The Land Beyond the Supposed-Should
How assimilation might bind, and coalescing might nurture.
Usually when I go for an early drive, I try and listen to music. Anything shy of 7am, the podcast mood hasn’t settled in. Some Sufjan Stevens or Little Wings seems to fit the mood most this Fall. Or sometimes, I’ll simply keep with the radio. 95.3 KPND being the station of choice in Spokane.
But last week, I opened the car door, got the engine started, and was overrun by truly adventurous behavior largely uncharacteristic of the grog fog I inhabit in the morning — still waiting for coffee’s unfurling.
I sought out the AM button.
Why not?!
See what’s happening on the radio equivalent of the dark side of the moon. The unfamiliar terrain of enhanced static, muffled voices, Glen Beck (yowza), etc.
I have fond memories of my Dad listening to AM 950 in Detroit on the way to school as a kid. I was mesmerized by the disembodied voices of all the radio personalities. One of cell phones’ overlooked sins is the ability to look these people up and actually see the who behind a radio voice. Before then, I went months, years even, not knowing and wondering what these people looked like.
My AM journey was born from craving some of that nostalgia. As well as a tinge of tiredness tied to my audio being Lossless. I wanted some true static and americana.
Amplitude modulation energy for my lack of ante meridian energy.
Some AM for my AM.
Call me naive, but I was unaware of the AM terrain these days.
There are a lot of pastors (*MALE*) asking for money. Via PO Box, which is both sketchy and kinda cool. URL’s were not discussed; apart from the one preacher asking for those who sign up to his email newsletter to please follow up.
Yikes…
And then there’s the show with the cohosts asking for people to pray for the President… Donald Trump (it’s 2023).
Strange!
And finally there was the plea to contact your local car dealership saying you wont buy a new car without AM radio because, “electric cars are being released without AM radios because the liberals are trying to silence the conservative and religious world of our AM broadcasts!!!!!”
Wowzers!
People who are listening to AM are listening to AM and really loving AM and people who don’t listen to AM and listen to AM are confused when listening to AM in the AM.
Dipping the french toast stick of my humanity into this sticky, syrupy alternative world left me thinking about how many different realities make up reality.
Which left me confused.
Which led me to need to write to help myself try and make some sense.
I find myself bouncing between two distinct energies when I encounter things that are unfamiliar to me. One is uncertainty and dismissiveness. The other energy is one of warmth and curiosity.
Each category of assumption is directed at real life humans, though. I place my supposed prescribed reality over their actual humanity. And often, I’ve found that assumption can somersault when reality reveals itself.
The interrogation of my assumptions has led me to spend time ruminating on two words a lot recently; coalesce and assimilate.
Here are some Merriam Webster definitions of assimilate:
to take into the mind and thoroughly understand.
to absorb into the cultural tradition of a population or group.
to make similar.
Here are some definitions of coalesce from Merriam Webster:
to grow together.
to unite into a whole.
to arise from the combination of distinct elements.
I’m finding both in my own life and in current culture at large, no one wants to coalesce with each other because we all want the other to assimilate to our preferences.
Example A: If you are at point F of your social-consciousness and uncle Vern is at point B and uncle Vern says something “bad” (based on your point F platitudes), you have to cut uncle Vern out of your life. Even though uncle Vern secretly has been taking meals to seniors at the low-income senior housing downtown for 10 years.
Example B: If Susie is not going by Susie anymore and they have changed how they want you to refer to them, preferring you use the word they and not she, Susie is no longer someone you can associate with. Even though you were never able to have kids and when Susie was young you treated Susie as your own and Susie always wanted to spend time with you because you were their favorite uncle.
Often times, between the disconnect, there can still be a profound energy of love. But it seems this is a love I often silence; instead choosing to fill the void with assumption.
Imagine asking every tree you have ever looked at to assimilate into one specific tree. Now imagine a forest made up of every distinct tree you have ever witnessed.
One river assimilating into all rivers is a flood. One river coalescing in tandem with all other rivers is a watershed.
Music assimilating is every song becoming just one song. Music coalescing is Coachella.
Something I have been asking myself is how much of my disdain for the other comes from a selfish desire for them to assimilate to my perspective.
Additionally, when I am feeling gracious and free, how much space does my coalescing allow for? What does it strategically leave out?
A thought seemingly random but I think related…
Perhaps I/culture at large is not wild enough.
It seems that I often live as a shadow of the full-fledged version of who I really am. If the fully embodied and realized person rather than the projected shadow came out to love, to dance, to live, I really do believe that version of me would also embrace, cry, and fall toward the other.
Time and time again.
And I don’t think I am alone in this.
But instead, we’re stuck in shadow. The shadow puppet masters being Fox News or Pod Save America (not equating, just archetyping).
Because of this, I find that I often live as a shadow of the thing I am supposed to believe based on the assimilation my social shadow-casters prescribe. A shadow of a prescribed belief… at least two rungs away from my actual self.
