I am absolutely tender this week and wanted to shy away from writing, but as a practice of showing up for myself and for this community with intention I am here. Y’all are welcome to share this offering with your communities. I just ask that you credit my work @meredithannewhite. Thank you so much <3
How do we move through judgment and into graciousness with more questioning and less assumption?
My initial reaction to something I don’t understand is to judge it. This is absolutely a defense mechanism I’ve built for myself, and it doesn’t seem like media allows me to feel any way but that these days.
I’ve been looking for spaces (physical and digital) that allow for more discourse. I’ve been looking under the blanket of “yes” and “no” for “maybe it’s yes and no.” Maybe just maybe it’s “I believed this truth for a long time” and now I can say “this truth does not resonate for me any more.” And instead of people jumping to dismiss that reckoning, what if we chose to honor the changing of one’s opinion on the matter?
I am repeatedly finding myself wiggling my way into scenarios that require a great deal of listening, a great deal of patience, and often leaving with more questions and less answers. My brain operates in a way that likes to put and package information in neat and tidy boxes. I like to learn a lesson, place it into a container, and check it off the box of “Learned! Dealt with! Completed!”
However, the universe has a way of throwing my ass back into the pit to say “that’s not how it works, honey.”
It feels very readily linked to the notion that I very often put people, all kinds of people, on pedestals. I see someone on social and immediately think “they are better and therefore know more because they have more followers, more likes, etc” This goes for my teachers too. I have amazing and wonderful teachers, practitioners, body workers, etc all around teaching me things at any given moment.
Shoutout to my Reiki practitioner Amy King and SRT practitioner Damaris Bybee for holding me this year. I am so grateful to you both.
I often forget that these people that feel called to work these jobs, roles, careers, passions, are just like me. They are very often people who have had to go through some shit to get where they are. They have information to share because they, too, had to learn those lessons in their lifetimes. These people are not *healed*. They’re not done *learning truths*. They’ll never stop throwing themselves into the fire to be challenged, to create new offerings, and to show up for their communities in ways that feel authentic to them.
It feels important for me to recognize that we are all learning from each other through these various lessons at any given moment. And just because someone readily identifies with a role doesn’t grant them the opportunity to shame, objectify, or guilt someone else for not knowing any better. I say this because I’ve done this. I’ve also had this happen to me in classes, by other practitioners, and at the hands of other teachers.
I listened to a podcast recently that spoke on holding spiritual practitioners accountable in this discourse if you’ve found and/or find yourself at this threshold on either end of the spectrum. Thank you Sarah Gottesdiener for this Moonbeaming episode. They go into depth with Chauna Bryant and Susan Ateh on breathwork and the dismantling of guru.
From a very small age, I’ve been asked to politely respect the authority figure that gives information, that supplies the truths, and requires us to button ourselves up without question. It wasn’t until I had a teacher (and a Bible teacher at that) in 8th grade that pulled me aside to say, “Meredith, you are doing what you need to do in class, but you’re not asking near enough questions.” Shout out to Mr. Vincent wherever you are. You changed my life.
It was a pivotal moment for me. It propelled me into a course of questioning everything, and quite frankly I don’t know that I’ve ever looked back from it. I’ve found that if I show up in a space of observation it allows me to move through my judgment with more ease and open myself up to a space of curiosity, compassion, and maybe just maybe a little bit more graciousness. I firmly believe that we are all in constant ebb and flow of learning from each other at any given moment.
So how do we continue to create these containers in a realm that defines many truths as “right” or “wrong” ? For me, it goes hand and hand with a system that readily identifies as one that is incredibly binary. It’s a system built on the foundation of “boy” or “girl.” It’s a system that identifies as “straight” or “gay.” It’s a system that sees employment, housing, money, etc in very linear boxes that can be achieved, gained, and managed in a very linear way. And that’s just not realistic for me.
For those of us that work in many different pots, whose love is fulfilled in varying intimate containers, and whose art offers more questions than answers, how do we continue to operate in this linear world?
I have started to allow myself to dismantle this binary thinking into one that offers nuance and radical love and big and often incredibly scary break downs. People ask “what do you do?” And I say “what I feel called to make in that moment.” This response does not offer a conclusive bio for people that often leaves them more unsettled and less defined about my own work.
I sat down with my wonderful friend Barry this last week, and we talked about how nice it would be to just make one thing and make money doing that one thing. How defined it would be to live like that. And their offering was something like, “well that would just be the capitalist way to make the most money off of that one craft wouldn’t it?” And for me, that felt clarifying. Because if I chose to make money off of solely drawing, then over time I would resent the very act of drawing. That would be sad for me. I like exploring medium, textile, texture, writing, nature, and craft in many different forms. My spiritual practice very much informs my work, and therefore as my practice shifts, so too does the work at hand. Sometimes I only have so much space, and it requires me setting something down to pick something else up that feels resonant at the time.
What if we had several containers that we readily identified with at various moments?
Does that make us any less deserving to sustain ourselves as makers, artists, and practitioners?
What if we removed the boxes altogether?
Again, I don’t know that I’ll ever have the answers to any of these questions. I just like to ask them and come up with more questions along the way as I currently define myself as an artist, a queer person, a maker, a spiritual practitioner, maybe a beekeeper?, sometimes a tree. I define myself as fluid and rigid at any given moment. I define myself as open and also reserved if the energy doesn’t feel aligned for me. I find myself offering compassion and direct feedback in a single conversation.
I offer these questions, these ramblings, and these stories to say this:
We can be both.
We can be all of it.
We can be none of it.
We can be some of it at one point.
We can learn from those experiences.
We can change our minds.
Let’s continue to show up in spaces with wonder.
Let’s continue to carve out new containers for intimacy and intention.
Just because we may not see or exist in them doesn’t mean they can’t ever exist.
Let’s build them.
I find that I exist between worlds on a daily basis. Some days I wish I had that one thing, but then that just wouldn’t be me. It’s not an easy space to embody. It’s gray, undefined, and non-linear. And also, it’s fuckin extraordinary. I wouldn’t change my community for the world. Thank you for being here.
With maybe just maybe a little more graciousness,