All That You Touch

It is not enough
that each step moves forward
if there is neither measure,
nor meaning;
if the ground that offers support
isn’t also speaking,
or, if speaking, is not heard.

Know: All that you touch is also touching you.

Being is a reciprocity,
an opportunity and invitation
to participate in fullness, everywhere
         to glean,
                  to feel,
to make,
         to sing and
                  celebrate.

Remember: All that you touch is also touching you.

You are the butterfly sightings
the drumsongs of feet,
caught up in this epic symphony;
your instrument
is tuned to the entirety
of all that has ever been,
         of all that can ever be.

Every touch, every encounter,
is an opportunity and invitation to renew,
         to grow,
                  to learn,
         love,
                  laugh,
an invitation to linger in song.

Celebrate: All that you touch is also touching you.

An infinite smear of star dust,
twin enigmas of light and dark,
blessings of water and earth,
join in the marvel of you,
burnished by sun, wind and waves,
l’dor v’ador, in saecula saeculorum.

There is no need to discover,
the garden of wisdom,
the lake of merit,
the mountain of repose,
the vale of mysteries
—they meet on the
landscape of your soul.

For, all that you touch is also touching you.

There is no need to search for
mystical union,
for all that you touch is already touching you,
awaiting an answer to the eternal question:
“Will you be with us?”
—awaiting the resounding song of your soul,
the song of “Yes.”

© 2018 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

9/11 and the Sins of Division

Like the books that fall off shelves into my hands when I’m in book stores (and, yes, that really does happen to me), the universe has been sending me urgent messages about the nature of wholeness. Whether it is my feeling of being an integral part of creation while on a walk in the woods, or hearing someone talk at the grocery checkout stand about how great it is to see people come together after a tragedy, or the minister who talks about the admonition to “Love one another,” or the rabbi who indicates that the waters were divided, but this was pronounced “so,” not “good”… or a whole train of other messages, heard and unheard—well, I guess you could say I’ve had the spectrum of “together” and “apart” on my mind.

Everything that is a part of creation is one great, growing expanse. I’m being simplistic, I know; this is a huge generalization. But it is critical for the survival of at least our little terrestrial ball that we embrace this generalization. 

There are so many people out there who talk about “original sin” – usually to blame it on womankind. Adam and Eve… the snake and the apple… but, at the heart of that story is the dichotomy between need and togetherness, separation and alienation. Here’s the thing, if we are going to look to the origins of negativity, or perhaps better understood as its challenges, we must look to “creation” itself. And while I’m couching this meditation within a tiny bit of biblical exegesis, I don’t want to lose people who reject religion. All of us are part of the same story, whatever the story is; it is all a matter of perspective, and we are all peoples of myths, whether we attend temples of some sort, follow post-Enlightenment philosophies or post-modern existential/secular ways of thinking. As I tell my kids, “All words are built on all words; this is the basis of evolution and creativity.”

And so, I present this unorthodox set of notions, on this day of days, which commemorates a terrible event in our modern history.

In the mythological creation story from Genesis, Divine Entirety suddenly felt alone. This conscious awakening could be thought of as the primary point of alienation. Alone and in the dark. “Let there be light.” What does the light do, but make a sense of isolation all the more apparent?  

What to do? Well, what to do is to do, or to make. Identify raw materials from within the sea of integrity, and separate them out from one another; dividing materials into kinds makes them easier to use. (Just think of the world as an assembly project from IKEA or a never ending LEGO construct…) Once the materials are organized, they can be combined and recombined, molded into what you want, what you need. This is the essence of the creation story in Genesis. The world was created, then seen to have some flaws, and so was reinvented. Over time and many interventions, the thing that was created (and perhaps objectified) forgot its true origin, forgot its original language, forgot its purpose, forgot that it belonged to and had individuated from a singular source.

Seen in this light, it could be said that the primary flaw in creation was/is the act of division, and that this flaw is a natural aspect of ongoing creation, and the original commission of Creative Energy. Alienated Being desires intimate togetherness, and so creates more being(s) to accommodate that desire… and yet, the product can only promote more longing that leads to more separations, more creations… more divisions and differentiations, more exposures of an insuperable design flaw.

Divisions and differentiations, “devices and desires”, these are primary motivating energies, I should say. These primary motivating energies drive all of our actions in daily life, as well as our politics. In societies, we grow within community units that during our formative years comprise the whole world to us. Maturing into “adulthood,” our sense of what the whole world is pans outward. We discover that many of our decisions are made for us, and we sometimes find ourselves at the mercy of divided waters and diverted streams not of our own making. There are many distractions and manipulations controlling everything we do.

