One of the big binary polarities in the United States is the two-party system. You might think it was in the Constitution, but it isn’t. The political system evolved early into the Federalist (strong central government) and the Democrat-Republican (small and decentralized government) parties. Others have arisen, but unlike most other democracies, we seldom see any sign of an effective third party. Their official names are Republican and Democratic, but their identity labels are conservative and liberal. I freely acknowledge that I vote Democratic most of the time, but it is far from fully reflecting my values and priorities.
I am a civil libertarian, wanting to protect the rights we have under the Constitution, like free speech and due process and the right to bear muskets. And especially the right of women to control their own bodies. Neither embryos nor corporations embody the defining characteristic of a human being, which comes from being born of a woman. I do send money to the ACLU, but it isn’t a political party.
I am a fiscal conservative. I believe that we should decide what we want the government to provide and raise enough revenue (on average, allowing for recessions and expansions) to pay for it. Neither of the two major parties qualifies as a hospitable environment for a fiscal conservative. Democrats create too many entitlements with built in growth when they are in charge, and Republicans never met a tax they couldn’t cut, especially if it falls more on the wealthy.
I am a social progressive, believing in diversity and inclusion and respect, which come from my faith tradition but are essential ways to live together in peace in a nation of immigrants. Democrats do get some points there. Protecting voting rights and money in politics are two of my big issues as a social progressive. I may not vote the same way you do but I will go to the wall to protect your rights.
I am an economic populist, believing in strong unions as a counterweight to corporations, a more equitable distribution of income and wealth, and adequate basic public services like health care, education and transportation to give more people access and opportunity. Both parties claim to be “for the working people,” but when the chips are down, they depend on big corporate donors to finance their campaigns. I also believe in protective regulation to save us from the destructive behavior of large corporations who subscribe the belief that, as Vince Lombardi might say, “Profits are is not just the best thing. They are the only thing.”
Finally, I am an environmentalist. This is the only earth we have, and we have trashed it long enough. Let’s show Mother Earth some respect I love the Green Party but their platform is very focused.
If I can’t find between these two parties one that honors all those dimensions of my politics, what would be the next best thing? The two-party system is not embedded in law or constitution. Third parties could capture enough votes to be represented in the electoral college. The obstacle is the custom (nowhere embedded in law) that the winner of the plurality (not majority) of votes in a state gets all that state’s electoral votes. (It was Thomas Jefferson’s idea because he wanted all the votes from Virginia to become our Third President. Shame on you, Tom.) The chance to have some electoral votes to bargain within the Electoral College and create a coalition government would certainly make organizing a third party an attractive option.
I need more than two choices. I’m tired of voting for the lesser of two evils. Can we “debinarize” our democracy and become a little more normal like other democrztic countries?
Category: Uncategorized
Competition and/or Cooperation?
Binary series #2.
Our culture is obsessively competitive. We believe that competition forces people to learn, grow, and succeed.. Without competition, we would all be lazy and disengaged. Competition makes products better and people richer, and rewards excellence. Competition for customers makes prices lower and products and services better. Success is measured by rankings-sports teams, movies, best-selling books, colleges. States compete to rank high if not first for business climate, retirement, or health and wellness. They are often supplemented by lists of the ten worst–SAT scores, longevity, poverty. Parents pressure their children to compete academically, athletically, and in just about anything else that puts their offspring at the head of the pack. Collecting prizes, blue ribbons, t trophies, good grades are important to parents. Getting into the right preschool is the first step in getting your child a head start in the race to succeed. Even play is often competitive, whether it is wining at monopoly or the best score in mini golf. To quote coach Vince Lombardi, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”
A cutthroat society of fierce and endless competition for supposedly scarce rewards (money, promotions, admiration, fame_ s not a nurturing climate in which humans can thrive. It also encourages shortcuts, whether it is steroids for athletes, misleading advertising, false claims, or other devious behaviors that can lead at least to a short-term victory (at the risk of being caught). Competition has a lot going for it as a motivator, but it also casts a big shadow.
So, what is the opposite of competition Collaboration. Working together. Teamwork. (Even if sometimes it leads to teams competing against each other!) Collaboration is also a skill we encourage our children to acquire, starting with helping around the house playing noncompetitive games, acquiring skills like playing a musical instrument or dancing or writing poetry or sewing or woodworking or acting. All of these are noncompetitive and many are collaborative. Collaboration makes it possible to accomplish things that take at least two, as my husband and son0in-law learned when they were building plywood canoes. The teamwork of a writer and an editor can do amazing things, as I learned over the years of writing some seventeen books.
