What if you didn't?

Culture jamming January

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I went to the ocean during Solstice. The sky was dark and the grasses on the dunes looked greener because of it. The old trees, orange when they washed up during the summer months, were now black.

It rained, and then gusts of rain with bigger drops pelted down, and then the sun came out for a brief moment, and then the rain started again. I walked the open beach, watching the top level of sand drift toward me in the wind. I heard the sound of my hiking boots crunching the sand. 

The sun set each day at 4:30 on the dot. Once it was a true sunset; another time a quick yellow smear behind the clouds. On the second night, there was a tiny Christmas parade: the town brought out its fire truck and a police car. They were joined by a few vans and trucks from local businesses, each decorated in lights. The drivers honked out the beats of some carols with their horns and waved, and people waved and cheered back, and the whole thing was finished in about ten minutes.

I often walk the beach to excavate feelings I can’t access in my daily life. I come hoping for an epiphany, or at least an insight. But this time I had already spent the month of December doing a four part reflection practice. There wasn’t a lot left to discover. My mind was quiet. I had a chance to listen, instead.

When I heard my boots crunching the sand and felt the wind and the spray of the water on my face, and that was all there was, I felt —

nothing.

Or more precisely, nothing-ness. Not the existential kind, but the actual lived moment of no thing other than what is. 

When I am at the ocean in winter I’m likely to view the landscape as a metaphor for my internal state. In its grayscale emptiness I see a making-visible of my own loneliness or lack. Other times, it’s a counterweight: its simplicity a contrast to my swirling preoccupations. 

This time I wasn’t using the ocean as a resource for my self understanding. I didn’t even know I was having the experience I just described, because I wasn’t narrating it to myself as it happened. I was just another aspect of that place. Nothing special, but included.

It takes me hours of sleep and silence and emptying out to get to the place where thinking becomes strange and being is my default. Each year I forget that it’s not the holidays that make me feel celebratory; it’s the after party. It’s this interregnum, where the collective agrees not to ask anything of anyone, not to slice time into fat, even chunks, and to instead give way, allowing formlessness to become emergence. 

After days of being this way I start to bump closer to the ground, like a balloon tacking across a varnished floor. I remember what it’s like to want something because my spirit needs it to survive. I can pick out the actions that connect me to my elemental desires. There aren’t that many: it’s not that my needs are legion, but rather that I regularly don’t meet them.

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I don’t have to tell you what it’s like to have your breath compressed by the shoulds that march forward from the moment your eyes open to the time you turn again towards the dark. I don’t have to remind you that your animal self wants air and water and fire more than achievements. All it takes is for everything to stop, and it’s right there.

We have to be urged, day after day, to want something else. We have to be assured that others want the something else too, to persuade us to surrender this wisdom.  

What is it you can not do, to get back the silence through which your true self can reach you? How much do you have to clear away?

All this stillness, all this not doing—it’s not a pillow. It’s not a refuge. It’s preparation for something you don’t know yet, that’s coming to you, or for you, or for someone you love. I don’t know if it has shiny pointed teeth, bared and dripping, or if it’s holding a wrapped box in its hand, sheltering the gift you’ve waited for your whole life.

I’m just wondering what it will take to be ready.

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After the election, a lot of people told me they were going to use the time before January to rest, and to turn toward those they love. The news orgs freaked out because their viewership dropped off a cliff. They panicked at the loss of our collective fixation.

Over the last two months I’ve heard all these stories from people about how they’ve been connecting with others, building bookshelves, repairing broken things, cooking challenging recipes, or engaging in other physical projects, all of which show their impact—evidence they are alive, right now, and can alter their environment.

Some people told me they are having multiple embodied experiences at the same time: their physical body tense and watchful; their spiritual energy flowing, clear and determined. Part of what I’ve been hearing is that people are listening for a what’s coming that isn’t about portending violence, but instead something altogether different, something more sensed than defined.

But now it’s January, and I wonder how people are feeling. I picture all of us, lined up like Olympic sprinters with our feet in the blocks. Are we going to jump the first time the gun goes off?

We know part of the strategy is to drown us in a thousand catastrophes, keeping us off balance, flooded, easier to defeat in a fight.

We know that anxiety creates black and white thinking, with nothing in between: we respond or we retreat; we hope or we collapse; we take care of our own or we give til we drop. The trauma logic: there’s only victim and perpetrator.

I’m wondering if there’s something from this time that can be carried forward. A practice of keeping your fierce and particular intention, unwavering in its focus. So in that moment that’s coming, when you have to decide in an instant whether to commit, you know how to choose.