If not resistance, then what? We are not forced to live between binaries: fight or flight, resistance or passivity. People often frame situations as this or that, yes or no, either you share my views and are in my group, or you are immoral, insane, or stupid. Many accept a dualistic worldview as the way life is. But love is by nature creative. We are creative beings who can imagine, name, grow, nurture, tend, and shape something new. Your choices are not between acceptance and resistance. You have a third way, and a fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh…
Water Ways
It’s common to focus on removing or opposing an obstacle rather than moving towards a desired end point. But if your energy is spent addressing a particular obstacle, you may not reach the space you’re hoping for. Try instead envisioning the desired outcome, and choose actions that move towards it. Let your love move like water, that finds its way into the cracks of the surrounding stone and opens them to flow and to life. Have you seen a weed, a wildflower, breaking through concrete?
Water flows around and over the obstacles, and seeps underneath them. We fashion containers for it, yet it eventually escapes. It evaporates and falls as rain or gathers as morning dew. It can erode obstacles, yes, but that isn’t its most prevalent characteristic. It erodes because it flows and it permeates, and through these two behaviors, things grow. New life is created. Eroding an obstacle is a byproduct.
As you envision the space you would like to create, follow your creative energy like water to feel for pathways among networks of relationships. Gather alignments with people to bring all manner of resources together. These may be material or financial, or they could be skills, professional position, or professional or social network. Resources can also be less tangible, such as encouragement, wisdom, healing, prayer. They can be qualities, like courage or empathy.
When people align under a shared desire or vision, it may be tempting to direct them into the roles you think are most needed, but people may align better if you listen for what each naturally brings. Look for ways that each person’s unique characteristics can join with the flow and nurturing of what is being created.
Water often gets muddy, of course. Painful aspects of various past relationships will need to be reconciled and new conflicts will form and require attentiveness. People will learn and grow along the way and that means making mistakes, making adjustments, and trying again and again. Accept that this is part of the process. Tend to reconciliation and growth to keep the water moving.
As people align energy, a droplet becomes a trickle becomes a stream becomes a river. Or maybe a droplet becomes a cloud becomes a sprinkle becomes a thunderstorm. Or maybe a droplet becomes a puddle becomes a pond, becomes a lake becomes a sea. Water moves in so many, many ways. Be open and flexible to move with it.
Words Form Substance
People often do not speak with awareness of their words being creative. This is not to say that words are an artistic art form, though they certainly often are. But rather that they exert a strong force in forming what is named. This is why it is critical to name and proclaim where you want to move towards, not what you want to stop. This positive flow naming applies to organizations, movements, mission statements, written materials, songs and more. It’s important to note, however, that it does not apply to bearing witness and giving testimony. There is a distinction made between telling the truth to the best of your ability about what you’ve experienced or seen, and using the characteristics and flow of love to form a space of greater justice.
In the case of terms like nuclear disarmament, anti-racism, and non-violence, the very title of what we supposedly stand ‘for’ uses language of negation. If it calls up any image, it’s the image of what is being opposed. You cannot picture anti-racism without picturing racism. Keeping that image ever before you and others gives it life, gives it creative force, when what we really want and need is to stop feeding it.
Our groups and movements are something that we water and grow with our creative energy, until they become entities with their own energy, their own lives. If the raison d’etre for our group is, for example, working towards disarmament, then weapons need to be present in order for this identity to live. In order to promote disarmament, the group promotes its own demise. But living things usually seek to continue living. This can put the group in conflict within itself, that generally doesn’t display overtly, but does contribute to ineffectiveness.
If the group or movement is defined through its positively stated objective, though, then once the harm is overcome, the group naturally transitions into maintaining the new space. Perhaps the disarmament group is instead identified as a trust building group. Then as fear of the other and reliance on weapons diminishes, the group continues its work on keeping communication open, facilitating conflict resolution, reconciliation, and other activities that will maintain openness and connection. Indeed, without this work, how long would disarmament last, if it ever were achieved? One cannot go through all the work of breaking new ground and planting a vegetable garden, and then abandon it, but still expect it to feed anyone.
Art Permeates
Art draws from and deposits into collective cultural awareness and subconscious. Through art, we form and express our collective myths. We live and die by the news from poems. We test the unity of dance and freedom.
Changing our stories about ourselves and world can help us to move out of harmful patterns. As the public interacts with an art form, there are experiences of resonance and dissonance. Maybe the art draws people in to a collective vision, or maybe it causes discomfort and seeks a resolution. Maybe it testifies. A person can experience these things whether or not they are consciously aware of it. A person can also pass along their response to someone who has never seen the art, with or without intention of doing so. The stronger these resonances and dissonances are, and the more people they reach, the greater the creative effect of the art.
Through this interaction, art has the ability to form and change the cultural myths – the way people visualize and understand themselves, their movements in the world, what is sacred, how their relationships work between each other, the elements of their world, and the divine. It’s important to recognize it as an interaction. The artist does not wield the power to control the culture. If the artist’s work doesn’t resonate with very many people in the culture, then it’s effects will be limited. It is also difficult (impossible?) to make artwork when there isn’t a creative energy with a life of its own welling up. Unless the artist taps into that well, a flow that is fed by the collective culture, the life experiences of the artist, as well as by the sacred, then the resonance is weak. The artist interacts with the collective culture and the creative spirit and the collective culture and creative spirit interact with the artist. Anyone who engages with both is in the archetypal role of the artist, regardless of whether the medium is paint or music or words or social structures or systems. Any entity, power group, or system that represses the creative spirit will die. A movement that nurtures and embraces creative spirit cannot be stopped.
What Do You Make of It?
The ways of moving like water and growing or creating something new are infinite. Here are just a couple of ideas for getting started.
1. Identify Your Focus on Obstacles – Where are you focused on what’s in your way? How can you refocus on what you want to see rather than don’t want to see? This may change your actions in large ways or small subtle ones. Some you may only notice using mindful awareness.
2. Rename and Rewrite – Whether it be the name of a group or department or movement, a mission statement, the sign you carry in a justice march, replace the no’s with yesses. What are you asking for? What are you picturing? What are you making? What does justice look like?
3. Paint Your Vision – Whatever your medium is – whether graphite or ash, pigment or words or dance or notes. Speak it from deep within. Speak it from beyond yourself.