Forgiveness is an initiation
On Cancel Culture, real accountability, and presence
Hi y’all,
I’m greeting you from the floor of my living room as I finish this post, rapt by a hawk in my backyard splaying open a small bird beneath its talons. Raindrops are being wrenched from swollen clouds by harsh winds in another unexpected wave of winter. At first I only saw the hawk – mesmerizing in its formidable posture, a rare sight to behold perched there atop the coyote fence – but then I saw it teetering on something beneath it. I had to get a closer look, so I stepped outside, coatless and shoeless, watching as feathers flew from its pecking and tearing toward organs. The hawk eyed me anxiously, understandably eager to get on it with its breakfast unbothered, and it was freezing anyway, exposed as I was… but I can’t stop flicking my gaze to watch it through the window with disturbed reverence. What a dramatic sight to wake up to.
Welcome to several new subscribers and hello to all of my existing subscribers wandering into this internet garden for a little while. Thank you endlessly for being here, amidst and despite all the tethers on your attention these days.
I’m starting with a brief intro / refresher about what this Substack offers, then a little insight into my current reality for further context. I’ll conclude with a short piece of writing on this post’s theme: forgiveness.
This Substack might feel a little confusing, maybe non-committal, but the intention is to be exploratory and emergent. It’s called hi•ne•ni (< read more about that here) but its URL remains Widening Circles Collaborative (mostly due to fear of losing everything to a technical glitch during URL trading). So, now it’s both. But it’s not about one theme at all. Instead, it meanders through reflections and research, poetry and policy, spirit and society and ideally it stretches beyond categorization entirely at times, asking myself to loosen rigid, artificial severances while still appreciating contrast. My last post represented more of the latter of each of these pairs (research, policy, society), just as an example.
In other words, I’m not mono-focused. I am more interested in the intersectionality and interchange between realms, especially when they seem entirely divergent, like quantum physics and love, or life’s smallest decisions, Russian literature, and the rise of extremism.
In another life, I would have picked a theme and stuck to it. I was entranced by building an identity, a name for myself, a brand, even. Someone coherent. Definable. Someone that made sense. In fact, I even found myself in exclusive meetings far beyond my skill level and other participants would turn to me and say: “But why are you here? Who are you?” I needed an easy, digestible presentation. I moved through a range of them trying to find the right fit… (this isn’t a resume, it’s really a vulnerable admission of everything I was trying so hard to be)…
once the feverish activist and social justice warrior with latent dreams of being a journalist, obsessed with rapid-fire documentation of unfolding events and long-form sense-making through the onslaught of political turmoil
once the devoted academic researcher buried in literature to publish “new” knowledge through data-driven scholarship at leading institutions to shift the script from neoliberalism to a paradigm of legitimate, universal societal transformation (not just empty posturing) [see: Abundance]
once the community organizer studying with the best of the best in the “Chicago School” which also trained Barack Obama, pounding the pavement for advocacy campaigns, flying to DC to learn lobbying from the organization that seeded more successful efforts like Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement
once the machine working 80+ hour weeks at Google and various nonprofits to throw myself into the burn-and-churn of naïve, idealistic self-sacrifice for systems change
And then I started farming in my free time and everything changed.
My relationship to the world and all of reality slowed down. Blurred. Rearranged. I didn’t expect to drop all of these layers of myself into the soil as I returned to something so easily enlivened in my bones. Neat distinctions melted into complex co-informing layers. “Success” became something new entirely. The Earth reminded me of the messy, fecund aliveness of vulnerability as the base condition of existence. The manufactured world, the rational world, the mentally/cerebrally-dominant world, the world of separation became profoundly less intoxicating, less convincing, less tolerable. And in that, the very foundation of my world began to crumble. Of course it did. It was built on distortion, conditioning, fear, and scarcity to survive a world antithetical to what’s real.
On my last post, a reader left this comment: “This really draws back the curtain to show the inner workings as they are and is something that really should be talked about more until the curtain is threadbare.” I yearned for this exact process in society, in politic, in culture, I fought with every ounce of energy I could muster, and I wrecked myself. I fought and fought and fought until I was literally brought to my knees, cradling a hearty parsley plant start, nestling its bright, fresh promise into the earth, and simultaneously loosening my own weary, nutrient-deprived, frazzled, frayed roots alongside it. I let more sink into the Earth than I ever could have imagined. I didn’t even know what was breaking down within me… I’m still learning what more I can release. Only recently do I finally feel like I’ve found my essence through all the clutter… and now I’m busy reinforcing those truths with constant, subtle remembrances.
