Facing the Trump in All of Us: First Steps in a Ceremony of Healing

I’m writing the persons who will replace us. At present we can only see the magnetic flash of someone in utero; that potential, which is more communal than personal. Some fetus audacious enough to see through its own charades.

I’m writing because this is the performance of a new way of being, this is how it begins to take shape. It’s you and I facing our shame, not I alone.

We don’t give birth to a new being by ourselves. This is an alchemical experiment, a shamanic dance. The eyes dance the words, and this ceremony creates someone capable of seeing the Self as a construct of self-deception. A way of being rises from the ashes of who we thought we were.

Imagine the courage it takes to not fool yourself.

Even the imagination of this person can’t be sustained without deception. The effort to do so creates a positive ideal, which is a desire for transcendence, and that desire is opposed to being seen as a fool. It doesn’t want to see how it fools itself.  It hides from reality and never acknowledges that it does so.

This is the origins of our political situation also. The system is running from reality as fast as it can, right into the arms of a narcistic dictator.Read More »

Ritual: Part 1

“His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything” (from Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko)

I enjoyed moving-up ceremonies in elementary school at the end of each school year. Every grade stood in a separate line in the gym. And then the principal commanded everyone in each grade to step forward. There was some magic in that step. It instantly made us older and wiser.

But after a few years ceremonies all began to feel like empty gestures. Stepping forward and serving Communion and so on felt too superstitious.

Then in college I read the book Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko. It was about a Laguna Pueblo man named Tayo, returning home from World War II, unable to cope, heading for ruin. Read More »