Co-dependencies may be understood, broadly speaking, as an unhelpful condition, a condition lacking balance—since they seem to require one party to be “unwell” as a condition of the connection. This may be so. It is certainly observable in human relationships which define the term.
It is fundamentally not possible for us to be co-dependent with the planet, not literally, but the image is instructive. We are not asserting the planet itself is capable of acting relationally with us. What we are suggesting is that we are incapable of being here-- without trying to master a profound urge to relate to the world, which includes the people in it.
A current television commercial sponsored by General Electric on health care, shows a new born child and the voice- over says, “Welcome to the Earth”. See?
The urge to relate is powerful, and for many of us, recurring. The specifics of our life experiences aside, the resiliency of our imagination, our symbols and metaphors— not our reality per se—compel us to drink deeply from a fountain of hopefulness leading to other pleasures, joy being first among them.
We admit it. Valerie and I are recovering realists having come to view this call of mind, “to be real”, an addiction, not unlike so many addictions which claim great displays of human loyalty. And like addicts everywhere, for us to be in recovery is to acknowledge that the object of the addiction, to be fully realistic and human, is unachievable. How else might we accommodate the resignation one feels when we consider how what we know, and what we do, so often go wanting for a connection? Denial comes to mind.
And denial is always present wherever addictions flourish. Denial is requisite to co-dependence. The planet with which we are co-dependent is remarkable. It operates on a scale which dwarfs people. Only our denial allows us to believe we may be capable of taming Nature expressed as our watery planet. The blue whale may be built to scale, but no other living beings come to mind. We are small, capable of keen observation, with great capacity for denial to manage through the random setbacks which visit us from time to time, by Nature. The setbacks which are of human inventing, and are legendary, derive from the dysfunction we have internalized, first from a nurturing and, occasionally heartless, planet destiny. More to follow.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Monday, February 20, 2006
21 February 2006
“Waterskiing on the Congo and Kouillou rivers is a popular sporting activity in peacetime.”
Source: From an actual travel site, http://www.wtgonline.com/data/cog/cog.asp, as posted on the web as of 16 October 2005.
Dysfunction is the word. What it is, is the question.
In the United States, and perhaps elsewhere, resources for self-help are available by the heap. Overcoming dysfunction is the under-belly of all of the self-help material, at least, so we say.
We think the urge to overcome dysfunction, to become functioning, is sound—it is the equivalent, however, of being asked to vote in favor of “motherhood”. It is hard to imagine a situation where a nay vote would make sense.
The source of dysfunction, not the yearning to overcome it, must be correctly enunciated. Most of us, until now, would be quick to nominate members of our immediate and extended families for attribution, to explain away abiding personal limitations and addictions. If we can work on ourselves, maybe the cycle of dysfunction can be broken.
Dysfunction is inherent in Nature, not in families per se. Nature, the context which contains all people the world-around, is for the most part, nurturing. Randomly, the succor of Nature can turn very cruel. The earthquake in Pakistan which has marooned thousands above the winter snowline with no shelter, the mudslide in the Philippines covering children and teachers with thirty feet of debris—from which they instant message and email to the observers above ground who lack the tools to free them, the Tsunami of 2004, the hurricanes of 2005—all of Nature, and each event wildly traumatic. How does one define functional behavior following these events?
If a mother or father were to behave as randomly with as much indifference to those caught in the moment—bingo—we would call this behavior abusive, dysfunctional, and maybe criminal. The trauma which perpetuates dysfunction is all about us. We learn dysfunction from Nature: It is nurture coupled with random acts of cruelty. It has always been so.
Eating disorders, addictions of all stripes and variety, and abuses which are mental, emotional and/ or physical, are all derivative of something very old and very entrenched in our experience, not necessarily, in our being. We have never known a time in this place, save for the Eden story, when it was otherwise. The Edenic world, if it must be acknowledged as prequel, is quite removed from the experience of anyone we are likely to meet in this lifetime.
Even the trauma of serious Illness is of Nature.
What we would like to suggest for today’s blog, is the following reflection: Valerie and I are in our early 50s today. Our frame of reference has been shaped since attending high school in the late 1960s in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. We are simply another pair of voices intrigued with the context of our life’s experience, and wondering, like a zillion others precedent to us, and many zillion, hopefully, who shall come after, how it is we are here in this place? We have to declare ourselves—we are two people who find this place endlessly wonderful and humbling. While we have never been elsewhere as sentient beings, we are wildly and comfortably totally co-dependent with this place, this planet.
If dysfunction is of Nature, our co-dependence with the planet must surely follow. Co-dependent relationships may betray a reality of connectedness which is not negotiable. Co-dependencies may be matters to be celebrated first, if they are to be overcome at all.
When the quake roars from the interior throat of the earth, we do not consider counseling or self-help; we shudder, worry and remain in place until the fearful moments pass. The volcano, the hurricane, the tornado, even the tsunami, while they are terrible, it never occurs to us that there is a healthier venue for our lives. We curry the dysfunction of having to live, on some level, in fear that our foundation in this place will be upset by Zeus or the elements. This may explain why so much dysfunction is observable in the daily lives of people everywhere—it is the way we stand in relationship to Nature, let alone one another. It does not matter that Cal Tech can explain it away, or that MIT has an algorithm which faithfully reduces the behavior to mathematical function. Father Time and Mother Nature are scary parents. It is our relationship with the planet, and its a priori status as prequel to us, which defines where this blog, the Avarice Fellowship, begins. More soon.
Source: From an actual travel site, http://www.wtgonline.com/data/cog/cog.asp, as posted on the web as of 16 October 2005.
Dysfunction is the word. What it is, is the question.
