Reaching Back to Look Forward

I just looked at my photo on this blog, and I saw my dad. He's there in the details for sure - old jeans, cotton shirt that was probably a little beat up, the posture with my arms akimbo, my smile that is faint and unsure of myself while sure of the world, the sunny day surrounded by beautiful people. My father's usual style involved either highly-predictable outfits for the office that involved gray or black slacks and one of a dozen identical pale blue dress shirts, or at home on the weekends it was anyone's guess as to whether it would be a checkered flannel shirt or solid color scratchy wool sweater to go with the old jeans that bordered on embarrassing family members who were with him. The best paternity test you could do for me is look into my closet right now.

My location is also where my father was too. I've listed myself as being from the United States: Minor Outlying Islands because that is often my emotional interface with the world, and my clever monkey brain loves metaphor and being rewarded for cleverness. My father was an outlier. He spent a lot of his life being slightly anomalous to the rest of the medical community in which he practiced surgery. He was often giving his life away, to too many people in too many ways without knowing what he was looking for. It's bold of me to claim this level of insight, but there's my assessment and I stand by it for now. Our house was awash in Christmas cards each year from patients of his from years or decades earlier, who still felt indebted to him for the care he gave them (often at a discount or a long series of affordable installments). Occasionally there were even in-kind payments of fruitcakes, breads, kiffles perhaps, baked goods that hearkened back to the slightly old world roots of Bethlehem, PA where I grew up. These are the odd and touching rewards of being a doctor with a smaller-town approach in an area that was actually growing and booming.

He gave his love away too, and I think his marriages and relationships suffered for it. I think he may have been very insecure his whole life, wanting to be loved but not really feeling able to accept it from others at a deep, meaningful level. It's a tough row to hoe if you can only give it away but not feel that you really deserve it yourself. (I know, cry me a river.) I think this kind of imbalance does lead to infidelity, stretching yourself too thin, thinking that the next person you meet will finally be The One to make you complete, feeling like you're stuck in a pattern that you can't get out of. I know this from my experience, and I'm working on being different and trying to feel more whole in my own right.

Whence this sudden reflection on my father? It just struck me as I opened my computer this morning in the slanting sunlight. I have also been thinking about revolutions, and as I rounded the corner heading over to my favorite local coffee shop, I had been thinking about what revolution meant when my father was a young man and what it means now.

I remember my father talking of things in history with a turn of phrase that seemed funny at the time. He would say things like, "Back at that time, there were many of us who were upset with the dictatorship in Spain," and he would have a slight sadness in his voice, like some grand vision hadn't panned out the way he imagined. He spoke of himself being included in a set of people who were undefined and without number, but I always had the feeling that he was speaking for humanity at large (maybe we all do this with our parents, and hence our worldviews end up the way they do). He was always mum on the U.S. party line about who was Right and Wrong in the world. He didn't go in much for speaking against specific countries, leaders, or the other side of the Cold War. He listened to public radio, and stayed on top of the news as best he could for someone who worked a lot. He had a bit of an academic removal from current events, in that he often spoke of them with regard to their historical contexts and roots.

But I feel that, at the end of the day, he had big hopes for humans at large that he couldn't let go of and he turned these into his motivation to be a healer. He supported the ephemeral dream of a socialized, single-payer healthcare system in the United States. He spoke with a warm wistfulness of some day working for Doctors Without Borders. In the Vietnam War, he spent much of his leave time working at an orphanage for Vietnamese children. I think that throughout his life he grew away from the hope for a top-down revolution to 'fix' our problems, and instead found satisfaction in working with individuals in his circles to be an example for how we might live our lives to create a different world.

I feel that I run the risk of waxing nostalgic here as well as simply mapping my own worldview on top of my memories of him. I know I am afforded this possibility partly because he is dead and is not going to call me up tomorrow to tell me that I've got him all wrong. I know that I'm skewed by attempts to find order and pattern in the bits that make up the past. So be it. If my memories are a bag of wool freshly shorn from the walking lambchop, then my coherent worldview is what I card, dye, spin, and knit to keep the narrative of my life intact.

After all this musing, then, what are my thoughts on revolution and my place in it? I think we need a revolution at the fractal level. What we need to do for ourselves we also need to do for society and the biosphere. We need some serious ownership. We need to cop to the fact that we're tearing through our resources and polluting the planet in myriad ways, all the while arguing what language we can use to describe it, obfuscate it, relieve ourselves of guilt about it, etc. We need to admit that we're making ourselves crazy by working harder and losing ground, even as we're motivated in large part by fear of falling behind. We don't know how to trust each other on a big enough scale to co-operate. We in the States have internalized the Official Party Lines inside our craniums through telling ourselves that we deserve our place in the pecking order, that our capitalist-socialist-fascist hybrid government is the best and we just need to tinker with it, that we can purchase and off-set our way to a brighter future, etc.

We need to revolt by owning the implications of society as it currently is and what we're doing to perpetuate it. Owning it is the first step, and when we do that and band together with others who want to smile and talk lovingly about how to be different, we can muster the courage to take further steps to change the world. We need to spread the revolution by setting our minds on fire, fueling our own personal growth by tossing our illusions in the blast furnace. We need to plant gardens, actual and metaphorical, and tend them as best we can to harvest good things. We need to place ourselves in an intellectually robust, meaningful context at all levels while doing our best to avoid religious dogma, empty rationalizations, struggle for illusions of control, and other fear-based ways of living.

When I think of revolution, I think of always swinging back and forth between our personal growth edge in the nooks and crannies of our soul, and refining our big picture understanding of the world at large. How do I want to be? How can I come from love instead of fear? How can I do better tomorrow than today? How can I find peace with this whole process, in success and failure? Much of my work these days is focused on moving more and more easily between and amongst these types of questions. How can I navigate more smoothly, so as to get stuck less often in a corner feeling like I can't imagine an easy way out?

These are my thoughts, laid bare in the disinfecting yet swaddling sunshine. I wish you much success on your journey today and everyday. While writing, I was reminded of a poem I love and want to share with you. Thanks to those who have kept poetry in my life. In spite of resisting it as best I can, and even identifying as a person who writes it much more than reads it, I find good treasures there.

To Lead or Follow?

The cup of my mind was filled with light,

But the darkness on their faces

Made me put out my light and follow them...

It was only afterward

When we were wandering in the dark together

That they told me

They had come looking for light.

~Harper Brown