Going to be: Heart Sutras, Enlightenment and Bizaan'imin

Been slowly returning to parts of myself that I let go of and thinking about this beatboxing monk and his stuff lately among other things. Enjoy.

 

Related (and partly copied/pasted from the comment section) too:

To me, wisdom is about reliable truths. What makes a lot of zen/buddhism [in general] challenging is they speak more to arriving at a sort of ideal state of "being" and leave it to folks to "be" there in whatever way they find themselves. Peace happens whenever we realize our ability to take genuine action in and from a place of love. This includes taking genuine action to surface, embrace, and transform conflict. It also includes the ability to simply be in and from a place of love.

For that last one, which I often found challenging, there's an Ojibwemowen word 'bizaan' that roughly translates to sitting in quiet/tranquility/calm/peace which really helps make a way for arriving at that ideal outcome of "just being" seem a bit more feasible than just suddenly "activating" or "achieving enlightenment" as it's often portrayed.

Some folks who study buddhist logic will say are 5 sorts of logical states--a thing can be:

1. true,

2. false,

3. true and false,

4. neither true nor false,

5. or undefinable because language+thought limits our ability and skews our paradigms for perceiving things as soon we try engaging with them

Being at peace and presence with those, especially that last notion, basically sums up the chunk of text below and what it's like to experience it even as a moment for me:

"...whatever son or daughter of the lineage wishes to engage in the practice of the profound perfection of wisdom should look perfectly like this: subsequently looking perfectly and correctly at the emptiness of inherent existence of the five aggregates also. Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form also is not other than emptiness. Likewise, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors and consciousness are empty. Shariputra, like this, all phenomena are merely empty, having no characteristics. They are not produced and do not cease. They have no defilement and no separation from defilement. They have no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no compostional factors, no consciousness. There is no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no tactile object, no phenomenon. There is no eye element and so forth, upto no mind element, and also upto no element of mental consciousness. There is no ignorance and no exhaustion of ignorance, and so forth, upto no ageing and death and no exhaustion of ageing and death. Likewise, there is no suffering, origin, cessation or path; no exalted wisdom, no attainment and also no non-attainment. Therefore, Shariputra, because there is no attainment, all Bodhisattvas rely on and abide in the perfection of wisdom; their minds have no obstructions and no fear. Passing utterly beyond perversity, they attain the final state beyond sorrow...." -Youtube comment by Dak pinned to the page

Love is

A dream from the other night: *friend's cat butts head and affectionately rubs against my hand while sprawled out in front of me*

I'm curious about what prompted the sudden affection.

"Tell me the different words you know for love."-cat named Kitty Smalls looking intently with eyes wide open

*me, surprised the cat is literally talking to me--? But, try to be present and make the most of the occasion to engage*

"Well, huh there's amorous, romance, tüng in Vietnamese, gizaagin in Anishinaabemowen, and a bunch of words in Greek and latin that I can try to name off. Like philae, a love from hardship, solidarity and camaraderie; ludos, the playful kind of love like when kindly teasing or dancing and joking with someone. Eros which is a sort of physical/romantic love which I think can apply to platonic cases too. Pragma--practical love through actions; storge, familial love like when you appreciate a sibling or cousin; agape for humanity which I think is a bit like the African concept of Ubuntu in maybe Zulu. I think that's most of what I know… ?"

Kitty Smalls: looks with a pause, head angled staring at me, still mostly upside down before "speaking" with great confidence as it resumes writhing with contentment.

"Ah, you see--I don't know anything about those words. But not knowing them doesn't diminish the fact that I want to express something and that it all means the same thing to me. How would it be fair if I had to know any of them to love someone?"

…

I guess the set up to the dream was quietly about wanting to know why the cat wanted to give affection to me.

In waking life, we all kind of know about the idea that love is love etc. and depending on how I feel, I'd probably get a bit agitated that someone were telling me what I already know.

But no explanation is really needed for being present with kindness from anyone, even yourself. Ever. And that can be really challenging to trust and accept at times. Hope that helps for whoever needed to hear this.

 

A revolutionary's end game

I asked an elder original Black Panther: "Imagine we win, what's the endgame for you? Imagine you no longer needed to focus on 'the struggle'--what would a future for your grandchildren look like here in Detroit?"

After a deep pause and expressing appreciation, he answered with something both visceral and achievable:

"I look at it in the micro and day to day wins as inspiration--for me, it's being able to create room to let my grandchildren envision and create their own future."

That's it. A textbook revolutionary simply wants his grandchildren to be able to envision and create their own futures without hassle. Unfettered by the hindrances of racism and other dimensions of economic oppression which, when we really look at it, get in the way of almost everyone we know and their ability to live a life that embraces dreams in a way that can trust in kinder futures.

Imagine we win, what's the endgame for you?

Imagine you no longer needed to focus on "the struggle"--what would a future for your grandchildren look like in your community?

seeing or silencing with sides of the story

Looking at any issue, it’s helpful to consider things from three angles:​​

1) personal stories from experiencing the issue

2) definitions, measurements, indexes, policies, etc.