Most nonprofits rely on teamwork, and activities like dance, sports, school projects, can help young people to identify their skills and interests and develop new skills for others with a mentor. Girl schouts, boy scouts, youth sports, sailing, gardening and martial arts are opportunities to learn in a noncompetitive environment. For the adults among us, volunteer work is a great opportunity to develop skills, to use your own skills, and to create something together. Habita for Humanity, food banks, coaching sports, and working with other volunteer organizations offers a rich and rewarding collaborative environment. I have volunteered (for 57 years) with the League of Women Voters and my religious community using and developing my skills in leadership, team building, delegating, facilitating, writing and teaching for the sheer joy of exercising those “muscles” and helping others to exercise theirs.
Like competition, teams have a shadow side. Shirking is the biggest challenge. Schools and colleges are increasing encouraging team projects but the efforts are not evenly distributed. Conflict among team members is another challenge. A temptation to parcel out credit or blame for a final product is discouraging for future tam efforts.
Competition and collaboration should be both/and, not either/or. They are both useful tools, one for building and rewarding individual effort, one fo building and strengthening community and doing the work that cannot be accomplished by a lone wolf. Ours is a society that tilts heavily toward individualistic competition, which carries over into team competitions in sports, politics, business and almost every aspect of life. What role does collaboration play in your life, and how can you encourage it in others?
Do consider sharing this post with a friend, and/or buying my book (kindle or paperback) from amazon, Passionately Moderate: Civic Virtue and Democracy.Do consider sharing this post with a friend, and/or buying my book (kindle or paperback) from amazon, Passionately Moderate: Civic Virtue and Democracy.
The World is not Binary
I am launching a new series of blogs on false dichotomies, encouraging my readers to think in terms of both/and rather than either/or. As I work through my list, I invite your comments and responses and stories to augment my own reflections, reading, and research for what will eventually be a book (I hope!).
We start with a classic from my own area of intellectual inquiry, economics (supplemented by ethics). That binary is the tension between the needs and desires of the individual and the needs and demands of the community. “The” community consists many overlapping communities from the family to the neighborhood, the nation, and the earth. Individual people or organizations (such as a corporation) can choose to satisfy only their own needs, wants and desires without regard to others or to the impact on the larger community. In an individual, that narrow-minded focus on the self alone is diagnosed as sociopathy. In law, that same focus, maximum profit for shareholders is the sole obligation of a business corporation. Regulations forcing them to consider the harm done to others (including the environment) are the only and often a weak constraint.
Unlike corporations, most humans have a moral sense and a social dimension to their overall well-being. They seek companionship, shared pleasures,and mutual respect as essential to their own life satisfaction, even if it means going without a big screen TV, an expensive house, a luxury car, or other extravagant forms of consumption. If they care about what other people think of them, of if they have an active inner conscience, they will be inclined to ask themselves “What is the right thing to do?” more often that “what would be the most satisfying thing to do?” Like a physician, they may feel called to “first do no harm,”
Parents, schools, churches and other groups try to socialize children to strike a reasonable balance between their own needs and those of others, to develop empathy, compassion and generosity. At the same time, we teach them a fairly strong version of individualism, that the world out there is a competitive environment, and your goal is to be a winner in whatever competition you choose engage. Each of us must parse those two divergent directives and figure how to live our lives while honoring both.
Success is the goal of individualism. Harmony I s the goal of society. We need not choose between them, but rather seek the right balance between them. Aldous Huxley once described the “merely muscular Christian” as a person who attempts the impossible task of continuously ladling from a bowl that is never replenished. We need tot sustain ourselves in body, mind and spirit, not instead of ‘ladling,” but as the nurturing that enables us to ladle.
In my faith tradition, s in many faith traditions, two core values are “respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person” and “respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.” There are no self-made men (or women). We are all nurtured and sustained by a larger community of people and the earth itself. It is our grateful task to contribute to sustaining communities and, as we approach Earth Day, the earth our mother.
