Category: Culture

  • Self-directed, community-minded.

    In a conversation this morning with a client we reflected on the kind of person who is self-directed but in a way that makes life harder for others—inconsiderate, making changes in community life without checking in with the people who would be affected, more focused on the part than the whole.

    It occurred to me that the problem is not being self-directed. That’s really helpful! I remember in my barista days I had folks on staff who really didn’t take any initiative unless I explicitly told him what needed to be done, even when there was a checklist for everyone to use to see what needs to be done. His request for support and direction might have been understandable if he hadn’t been there for a while, and if I didn’t have to stop and walk him through every task when I was already trying to stay ahead of the numerous things expected of us.

    I know many of us experience this frustration either at work or at home with partners who seem unable or unwilling to take responsibility for the tasks of the household and living. You want some self-direction here, you want them to be able to see for themselves what needs doing and to take the initiative to do it. It is exhausting to have to hold all of the expectations and follow through on them and hold someone’s hand and help them understand and follow through on the expectations.

    But the other side of this is being community-minded. Again, it’s clear that self-direction without community-mindedness is going to create as much irritation as no self-direction at all. Because when you’re operating in a shared space—a workplace, a community, a home you share with others—it serves you well to work the norms and the consensus.

    Any change you make that affects others involved, it behooves you to think proactively about who is impacted and make sure they understand and appreciate the change you’re trying to make. Otherwise, even if you have a great idea, the people who weren’t included are going to be unhappy and make your life a lot harder. On the other hand, if you really pay attention to what helps the community work and you do your piece without being asked, it makes everyone’s life easier and more joyful.

  • The Grandiose and The Powerless

    The Grandiose and The Powerless

    I was at a friend’s party, having just had a personally beautiful and moving psychedelic experience, in which the god who experiences life through me showered my parts with praise and gratitude even as it encouraged them to lighten up and stop spending so much energy on stress and anxiety. I’d mentioned the trip in passing, not intending to dump it on people, but two of my friends seemed interesting and affirming so I spent longer sharing the story. Afterwards a part of me that always comes in to find something to cringe about and imagined these two friends walking away with a bit of an eye-roll. I was a cliché. White Man, Tripping, Discovers He is God – News at 11.

    There is this cynical, dismissive part of me that gets so concerned about spiritual narcissism and so worried that I will succumb to it. The tone is quite judgy, but it’s not always been so harsh. It’s watched my sincere, enthusiastic parts run toward the spiritual world with a desperate longing to be told my purpose and meaning in life, and that running toward has gotten me into great hurt and confusion. Every wise teacher I’ve had, human or otherwise, has responded to my seeking by holding up the mirror. Even in this psychedelic connection to the divine, the message remained the same: look how hard you are searching outside of yourself for what’s been here always and forever.

    My good friend and spiritual compatriot once sent me an episode of Teen Creeps in which the podcasters, themselves seemingly not occultists, do a hilarious survey of theosophical occult ideas and the tendency for spiritual teachers to eventually “reveal” that they’re incarnations of important deities. “Oh my god, you guys. Me and my wife Alice are actually descendants of Osiris and Isis. Isn’t this crazy?”

    If you practice long enough, it seems, eventually a spirit will tell you you’re a manifestation of a god, or something like that. There’s a way to take such experiences and use them to stop growing. One could make such an experience and turn it into an identity. This is akin to finding a balloon and forcing your whole being inside of it. Feelings of specialness and importance inflate us, lifting us high off the ground. It feels amazing! The perspective is profound. And it feels safe! Because we are held aloft by this warm air and we are separated out from the poor ignorant ones who still live on the ground.

    What we’re missing is that we’re still living inside a latex vessel. We can’t keep growing inside of it. Eventually the material starts to chafe against our efforts to grow. We feel vaguely suffocated and panicky and don’t understand why. If we want to stay afloat, we have to keep the feelings of specialness warming and filling our balloons—no wonder people like this position themselves as gurus and human gods for their devotees to inflate. Fear the day when that special identity punctures, and we fall hard back to reality.

    Instagram’s algorithm offers up a lot of inflated balloons to my feed. And my cynical part wants to protect me from the foolishness and the fall of such inflation, so much that it mistrusts the beauty and nourishment of these moments of connection. What feels most true to me is that, being a facet of god—whatever that is—is both profoundly special and extremely mundane. You, too, have god within you. The fiddle leaf fig that lives in my office is a facet of god. We all emerge from the same material, if only the soil of the earth, and so we are all composed of the body and of that god. Even the people I would judge and dismiss.

    This truth need not be inflating. Such a realization frees us of the relentless urge to fix ourselves, constantly scrutinizing for deficiencies and flaws to correct and excise. My first true message from the divine came in response from repeated entreaties to be changed and freed of something about myself that I thought was awful, and it turned out it was nothing to worry about. It was fine. I could go and live. When you feel how profoundly loved you are, it’s easier to stop being a surgeon constantly operating upon one’s self and instead become the soul from which our lives grow. This is spiritual experience that ripens us.

    Lately I feel my cynical themselves becoming inflated, bitter in attitude toward those they perceive to be prioritizing prayer over action, intention over getting one’s hands dirty in the business of living on this earth. Yet this is a projection of how I myself feel, my own feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy. Parts of me miss the idealistic belief in sincerity and spiritual purpose. They do not miss the impossible state of moral purity I felt pressured to perform.

    I would reconcile these again, the parts that believe life is worth living, that it’s worth trying to be more than we are, and the parts that say I am just enough and do not need to carry the world’s sufferings on my shoulders all the time. Neither idealism nor cynicism need be at war, for both can drive us off the cliff while together they can keep us on a human, healthy path. We are not gods responsible for redeeming the world, nor piles of shit whose every effort is meaningless. This moment matters, and how we act in it is important, and that is enough.

