Postures of Leadership
“We are each other's business.
We are each other's harvest. We are each other's magnitude and bond.”
~ Gwendolyn Brook
Last week I drove to Trenton to attend to some lingering paperwork to support the legal death of my mother. It’s been three and half years, and each time the Greek Government asks for more, a wound is re-opened, and I am forced to return to feelings that feel isolated, uncertain and without power.
Still, with my dad home from a close call with AFIB, something inside tugged and even pushed me out the door with nothing more than a valid ID, an address and a vague idea about what would greet me when I arrived.
Well, it was nothing like I had imagined.
Instead of a stately, grand, green, greeting, I entered a concrete jungle, a maze of parking confusion and inefficiencies, and a system that, frankly, didn’t serve me nor the inhabitants that proliferated its vacant streets - the homeless and addicted, stumbling or bent over in a zombie like pose whose suffering offered a terrifying yet reflective revelation:
In our zeal to be right - in the proclamation to be free - we have lost contact with the reality of our beliefs — that they no longer travel upright when we make someone else wrong ; and this has caused us to anchor justice in the behaviors that deprive us, and our brothers and sisters, of our dignity.
We live in a world of US and THEM without mercy.
It was like our local planning board meeting recently, where town residents gathered to oppose a variance to bifurcate a property that would inevitably create density and flooding in an historical neighborhood.
The developers - THEM - came in a patchwork quilt design void of any relationship with the property, and with an ill prepared planner promulgating codes like cults manipulating scriptures … editing them for the purpose of attaining the goal - to manifest their destiny; while the lawyer bullied his way through his demand that, having met the burden of the variances, the consideration to the residents is automatically met.
It was a testament to the wisdom of first hand experience and the lackluster ethics of developers using the need for housing to justify their means. And, reminds us to stop following ideas and putting models of growth or plans of conservation above the foundations that support the fundamental rights of humanity.
Because, designs without conscience, invite more authoritarian views that ask us to give up our civil liberties.
This is what and how I felt encircling this city. I was, on the fringe of my surreality seeking a place to rest my car so I could certify my birth. Instead, I was face-to-face with the isolation of a system fueled by ideologies gripping goals, but which take no responsibility for the failure of lack of humanity along the way. I felt helpless and started to cry.
What I witnessed (that I have not witnessed in the many impoverished places I have encountered around the world) is not the poverty of my parents - post Greek Civil War rural poverty. That poverty was met with a spacious solidarity, as villages huddled together to share their reserves, and, even, in some cases, the overflow of children. As barbaric as that sounds to my contemporary sense, when I put down the judgment of “that”, I can see it as an act of love.
I am not attempting to glamorize any suffering, only to point out that this poverty in our State Capital is a reflection of our inability to thrive - of a responsibility or conscience that leaves us with only one possibility: a world aligned and judged by the very ideas that created it.
It is a pendulum of action and reaction that keeps us suspended in the momentary high of being above and right, only to be catapulted through the low into another high of appearing wrong. Once we buy in, we are part of the pendulum and the crux of the problem.
However, if we were to stay clear from gripping to either, we might become leaders ready to stand up for each other; and then compassion might fill us, and we might see ourselves in the collapsed pose of these injured and unseen souls - see the outward addiction of ideas justifying violence and consumption without mercy that have degraded the human spirit and enslaved the body - robbed individuals of being in healthy relationships, and which have dissolved the boundaries that support overall well-being.
And, though addiction may be more recognizable in the face of the poor or those struggling outside the purview of this reader - THEM - it is less apparent in the collapsed moral codes of those in power who are addicted to wealth and fame (political, corporate, religious, and institutional leaders who are engaging in the politics that further the ideas that push US farther apart).
It is even harder to see our own collapsed state of submission and consumption when we make choices that are not seated or postured in ways that reveal truth or deceit.
These moments are vital -- so important to our growth, to the corrections and misunderstandings that may feel painful when we attempt to stretch out and unfold the meaning behind the beliefs we thought were true.
This is why we must attend to and be vigilant about "who" and "what" we follow and "where" we will inevitably be led because,
whom we choose to follow reflects onto our Soul and leaves footprints on other Souls - veils the Self, and hides from us our potential, and, therefore, from the potential of the world.