The Taxman Is After You
Many of my rr readers are South Carolinians. Even if you are not, a similar tax “reform” proposal may be coming to your state, as it has elsewhere. . So here’s the South Carolina version of the latest Republican plan to tax the middle class, and cut fores for the rich proposal.. South Carolina’s new proposal for a flat income tax, H. 4216, seems to be on the fast track for what is billed as a tax cut. Maybe. But not for most of us.
The federal standard deduction, expanded in the first Trump administration, would be cut for state tax purposes from $15,000 ($30,000 for a married couple) to a miserly $,6000 and $12,000, respectively. Then it is phased out until it disappears at an adjusted gross income of $40,000.
But wait, there’s good news. The tax rates would be changed from a two-step schedule of 3% and 6.3% to a single flat rate of 3.99% (just so we can claim to be lower than our neighbors). That’s a tax cut, isn’t it?
Yes and no. The General Assembly giveth and the General Assembly taketh away. The federal standard deduction, which was also followed in South Carolina’s state income tax, gives people at the bottom a little relief and makes the income tax just a little bit progressive.
That’s “economist-ese” for taking a smaller percentage of income in taxes for poor people than rich people. Our other state and local taxes on sales and property, and our fees and charges for government services, are regressive. They take a larger share of income from the poor than from the rich. So, the income tax has provided a partial equalization of the total tax liability across households at different income levels.
According to estimates by the S.C. Department of Revenue and Fiscal Affairs, if your family is in the median income range of $50,000 to $75,000, more than 80% of you will discover that your income taxes will go up, not down. Less than 10% of households in the income range of $300,000 to $500,000 will have that same sticker shock, but most will see a steep reduction.
Revenue from the individual income tax is expected to decline by about $216 million in the first full year. Bottom line: This is a tax cut for the wealthy, plain and simple. And unlike the usual justification – attracting business – the personal tax rate will now be lower than the business tax rate.
That’s not the only problem with this bill. With no chance to itemize, citizens with heavy medical expenses and/or generous charitable contributions or lots of interest on their home mortgage and/or student loans will have to rethink their priorities. Medical expense deductions are important for many disabled or elderly citizens, especially if there is a family member in a nursing home. Medicare is not much help there—and the future of Medicare is uncertain.
South Carolina is riding a wave of revenue growth that is overdue for correction. The stock market is flailing, consumer confidence has dropped, tourism prospects (important to our state) are dismal as people from other nations are reluctant to come here, and tariffs are likely to revive inflation that has just returned to more normal levels (not counting eggs).
The state’s definition of income for tax purposes will still be tied to the federal definition of adjusted gross income but that may change if Congress, worried about ballooning deficits, fails to extend the tax cuts from the first Trump administration. The legislature has made a number of commitments, such as higher teacher pay and a larger state contribution each year to protect the soundness of the retirement fund. Legislators may not be able to fund these priorities if revenue from the income tax falters, as it does with either tax cuts or recessions.
This bill needs to go in the circular file and start again.
Saint Patrick Meets Ostara: The Living of the Green
It is no accident that Saint Patrick’s Day falls in the same week as the vernal equinox, the holiday called Ostara by the ancient Celts. Ireland is the Emerald Isle with, as Johnny Cash reminded us, its 40 shades of green. Ostara had other names, Oestre, Astarte, and, of course, Easter, yet another celebration of revival, renewal, and resurrection. (I once was asked by a seminary professor why Unitarian Universalists celebrate Easter. I replied with my own question. Why do Christians name their most important holiday after the goddess of the dawn?
Some of the customs of the equinox holiday have migrated to the moveable feast of Easter, celebrated in the Western world on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring Equinox. They are supplemented by ancient Roman and Scandinavian equinox customs involving eggs and rabbits, agents of fertility.
What comes to mind about Saint Patrick, besides green beer and shamrocks? You probably know that he was born around 400 CE in Britain to a Romanized Christian family. Captured by Celtic pirates, he was hauled off to Ireland and worked as a shepherd. He escaped, returned to Britain, studied for priesthood, and was ordained. He chose to return to return to Ireland as a Christian missionary..
Like many such missionaries, Patrick adapted the Christian story to the local environment—a rural, earth-centered culture, He used the shamrock or three -leafed clover to explain the concept of the trinity. He planted churches and monasteries all over Ireland. It is appropriate that his day is celebrated during the season of preparing for spring planting. Like so many other holidays including Yule), the celebration of Ireland’s patron saint was part of the bridge from the old Celtic nature-based religion to what the Irish called the New Faith.
