Well, another day has passed, and it still seems like Trump won the election. I hate this. I'm not sure I've really understood why people voted for this wanna-be dictator. The most resonant point to me that I've heard is that the US wasn't ready to elect a competent, effective woman president. And so we elected a monstrous man instead. This explanation, mixed with a fractured media environment (TV networks + social media) that could be gamed by bad actors gives the start of an explanation for this awful result.
I've often felt through my life that I would end up involved in some kind of non-violent resistance movement. So here we are. What will it look like? Let's hope this setback leads us forward to create a climate and justice movement of the scale needed to face the new time on this planet we are up against.
An idea comes up as I think about how to move forward. I've been reading "The Process Model" by Eugene Gendlin, the creator of the psychological technique of focusing. It's a terribly abstract book, extremely frustrating at times, but also with a large scope of trying to create another way of thinking that includes life and consciousness and first person perspective and pushes back against the Cartesian mind-body split. It fights back against reductionism by starting with fully functioning processes rather than trying to build them up from their parts. Gendlin next introduces the concept of a stoppage in which something prevents the process from moving forward (e.g. a lack of food means the feeding-energy gathering process can't move forward). Out of this stoppage, the process is able to change and evolve. Trump's election is a kind of stoppage in our political process. How can we respond creatively to encompass a larger perspective that moves our world forward?
A soft snow fell on us yesterday here in Colorado. Here's a plum tree, its green, yellow and orange leaves dusted with snow. This world is too beautiful to give up on.
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