Truth is, all people are The People. All existing or created divisions between people are false, illusory divisions; at the most basic level, we all have the same needs. I have often stated, “That there are so many of us is for only one reason, so that we can help one another.” Certainly, this is the message of the Golden Rule, in all the different ways we see it expressed throughout world history. 

On September 11, 2001, we experienced what could be called a “Great Sin of Division and Discord” in the event and aftermath of terrorist actions that resulted from a magnitude of hate, death and destruction not seen before on our shores. This day continues to be a day of mourning and remembrance for the loss of so many lives, of so much potential for good, so much purpose. This day also continues to be an open, unhealed wound, perpetuated by systems of injustice that are politically motivated in order to consolidate money and power—actually to rob people of their personal assets and agency in order to feed the greed of powerbrokers.

Healing will not come until we acknowledge civil unity to be of primary importance. In the days following September 11, 2001, there was a sense of unity, even if tinged with anger over losses and against “foreigners,” and even through a profound sadness in the knowledge that it always seems to take a tragedy (flood, hurricane, war, forced migration, and the like) to bring people together— as if we cannot achieve unification by any other means. We huddled together in our grief.

Territorialism, nationalism, tribalism, ghettoization… these are all false constructs, designed to make people think in terms of scarcity and fear, rather than in more holistic terms, such as a recognition of abundance that is able to fulfill need wherever it exists. 

I’m grateful to Rabbi Jay LeVine for his discussion, yesterday, of a famous quote of the Prophet Amos, who states that feast days and hymns of praise and blood offerings are not the sacrifices desired by the Divine Source. Instead, “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” Rabbi LeVine said of social action that we must think of ourselves as drops of water, which join in puddles and pools, and rise with the rain to flow with power and might. Likewise, there is no more powerful agency in the world than people joining to work together, to help one another. 

In short, I suggest that togetherness and inclusion are the balms to heal a broken world. Today, I hope for you and for me, for all of us, that September 11^th be remembered as a call for unity to the common goal of being for each other in goodness, truth and equity. 

Let all that who are joined toward such goals never be put asunder.

© 2018 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

earth and air, water and light

—on the trail,
engaged in a counterpoint of breathing
over an ostinato of stepped footfalls,
meeting a rising and falling landscape—

ferns reach out to stroke ankles and shins,
as if to say,
too long, too long have you been away—

even the rising dust from these stamping feet
joins an alleluia chorus of motes,
dancing,
suspended in shafts of light,
trained and focused by the benevolent branches
of these sentinel redwoods
that guide this way;
it is a music of welcome,
quiet but potent—

sorrel and trillium,
their delicate blossoms content just to be;
even violet and columbine
speak a language of color and moment;
wild ginger carpets each moist patch below,
visually cooling the warmth of this day—

and ahead are the rocks,
tumbled there from time immemorial—

and imperceptibly the trail rises,
drawing nearer to a water music,
heard from over the next ridge—

mingled medicinal aromas
of coyote mint and yerba buena
drift from somewhere below,
or from over yet another ridge,
one that seems a world away—

an awareness overtakes,
of height having been achieved,
these feet drawn over pathways
traced earliest by small creatures,
then by migrations of deer,
and followed by others for millennia,
only to be discovered again, today—

then comes a sudden touch;
water reaches out whenever
riparian proximity is achieved
—playfully errant spray
tickles and teases the flesh
with its coolness—

rushing up from the depth and darkness
of its rock-hewn source to meet the light,
water rushes all a-tumble,
falling all over itself in joyous freedom,
to flow and drift into the meditative rest
of pools below blue-hued skies,
spiegel im spiegel,
there to be serenaded by what congress of birds
is berthed in the surrounding canopy—

too long, too long you have been away,chants the feathered choir
in their various languages,
but you are here with us now,
reply earth and air, water and light,
the only truth worth knowing—

but you are here with us now,
alleluia!

© 2018 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Labor Day, American Political Parties and Elections

“The mere fact of the existence of large fortunes concentrated in a few hands is of permanent demoralization in society; it belittles unassuming and honest work; it gives the rein to desires and appetites; it makes the pursuit of wealth the highest aim, the ideal of life, and drives all other aspirations out of the human mind…”

~ Moisel Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, Vol. II (1902)

I’ve been trying to complete simple archive of my late friend Arthur’s papers.  He was a Political Sociologist, a member of the Free Speech Movement, a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, an educator in the United States and in Britain, and a grass roots organizer for labor, along with many of his peers and colleagues, back in the day.

