We have all felt the shock and pain of repeatedly witnessing the searing images of violence unleashed upon those who died in New York and Washington.. Yet where do we witness the pain of the victims of U.S. aggression? Anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements and theorists have long insisted on placing the bodies and experiences of marginalized others at the centre of our analysis of the social world. To fail to do so at this moment in history would be unconscionable. . .I am more convinced than ever of the need to engage in the language and politics of embodied thinking and speaking. -Sunera Thobani (ex-president of Canadian National Action Committee), "War Frenzy," October 2001
In my earlier days, I had no real interest in politics, because I saw the kind of change really necessary was so profound that no-one in political power could even think about it. Now to my amazement I find the possibility opening up that these ideas can become actively relevant and useful. I thought it would takes centuries. I am talking spirituality and embodiment. - Peter Payne
I keep thinking of embodiment as practice, too - maybe this is implied in everything we've said, but it seems important - that embodiment is about BEING what it is we envision, in the most profound sense about walking our talk. I see this as the edge we're all on as a species right now - how do we EMBODY peace, justice, compassion - all these words that are empty shells in the mouths of politicians. The understanding that consciousness is itself embodied, and that change on both an individual and a collective level has to happen in/through the body. - Lise Weil First, thinking about social action should not be bracketed, it should be part of every concentration and individualized study - that's implicit in our demand for a practicum The right/left polarization is obsolete in its old form. We need deep understanding of the psychologies of liberalism/modernism and conservatism/fundamentalism The old forms of struggle have set up a heavy counterforce we don't know how to handle. This doesn't mean there shouldn't be minicourses on social/cultural intervention, but these should be investigative not orthodox Whatever we come up with in relation to social action has to have a ring of truth that can be recognized by both conservatives and liberals This is already happening with local struggles, where people willingly cross party lines to act on well-thought-out practical issues that make sense to them Global corporate commercial expansions are contemporary paradigms of effective social action conducted without coherent principle. A coherent approach to social action might eventually follow from a better understanding of humans as embodied Humans as culturally altered bodies can be understood as a nested subset of organic bodies, which in turn may be understood as inherently embedded parts of the physical world. Such a vision is more likely to promote the value of nonhuman parts of the world. Intervention on this basis is more likely to be broadly founded rather than tribal, commercial or otherwise parochial. There probably are many implications of embodiment for social action - faculty correspondence
Toltec ethics: notes from Fernando Flores Speak with intention. Tell me what you think of me: this is how you develop trust. I promise I will answer you, Thank you for your assessment. When trust improves, everyone feels more confident. One thing we need to do here is to produce despair because despair produces reality. I want you to build your sense of curiosity. The compassion of the strong is in waking people up to their blindness. For that, you need to be a warrior. I am tough and sweet. Know this. we aren't aware of the amount of self-deception and self-limitation that we collect in our personalities. I'm fighting for freedom, for breadth of being. I have unlimited patience. Get them to engage. What you know you know. What you don't know. The realm of anxiety and boredom. What you don't know you don't know. Another realm, whose language is truth which gives and requires trust. People with ambition don't want to listen to positive assessments. You need emotional strength to be able to hear. Negative opinion, positive, follow up with thank you, you're welcome. When warriors fight they end by offering each other thanks. One must feel gratitude toward the person who engages you in battle. Make promises. Make them publicly, they create solidarity. They make us responsible and give opportunity for freedom. Ask others to assess you. build identity not persona, identity is about commitments. We need to reach a point where every moment tells us what to do in our body. The body never lies. Be practiced in making assessments, so you always see through. Stop producing interpretations that have no power. Your talk does not indicate action, only desire. There is no energy in that story! If you can't put your body into it, there is no truth. Develop a big story, a story of transformed reality. Can you invent a story in which you can be competitive, world-class people? Value is not produced by hard work. Value is produced by a story. You have to be willing to risk your identity for a bigger future than the present that you are living. -notes from interview by Harriet Rubin in Fast Company January 1999, 142. Whole interview found here. |
I am writing at a moment in history when the tension between democracy and patriarchy has become explosive, the driving force of fundamentalism signaling the power of the threat. Freeing love means freeing the voice so it can carry the full range of emotion and the subtleties and nuances of thought; it imposes psychic equality in the sense of everyone's having a voice and feeling free to speak. To say this is to see the affinity between love and democracy, to see that love is the psychic grounding for a democratic society not an idealizing love, but the actual gritty pleasure of living in relationship. -Carol Gilligan, The birth of pleasure, 207-8
Engaged bodies: ethics, activism, praxis
Eli Clare's workshop: Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Telling Our Scars
Presentation Abstract: Activists in various social change movements have built their work around the truth that the problems faced by any marginalized group of people lie, not in their bodies, but in the oppression they face. Locating the problems of social injustice in the world, rather than in our bodies, has been key to naming oppression. But at the same time, we must not forget--as sometimes we're inclined to--that our bodies are still part of the equation, that paired with the external forces of oppression are the incredibly internal, body-centered experiences of who we are and how we live with oppression. Often oppression--transphobia, homophobia, sexism, racism, ableism, fat phobia, classism--lodges in our bodies, stealing them away from us in a myriad of ways. What do our scars--both literal and metaphoric--tell us about this thievery and about the ways in which we resist, working to reclaim our bodies? This presentation will explore these questions and issues across various identities and oppressions, drawing examples particularly from trans and disability body politics, examining commonalities and differences.
