If Michael were to live in this late COVID-19, climate critical moment, he’d have a lot to say. He also would have slowed down and listened. The incredible cultural shifts of the last few years would have taught him so much. I imagine he’d have learned a lot about his own enmeshment with hierarchical Buddhist structures that elevate some over others and that rely on unpaid volunteer labour. I imagine he’d also be unpacking his own internalized colonizer. Examining the ripple that comes from and reverberates in himself and the world. His own privilege to speak and to be heard, like mine right now, and his position as a voice many listened to – he’d be deconstructing all of this. He’d be held accountable to do so.
It’s a heavy time. People are confused, and diverging ethics seem at odds in limitless ways. Hopelessness and surviving are trotting along together inseparably. Folks are weary. The card house of Capitalism is wobbly, and the ground we’ve always shared is fragile. The patriarchal father, the state, is unignorably diseased, mal-attuned and neglectful. The Mother, the earth body, is reclaiming themself, and it is reassuring as much as scary. Can we resist like Mother? Can we step out of feuding among each other like children of a high conflict separation and stand in some shared space of resistance?
Folks have wondered, what would Michael say about all this.
I think he’d say listen. Listen beyond the confines of your body, of your perceived self. Listen beyond your fears and anxieties. You are bigger than you seem, you include a lot, and this is not transcendental. You are connected infinitely whether you feel it or not. Karma, Michael taught, is material. Believe what you will about the esoteric, but here and now – and this is a contemporary reading of an appropriated term – karma is the causal effect of your actions and inactions in the world. It’s the ripple effect. The choices you make, even the passive ones, affect other people’s lives, livelihoods, and communities. What privilege do you have if you refuse to take care?
There are a lot of toxic myths in many spiritual communities.
This community is a refuge for folks who are jaded about living in the world. So much so that folks think beyond it to justify real world choices made here and now. This is spiritual bypassing 101. Everything you do in your life impacts life. Do not squander your life! Or the life of others!!
I say this and at the same time I feel cautious. I know there is a lot of pain behind fear. Fear in trusting the medical system, and the political system that dispenses it. There are folks who have very good reasons to distrust these systems. Folks who’ve been systemically oppressed by them. I hear that and I haven’t lived that experience, so I cannot speak to it. I have a uterus body in a medical system where “people” historically don’t have uteruses (sheesh to that). But simply being a uterus person is not reason enough for me to mistrust the pandemic response. Because I have a uterus body, I have creative responsibility to people and that is an honour. I can look beyond my valid mistrust in a system and see the science at work. If nothing else, I can see the efficacy of prevention proving itself in hospital and ICU cases. That’s actually my community teaching me, not even the medical system.
The toxic spiritual myths of body purity and of “high vibration” light body narrative are self-limiting. It rings capitalist to me – what do you need to achieve that elevates you, uniquely? What makes you so special, and separate? That’s a pretty dangerous pedestal. Who is excluded? Undoing this story, ironically, is a path to deep growth. A mycelial kind of growth. It’s anti-hierarchical. “Soil that is dirty grows a million things, water that is clear has no fish” reads the Vegetable Roots Discourses.
Have you gardened? Have you studied compost?
We’re messy with each other when we are truly living in community. It’s not pretty, it’s not pure, and it’s the richest fricken place you can be. Don’t escape your own life. You’ll miss it. That high vibe stuff is for your dying moments. Savāsana isn’t a feeling you walk through life in. The great bigness to stand in is life. It’s the interconnected sense to others and the world. It’s not separate.
“At the end of asana [yoga posture] practice is śavāsana, or corpse pose…[its] actually the practice of death. For ten minutes, you lie down and you practice dying. You say goodbye to your body, your family, your role as a teacher, your role as a parent; you just say goodbye, as if this were your last ten minutes.”
When you get up, Michael would continue, you wake up into your life. Not above it, not around it, not zoomed out and watching. Dissociation is not a true personality, it’s a coping mechanism. So you wake up from that too. When I told Dolphin, my eldest child, that his dad was dying, the first thing he said was, “but doctors can’t get sick, right?” He sought an anchor for his pain, some island of permanence. It’s not a bad thing, this drive for stability. Coping mechanisms are simply that.
You have to move past the fear of living.
There’s pain, guilt, grief, righteousness, but it’s real. You gotta love yourself enough to love your dark parts, and you gotta surround yourself with folks who love your complexity too, so it doesn’t need to hide. Your shadow body. Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost. Living is messy. It feels imperfect. It’s something to be cultivated. Look around the room. Feel your body. Perfection takes way too much energy and brain power. It saps creativity. We need your creativity. If you get stuck in perfection, the world loses you.
I’m in the midst of finishing watching the TV series Pose. I feel overwhelmed, my own grief is bigger than I can hold right now amongst All The Other Things. So I’m watching TV. I haven’t watched TV very much in my life, until the last few years. I am neurodivergent and have the propensity for black and white thinking. I read a book as an 18-year-old called Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman. It schooled me in one thing quickly and one thing slowly. Quickly, it showed me that entertainment is a tool of the political system to keep me preoccupied from what’s “really” going on. It makes me into a subject of the state. I took this super literally and it informed a decade of my life. Slowly, what it taught me was that this rigid idea I adopted was limiting. I was missing out on culture and my community. I could feel it in the gap between me and others. I was missing a shared language through which I could connect with peers. Michael was a big part of helping me shift that. He demanded engagement. I was in a beige phase, but he could see the multicolour me, the most authentic, geeky and weird me, and he brought it back out. Phew!
So anyways, I’m watching Pose. If you haven’t seen it yet, seek it out! The story follows New York Ballroom culture from the late 80’s through 90’s. The predominantly LGBTQ+ cast includes the largest trans cast in history. It’s a story of survival, of chosen family, of melanated self-representation; of power, agency, unapologetic desire, and creative celebration. The HIV/AIDS pandemic – usually described as a global epidemic nowadays because it isn’t killing people so much in rich countries – is prominent in Pose. The characters are fictional and historical. The cast is playing roles, but also their own truths. They represent a huge community that was lost one by one in hoards to AIDS, and yet the celebration of life continues, the Balls continue. The community cares for each other because nobody else does. They look out for one another as a priority.
This year, in 2021, new leaps were made in a potential preventive HIV vaccination that could even be curative for those living with HIV. June 5, 2021 marked 40 years since this virus was first identified in 5 people in New York. HIV/AIDS has killed at least 38 million people worldwide. Stigmatized into the margins for it’s association to queerness and racialized to the moon and back, despite the fact that the virus is not inherently discriminating. Nobody is immune. Would HIV not yet have a vaccine if it was a disease affecting the cishet majority? Or more exactly, the wealthy cishet white few?
Hold these things in mind, but also just watch this story and let the characters affect you. I think it will pick you up as it knocks you down, in a medicinal way.
Look out for one another. It’s all we’ve got.
C. Stone
I acknowledge that this was written on the ancestral and unceded traditional territory of the Hul’qumi’num and SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples. I recognize that land acknowledgements are only a small part of the ongoing work needed in order to seek actual truth and reconciliation. I am sorry for harm caused from what I write here and by my omissions.
This blog post was proofread and edited by Shauna Wootton.