The Practice of Liminal Dreaming
The Practice of Liminal Dreaming
Kosmos | What is liminal dreaming and how is it different from the more well-known lucid dreaming?
Jennifer Dumpert | There are two dream states that, together, make up liminal dreaming: hypnagogia and hypnopompia. As you fall asleep at night or into a daytime nap, or struggle to stay awake when you’re exhausted, you pass through a hallucinogenic, psychedelic, swirling realm that feels partly like dream and partly like awareness. That’s hypnagogia, the kaleidoscopic, free-associative dream state that artists, scientists, and thinkers of all sorts harness for various purposes. In the morning, you surface from sleep through the swimmy realm of hypnopompia. Lying warm and cozy in your bed as you slowly awake, you might notice that something that began as a thought has become a dream. Memory shifts into story as your mind sinks back into dozing and you realize you aren’t actually as awake as you thought you were. Then you know you’re in hypnopompia, the twin of hypnagogia.
The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word limen, which means threshold or doorway, places that are simultaneously both and neither, in the same way that the doorway is part of both rooms and yet is also neither room.
In hypnagogia and hypnopompia, you are both awake and asleep, while also being neither. In a liminal dream, you straddle the dream world and the waking world. Because you’re not fully asleep, you can generally maintain awareness of your actual physical environment. You can identify where you’re lying, hear the sounds in the room and know what they are, even listen to and understand nearby conversations. You’re both asleep and awake at the same time, aware of your surroundings yet also immersed in the dream realm of the unconscious.
In a lucid dream, your waking consciousness arises within an REM dream. You have access to your daytime thoughts and memories, and this familiar “you” can take control of at least part of the dreaming narrative and environment. You can fly, breathe underwater, and manifest particular people and places. Unlike liminal dream space, in a lucid dream you’re fully immersed in the dream world, just as in ordinary REM dreams. Your daytime consciousness has managed to penetrate the dream, but remains separate from the circumstances of the waking world. While you can control lucid dreams, at least to some extent, liminal dreams move too fast, present too much material, and are simply too far outside normal experience to be able to manipulate at all reliably. What you can do is maintain detached awareness of what is happening even as you move deeper into dream space. Developing this awareness is how the Tibetan Buddhists begin to train for full lucid dreaming.
Whereas lucid dreams generally feel like the world, only weirder, liminal dream space doesn’t have the same narrative or environmental structure. We all move through the three dimensions of the daytime world with our personalities, desires, and thoughts intact. In lucid dreams, as in waking states, you’re a self “in here” dealing with a world “out there.” This condition breaks down in liminal dreams. Though some liminal dream experiences do insert you into a specific—if weird—place, much of the time there’s no story line, no “you”, no “world” you move through. It’s harder to map your everyday experience onto the whirling kaleidoscopic excess of hypnagogia and hypnopompia because these states feel so unfamiliar.
Kosmos | How did you become interested in dreams?
JD | Dreams have been a major factor in my life as long as I can remember. Childhood dreams have stayed with me more vividly than a lot of my waking memories. Clearly, my mind-body has always been geared that way. But over time, as I’ve learned more about the topic of dreaming, my recollection of dreams and the level of their intensity have increased. As with most things, the more you learn about something, the richer your experience of it becomes.
Dreams offer an entirely different way of experiencing our own minds. Like most people, I find that sort of experimentation irresistible. The urge to play with consciousness is hardwired into the human psyche. Little kids roll down hills and press their palms against their eyes. They spin in circles until the world tilts into an altered state of reality. We all naturally experiment with our experience of ourselves and of the world until we grow up. Then reality hardens and becomes less fluid. Adults still play with their minds, though. We drink alcohol, take drugs, dance ourselves silly, and seek out all manner of mind-expanding experiences, from sweat lodges to ten-day meditation retreats. Whole industries are built on the desire to experiment with our minds—from ayahuasca tourism to amusement parks. (Even the most straight-edge realist loves a roller coaster ride.) And yet we generally ignore the most easily available, safe, legal, free, and effective means available to us to explore consciousness.
Dreaming is the original altered state.
I’ve been spelunking inner realms with dreams my whole life, learning subtle or sometimes not-so-subtle ways of tweaking the experience for different effect, or just paying attention to my night time travels as a way of amping up the experience. At university, I wrote papers about dreams. When I was doing my Master’s Degree, I volunteered at the Jungian Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, paying close attention to dreams. I started using the city itself as a dream journal. Then I started teaching various ways of working with dreams. Basically, I’ve been interested in dreams my whole life, from childhood. That interest has only grown over time.
Kosmos | How has your practice has affected your waking life?
JD | In the process of exploring liminal dreaming, I discovered a new mode of perception and understanding. I call this mode liminal mind, and it has changed my outlook on life. Hypnagogia and hypnopompia occupy the middle zones between awake and asleep.
Thinking of this space of the in-between as not just a phase through which to travel but as destination of its own offers new ways to see and understand the many liminal zones of the world.
