Finding Connection

In the age of unraveling

Dear Reader,

We normally offer our monthly Down The Rabbit Hole column exclusively to our paid subscribers. Each month, we contemplate a meaningful and heartfelt question to discover the gifts of that particular inquiry. This month, however, we would like to share our musings with all our subscribers as a gesture of reciprocity. May you find glimmers of possibility in and between our words … If you would like to keep journeying down the rabbit hole with us, you can become a paid subscriber. And if you too have a burning question, please submit to debra@holybeepress.com. Thank you.

This month’s question is from our dear friend Ayşe in Türkiye:

How do I liberate myself from feeling like I am the product I should be advertising each day and still exist in a system built mostly around money and power? What does genuine connection look like in an age of technology?¹

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From Filiz …

Dear Ayşe, thank you for your well-articulated questions which I am sure deeply resonate with and are shared by many. It is an inquiry that has been troubling me a great deal in the recent years.

A little more than a year ago I deactivated my personal Instagram account. I had been contemplating about it for some time, and finally the time came to make the leap, and I did it. Because, Ayşe, just like you I was feeling trapped and frustrated, and I was looking for a way out.

This move came at a time of a lot of letting go and retreating into my own chrysalis;
it was in alignment of an inner movement that demanded me to be slow, small and private. It was and is outrageously counterintuitive considering that the overculture continuously pressures us toward incessant growth.

However, there are times in our lives when all outward energy needs to be retrieved inward, toward the core—the inner being—so the necessary changes can take place. Within this context, it was not hard to sever my dependence on social media for self-promotion of work at large. It was, in fact, what I precisely needed. I was suddenly feeling fiercely protective about sharing my personal life stories with an anonymous audience. It was a visceral decision; I followed my body’s guidance over mental constructs and social pressure.

As someone who often lives with the paradox of “creative solitude” and “longing for human community”, I often wonder whether we are free in our choices, and whether we have agency over the invisible forces—karma, trauma, history, systems we are born in, the Unconscious, destiny—operating in our lives. It is indeed a hard labour to liberate ourselves—children and grandchildren of colonial, extractive modernity—from the habit of fixing/improving/grasping for personal gain. Vanessa Andreotti, the author of Hospicing Modernity, names it as the tendency “to turn relation into possession, encounter into experience, medicine into commodity, and mystery into a mirror for the human ego.”²

Perhaps it’s not about the social media itself—though it is a product of the same extractive, profit-over-anything mindset—but about our own conditioning and our own glorious struggle to evolve out of the maze of this dying dream with which we are so profoundly entangled that it feels like our complete and utter demise. We have been suffering from a disease called wetiko³ which has been consuming our world. Healing from it is a mythic undertaking of epic proportions.

The more we allow the shedding and composting of the old dream, the more connective tissue of the new dream will be revealed to us. And it is happening already. Our glorious struggle can be full of imagination, creativity and wonder along with our rites of passage to honor our grief, losses, transformation and death-rebirth cycles. I don’t wish for another pandemic but I believe there will be plenty of opportunities for us humans to change our ways in the near future.

Most importantly, we each are more than how this particular era defines us. One of our most sacred tasks is to remember that we are participants in co-creating a new story. The ruins we find ourselves in aren’t our only inheritance. We do know what genuine connection is, otherwise we would not have made it so far.

A moment of connection from a recent ceremony honoring a life transition. Photo by Aybike Savaşır Serdar

An incredible art project called Beyond Walls by the artist Saype.

“The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter. Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on. When you give in to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it. When you take back your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, your creativity awakens and flows to become an active force of renewal and encouragement in the world. In this way, even in your own hidden life, you can become a powerful agent of transformation in a broken, darkened world. There is a huge force field that opens when intention focuses and directs itself toward transformation.”

JOHN O’DONOHUE⁴

❤️ Filiz

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From Debra …

My dear Ayşe, I have just this week returned from a month of travel in France and Turkey. I am very much heart-whole and head-mush as I write this. I was in five airports in a day and a half. Airports are one of my favorite places. The more I am around a lot of beings that don’t look like me and am surrounded by languages I don’t speak, the more relaxed and at home I feel. I can’t explain that but it has always been true.

I love watching people, connecting through smiles, appreciation, sometimes short (sometimes long) conversations, and mostly through presence. It is the best Human TV and for me, leaves Netflix in the dust. Yes there were a lot of individuals on their phones or computers but so much life was also happening. This trip home, I watched a father play hide and seek with his two young daughters, he managing to waddle like a four-year old which really made me laugh. Then he took three chairs from a café and lined them up one behind another, handed a brochure from a kiosk to each girl, put on his pretend inspector hat as he inspected each “ticket” closely, and then escorted them to their seats. He made sure their imaginary seatbelts were tightened then sat down in front of the bus and off they went, chattering to each other about what they could see from the air.

