Letter to my Children: Thoughts on Somatic Capitalism

Dearest Beloveds,

Over the last couple of years, depending on circumstances and audience, I would dust off this joke.

“The history of the world could be written as - I don’t want to dig my own potatoes.”

And then I would pause for laughter.

I am retiring the joke. I have dug fewer than 1% of the potatoes I have eaten in my lifetime. It doesn’t feel as though I am the right person to say it. It also feels, given that I am trying to dismantle the overstory of capitalism from my cells - too tragic. Most importantly, I am the other person.

The Aquarian Age tells us the other person is me. We are each each other.

I don’t want to dig my own potatoes. So I am going to get someone else to do it - all day in the hot sun. I am going to get exploited children to harvest cocoa, melons, tobacco, tin, gold, cotton.* I am going to get those people who didn’t win the lottery of birth and education and class to do it and then vilify them when they, rightly, push back.

I am both the victim and the perpetrator.

I don’t want to dig my own potatoes. I want to stay on top of the lastest trends and so I don’t buy secondhand clothing - as I participate in the fast fashion maw. The secondhand clothing ends up in Accra - polluting waterways and the air in Ghana. I have outsourced the repercussions of my spoiled actions.

I am both the exploiter and the exploited.

I don’t want to dig my own potatoes. I purchase single use plastic transported on toxic large container ships - thus contributing to global warning - as the island country of Tuvalu disappears into the ocean.

I am both ignoring and ignored.

All of these schisms inside of us - disassociating us from our hearts and our intuition.

Argh - it makes me want to take a shower.

As Christina Rivera Chapman states so beautifully in a piece on Tema Okun’s White Supremacy Culture site, “I would say at the end of the day what white supremacy culture needs me/us to believe is this one thing: The only way for me to swim is someone else has to sink.”

But in reality we are all sinking.

The only way that I can succeed is when someone else fails. I am not talking about a foot race where everyone gets trophies - I am talking about the unwritten, unsung, unacknowledged, truth of our overculture - which is that my happiness and comfort is predicated on the misery and labor of another human.**

Dehumanizing us both in the process.

My beloveds, I don’t know how to help you grok this. How to push back against your desires for new clothing and new toys and new blah blah brought to these shores by global conglomerates. So I use big words like consumerism and capitalism. I tell you we are hurting our beloved planet. I tell you that spending your money on such things is not supporting our family values.

Perhaps your brains are not big enough yet to really grasp that we are swimming in a soup that doesn’t serve. Or maybe it is too much sadness and pain to contemplate. Or maybe it is just that these are the times where we are all feel pushed to the brink. Or maybe it is because we have no clear antidote for living in a more harmonious way with the earth and each other - yet.***

Or maybe it is my own training - my own modern rationality steeped in capitalism.

Arkan Lushwala talks in his The Spirit of the Glacier Speaks of the “great limitations” of “modern rationality … its poor ability to adapt itself to the unexpected, its slow analytic thought processes, its doubts, and a complicated relationship with certainty. The heavy baggage of knowledge used as a reference to understand something ends up being an obstacle.”

“When a new time comes and something happens in the sky that creates a wave that threatens to bring destruction in order to liberate us from a place where we have been stuck for a long time, we respond, dancing with joy and without fear, with the present movement of time-space.”

Beloveds, I read Lushwala’s words about responding to these times by dancing with joy. I read them and a part of me feels joy and hope and a part of me feels RAGE.

I want to fix this NOW. I want to tear the capitalism out of my cells and make sure that it doesn’t infect you two. I want to FIX THIS NOW.**** I want to scorch the earth like when I found the first deer tick on Bean’s body when she was a baby. I want to see clearly and choose wisely in this murky water. I want to free myself and you both from an overstory that is terrible for humans and terrible for our planet.

So I take a breath and reread.

“When a new time comes and … creates a wave that threatens to bring destruction in order to liberate us from a place where we have been stuck for a long time, we respond, dancing with joy and without fear.”

Dancing with joy and without fear.

Let’s all go dancing to sweat this capitalism out of our cells.

*You can learn more about this at StopChildLabor.org - hopefully enough to give you pause when you reach for a “cheap” chocolate bar.

**This might be time to reread Ursula K LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” if you have not read it in a while.

*** Yes, there are pockets of humans living in integrity, love, and awareness - but this is not yet the global system. I am thinking of The Forgiveness Project, Resmaa Menakem’s Black Octopus Society, and even beloved Zingermans - modeling love and care in all actions.

****On Singing to the Beloved in Times of Crisis, Joshua Schrei’s latest Emerald Podcast episode, talks to this feeling directly (1:33 for those of you who want to listen to his great voice yourself). Shoutout to Josh for being a lighthouse in these times.

Can we find you Beloved in the difficult places… in the friction that is inviting us to deepen. Every face of the wave is Sacred. We have been told and we have been sold that the consummation is the holy part. That the goal is to get from here to point B and the only sacred part is when we find the Beloved we have been chasing. When we achieve our goals and topple the system and find at last the utopian Disney wedding. So our searches, instead of being sacred, our searches our impatient, frantic. Our longings divorced from sacredness. They spiral into obsession.

I have to get there. I have to pursue happiness. I have to actualize the distant future now. I cannot rest till climate change is solved. We are left with a movement - that like the very thing that it is struggling against - has only a commitment to relentless movement driving it.

The movement becomes movement for the sake of movement - becomes agitation itself.