Some of these liminal zones stand between what we might call the real world and the historical or mythic spaces that often occupy the same space. Australian aboriginal people believe that the sacred time of origins, called the Dreamtime, literally overlays the rocks and hills of their landscape. They can slide between these zones, at one moment standing next to a rock in consensus reality, at the next standing next to the corpse of a lizard man in the mythic world of the Dreamtime. Another example is the personal maps of meaning that organize your city, if you live in one. For one person, a corner bar is just a corner bar; for another, that same tavern is almost sacred because James Joyce once drank there. Liminal mind includes the ability to see the actual world we all share, the rock or the corner bar, yet also perceive the imaginal places and associations that overlay these places. Another great example is sound. Let’s say a bell rings across the street from where I stand. The sound waves travel through space, enter my ear, and get processed by my brain. So does the sound happen across the street, inside my head, or in the loop between bell and me? Understanding that relationship arises from what I call liminal mind.
To explore liminal dream space for creativity, try this exercise:
THE DALÍ/EDISON METHOD (FOR HYPNAGOGIA)
Many people have tapped into the creative potential of hypnagogia. Both Salvador Dalí, the surrealist artist from Spain, and the American inventor Thomas Edison conceived more or less the same exercise independently of each other. When feeling tired, each man would sit in a chair holding something in his hands. Edison held balls in both hands, whereas Dalí placed a solid brass Spanish key in one hand. Beneath them lay metal plates placed on the floor. Each would sit in the chair and start to drift off, until the balls or key dropped onto the plate and woke the holder. Edison kept a notepad nearby to write out ideas. Dalí kept a sketchpad. Here’s one way to adapt this practice, though you can find alternatives quite easily.
Wait until you naturally feel sleepy. Thanks to chronotypes and circadian rhythms, most of us experience an energy dip in the afternoon. Just before bed is also good.
Sit comfortably in a chair. If you’re at work, try this at your desk. You can also recline. If you really can’t nap, even lightly, sitting up, go ahead and lie down.
Hold onto something that will clatter loudly when you drop it. You can try holding something over metal plates. You can also hold a bell, a handful of change, or a jingly dog toy. If you’re lying down, just raise your arm in the air.
Keep something next to you to record your ideas. Pen and paper or a digital sketchpad work, as do voice-activated recorders. You can also just dictate into your phone, but set
Drift off into hypnagogia.
Once you drop what you’re holding, or your arm drops, without doing anything else start capturing what’s in your mind.
As always with exercises like this, remember that you’re exploring creativity and generating ideas for yourself. Creativity is not the sole domain of artists, nor is the need to generate ideas confined to academics or inventors. We all hold the potential to make things, to ponder things, and to generate great ideas. Because everyone has access to liminal dreaming, anyone can benefit from these exercises.
From Liminal Dreaming, Exploring Consciousness at the Edge of Sleep, by Jennifer Dumpert, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright ©2019. Reprinted by permission of publisher.
Kosmos | Early in Liminal Dreaming, you share the story of how Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali independently of each other developed practices for using liminal dreaming. Did liminal dreaming prove itself to be a catalyst for certain aspects of their lives?
JD | Many people have tapped into the creative potential of hypnagogia. Both Salvador Dalí, the surrealist artist from Spain, and the American inventor Thomas Edison conceived more or less the same exercise independently of each other to harness hypnagogia for creativity and to generate ideas, a practice I present in my book. It’s a really easy exercise that anyone can undertake to access creativity or generate ideas.
I think that the main reason liminal dreaming opens up visionary possibilities and helps unlock problems is because different modes of thought come together, a kind of two-for-one deal. Most of the time you spend in liminal dream states, you retain at least some semblance of your waking self. The logical, linear, and focused part of your mind remains active to varying degrees. But you’re also dreaming, adrift among intuitive, visual, emotional thought processes and associations. As a bridge between conscious and unconscious mind, liminal dreaming provides a unique opportunity for approaching creative, emotional, and even quite practical questions.
Kosmos | How would you describe the influence of liminal dreaming on the everyday life of someone who takes up the practice?
JD | The influence that liminal dreaming has on those who try it can vary widely, depending on how deeply someone goes into the practice and what motivates them to do it. Everyone is a natural liminal dreamer. We all pass through hypnagogia every time we fall asleep and hypnopompia when we wake, though people who snap wide awake immediately might not experience much hypnopompia. Because we all experience it so regularly, liminal dreaming is extremely easy to learn. Just pay attention as you slide into slumber or coast back up to waking consciousness. That’s probably enough to find the space, though the how-to exercises on www.liminaldreaming.com are easy to follow. Really, though, reading this article is probably enough for most people to have the experience.
Once you learn to locate liminal dream space, you can decide how you want to use it. You may feel satisfied with simply being aware of this marvelous mind state and learning to enjoy the wild ride through your own unconscious. After all, doing things for fun is good for you. Joyful activity promotes good health and happy life. You might also, as I have, really get into it and devote yourself to consciousness experimentation. I use liminal dreaming like a meditation practice, following the ever unfolding moment in the absence of the dominance of my waking ego’s constant grip on my experience, with its expression via never-ending internal monologue. To have a different experience of my own mind fills me with wonder.
You can also direct the experience. I love when people tell me about how they use hypnagogia and hypnopompia. Many people access the visionary space of the liminal dream to amp up creativity to help them write, make art, or solve problems. I wrote a big chunk of one of my most commonly given talks in a hypnagogic dream. People use the practice to deal with insomnia. Learning liminal dreaming changes your relationship to falling asleep so it really helps people who suffer from the inability to easily slip into slumber. I provide a lot of examples in the book for how people might use liminal dreaming in their lives, though I’d say the ones I listed are the most common.
