Category: community

Domesticity: Stephon Harris and the Performance of Empathy

dust March 30, 2020

Roy Herndon Smith https://www.ted.com/talks/stefon_harris_there_are_no_mistakes_on_the_bandstand?language=en I wept as I listened to this performance. Stefon Harris describes and demonstrates how jazz happens, how the performers in an ensemble are continually empathically (“empathy” is Harris's word, in an interview on NPR's Morning Edition on March 30, 2020, for what is happening) listening, attuning themselves, and responding to each…

Domesticity: The COVID-19 Crisis

dust March 25, 2020

The COVID-19 crisis exposes the truth that domesticity, defined as “home or family life” (Apple Dictionary 2.2.2 2005-2017), is as fundamental to human existence as body and mind.

Power

dust March 20, 2020

The policeman walks
his beat, sees “only color,”
and kills a Black child.

Domesticity: Jenny Offill, Weather

dust March 10, 2020

The importance of Offill’s novel lies in its evocation of the domesticity of the climate and extinction crises. These crises result from how we have lived in the delusion that “I am here,” in an autonomous space categorically separated from “you” and the world, who and which “are there.” Offill’s work opens us to the realization that what we usually take to be unrealistic moral admonitions for how to live are realistic descriptions of how we and all else actually do exist, with each other and all beings as families, in reality as home. We only exist because we love each other as ourselves. What we do to others, not only other human beings, but also rocks, trees, bugs, dogs, oceans, stars, and all else, we do to ourselves.

Domesticity: February 16, 2020

dust February 16, 2020

A daily practice.
Writing as an act
of living compassionately
in and of the world
that is falling apart.

Domesticity 1: Introduction

dust January 31, 2020

Effective social responses to crises require trust. Trust emerges, inheres in, and grows in domesticity, “home or family life” (Dictionary, Apple version 2.2.2 2005-2017).

Jane the Virgin: Beginning with Loving Communities

dust October 2, 2019

The popular television show, Jane the Virgin (available on Netflix), portrays human reality as forming around a loving community.

Loving Communities: Introduction, Theory, and Method

dust June 21, 2019

Throughout my adult life, I have sought to understand love in order to be more loving. I have also sought to understand how to help communities be more loving. Writing these posts is one way I am continuing to work on what I have, in the past, thought of as two different tasks, but which are, I have come to understand, two aspects of the same work. To love is to participate in loving communities.

In this post, I summarize the theory that grows out of my sense of reality as loving communities, the method I use in thinking and writing about particular events, stories, articles, books, movies, t.v. series, or whatever as constituting elements of reality as loving communities, and a listing of the discussions that result . I will be updating this post as my thinking develops and to keep it current as a table of contents for and summary of the whole series.

I introduce each post with a poem or a selection from a poem. Poetry creates and evokes visceral senses of reality as a whole. Articulating and attending to these senses (feelings, atmospheres, or moods) is essential to understanding reality as loving communities.

Loving Communities 4: Empathy

dust May 9, 2019

Trust assumes empathy, opening to and feeling with the trustworthy other. …. Like trust, with which it is almost synonymous, empathy is ontogenetically and ontologically primal, both the individual historical and the ongoing always present ground of reality as loving communities or co-creative meetings between knowing and known. Reality as a whole and we and all the participants in reality as a whole are continually empathically forming and formed.

Living Communities 3: Religion

dust May 4, 2019

The understandings of reality as loving communities and of trust as the womb of being are “religious.” A “religion” is a sense of reality as a trustworthy whole. This definition is a variation of the understandings of “religion” a hundred and fifty years of anthropological, social, psychological, historical, and philosophical studies of “religion” have generated. It builds specifically on the Jewish religious thinker Martin Buber’s statement that “religion” is “the whole of human reality” and the psychologist Erik Erikson’s understanding of “religion” as the social institution charged with restoring, when threatened, basic trust.