It was the Earth that was my greatest teacher in this Great Letting Go, the immense incineration that this reader spoke to: burning layer upon layer to illuminate and dissolve delusions, to wake up to how I had internalized these broader mechanisms of violence that had been metabolized into my lineage, my family, and into myself. My journey through this awakening and transformation has catalyzed into a new/old formation, one that comes easily: writer and teacher.
These are nascent and for any artist or teacher out there, we know it can feel more challenging than ever to serve our craft and sustain our lives in rampant capitalistic conditions. May we soon bridge into a new paradigm in which the beauty of what we love can be what we do.
Ok, now onto to today’s post with big love,
Rachel
Forgiveness is an initiation
Several months ago, I encountered a Google spreadsheet ripping around the internet. It was fully open-sourced so anyone could anonymously contribute to it. The arrangement was simple. It had two columns: “Author”, “Evidence”.
A list of names flooded into column A as scattered comments dragged column B wide across my screen in real time. I scanned, attempting to absorb what was happening here. Regardless of whether I agreed with what was claimed, plenty of the “Evidence” cells contained clearly-argued comments linked with source notes. But the vast majority of Column B looked more like this:
“I don’t even know if he’s a Zionist but I hate him.”
“No evidence she’s a Zionist but she’s Jewish so probably.”
“Not Jewish or a Zionist but definitely a Karen so fuck her books.”
“He’s just cringe. And he’s not even a good writer.”
“Can’t confirm he’s a Zionist but he hasn’t posted anything about Gaza. He’s been totally silent for months. Unforgivable.”
“I think he was on Bill Maher???”
The spreadsheet exploded to the thousands. A burn list. A banned book list.
A “DON’T READ THESE ZIONIST AUTHORS” list.
A list of convergence, where far right and far left form a circle, not a spectrum, engaging in equally destructive behavior from purportedly opposite angles, yet mutually convinced of their own righteousness. The tiger eats its own tail. It chilled me to the bone, not actually because of the blatant rejection of authors with purportedly Zionist affiliations (which it did a terrible job of identifying), but because of the brazen reductiveness and hypocrisy of its very premise. It felt like another instance in which the left is simply erasing hundreds (if not thousands) of years of education about abolition and collective liberation in a second. It’s hard to stomach that when this callous refusal to put in the work of our forebearers toward legitimate solidarity and appropriate nuance emerges specifically around Jewish people.
How are we still so blinded by eye for an eye retaliation? In pursuit of the justice those spreadsheet warriors claimed to unquestionably defend, how is it remotely just to cancel an author based on conjecture, based on loose observations reformulated into incriminating accusations, based on… “cringe”? On not posting? On being Jewish?
And yet, cancel culture, in all of its flawed ferocity, makes sense to me. It is the flammable attempt at a course correction centuries in the making. It’s a crack in the veneer of entrenched abuse, predation, terror, and oppression. It’s a molten, raw, densely potentized RAGE that has been thrashing and burning in the deep, driven by compounding unacknowledged, disregarded cruelties accumulating generation upon generation. I may be wrong, (and I’d love to hear what you think), but I believe Cancel Culture’s mother was the Me Too movement.
“Enough”, victims of sexual abuse screamed in unison. Enough bearing these horrors in silence. Enough facing disabling tactics of suppression through gaslighting and retaliation. There are too many of us here now. And the Me Too movement was a shockwave that continues to ripple through culture and society with truly unquantifiable implications.
Me Too felt good in its redemptive power. It felt alive. And then Cancel Culture took the playbook of Me Too and threw kerosene on it. Not just men. Now ANYONE could be canceled with nowhere to hide after seemingly impenetrable impunity. And this was good too. It continued the work of Me Too to disrupt normative suppression of marginalized voices from not only naming harm but finding even a shred of accountability.
But we can’t lose sight of the fact that Cancel Culture and the Me Too Movement were bred in conditions of normalizing extreme behaviors within survival paradigms.
When we feel unheard for so long, when we carry the hurt of our ancestors in our cells murdered for far more innocuous actions of simple self-expression, when we are surrounded by people programmed to never acknowledge their inflicted harm, let alone apologize for it, indeed celebrated for their atrocities, as we explored last post… the RAGE reaches total uncontainability. And we are safer now than we ever have been to say it out loud.
