The Shape of Redemption

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Shawndra Miller

Have you seen The Shape of Water, that marvelously innovative film with atmosphere that just won’t quit? Mostly I loved it. So lush and creative!

The film has been lauded as a modern fairy tale about embracing the “other”—with characters who are all outsiders (monster, mute woman, gay man, African American woman) banding together in the name of love.

But: I was disappointed in the ending.

Spoiler alert. I’m going to reveal the ending.

monster

Here’s my thinking: The monster/amphibian man/Amazonian river god could have emerged as a true hero if the last five minutes of the film had gone differently. Sure, the Hollywood ending works—he slashes the throat of the man who shot him and his beloved. He exacts revenge for torture and imprisonment as well as the final insult of murder. He gets the girl and even brings her back to life in a dreamy underwater scene.

Satisfying, on one level.

But I was rooting for something really innovative. The god-man’s foil is the heartless Colonel, who throughout the film jabs the “asset” with a cattle prod. Faced with the “other,” this white man persists in cynically disbelieving that he might have anything to learn.

Throughout the film I watched the villain suffer both emotionally and physically—while the river god-man turned out to have bona fide healing powers. And I thought that maybe, just this once, Hollywood might surprise me.

Amazon River photo by Mariusz Kluzniak, via Flickr Creative Commons.

Maybe it didn’t have to be all “kill the bad guy” this time. Maybe the river-god would turn out to be a true healer. He could turn to the man who had made his life hell, recognize his suffering, and show him something different, reveal a whole new worldview.

The transformative power of love—real love, not just the limited “I-need-you-you’re-mine” romantic variety—would surely alter the Colonel. The fingers the river-god had bitten off could be regrown. Healing and forgiveness would pack even more punch than a vengeful, justifiable slash to the throat.

It sounds sappy, maybe, or wispy. But compassion doesn’t equate weakness in my mind. And it doesn’t have to be exercised without muscle. Say the villain, fingers restored, still lashes out in violence instead of bowing down to the greater power of love. The river-god could contain him, without hurting him physically, understanding that his suffering is of a different sort. The kind that takes longer to heal.

I’m aware that it’s largely my privileged and coddled life that allows me to think this way: Never having confronted true evil, I am free to look for the sliver of light I believe everyone possesses. To watch for the wounds beneath the villainy. To consider the villain as more than just the sum total of evil acts.

I am free to call for transformation, never having been on the receiving end of violence.
But there are people who’ve been there. People like Immaculee Ilibagiza, who survived genocide in Rwanda and brings a message of forgiveness now.

Or Phan Thi Kim Phuc, Vietnam’s “napalm girl” who, years later, embraced the man who ordered the bombing of her village.

Their courageous example tells me that this impulse toward healing over vengeance is possible, and that I’m not wrong in seeking it. And maybe it isn’t only about effecting change in a “villain”—change that may or may not happen. Maybe it’s about the transformation arising in the one who holds compassion.

It’s just a movie, you might say (back to Shape of Water). Let the ending stand unquestioned. It’s what we’ve come to expect. After all, the same theme turns up in countless novels, song cycles, video games, operas, paintings, on and on. It’s the theme that’s driven Western society for eons: that we overcome by force and domination.

Not the Amazon. A river I’ve visited, with its own transformative healing power.

But the cultural myth we live by is shifting, and needs to shift, and it’s time for our cultural expressions to reflect that. Who better but the artists to explore and embody a new Story of Reunion, as Charles Eisenstein puts it?

Note: For more on the transformative power of compassion, check out the Forgiveness Project, a powerful collection of stories from all over the world.

Localizing: A Systemic Solutions Multiplier

Posted on November 3, 2017 by Shawndra Miller

A few weeks ago I attended an Economics of Happiness conference in which one of the speakers, localization pioneer Helena Norberg-Hodge, laid out the case for breaking free from the corporatized global economy. She pointed out that many social ills today are symptoms of an economic system based on greed and top-down control.

Localizing our economy, she said, offers a “systemic solutions multiplier.”

What do we mean by localizing? It involves bringing small businesses back into communities to produce what’s needed closer to home. It means investing in Main Street instead of Wall Street. By preserving customs and cultures through locally produced goods, we all can live better, says Norberg-Hodge.

rome (1024x768) I purchased a DVD of her documentary, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, about the arrival of “development” and subsequent breakdown of culture and environment in a traditional community of the Western Himalayas. I also bought The Economics of Happiness, a followup film on reversing the trend. I’ll watch them and write more.

But in the meantime, here’s an eye-opener for you. Did you know that a Swedish energy company is suing Germany for $6 billion because the country decided to phase out nuclear power after Fukushima? And that this suit is allowed under our current trade treaties that prevent governments from inhibiting the profit-making effort of a corporation?

Chilling.

But what does a “de facto world government made up of multinationals” have to do with sexual violence or racism—or the scapegoating of trans people/immigrants/Muslims—or the disrespecting of our earth home? By looking at the broad outlines of structures set up to consolidate power, Norberg-Hodge connects the dots between a global epidemic of depression, a neofascist voting trend, terrorism, domestic violence, disregard of the sacred, and so on.

Insecurity in the workplace, a sense of helplessness and alienation, and skyrocketing costs of living are the direct results of this system, in which multinational corporations wrest control from local communities (often by force).