3) the systems that lead to producing the stories

If you uphold one or two of those dimensions above any other, there’s a strong chance you’re silencing someone’s reality/(ies) and no longer seeing the whole picture. 

[fragment/incomplete thought:]

Rely solely on personal stories, and you risk missing the opportunity to translate it into actionable change while being at odds with the remaining realities that make up the big picture.

Rely on standard definitions and policy, and you bar the validity of perspective individuals may have by requiring a transactional fluency in bureaucratic standards — this requires more resources than the average person might have available to effectively navigate and contend with. Meanwhile, a bureaucratic or academic bias toward definitions puts people at risk of denying nature and the larger institutional or environmental factors that really determine whether the definition and policy works at all.

Rely on systems and the complexity shuts out those who don’t have the capacity to be in community with seeing those realities at work in their day to day life

Swinging and Singing

Speaking with a Detroit elder today: "Our biggest mistake in the 60s and 70s was that we got comfortable. They gave us a few crumbs and we let off the pressure before serious changes really happened."

Bear in mind, the protests in the 60s and 70s were planned sometimes up to 2 years in advance and sustained anywhere from a few months at a time to more than a year at a time (i.e. freedom riders).
If you caught it in the news or were there, yesterday's Detroit protest took a different note--folks described it as turning into a dance party.

South Koreans, who ousted their president circa 2016, held concerts and official public events and forums in the streets--if Foreign Policy magazine can be relied on for some of its reporting (a few friends and acquaintances who've been interviewed might share less-than-thrilled accounts experiences with diluted reporting), this may also hearken back to their history when an Emperor provided a special drum for the public to strike as a way to garner his attention and air their grievances.

Some seasoned advocates would describe this as "pleasure activism", and if we consider justice "by any means necessary" from a zen perspective, celebration is a valid means for convening, communicating, and mourning as much as the usual forms seen in uprisings.
The tactical and strategic value of a protest comes from how it disrupts the pattern of attention for politics, media, and commerce in a way that persuades stakeholders into convening to take serious action for change. And most Djele/griot artist-advocate "mujicians" recognize the significant peacebuilding and peacemaking capacity a creative event has for cohering more intentional communities if done well.

So while a crisis may be comprised of danger, the inherent caution it demands also presents an opportunity for care--just as the COVID-19 Pandemic has demonstrated.

By the way, we're still in the pandemic, and it remains a crisis of crises that could guide us through understanding what's needed if we look to root causes that prompted protests.

As a crisis of crises, the systemic change needed to address the gaps in treatment and supplies can and should be made through this moment in concert with those who put their lives at the forefront risk and those who are unwilling to--because for some, there's a point where staying in silent vs. speaking out in a monumental moment at the risk of catching the virus carries the same amount of threat to their life.

COVID-19's complexity is on par with grappling with the pervasive realities of racism in the U.S. -- the legal system, our access to health care, our collective right to express anger and capacity to empathize and process it into healthy pathways all benefit from a healthy degree of conflict--whether it's an uncomfortable series of conversations, or from delivering grievances and contentions to officials and the world about how "business as usual", "rule of law" and "good enough for government" do not amount to justice for all.

If anything, we likely need to find ways to safely maintain disruptive presence while we mature the overarching priorities beyond city-wide municipal demands into something that changes national and economic processes to ensure real change stays in the public interest. For some people, that means shaking up the workplace's way of doing business--do you have colleagues or executive leadership who "value diversity, equity, and inclusion" but also tokenize most of the "diversity" and haven't done more to account for perspectives that would create lasting change in their operations that creates real community and employee benefits?

Disrupt that. Institutional racism is something people in organizations can change within their own institution. Aretha Franklin did it every time she worked through her contract agreements: 1) no segregated audiences 2) cash, upfront.

The analog for inclusion/diversity and equity in most business may have a few more nuances but it's basically the same. Contrary to what communists and Marxists like to focus on, "wealth redistribution" should also entail opportunities for wealth co-creation. "Equity" -- as in sharing opportunities for better compensation within new ventures or revenue streams is part of co-operative economics too. If you need more guidance for navigating unstable times, look to the 7 days of Kwanzaa and what they can mean.

And so while we may need to grow and adjust to the real discomfort where "by any means necessary" entails being present with long-silenced anger that's galvanized into righteous Black Rage, the right to exist by any means necessary also includes letting people take to the streets in dance as they and their communities work toward manifesting tangible solutions that honor our healing and fortify our capacity to keep us nourished as individuals and as a society. Just make sure there's enough people swinging and singing with the same cause in mind.