This workshop can be delivered in several different formats: in a 20-25 minute reading, an hour long multi-media presentation, or an hour-and-a-half to two hour interactive workshop, including several journal writing/reflection exercises and small group sharing.
from Toni Cade Bambara What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow
There is a war going on and a transformation taking place. That wa is not simply the contest between the socialist camp and capitalist camp over which political/economic/social arrangement will enjoy hegemony in the world, nor is it simply the battle over turf and resources. Truth is one of the issues in this war. The truth for example, about inherent human nature, about our potential, our agenda as earth people, our destiny.
I hope to encourage the fusion of those disciplines whose split (material science versus metaphysics versus aesthetics versus politics versus ) predisposes us to accept fragmented truths and distortions as whole.
There are no career labels for that work, no facile terms to describe the tasks of it. Suffice it to say that I do not take lightly the fact that I am on earth at this particular time in human history, and am here as a member of a particular soul group and of a particular sex, having this particular adventure . I figure all that means something-about what I am here to understand and to do. [thank you SM]
Report from Justin Ruben in Quito (distributed by email)
Friends,
Please accept this [unedited] bulletin from the edge of consciousness. I don't know whether I feel like crying because I am so moved by what I saw today, because my mucous membranes are all shot to hell from too much tear gas, or out of sheer exhaustion. But I want to get this out while it is still fresh in my mind, and tomorrow will be another insane day.
Tonight I watched some of the most oppressed people in this world confront some of the most influential. Tonight I watched a group of poor farmers, indigenous people, and workers speak, shout, sing truth to power. Tonight, I think, I think, although we will not know for a few days, I watched the terrain of hemispheric politics shift before my eyes. I feel so inspired, and so humbled.
When the day started, I was 20km south of Quito with maybe 300 indigenas, one of two protest caravans that had crossed the country spreading the word about the protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quito. As we crowded into buses to head north, I called the other caravan, who reported that they had 80 people. "And this is how it ends," I thought. 4 months of work, promising reporters, funders, countless activists in North America that thousands of people would come to disrupt the FTAA ministerial meeting. And we were going to end up with 500 people rallying in a park. But soon after we got down off the buses and began a 15km trek to Quito, the number of people seemed to mysteriously increase, as buses from the South caught up with us and disgorged fresh groups of protesters.
The procession was a riot of color, filled with red and blue ponchos and hundreds of rainbow flags (the symbol of the Andean indigenous and campesino movements). People lined the street to watch as it passed by.
One shopkeeper explained to me that the indigenous people were like burros, dragging along the rest of the country, who were also opposed to the FTAA because it would devastate the Ecuadorian economy, but who let the indigenous movement carry the torch for their opposition.
Old women chanted ceaselessly for four hours, "No queremos, y no nos da la gana, ser una colonia, norteamericana," (We don't want, and it doesn't do us any good, to be a North American colony). One group of Bolivians, led by Evo Morales, the coca-grower who almost became president there, marched with coca leaves taped to their foreheads.
