Nouns and Verbs

I practice Zen meditation, but I’m not a Buddhist.

 

I vote Democratic, but I’m not a Democrat.

 

I resonate with the basic teachings of Jesus Christ, but I’m as far from today’s American incarnations of “Christians” as it’s possible to be. 

 

I teach via the Orff approach to music education, but even here I’m not tied down to the label of “Orff teacher.”

 

In short, I refuse to be identified with an “ism” or “ology,” bound by their dogma and discouraged to pursue independent thought or trust my own intuition and experience. That gives me a freedom that people bound to ideologies or religions or identities don’t have. If it works, if it brings happiness to me and others, if it makes sense, I’ll follow it until it doesn’t anymore. I don’t need a priest or political leader or expert to approve my decisions. I’ve learned to trust my inner voice of what feels right and when it sometimes leads me into edgy territory, I’m not ashamed to backtrack and go another way. 

 

When the verbs of human thought solidify to the nouns of human identity, things go bad. The rigidity of the entire edifice of my way/ your way, the true God/ the false God, the right way/ the wrong way, creates so much havoc and discord, both inside our own psyche and in our relations with others. 

 

In the old fairy tales, (Faithful John one example), some characters are frozen solid, the flowing water of their moving and changing selves stopped cold into the un-meltable ice of an immobile fixed self. They can neither move forward nor back and are forever stuck in the statue of one moment in their previous living self. 

 

Last night, the Democratic Party had a glorious and needed victory in several elections around the country. It’s a vital and necessary step towards restoring Democracy and yes, there are right and wrong ways to creating communities devoted to fairness, equity, justice, helping and healing practices, and Democracy over Fascism is a principle I stand by. But the ultimate healing does not come from Democrats roundly defeating Republicans, but from elected officials using their parties as ways to organize their values and thoughts while being open to other values and thoughts hashed out in sincere conversations. In short, anyone is Congress should not be pledging allegiance to their Party Line, but to their mutual concern to serve the people of their shared country and defend the Constitution. In a healthy system, votes on any particular issue should be mixed between the parties, based on solid information and independent thought. We are so far from that. 

 

Likewise, all religions should consider that they simply have different names for spiritual powers they equally recognize. That any written summaries of beliefs are human-created and fallible, and that first-hand experience of Spirit should be trusted over second-hand dogmas in the confusing and contradictory testaments of Bibles and Korans and Sutras. 

In short, we may temporarily identify with certain systems of thoughts and beliefs, but things are so much healthier if it’s a light affiliation subject to doubt, questioning, consideration of other ways and an unshakeable faith in our own experience not to be dictated by those people or belief systems that demand our blind obedience. Only then can all the petrified characters in the fairy tale be set free. 

 

Kafka said, “A book should be an ax to unthaw the frozen sea within us.” Let’s get to work unthawing the petrified nouns of our allegiances and start the verbs of conversation, thought and experience flowing again.