  • Response: Three Books of Doom

    A couple weeks ago, I was on the plane with my copy of Bowling Alone reading a prescient chapter about how the decline of American civic culture and social involvement includes increased mistrust among neighbors and decreased tolerance for talking about differing opinions on political matters. Putnam suggests that this decreased tolerance would imperil democracy, leading to the more shrill and extreme views taking a larger and larger role in American politics. As it happened, sitting next to me was a man reading a book called The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

    He glanced at the chapter title on my book. “The dark side of social capital?” he asked aloud. Younger me would have awkwardly tried to avoid any conversation whatsoever, but I felt thoroughly called out by the chapter I had just finished, and realized now was the time to practice.

    I closed the book to show him the title: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. “I think we’re reading about similar things.”

    He chuckled and showed me his, and then his wife showed me her book, whose title I didn’t quite retain but had a similar theme around the collapse of America.

    “A lot of doom!” I said, and for a moment we could laugh together, and share some of our observations and concerns from our own perspectives. What struck me in the moment was the very shared moment of alarm as Americans, the sense that we are in decline, that whatever once united us is dissolving, that it scares and angers us to live through this dissolution, and that we very understandably are looking for something to blame. Having something to blame gives the illusion of control, the possibility that this process could be averted or undone.

    Within the same month, these three books became available to me through my local inter-library loan program, so I read them all close together, and they could speak to each other:

    • Reeves, Richard. 2022. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Washington, DC, USA: Brookings Institution Press.
    • Putnam, Robert. 2001. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. London, England: Simon & Schuster.
    • Harari, Yuval Noah. 2015. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York, NY: Harper.

    Harari’s Sapiens does not appear, from the title, to be a book of doom, and the cover features Bill Gates’s enthusiastic endorsement of what an entertaining book it is, but I found it the most depressing of the three. Putnam and Reeves both trace increased sense of alienation and discontent among American men specifically but also American citizens more broadly, yet they come with a sociological analysis and offer ideas for change.

    Harari tells a story of a species—our species—who has throughout its existence managed to decrease biodiversity, damage environments, and become increasingly dependent upon technologies and structures that have extended our lifespans and yet may well continue to decrease the overall quality of those lives. He tells the story of how credit, empire, and capitalism have become the ruling political and economic paradigms and have liberated the individual from the bonds of community, family, religion with a clarity that that I think more Marxists should aspire to emulate. His tone does not struck me as bitter or antagonistic toward these developments, though he’s willing to share the losses and risks of these changes along with the benefits and opportunities they have created.

    So the depression came from inside the house, so to speak. Loneliness and the deep need for belonging and connection have become so core to my interests and my life’s work, and each of these books speak to both how hard it is to have those experiences and how our modern life actively works against them without offering anything of substance to replace them with. And I am part of the problem. I see how the conservative drive to protect family, small towns, religious communities are all efforts to hold on to what has given us belonging for centuries. It is also what gave men a role and an identity. Reeves’s Of Boys and Men offers a rather striking suggestion that it has long been understood that a lonely man is a danger to society, because he has nothing motivating him toward prosocial investments of his strengths and energies. It was marriage and children that tamed men, gave them emotional bonds that turned them into good citizens. When that role becomes increasingly unnecessary, we get lonely, angry, violent men.

    Neoliberalism offers us a world based on what Harari describes as the state and market liberating the individual. We are free to live our own lives in accordance with our inner sense of self, our identities, and form relationships based on our values and sexual and gender identity. We have the possibility of forsaking the support of family in pursuit of this freedom of self-expression—we can cut off our parents or demand they get on board with loving us, because we have the possibility of existing outside of their support. (Some of us, anyway.) The stability of empire and capitalism, per Harari, further decreases the risk that we will suffer violence at the hands of each other. But suicide, the death of loneliness and despair, continues to rise.

    I cannot help but think it’s the absence of human connection, the absence of a role in the world, the absence of stable community that contributes to that suicidality. Putnam speaks about a time in which the workplace attempted to become a social center to encourage their workers to be more productive, more connected to each other, and to feel that sense of belonging. But we all know that’s bullshit. I mean, we have to all know that’s bullshit. The first time I got a job at a place that had a video game console and a pool table I inwardly thought, “If they see me playing either of these they’re going to think I’m slacking and I’ll be out the door.” And indeed I never saw anyone blowing off steam with a first-person shooter or talking about a project over a game of billiards. There is no stability in a workplace community. Loyalty is not incentivized, it is in fact a liability.

    Having been in queer, left-wing, activist, and religious spaces for much of my adult life, I often hear about the role these play in giving people a chosen family, a community to offer the belonging they couldn’t get at home. And yet even these communities, we know, are not guaranteed havens of belonging. Community of shared values and shared identity feels really wonderful, there can be profound connection and care, and I continue to marvel at all the ways people come together and support each other. And it can also feel quite precarious. One day, I feel completely on board with my friends’ beliefs. And then something happens, suddenly there’s a new polarization or a shift in attention, and before you know it, it seems like there has been a collective decision on what the right moral stance is today, and if you aren’t already on board it can feel like that belonging is at risk.

    Mostly this is true of Internet communities. When you have in-person relationships with people, when you share resources or take care of each other in tangible ways, it becomes a lot harder to discard people with different opinions. We tend to have a more natural inhibition not to get into black-or-white thinking to each other’s faces, but we sure go to all of our friends who agree with us to vent and wonder how we’re going to fix this problem. The phrase I’ve really grown to hate in these communities is “educate.” Like, “I’m going to educate you” or “Don’t make me educate you.” It’s such a power move to basically imply that the other person’s view is coming from ignorance rather than their own principled examination of the situation and arriving at a different conclusion. Then you’ve set yourself up as the beleaguered expert who has to educate and doesn’t have to listen.

    But these are all symptoms of the separation that already exists, not the cause. Those educators also have thoughtful perspectives and want to be understood and included in this culture. We’re all trying to create spaces of belonging for ourselves and protect against being exiled and harmed. The couple next to me on the plane had very different politics than I do, and I don’t know what they’d think of my personal life, but for a moment we could connect on a couple things—our shared citizenship of this country, our shared experiences of having lived in Indiana and spent time in Seattle, our shared experiences of being concerned about the future.