When we finally reached our destination in Quito, we rounded the corner and found not 80 but somewhere between 2 and 6,000 people waiting. As the two groups approached each other, people on each side were visibly stirred, and some began to run. At this point, I realized that after 4 months of frantic organizing, the mobilization was a reality, that whatever happened we had already won, that thousands of campesinos and indigenas had come to Quito to unequivocally reject U.S.-style free trade. And I simply began to bawl.
Our group didn't even pause, but continued straight toward the Marriott Hotel, where the 34 trade ministers from North and South America were arriving to negotiate a treaty that promises to wipe out small farmers, to hand corporations a sweeping new set of tools to evade environmental, consumer and labor laws, to force the privatization of water, health care, education, culture, and biodiversity. In other words, a really crappy treaty.
As we headed north we were joined by large groups of campesinos, students, trade unionists, and international activists who had already been fighting running battles with the police, who were attempting to turn everyone back several kilometers from the Summit.
The march was led by a line of campesino and indigenous leaders ("dirigentes"), walking arm-in-arm, preceded by a Shaman conducting rites to improve the success of our efforts. Soon we were stopped by several hundred riot police. The dirigentes asked to send a elegation of civil society groups in to the summit to present a giant letter made up of the proposals and demands of thousands of people who had joined the caravans along their route. They were soundly refused.
So the dirigentes deliberated and decided to head west toward the Volcan Pichincha. As we rounded the corner we saw a thousand or more people ahead of us. More groups drifted in from the sides, and soon la Avenida Colon, one of Quito's widest streets, was packed for perhaps 8 or 10 blocks, with more people out of sight. There must have been between 8 and 15,000 people. There were giant puppets, a smattering of black-clad anarchists, a surprising number of international activists and lots and lots of campesinos: 75 year-old women, small children, 20 year olds who wanted nothing to do with traditional dress, mothers and teenage sons marching together. And they were all psyched.
As the most important social movement dirigentes approached the Avenida Amazonas, the police opened fire with a LOT of tear gas. They shot it at the crowd and over the crowd, so that as people ran away, they ran into more gas. I walked until I couldnÕt see or breathe, then began to run, then someone grabbed my hand and led me away (Why do I never carry goggles to these things?) The president of the National Judicial Workers Union was hit with three tear gas cannisters and taken to the hospital.
Several young kids passed out and almost asphyxiated. One woman fell on her baby, who was injured and taken to the hospital. A reminder that free trade can only proceed via brutal repression, which is now so commonplace at trade summits that it hardly elicits comment.
And so people retreated to the south to regroup, and I retreated to the communications center to try to get the word out about the success of the mobilization, and its repression.
At 6 PM, folks decided to try once more to deliver their giant letter, this time at the Suissotel, where the trade ministers were meeting with assorted CEO's and trade lobbyists at the 7th Americas Business Forum. As a strategy to boost legitimacy and head off disruptive protests, the government had already made offered to allow a couple civil society representatives to address the ministers. On these terms, the indigenous and campesino groups had refused. But tonight, 2000 people marched up to police barricades, where they demanded that a much larger delegation be allowed in to deliver the letter.
Clearly hoping to avoid the kind of confrontations that have occurred in past uprisings here, the government allowed 40 people from across the hemisphere to come in and meet with the ministers.
Hearing this was going on, I ran to the hotel, easily passing through several police lines because I have press credentials for the summit. In the lobby I simply asked "Where are they?" and several people pointed down. Once in the basement, I followed the shouting until I reached an auditorium where 25 or so trade ministers sat uncomfortably on stage while 40 campesinos chanted that they had no desire to be a U.S. colony. Peter Rossett of Food First stood up, his arm in a rainbow colored sling thanks to a protest injury. He yelled to Bob Zoellick, the U.S. Trade Representative, that he should be ashamed for pushing an agreement that would impoverish Latin Americans, not to mention many U.S. citizens. Zoellick stared fixedly at his shoe. It was a scene that is, I think, pretty much unprecedented in the history of trade negotiations.
Soon the civil society presentations began. A line of people fanned out in front of the ministers (and TV cameras) holding signs that said "Si a la vida, No al ALCA" (Yes to life, No to the FTAA). Behind the podium stood an indigenous representative holding a beautifully painted Inca sun with North America and South America, and the words Si Una Integracion Solidaria Con Respeco a la Soberan'a de los Naciones (Yes to an integration based on solidarity, with respect for the sovereignty of nations).