Detroit Protest as a Dance Party? https://photos.metrotimes.com/detroits-ninth-day-of-black-lives-matter-protests-turned-into-a-dance-party/?slide=1&george-floyd-protest-day-9-bw_3383

How South Koreans kept up in the streets:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/12/02/koreans-have-mastered-the-art-of-the-protest/

Detroit's demands:
https://www.wxyz.com/news/detroit-protesters-have-23-demands-meet-with-mayor-duggan-on-tuesday

Washington DC's demands:
https://dcist.com/story/20/06/08/dc-black-lives-matter-blm-demands-change-how/
For root source, see MLK's address to the APA:
https://timeline.com/by-the-end-of-his-life-martin-luther-king-realized-the-validity-of-violence-4de177a8c87b

Kwanzaa
http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/ 

Singing/Swinging Malcolm X's Ballot or the Bullet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLHq4Fvnuc0

Text:
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1964-malcolm-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity/

Fire teachings; anger and rage

"Fire is a lot like electricity. Electricity is a dangerous thing. You can get a severe shock and it can kill people. But it can also be put to wonderful uses. And fire when used in a sophisticated manner is very much the same way."
...
"If you're afraid of fire, you won't understand fire."
...
"So fire suppression is very much tied up with the social and political oppression of Native American people."

There's an important teaching here that parallels how we as individuals, communities, and societies are to learn: work with embracing anger to heal what fed rage at the root as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-EXQ9be8mE

"Is this what we're protesting about?"

A reply to a mostly white libertarian "alt-intellectual" group where someone asked "is this what we're protesting about" posting a graph at the number of deaths caused by US police being in the double digits:
​

Looking at any issue, it's helpful to consider things from three angles:​​

1) personal stories from experiencing the issue

2) definitions, measurements, indexes, policies, etc.

3) the systems that lead to producing the stories

Qualified Immunity -- which is a fairly recent protection and gives way for relative impunity and lack of meaningful accountability, is what I'd consider one of the top systemic issues that results in more brazen acts of police violence when coupled with certain paradigms baked into the training (tactical combative minus stringent value for reasonable escalation/de-escalation or adherence to Rules of Engagement that are connected to enforcement and serious consequences) would be one systemic issue.

This arguably leads to relatively uniform distribution of police brutality incidents despite diversity of police "force" (again, a term that easily connects to misguided but nonetheless militaristic paradigms--much like the distinction between "civilians" and "officers" which orients an us vs. them relationship rather than one of service and membership as civilians who uphold law in public interest).

There's also the influence of police unions which often add a layer of insulation from accountability.

That said, it's apparently very difficult to retrieve data on deaths from police interaction for a variety of reasons (i.e. in Detroit if someone were to be injured during a police encounter, but dies in a hospital from that injury, it doesn't get counted and often won't be registered on any searchable record other than the coroner's--policies may vary depending on the city and how good they are at providing transparency or data accessibility).

For people who have experienced historic discrimination, with living elders who knew great grandparents only 3 generations ago who were enslaved, the social factors compound into reason for visceral upset.

https://theappeal.org/qualified-immunity-explained/

​

Deeper yet, is the intrinsic history between slavery and policing, at least from the south, but also the behaviors (i.e. breaking into a house unannounced; even imposing curfews) continue to echo many of the tactics, attitudes, and obvious impacts which are felt more deeply in Black communities because of the continuous injury and outright oppression that often goes unaddressed. News of a neighbor or extended community member getting attacked, harassed, or getting a gun drawn on them by police with no explanation adds to the tension. Seeing executions on television and online in social media further amplifies it.

https://theconversation.com/the-racist-roots-of-american-policing-from-slave-patrols-to-traffic-stops-112816

And then finally there's a disproportionate silencing effect that eventually escalates to a spectrum of protest behaviors.

One might not agree with all of them, but in a zen kind of way, it obviously exists, so read with an eye for the sake of empathy more than anything else:

"Beyond the misattributed quotes and bad memes and poor logic made in his name, the real tragedy of King’s legacy is that the white people who so frequently invoke it in the name of peace do so with a fundamental perversion of his message. Nonviolence — as it is discussed and fetishized in proximity to the poor and/or marginalized — is so often only dragged out in response to any uprising of those people. The riot is a language, yes, but the response to a riot is also its own language; a language of doublespeak. The call is for peace and love, but the true demand is for complete silence altogether. An NFL player takes a knee without speaking, and is threatened and hated, called a violent thug and a racist. For those of certain skin colors, no protest can be peaceful enough.

And it’s funny how that works. The people who have the most justifiable anger, the most rightful case for rebellion are the ones most frequently told to settle down, to embrace nonviolence. They are the ones told to follow the example of a man who met his end with a bullet, fired from a racist’s gun."

Couple it with how poorly the public education system educates citizens for effective civic engagement to begin with, and add racial barriers in education to the mix:

The conventions of school segregation policy--which the school district funding system was designed to bias favor toward certain communities similar to the way gerrymandering or redlining works--and then later when Brown v. Board of Education came into effect, one can argue the privatized education movement in part evolved as a way to maintain segregation through wealth (similar to how redlining insurance as a discriminatory policy no longer remains legal but in practice by income and geographic distribution its legacy has similar effect but over class at this point). The ingredients for unrest and outrage are probably a bit easier to understand even if not all of them are something we might relate to from experience.

https://timeline.com/by-the-end-of-his-life-martin-luther-king-realized-the-validity-of-violence-4de177a8c87b

Let it be with our greatest intent: Anger, Grief, Conflict, Peace, Resilience

Beneath anger, there's grief. Within grief, there's gratitude. Anger channels the fire stoked by violated boundaries. It can clear the brush as wildfires do when there's too much left dry and crowded in the plain or forest to make way for the new. Or it can scorch the earth barren when years of fire suppression policy turn a regular event for maintenance into a congested pyre waiting to raze everything around it including the earth below. Rage emerges when perception for our normal paths of influence loses efficacy in the face of unrelenting anger. Rage emerges because there is a profoundly unmet need for healing.