Many, many notebooks contain hen scratch lists and flowcharts. Arthur had read so very much for so many decades that he would write the outlines for talks and papers as lists of names and terms.  The lists would look something like this:

Ostragorski (vol. II)…

Plebiscitarianism…

key idea: hollowing out of democratic institutions…

Civil Rights aborted movement…

MLK, Jr.’s Unfinished Journey…
Labor movement, D.P. collaboration…

campaign finance laws…

“Technopopulism”…

atomised electorate…
why no third party?

Since I met him after he retired from teaching, I couldn’t tell you if he’d use these lists to speak extemporaneously or if he’d always develop the list-outlines into fully fledged lectures or papers.

The list above is not an actual list made by Arthur, but a composite one that I’ve composed from among several of his. I will use this list to explore the interrelated themes of Labor Day, Political Parties, and Elections.

Arthur believed in the labor movement and in unions. He helped with grass roots organizing here in California and in Detroit, and when he relocated to take teaching positions in Britain, he joined the British Labor Party. Arthur was convinced that democracy required strong parties built from the grassroots level, built from below with a strong and highly organized representation. He decried the fact that the American unions were yearly suffering defeats; in Britain, the same trend was afoot within the parliamentary system, led by neo-liberal leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. While I cannot cite authors, titles, chapter and verse, I can tell you that all the defeats trade unionism in America is suffering today are a direct result of the way the party “machines” work.

Political Parties, since federal times, have always been about consolidating power, which is to say they are and always have been run as top down organizations, demanding loyalty to “the party and party policy.”

The Democratic and Republican parties have their origin, more or less, in the “first phase” Democratic-Republican Party. It is crude of me to make this assertion, but if you look closely at bipartisan actions by our modern day congressional houses, you’ll see that the two parties have more similarities than one would expect, more similarities than differences—and that should be a disturbing fact. Democrats are not always so liberal as people who identify as Democrat would realize. Republicans are made up of a number of conservative splinter groups, divided on more lines than they would like to admit. 

Where do the interests of labor fall in this picture? That is an extremely complicated analysis to attempt within a short essay. Arthur and his peers and colleagues argued on this topic for over fifty years, books were written by them and upcoming generations of academics who studied the problem, but could not find adequate answers to the question or solutions to the existing problems.

The Civil Rights Movement provided a huge clue to Arthur.  The “twin” struggles of Civil Rights and Labor had the potential to move into greater groundswell of public support, but Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968 nipped that possibility in the bud. The movement remained strong, but suffered by the dissonance of a split between advocates for non-violent demonstration and a tendency toward militant Black Nationalism, particularly after national leadership of C.O.R.E. changed from James Farmer eventually to Roy Innis, in 1966. 

I have a friend, black woman in her mid-90s, who was at the National meeting of the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.) in [I believe] late summer of1966. She told me (while I was helping her put together her autobiography) that Roy Innis came “with his thugs” who displayed weapons and took over the meeting, which I believe was held at the Henry Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, CA. An announcement was made to the assembly, composed of white and black rank-and-file, “Whites are no longer welcome; get out.” Innis had come with his posse from New York, funded by a “small business grant” from Ford Corporation. My friend, who had marched and participated in sit-ins and registered voters along side her friends, white and black, knew that everything had changed. She and her friends left the meeting that night in tears; they also quit the organization, to remain in solidarity with one other—there were other organizations where they could be active together.

The additional interesting outcome with regard to C.O.R.E. is that the organization went on to support conservative positions and political candidates, for example, supporting the candidacy of Richard Nixon in both 1968 and 1972. No one talks about this divisive turn in the history of the Civil Rights Movement—and while I have not read extensively in this area, I suspect no one has really written about it. 

Arthur and I never talked about this incident in the history of C.O.R.E.; I discovered that on my own. What Arthur and I did talk about was the pivotal 1964 Democratic Party Convention, held in Atlantic City. Black Freedom Democrats from Mississippi wanted to be seated at the convention, to be “integrated” with the rest of the party—this would have been the logical progression from the recent signing of the Civil Rights Act, but Lyndon Johnson need the support of the segregationist “Dixiecrats”, and tried unsuccessfully to put them off until the 1968 Convention, saying lamely, “It’s all happening too fast.”

Walter Mondale recalled, “Over the years, some veterans of the civil rights movement have claimed that the only moral position for the Freedom Democrats to take at the convention was ‘no compromise.’ They have argued that the Freedom Democrats should have accepted nothing less than all the seats for Mississippi, and that anything less than that would have been a ‘compromise with racism.’ But I think the Freedom Democrats were willing to compromise, and I believed there was room for a compromise.”