The first speakers were representatives of an international meeting of parliament and congress members from across the hemisphere. They condemned the FTAA process, and called for an alternative integration, one that respects the needs and particular situations of the people of each country.
Next came several representatives of a "civil society" forum organized by a number of pro-neoliberal NGO's with close ties to the government. Their proposals were generally tepid, but they were for the most part drowned out by the crowd. (When one speaker asked that the FTAA process be opened up to include civil society observers, the whole crowd responded by chanting, "Plebiscito, Plebiscito").
Finally, the social movement representatives spoke. Leonidas Iza, the President of the CONAIE (the Ecuadorian indigenous federation), stated the social movements' clear rejection of the FTAA and of neoliberalism in general. "We are in desperate shape," he told the ministers. "You couldn't possibly understand, you who were born in golden cradles and have never suffered" (at this the ministers looked even more uncomfortable). "But we don't have food to feed our children. Our markets are flooded with cheap imports. Imported milk is dumped in Ecuador for half of what it costs to produce it, but transnationals [mostly Nestle] sell it back to us at $1.80 per litre. We have no way to live, and the FTAA will only make it worse. When we complain, the U.S. government calls us terrorists. We are not threatening anything, but we are hungry and tired and things have to change." In the wake of widening protest throughout Latin America, the message was not lost on anyone.
Then a woman worker from Nicaragua spoke powerfully of the details of the FTAA, of the privatizations and poverty and social exclusion it would bring, particularly for women. "Don't think you can simply take your picture with us and push forward," she told the ministers. We will stop the FTAA.
The meeting ended and, unable to contain myself, I stood up and shouted in English and then in Spanish that never again could Bob Zoellick claim that the people of Latin America were clamoring for free trade, because today they had unequivocally rejected it. Then Peter Rossett chimed in that polls consistently showed that the majority of U.S citizens oppose free trade, and that the Bush administration had no right and no mandate to push forward with the FTAA. There were loud cheers, and the moderator hurriedly announced that the ministers were leaving and could we please sit down so they could leave. NO! screamed the civil society folks in unison, and they pushed out the door, leaving the ministers sitting on stage.
And, at that moment, I felt something shift. I realized that (unless the media bury this entirely despite our best efforts to get the word out, which is always possible) the FTAA has in 24 hours gone from something whose praises its proponents sing, to something they have to defend. Like the WTO before it, the FTAA has become the treaty that has to be sold to an America that doesn't want it. Or so I hope. I hope I hope I hope. This is how it feels here. But it may be different elsewhere.
If I am right, the hemispheric resistance to free trade and the FTAA has taken a huge step forward, even if this is but one day in a long struggle in which many more battles will be fought. Tonight's show of force may also strengthen the resolve of poor countries in the negotiations that follow here, which will piss off the U.S. and make it harder to reach agreement. In any case, it was a beautiful day for some of the nation's most powerful social movements. Not to mention a shitty day for Bob Zoellick and his buddies in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
We marched out of the Suissotel, reached the police barricades and were greeted by hundreds of cheering protesters, who had been dancing to traditional Kichwa music while we were inside. Then the partying began, and it is still going 5 hours later (these folks are not lightweights when it comes to cane liquor). I just said goodbye to a compa-era from one of the rural provinces of the Sierra, a woman I met when I was giving workshops on the FTAA several months ago. I asked her what she thought of the day's events, and she said, "I am happy. Very happy. This was the first time I have ever done this, and I think today we achieved something important, something that will improve our lives. And now I can go back to my children."
I am so proud, so proud and amazed by the incredible work people have done here over the last few months, so moved by their commitment to this struggle, so humbled by the generosity, patience, tolerance, and trust they have shown me. I am so honored to be part of this fast-coalescing hemispheric movement for a new economic and political order, one based on reciprocity and social justice, on true democracy and respect for human and natural diversity And I'm so happy to be going to sleep.
In solidarity,
Justin
Justin Ruben is a US activist who has been working with campesino groups mobilizing against the FTAA in Quito, Ecuador.
From Crossing
the Unknown Sea, copyright 2001 by David Whyte, published in the
UK by Michael Joseph.
One morning, hurtling from my desk toward the photocopier, I passed a roomful of my colleagues just about to start a meeting. There was someone I needed to talk to. I saw immediately that he wasn't among them, but I put my head in the door before they could begin, and in a very loud, urgent voice, I said, 'Has anyone seen David?'