Gratitude chooses something we honor from a situation and expresses it in ways that allow us to grow--it finds the warmth in the ember of the fires, or the paths and prairies cleared by the flames. Peace is being able to take genuine action in and from a place of love.

But how will you hold someone accountable when you won't hold them in the first place?
Who's responsible for holding whom, and historically who has done the most work to hold the other?

Most cultures avoid imagining anger in its full context--if anything, we tend to invalidate, avoid, and ignore its explicit presence.

What's the healthiest expression of anger you've ever witnessed?

Who teaches you when it is safe and appropriate to express joy?

Who teaches you when it is safe and appropriate to express anger?

As a nation, what events do our US History books celebrate or commemorate as a formative nation?

Was the 1770 Boston Massacre revered in US History as a moment for non-violent protest or did it become propagandic cause for honoring victims of an oppressive force that led to a certain Declaration of Independence?

Was the Boston Tea Party a violent protest because a British tea company chose to sell tea from China without paying taxes to the North American colonies?

The U.S. behavioral play book is littered with unacknowledged feats of anger, but crafty authors weave narratives to make it look like we've always solved our problems by muffling or omitting the work and hardship that more often than not remained unresolved.

We're only three generations away from Civil War-era slavery -- community elders in their 70s have great-grand parents, some whom they've met, who were slaves during the civil war.

The Civil War was a Union military victory by conventional standards, but the KKK emerged as a terrorist insurgency with so much influence, the reconstruction era policies and constitutional amendments remained gutted well into the late 1960s. 

State's Rights was the civil rallying cry for secessionist Confederate states long after they were defeated on the battle field. Separate but Equal rulings were put into place as a justification for segregating schools. The tax structure for school districts was then designed to further segregate school populations. By the time integrated schools were providing official US History textbooks to Black children across the nation, the American Legislative Exchange Council's founder began championing the privatized school industry as a way to legally perpetuate segregation by wealth.

So the basis for unresolved conflict and the modeling for destructive action has been with us since the beginning of the nation's settlement.

War is a form of conflict where the most influential cohesive parties acknowledge their will to risk abuse and annihilation for the sake of asserting their interests.

Conflict is a necessary phase of peace when it can exist with clear intention and phase into resolution:

There are times for peace building to prevent or help us better embrace unnecessary conflict.

There are times for peace making to intervene with conflicting trajectories of interest and apathy.

There are times for peace keeping to steward healing and restoration so that we can better build beyond our capacity for dwelling amid destruction.

And they cycle into one another so long as intention exists to guide that.

Destruction is also intrinsic to growth so long as we have capacity to identify the patterns and intention that allows for integrity to stand amid perceived chaos.

But let us remember there were and always will be more people who are looking to heal, some seeking to heal from past episodes of bloodshed, and still more whose deeper cause for rebellion comes from a need to heal something with immense impact that it extends to the societies we live in.

Medicines are best used to prevent unnecessary suffering. They embody conflict with intent. They exist with ceremony and ritual--the processes that foster emotional and intellectual solidarity for treatment to be trusted and implemented well.

Healing restores our capacity to care for ourselves and each other. Wealth is a form of collective health when our capacity to care for each other exists with the special kind of regenerative endurance we tend to call resilience.


Let us choose to make all of this be with the intentional arc of our healing in mind.

For the fragile

Headline keywords translated for those feeling sensitive about it:

"People"=not singular individuals/groups of; a selection of individuals that can be representative of a majority.

"across the socioeconomic spectrum" = not all people in each portion of the socioeconomic specturm, but people across the socioeconomic spectrum

In the US, racism often has a nuanced meaning beyond overt discrimination on white vs. black. Typically it's also about systemic benefits and policy in addition to the prejudice it was crafted to impose.

If you're not feeling those alleged benefits--and it's not because you question whether you'll get attacked or shot for wearing a mask to the store at this time, or if your name and way of speaking isn't reason for getting turned down for a job interview--it's probably because you're experiencing the legacy of racist policies that now apply to whole classes of people.

Folks who've been born into wealthy families like Betsy DeVos, the Koch Brothers, or the current US President and his children have no concept of what it's like to be among sweatshop employees who still get paid about 8 cents per garment in LA as of 2015 for companies like American Apparel; or to be tomato field workers get paid about $0.50 per field basket (which is about half of what they got paid in the 1950s if you adjust for inflation).

But at the same time, neither do middle class families and some low income families who believe/d if they simply work hard and smart it would solve poverty--or that because no one helped them, other people shouldn't get help either.

