Dedicating the Merit

Strategies for Surviving Fascism

A few weeks ago, I attended a playful and powerful show that some of my friends and fellow YES! Jammers put together. Initiated out of the cancer journey of one of the creators, “Groverflow“ linked the illness burgeoning from blockages in the human body, to the killing/depletion of salmon and other wildlife when mega-dams block the natural flow of rivers. It revealed the interrelationship of the small to the big, the human to the more-than-human, the sickness of one to the sickness of all, the healing of all to the healing of one.

There were many gems in the play: beaver, snake, and bird puppet-people with fabulous costumes; sweet songs about laying down our grief and finding gratitude for all of life; understanding the damage wrought by generations of exposure to ‘disconnectitis’, a debilitating disease that separates the head from the rest of the body. Not to mention the simple beauty of seeing grown-ass adults tap into their inner children and share their spirit on stage. All of it felt poignant, inspiring, moving.

At the end of the show, we were invited to dedicate its merit to the places and people alive in our hearts. ‘Dedicating the merit’ is a Buddhist practice. It involves acknowledging the goodwill and love co-generated in a moment (usually through collective meditation) and sending it somewhere that could benefit from such positive energy. It’s similar to offering metta (loving-kindness) to all, and different too, because it’s about sharing the gift of our collective work together, trusting that it has a value and purpose beyond what we reaped by doing it. So many dedications were named by the audience and the play-ers, from Palestine to Sudan, Ukraine, the Philippines, Haiti, from personal friends going through health crises to elderly family members, from particular watersheds and forests to the entirety of Mama Earth.

It came to my heart-mind, though I didn’t shout it out at the time, that I also wanted to dedicate the merit to all of us there in that room, and all of the people in rooms around this country and others — India, Turkey, Russia, Israel, China, Saudi Arabia, and so many more places — who are doing our best to survive under fascism. To live in a time and place where so many forces are preaching hatred, greed, violence, consumption, and all manner of destruction, and to stand as a commitment to connection, simplicity, balance, belonging — that is a profound act of radical courage, a major coup d’etat (literally). To have the energy to not just stay alive, but to also work on cultivating goodwill and love for self, each other, and the Earth, is beautiful, even while the contrast also makes for a pretty constant mind fu*k/fudge.

It’s not surprising to me that fascism is extra on my mind. I recently finished reading Arundhati Roy‘s memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me. Her experiences worked their way through my body and called up many of my own memories of my time in India (1999-2008). I felt like I was living them again. She recounts her time supporting the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a massive peoples’ movement to stop the creation of a mega-dam on India’s Narmada River. Despite years of organizing efforts, the movement ultimately lost. Millions of rural people were displaced and tens of thousands of acres of farms and forests were submerged, to feed the electricity needs of India’s growing industries and cities. Arundhati similarly describes the fights of the indigenous people of eastern India to stop mining companies from taking and destroying their forests (another lost cause), and the state-sponsored mobs that killed about 2000 Muslims in Gujarat in a day as ‘revenge’ for the burning of a train car of about 60 Hindu nationalists. I felt the pain and impact of all of these brutalities at that time, and again today, and can see them as precursors to the fascism that now abounds in the subcontinent.

Reliving those examples, and feeling the even greater rise of government-corporate-authoritarian collusion, I recognize that it takes so much from each of us to just have hope in a new tomorrow. Every turn of the screw brings more unbearable pain and suffering. So, what does it take to not lose ourselves in it? How do we bear it and not let it destroy us, or infect us from head to toe in the same violent energy? How do we retain our humanity in the midst of such inhumanity?

I try to remember that our ancestors have survived even worse, and that’s why we are here. I try to remember art and music and all of the creative expressions that show us light and beauty and humanity. I try to remember that I am embedded in an Earth rooted in abundance and interdependence, and no one and nothing can take that away. I want to look fascism in the eye and say, “No. You will not win. You will not take my soul. You will not take our earth. You will not destroy humanity. We are here to love. We are here to connect. We are here to heal. Even if you stand in the way, you cannot stop it. You will fail because hatred can never win in a universe based on love.”