    All of these, per Harari, are fictitious mythologies that bind us together, and they’re the bedrock of civilization while having no substance whatsoever. Harari is quite dismissive of religion and imaginal communities except insofar as he sees their value in binding people together. But he seems to argue there’s really nothing better or worse between feminism and capitalism, christianity or neoliberalism, so long as enough people buy into the system and the armed gang running their lives. Harari is less of a prescriptivist and more a historian, more curious about how people did things than whether it was the moral thing for them to do.

    Reeves, on the other hand, might be considered one of those progressive elites excoriated by my plane companion’s book. Reeves both identifies how cultural and economic changes have disenfranchised men and considers what sociological, political, and economic projects need to be instituted to help men stay a part of the future. He argues that the brains of boys do develop differently from girls’, in ways less overblown than reactionary gender politics would have us see, but also more significantly than left-wing gender blindness would acknowledge. Boys’ well-documented lack of maturity relative to girls is less cultural than biological, he argues, and actually means that boys are doing increasingly worse in school because they cannot keep up with their more mature girl peers. He offers an ambitious, dare I say technocratic intervention to start boys in school a year later than girls, a discrimination that would engender more equality.

    What I appreciate most about Reeves’s argument is that he is addressing a hole in progressive politics that he identifies very explicitly: in our efforts to create greater equity, we look to systemic and sociological causes for inequality among marginalized and oppressive groups. We look at how economic and cultural conditions lead to criminality, for example, or how giving girls and women greater economic support and freedom decreases the need for abortions. We avoid blaming the individual and look more at the conditions that cause the behavior. But when it comes to men, they’re just blamed. They just need to do better and stop being toxic. Reeves tries to step back and ask, what if men are just as subject to sociological conditions, and what if we could intervene on a systemic level to change individual behavior?

    Putnam speaks to the golden age of American civic culture as being a product of such progressive technocratic innovations, though he is not wholly celebratory of these and acknowledges the skepticism many of us have of data-driven, top-down programs meant to change our behaviors. They’re the same programs that, per Harari, partner with markets to dislocate the individual from our traditional sources of meaning and belonging. The progressive goal may well be to free us from the need for tribal belonging, but as we’ve seen since most of these books were published, the instinct to return to tribe and deep belonging remains. We cannot legislate that out of existence. We cannot shame it out of existence. This instinct may well be the bond of collective care and meaning that we complain are missing from our individualistic modern lives.

    When I started reading these books, I thought it might be worth trying to write more responses like these, as a way of generating the all-important content and as a way of helping me engage. Writing is how I engage, digest, and process information. Obviously I think often about doom, loneliness, social disconnection, and culture change. What reading these books together has challenged in me is my nostalgia for an imagined history of hunter-gatherer tribalism or agricultural communalism. Whether the past was better or not, Harari makes a surprisingly persuasive case that it does not matter because it is now impossible to return to an earlier stage of development. All we can do is work with the spirit of the time as it is today, seeing both its gifts and its pains, and find ways to adapt.

  • Man vs. Bear

    Man vs. Bear

    Note: This was written with an audience of men in mind. Anyone is welcome to read it, but people who aren’t men might feel triggered by some of the content as it touches on themes of domination and violence, and has a compassionate tone that is sometimes triggering for people who have too often been compelled to set aside their own hurt and feelings and instead be compassionate toward men. If you are such a person, I am not asking you to do that, and I encourage you to take care of yourself.

    Once, I chased away a black bear. It was a bright dry day in the New Mexican mountains, a mixture of desert and pine, where I worked as a backpacking instructor for a Scouting camp. We taught participants to be meticulous in bear safety—never leave out anything unattended that might attract bears, and avoid getting involved with them. For staff, we were given the extra task—if you see a bear getting too close to your camp, chase it away.

    This was for the safety of both bear and human. Bears drawn to human encampments for food are naturally then more likely to have hostile encounters with humans. I’d heard stories of bears going into tents at night—I don’t know how true those were, but clearly that would be a problem. Bears that were too familiar, too drawn to humans, would therefore have to be put down by those monitoring the bear populations. 

    So it was a bright afternoon and I saw the black bear close to camp. I told my crew to stay together and ran toward the bear. It backed away several feet, but then it paused to look back at me, as though to see how committed I truly was. So I ran at it again, making my body big and shouting as I was taught, and the bear backed off several more feet, then paused. We did this three or four times before the bear finally wandered off, and I felt I’d done my due diligence.

    Few animals are interested in getting into an unnecessary fight. We have all kinds of signals to let potential predators and competitors know we’re going to be a problem for them if they keep encroaching on our territory. We can hiss, we can bare our claws and teeth, and we can do this kind of feinting aggression—a lot of creatures do it, appearing to aggress at you only to back off before making contact. It’s a way of negotiating space and making a contract. If we have to fight, we’re going to fight, but we’re both going to get hurt and many animals can’t afford unnecessary hurt. So they’re not going to actually fight unless they’re desperate, wounded, or you’re a threat to them or their young. You have to know what you’re dealing with, however—you can chase away a black bear, but doing that with a grizzly is going to get you into trouble.

    Chasing off a black bear is one of those stories I milked for a while. It was scary—I wasn’t sure if I would succeed or if I’d get in some bad trouble, but it felt amazing when the bear backed off and did what I hoped it would do. It felt so good to protect my crew, to keep the bear safe. There is so much pleasure in being a protector, especially when one is seen by others and feels their gratitude. So many men gravitate to this role, to this way of being valuable and of service to their community and loved ones, and take on so much hurt and damage in our efforts to protect. If we can feel in integrity and receive gratitude, it feels worth it. 

    But what about when we’re judged for our protectiveness? What about when we fail? What about when we’re told what we’re doing is unwelcome, though we still believe to our bones we need to keep them safe? What about when we’re told we’re not protectors, we’re actually harmers and abusers? That feeling is terrible. There is so much shame, and guilt, and resentment, and failure, that it’s almost inevitable we’d get defensive and bring everything we can to bear against that accusation. So many men don’t think of ourselves as the predator, we think of ourselves as the protector.


    When we are really young, all we really want is to belong, to be loved, to be safe, and to get to be ourselves. When our kid selves experience being hurt, cast out, ridiculed, humiliated, sometimes they hold onto the pain and shame of those experiences. To my mind, kids are just innocent, even when they’re acting like assholes. They need adults to love, protect, and understand them, and it is a sorrow of life how often even the most well-meaning adults are not able to do that to the extent kids need. 

