As one of many US citizens living within (and outside of) the USA wishing to stay out of the toxic political fray, thinking abstaining, and refusing to participate in the insanity of our collective nightmare where DOMINANCE is both the goal and the reward – whatever the cost…you might just be thinking it is not worth engaging – I beg of you to VOTE.
Your moral compass might be right but here is the rub. The body is political. The past, present and future is reenacting right now deep bone knowing that all humans (and more than humans) must contend with on the ground. I believe, although I’m not religious, the exodus got it right. “The sins of the ancestors will be visited upon the heads of children.” It is happening right now and I’m guessing this is might only be the beginning. There is no going back.
Bone knowing is a deep wisdom and a deep wound. Being born “white” lower class in the United States is a confusing lineage of just scaping by and privilege. Our ancestors severing roots leaves behind a loss and our forgetting keeps us in a deep sleep for which our myths and fairytales foretell. Our sleep is dense and deep. We are under an intoxicating spell.
In this moment dissociative tears are simply the cycle of reenactment. Whatever I do or not does matters. We will participate whether that be as bystander, perpetrator, or rescuer. Whether we think we are choosing consciously to take the higher ground and not to be involved, we are involved…messily entangled.
Any inkling of freedom from being one of “them” is lost upon our breathing tissue just as microplastics flood all our cells no matter what we eat – there is no escape. Whether or not we are frozen watching in horror, turning our backs, lifting our eyes in pray for a higher power to manifest…all physical gestures are shaping this moment.
If you like me live in relative freedom even if bound like the wolf in a trap not of our choosing – you, me and all living creatures cannot stand this one out. “Wrong question says the wolf” to the girl who asks WHY? Refusing to listen to the over-culture she goes out into the forest. She sees for herself the entrapment and takes action to free the wolf. Tending to his injured paw even when she’s been told she will be eaten.
My point here is not why you should vote but understanding that choosing not to vote in this election will not set you free. It does not wipe your hands clean. Or keep them clean.
The craziness rings in my bones. Don’t get me wrong I am not necessarily “political” but my Psoas sure is! It stands up to a deep knowing that no matter who is at the top of the heap I will participate. The choice, as American film director and social/political commentary Michael Moore calls this vote a Sophie’s Choice. I did, by the way, walk out of the theater the night the movie played in Boston, I paid my ticket, but I cried no thanksfuriously, refusing to participant in a re-living of the agony of re-enactment.
We do not escape: this time, freezing, running or hiding. Life is requiring us white folk to make a move towards or away from Democracy. I like to call democracy a VERB – it is agency engaging our active Awareness. I am witnessing the top-down conditioning that has been internalized. A sensory awareness response means no more fawning to feel safe no more hiding to not get involved…no more looking away as a form of flaying and fragility, no more looking up as if I am better than this. Tending our Bones, we tend our ancestors wounds still alive in our flesh.
Nigerian Philosopher and self-proclaimed recovering psychologist, Bayo Akomolafe holds a capacity for life so inspiring it frees my lungs to exhale fully and my heart to sing. When he humorously tells stories of watching those who care deeply about the earth sorting their garbage into specific colorful bins, he can’t help but wonder if we know that it all ends up in a mountain high heap in his country? He says he saw it with his own eyes as a kid next to where he went to elementary school. He wonders if we know that while holding our precious cell phones in our hands young Nigerian boys sacrifice their lives forced to work in dangerous mines collecting the precious metals that make our Western world comforts and conveniences.
So here we are messily entangled in a world not necessarily of our making but nevertheless of our ancestors and it is calling on our capacity to show up and tend to the wounds. Mythologist Martin Shaw tells us we are entangled in the grip of a monster serpent that encircles the earth four-times round. Today’s story was told 5000 over years ago.
When was the first time you heard of Genocide? I remember my exact moment. It was the movie Ann Frank playing on our black and white TV. I stood in the middle of the living room frozen… tears flowing down my checks. My father reading the newspaper in his favorite chair, his pipe making a gentle spiral whiff into the air. My mother doing some manual household tasks. I was left to wonder why? Wrong question says the Wolf. It was a crack… a moment where my “white world” first splintered.
The movie was a foreboding tale of harm to white bodies, a loss of innocence, and a seeding of deep despair. Plans for building your own personal bomb shelters were advertised on the TV. We practiced ducking under wooden desks when the sound of a siren rang in preparation for an attack. I didn’t breathe terror directly; I didn’t need too; it was filtered through the heating vents and air conditioning. I was being conditioned which brings a strange combination of comfort and doom.
Raised in a segregated part of Cleveland I knew nothing about the rest of the world. I was served up a numbing pablum. The US continents original Nations Genocide story buried so deep it played out as a warping wobbling intentional lie that we celebrate as Thanksgiving Day.
Bones now quaking there is a seeping up from within the bowels of the earth awaking living tissue and buried memories. All genocides around the world are colloidal damage of an “advancing civilization”.
The time has come where we who have benefited may no longer gateway ourselves to safety.
As humanity is in a vicious cycle of ancestorial reenactment, what if we listened to our bones and the wisdom of the Wolf? What if we are not asking the right question? What if we stop trying to extract ourselves from harm? What if instead of continuing to sooth ourselves back to sleep, we awoke from the deep sleep? Might it ignite a crack in our great patriarchal story of dominance over?
Voting for me is choosing a Black Woman to oversee our Nations Ancestorial Birth Story. Why? Because my psoas tells me so…my cells know the depth of the human origin story and those DNA tracings that lead us all back to a black woman in Africa … she who bleeds but does not die. Every human being came from within and through the body of a woman to this earth. For me the small gesture of Voting is a vote for a crack in the US illusion. It is a way of holding to a reality that Bayo calls small b blackness…the dark universal unknown.
- The Wolf’s Eyelash told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes author of Women Who Run With The Wolves
Photo sources: Otto Norin Unsplash / Torn paper Pixaby