In a lot of cases I think there probably was a point in time that those assumptions came to be after they "survived and made it"-- and wasn't just because they wouldn't take time to imagine or learn from other people in extreme struggle.

It's more likely because they're so occupied with trying to make ends meet that it's hard to connect and their communities don't necessarily value or support each other the way poor and other cultures tend to rely on each other--so they couldn't imagine or see other ways that people struggle because of what the surviving in the economy seems to require from their lives.

Most of the people working the field and sweatshop jobs are stuck in very clear wage slavery due to policies that were set during the post-Civil War "Reconstruction Era".

But the fact that most people will deeply struggle to make ends meet and need to turn to unemployment benefits if the pandemic affects their lives in the wrong way says a lot about how most of us are actually stuck playing someone else's game.

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews

https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

See comments for Garment + Fieldworker wage sources:

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10113092118162073&id=2256689

Decolonizing Geology: Sincere Apologies are Never Controversial

---

Decolonizing Geology

Here is a controversial topic.

“One of the existing traditions and legacies of colonialism is the renaming of geological features after Europeans.

This practice undermines indigenous contributions to human knowledge & rewards European Colonialism.

Returning to indigenous names is vital to Decolonising Geology.”

Discuss. — A Post Prompted in a Geomorphology Group

I don’t think it should be controversial if there’s honest accountability for what the colonization of names entailed. How often are overdue but sincere apologies controversial among people who are interested and willing to do the right thing?

Decolonizing the name of a place is often a step toward acknowledging the cultural genocide imposed on the people who originally live/d there considering how often erasure of a language and culture is tied to the negation and dehumanization of people.

On many nations, the names of places are sacred in that they often connect people to sense of purpose and cosmology — it’s not just the name of a person, it might be part of their creation story, or the language is a form of inductive reasoning once you learn the context to its words.

While Western Science is premised on process for discerning replicable truths mostly through deductive reasoning, several languages embed ways of knowing or looking at the context for existence into the meaning of their words — the language is often a direct device for inductive scientific reasoning, not just a means to deducting how things come to be, behave, or are.

I wish I knew enough Vietnamese etymology and linguistics to point to my own heritage but I can point people to consider Ojibwemowen which is one of the indigenous languages spoken where I live — gichigami tends to refer to “big water” or “fresh water sea” as I understand it and is suffixed to the name of our various Great Lakes. Linked you’ll see a map of the Great Lakes from an Ojibwe point of view — the map is East Facing in accord with their creation story.

Apparently Gaa-zhigaagowanzhigokaag (At the Place Abundant with Skunk-grass) describes what most of us now know as Chicago, IL; Gaa-zhigaagowanzhigokaag even in a simplified translation says a lot about the potential soil, ecology, and climate conditions in ways that Chicago, IL does not.

If we think about how invasive species disrupt an ecosystem from ecological point of view as analogous to colonizing names for places, there’s an apt parallel: the connections that often uphold a community in name, relationship, and refined experiences that become reliable truths over time are often severed.

The word for Autumn, Dagwaagan, has been translated by some as “the time for bending trees”

As I think of it: in many places throughout the NE United States, you can find bent trees that often served as major trail markers or sign posts pre and post colonization by native people.

Bend a tree in the spring and the growth spurts throughout the season can rupture part of the tree just like how tomatoes will burst with stretch marks when there’s too much rain after a drought. But in the fall, a tree is on its way to dormancy and the various growth hormones do not come into play until after the winter subsides into springtime. It’s reasonably the best time of year to bend a tree without risking great harm to it.

Granted these are a few examples gleaned by a non-native learner from an entire language — it’d be a logical fallacy to claim one word or name represents everything so do what you want if you feel the data is insufficient.

If I could dig up the Radiolab episode for an optical phenomenon (Zimulski effect? some Russian name) that Arctic indigenous people used as a way to gauge shifts in climate I’d link it here as an example also.

But on the whole, I think it’s important to consider decolonization as a process for recognizing and acknowledging that there’s intrinsic value and context for people and different epistemological methods beyond the Western approach.

https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2015/04/14/the-great-lakes-in-ojibwe-v2/amp/

---

I’ll add that decolonizing the sciences like Geology likely makes it easier to tackle abstract issues like Climate Change and even defending science-based guidance.

From a scientist’s point of view: Localizing contexts to different ways of validating certain realities that don’t require the kind of institutional resources climate and air quality data we normally use (which is still important).

But beyond that, the kind of social + public engagement necessary to connect, respect, and learn or reconcile different epistemological and cultural approaches is sorely needed.

In a society where we can hardly communicate basic public health, medical, and epidemiological scientific guidance for safety with residents (and government officials[!]) who are vulnerable to mis/dis-information and obfuscating rhetoric — consider the US President and much of his supporting base, not to mention low-income people or the MANY people living in places where fundamental education for scientific literacy and climate science are non-existent.

Navigation for most “wicked problems/processes/systems” like climate change or COVID-19 eventually boil down to cultural, social, and behavioral challenges — the scientists and other technical professionals tend to figure out the answer or at least good guidance earlier on than what the public (including the politicians who “represent” them) is willing and able to accept.