    Those young needs stay with us all of our lives, along with the hurt and judgment those young parts take in when their needs go unmet. We are like trees who age by growing new rings around the old. All of those younger ages are still contained within the trunk, and when you look inside you can still see the wounds they suffered and how those affect the later growth of the tree. We grow new layers of safety and protection to hide, but not heal, those wounds, and those protections add much of the richness of life. They’re not intrinsically bad. They mean well. And they can be unbalanced, and cause harm. 

    Becoming a feminist, for me, was a ring I grew around a young part of me that saw the women in my life, whom I loved, being hurt by men. I felt their hurt so keenly that I wanted to protect them as much as I could. Yet I was actually much younger than them, and I needed protection itself, and no one knew this was happening and had the clarity to tell me it was not my responsibility.

    As a result, my continued growth took the shape of a person who feels much more protective of others than myself, much more concerned about their hurts and needs than my own. My story was, “I can handle anything, but I can’t believe they’d do that to you.” To my mind, it was noble to bear the suffering you would not allow for another person, so I developed the strange capacity to be able to speak up for others’ issues and problems with a lot of courage and yet remain terrified and anxious when it came to asking for something I needed. 

    This protectiveness was perhaps valuable, and yet it contained an inability to recognize the power and agency of those I decided to protect. In that protective state, I was unable to step back and ask—does this person want my protection? Are they asking me to speak on their behalf, or help them to advocate for themself? Are they truly confused and making bad choices, or are they dealing with their problems in a way that would totally make sense if I humbled myself enough to be curious? Do they even see this as a problem that needs protection? 

    When you get really fused with that way of being in the world, when you feel you are the protector and it’s all on you, then it’s easy to start to turn on the people you’re protecting. Here you are trying to keep them safe and somehow they just keep making the same stupid choices. They throw themself into the danger you just rescued them from. They seem ungrateful, ignorant, and heedless of your sacrifice. So then it starts to seem like a normal and comprehensible next step to start protecting them from themself—to control their movement, to limit their choices, to harangue and undermine them. And all the while, internally, you still feel that earnest desire to help. But from the outside view, your behavior is abusive.  

    When we’re really identified with our protector and we hear this—that others may see us as no different than the violent men we’d protect them from—it is devastating. Suddenly we feel all those little kid parts again who learned they were unworthy, they were embarrassing, they were unwanted. We are kids stuffed into adult suits. Emotionally we are acting as any kid would—wanting to be loved, wanting a hug, wanting reassurance and care, or pushing away what feels threatening and scary. But our little kids don’t know they’re in adult bodies, so they don’t realize those bodies have more power and impact. So they’re not pushing with the force of a toddler, but rather the force of a man.


    Being a man is the greatest risk factor for experiencing violence or homicide. Three in four homicide victims are male. Yet collectively we have not organized around that risk the way other targeted communities do. It’s possible this is in part because men are also most likely perpetrators of violence—almost 80% of murderers are male. Most of us grow up in worlds where the threat or experience of violence is normalized. 

    As a closeted gay kid, I thought I was uniquely attuned to this—once I heard my friends, guys my age, making comments about “bringing a baseball bat to prom” because an openly gay classmate was planning to go with his boyfriend. But now I think that threat of violence extended to all boys and men who fell out of the narrow and confusing lines of acceptable male behavior. So being gay was obviously gay, but sometimes recycling is gay, or wearing nail polish—unless you’re a mixed martial arts fighter. Even without violence, there is the threat of violence. 

    Protecting myself from violence is so ingrained in me that I almost forget how much I think about it. When walking alone at night through dark places, I’ve learned to walk with upright posture, open senses, hands out and ready to respond. I’ve avoid looking at my phone, wearing headphones, anything to suggest I’m inattentive to my surroundings. I walk like I know where I’m going because I know appearing lost and confused makes me a target for predation. This has been so much in my mind that the times I have been stolen from I usually blame myself before I feel angry at anyone else. It’s my own fault! I knew better than to leave my backpack in the backseat where anyone cold see it. I knew I should’ve taken that expensive headlight off my bike when I locked it outside.

    Confronting our own capacity for violence and relationship to force is a task I believe all men—really all humans—need to take on at some point in our lives, especially if we want to become powerful. Jordan Peterson, a Jungian-informed psychologist who offers guidance to young men and someone with whom I frequently and forcefully disagree, has said it thus: “[a man] should be a monster, and absolute monster, and then you should learn to control it.” When we disown our own violence, Peterson suggests, we may be naive and resentful of the ways others take advantage. Claiming and training our capacity for power and violence helps us to stand up for ourselves, set clear boundaries, and make moral choices. Instead of our capacity for violence leaking out in reactive ways—our little kids in adult suits lashing out—we know our power and use it on purpose.

    Peterson and I would wholeheartedly disagree about a number of things—he would want me imprisoned for supporting transgender people access medical care—but here he is speaking of what is broadly understood to be “shadow work” in Western spiritual communities, drawing upon Carl Jung’s insights into the shadow as the parts of us that get disowned. Until we can turn toward, witness, and accept our anger and capacity for violence and cruelty, we have no real control over it. We are either useless in our fear of power, or we act out our power covertly and avoid taking responsibility for the harm we cause. Doing this shadow work includes facing the guilt and shame we feel over our capacity for violence, and facing the impulse to avoid that guilt and shame through inflating ourselves with ego-flattering stories of being a hero and valorizing violence. 


    Once I was working at a community mental health agency with clients who were on probation, corrections supervision, or otherwise had criminal charges. I loved this work and the clients and rarely felt concerned for my own safety. Clients may have been frustrated and angry with me, and a couple made scary-sounding threats, but there was always a sense of a line between us that would never be crossed. 

    Except one time when someone did. It wasn’t my client but someone who’d been discharged and came in crisis. We sat down and I re-enrolled them in services and set them up with appointments to get care, but the client was very difficult to engage. He kept getting off-task or making weird inappropriate comments. At one moment, he leaned in, reached his hand out, and slapped me on the cheek. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt me, but it was enough to sting. It was a deliberate intrusion. It was a test.

