Mennomystic

  This is the way things always have been. It’s always been David and Goliath. The least likely, dirty, smelly, sheep herding child against the sure-to-win, powerful giant. This has always been the way. And it’s not about the victory; it’s about the struggle. Victory is fleeting. Struggle endures. I’ve been reading the murder mystery book series by Kate Wilhelm written between the 1990s into the 2010s. The protagonist, Barbara Holloway , is a criminal lawyer disillusioned with the justice system that is so easily manipulated by greedy, self-interested, powerful, wealthy, elites. She literally takes the law into her hands to advocate for the innocent, the outcast, and the vulnerable. Just like history is often written by the victors, laws were written by those in power to favour them and maintain the status quo that maintained their hegemony . It’s a conspiracy that hides in plain sight through authority, legitimizing atrocities with impunity. Barbara agonizes over her own man...

  I sit here in exhausted resistance. Not having been able to write for the past month, I wonder if I can at all. The ideas, thoughts, and perceptions are all there, but feel cloaked by a heavy wool blanket of torpor, doubt and fear. Writing is soooo much work. It's hard and time consuming. And for what? Hasn’t it all been said before? There’s nothing new under the sun. Does my voice really matter? Am I just adding to the clamor? I keep thinking that people will know the things that I know but I also know they don’t. But I feel like, they should. Just go look! Seek and you will find. Be curious about the world around you. Ponder deeply. Find credible, thoughtful, humble, optimistic, creative, and out of the box thinkers and read or listen to them. That’s what I do. My friends tell me that a lot of people don’t do that. Can’t I just show them where to look? Sure, but no one else experiences life, and reads, and listens, and processes, and writes in exactly the same way that I can. A...

 I'm reading an "old" book this summer. It was published in 1986. One short section most mornings. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg . I bought it ages  ago and I believe I didn't get very far because one of the first things she says is that writing is a journey of exploring the truth of what is. And like Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, "You can't handle the truth!" I couldn't. I couldn't handle the truth of my inner life in turmoil, the weight of lies that I believed about myself. So, unconsciously I slipped the volume into my library and kept the pain inside. But it never stays inside. It pours out and wounds those in my orbit. I can see this now. Now, as I read her passages, I can see that I wasn't ready for Natalie's words at that time. Or maybe, had I persisted, I would have begun the healing process earlier. No matter. Here I am. Today's reading was about writing first lines. Write a b...

The saying goes, "The more you learn, the less you know." But from my Old Colony Mennonite heritage, the saying is a bit different, "The more you learn, the more you're wrong." This saying, in itself, has a few different meanings. One is that, the more you expose yourself to knowledge the more responsible you are for  that knowledge. From ultra orthodox Mennonite colonies in Latin America, I have heard stories of women running from the room if someone started to read the Bible. One woman told me that her mother would chastise her husband if he took out his Bible to read it, "Put that book away!" I never grew up part of the Old Colony, but it's funny how a generational way of thinking snuck in to my consciousness. Paradigm shifts are not easy. No Staples big red button here. Gaining knowledge that contradicted what I had been taught cause inner turmoil and struggle as the tectonic plates beneath me shifted. I remember at times thinking, "I wish...

 In your anger do not harm yourself or others. I'm doing a course through a meditation app on better understanding the anger within myself. One of the exercises is to think about the things that make you angry and locate where that anger lives in your body. The last time I listened to a lesson from the instructor, which was a couple of weeks ago (I am not, if anything, inconsistent), she was talking about our "inner child." I've always thought of her an my "inner toddler." Most of the time she doesn't want to transition. For example, she doesn't want to leave the house, get out of bed in the morning, take a shower, get to work. She's very vocal in my head, but that's a post for another day. Today, she told me that she was scared when I got angry. She was scared that I was angry at her. When I get angry at myself, it's to my current older self. I told her, with the utmost care, that I was never angry at her. When I'm angry, it's us...

Yesterday I read the Center for Action and Contemplation's daily meditation about the myth of the hero as a means of understanding the path of transformation. And I thought perhaps this was a good opportunity to reflect a bit about the journey I undertook last summer using Richard Rohr's threefold hero's journey template: leaving, encounters, and the return. Through a working group on Maya-Mennonite Relations, I went to Campeche as a guest of a Maya collective of farmers and as a Low German interpreter for two other delegates among the Mennonite colonists. I had been in the area twice in 2009 as a researcher getting stories on the history of the Mennonites in that area. This time, I would meet those I could not and learn the stories I was unable to obtain at that time due to language barriers (I don't speak Spanish), that is, the Maya's own story of their lives and how the Mennonite's intersect with theirs. The heroic myth first involves a leave taking from home...