Initially the New Faith was welcomed to Ireland as an addition, rather than a competitor, but eventually it became its own wayward version of Roman Christianity. Today there is a revival of the Celtic version of Christianity not only in the two strongholds of Celtic culture, Ireland and Scotland, but also in North America. That culture and that way of being Christian was earth-centered, non-exclusive, and egalitarian, with a particularly strong affirmation of women as full participants in the larger community. Women in early Ireland had the right to choose their spouses, divorce if they wished, get an education, own property, and enter many of the professions. Many of those rights were not available to women in this country until the late 19th century. (A nod to another annual observance in March, Women’s History Month.)
Even after Roman Christianity forced the Irish to end their practice of co-houses of nuns and monks who were free to marry, have children, and raise them in the faith, there was still always a Celtic underground that survives today in some of the ancient holy places, especially the Scottish island of Iona. There is much wisdom in dedicating this pair of holidays to the re-planting of that vision in our own hearts and mind, As as we begin the season of fertilizing and planting, we can celebrate our oneness with the natural world that nurtures and sustains us.
Note: I am indebted to historian Peter Tremayne’s fascinating set of historicall novels about Sister Fidelma for background on the customs of the Irish in the 5th and 6th centuries CE.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
In 1967, I was a 26-year-old newly hired part-time assistant professor of economics at a southern state university. I just happened to be in the neighborhood because my husband was a new faculty member in the physics department. Part-time was my choice: I had two daughters, ages three and one, and a dissertation to finish.
I sat down for a chat with my department head. Holley, he said, you know that you are the only woman among six men. I nodded, and he went on. “You are liberal, we are conservative. You are a Yankee, we are Southerners. Your degree is from a Northern University, we ae all products of southern Universities.” He paused, and I waited. Finally, he said, “You know, if you were just black, you’d be perfect.” I wasn’t a “DEI hire,” as far as he was concerned. I was just a blessing that had dropped unexpectedly into his domain, and he was grateful.
In the late 1960s, acceptance of diversity as a desirable situation was widely affirmed, especially in colleges and universities. What went wrong? What made DEI the official abbreviation for highway to hell?
Diversity is a fact, something that can be described and measured. Equity is a value, an affirmation that as a society we believe that everyone should have a fair chance at opportunities. Inclusion is an act, an effort to make everyone welcome in the candidate pool. Later came measurement and with measurement, quotas. What percentage of your faculty/staff/student population is nonwhite? Female? How do you accommodate people with disabilities? DEI became a slogan for governments, firms, and organizations. Look, we have a black CEO! You can trust us.
Then it became a game, and beyond that, a backlash. Many years after that chat with my department head, I had another conversation late in the evening with a younger male friend who felt that DEI had shortchanged him. He said, I wanted to go to Princeton, and I had a1300 on my SAT, but they gave that place to some woman instead. I paused for a moment and said, “I really wanted to go to Yale in 1959, and I had 1500 on my SATs, but Yale was not admitting women until ten years later.” There is no easy way to counteract the effects of past discrimination. Life is short, and changing attitudes, beliefs and misconceptions is slow work, with a temptation for governments to respond with mandates and measurements.
My own education was enriched by learning from professors and colleagues of a different culture (southern), gender (men), age, and political values. It was also enriched by student diversity, especially in the last 15 years of my long career when I was teaching students from all over the world in a Ph.D. program in Policy Studies.
The backlash against DEI has been a long time in coming, but today it is in overdrive. For those of us who believe that equity is a value that addresses the fact of diversity that is best served by efforts to include a more diverse array of employees, customers, investors, colleagues, etc., what can we do?
First, we can share our own positive experiences of diversity, and I do whenever there is an opportunity. What stories do you have to tell?
Second, as an economist, I believe in the power of money. We can shop with and invest in firms that are intentionally inclusive. The president administration has done us a great favor by making clear who is and who is not on board with DEI so that we can direct our dollars accordingly. We know that Target, Walmart, amazon, the Washington Post and Lowe’s do not share DEI value and have in fact deleted the ones that were once part of their corporate credo.
