On Things That Matter — Practice & Reality

From the Second Circle Newsletter, June 2020

We weren’t going to do this. This was supposed to be the quiet part, the message beneath the messages, the end of the trail of crumbs.

But the time for quiet has passed.

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Here’s how the neurons in your brain work. Ready? Little chemical signals called neurotransmitters activate one ‘end’ of a neuron, turning on an electrical charge. This charge travels the length of the cell to various endpoints, which in turn release neurotransmitters of their own, which cross tiiiiiiiiny gaps called synapses until they land on adjacent neurons, turning their electrical charges on and continuing along the chain. And that’s how your brain does brain things.

When whales die, their bodies sink to the bottom of the ocean and become the food supply for thousands of deep sea dwellers. In fact, a “whale fall” can feed these scroungers of aquatic carrion for over a century. Migration routes for whales have created entire ecosystems of such organisms, denizens of the darkness that lie in wait for a humpback or a blue to descend from above like manna for the Israelites. In the process of sinking into the deep, incidentally, whales bring up to two tons of sequestered carbon down with them.

In 2001 Warner Bros. released Osmosis Jones, a combination live-action/animated feature film in which Chris Rock voiced the titular character; a white blood cell who is also a cop and who must save the human in which he lives. The movie bombed, in no small part because it was really gross.

The largest known organism on the planet is a fungus that lives in Oregon. It grows underground mostly, but pops up in little mushroom tops all over the North Pacific rainforest. If you walk the Pacific Coast Trail, you’ll likely think you’re encountering thousands of individual fungi when you’re really just hiking over one.

The best way to determine the political beliefs of any given human being is to study their friends and family. This is also the best way to predict if they will take up smoking, turn vegan, or start practicing yoga.

Do you see?

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A question that seems only to get harder by the day: should I watch the news? The information arriving through the digital aether is so often overwhelming and negative and dark. Should I tune in or tune out? What is the responsible choice? What makes me strong? What makes me gullible? What is the line between being an informed citizen and an anxiety-ridden information addict?

These are real questions with few easy answers. And they all source back to an undeniable truth about human beings: we change each other. When I observe suffering, I feel suffering. This can have difficult emotional consequences. For example, when I watch a police officer kneel on the neck of a handcuffed man, a man who is calling for his mother and saying he can’t breathe, I am overwhelmed with emotions I have trouble naming.

I heard an old song the other day. It swelled in the middle, and I began to sob without warning. I had to sit down in the grass near St. Paul street until I could walk the rest of the way home. I didn’t know who I was mourning, I have only images and tales to grieve.

Passing through the produce section this week I made eye contact with someone I knew, but wasn’t sure, because of the masks. Because we were protecting each other.

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The concept of a superorganism is usually applied to insects like ants or termites; groups of small, unintelligent creatures that coordinate - somehow - to perform relatively complex tasks. What appear to be distinct individuals (bugs) are in fact members of a collective, a more comprehensive unit with a higher purpose than any single component could achieve or even understand.

My friends, we aren’t what we are so often told. You and I are not you and I. We are filled with electricity and we share it across spaces small enough to carry a virus. Beneath this soft loam you will find mycelium for miles, an embedded substrate, a communication, a bond. If you choose goodness and love, if you move to compassion, I am more likely to do the same.

There is an inborn networking capacity to human beings, we radiate ideas and emotions. We perpetually receive and transmit signals, whether we like it or not, in heartbeats, glances, and iambic pentameter. The Tao moves everywhere and nowhere. God is in the hearts of all mankind. The sound of Om is an infinite chord.

Do you hear?

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Osmosis Jones rode on a fever-born teardrop into his host Frank and revived him from certain death. The citizens of the ‘City of Frank’ celebrated Jones for saving their lives. Years later, Chris Rock made a statement about “bad apple” cops, noting that bad apples spoil the whole bunch. The group is conjoined, he pointed out, and their condition affects their entire community.

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We live in a culture that wants, desperately, to convince you that you’re alone. That you have to do it by yourself. That the pain of the oppressed has little to do with good people in liberal states. These are lies.

On average, the ocean is over two miles deep. The humpback whale only dives to around 200 meters; the ecosystem it sustains when it falls will be completely alien to it, unknown in the most complete sense.

At the studio we try to draw a boundary - a circle - around the space so we can all remember: we are not alone and never will be. Second Circle is not a place to connect, it is a place to rediscover a connection that was always there. We are embedded within a network, both individuals and pieces of something beyond ourselves. When we deny pain and anguish and oppression we do not end them, we only push them away like Syrian refugees turned back from Lesbos. Just as capitalism thrives by externalizing costs, individualism thrives by externalizing suffering.

This myth of individualism lets us invent ‘others’ that are not like us and pretend the past has nothing to do with us. However, biologists have confirmed that trauma can be transmitted through generations, embedded in our genes. You did not begin when you were born, friend; you extend back into the unknown darkness of the past. Your ancestry lives and breathes inside of you. How deeply is slavery written into us all? How many generations before our DNA forgets that some of us were masters and others property?

If you need more evidence, look no further than our tribes. Look and see how instinctively we flock towards the call of a group, the promise of a place. Look how we form ideologies by sharing our beliefs in word, thought, and deed.

And then look to the lines of riot shields and black boots and gas masks, tell me you do not see a collective. A murmuration. A pride.

The joint pursuits of group psychology and marketing are clear on this: the essential need for human connection can and often does override moral judgment, particularly when we deny its power. If you can manipulate empathy you can start a world war. Empathy is a sort of interpersonal nuclear power; it can go either way.

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So here is our position. (And thank you if you made it this far, we don’t know how to do this type of thing succinctly.) When George Floyd was murdered a charge in a cultural neuron flipped and sent something undeniable hurtling across our synapses. And much of what emerged was pain, some ancient and buried and girded with shame. Second Circle isn’t here to make that pain go away. Instead, we ask you to notice how the pain of others extends beyond them like the light of a signal fire. Notice that you have within you the inherent capacity to receive this sort of message. To read this code can be as natural for you as breathing.

I don’t like to preach about progress at the studio, or tell others about their responsibility in life. Nor do I feel right telling anyone else how systemic racism feels on a personal level. I’m a cis white man, what the fuck do I know about it? However, I will say this: empathy is not an ethical principle; it is a way of experiencing life, like a sixth sense. Pain we refuse to acknowledge must still be processed somewhere, by someone. Perhaps notice that being a node in a network of healing can hurt, because we are called to look upon and sit with suffering beyond our own. But also notice that your actions reverberate and touch others. You can help. Because you are embedded in the totality, what you do matters.

Black Lives Matter because life matters. Systemic oppression matters because it causes tremendous individual and communal suffering, which in turn creates massive trauma in the shared body of all humankind. We are all connected. What we do matters.