Ultimately, the Freedom Democrats had to settle for only two of their delegates being seated, one white and one black, along with the entire delegation of Mississippi Regulars (all white). The decision was made behind closed doors in closed committee, and the Freedom Democrats were not allowed to choose which two of their number were to be seated. As you might imagine, this did not go over well. To avoid this challenge at future conventions, the rules were changed… There was a lot of politicking that went into all this than I have room to describe, but suffice it to say the Freedom Democrats felt cheated—because they were cheated.

And what happened to the labor movement? In 1978, the Democratic Party invited Labor to come in under the Democratic Umbrella. “We’ll take care of you,” the party said. Since that time, under three different Democratically controlled administrations, Democrat lawmakers failed to pass labor laws that would benefit and protect unions. Labor has suffered loss after loss after loss. There’s a book in that; the title for it could be “An Inside Job; The Slow Death of the American Labor Movement.”

As for Martin Luther King’s “Unfinished Journey,” Arthur’s notebooks and handwritten flowcharts frequently contain references to this, and suggestions for further reading, including the “Beyond Vietnam” speech given at Riverside Church and writings by Bayard Rustin (though he didn’t include a particular book title). Arthur spoke to me several times, in the years before his passing, about his desire to write a book on this topic. I have found neither substantive notes nor any outline among his papers. I will take this opportunity to hazard my own guess.

The Labor Movement, as I said earlier, was simultaneous with the Civil Rights Movement, but the latter was stalling for lack of funds, not to mention the rise of militant splinter groups that were not honoring the non-violent style of protest to which the main movement had committed. Dr. King’s death was a huge blow. While Arthur focused on the “Beyond Vietnam” as having been the trigger for King’s murder, in the past few years, I have come to a different conclusion, and have found supporting evidence in other speeches King made, including his very last speech. Dr. King was suggesting that a much broader coalition, built on labor, class and race, would be unstoppable; blue collar workers men and women, white and black, union and non-union could join hands at bargaining tables en masse and wield immense power by initiating mass strikes. I think he was on to something. I also think that blue collar white labor was not prepared to have a university educated, charismatic and articulate black minister as their putative leader.

To reiterate, party politics in America is all top-down. The machine is run at the top by a collection of party committees headed by people of whom voters identifying as “party members” have never heard. The anonymous people at the head of the party wield a lot of money, and they decide who the best possible candidates should be, as well as how to steer the electorate to thinking those candidates are the best thing since sliced bread, spending a ton of cash on media hit campaigns against the opposition. I find it astonishing that there is always plenty of money to manipulate public opinion, but never enough to offer living wage and healthcare (tied to actual cost of living indices) to the struggling middle and lower classes. Interesting, how tax cuts benefit the wealthy, rather than the average person.

Read today’s news, and you’ll see that social media, money and corruption (on an international scale) all work their way into our living rooms. The atomized electorate is experiencing a demoralizing sort of whiplash of daily distractions and outrages, and is generally responding with knee-jerk reactions, followed by division upon division upon division, with identity politics leading the charge to divide us ever further to our detriment.

Arthur, in examining the Democratic and Republican parties, found very little difference between the two parties. I suggest that everyone take some time to examine the voting record of House and Senate representatives from both parties. You can make up your own mind. War-mongers, surprisingly, are well represented among both parties in administrations recent and current. The array of bi-partisan support for policies that disempower a wide array of people on the gender and color spectrums, as well as unionized and non-unionized workers, is breathtaking.

What can be done about this?

Arthur’s ready answers: (1) Organize in broad coalitions, and it must be grassroots, from the bottom up. (2) Vote, but not along partisan lines—vote for people and policies that help the average person and strengthen our republic, that uphold our constitutional rights and societal values. (3) Hold elected officials accountable; public opinion is a powerful tool, if it is used wisely by, again, broad coalitions.

I’ve always found that when holidays are proclaimed to “honor” something, the first consideration is the celebratory party, while the “honoree” is consigned to a shallow, hagiographic mention. This Labor Day, I invite you to remember the very real and horrible sacrifices of life, limb and liberty that unions and rank-and-file labor  have endured, and continue to endure, over the course generations for your sake. Lives were lost in this long and enduring battle; the lives and safety of millions owe a debt of gratitude to those, the brave and even the foolhardy, that fought and gave and strove to make life better for the average worker, the average citizen.