we out here being and becoming ☯

& breathing!

Rendering by Scott Turek

Two weeks ago, I started a new gig and it’s been fairly all-encompassing. Still, since my writers retreat, I’ve felt prolific in poetics, and I’ve been sneaking 30-minutes here and there to word-vomit.

This weekend, I’m heading to my first ever burn—I’m nervous, I’m giddy, but mostly, I’m open to come-what-may.

In all my life happenings lately, there has been one through-thread. I’ve begun to confront my complicity in our system (“little miss anti-capitalism venture capitalist”) in parallel with the dawning reality that the dream I had for my life was both 1. at its threadbare, very much a capitalism-fueled dream of consumption, of materialism, of belongings over belonging, and 2. it isn’t going to come true.

The reality is, I have everything I’ve ever wanted, I have more than I need, and—as Tom had the audacity to point out—I still want more. The motivation behind this wanting is inscrutable to me. It’s not one thing—it’s sampling from a bit of everything: keeping up with the Joneses, a sense of security and safety that I didn’t have for much of my life, the freedom and the optionality that money buys, the future I want to give my family.

Growth has become an essentially capitalist concept. Companies, especially tech companies, practice a religion of optimization. People do too. What are we doing if we’re not getting “better”? There’s a pervasive fear of standing still, a conflation of standing still with stagnation. Stillness reminds us that we are mortal, ephemeral, waning with every breath. Stillness, I think, reminds us too much of death.

I wonder, though, if stillness is what we are all meant to arrive at. Isn’t that what mindfulness and meditation are in service of? There is no peace in the forward march or the ladder climb, in all this steadfast striving. No matter how far you get, there will always be further to go.

Maybe, instead of growing, we should be being and becoming—and remembering to breathe.

I had the fortunate misfortune to find my person in someone who has never valued money—or who has only valued it in terms of the experiences it can afford him. He dreams of big waves and big walls, not modern appliances atop granite countertops atop cherry hardwood flooring. The truth is, he dreams bigger than I do—or at least differently, and, for three years now, he’s been showing me a new way to dream. And I’m beginning to see—to move through knowing to understanding. His patience makes me weak (this is an homage to a line from a darling that I’ve killed).

Tom and I (and John and Diana) have talked about what it might look like to unyoke ourselves from capitalism. We’ve talked about moving out of the states, to live in forests or on communal farms, to nurture our own homestead, to remind ourselves that humans are only one part of the ecosystem, that we are only one speck in a universe that goes on. The possibilities always end in a question mark. We’re searching for an alternate reality that doesn’t currently exist—or at least, we aren’t aware of, or able to access, it. It’s the perfect moment to find myself at Burning Man. When I get back, I might be a different person. Maybe my politics will be somehow consistent, my philosophies finally sound. Or, maybe not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