In large part it’s because most scientific findings are disseminated piecemeal and haphazardly with little guidance on how to process or embrace what it means and how dynamic the prescriptive approaches tend to be.

The information yielded is often imposed in ways that the public has no meaningful stake in aside from dependency on a small population of trained professionals and their institutions. Those institutions were never designed for public engagement — and the media has little to no incentive for accurate and precise scientific communication reporting when most results are really about “risks” and putting nuanced disclaimers for “statistical significance” [very important, but rarely to the media] and a call for “further research needed” to validate a study.

“Citizen”/”Community” Science initiatives like Project Budburst (phenology which potentially points to climate change — budburst.org for those who want to check it out; this is probably the best time of year to get involved if so!) provide a glimmer of hope and are a step in a positive direction. It can potentially scale out scientific inquiry and learning much faster than we’re used to seeing from academia.

But more often than not, the average participant tends to be used as a data funnel for scientists rather than being given the literacy and agency to shape actual experimentation or study at a local level.

Taking the deliberate path to decolonizing (and maybe even re-indigenizing) science eventually leads us to a more robust range of capabilities for addressing what we need so long as we’re willing to look at the skills embedded in the endeavor beyond the compatibility of expected outcomes and epistemic paradigms.

"Storytelling is inherently political"

"Storytelling is inherently political--and you have to draw your lines as to where your politics are. Even if something seems like a step forward in your career, if that's so many steps back in your perspective or your morality then you're losing the very thing you might have inside you that might be worth sharing with an audience."-Brit Marling

Those first four words stayed in my mind for years--to me, politics is about the articulation of desired action (because face it: a lot of politics is about how people say things and look rather than what actually needs to be done and how).

We might not think about it, but sharing a bedtime story says a lot about what someone believes or wants to believe:

That a child might trust in the vision we share with them. That we have the right and duty to take time with someone we care about to create or visit a world that few people get to see.

But if we're to believe the rest of the quote, you must expose yourself to new challenges and responsibilities as a storyteller:

It implies there's a level of will and preparedness you (and your community) need to muster in order to stand by what you care about to maintain those boundaries.

Sometimes you won't have the strength to do it on your own, but if you're fortunate, there will be folks who choose to stand up for the same because they know the story also speaks the truths found in their own lives too.

Sometimes, the best stories to tell are the ones you craft and share together.

......

"Storytelling is inherently political--and you have to draw your lines as to where your politics are. Even if something seems like a step forward in your career, if that's so many steps back in your perspective or your morality then you're losing the very thing you might have inside you that might be worth sharing with an audience."-Brit Marling 16:25
https://youtu.be/1H79-O1IxFA?t=985

I've heard this before but at the time just the first four words stood out: "storytelling is inherently political."

Hearing the rest (and finally 
I think in past moments my hesitation to stake claims

was out of conflict avoidance--

while I can muster what's needed to defend my position

I wasn't confident that I'd have the energy to at the time

Growing and Healing: Every Day on Earth

Trauma forces disconnection which can be seen in landscapes, our human and ecosystemic communities, and even among collective and personal identities. But relenting disruptions can often transform ecosystems the most to become places for life:

After a prairie or woodland fire, Jack Pine cones open up to release their seeds only when there's fire present. The Kirtland's Warbler will only breed and nest in the new Jack Pines that emerge from freshly burnt prairie land.

A tree falling in the middle of a Sugar Maple forest allows more light in and many plants that were previously crowded and shaded out take its place.

And while so many people tend to associate trauma with the destructive process, we often fail to shift our gaze from the terminal moments toward the cyclical progeny it can point to.

Healing is a restorative form of growth that happens when there's respite from harm that inhibits our capacity to care for ourselves and each other.

Health speaks to one's capacity to take care of their self. And wealth speaks to collective health--our capacity to take care of ourselves, each other, and everything that supports that process.

Prosperity happens when nourishment is manifested as a result of healthy growth. And hunger without extreme keens our intuition for seeking appropriate nourishment.

The difference between healthy fulfilling organizations and hate groups is surprisingly narrow: both will utilize sense of purpose, progress, and meaningful connection.

But hate groups eventually force dependency for connection among their membership and limit the scope of purpose in ways that intentionally preclude "others" while playing on ambiguity enough for it to seem innocent or a dualistic good and bad with biased emphasis on only one side and denial to the other.

Healthy organizations, in contrast, encourage emancipation and meaningful connection within and outside of the team. They allow for growing up and out depending on their role in the environment.

The pandemic is a crisis that highlights a myriad of ongoing crises--and in many circles, you might even come across the phrase "disaster capitalism"--where people choose to exploit crisis for maximum near-term profitable gain at the expense of others.

But a contrasting path exists too--disruptions can be creative as well. Whereas the news and traumatic events are often shaped and exploited for manipulative purposes without genuine solution, creative acts function as a kind of exercise in gratitude:

They frame a chosen reality (or multiple realities) with uplift, elicit our being, inspire, and tend to empower people toward relevant and significant action.