I speak as if fascism is a person standing before me, instead of the water I (and we) are swimming in. Yet, maybe the same message applies, just in a different way. Instead of speaking aloud to fascist individuals and forces, maybe I am simply speaking to myself, to remind myself to not get lost, swept up, overtaken by them.

Where I arrived after a 10km hike in the East Khasi Hills, Meghalaya, India

Well, maybe I’m also speaking to them. Truthfully, I don’t understand the energy it takes to continually hate/destroy/hoard, etc. Those folks seem so unhappy, the perpetual grimace on their faces, the hungry ghost that can’t be filled. Of course, some have been indoctrinated in greed, narcissism, selfishness, in their families of insecure people with unhealed trauma and too much power. In some way, I find their actions understandable. The craziest-making folks for me, though, are those who justify their fascism by saying it balances out what was done to them 25, 50, 100, 1000 years ago. As though perpetrating the same acts of violence and apartheid and incarceration towards others, will, in any way, change what happened in the past to them. It makes no sense to me, and even less so, if I want to retain and anchor in my own humanity. So, I want to offer strategies that guide me in that direction.

Like, whenever I’m working with folks in conflict mediations, I remind them (and myself) that we can’t go backwards. Whatever has happened has happened, and it cannot be changed. The past has passed. Yet, we can learn about it, about ourselves and each other, about our contexts and conditions, about our intentions and impacts. We can be honest and listen, grieve and be vulnerable, apologize and forgive. All of this is healing. And then, we can take actions to repair and rebuild. We can be present to what’s here now and then go forward with new possibilities. That’s transformation – going from one form to another.

Maybe it’s another marker of ‘disconnectitis’, to choose revenge and separation, over healing – forsaking the compass of compassion for the compass of reactions. As my friend Coumba shared in a YES! Jam many years ago, “The moment we separate, any and every kind of violence is possible.” She is reminding me of another strategy: to mind my own micro-fascism. I say ‘micro’, because I don’t have guns and bombs, or repulsive amounts of money, or the state/police apparatus at my disposal, to force my will and inflict serious bodily harm on others. And yet, othering / judging / separating is something I can do, and it has impact, visibly and invisibly, on the quality of my humanity and on the world I contribute to co-creating. I can bring awareness to this tendency and nip it in the bud and/or get curious about it, to slow it down and investigate the opportunities for healing.

Which brings me to another insight that emerged from a conversation with a dear friend. You can’t change them; don’t let them change you. My friend has been struggling with intense and unwarranted harassment from their neighbors for extremely minor issues, and despite their best efforts to compromise and resolve it, the neighbors kept escalating and it only got worse. At the end of the day, they – and me too – had to accept that other peoples’ behaviors are not in our hands. While some folks can act like chaos agents, more comfortable with destroying things than building them up, each of us is ultimately responsible for the person we are and what we do with our time and energy. I try to tap into that truth of who I want to be and how I want to behave. I don’t want to attack others for believing in something different from me, or having a certain skin color, or for leaving one country and coming to another, or for having a particular sexuality or gender expression. I want to be accepting differences, connecting open-heartedly, engaging with curiosity, moving with awareness and intention. Regardless of what gets thrown my way, I don’t want to get swept up and lose sight of what really matters to me.

Basically, I don’t want to let the chaos agents turn me away from my purpose as a love agent. I am here to love on people! (if they consent to it, of course.) To hug them and hold them, to cry and laugh, often at the same time, together, to create beauty and express kindness with each other. This also means being generous with my apologies and forgiveness – which is not just a sign of cognitive flexibility, it’s also radically anti-fascist. Power can’t compress into extremism and violence, if humility and grace stay at the center and I keep flowing with forgiveness.

All of this, and more, cultivates goodwill and love. From which, I can dedicate the merit to others who are suffering. Which allows me to feel our connection and inter-being. Which, in turn, helps me to face fascism, survive it, and find ways through it (and hopefully out of it). And, so on, in a virtuous spiral, radiating inward and outward. What could be a better (grow)overflow than that?