But what is actually happening beside the fire that is casting the shadow? What does it look like to coalesce (to arise from the combination of distinct elements) around that fire?
What does it look like for shadows to take the backseat to bodies? For our bodies to step up and out, fully in our skin, and sway and laugh and play and cry and love together?
What are the dances wanting to be had beneath the moon in the land beyond my blind-abide?
This past year I have been drawn to the work of Martin Shaw. Martin studies myth and the necessity of it in modern times.
I crave a land for story that exists beyond the often reactive landscape of the day-to-day news cycle and discourse. Without a larger weaving, a making of sense beyond immediate reaction, I worry I’ll sink.
I’ve felt that sink happen before. Tight shoulders, unsettled belly. Malaise and short breath.
Martin Shaw’s work has allowed my dismay at the often overwhelming state of things to have place to look up and out from.
Below is a story of his. The pervasive question I felt it asking:
What is our relationship to the pelt; the earthly, embodied spirit?
Once upon a time there was a lonely hunter. One evening, returning to his hut over the snow, he saw smoke coming from his chimney. When he entered the shack, he found a warm fire, a hot meal on the table, and his threadbare clothes washed and dried. There was no one to be found.
The next day, he doubled back early from hunting. Sure enough, there was again smoke from the chimney, and he caught the scent of cooking. When he cautiously opened the door, he found a fox pelt hanging from a peg, and woman with long red hair and green eyes adding herbs to a pot of meat. He knew in the way that hunters know that she was fox-woman-dreaming, that she had walked clean out of the Otherworld. ‘I am going to be the woman of this house,’ she told him.
The hunter’s life changed. There was laughter in the hut, someone to share in the labour of crafting a life, and, in the warm dark when they made love, it seemed the edges of the hut dissolved in the vast green acres of the forest and the stars.
Over time, the pelt started to give off its wild, pungent scent. A small price, you would think, but the hunter started to complain. The hunter could detect it on his pillow, his clothes, even on his own skin. His complaints grew in number until one night the woman nodded, just once, her eyes glittering. In the morning she, and the pelt, and the scent, was gone. It is said that to this day the hunter waits by the door of his hut, gazing over snow, longing for the fox woman.
Encountering fullness is intimidating. It is wild. It is not always simply about our own priority.
The supposed “should” tries to prescribe where and who and how love and advocacy come into existence rather than living within the realm and reality of love and advocacy.
In doing this, you have to smell the pelt But in doing this, you also know you are alive and wild with the other.
What does it look like to invite a little wildness back into life? And what if that wildness is simply the ability to make space for a world where we can desire a coalescing for the distinction between us rather than coercing distinction toward our own desired assimilation?
The mycologist (studies fungus) Merlin Sheldrake was interviewed recently about how he perceives the future of humanity in light of the field he studies. The first thing he brought up is how fungus have taught him that thing-ness is a myth.
“Things do not exist in nature. What we call a “thing” is merely a “field of stability,” Merlin said.
A fungus blurs the notion of self. It’s roots extend from roots of different trees, webbing together distinct pieces into a whole that blurs individuation.
Merlin’s alternative to thingness?
“What we call things are actually, more accurately, processes.”
Matter is just a temporary field of stability. But because it cannot be created or destroyed, matter is always processing and flowing between. There is no real thing. Even a rock, given enough time, will shift.
When we let time move beyond the field of our own ego and self, we begin to see how the true identity of this world and the things within it are much more in flow, not fixed.
Trees break down into soil, bodies return to the earth.
We are always in motion toward some otherness beyond the category we inhabit now.
This has great meaning in light of a call to love the other.
In the land beyond the thing and in the world of process, I am them and they are me.
This deep time, process-filtered world, is one of infinite coalescing.
I don’t think about that overloaded word sin hardly at all anymore. But if I did, I think the sin I am most frightened of falling into is assuming I and the others around me are static, rather than dynamic and unfurling possibilities.
I want to encounter the pelt. The version of me and the other beyond our prescriptive assimilated grave clothes. We are so capable of love. Of connection.
Stare into the eyes of anyone for 30 or more seconds, you’ll see it. Ask someone about a child they love, you’ll know it. Talk to someone about a place that means a great deal to them, you’ll encounter it.
When we choose to coalesce in the land beyond the supposed should, we wake up in that place Rumi talks about when he said,
“Out beyond wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
As processes, we have the chance to web and weave and collaborate in our processing.
Assimilation might end us, coalescing can nurture.
Seated on mountain ridge, the goat eats its green. Below, the human stares up. Beyond both, Stars. Flatten flatten flatten, the gulf between you and the other. Infinite streams make the river Infinite rivers, the ocean. There is no One Way, in a universe, in a Love, that you breathe in and out even now. Onward until the breath ceases and you become whatever it is that the Process choses to embark upon Next.