On the investing side, there are three kinds of positive signals from companies, mutual funds and other investment instruments> DEI, ESG, and B-corporations. ESG stands for environment, social, and governance—a commitment by the form to minimize environmental damage in their work, to be attuned to the needs of communities, minorities, workers, and suppliers, and to practice transparency and accountability in their governance. A B-corporation actually has environmental and social goals written into its corporate charter and is required to account for them annually to their shareholders. If you are interested in the investment side, google socially responsible investing and see what you can find. A number of mutual funds offer socially responsible investing in both their own management activities and in choosing what firms to invest in.
Third, there is money that we give away. Some of it can go to organizations who do good work among the “outcasts”—immigrants, former convicts, impoverished families, victims of domestic abuse, global giving to help people in other countries. Charity Navigator can help you evaluate which nonprofits to support. Other nonprofits like ACLU will direct your funds toward resisting the backlash, as will your campaign contributions to candidates who represent or support e inclusion as an action that acknowledges diversity and values equity.
Sexism, racism, xenophobia, ageism, and other forms of targeting marginalized groups is not new. It has been around at least since the Greeks referred to all non-Greeks as barbarians. But the facts of life can be changed by the determined efforts of good people who care about the world we are handing off to future generations. DEI backlash is only a symptom of a much deeper malaise, but for me, it is a good place to strengthen and deepen my work for The Resistance. I hope the same is true for you.
Weaponizing Your Wallet
A dozen or so years ago, my sociologist friend Catherine and I wrote a book called Our Money, Our Values. We started with a presumed set of shared values—strong, healthy communities, social and economic justice, and environmental sustainability. We invited our readers to reflect on how their use of money promoted or worked against those shared values. Today those of us who believe in community, equity, and sustainability are mor challenged than ever by a contrary se of values under the misleading label of ”conservatism.”
Money is powerful. Money motivates, rewards, punishes, empowers, threatens. We need to harness, individually and collectively, as much of this tool to restore the good society we once thought we had.
How you spend or refrain from spending, how you save and invest, how you contribute to worthy causes and organizations all can be your voice in the larger world. Here are some thoughts on how to tweak your habits in ways that will help bend that arc of the universe so that it bends a little deeper toward justice.
Shopping. This one has had a lot of press lately as firms kowtowed the Trump administration over DEI. Amazon.com, Target, and Walmart were among the many firms who meekly withdrew their commitment to being intentionally inclusive of all varieties of people—age, gender, gender identity, disability, color. Pocketbook language is something that the owners will understand. (When the Washington Post started backing away from its traditional progressive stance, it lost some of its best writers and also 250,000 subscribers overnight. I was one of them.) Shop local. (That helps with building strong communities). Find firms that support positive social values and shift your spending there. And forgive yourself if you can’t find (as I did) Blue light 275 readers anywhere except amazon. Cancel your amazon prime, your streaming services that do not support your values, and seek out others that do. Sorry, X (not really), Facebook (don’t miss it), and lots of others which spout anti-environmental and anti-justice. See if you can find a B-corps firm, one that has a commitment in its corporate charter to pursue specific environmental and justice goals and be respectful of the needs of the communities where’re they are located. B-corp is one label. ESG (Environment, social and governance) is another. DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is a third indicator. And waste our time, a resource worth much more than money.
It matters not only where you shop, but what you buy. Look for products whose production or consumption doesn’t overload the solid waste stream, involve harmful chemicals, require practices like fracking and strip mining, or are produced under unhealthful conditions by cheap labor (often children).
- Investing—this is a key place to express values. Avoid the big banks who rip of low income customers with monthly charges and fees (especially on credit cards), minimum balance requirements, justice rhetoric. Read the prospectus for any possible investment. Look for mutual funds that endorse and actively promote your values. Green Century, for example, s one of my favorite mutual funds because it invests in clean and renewable energy. Here the acronym is SRI—socially responsible investing. Some economists would have you believe that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder wealth. It isn’t. Profits should be the reward for providing useful goods and services to households and other business firms. If your retirement savings are under your control (mine were not), explore your options for investing in assets and management philosophies that affirm your values,
3. Giving—use your money to support political candidates who share your values and to support local, national, and international organizations who are working to affirm and promote a just, peaceful, and sustainable human community that respects our fellow beings and the earth. Check Charity navigator to see what they support and how much of their revenue goes to marketing, promotion and top-level staff rather than direct assistance to those in need or support for actions that make people in need safer and healthier..