    I leaned back and looked straight at him, soberly. “Do not touch me again.”

    He raised his pale hands in feigned shock, clearly making fun of me and pretending he was so surprised by my response. I decided we’d accomplished all we could that day and told him it was time to go. We stood to leave, but he disregarded my direction and walked the other way, toward a staff door.

    That’s when I felt scared, because I knew I was not in control of the situation. I had clients who had murdered people, and worst, but who respected my role and followed directions. This guy was unpredictable, clearly fed off my reactions, and I had no other moves. Fortunately another staff person was in that office, and together we guided the client to turn around and go out the clearly marked exit door, but I still had to go outside to give him his appointment card.

    I remember it was an overcast Seattle afternoon, not cold or rainy, but grim. I handed him the card, relieved he wasn’t my client, and told him the next steps with some distance between us. Then he raised his hand and punched toward me as a feint, stopping before it made contact. My body remained still and I held eye contact with him. Something in my sensed that he wasn’t going to hit me, but if I flinched then it would escalate him. I held my stance, and we both walked away safe that day.


    As a gay feminist, as a little kid growing up into an adult male suit, it didn’t really occur to me until my twenties that I might be part of the problem. I’d gone back to a high school friend’s wedding, feeling weird being around some of the jock guys I didn’t know in school. I’d viewed them suspiciously, as potential bullies and sources of violence, having not ever gotten the chance to get to know them and only going after my own fear, biases, and self-protection. I wanted to seem cool and together and not a loser anymore, but I was still making a mess out of my life and uncertain where to go with a career. But I ended up talking to some of those guys and started to really see that no one gave much of a shit about our old roles. They treated me like another guy, and it felt great.

    I said hello to a woman friend of mine from school who’d worn this beautiful dress that exposed her shoulders. I put both hands on her shoulders and squeezed them in a familiar way. Moments later, I had this thought—“Would I have touched her like that if she were a man?”

    The question hooked into my brain. What made me think that she wanted or appreciated that kind of touch? What did it mean that I would touch a woman in a friendly way that I’d never consider doing with a man? The only times I touched men were awkward hugs or sex. Friendly touch was not yet in my vocabulary of social connection. Mostly parts of me feared that a man would respond to that kind of touch with violence.

    I started to realize I was walking through the world in an adult white man suit, and from the outside a stranger would experience me with the protections of mistrust and caution through which I viewed most men. Casual touch could no longer be innocent and thoughtless, it needed to happen in a relationship of consent and care. Years and years later, in my martial arts community, I now have male friends who do share that kind of friendly touch. It was strange and confusing to me at first, but completely straight men seem totally okay giving and receiving affectionate touches on the shoulder, rubbing each other’s backs, and hugs. Perhaps it’s because we’re facing the monsters within and now we have nothing to prove.


    If we could sit together, and you were having your feelings that a woman would rather be in the woods with a bear than with a strange man, I would want to tell you I completely get it. I get how sincere is the desire to be a protector, how much we long to celebrate our good intentions, and how painful it is to be cast as a villain even if only by association. I get how those little kids inside of us only want to love and be loved and how painful it is to feel like we’re never enough, we’re never doing enough, or that we’re intrinsically monstrous. 

    I want us all to look in the mirror and invite every part of us to see the adult men we’ve become. I want those scared little kids to see that they now have an adult—they have you—whose job it is is to love and care for them, keep them safe, and help them find the places where they can belong and be loved. I want those wonderful fighters and fixers and figuring-out parts of us to see the strength and power of your body and mind, to cultivate those powers if it’s their will, and to know it’s not their job to fix the entire world. I want all of those parts to know it’s safe to allow others in your life to struggle, to make choices, to have feelings and opinions you dislike, but it’s not your job to make them different any more than it’s their job to make you different. 

    I want that permission to be okay exactly as you are, and to allow others to be okay as they are, to let you let yourself off the hook, so you can really listen to all the parts of you and make the choices that are right for the whole team. So you can know your heart and your own good intentions and you don’t have to change or fix the reality that some people will think you’re scary at first, or may be guarded around you because of your body. Letting their experiences be, without making yourself wrong, without making them wrong, is what allows them to trust you. Knowing you are capable of violence and not doing it is what makes you safe. 

  • Variation on a Theme by Marianne Williamson

    Variation on a Theme by Marianne Williamson

    “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

    ― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”

    Our deepest fear is not that we are powerful beyond measure. Our deepest fear is that we are solely burdened with the responsibility to make life work. It is the endless feeling of inadequacy, of not doing enough, of failing in some core way to be big and bright and bold enough that frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘When is it enough? What is wrong with a quiet walk and hours spent admiring the variations of bark on a tree, its subtle colorations and textures?’ Actually, who told you that accomplishment was your purpose on earth? You are God experiencing herself in the fullness of her being, through your unique body. Your suffocating your soul for the sake of money or attention, reputation or influence does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about constantly striving to be brighter than your neighbor, to be an influencer, to feign superiority of knowledge or insight over someone whose life you could never understand. We are all meant to be kindred, each fulfilling our unique niche in the ecosystem of life. We were born to delight in the body of God who is our mother and the ground of our being. We alone are not meant to save the world; it is everyone’s job to do our little part. And as we let go of the need to dominate at all costs, we stop suffocating everyone else and allow them to breathe for once. As we stop demonizing our fear and accept it as one of many beautiful sensations keeping us vital on this beautiful world, our presence invites the presence of others.

  • Running toward and away from connection.

    When I think of belonging, it is like two dogs tied together wanting to run in opposite directions. One dog wants so desperately to belong to a pack it would run toward whatever looks welcoming. The other is so suspicious of groups that it mistrusts and wants to flee anyone whose agenda seems suspect—and to this dog, most agendas are suspect. Yet in running away from each other, the tether binding them both ties tight, and they falter in their missions, and they turn and attack each other in their longings to be free to seek what they desire.

    Two little dogs jumping on each other, both leashed to the same human.