In the United States, and perhaps elsewhere, resources for self-help are available by the heap. Overcoming dysfunction is the under-belly of all of the self-help material, at least, so we say.
We think the urge to overcome dysfunction, to become functioning, is sound—it is the equivalent, however, of being asked to vote in favor of “motherhood”. It is hard to imagine a situation where a nay vote would make sense.
The source of dysfunction, not the yearning to overcome it, must be correctly enunciated. Most of us, until now, would be quick to nominate members of our immediate and extended families for attribution, to explain away abiding personal limitations and addictions. If we can work on ourselves, maybe the cycle of dysfunction can be broken.
Dysfunction is inherent in Nature, not in families per se. Nature, the context which contains all people the world-around, is for the most part, nurturing. Randomly, the succor of Nature can turn very cruel. The earthquake in Pakistan which has marooned thousands above the winter snowline with no shelter, the mudslide in the Philippines covering children and teachers with thirty feet of debris—from which they instant message and email to the observers above ground who lack the tools to free them, the Tsunami of 2004, the hurricanes of 2005—all of Nature, and each event wildly traumatic. How does one define functional behavior following these events?
If a mother or father were to behave as randomly with as much indifference to those caught in the moment—bingo—we would call this behavior abusive, dysfunctional, and maybe criminal. The trauma which perpetuates dysfunction is all about us. We learn dysfunction from Nature: It is nurture coupled with random acts of cruelty. It has always been so.
Eating disorders, addictions of all stripes and variety, and abuses which are mental, emotional and/ or physical, are all derivative of something very old and very entrenched in our experience, not necessarily, in our being. We have never known a time in this place, save for the Eden story, when it was otherwise. The Edenic world, if it must be acknowledged as prequel, is quite removed from the experience of anyone we are likely to meet in this lifetime.
Even the trauma of serious Illness is of Nature.
What we would like to suggest for today’s blog, is the following reflection: Valerie and I are in our early 50s today. Our frame of reference has been shaped since attending high school in the late 1960s in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. We are simply another pair of voices intrigued with the context of our life’s experience, and wondering, like a zillion others precedent to us, and many zillion, hopefully, who shall come after, how it is we are here in this place? We have to declare ourselves—we are two people who find this place endlessly wonderful and humbling. While we have never been elsewhere as sentient beings, we are wildly and comfortably totally co-dependent with this place, this planet.
If dysfunction is of Nature, our co-dependence with the planet must surely follow. Co-dependent relationships may betray a reality of connectedness which is not negotiable. Co-dependencies may be matters to be celebrated first, if they are to be overcome at all.
When the quake roars from the interior throat of the earth, we do not consider counseling or self-help; we shudder, worry and remain in place until the fearful moments pass. The volcano, the hurricane, the tornado, even the tsunami, while they are terrible, it never occurs to us that there is a healthier venue for our lives. We curry the dysfunction of having to live, on some level, in fear that our foundation in this place will be upset by Zeus or the elements. This may explain why so much dysfunction is observable in the daily lives of people everywhere—it is the way we stand in relationship to Nature, let alone one another. It does not matter that Cal Tech can explain it away, or that MIT has an algorithm which faithfully reduces the behavior to mathematical function. Father Time and Mother Nature are scary parents. It is our relationship with the planet, and its a priori status as prequel to us, which defines where this blog, the Avarice Fellowship, begins. More soon.
"Never draw [one's gun] in anger...it slows the hand." Paladin
It is all around us, the call for calm amidst all the clamor. The complexities of human endeavoring, if they were not so painful for so many, might be wonderful to contemplate as imaginative displays of unperfected self-interest. Add to this the apparent post-modern burden from which there is no seeming escape, and we have the backdrop for the Avarice Fellowship blog.
The post-modern "burden"--may have less to do with the pluarlism of formerly isolated world peoples, and more to do with the object lessons of Nature itself. This makes today's competition for metaphorical supremacy, and their adherents, no less scary.
How self-interest and our clash of metaphors lay down together, or do not, is profoundly human, and thereby, on some level irresistible as a challenge to one's frame of reference and peace of mind.
Jeff and Valerie Snider are the co-authors of the Avarice Fellowship blog. They have been together as life partners for more than thirty years. Each claims a public school background leading to respective Ivy League and Community College educations. They are parents to five adult children. Their family life, as a first pre-occupation, has been shaped by both private business and multi-national NGO experience.
The Avarice Fellowship is a journey of reflections they have collected, sprinkled with points of view clawed from all the reflecting and the doing. With patience they believe the journey may reveal a process for resourcing community and for realizing a convergence of self-interest, the avarice, with content and value-rich living, the fellowship, in this place, if not in our time. It is their wish.
The post-modern "burden"--may have less to do with the pluarlism of formerly isolated world peoples, and more to do with the object lessons of Nature itself. This makes today's competition for metaphorical supremacy, and their adherents, no less scary.
How self-interest and our clash of metaphors lay down together, or do not, is profoundly human, and thereby, on some level irresistible as a challenge to one's frame of reference and peace of mind.
Jeff and Valerie Snider are the co-authors of the Avarice Fellowship blog. They have been together as life partners for more than thirty years. Each claims a public school background leading to respective Ivy League and Community College educations. They are parents to five adult children. Their family life, as a first pre-occupation, has been shaped by both private business and multi-national NGO experience.
The Avarice Fellowship is a journey of reflections they have collected, sprinkled with points of view clawed from all the reflecting and the doing. With patience they believe the journey may reveal a process for resourcing community and for realizing a convergence of self-interest, the avarice, with content and value-rich living, the fellowship, in this place, if not in our time. It is their wish.
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