Make this the year of the moral consumer—citizen-worker-investor. It takes effort. It takes a village, so encourage your family, friends and neighbors, to do the same. The world will be a better place for it.
A Gratitude Alphabet
A while back, there was a fad for keeping a gratitude journal. It didn’t last long. People’s grateful imagination was not well-developed. One dropout wrote that he was tired of being thankful for his cat. Even my own energy for gratitude, I have been doing for years, was flagging. In these challenging times
I took some training in teaching journalling a fw years ago. The training offered a variety of prompts to ensure that your journal isn’t just “yesterday I saw, I thought I heard, I watched…today I plan to ….). I adapted one of the prompts, the alphabet poem, to gratitude with surprisingly good results.
The alphabet poem starts with writing in the margin the 26 letters of the alphabet down the side of the page.When you come to X, you can cheat with a word staring with ex,, because the e is more or less silent. The letter in the margin starts the first word of each line of a poem. Free verse is fine; it ,doesn’t have to rhyme. You can have one word per line lone, which is hard, or you can write several words on some and one on others. You can use other poem starters,like your name,, or just a nice longish word, like beautiful or happiness or democracy. Try it, It’s fun.
So how does it adapt to gratitude? Start by writing down your gratitude with A on the first day and think of three things you are grateful for that begin with A. Apples, ancestors, America, asparagus, adults, animals. I am now on the letter T and so far have been thankful for such oddities as radio, Celts (my ancestors), poetry, rainbows, and Stoicism.
Gratitude is always a good way to start and/or end your day. Acknowledging gratitude is a good antidote to all seven of the deadly sins (pride, greed, sloth, anger, gluttony, envy and lust, in case you don’t keep a list handy) and replacing them with humility, generosity, patience, joy, trust, moderation, and compassion. (And also constructive action, the antithesis of sloth, but that’s for the next blog). Keep that latter list handy to use when you come to the letters c, g, h, j, m, p and t.
It’s Groundhog Day Again!
This is my annual updated version a holiday variously known as the feast of Saitn Bridget, Imbolc, Oimelc (both Celtic words related to lambing), and Groundhog Day. I mentioned that the first of February was the only holiday devoted to housecleaning in an email to my daughter. Aha, she said that explains the backstory for the movie Groundhog Day. It’s like house cleaning. You clean, it gets dirty, you clean it again, it gets dirty again… A good story line for a movie! At least my repetition, unlike the movie, is only once a year.
Imbolc, Oimelc, or Groundhog Day, they all anticipate spring. It is one of the lesser-known cross-quarter holidays on the Wheel of the Year. In addition to Groundhog Day it survived as the feast of the purification of the virgin (Mary) after the birth of her son 40 days earlier. It is also the day devoted to Saint Bridget or Brigid. Bridget is the Triune Goddess in her maiden phase, converted to a Christian saint. The corn maiden from the previous harvest is brought out in her honor as a virgin once again, ready to encounter the Sun King reborn at Yul in a mating ritual of spring.
The purification part of this holiday was known in pre-feminist times as spring house cleaning. In ancient time among the Celts, Imbolc cleaning consisted of removing the Yule greenery from the home and burning it, cleaning up fields and home, and in Ireland, burning old Bridget wheels and making new ones. By Imbolc, most of us have taken down the tree and put away the decorations from Christmas, but if you haven’t, you can use Imbolc as the excuse for delaying it till now. After Imbolc, you are at risk of being labeled a lazy pagan if you don’t deal of the winter holiday residue.
Imbolc is approaching the end of an indoor time. It’s cold and still pretty dark, but it is the waxing period of light and warmth following the winter solstice. It represents a final stage of wintry inwardness before the crocuses and daffodils invite us to look outward again. Housebound, we must find our spiritual practice within that space. It is the late stage of the hibernating season as we prepare for the cycle of life to begin again.
Spiritual practice has enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent decades. A spiritual practice is anything that is centering, mindful, focusing, and connects you to the sacred in a very inclusive sense. Practicing patience with difficult people is a spiritual practice. Listening attentively is a spiritual practice. Eating mindfully is a spiritual practice. Meditation and prayer are traditional spiritual practices in many religions. But there is also a form of spiritual practice that invests the ordinary activities of daily life with significance in the way carry them out.