    In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben talks about the difference between trees deeply rooted in an established forest versus the “city kids.” In the forest, the trees connect with each other through root, leaf, and an extensive mycelial network that helps them to know about the other trees. Trees rich in resources can send nutrients and support to those having a rougher season. But urban trees are unsupported and unconstrained. They grow too quickly and die sooner. They cannot help each other because their roots do not connect.

    One of the manifestations of the war of belonging within me was intense anxiety and social pressure. When interacting with people I didn’t know, I was afraid to take any risks because I didn’t know the rules and expectations. I was afraid of alienating them by crossing a line I didn’t know about, so I learned to be quiet and fade into the background until I had a sense of the culture. If people were too warm, I backed away. When making small-talk, I would shut down and get overwhelmed with self-critique about how stupid I sounded, or how I didn’t know what next to say.

    The isolation of COVID enacted a strange alchemy. One thing I learned was how much I needed human connection, though I deeply enjoy my alone time. When I re-emerged into making small talk with other people, I realized it was so much easier than I’d thought. All you do is talk about stuff. If they’re not interested in that stuff you talk about other stuff. It doesn’t even matter what stuff you talk about because the whole point is just to connect and build rapport. I thought I had to be interesting, or witty, or profound, and that made it much harder to connect and probably pushed people away who read my hesitation as aloofness rather than a desperate desire to figure out how to connect.

    The other side of that, was realizing that when I felt the conversation was boring or foundering, it wasn’t all on me. That’s a two way problem. The other person isn’t showing up with presence or authenticity. They’re not investing energy into the connection, perhaps mirroring the lack of energy on my side, or perhaps for other reasons. I you take the risk to be honest and connect, and they choose to hide and obfuscate, there’s not much else you can do about them. The real question becomes how much you want to invest in this connection.

    Along with this liberating new perspective on small-talk came the extension toward belonging. What if I just belonged because I’m here? What if belonging wasn’t something to run toward or away from but something just to be in and cultivate in the connections that really work for me?

    Focusing on those connections has been deeply restorative and important, and after a time I find myself ready to expand again. I start to see that when you only surround yourself with people who validate and love you, the rest of the world looks really scary. That begins to have diminishing returns. We lose some of our hardiness and practice in the face of adversity. Supportive relationships should feel like a safe harbor that will always be there to welcome us as we return from our adventures, to regroup and relax. But if we never leave, it starts to feel stale. We perhaps begin to find little faults in the harbor or fixate on the little moments of invalidation and unsafety that are inevitable in human communication.

    But that’s what belonging brings us. A harbor. A safety net. A crew that has our back. A place we can tend and nurture, and a place from which we can launch and return. And it’s made of these little moments of connecting, of feeling our ruptures and risking reconnection, or finding the people and places safe enough for us to risk vulnerability. For so long I thought community was something that had to be made through laborious work with just the right people, just the right rules, the right shared values. But rules and work are the head. Connection comes from the heart. The most perfect guidelines and group agreements fail when the heart is not engaged. It’s worth, for a time, dropping the expectations and finding how the heart wants to connect today.

  • Words get in the way.

    Words get in the way.

    Before the pandemic, I had my first ritual psychedelic experiences in a shared, facilitated space. That first experience was intriguing—I had the sense of being a larger spiritual consciousness that was aware of it temporarily living the body and life of this human being. In that sense of expansion, I felt a sense of how much experience there is in experience, how much sensation and information there is in every moment. And a sense that the words I spoke to try to communicate it felt wholly inadequate to the task. There were these thoughts that felt incredibly profound and beautiful but when I tried to write them down, I was disappointed. The words were nothing like the thoughts.

    Since then, I’ve felt disenchanted with language, which is a hard problem for someone who loves reading and writing. In my younger days, language had a talismanic, magical power. A beautifully written poem or song lyric seemed to resonate with its own spirit. I’d post them where I could see every day, quoted them on my embarrassing personal blogs, and held them up as these incredibly beautiful pieces of magic.

    Occasionally there is a piece of writing that strikes me with that beauty, but so much of the content that I read every day begins to blur into this meaningless Orwellian duckspeak, or obfuscating rhetoric. It is the fate of every revolutionary concept to be laden with more and more meanings and used beyond the bounds of its original formulation, until it comes to represent everything and nothing. One can almost predict the litany of words a writer is about to apply as though they are self-explanatory.

    Once I was talking to a friend about a problem I was having, and I started with, “I know I’m privileged, but—” and the friend, who was less privileged, stopped me. “You know you don’t have to say that.” And I wondered why I felt like I did. I joked, “I feel like it’s a ward against cancellation.” The more I thought about it, the more true it felt. It didn’t add to the conversation or change my privilege in a meaningful way, it felt like a superstitious act, like picking up a penny.

    When I started working as a therapist, I was in trainings where we were encouraged not to use psychological jargon in our practice and whenever possible to use the client voice in our notes. The thought was, however you the client speaks about your problems has far more use and aliveness than our clinical language. Yet these days clinical jargon has become so popularized that my clients use it more than I do in a session.

    When the clinical concepts give them a us to hold our struggles at a distance and look at them, it’s useful. What becomes unuseful is when our language compresses a wealth of information and feeling within one or two keywords that we assume all of us understand in the same way, when we do not. Sometimes the clinical language becomes our way of trying to race over treacherous ground. If we had to stop and really talk about what was happening and how we feel about it, we’d be overwhelmed.

    As a therapist, I often stop my clients and ask them to do slow down and walk through the treacherous ground. When they label someone in their life a narcissist, I want them to explain to me what that means to them—not because I don’t believe them. Often, when I hear the story, I agree. But because it’s the story that connects us. Your efforts to put your experience into your own words is what brings suffering out of the undifferentiated mass of pain into something we can see and heal.

    On an aesthetic level, I do not like most clinical language and jargon. I do not like a lot of the words we’ve turned into identities because they are Latinate and carry an aura of authority. I do not like encoding our pain and heartbreak within the language of science and psychiatry. To me this trend seems part of the ongoing struggle of the analytical mind to tame and dominate the wild vitality of the sensuous soul. I want them to partner with each other and support each other in being.