Whether in the West African Tradition of the Jele, Celtic Bards, or singular storytellers, minstrels, painters, and warrior poets of many cultures over -- people have chosen to bridge the momentary tragedies and triumphs with creative acts that let us dance between the work in our day to day lives and the magic that manifests a timeless sense of wonder for lifetimes to come.

So what do our narratives for post-traumatic healing look like? It's likely a way of being that allows for independent and collective sense of purpose, progress, and connected relationships to flourish.

For sustaining prosperity, any act will tend to have characteristics that allow for creative, comprehensive, and continuous existence at appropriate scale.

At what point do we recognize the growth that's inherent to our healing?
What will be done for prosperous growth to happen?
As a person?
As a people?
As a population?
As a place?
As a planet?

Seeking answers to any of the above questions brings us into sacred moments--the ones that connect us to sense of purpose and compel us to live in good accord with ourselves and the world alike.

 

 

 

 

 [ ] kirtland's warbler + cultural burning / indigenous knowledge  traditional knowledge ecology {tending the wild}

[ ] Leila Janah's note on seeking post-traumatic growth

[ ] delivering happiness framework for fulfilling / sustained happiness

[ ] neuroscience of hate

[ ] 

The Call for Cybersecurity, Samaritans and Civics

Last week an associate sought help from being digitally stalked, after sifting through a few guides these were the most thorough I've found for basic cybersecurity.

Hackblossom (very thorough, has a 'cheat sheet' condensed version, but lots of reading to do and can be overwhelming in times of emergency)

https://hackblossom.org/domestic-violence/

Chayn's brief guide (quick, not thorough):https://chayn.gitbook.io/diy-online-safety/english

Chayn's complete guide (I've not yet reviewed it--note that it's a separate link but includes a sort of procedural outline for navigating through all elements and a step for basic risk assessment in the process):
https://chayn.gitbook.io/advanced-diy-privacy-for-every-woman/


WHO'S BEHIND SOME OF THE "REOPEN" CAMPAIGN?
As an example of digital security risks based on current events--someone (not me) found and compiled a list of various websites and IP addresses belonging to the various groups that advocate for re-opening the economy.
There's at least one case of a few names and physical addresses being found (possibly including someone's home), several gun companies and coalitions (which corroborates reports that the protests were quarterbacked by 3 brothers who owned a gun company) and another being traced to being funded by the Nevada Republican Party.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HQnx-RvMM7BrpX1ysgjqzu8XkaDeu0w4gJgTtzB3dfk/edit#gid=0

On one hand, I think of how some native horseback warriors would carry a special stick and  tap an enemy with it in battle as a kind of humane way to acknowledge they've bested the opponent while sparing their life. So when it comes to this kind of quasi(? I don't really know what the official definition is)-doxxing, there's a part of me that just wishes they'd get their act together and that folks would gently tap them on the shoulder (or leave a note at their doorstep). 

Violence often manifests an unusual duality to the spirit.







Use caution with online social media quizzes--or just don't do them:
Given that we're 1) in the midst of a major election year 2) in the midst of a major pandemic that forces everyone to stay at home and use the internet more often if they have access to it and 3) at the cusp of a major economic crisis

This is a key time for gathering information and refining ai + fake social media profile creation.

The Senior Picture challenge, and various personality quizzes are all prime suspects.

[see Ukrainian connection to the quizes]



ZOOM
Meanwhile, the reason for concern over zoom's security vulnerabilities for folks who tend to get lumped into the other side of the political spectrum:


For folks who downloaded the app, it's possible someone could get your own IP address much like the stuff above.  Since the "zoombombing" incidents often targeted PoC

I'm not going to put energy into editing a comment I made elsewhere so here's the basic reason for caution among folks who are often targeted by the Neonazi groups that have disrupted various zoom meetings:

The issue with zoom for people who advocate: to wait and continue trusting a platform where Neonazis already coin the term "zoombombing" for its easy exploits is a serious risk--especially to anyone that's not compatible with the white supremacist agenda. Your fundamental safety and survival outweighs features and nice feelings for professionalism or at least should for people who've historically had the cards stacked against them.

For people whose communities or families have directly been threatened by neonazis, leaving trust to a company with your presence and data--chats, names, correspondence, images, likely user IP addresses and MAC addresses [which can reveal one's personal physical location] too for those who installed--is a serious threat to personal safety and also national security considering the encryption key behavior and where the zoom development division is based or if data gets intercepted and brokered out in unscrupulous ways.

The last item I'll raise is that zoom isn't based on open source principles which probably says a lot about their fundamental paradigm and culture for transparency. That they've repeatedly misrepresented their security assurances -- much of it being architectural and organizational level -- suggests to me it'll take a while to fully adjust their stance.

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/03/zooms-encryption-is-not-suited-for-secrets-and-has-surprising-links-to-china-researchers-discover/

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/03/826129520/a-must-for-millions-zoom-has-a-dark-side-and-an-fbi-warning

 

As always I also need to include a disclaimer: as individuals, I appreciate and respect my international friends. I also know that countries, US, China, Iran, Russia, wherever--don't always act in the best interest of each others' residents (including their own), and remind folks that several of these countries often set up, fund, or even operate entire companies, not to mention often have specialized departments or units where peoples entire full-time job entails adversarial and exploitative activity.