White Men and Native America
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people…I am thankful…that some of our white [sisters and] [1] brothers have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it.” – Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [2]
Over the last forty years, the North American men’s movement has increasingly looked to indigenous ways of living for wisdom and guidance. Today, the influence of earth-based practices is gaining even more traction among many men’s groups. Organizations, such as the Mankind Project, Sterling Men’s Institute, EVRYMAN and Menschwork, which were started by “white men” are increasingly using practices from Native American traditions in their retreats and groups.
I am choosing to use quotation marks for “white men” because the five racial categories used by the US census bureau [3] date back to 1676 in the American colonies. Before that time, race was not an agreed upon categorization tool for human identity – on this continent or anywhere else in the world.
Heather McGee, a recognized thought leader on the national stage and Senior Distinguished Fellow, at Demos, a dynamic “think-and-do” tank that powers the movement for a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy, speaks to this essential historical context in a recent podcast on Bioneers. [4] She says:
“Racism is not inevitable. In fact, the very idea of racial categories didn’t take root until the seventeenth century. It’s important to remember, because so much of this history has been suppressed, just how important to the American economy racism was – and slave labor that took place on plantations on land that was expropriated from Native American nations. That is our economy.
The invention of “whiteness” dates back to 1676 in the Virginia colony, which was then a corporation of the British crown. European indentured servants and African slaves joined forces to rise up against the ruling class. At that time, whites and blacks lived and worked together, intermarrying and raising children, interracially. There was more racial contact then, than there is now. Called Bacon’s Rebellion – it was quite successful, causing the elites to experiment with ways to divide and conquer.
They tried religion, language and place of origin before they stumbled upon race, and retaught the “white” indentured servants to identify with the “white” elites and to police the non-whites. They created a new identity that hadn’t existed before.”
This historical context may come as a surprise to you, as it was for me. I am deeply grateful to Heather McGee for making me aware of the explicit invention of race as a category to identify human beings in our country, for the specific purpose of economic exploitation. The categorization of race was a distinct act with a divide-and-conquer political agenda – to establish and maintain separation, domination and exploitation of slave labor on stolen land.
From this ground of clear understanding, we can move forward and acknowledge that racial categories do not speak to our personal relationship to time or place. We all come from somewhere. My ancestors were Jews who fled the pogroms [5] in the Ukraine about a hundred years ago. My great-grandfather was a tailor who built a better life for his family after the trauma of persecution in his homeland. My ancestral heritage is distinct from “white” people who came here from England, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece or other parts of Europe. Every individual and family’s journey is unique. Simply put, racial categories strip away the humanity in our unique identities.
All that being said, here in the United States of America, in 2019, as a political being, I am seen as a white man. I am categorized as a white man; and therefore, I receive the benefits and privileges of being considered a white man in a racialized society in which “white” has more status than other racial categories.
With this awareness, I am doing what I can to take responsibility for this role that I find myself in, here and now, in the United States of America. Today, I believe that men who receive the benefits of being seen as “white” have a responsibility to work towards undoing white privilege. As Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, it is not enough to be a progressive who says nothing. And, I would add that it’s not enough to say that you would rather live in a society that has equality. It is time for us to stand together, acknowledge our brutal history as Americans, and actively work to dismantle and transform the systemic racism that permeates our society.
I feel a personal desire to take responsibility to acknowledge and transform our heritage of systemic racism in the United States because of the deeply personal benefits that I have received from the native cultures of North and South America, Africa and Asia. In a very real sense, I owe my life to people who generously invited me to participate in particular ceremonies that strengthened my resolve in past struggles with depression, illness and loss of hope.
I’ve been involved with men’s work for over twenty years, and have been walking a path of Native American spirituality for fifteen years. Two years ago, I began a four-year commitment to participate in the Lakota Sundance Ceremony on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota.
Receiving the opportunity, responsibility and privilege, -as a white man – to participate in this most sacred cultural ceremony has transformed my life for the better. I intend to continue Sundancing for the foreseeable future, and to begin pouring sweat lodge ceremonies once I complete my training, as is expected of Sundancers, in order to serve their community.
I felt called to write this article after attending two weekend men’s retreats that both used Native American spiritual practices and words. At the first retreat, a sweat lodge was used, and in the second retreat, the word aho [6] was invoked. I left those retreats with a strange feeling in my gut – a sense that something essential was not said – an opportunity was missed.
I am not here to point my finger at anyone. I am just another “white guy” on the path of growth and healing. My intention in writing this is to point my finger in the direction of where I sense we can go together. These practices, and words have been passed down, taken care of, and protected. They come from somewhere. My sense is that we would grow as men if we took the time to better acknowledge this history – together.