    I use diagnoses, because I must, because that is my training and the tradition in which I practice, and because that is the prevailing norm of our healthcare system. But a diagnosis does not heal. It is the foam on the surface of the ocean. Healing draws us deeper into the dark ocean, to know the unspeakable velocities of emotion, and to come back with new words for old stories, words that may transform our worst pains into a source of vitality and strength.

  • The work is never finished and cannot be ignored.

    You see litter on the ground. One day, you get it together to be part of the solution—to pick a part of the ground to monitor, gather all the scraps that do not belong to the land, and put them in the trash.

    It feels good to see the ground cleared of garbage, to participate in making things better for your cousins—the trees, animals, bacteria, fungi.

    Then, later, there’s garbage again. It’s sad and upsetting. All your work undone by other people’s actions.

    So you pick up more. Maybe you start bringing trash bags with you wherever you go. But the more litter you pick up, the more you see. You’ve trained yourself to pay attention to the world in a way that the litterers do not. You can’t help but notice it and feel responsible for cleaning it up.

    The good feeling becomes overwhelmed by resentment and anger. How exhausting is it to keep doing this work that is never done. Perhaps there’s rage at the insensitive idiots who keep throwing their shit on the ground and do not care about the greater world. Perhaps there’s a sense of martyrdom of why do you have to be the one always picking up other people’s garbage?

    So maybe at some point you stop. You become numb for a while. Really it’s unfair to expect one person to do all this work. It’s a collective problem and there should be collective solutions. Perhaps you yell at people who litter, hoping they’ll take responsibility for once. Perhaps you petition for more cleanup workers. Perhaps you completely give up and stop giving a shit, throwing your own litter here and there.

    The distance is soothing, but too much. You’ve lost that feeling of participation. It’s all someone else’s problem now, but you’re still living in it. You still see the garbage and that the trees, the animals, the bacteria and the fungi cannot gather it themselves. In fact, it’s killing many of them.

    How to live in a world with a caring heart when your own work will never be enough? How to participate in restoring problems you didn’t create? Is it enough to pick up only your own trash? To do an hour in your neighborhood once a week? Once a month? To organize a crew?

    Perhaps picking up trash isn’t your passion, simply a feeling of responsibility. There are things you’d rather be doing but it feels like you can never prioritize them because there is so much litter and so few people stepping up. Perhaps you grow to resent even your cousins the trees, the animals, the fungi and the bacteria for being so vulnerable and needing so much care.

    There are so many big questions. Cynicism covers over the deep well of caring that made you look at this in the first place. You may feel despairing and trapped. You cannot escape this dilemma of caring about an issue you cannot solve.

    Perhaps there are well-meaning people who tell you that this dilemma is “meant” to do something, like soften your heart, or teach you a cosmic lesson. Perhaps this gives you some solace, or perhaps it further outrages you, because in what universe is destroying the environment to teach one person a lesson in patience something that makes any sense?

    And yet there is no escape. Destroying yourself to save the environment offers no escape. Numbing yourself in complete disconnection is no escape. You are embedded in this world.

    You go back to picking up litter when you find it, when you can, when you’re prepared. It’s not enough. It’s what you can do.

    Image of a woman in a medical mask by a body of water with a trash bag.
  • The Pearl Pentacle and Relationships

    If you have no idea what the Iron or Pearl Pentacles are, you might want to skip this chapter or buy my book Circling the Star .

    It is said that the work of the Iron Pentacle is the work of a lifetime, while the work of the Pearl Pentacle is the work of many lifetimes. There are so many pathways one could explore with this statement. We could speak of the polishing of souls over multiple incarnations. We could speak of the long-term evolution of culture.

    What calls me the most is an interpretation that we are speaking of relationships. Pearl energy is not a solitary pursuit, but one that emerges in connection with others. With Iron, we draw upon the hot, passionate energy of our “animal” nature and differentiate its energy into five qualities, naming them, giving them form, opening communication between our conscious and unconscious selves. What we might consider “base” becomes elevated, suffused with the energy of our divine self, and a quality through which we can express our whole being.

    It’s such a beautiful transformation. When treated as undignified, “primitive,” or otherwise as objects of disgust, these qualities are ones we tend to simultaneously suppress and become obsessed with—power, sex, pride, passion, and our sense of self. Once named, explored, and claimed, they become energies we can cultivate and use with ever-increasing skill. The intensity of repression or obsession ebbs.

    Before getting to Pearl, a further quick aside on this. Recently I was spending time with a friend’s children and got to see a nighttime ritual that astounded me. They keep a tin of miscellaneous sweets and every night their oldest is allowed their choice of one of those sweets. I was put in charge of administering this sweet and the young one asked me to pour them all out so they could look at their options.

    If it were me, I would’ve taken three. If I were that kid, I would’ve tried to con the adult into saying it’s okay.

    Instead, this kid looked, chose one, and said thank you. I put all the rest of the sweets back. End of story.

    My complex, which this kid does not have, is that my craving for candies is split by shame and self-judgment. One part of me says sweets are bad and I’m unhealthy for wanting them. Another one wants them so much, and sneaks as many as it can get away with, because there’s a polarization in me between indulgence and restraint.

    This kid, though, has had it modeled that it’s totally okay to enjoy a sweet, and there will be more. So they don’t have hangups about it. They have the one they want, and they know they’ll have more later. My complex says either I should deny myself completely, or I should have a bunch because I’m at risk of denying myself.

    This is the kind of splitting that the Iron Pentacle starts to heal within us around these qualities. Because we have so much shame, judgment, and competition, most of us have some kind of similar splitting around at least one of these things, and culturally we see all kinds of polarizations between whether sex is good or evil, whether power is righteous or immoral, whether passion is the only thing that matters or a dangerous abyss, whether the self is the most important thing in the world or something to be annihilated, or whether we must have pride because “either you’re on top or you’re on the bottom” or we must abase ourselves because “pride goeth before a fall.”

    Two people holding hands, with a tree between them.

    Coming into right relationship with ourselves, and being in relationship to others doing this work, allows those Pearlescent qualities of love, law, knowledge, wisdom, and liberty to emerge in affirming ways. When we cease to be at war with ourselves, we learn how we can be in connection without coercion.