There was a moment of stunned incomprehension, which to my amazement, quickly dissolved into table-thumping laughter. My comic timing must have been impeccable, because the whole room was soon helpless, repeating what I had said and generally behaving like the pig-ignorant fools other people seem to be when the joke is at our expense. I looked back at them blankly, the truth dawning as I looked. 'Has anyone seen David' might seem an innocuous question in most organizations, but I happened to be the only David who worked under that particular roof. I realized the forlorn and public stupidity of my request and forced myself, after a wide-eyed moment, to laugh with them. Inside, I was dying.
Looking for David
I was looking for David, all right, and I couldn't find him. In fact, I hadn't seen him for a very long time. I was looking for a David who had disappeared under a swampy morass of stress and speed. In the humiliation of that moment, caught forever in a doorway, calling my own name, I saw I had become a stranger to myself.
I left the doorway with whatever dignity I had remaining and went straight home. I felt as if I didn't have an ounce of energy left to do the work I had been doing. As I came in the kitchen door, I saw the bottle of red wine I had pulled out that morning sitting on the table in front of the window. Behind it, the sea formed a glinting grey-green background. The dark bottle stood there in preparation for a guest I would be seeing that night. I dropped into a chair and looked at the unopened bottle and the sea and the sky for a very long time. I could feel how utterly exhausted I was in body and spirit, and how much I needed to talk with someone, anyone, but also how marvellous it was that the person arriving to share that bottle had exactly the kind of perspectives I needed at that moment.
I could see Brother David already in my mind's eye, sitting across from me with the glass of wine in front of him on the coffee table. A book of Rilke's poetry balanced on his knees. He was reciting Rilke in his rich, Austrian inflection, the sounds emanating not only from deep within his body but also from far inside some powerful understanding, mediated by long years of silence and prayer. Brother David was my kind of monk; no stranger to silence but equally at home in the robust world of work, its words, and its meanings. He also loved poetry with a passion similar to my own, and exhibited a far-reaching intellect and a far-reaching imagination in its exploration. You might be impressed by his extraordinary capacity for compassion, but it did not mean he would let any unthinking assertion pass him by without a challenge or a clarification.
The awkward way the swan walks
A few hours later, Brother David was indeed sitting in that empty chair. The bottle framed by darkness now in the window, and the cork sitting next to it. He was turning the pages of the Rilke book with one hand and sipping from his glass with the other. I had a second copy of the book but it sat on my lap unopened. After the first sip of cabernet, I felt as if I was in a deep well of fatigue looking up toward a tiny ellipse of light flickering at the surface. I felt as if the tiny light might disappear altogether and the waters flow over me if I didn't say something soon. I looked at Brother David, whose eyes had just lit up with the discovery of a poem to begin our evening, and heard him begin to read:
- Diese Mushal, durch noch Ungetanes
- schwer und wie gebunden hinzugehn,
- gleicht dem ungeschaffnen Gang des Schwanes.
- schwer und wie gebunden hinzugehn,
I found the poem in my own book and read, on the opposing page, Robert Bly's marvellous translation.
- This clumsy living that moves lumbering
- as if in ropes through what is not done,
- reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.
- And to die, which is the letting go
- of the ground we stand on
- and cling to every day,
- is like the swan,
- when he nervously lets himself down into the water,
- which receives him gaily
- and which flows joyfully under
- and after him, wave after wave,
- while the swan,
- unmoving and marvellously calm,
- is pleased to be carried,
- each moment more fully grown,
- more like a king, further and further on.
- as if in ropes through what is not done,
I read the lines, seeing the image of the swan being borne on the waters so effortlessly, and thought of my own days so full of will and effort. I looked up at Brother David, the nearest thing I had to a truly wise person in my life, and found myself almost blurting.
'Brother David?'
I uttered it in such an old, petitionary, Catholic way that I almost thought he was going to say, 'Yes, my son?' But he did not; he turned his face toward me, following the spontaneous note of desperate sincerity, and simply waited.
'Tell me about exhaustion,' I said.
He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along, to say a life-changing thing to me. He said, in the form both of a question and an assertion:
'You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?' 'The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest,' I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before I reached the end of the sentence. 'What is it, then?'
'The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.'
