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Before I kick off #Nomadology for today, I just wanted to mention something that happened to me yesterday that both moved me and made me reconsider a decision.
I was doing a podcast interview with a guy who’d come down from Edinburgh — the conversation was great, but I’ll let you find out about it through sharing his link, when it goes live — and he said something that really made me think. He’d read “Lifehouse,” carefully, and said something to the effect of: this seems so obviously founded in
a Taoist or Buddhist value frame, but you don’t speak about that overtly — why is that? And I had to think about that for a little bit, because of course he’s absolutely correct to have picked up on that.
My first answer was simply to point him at the very first thing it says in the Tao te Ching: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” I don’t like to talk about it because doing so is in some way to miss the point. Either it shows up in our practice and our conduct, or it...isn’t.
But that’s a little unsatisfactory. After all, whether or not there was a historical person Lao Tzu, who set out to record his thoughts on bamboo leaves one fine day in the spring of the year 317 BC, clearly *some*one or -ones at some point thought it was worthwhile to record this coherent body of thought as just that, without undue mystification. And thank god they did so, right? If he or she or they could bear the conceptual shear involved in reducing the Tao so it could be communicated,
well then, so can I. And so I decided my interlocutor was right — that I probably *should* be more overt about the source of the values that drive my own theory and practice of anarchism, such as it is. You can expect to see more of that showing up in the writing.
But more than that, it made me want to dust off the idea I’d had about a Liberation Studies Collective: a group practice of silent meditation, specifically for people with emancipatory politics (understood as you will).
In the interview I’d mentioned what an honor and a privilege and a pleasure it was to sit with John P. Clark and his anarcho-Buddhist sangha, when I was through New Orleans last spring on my Lifehouse tour, and how that experience reminded me of the importance of that kind of deeply restorative collective action.
So: a show of hands, please, as to whether you’d be interested in joining a weekly, hourlong online call, with check-ins, 30-40 minutes of silent meditation and some readings.
@adamgreenfield YES PLEASE ... I had been doing something similar and wanting to revive it but haven't had the bandwidth to bottom-line.
And let me know, if you would, what timezone you’re in, and if there’s a day of the week that would be more convenient than the Sunday I’d otherwise tend to default to.
I really want to pick this idea up, because I get the idea that a regular Liberation Studies Collective practice is *exactly* the missing piece in our praxis of perseverance. It feels like a way we can restore ourselves to ourselves, if what we want is to retain the capacity to act wisely, decisively and completely,
and forge an enduring capacity to care for ourselves and one another amidst everything that’s unfolding in our moment.
With my whole heart, then: I invite you to join the Liberation Studies Collective, a networked sangha dedicated to the emancipation of all sentient beings, and hope to see you in a meeting as soon as we can agree on the most appropriate timeslot. 👊
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