A Potpourri of Monday Thoughts

I was doing pretty well with weekly posts but the last few weeks got too complicated. I had a really demanding week of work travel and then the next week was Labor day week. So now I’m on week 3 and if I don’t get back to writing, I’ll really be letting the momentum shift. That means today’s the day, whether I know what I have to say or not.

Last week I actually started writing a post about sleep. I had two of the best nights of sleep of my life, which was amazing, followed by four nights of terrible sleep. And then I was reading the yoga sutras and realizing all the ways that sleep is actually important for spiritual growth. Not just because sleep deprivation feels horrible and makes it very difficult to focus the mind or be disciplined, but because the experience of good sleep is a resource to draw on while moving toward the experience of clearing out the mind while awake. There’s a beautiful passage in the yoga sutras about how one way to make spiritual progress is to recollect and contemplate the experiences of dream-filled or dreamless sleep during a watchful waking state. This commentary stood out to me: “A yogi maintains passive alertness without allowing thoughts to spring forth, or strives to restrain them. This is reflective contemplation.” (LOY 1.38; p. 39) So sleep is where we can have a glimpse of passivity and we can tap into that to create passive alertness. There’s a lot more there – we are urged to contemplate the soul while falling asleep so we can bring the spiritual quest into the sleep itself. Wow.

It tells you something about how sleep and self-care figure into our world that even as I started to write, the internal backlash started. I started to feel that it would be so frivolous to write about sleep when I should be writing about dismantling white supremacy. And in general my life is so privileged – not just race/class-wise, but also because right now I’m not working the kind of crazy job I have in the past and so I have time to contemplate sleep and figure out how sort out my sleep problems. If I write about it, that’s like parading my privilege. That is both ugly for people who don’t have that luxury, and also embarrassing for me. I’m supposed to be sacrificing everything for the cause, not sleeping well and then writing about it.

I recognize that line of thinking as diminishing my own well-being as a legitimate topic. It is dysfunctional and not okay. I haven’t fully reconciled it internally. But I can say that the passages about sleep in the yoga sutras are beautiful and esoteric and have their own dreamy quality, and writing about them might give other people permission to think that their self-care isn’t selfishness. I wish for all my comrades in the struggle to have beautiful and nourishing and spiritually progressive sleep. And I’ve now had the worst week of sleep in awhile, so I guess I want to wish that for myself too.

Meanwhile, so many other topics are drawing my attention right now. Everything I start to write about gets stuck, so instead of trying to make conclusive statements, I just wanted to share a few things I’m working on.

I started following on twitter journalists who specialize in covering the white supremacy movement and then got into some research on best practices for reporting on them. It feels relevant to me that we everyday people understand the pitfalls of this journalism because it will empower us to demand better from our news outlets and be more careful in what we elevate on social media. I’m still reading and synthesizing but I’m going to write about it as I figure it out.

I got really intrigued by the anti-fascist movement after attending the neo-nazi rally in DC back in august. Basically you can’t get into white supremacy without noticing that antifa members are doing a lot of work to document what is going on – the people, the organizations, the tactics. I see all these casual debates on facebook and elsewhere about the antifa’s willingness to engage in violence and I find it frustrating how people are quick to dismiss and condemn them without understanding the context of what they’re doing. There’s a whole history of anti-fascism that we need to understand. And I’ve been struck by how many trans women seem to crop up in my antifa twitter feed. Their courage – even if I would say I don’t believe in violence – is really powerful to me. It’s challenging me to think more about how non-violence figures into my life and practice. After all, the yoga sutras say that non-violence is one of the great, mighty, universal vows, unconditioned by time or place. So that means we’re all supposed to do it. What to say about how much I value and appreciate what antifa members are trying to do, using violence as one among many of their strategies?

Throughout all of this, I am constantly reminded of the terrible role police play in adjudicating conflicts between white supremacy and the rest of us. There’s no shortage of evidence of the police stepping in to protect white supremacists and then attacking, arresting, detaining, tear-gassing the counter-protestors who show up to make a different kind of statement. It’s happening again in North Carolina now. Silent Sam was a statue on the UNC campus erected as a monument to the confederacy. What is becoming more clear is that all of these monuments to the confederacy were put up in the early 1900s – well after the civil war – as part of the Jim Crow era. They stood as a reminder to people of color and freed slaves that the prevailing order was to reinstate slave-era practices. In late August a group of protestors knocked down Silent Sam. Since then, every weekend it seems there are neo-nazi groups protesting alongside racial justice and antifa groups. And time and again, it is the racial justice/antifa protestors who get arrested. This weekend, the racial justice/antifa called for a peaceful potluck at the site, and asked people to bring canned food for food pantry donations. Their potluck was disrupted by police. Their donated food was confiscated. And peaceful demonstrators were arrested.

These incidents are telling us something about the relationship between formal, official, armed government power and white supremacy. It is disturbing. It came before DJT and it will last beyond his time in power. As part of the larger project of working for racial justice, we have to interrogate the connection and transform it.

I’m not saying anything new to people of color who have experienced that connection personally, in their families and on their bodies. But we white people have had the luxury of not seeing or experiencing it. We have to be willing to see it now.

That’s all for today. I feel overwhelmed by what I have to read and understand. And so grateful for the opportunity to live my life in this struggle.

Love, gratitude and solidarity forever.