I also happened to look at a young man who was just about to take his first bite of a burger and we both smiled, recognizing the pleasure of that moment. A woman sitting across from me shared appreciation of two siblings deeply absorbed in their fantasy conversation. The girl had a dimple on her left cheek that was much higher up than I had ever seen one before, right in the middle of her face. It came and went as she talked with her brother and was fascinating. A small golden Cocker Spaniel was such an ambassador of goodwill that he left all of us around him wagging our tails. A Turkish man asked me if Americans were mad at the Turkish (I have no idea why). I told him I wasn’t and didn’t know anyone who was. Satisfied, he then told me about his engagement, wedding and coming move to Germany. I noticed a young man as I boarded a plane who looked on the verge of tears and very close to despair. His eyes were overwhelmingly sad and I made a prayer for his heart as I passed. I sat beside a woman who was visiting her grown children on different continents and ended up saying hello to one of her daughters in India who popped up on Facetime. I observed individuals, couples, colleagues, families, sports teams … all on the way to somewhere. I flowed through a stream of check-in agents, security and customs officials, airline stewards and pilots. I moved through thousands of people across a day and a half, folks I will probably never see again. It was very, very human. And made me very, very happy.

I felt like I was microdosing on humanity and how people actually are, which often has nothing to do with the news and what is supposed to be true (especially when someone doesn’t look or sound like us). No one gets to define what my world looks like. There is a lot going on in these times, including some very hard stuff that I don’t prefer, and I know you are feeling that too. I stay aware of what is mine to keep track of and I also don’t let it swallow the intense beauty that is also alive and well. I keep my grief and sorrow tended because otherwise it is hard to stay steady and rooted. I stay focused on the world I want to participate in and keep my gifts alive there. And for me that is so often in the sacred-in-the-(so-called)-ordinary moments where so much magic and love live and dwell.

I don’t think connection looks like something so much as feels like something. Where do you feel connection? Amongst people? Animals? The chickens you built a fence for and the dog, a hut for?⁵ Taking a walk? Visiting family? Spending time with friends? Trees? Writing? Around strangers in a cafe? Who and what replenishes you? This is precious nectar in your life.

I really appreciate your questions, Ayşe. There is a strong narrative about money and power. It just isn’t mine and at age 74 I don’t have the bandwidth to spend time with what doesn’t feel true to me, especially where the true nature and potential of our species is concerned. My experience is that most people are good humans. This is an age of technology. But what else is it? For me it is an age of emerging communities, good questions (thank you), a time of creative resourcing and solutions, courage, and a deeper commitment to love, creativity, and devotion to life. How else would you define this age? Both in respect to what you see and also what you envision? Who are you when everything is silent? … the question you so beautifully pose (in the footnote). However loud and full of bigness some systems seem right now, we were born for these times to create something else.

Liberate yourself from other people’s ideas of what is true. Make connections in your own way. Make this some of the core business of your life. You are in charge of where you put your attention. Stand beside your own vision because it will be beautiful and life-giving. It is holy business and divinely timed, as your presence in this life is also divinely timed.

I don’t think there is anything essentially wrong with social media and it isn’t going to go away anytime soon. But we can say yes and no to how often we use it, how much of our day it occupies, and to not let our world view and attention be hijacked or shaped by it.

I heard a new favorite song of Joe’s this morning that is also now mine by the wonderful British singer Jahnavi Harrison. It is called “Like A River”. She sings:

Now cell phones ring instead of bells
The sacred hill has almost disappeared.

But despite that, she knows her own heart and devotes herself to the river of grace that flows through:

My heart flows like a river to the sea
May it always be
A river of grace flows through me
May it always be, may it always be.

May you find the river of grace flowing through you, Ayşe. I look forward to meeting you there.

❤️ Debra

I lit candles and activated this altar in Joe’s Great Wall as a prayer for the wellbeing of all the beautiful people in my travels across June … and for all people everywhere. And for you. Hoş geldiniz means welcome in Turkish.

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1. Here’s the full text of Ayşe’s inquiry:

There is a longing in me for the version of myself that lived in a more quiet world. Like before the internet, social media. Before every second was occupied with “the other”. What did connection feel like then? What were “the other’s” that were in my life? Schools had a significant effect on being in a community and maybe that is why people just continued on to working in offices. A purpose and a bunch of people there with you working for the same purpose (even if the personal motivation was earning money, the work produced was for the company values). What about the ones like me who didn’t like the values the companies presented and wanted to work for other purposes? How were they to find their communities, their customers and their worth in the system? Yes, we created our own communities, maybe moved away from “the system” but the system caught up. The dreams fell short. The economy collapsed. We became our own companies wearing ten different hats and getting more and more isolated while “selling ourselves” in a same but different way. It was lovely when the world slowed down and capita lost its meaning in many ways during Covid. I loved that version of life! I was living in a village, building fences for the chickens and a hut for the dog. The world was not pushing me to “be something” because everyone was slow, everyone was focused on surviving. The creativity it allowed people! How did it happen? How could it happen again? Why do I constantly feel like I have to chase something? Drifting away from my question and adding lots more, so let me try in a paragraph:

What qualities could I carry to my life from my version before social media became my “connection fixer”? Is it even possible to reach there if I am not physically connected to others? What does it mean to “not force life?” and not have to feel like I am the product I should be advertising each day and still exist in a system built mostly around money and power? Who am I when everything is silent?

2. Quote from following essay:

The Spell of the Pedestal and the Plan of the Mushrooms

3. “Various First Nation traditions of North America have specific and long established lore relating to cannibalism and a term for the thought-form that causes it: wetiko. We believe understanding this idea offers a powerful way of understanding the deepest roots of our current global polycrisis.

Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko in Powhatan). It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live.

Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder. It allows – indeed commands – the infected entity to consume far more than it needs in a blind, murderous daze of self-aggrandizement.”

Quote from an essay called Seeing “Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition” by Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk.

4. Excerpt from the book To Bless the Space Between Us.

5. See Footnote 1.