    We learn what love is when we feel it toward another, or we experience it from another. And some of us cannot tolerate the intimacy of being loved by another until we have taken the time to build the capacity for love within ourselves. And some of us cannot know what is lovable within ourselves until we see ourselves through the perspective of someone we love. Don’t get hung up on arguing about the reductive meme statements. Loving and being loved is mutual, and we can grow in either capacity, and growing in one gives us more opportunities to grow in the other.

    While in Love I open my heart to those in my life, I do not look to them as the only source of energy, passion, and connection. If they need to step away, I can know I’ll be okay and don’t need to chase them in terror. If they come at me with big energy, I know my own relationship to my self and my power so I do not need to run away, but I could have a firm boundary.

    The agreements of our relationship emerge as their own kind of Law. Rather than following some prescribed model of what relationship is supposed to look like, we can negotiate our needs between us and find what works for us. For some, that could mean a deeply intertwined life with shared home and a shared business. For others, that could mean a very spacious relationship in which there are multiple partners or living in different cities without a need to move in together.

    These Laws reflect our actual emotional needs and likely vary from relationship to relationship. I have friends who I know to be consistently late to things and I’ve accepted that as something not personal that I can use in planning our time together. In other relationships, I experience lateness as a sign of disrespect and lacking care for my time or energy. This may seem inconsistent but these reactions emerge from the larger context of relationship—how communicative does this person tend to be? Do I feel respected in other ways or is this detail a sign of a larger pattern of disrespect? From one friend, I can allow grace without feeling compromised, but from another friend I might feel consistently compromised and realize this is one place where I need to draw a boundary and insist on timeliness.

    This Law takes Liberty for granted, that I neither wish to control nor be controlled by the people in my life, but to be connected we need to have shared understandings. We need to have a common center and container in our relationship because too much Liberty is a centripetal force that spins us away from each other, but our shared Laws keep us connected. Making agreements from a place of self-knowledge, mutual love, and valuing our respective freedoms also helps mitigate resentments—resentment is a sign that something needs to be renegotiated.

    That’s the Wisdom that emerges from this state of being. Instead of seeing emotions and ambivalence as flaws to be corrected, we can use them to guide our actions wisely. Knowing that agreeing to something will bring up resentment, and resentment is a relationship killer, helps me to be clearer when I need to say no or see if there’s another option.

    Knowledge, too, compliments Wisdom in the engagement of our higher faculties of reason and contemplation to gain more precise and nuanced definitions of reality and relationship. Knowledge offers new possibilities for action and relationship that were not available before. If I’ve never experienced another country, I might think my life is normal and all there is. When I know things can be different, then I have choices. I have room for negotiation.

    None of these qualities of Pearl remain stable if they are purely emerging from the individual. I can know myself intimately but still founder in relationships where the other person is unknown unto themselves or unable to tolerate honesty, intimacy, and clear communication.

    Abuse, deception, manipulation without clear boundaries that protect our Iron energy makes it impossible and perhaps even unwise to keep hold that Pearl energy. What kind of Law is tenable when one person will always do what keeps them in power and refuse accountability? What kind of Liberty can we have when others in our lives require us to be small and meek in the face of their unchecked anger?

    Only the Liberty of cutting those chains and getting free, and that’s often easier said than done. Better to go back to our Iron, cultivating strength and the knowing we deserve better, and find our way back to Power.

  • On Changing Your Attitude

    On Changing Your Attitude

    Recently I was working with a person who has a habitual reaction to stress that isn’t working for them, and they expressed a longing to be able to change their attitude, but since they could never “feel” that different attitude, they doubted their capacity to change.

    But I think there is a false expectation there. When you commit to a change in attitude, you are probably not going to “feel” any different for a while. It is more like putting on a different mask at first. You might wake up as cranky, sore, and easily irritated as you did yesterday. But if you have resolved to meet this day with an attitude of patience or courage, then you will practice holding those experiences differently than you did yesterday when you flailed and complained.

    But isn’t that being inauthentic?

    Here is one of those confusing paradoxes of a therapist’s perspective. Because it is important that we can honor and respect our own feelings, to know and name and care for them. At times, being willing to vulnerably share these feelings in relationship is deeply authentic and connecting.

    And it is one of the powers of maturity to know how to deliberately put on a mask appropriate to our circumstances. There are numerous times when expressing every thought or feeling that passes through us, immediately and without reflection, hurts us and the people around us.

    To practice taking on a new involves recognizing and holding inner spaciousness for my difficult experiences, but also engaging will to behave as though I am a person with this attitude. I may feel frustrated, but I am going to behave like a loving, patient, considerate person. And if I find I’ve fallen back into old habits, I’ll catch myself and try on the attitude again.

    This discipline may actually make us more authentic people. Our old habits may themselves obstacles to the expression of authentic inner qualities. How often do we reflect on things we’ve said or done with shame, guilt, or regret? How often do we realize we didn’t really mean what we said, or we were unfair to the people in our lives, or we acted in ways that made us look bad when we weren’t the problem?

    The key is that taking on a new attitude is a choice, a practice, an act of will, and not a way I am trying to lie to myself and others. I don’t have to say, “I don’t feel bad at all! I’m not grumpy! My life is great!”

    I can feel completely grumpy and frustrated and still remember that I am practicing an attitude of gratefulness today. Then the work is to find anything I can offer some gratitude toward, no matter how small. Like I can be grateful to be warm, or to have a place to sleep, or to have clean running water.

    This friction makes it an actual exercise that grows us. Like any kind of exercise, it is challenging, it takes effort, and parts of us want to resist the work and go back to the movements that were comfortable and easy. It is useful to be a little uncomfortable and feel the effort of this. It’s not useful to be ignoring, pushing past, or denying any pain you’re causing to yourself.

    The authentic self is not every thought, feeling, and reaction that comes up in the moment. Neither is it some hidden nugget of gold buried beneath all of our protections and social conditioning.

    All of these things, together, are our authenticity. That is the mystery. When we can allow all of them to be known, named, and participate, that is the alchemical process that turns our lead into gold.