Inspiring Examples Already Underway
We, as a men’s movement, are poised to deeply transform our identity by consciously choosing to stand with all people. I am suggesting that it would serve our growth to join the movement of truth, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation that is already underway. For example, in 2019, the Ceremony of Repentance and Forgiveness created a sacred space for descendants of U.S. military families to apologize to Native American families for their specific role in the genocide of indigenous people, as well as those whose ancestors survived crimes against humanity, such as massacres, mass execution, displacement, colonization, enslavement, cultural genocide and the Nazi Holocaust. The ceremony, led by a Lakota elder, “created an opportunity for healing profound and old wounds of both the perpetrator and the victim that have been sustained throughout hundreds of years of occupation of this land known as Turtle Island and beyond.” [7]
Another example of a forgiveness ceremony took place during Standing Rock, the international demonstration of solidarity to protect our water. A US military veteran asked for forgiveness from Native American chiefs. [8] I highly recommend watching the two-minute Youtube video. Here is what he said:
“We came. We fought you. We took your land. We signed treaties that we broke. We stole minerals from your sacred hills. We blasted the faces of our presidents on your sacred mountain. And then we took still more land. And then we took your children. And then we tried to take your language. We tried to eliminate your language that God gave you and the Creator gave you. We didn’t respect you. We polluted your earth. We’ve hurt you in so many ways. And we have come to say that we are sorry. We are at your service and we beg for your forgiveness.” [9]
In response to this request for forgiveness, a Lakota Chief responded with this:
“Let me say a few words of accepting forgiveness. World peace. World peace! We will take a step. We are Lakota sovereign nation. We were the nation, and we’re still a nation. We have a language to speak. We have preserved the caretaker position. We do not own the land. The land owns us.” [10]
The Invitation
What if we, who are doing men’s work and finding value in these practices, such as sweat lodges, using sage for purification, and saying aho, as a way of acknowledgement, collectively chose to stand in alliance with Native America, as well as all indigenous people, people of color, women, all living beings and the natural world.
What if we, as an alliance of men’s organizations in North America, initiated a collective dialogue with Native American community leaders for the purpose of getting real about our bloody history, and moving in the direction of truth, reconciliation and doing our best to make things right? What might be possible if we moved, together, in this direction?
This is the invitation that I see, for us, as a men’s movement in America:
- Let’s become more aware of, interested in, and connected to these movements
- Let’s do our own work as “white men” in America, with each other, so we are more aware of our own relationship to the privileges that we experience in our society that is systematically racist.
- When we are ready to do so, let’s initiate dialogue and intentional relationship-building with people of color and native community leaders, so we can look at these issues together.
- Let’s share our story, and by doing so, invite and encourage others into greater participation in this dialogue.
- And, finally, as we naturally establish a substantial degree of trust in these relationships, let us organize our resources and skills towards systems-level programs that foster and support truth, repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation, racial equality, cultural regeneration and socio-economic revitalization for communities who have suffered at the hand of systemic racism.
Opening this clear, straight-forward dialogue with Native communities establishes solid ground for honest and good relationships to grow.
Now What?
In taking this stand, I have been able to put down a huge burden – the burden of living the lie that I am better than everyone else because I’m white. I’m not. And the dehumanization that we have visited on the rest of humanity through the global imperialist project over the last five hundred years has greatly diminished our own sense of belonging, compassion, and care for all living beings.
Writing these words is setting me free. I no longer need to hide the obvious truth that we live on stolen land and our wealth was built on the backs of stolen labor. And yet, a small voice in the back of my mind sometimes asks, where is this taking me? What will be asked of me? And, will I be able to rise to the occasion and meet the challenges ahead? I’m grateful that these questions are being met by a deeper voice that tells me integrity has its own rewards. I know that I am living a more honest life, even by writing this article.
Alliance for a Viable Future is sponsoring this initiative because we believe change moves at the speed of trust. Therefore, in order for us, as one human family, to co-create a viable future for generations to come, we must build it on a foundation of honesty, integrity, and trust. Trust requires telling the truth.
Youth leaders of the next generation are already speaking up [11] with clarity, boldness and courage, about the urgent need to transform our society. As white men we have the responsibility to hear them and the opportunity to consciously lead by example as good role models for our children.
By publicly acknowledging that the founding of our nation began with genocide and slavery, and that our ‘wealth’ is a result of stealing and bloodshed, we are grounded in reality. Only by acknowledging the truth of our past can we stand on solid ground, and walk into the future together.
What if we wrote a collective statement to express our solidarity?
What if we, as a men’s movement in America acknowledge the wrongs of our ancestors and present-day national policies and social norms towards Native people, in North America and around the world?
What if we decide to give thanks for the many traditional teachings and practices that Native America culture has contributed to the men’s movement?
What if we express our solidarity with Native American leaders and communities with a declared commitment to mobilize our collective resources in service to the renewal of their cultural practices, community resilience and civil rights within North American governments?
And, what if we extend this same solidarity to all “people of color” because we want our collective future to foster cultural respect, dignity and flourishing; economic justice, fairness and equality; and honesty about our unspeakable past?
A Proposed Public Statement might look something like this:
As citizens who receive the privileges of being considered white men in the North American and global political economy, we are aware of the responsibility and opportunity to contribute to the evolution of our social and cultural norms in the direction of respect, dignity and well-being for all people and all living beings.
We now understand that we must bow our heads in humility, and extend our greetings, thanks, respect, and dignity to those whose lands were stolen in order to establish this United States of America. We are speaking to you – the Native American peoples, tribes and nations of North America. We acknowledge the heinous crimes of our ancestors and current policies towards your communities, and we now see that it is our responsibility to not only acknowledge these wrongs through our words, but to use the tool of our privilege as white men in this political economy in order to bring about systemic change in our country.