As difficult as it may be to acknowledge: cancel culture and book banning are entirely interrelated, two sides of the same coin. They are symptoms of such acute stress and collective nervous-system hijacking that a five-alarm fire demands only intensely punitive actions. SOMETHING IS WRONG! Get it under control! NOW! And things are deeply wrong. And we need a spectrum of responses. But we need to be discerning about what those are, lest we toggle back and forth between whose “righteous” violence can be justified.
Learning is slow.
Conversations are slow.
Questions are slow.
Consciousness shifts are slow.
Healing is slow.
Accountability, forgiveness, surrender, peace, apology… when done in earnest, are all slow.
Principle, wisdom, virtue… slow.
Vengeance, retribution, punishment, extortion, scapegoating, ghosting, and canceling are lightning swift, brutal, overgeneralized, clumsy, and ultimately, they are cheap compromises in a reality built on horrific degrees of brutality.
In conditions of desperation, expediency makes sense. We want to save ourselves from considerable pain, prevent any further injury, feel better by any means necessary even if it’s not our pain but whatever we’re watching on instagram. Even if that short-sighted, hypocritical act violence in the name of “justice” is just a quick-burning dopamine boost that will leave us worse: further from each other, further from connection, further from redemption, further from humanity — ours and theirs and everyone’s.
Urgency desensitizes us by pushing us beyond our capacity. It’s necessary in emergencies to abandon everything but the demand before us, but it’s actually not helpful in the deep process, analysis, and integration work that we are afforded when we’re not literally on the line. When we can truthfully acknowledge our positions and benefit from slowness. This work requires us to stay, to breathe, to act mindfully toward right action with integrity.
We may fear that losing pace when the clock is ticking, when it’s only getting rapidly worse, when they - those forces of evil - aren’t slowing down, but we have to understand that matching energy is only a mirror, reinforcing endless repetition. To mirror often asks the more conscious person to succumb to aspects of the unconscious position. Modeling energy is a prism. It disperses and enhances and opens the truth of multidimensionality that makes us exponentially more powerful.
Time is not the only power source.
Real power is timeless, ancient, and irrelevant to the fickle ideations of the ego.
Me Too and Cancel Culture were/are powerful demonstrations of collective consciousness reaching a fever pitch of irrevocable progress: a threshold to signify that the paradigm is shifting. But it was explosive, reactionary, and fraught with extremism. We can admit there is a place for that, a necessary expulsion of calcified toxicity needs that. But what’s even more interesting to me? The way it seems Cancel Culture is already feeling weary and ill-fitting, because we’re witnessing and integrating the data from these experiences so quickly we realize… we’re not going backward to more suppression, denial, delusion, distortion to reinforce more violence, we’re getting tired of violence, of constant duress, of the depraved conditions millions of people are living through, of sociopaths at the top, but transformation is asking us something different.
Moving through pain unconsciously = repetition.
Moving through pain consciously = transformation.
I once held extremely rigid positions on forgiveness. I believed in a kind of accountability that would be thorough and complete and perfect. In some specific instances, I felt so misunderstood, so burned for too many years, that I imagined the only way I could muster an apology was if those who had harmed me could crawl inside my skin, embody my heart, and feel my experience so they could take full account for it in ways all my words failed to get through to them.
And then… I healed my nervous system. And I learned the breakthrough that let me forgive: I learned to forgive my past self for all the ways I was unconscious, for all the ways I abandoned myself, for all the ways I didn’t know how to protect myself. Sometimes I didn’t even know what I was forgiving myself for distinctly, I would simply say: “I forgive myself” with each step I took down a trail through a forest. And through this we can recognize: whomever is holding our grudge can also be met in their own evolution. “I forgive them for everything they did when they were unconscious.”
We need time. We need presence. We need to drop into the deeper story of inseparability that is the antithesis of the paradigm we inhabit now if we’re going to live a different story.
Presence to be with forgiveness, accountability, justice, redemption… because we know with absolute certainty that burn it to the ground thinking (*ahem*, burned books, no matter whose books) is the poison that traps us in the same problem. Presence is the power to protect life. Presence is the power to act responsibly. Presence is the power to channel action that facilitates more connection, more love.
I have no idea what happened to that spreadsheet… I have no idea what kind of impact it could have had… but in these high velocity times, my prayer is that it found its way into the compost pile to birth something more legitimately supportive of accountability.
. . .
Thank you again for devoting your attention here. We walk together. Your feedback in the comments — constructive critique, resonance, provocation, anything — welcome.
As always, thank you for bringing your heart here. If you liked reading this, please click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Or help widen the circle, by sharing hi•ne•ni with someone in your life.