I'll begin with an apology. I'm sorry for putting you on the spot, in my previous post. I did jump the gun, by laying out a charge at your feet and rebuking you so publicly. You're only doing your best in this world and trying to inspire people to live well together. By lashing out in my frustration, I put you in a corner – not a good place from which to invite dialogue.
So this morning I picked up your book, Turning to One Another, to seek your advice on what I might do. The book fell open to page 95, with the following passage:
A school teacher told me how one day a sixteen-year-old became disruptive – shouting angrily, threatening her verbally. She could have called the authorities – there were laws to protect her from such abuse. Instead, she sat down, and asked the student to talk to her. It took some time for him to quiet down; he was very agitated and kept pacing the room. But finally he walked over to her and began talking about his life. She just listened. No one had listened to him in a long time. Her attentive silence gave him space to see himself. She didn't offer advice. She couldn't figure out his life, and she didn't have to. He could do it himself because she had listened.
The passage jumped out at me, because I do think of you as one of my teachers. And so I am going to ask you once more to take the time to read my words – to listen to me.
When I discovered the theme of your latest book, it felt like I had walked past the teacher's lounge and overheard you ridiculing me with discriminatory language, with the rest of the staff nodding along and laughing in agreement. (I'll point you here to a post I wrote several weeks ago, about sanist language.)
You are an influential person, with a large platform, a number of published books and a thriving organisation (the Berkana Institute) extending and promoting your life's work. You are by our conventional benchmarks a very successful individual. People listen to you.
I do not have these accomplishments on my side. I have a very small platform, and what I consider to be my life's work is squeezed into my life at the margins of an unrelated full-time job. My mad friends and I are in the very beginning stage of setting up a co-operative organisation (Mad Insight) to promote our work in the mad movement. And I am just at the start of preparing a book proposal, in hopes of beating the odds and finding a publisher. Add to this a history of psychosis and hospitalisation, and my journey becomes that much harder. Mad voices are not listened to; they are silenced with incarceration and tranquillizers.
I have a daunting mountain to climb, with the message I hope to share with the world. Discovering that your latest project involves 'restoring sanity' felt like I'd encountered an enormous boulder on my narrow, precarious path. What hope has the mad movement got when so many people equate sanity with a prerequisite to wholeness and goodness?
So I turn to ancient wisdom: the obstacle is the path.
Again, I invite you to dialogue with me about sanity and madness. I invite you to meet me in that messy middle of mutual learning, a space that brings you from where you are, and brings me from where I am, in order to find our common ground. I invite you to listen.
Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash
Improvisation leads to improvement.
People are quick to discredit improvisation, even rebuke it.
From Beethoven to Mark Twain, popularism hates a maverick because learning is more difficult than judgement.
In my world the university of thoughts, can be applied to the universality of waste.
The world of waste is choking us of life itself into a green mushroom biome not fit for lungs to do their job of transcription.
Or what is ‘wet bulb atmosphere’?
You see, I’m already on the listed madness page.