We also humbly address the African American people of this country, acknowledging that the growth and development of our wealth as a nation came on the backs of your ancestors, brought here as slaves, kidnapped from your families, communities, and lands in Africa, and brought here under brutal, unthinkable conditions, against their will.
We acknowledge the systemic oppression of all people of color in this country. We acknowledge the system which denies equal resources of all kinds, including housing, education and health care to people of color. Over the last four-hundred years, our country has exploited “people of color” for the benefit of the white population.
We acknowledge that the white men who came to Turtle Island and committed genocide against the Native people, established a racist, patriarchal social hierarchy. We thank God they did not succeed in complete genocide, and will never succeed.
We also acknowledge that white men who have wealth and power have exploited other white men who did not have wealth and power in similar ways. And, we acknowledge that this system of social, economic, political and environmental exploitation and oppression is still actively at work today, all around the world.
As men who participate in men’s groups, we see ourselves as a men’s movement that stands for an end to the dominance of a patriarchal society and the beginning of a new identity for American white men in the twenty-first century. May our great-great-grandchildren look back upon us, and say that we were the generation that said – enough! We refuse to be complicit in the inhuman behavior of our preceding generations.
We see an opportunity, responsibility and privilege to reconcile, heal, transform and renew the relationship of white America with Native America and all people of color. And, through this effort, we see an opportunity to redefine what it means to be a white man, from here on out.
This new identity is rooted in a commitment to do our best to live in ways that protect and steward life, and thus we are dedicated to:
- Acknowledge the sins of our ancestors, for attempting to commit both cultural and physical genocide to the Native American people and enslaving Africans for free labor, to build the American economy.
- Foster restorative justice, respect and reverence for women, native peoples and people of color.
- Practice self-discipline, awareness and proper conduct in expressing our sexual energy
- Protect the earth and be in service to the regeneration of natural ecosystems because of their divine right to be beautiful and to thrive.
- Take responsibility to provide a free and just human society and a viable natural environment for the generations to come – with respect for all peoples and clean water, nourishing food, and all that goes along with the protection and stewardship of Life.
While we do not speak for every man around the country, we are key leaders in many organizations that support men to live good, responsible lives.
We have gathered together in this men’s delegation to represent men’s organizations throughout the country. This public statement is our first project together. From here, we are humbly asking to meet with a delegation of leaders from Native American communities. We look forward to eventually expanding this dialogue to include community leaders from Black, Latinx and Asian communities, as well. Through this alliance, we want to work together to improve the lives of all Americans.
Though we aren’t elected officials, we make up a delegation of men’s organizations throughout the country and are influential in our communities and businesses. We share this to underscore that this conversation won’t be a waste of time – another group of white men who want to listen and feel like they did something. We are committed to action.
Sincerely,
North American Men’s Delegation
Endnotes
1. Just as “white man” is a socially defined category that was created as a divide-and-conquer tactic in the American South in the 1600s, the term “people of color” is a corollary term that didn’t exist before racially defined identities were established as a cornerstone of the American system of governance. (listen to the Bioneers Podcast featuring Heather McGee, distinguished faculty at Demos: https://bioneers.org/who-is-an-american-is-our-democracy-as-unequal-as-our-economy-with-heather-mcghee/?mc_cid=91b0034724&mc_eid=7e9fdcb689.
2. A common name given to this North American continent by Native American people.
For More Information:
In 2020, AVF will be piloting a dialogue program with a small group of representatives from men’s organizations and Native American communities focused on truth, reconciliation and restorative justice with a tangible outcome of drafting a public statement to distribute widely. From here, we will (1) replicate and expand this model, (2) initiate programs and (3) draft policies in alignment with the public statement.
If you are a leader of a men’s organization and you feel called to get involved with this initiative, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. If you are in a men’s group, bring this article to your circle and read it together. Discuss whether you see any truth in these words, and if so, explore how you might choose to respond.
If you are not a “white man,” but you see yourself as an ally of this work – i.e. a spouse of a “white man”, a native person or a person of color who wants to see this initiative move forward, think about how you feel called to participate.
This article is just one step on a long journey ahead. It is a step that comes on the backs of many previous efforts, and efforts that are happening in concert with this one. Be in touch and let me know what you are thinking and feeling. Thank you for your interest in this work. I look forward to moving forward together.
Endnotes
1. “Sisters” added to Dr. King’s words to update the message for our times.
2. Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16th, 1963.
3. White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race. – https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html.
4. Heather McGee of Demos, Keynote “Who is an American?” https://bioneers.org/who-is-an-american-is-our-democracy-as-unequal-as-our-economy-with-heather-mcghee/?mc_cid=91b0034724&mc_eid=7e9fdcb689.
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire.
6. Aho is a Lakota word that can be loosely translated as “I agree” or “I am with you.”
7. Ceremony for Repentance and Forgiveness: Background and Summary, unpublished paper.
8. Veterans Ask for Forgiveness at Standing Rock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8GUgwLLDQ.
9. Veterans Ask for Forgiveness at Standing Rock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8GUgwLLDQ.
10. Veterans Ask for Forgiveness at Standing Rock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8GUgwLLDQ.
11. Earth Guardians led by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, Greda Thornberg, The Sunrise Movement, International Indigenous Youth Council, March for our Lives, and more.
