Omelas

I keep returning to Omelas and the ones who walked away. I first read Ursula K. Le Guin's affecting short story as a college sophomore for a philosophy course.

With little experience in the world, what struck me about the story at first was the utilitarian thought experiment it surfaced. Le Guin describes a utopian city in detail, then asks:

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

Le Guin then paints a horrid picture of a child kept locked away and in a permanent state of misery. This child's pain is part of the trade for utopia:

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

The story forces the quesiton: Should we accept the absolute suffering of one in exchange for the absolute joy of all?

So caught up in the literal sophomoric philosophical tension and under the pretenses of fulfilling my responsibilities as a resident assistant to organize activities for my floor, I foolishly tried to assign the text to my residents the story to read and discuss with me over chocolate chip cookies. Not even a warm cookie could entice my residents; no one came.

Still, I kept thinking about Omelas and over the years, returning to the story. In a world where I could spend the rest of my days doing nothing but consuming the new, revisiting incurs costs. But Omelas keeps calling, and I keep returning, only to walk its streets and notice or feel something different.

I read it again sometime in law school, a time when I was quickly learning how the deeply embedded structures of society were not built with human flourishing in mind. No longer could I even philosophically entertain the merit of the bargain of Omelas. I felt in my bones the injustice of the fictional city's deal. More and more, I thought about the ones who walked away. Where were they going?

I wanted to know their destination because I, too, had felt the pangs of disillusionment and I was searching for a new north star. Something in me broke a little going through law school. I entered in the thralls of an Obama-styled hope for careful and almost inevitable progress; I exited with a growing knowledge of law's masters and amidst the chaos of Trump. I'm glad what I brought with me to law school broke, because I became stronger for it. And, in unexpected ways, what replaced the broken is more hopeful and more committed.

After law school, I started a two year fellowship. Having raced through consecutive years of education, this was my first real job, really. I felt a little lost at times, facing professional challenges and more existential ones about what justice work can and should look like. I re-read the short story again some time during that first job and did my best to connect with that feeling of knowing when to walk away from Omelas and allowing myself to truly learn and unlearn.

In law school, I wondered where the ones who walked away went to, but later I began to grasp that no one really knows. One must make the road by walking. Walking away is the spirit on which everything else rests; the north star is an internal one and we must train our capacity to connect with it.

In that spirit, I took a new, different job. Before COVID hit the US, Asha and I moved to Monterey because I took a job at California Rural Legal Assistance in Salinas. I had to improve my Spanish, get up to speed on new areas of law, and learn the ropes of the legal aid model, fast. The new job challenged me and a sense of overwhelm threatened me, sometimes overtaking me. What kept me afloat was just how strongly I felt the spirit of walking away from Omelas in the work that I was doing.

I've struggled to write about my work in the last two years because in many ways, it feels so personal to the people I work for. My team is integrated with local health clinics, where health providers - social workers, doctors, and nurses - can refer patients to us address unmet legal needs. Our caseload is diverse. A normal week might involve preparing a pregnant farmworker for their appeal of denied disability benefits, analyzing the validity of a tenant's eviction notice, helping a worker understand their rights to job protected leave because of their medical situation, and assisting a parent trying to understand how they can best advocate for their child with a disability to get the education they deserve.

The work can be hard, but it's always good. Though I have struggled with overwhelm and the challenges of having a client-facing job as an introvert, I'm stronger than I thought I was and I keep learning how to see things better. I meet people, their families, and their story, and I am always growing.

In the weirdness of the new pandemic and the new job, I re-read the story. This last time, I thought about the child that Omelas kept in a tragic state for the city's bargain and how to think about our own society's "child." In some ways, the deserters of Omelas had the courage to reject a tempting deal; in other ways, they could see so clearly the tragedy of the deal given its singular expression in the abused child. To the surprise of none, our society is more complicated. There is no one being that shoulders the burden of the trade. There is no golden world. The misery is distributed and the world still broken. One has to work hard to see this misery because our systems' basic functioning depend on us never seeing it.

The pandemic sharpened the cruelty I saw. "Essential" workers picked our food, packed it, shipped it, cooked it, and delivered it to our doorstep. No where is the child of Omelas. "Essential," yet fungible, these workers' labor stays hidden for our convenience and compliance. Omelas presents the suffering transparently. Everyone must know. As my brother said to me, in our world, "the trick is most people aren't allowed to see it." The veil is intentional.