He looked at me for a wholehearted moment, as if I should fill in the blanks. But I was a blank to be filled at that moment, and though I knew something pivotal had been said, I had not the wherewithal to say anything in reply. So he carried on:
'You are so tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life. You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while. You need something to which you can give your full powers. You know what that is; I don't have to tell you.'
He didn't have to tell me. Brother David knew I wanted my work to be my poetry.
'Go on,' I said. 'You are like Rilke's Swan in his awkward waddling across the ground; the swan doesn't cure his awkwardness by beating himself on the back, by moving faster, or by trying to organize himself better. He does it by moving toward the elemental water, where he belongs. It is the simple contact with the water that gives him grace and presence. You only have to touch the elemental waters in your own life, and it will transform everything. But you have to let yourself down into those waters from the ground on which you stand, and that can be hard. Particularly if you think you might drown.' He looked down and read again.
- And to die, which is the letting go
- of the ground we stand on
- and cling to every day...
- of the ground we stand on
Do something heartfelt
He looked up again, warming to his theme. I was getting a good talking-to. 'This nervously letting yourself down, takes courage, and the word courage in English comes from the old French word cuer, heart. You must do something heartfelt, and you must do it soon. Let go of all this effort, and let yourself down, however awkwardly, into the waters of the work you want for yourself. It's all right, you know, to support yourself with something secondary until your work has ripened, but once it has ripened to a transparent fullness, it has to be gathered in. You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly' he hesitated 'to rot on the vine.'
I gave an involuntary shiver at that last image, and recoiled from the prospect. It was the prospect of an early death experienced while still alive and it jolted me out of my exhausted torpor, as if some imaginative adrenaline was now beginning to flow through my system. I looked back at him, and realized that simply in the act of coming awake for a moment, my tiredness was falling away. His words had helped to lower me deeper into myself, down into some imaginative buoyancy, had plucked me off the vine; whatever the metaphor of harvest or arrival, it was happening right there in the room. From outside the window you would have seen a younger man and an older man speaking intently over two glasses of wine, their books put aside. You would see the younger one lean forward, purse his lips, say something, laugh, and sit back again. You would have seen a moment of light intimacy; you would not have known anything had changed profoundly for the younger man in that instant. But everything had changed.
Turning point
I said, 'That's it, that's it exactly.' I sat back. What came to my mind even as he was speaking, were the faces of all my colleagues in the organization, with whom I would have to have those difficult, courageous conversations in order to change my work; change my work more toward teaching, more toward speaking, more toward poetry. It was a daunting prospect, but I wouldn't be put off the task. I was so shaken by the moment in the doorway earlier that day and by the strong, pivotal words of Brother David's that I took those conversations as a felt challenge and discipline from that moment on. I realized I had nowhere else to go. I gathered my courage the very next morning and began to talk with my colleagues.
Over the next few months, I took the time to make those imaginary conversations real. I spoke with person after person, and slowly, conversation by conversation, changed my job description in the organization to something more fitting to my temperament. But the success itself told me the game was up for half measures. 'Halfway will kill you,' I remembered, as my work life slowly began to simplify and come back into focus. As I met with each of my colleagues, I began to see that in an extraordinary way the conversations themselves were doing all the work. It forced me to ask myself the next question: 'If this kind of conversation will bring you to the work you want for yourself within an organization, what kind of work do you really want to do in the wider world? What are your elemental waters? What courageous conversations will bring you to your poetry?' Each of us has an equivalent core in our work, whether it is the path of the artist or the explorations of the engineer. Even if we already possess the work of our dreams, there is a way of doing that work that will deepen and enliven it, a way that begs for a daily disciplined conversation.
A day-by-day conversation with the future
I decided on two things: firstly I was going to do at least one thing every day toward my future life as a poet. I calculated that no matter how small a step I took each day, over a year that would come to a grand total of 365 actions toward the life I wanted. One thing a day adds up to a great deal over time. One thing a day is a powerful multiplier.
Just three months later, I found myself on a podium facing a very large audience, for which, despite everything I had done to arrive there, I was still not prepared. It came about very quickly, before I could complete even a quarter of those promised 365 actions. A speaker had cancelled for a conference at the last moment, and one of my daily 'actions' had brought me to the notice of a friend who ran the conference. From that infinitesimal but infinitely important connection, I and my work were catapulted into the visibility for which I had waited long years.