physically and emotionally … and I cannot speak in some universal sense and say ‘stay there and see what happens. But there is, even in the most oppressive dark places … a glimmer of hope and glimmer of light. The work then is to create a community for us to hold and cultivate resilience.”
- Bayo Akómoláfé
This dominant reality has a way of sharpening irritating edges around my cognition, pricking and poking me to stay within fixed frames. This week, I read the gorgeous interview linked above, in Davis's culminating months of incarnation, and I savored a talk between one of my life's most profound mentors, john a. powell, and one of my favorite minds, Bayo Akómoláfé. When I tap in to the consciousness moving through people like john, Bayo, Mike, and countless other wellsprings – perspectives that ring with primordial truths and awakened perception – I remember to breathe. I remember I am electric, ever-changing, and receptive - not fixed, stagnant, and rigid. Synapses fire with fresh tinder. Tight tunnels expand into limitless landscapes. I return to boundlessness where I can see in all directions instead of crowding myself into the constraints projected by the mainstream, by the machine. I am finding it increasingly important to be disciplined about whose minds and hearts in which I find refuge. Digestion is sacred, healthy inputs are crucial.
Bayo opened the talk with john with a humbling provocation:
“How might it feel to have a conversation, to just talk, in ways that are not about finding some universal notion, but about allowing it to decay? We are not searching for consensus or a manifesto.”
The two dialogued about the most prescient matters of this moment, but offered no reductionist narratives, no simple solutions, no pacifying promises. The door was swung wide open to the edges of unknowing, to the peripheries of unraveling. This is the art of true conversation (which our world seems increasingly devoid of) – continuous and reciprocal improvisation with no culmination.
What would it mean to meet each other with this level of willingness to ask questions with no expectation of totalizing, concretizing answers? What new thresholds could we reach together if we weren't trying to constantly convince or prove with perfect conclusions and analytical absolutes? In times as dire as these, we may feel desperate for the easy fix or the escape hatch. But this is precisely what got humanity into this mess.
I return to Davis's quote: "Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future. A small group of people have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, and they have no vision, no strategy, no plan."
I agree and I also believe in its contradiction. When I think of the Billionaire boys, my mind conjures a group of immature, uninitiated teenagers, tripping on ego-highs and testosterone, spitballing their fantasies for world domination in a basement, but tragically they're in adult bodies with too much ammunition in their grip. I also see what Mike says: their consciousness is uninspiring, they have nothing to offer. If their destruction wasn’t so cruel it would be absolutely boring. We've seen the plans they peddled for revolutionary technologies to "save the world". We've seen how empty they are. As imaginative and futuristic as they claim to be, these men have built empires upon everything remaining exactly as it is so they can continue their linear ascent to the supposed "top" – churning up finite resources into cash as feverishly as possible.
In an old interview with Bezos, he specifically talked about building his business on what never changes:
“What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” That is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.
In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher.”
What fascinates me about Bezos's "vision" is how fragile it is. It hinges on permanent possession over us through two mechanisms: cheap and fast. The irony of striving to change the world, yet shackling it to the self-serving status quo burns in my gut. Arundhati Roy is cold water:
"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them."
In my years at Google, I saw how millions of moths were lured to the intoxicating flame of "global impact". I was amongst them - flocking to the mecca empty-bellied, ready to devour the world's most complicated problems, eager to apply the limitless resources of Google's domain to resolve them. From abolishing traffic accidents, to measuring insulin effortlessly, to scaling affordable internet access, every great question facing humanity was (is) typed into the metaphorical search bar and promised to be answered there. But what Google did was transmute every single one of these questions into an advertisement.
We bring our curious minds to that search bar and become the commodity itself – the consumed and the consumer.
Now these Billionaire boys with their big visions for changing/saving the world are retreating to their bunkers – Bezos to his rocketship, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, Zuckerberg to his metaverse. And even as they rush to insulate or escape from humanity, from the reality they shaped, they're still handing us an all-powerful verdict, as Davis says, a mandate, a manifesto, about our doomed fate. And even as they flee, they insist upon holding the key to our freedom.
What does a politic of refusal of this paradigm look like?
It looks like a million different things.
It looks like shattering every rigid restraint on our imaginations and reclaiming our sovereignty and our hearts.
This sparks one of my favorite quotes by Pema Chödrön who guides:
"It isn't that we say 'but if I changed the world, it would be better for others.' It's less complicated than that. We don't set out to save the world. We set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people's hearts."
There is nothing corruptible in the reality she reminds us of, as she returns us to the undefended heart that awakens to undivided wholeness. It is not: "I know how to save us. I know how to solve this." It is: "how is your heart and are my actions serving your wholeness?" Even the "best" of us, the "good" ones, are still talking about "all we can save” about “rescue” – and while this is noble, is it exactly true that the ________ (enter species here) needs saving, or is it us humans that need that? Not to center ourselves over and over again, but to take responsibility for the unhealed hurts that cause so much external harm, so excruciatingly separate from our own hearts? Imagine if Bezos lived this way. Imagine if Bezos stopped his external pursuits, got quiet, and tuned into his own heart with courage.
I want to caution any creep toward “us vs them” thinking. It's important to always remember that Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and other members of the ruling class, aren't foreign “others”, they are part of this wholeness. Yes, they perpetuate hierarchy through their ways of being, they avatars of a persecutory paradigm, but they are arguably the ones most consumed, most programmed, most imprisoned by it. Their lives are not their own, and likely they don't live a single day without surveillance. Far different than a prison cell, but (golden) handcuffs nonetheless.
They are still human, their hearts beat just the same. And they are not exempt from the liberation that bounds us all together. I refuse to relinquish them from their responsibility. I refuse to pedestalize them on the idea that they can never change. For that’s exactly what the wounded ego wants.
Turning back to Davis, Bayo, and Pema – each of them remind us that it is love for each other that will see us through, it is community that will hold us resiliently.
I am not arriving to neat conclusions today and I don't want to be "right". Though, there are some more notes I've collected to share on this theme. I'll pause here and continue next week.
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