What I've learned is that so much of the initial work of walking away is clear sight. I dream of what those who exit Omelas are building, something new, something just on the horizon. But sometimes you can't know what to build until you know what you cannot endure. We only learn that with eyes wide open. The seeing, and the visceral moral intuition that floods us with the sense that what we see is wrong, is a powerful compass.

I am still learning about how we hide the child and what to do about it. I do not pretend to have the answers. I am not enlightened. I’m just walking. I’m just walking.

toda la historia

Si pierdes un capítulo, pierdes toda la historia. (If you lose a chapter, you lose the whole story.)

A few months ago, I went down to Guadalajara, Mexico, for the christening of my good friend's daughter. After the ceremony in a spacious Catholic church, we went to a party to celebrate. We found out the party was no joke: it lasted over eight hours.

I had taken a red-eye, arriving the day before to explore the city a bit with another friend who came in. Asha took the next red-eye. By the time the party had just started, we were already feeling tired. I wasn't sure we were going to make it to the end of the party.

Had we left early, we would've missed so many chapters that made the day a whole story.

We would have missed the live band playing Brazilian songs to the delight of my friend's Brazilian family.

We would've missed my friend taking his mother's hand to dance joyfully together.

We would have missed the DJ throwing on YMCA, pulling all the Americans to the dance floor for a hilarious, universal dance.

We would have missed Asha throwing down some serious dance moves to the repeated cheering ("Ay! Ay! Ay!") and clapping of a Mexican auntie.

We would have missed the stolen nap on a couch upstairs from the party's venue.

We would missed the excited yet failed search for a cup of coffee.

We would have missed the tequila shots that brought together an international community, if only for a moment.

We would have missed a torrential downpour and a quiet conversation with a friend looking out over the flooding landscape.

We would have missed the slow migration of people leaving the party, observing the core of support for the two families.

We would have missed a heartwarming and light conversation with the daughter's maternal grandparents riding away from the party.

We would have missed a late-night feast of al pastor tacos with the those who came to support my friend.

In short, we would've missed it all. Si pierdes un capítulo, pierdes toda la historia.

"something like hope"

The other day, I stumbled upon a memory lane: my YouTube "likes." Far down that lane -- early in my YouTube history -- I found a gem: a low-budget music video for "Postcards from Paradise."

Where did I come across this great song? A hazy recollection suggested that one of my Carnegie Mellon professors, Nico Slate, had asked us to watch the video for a class of his that I took. A short email to Nico confirmed that this was true and his good taste in music. If I had to guess, it was a class called India Today. (An aside: Nico taught my very first class at Carnegie Mellon, a small seminar called Barack Obama and the History of Race in America that met Monday morning. I loved the way Nico taught and asked us questions, so I took every class I could from him. One of them was a class he taught on India, where I found this song. Later, Nico created a service learning study abroad program in India and invited his students to apply. During that trip I fell in love with another person who had also found Nico a bright spot during her time at Carnegie Mellon. We're now engaged. Thanks, Nico.)

The song exemplifies the powerful blend of stark realism ("We deep inside hysteria / outside of history / On the fray"; "Religious riots, firebrands scar a black night") with a resilient hope ("Something like love, something like hope / Something like beautiful, something I wrote"; "Psychological damage, famines, but we managed"). This is the space that I want to live in: that of clear-eyed, deeply human hope.

I was so taken by this gem of the past, listening to it on repeat, that I tried to learn more about the artist, Chee Malabar. I came across this fantastic essay he wrote about how he found hip hop and why he found it such a powerful art form. I was struck by these three sentences:

These days I approach my work in the tradition of the griot. I tell stories. Not only my own, but those of my larger community (Black, Brown, White) who have helped me weave my experience into the American fabric.

A griot is "a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, or musician." I love the many manifestations of the storytelling traditions across history and cultures. Whenever I want to understand progress or what's broken or painful, I look for stories. It makes sense that I was enthralled by this song; it's deeply rooted in storytelling.

We need more griots. More storytellers. No story is too small. Do your part in sharing "something like love, something like hope."

the quiet at the top

As if the world takes for itself a moment to pause, autumn brings a lull and quiet that I crave in my bones. If you're not paying attention, you can miss it, swept into the holidays and the coming winter that brings with it a harsh busyness that crowds out the stillness.