Holacracy | An Emergent Order System
Kosmos | How are systems of dynamic governance transforming our organizations?
Brian Robertson | Sociocracy, or dynamic governance, still uses a top-down management hierarchy as its fundamental power structure. It gives you a policy-setting vehicle that encompasses every team, but that policy-setting vehicle is using basically a modified quorum of consensus. With Holacracy there is no top-down management hierarchy. It’s an entirely different power structure. Holacracy also doesn’t use anything that looks like consensus, at least not when it’s done correctly.
What makes Holacracy unique is that it gives people a taste of real genuine power without trumping others’ power, of sharing power together, in a framework where no one else is responsible for taking care of your issues. You are responsible for solving your tensions, as we say. In management hierarchies, the boss is responsible for solving a lot of your issues.
Kosmos | So in a sense, this is a personal practice as well as a system.
BR | It’s kind of a stealth spiritual practice. … It’s a personal development or a transformative practice.
Our organizations are facing environments where the complexity is far greater than anything they’ve faced before. What I often say in my trainings is: Imagine you were an executive 100 years ago, and the level of complexity you would have faced in the company, the demands that would have come in from the outside world. How many messages would you have needed to process in a day? 100 years ago, very few. 10, 20. But today, with all the channels that send us inbound messages, it’s at least 10 times if not 100 times that. Management hierarchy worked beautifully in the complexity we faced back then.
People will sometimes think that I’m anti-management hierarchy. I’m not. I think it’s a beautiful way to run an organization – when complexity is lower. I think it just fails to keep up with most of our environments today. We’re not sitting here talking about alternatives to management hierarchy because management hierarchy failed us for centuries. We’re here because management hierarchy succeeded wildly. In fact, it helped create a world more complex than it could manage. Today, the environment is just demanding more.
I use the human body as a great metaphor. It’s a wonderful way of dealing with complexity. In the human body, there is no “CEO cell” telling the other cells what to do. There’s also no management hierarchy of cells with command authority over other cells. What we have instead is a more holarchic structure. Every cell is both autonomous and also operates as part of a larger function, a larger organ. This larger organ doesn’t violate the autonomy of the cell by telling it how to organize. Each of these cells, and organs, in the body has autonomy and they’re all connected to the others. That’s nature’s way of dealing with complex systems. I think our companies are going to need look a lot more like that to deal with the level of complexity in the world today.
Kosmos | You touched on a couple of points that are really interesting to me. The idea of emergent order reminds me of other natural systems like ecosystems, rainforests. No one needs to tell a rainforest how to be a rainforest, or a coral reef how to self-organize. Is that what you mean?
BR | Yes, that’s true, although Holacracy wasn’t designed with an intention to parallel the natural world or anything else. Holacracy was created much more empirically or evolutionarily, through experimentation. It itself is an emergent order system.
Holacracy is not the result of intelligent design. I didn’t go out and say, “Great, here’s the way nature works. How do I get a company to work like that?” Holacracy came from years of experimentation, seeing what works, and changing what doesn’t. This is exactly what Holacracy brings to companies – the ability to constantly experiment and adapt. It converts organizations into evolutionary systems.
But then when I step back and look at what emerged from that experimentation and seek out the mental models best illustrate what it is and how it works, they are all mental models drawn from the natural world. I found this much more validating than if I had designed the system using those as a theoretical framework.
Kosmos | I was really curious about a transformational moment you described in your TED Talk – the story of the voltage meter.
BR | This happened in the very beginning of my journey, and it became a very powerful metaphor for me. I guess nearly dying can have that effect.
At the time I was studying to get my private pilot’s license. I only had 20-something hours of flight experience under my belt. It was my first solo flight away from my home airport, so I was hundreds of miles away from anyone with no instructor for the first time. I was only 50 or 100 miles into the flight when my low voltage light came on. I didn’t know what that meant because they don’t teach you much about the hardware of the plane at that point in your learning. I guessed it had something to do with the electrical system, but since I didn’t know much about the airplane, so my instinct was to check the other instruments. I scanned every other instrument on that control panel. My air speed was fine. I wasn’t losing speed. My altitude was fine and my navigation was perfectly on course. Every other instrument said that everything was fine.
So my instinct was, “This must not be that big of a problem. Only one instrument is sensing anything wrong, so I’m going to ignore it and just keep flying. I’ll check it out later when I land. It must not be that important.” As it turns out, that was a really bad decision. That low voltage light was tuned into information that no other instrument had, and I nearly crashed the plane that day. I ended up completely lost in a storm with no radios, no lights, no navigation, almost out of fuel, and violating air space in a major international airport. It was a bad scenario. I did make it out of it, but barely.
When I reflected on this, I realized this is what happens in organizations all the time. One person, or maybe a small group, sees something that no one else can see. And then they have a really hard time driving change because everyone else just kind of outvotes them. I often talk about the tyranny of consensus, which is where everyone has a voice but nobody can drive change because you can’t change anything unless everyone sees it all the same way. This is difficult for that one lone voice who wants to change something. The question for me was, how do I build a system where anything sensed by anyone anywhere in the company has somewhere to go where it can rapidly and reliably drive meaningful change?