The essence of spring housecleaning as spiritual practice blends several Christian and Buddhist ideas. One is humility; no task is too menial that we are above it, as in Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. The second is mindfulness, to be engaged in the moment, to calm the monkey mind, to focus all our attention on the window being washed or the floor being swept. The third is letting go of attachment to possessions as an encumbrance on our spiritual life, passing them on to another use or another user. The spiritual practice of spring housecleaning can incorporate all three.
Housecleaning means two different things. One is the emphasis on clean, as in wash windows, polish furniture, remove cobwebs, paint, scrub floors, clean woodwork, dust the books. That’s both the humble and the mindful part. In the words of one contemporary Buddhist writer, “after enlightenment, the laundry.” The other kind of housecleaning is to declutter, simplify, recycle, let go of possessions no longer needed, like the greens from Yul in the Celtic tradition. That’s the letting go part.
For many years my Lenten practice, for the forty days that begin sometime after Imbolc and stretch to the floating holiday of Easter, was to wash a window every day. Then I moved to a smaller house, which taxed my ingenuity to find forty windows. I included car windows, TV and computer screens, mirrors. Friends helpfully offered their windows, but I did not wish to discourage their own spiritual practice. There is something very satisfying, very symbolic in letting the light of the returning spring shine through a clean window, but it means more when it’s my window.
A friend described a similar cleaning ritual, only she does it all on New Year’s Day. She takes each of her many books down one at a time off the shelf, dusts it (and the shelf), and decides whether it stays or goes. If books are a rich and meaningful part of your life, revisiting these old friends and deciding what role they still may play in your life and which ones should be shared with others is definitely a spiritual practice. This particular ritual embodies both humility (dusting). mindfulness (concentrated attention on the books and the memories and teachings they hold) and letting go (books to be passed on). This year I used my cocooning season, December 26th to February 1st, to declutter bookshelves, which led to one empty bookcase and about 80 book donations, plus a major cleansing of my Kindle.
So, as the daffodils and crocuses pop their leaves through the ground, as the groundhog in Punxatawny ponders his forecast, we can prepare to emerge from the hibernating season by renewing the spaces we inhabit. Like the bluebirds, whose house I have to clean very soon because they refuse to return to a used nest, let us be about the humble tasks of maintaining our habitats. Spring housecleaning only comes once a year!
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Day of Service
This year, ironically, the start of the second reign of Donald Trump coincides with both the national college football championship and Martin Luther King Day. I’m betting that more people will watch the football game than the inauguration. But the real contrast is between how we observe the other two events, Inauguration Day and the Day of Service, that many of us observe in honor of MLK. Many communities will have organized service projects that will, alas, overlap the noon inauguration. For me, that’s an easy choice..
But I like to honor the day of service my way. So I chose this week, the week of his actual birthday (January 15th), because I don’t believe in forcing actual dates of a holiday into the nearest Monday. And instead of a day, I will do something each day from Monday through Friday.
Today I am speaking to the county legislative delegation about making the state’s local governments more accountable and transparent rather than evading or ignoring the legal procedures they are required to follow. Advocacy is one form of service.On Tuesday I plan to take my blind friend and neighbor to the grocery store and the recycling center. Care giving is another form of service. I will also try to recruit a college student to help her with transportation. Care giving is another form of service.
On Wednesday, I am making my share of dinner for about 25 residents of a local homeless shelter, It is a monthly service organized by my congregation. Helping the less fortunate is also a form of service.
On Thursday I get paid, so it is a good time to go to my favorite charity website and give some money for Gaza and California. Money can be a vehicle for service. I am also attending a Zoom meting with updates on what is happening in the state legislature that we might want to discuss with our legislators. Advocacy again.
On Friday I will tend to my duties for the two organizations through which I channel much of my service, The League of Women Voters and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Service is more effective and more satisfying when done within organized caring communities. I serve the fellowship as Social Action chair and the League as program chair. Both communities are dedicated to making the world a better place in many ways. Serving in leadership roles sustains the organizations through which we can engage in service more effectively.a
The point of this recitation is not to tell you what a good person I am, but to be mindful of what I do and why I do it. It is also meant to illustrate the variety of things that I choose to do, while others among you may have totally different but equally valuable ways or serving the larger community. I hope that this day will make me more intentional about carrying through this commitment the other eleven months of the year.
Celebrate your day of service in ways that reflect your unique challenges, opportunities, skills and interests.
PurpleSage41 