In the U.S., we've seen various tensions and systemic issues in society further amplified and exploited--whether it's racial tension and police brutality, or rumors of chemical plants exploding that rely on digital gossip to spread, or as most of us have heard about and witnessed, propaganda, false news, and misinformation around political candidates.

Should I stay or should I go now?

When to engage, when to walk away; census:


You don't have to stay in the game if you can get out, but you and the people you care about need to be in the position to make choices for dignity to happen as you make and gather players for your own until enough people can step out without becoming dependent.

I personally prioritize a census over any presidential election because so many resources, so much intelligence, and decisions can be generated from it.

Here's where we're at:
Even if/though the US school system+DPS is failing lots of youth and families, the money for them would still legally be required to be allocated to Detroit--so if a group like the Boggs School were to apply, we'd still have access to the funding. Same with hospitals, roads (pothole repair), possibly water infrastructure, and even development for homes etc. leans on census data for justification and funding. I seem to recall a lot of agencies and aid programs are legally tied to allocating aid/resources based on Census numbers.
Census data also informs where election districts/electoral college lines, federal resources, and agency funding are supposed to go for the next 10+ years (folks will still use Census data from several decades ago to look for patterns, trends, etc. and forecasts)-- so there's a big window where the Trump administration won't be in place.
All of diasporic Detroit is not yet ready to operate independent of the federal dollar and most aggregated (including federalized) systems. The Boggs School, Alkebu-Lan Village, and pre-takeover Charles M. Wright Museum aren't enough to service the community's youth and adults in the way they work at this time either. In ten years, comfortably they could do it with good leadership + engagement from folks like us, yes.

But they'd need whatever support as buffer in the meanwhile and the Village and Wright Museum also take some funding that connects to Census data in some way as well, and I've personally used census data to articulate grant-quality content to prove the case for local populations affected by air quality issues around Alkebu-Lan, SW Detroit on workforce/economic development, or briefly with Peace Zones for Life to inform support for returning citizens that still informs my priorities for outreach today.

Funding for private foundation grants that you benefit from using to leverage for the communities you care about often hinge on data from US Census numbers too if we dig deep enough into where and how the granting organizations procure and allocate funding.

The obvious part--numbers and population count are used to draw federal-level election districts, funding allocation, etc.is stuff that's not something we have a strong connection to unless there are lots of people from the community working+influencing that level of federal operation.

But the Census also informs data for things like disease control response, etc. --used by local advocates who definitely don't have capacity/influence to coordinate this kind of assessment at scale and use the data to inform impact.

Maybe saying too much for here but here's a milestone to ask and watch for before we get to the 10 year mark:
When will mutual aid and community organizations can glocalize (defn/charzn: integrate local support with global resources and relationships as I define it--Baba Wayne might have a different angle on the word but likes using it too) and effectively support and scale out something like the Sinai Grace Hospital worker strike + labor shortage without strain, working without any federal/state resources? Absolutely operating independent of a census will probably be less than beneficial until then.

........

Returning for a clarification re: informed consent--the idea of "by any means necessary" is still important for the collective (and sort of in terms of how evolution tends to happen--there's always a beneficial behavior/trait in the right environment), so it isn't necessarily to/on you to do the census if it's not where you're at. 

But to flip extractive/co-optive systems, I (and that may be different from most people) think it's important for having the ingredients to make those choices clear and available for others to decide on rather than say "you have everything needed to make a cake, that's your job"--when in reality you know what's needed for you+the realities of the folks that you touch most directly could benefit more from using those ingredients to make bread.

It's like people's bodily sovereignty (my body, my choice) or other things where the reasons for letting people make informed choices with their own consent matter most.

Even when we do our "performance" /storytelling/education/advocacy/djele work:

It's one thing to tell people what's needed and to take action with no rationale/explanation--and that's important in it's on place on the landscape.
It's another to bring out within them that they have and can create choices to navigate future situations with their own sensibilities. 

One can create quick results, another can bring out the leaders within us. Both are necessary tools.

But on the far end to those dualities:

Telling folks what "must" be done as if it's the only way without letting them consider their choices becomes a kind of coercion and is typically how propaganda winds up functioning in toxic ways. 

Leaving folks amid lots of choice and possibility without the granting guidance with one's wisdom from reliable truths is a form of negligence.

So at the end of the day, do you.

But for those who look up to you+those you care about as peers and elders, clearly communicating your action among those you're willing to trust adds to the collective benefit.

As long as the folks who are working toward the same cause know what's on the landscape and what it tends to mean +why/where we're coming from, I like to believe things tend to turn out well. 

If they don't and it's important that they do, that's where work shows up for growing relationships too.

I hope that's not too much, been thinking about a lot of the stuff you asked and haven't been able to speak with anyone to unpack until you made the space with the root post.