To really take the deep breath of the season, one must work to provide space for it. You have to climb a mountain to find the rarefied quiet.

Lately, I've felt bogged down in the underbrush. I can hardly see a few feet in front of me, to say nothing of the forest and its trees. Put another way, caught in the trenches of the gruesome attention war, I've been hit. I need a medic.

I have to find a place to rest and repair. The autumn quiet feels right and restorative, but I have to climb a little to find it. Past the sirens of the information. Past the enticing yet noxious fumes of social media. Past the false advertisements of respite. Past the taskmasters of busyness.

What lies in the quiet at the top? It's been so long since I've truly sought its oasis that I'm not totally sure anymore. I know there's a curative boredom. I hope that the missing pieces of my shattered attention have sought refuge there, and I can coax them to come back to me. I dream that the view from the top offers some much-needed perspective -- that I can again see the forest. Perhaps a medic of my own making waits to treat the wounds of this attention war. I will only know once I summit.

I don't plan to stay there. What comes up must come down; for me, the quiet at the top has always been but a temporary asylum. If only what comes down from the mountain quiet arrives changed and recovered, ready again to head back into the fray. Any wise warrior needs a rhythm of repair and reengagement. If we are not to just survive but thrive, we all need to visit quiet's sanctuary.

I am the bear and the mountain

Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself" has a verse that I think about a lot:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Even the verse itself contains multitudes. I've written before about this verse and how I sometimes feel like I embrace paradoxes.

But on this revisit of the verse, I'm pairing it with Asha's image: a bear that contains within it the mountains and forests it roams. There is little difference between the landscape and the animal adventurer. They are one and the same; in the bear is the mountain and in the mountain is the bear.

I've found it very difficult to translate the state that some of my meditation retreats have dropped me into, but this image hints at the feeling. After the dust of daily living has settled and I slip deeper and deeper into practiced contemplation, that feeling of being separate and apart from my environment fades. The lines between me and everything else become fuzzy. I'm not divided from the environment, I am it. I am the bear and the mountain.

this could help

On a recent podcast, Patrick Rhone talked a little bit about choosing the title of his book This Could Help, a lovely collection of advice that covers everything from creativity to sickness.

Patrick shares that he named the book This Could Help rather than This Will Help because he saw those two titles as varying promises, and he knew that if just one person found his book and walked away with nothing useful for them, then he "would feel the weight of that one promise broken."

I admire this careful attention to a reader's relationship with an author's words and to delicate nature of advice-giving in general. I'd add that offering advice from this place of humility makes the advice more likely to stick. When the receiver of advice takes on board a suggestion with the promise that it might help, they are relieved of the burden that it must help. There's no stress that they've found the solution to their problems and that if it didn't work, they didn't do things right, or there is something wrong with them. The advice is more likely to work when freed from that burden and that stress of a definitive promise. In other words, saying "this could help" makes it more likely that "this will help."

In that spirit, this could help: buy a cheap alarm clock and charge your phone anywhere but your bedroom. I started doing this a few months ago and found that it dramatically improved the quality of my sleep, encouraged me to linger quietly in bed in the mornings, and made me walk to another room if I wanted to do something on my phone. It's not revolutionary. It's just a small change that sparked welcomed and easy improvement in my quality of life. It might help you.

towering windows

Almost three years ago to the day, I scribbled down a rambling fist-shake and reflection in La Sagrada Famīlia, a truly awe-inspiring church in Barcelona.

Re-reading those words, I still feel that I'm in that place, looking up, looking for something. I wouldn't be surprised if, looking up to the towering windows, I found some version of Asha's musing image that she passed to me this week.

When I sat in the pews in that church and wrote that post, it felt cathartic to doubt. I still live in that doubt and I'm still okay with it. There's immense relief and reward in passing through nihilism to some kind of existentialism. Once you make it through, there is only the continuing journey. But in that lies the beauty.

the new muses

Myth tells us of the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who served as the inspiration for the world’s creatives. While the gods are dead, in their swirling dust we continue to create. We are each other’s muses.

And so comes this project: two muses in a simple, two-step dance. One pulls from the void, creating something out of nothing. The other builds off that creation. Then, the muses swap and the initiator becomes the responder. Ad infinitum.

In other words, sometimes I will write and Asha will create in response. Like this post, for example. Other times Asha will create art and I will write in response.

Step by step, we mutual muses inspire one another.