Kosmos | Did your life change after that experience?
BR | Yeah, it was weird. It was almost like my life was already changing and ready to change in exactly that way, and that experience kind of gave me the metaphor I needed to put the pieces together. I’d almost say I was perfectly ready for that experience, rather than that experience alone changing something for me. It’s funny how that works.
My old way of making sense of the world, my old way of thinking about good leadership, everything was just crumbling. I was in this state of not knowing and embracing the unknown, and saying, “All right, I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers now. In fact, I’m going to realize just how much I don’t know,”
Kosmos | Our greatest transformations often occur during our darkest moments.
BR | It was one of three in my professional journey with this, and each one, interestingly, has catapulted the development of my work massively afterwards.
Kosmos | The hero’s journey. It’s helpful for people to hear that story, because we often feel despair, and I think especially younger people. What role can Holacracy play in transforming some of our despair about our work life or the meaning of work itself?
BR | I think there’s a hunger for more meaning, especially among a younger generation. When was the last time you heard a millennial saying, “I just want a job that provides me a steady paycheck to put food on the table”? For my grandparents’ generation, that was enough. Now there’s a hunger for meaning and purpose and autonomy. I see this struggle even in very purpose-driven organizations. It’s one thing to have an organization that serves a compelling purpose. That helps. But when that purpose-driven organization is run in a very conventional way, people inside often feel very disconnected from that purpose. In a conventional system, it can be hard for individuals to have enough autonomy to drive change, to have a meaningful impact.
With Holacracy, it’s not just the organization that has a purpose; every role inside the organization has a clear purpose that’s connected to the organization’s purpose, and each individual has real deep autonomy to lead their part of it. And you no longer find yourself these parent-child dynamics because roles have real authority, and there is no CEO or manager. In my company, it’s a regular occurrence where I’ll go to one of my colleagues and give them a convincing argument of, “Here’s what I think you should do,” and they’ll turn to me and say, “Thanks for your argument; I’m going to go a different direction.” Or if I get too aggressive they’ll even remind me and say, “You don’t have the authority to tell me what to do.” That is such a shift.
Kosmos | I think that there’s a misconception about Holacracy that it’s leaderless. What is the difference between leadership and authority? And also what have you discovered in yourself about conscious leadership?
BR | I find it beautiful and ironic that most of the things that people think of as “getting in the way” of progress are exactly the things Holacracy embraces, but reframed. For example, we often think of structure as all the policies and the bureaucracy of companies. We think that structure gets in the way. But if you want to have a deeply empowering environment you can’t just throw structure out. If you go to your team tomorrow and you say, “Guess what guys, you’re all empowered, no structure,” you won’t get an empowered team. What you get is a bunch of confused people. People know there’s a need to have some limits on what they really shouldn’t do. And if you don’t know what you can’t do, then you also don’t know what you can do. If you don’t know the limits of your power, then you don’t know your power.
Kosmos | So Holacracy, ironically, is more structured, not less, than conventional hierarchies?
We each have authority to lead our role. It’s not a leaderless environment; it’s a leader-full environment. We each have this autonomous leadership in an environment that sets clear expectations and clear bounds. I know what’s not mine to control, or not mine to decide, because it falls in my colleague’s area. And also I know what to expect of my colleagues and what they can expect from me. Any one of my colleagues can come to me and say, “Hey, you’re accountable for this. Tell me how you’re meeting that accountability.” So it’s clear autonomy, clear authority, but within clear limits and clear responsibility.
So this is one of the things I love about Holacracy. Instead of rejecting autocratic decision-making, or rejecting structure, or rejecting clarity, it embraces these, but it embraces them along with the freedom and flexibility that we see as their opposite.
Kosmos | Very Dao.
BR | The seeds of each are in its opposite, absolutely…if you reject something that appears to be an opposite of what you want, then you’re actually hurting the very thing that you value.
The capacity that does seem to matter is more a maturity, what I call a vertical capacity. For example, openness, if you’re open to the fact that there might be other ways of seeing things, other perspectives, other points of view. The more open somebody is, the more they’re going to thrive in this system. It actually doesn’t matter what their point of view is, or what they personally value. What matters more is the way they hold these values or perspectives. Do they reject and judge and dismiss anyone that has a different set of values than they do? Or do they get curious? Do they get open? Do they explore the difference?
Or can they actually integrate the differences between their perspectives and the perspectives of others? This requires even greater maturity, the ability to see these differences and create space for both together. That is not to say Holacracy doesn’t work when people are earlier in that journey; it does. What I find, though, is that there’s a fairly high bar for the leader who’s actually making the decision to adopt Holacracy. The leaders that are adopting this today are remarkable people with a lot of developmental capacity. They have their own way of being in the world is rather rich, nuanced, mature.
I often get asked the question, “How do we get people ready for doing this?” Adopting Holacracy is a huge change, and I think when people ask me that they’re rightly intuiting that this will require new capacities for most people. But the answer is you don’t get them ready before you do it. We get them ready through their practice. It’s kind of like asking somebody, “How do you get ready to be a master meditator?” Well, you just go meditate. You don’t try to prepare for it. That would be missing the entire point.