“When you rob men of their ability to provide for their families, take away their self-respect and livelihoods, you have a recipe for violence,” Norberg-Hodge says. She fingers globalization as the main root cause behind fundamentalism and “othering.” As communities break down, isolation leads to fear, which leads to more separation and suspicion, which sometimes erupts in violence.

The economic system mirrors the cultural story we’ve all been sold. It’s a story that says “reality is physical only” and discounts any wisdom that comes from intuition, heart, spirit. Such a story can make corporations into “people” and people into interchangeable parts of a big machine whose purpose is to turn the natural world into money-making widgets as fast as possible, to make the most money for the privileged few.

Norberg-Hodge points out that the media itself is corporatized and duly invested in keeping people from seeing examples of relocalized power.

Interestingly an energy worker named Lee Harris spoke to a similar phenomenon today. He said the media and power elite don’t want us to focus on grandeur and beauty, on things that would uplift us. They benefit from keeping people depressed, despairing, and impoverished in spirit.

I suggest that it is up to us to maintain our inner sense of agency, in the face of these forces.

Consider Victor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust. He wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread… Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way… Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom…”

Let us not submit!

The More Beautiful World

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Shawndra Miller

I’ve been savoring Charles Eisenstein’s book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. It’s affirming, challenging, stimulating, surprising—and filled with wisdom for this age of crisis. Shared cultural myths make up the “Story of the People,” the beliefs we all hold about the way the world works. Eisenstein notes that the old story is beginning to crumble as we see institution after institution unveiled as unworkable, untenable. He shows how this old Story of Separation—based on control, force, domination, competition, and scarcity—informs everything we see: the prison system, food system, educational system, money system—not to mention religious institutions, childrearing practices, and even activist organizations.

Even the medical establishment’s treatment of illness is based on this model, where bacteria is the enemy we need to conquer to save our own skin. (Never mind that 90 percent of the cells that make up a human are actually bacteria and fungi!)

This overarching cultural myth—that we are separate from each other and the rest of nature, inhabiting a hostile universe built on random accident and competition—is the source of much pain, violence, despair, and exploitation.

But the old story is beginning to fall away as a new Story of Connection takes its place. This transition is far from complete, Eisenstein says. And the time between stories is fraught. Many of the institutions are revealing their true natures in horrifying ways, and our usual tactics seem useless in the face of the horror. That’s because the tactics are also made of that old story. Compelling people to change by force or ridicule, demonizing institutions and leaders as evil, even rushing to action or response before the best path is clear—these are all born from a model that won’t work anymore.

“The situation on Earth today is too dire for us to act from habit—to reenact again and again the same kinds of solutions that brought us to our present extremity. Where does the wisdom to act in entirely new ways come from? It comes from nowhere, from the void; it comes from inaction.”

That passage is one of many that resonate with me, especially since I’ve been spending so much time in that void he mentions. Sometimes I worry that by the time I emerge from this cocoon the world will have been fracked to death. That urgency to stop such horrors is real, but we need to reach deeper than action. Our task is to create something new that leaves these old systems and tactics in the dust. We need to make a whole new world, based on the vision of connectedness. Eisenstein brings up the ebb and flow of the birth process. Much of the time the mother is not pushing, but resting. When the time to push comes, the urge is unstoppable. But the push comes in its time, and not before.

“Can you imagine saying to her, ‘Don’t stop now! You have to make an effort. What happens if the urge doesn’t arise again? You can’t just push when you feel like it!'”

The question is, what are we gestating? What kind of world wants to be born?

Birthing a New Story

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Shawndra Miller

Does it ever seem to you like an age of innocence is past? I’ve been thinking about this since reading Charles Eisenstein’s brilliant article, 2013: The Space Between Stories.

He describes a nostalgia for the cultural myth of his youth, “a world in which there was nothing wrong with soda pop, in which the Superbowl was important, in which the world’s greatest democracy was bringing democracy to the world, in which science was going to make life better and better. Life made sense.”

By Simon Q from United Kingdom (Rusting Sherman Hull Uploaded by High Contrast) via Wikimedia Commons

He talks about how we used to believe that the good folks in charge had things all under control, but of course it’s clear now that isn’t true. Our eyes are opening. We can’t ignore the perpetuation of global poverty and extreme inequity. We’re waking up, painfully, to the destruction wrought in the name of commerce and greed. We see that things are falling apart, and the institutions and experts we used to trust are not going to fix it.

And we can never get back to that old cultural story. We’re birthing the new story now, but we’re in a between-time. Our lack of shared cultural myth makes this a turbulent and often frightening time, with the extreme death throes of the old story showing us the worst of the worst.

Or that’s what Eisenstein thinks anyway, and it rings true for me.

Joanna Macy says it this way:

This is a dark time filled with suffering, as old systems and previous certainties come apart.

Like living cells in a larger body, we feel the trauma of our world. It is natural and even healthy that we do, for it shows we are still vitally linked in the web of life. So don’t be afraid of the grief you may feel, or of the anger or fear: these responses arise, not from some private pathology, but from the depths of our mutual belonging.

Bow to your pain for the world when it makes itself felt, and honor it as testimony to our interconnectedness.

So instead of running from our pain in this chaotic between-time, we can turn toward it, with compassion. We can grieve what’s passing away, mourn what’s lost to us forever. We can acknowledge the emotions that arise as we awaken, even the ones we’ve been taught are best kept locked down.