Lance Phillips • September 03, 2024
I just returned from a week at the beach. From a week watching the ocean encroach on the sand in the guise of its emissaries, the waves. It never fails. Every time I spend time beside the ocean a couple of things come to mind: a poem called “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens* and the Buddhist notion that each of our lives is a wave in the ocean and that the ocean is Living.
What is Justice? How do we embody it? How do we model it for those watching us (because someone is always watching)? I don’t know, frankly, though there’s much to be learned from taking a hard look at ourselves. Questions start popping into frame for me when I start poking at the Stevens’ line:
“Oh! Blessed rage for order…”
What is Order? Why the rage for it? Is that rage necessarily blessed?
It is my opinion that Order is another rendering of Control and that Control has very little concern for Justice. Justice is an asymmetrical idea that will always call Control to task. Why is there rage for Order? I see it in this poem, though the terms here are different, as well as in American culture as a whole. Honestly, I think the answer is simple. Humans like to feel safe and comfortable. Bequeathing blessedness on raging for Order is exactly what “justified” the colonization of the Americas — it empowered the radical notion of Manifest Destiny, and it continues to inform everything from the reduction of voting rights to the villainization of people, of culture, and the LGBTQIA+ community.
If this is Order, put me down for Disorder.
Next, how do we make our lives? How do we reconcile the fact that our lives are finite and that the struggle for Justice will outlast us? How do we embrace the metaphor of our lives as waves surging in the ocean of existence? One of the things I read while watching the waves at the beach (well, I’m still reading it) was Mark Epstein’s Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart:
“We must learn how to be with our feelings of emptiness without rushing to change them. Only then can we have access to the still, silent center of our own awareness that has been hiding, unbeknownst to our caretaker selves, behind our own embarrassment and shame. When we tap in to this secret storehouse, we begin to appreciate the two-faced nature of emptiness—it fills us with dissatisfaction as it opens us to our own mystery. As the Buddhist traditions always insist, if we look outside of ourselves for relief from our own predicament, we are sure to come up short. Only by learning how to touch the ground of our own emptiness can we feel whole again.”
Epstein sums this up wonderfully. Part of how We Are Justice is by modeling the act of sitting with that which makes us uncomfortable, that which calls us to do hard things, that which sets us on a path to influence those around us. Being with Emptiness is embracing the idea of disorder. Being with Emptiness is embodying our role as a wave in the ocean of community. Being with Emptiness helps us embark on the journey of Justice by starting with ourselves.
I love the beach for many reasons: the sun, the lifting of responsibility, the disruption of schedules, the positive attitudes of those around me, and the waves. I adore seeing the waves move toward the shore without trepidation and without remorse. That’s how I want to live; and through that life manifest to others that there are choices we can all make that will move us closer to Justice every day.
*I should point out that while some would call Wallace Stevens the greatest 20th century American poet there are a number of occasions in which he made racist remarks or wrote racist things. I believe firmly that art should be viewed separately from the artist but I don’t want Stevens’ more shocking comments/poems to get in the way of a reader getting something positive from the blog. I hope, if nothing else, we will consider the multitudes (as Walt Whitman put it) we all contain and have the courage to confront even our most destructive faces therein.
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