My path to Holacracy was not very saint-like. I needed something that was going to protect the organization from my own tendency to want to control everything. But now when I go to a colleague and I start pushing and say, “No, here’s how it should be,” they just hold up a mirror and say, “Wait a minute. Do you have the authority to make this decision?” And I look at the roles and I say, “Sure enough, I don’t,” so I pitch them on making the decision.
If I try to talk over somebody in our governance meeting and dominate the space, there is a really strong facilitated process, and the facilitator just stops me, immediately interrupts me to say, “Wait a minute.” Holacracy is based in a set of rules; there’s a Constitution that defines the power structure.
The facilitator has the authority to just cut somebody off if they try to dominate the space and talk over everybody. That same process, also defined by the Constitution, makes sure everyone does have space to share their questions, reactions, and concerns. So for the more introverted folks, they can just wait for their turn. They don’t have to fight for space because they know that they will get a turn in this process.
Kosmos | It sounds like in the constitution itself you have some of these other built-in practices of empathy, compassion, and also non-violent communication, (NVC), deep listening. Are these parts of the actual practice?
BR | When I look at what an organization practicing Holacracy maturely does, you get things that look like NVC happening naturally even from people never trained in that practice. And I find that fascinating.
Kosmos | That is fascinating.
BR | Yeah, the system builds those capacities. Does it force them reliably? No. You could still have somebody dumping judgments all over somebody in this system. That’s still possible. But it’s more likely that that behavior will be transformed over time and that people will naturally develop the capacities to communicate differently.
If you add something like NVC into a company doing Holacracy, it’s going to help; it’s going to accelerate the journey. So I often recommend that companies running with Holacracy go work on developing a conscious communication practice. Because it will help. It will accelerate your team’s development. But one of the beauties of Holacracy is that if you really do this well consistently for a while, those capacities get naturally developed or enhanced.
Kosmos | How do you see this evolving from this point on? In other words, do you think Holacracy has a role in governance?
BR | Yeah, interesting you mention governance. There are actually many government agencies now practicing Holacracy, and I’m really curious to see where that will go. There are multiple government agencies now in Dubai that are doing it. There’s one in the U.S. There’s a whole city in Canada, a whole town, that is trying to organize the entire town using Holacracy. Part of the city of Amsterdam is doing Holacracy in one department. There are many interesting cases of experimentation in that area.
Instead of asking how do we get better top-down control, I think a more interesting question is how can we change the fundamental frame to not need top-down control? The question of how do we get better legislatures is, I think, missing the point. How do we create a system where we don’t need the same kind of top-down control? We have an emergent system that has the potential to adapt and take care of our needs for governance, where governance could be distributed throughout the system. Governance could be kind of just like breathing; meaning that it just happens; it’s not something that is handed and controlled top-down.
To achieve that, I think we would need a whole lot of purpose-driven organizations, and we need to start seeing them interlinked together. Holacracy has structures that are equipped to do that. We’re seeing examples now of companies interlinking to govern their commons. I think that can get really interesting. You have purpose-driven entities that are starting to interlink to govern shared context across the company boundaries and with multiple stakeholders having a voice in that governance, not just one.
Holacracy, you could say, is management without managers. It’s decentralized management that uses a very different process to get some of the same results. You still have order. You still have structure. You still have clarity. You still have rules. You still have all those things. You just achieve them completely differently. Could we do the same in our societies? I think so.
Kosmos | Beautiful. Thank you so much.
Inner Work Makes Our Outer Work Massively More Effective
Inner Work Makes Our Outer Work Massively More Effective
From half a century working with people at the very top of the decision-making tree on nuclear weapons, as well as those at grassroots levels risking their lives so that other people don’t get killed, I have come to understand that those who use a regular practice of self-reflection or self-awareness are more effective than anyone else in changing the world.
It happened like this. In 1982, I was incensed by the fact that decisions on nuclear weapons were being made without parliamentary scrutiny. Working at the UN Second Special Session on Disarmament, I observed how the United Nations had no power to stop the acceleration of the nuclear arms race. So, I came home to Oxford and set up a research group to find out who actually makes decisions on nuclear weapons—physicists designing warheads, intelligence experts supplying rationale for new weapons, arms producers supplying those weapons, defense officials paying for them, military deploying them, and so on, in all the [then] nuclear weapons states.
Four years and a lot of hard work later, we were in a position to start trying to open a dialogue with these individuals. We got nowhere, all our invitations refused. At about this time I began to meditate, and with the help of a skilled Jungian, to try to answer the question that had been sitting in my consciousness for years: “Who am I? Why am I here?” In that process I learned to self reflect, to discover and examine my shadow sides, my anger, my fear….
Gradually, I realised that as long as I was projecting these emotions out onto those I wanted to talk with, they could feel my animosity. So I had to do the hard work, the work to face and address and transform the roots of those emotions, as best I could. I became a Quaker and was fortunate to be mentored by Adam Curle, one of the greatest peace mediators the world has known.
Bit by bit, we in the Oxford Research Group were able to convene face-to-face meetings between the top decision-makers in the US, the (then) Soviet Union, Britain, France, and even China. These meetings were below the radar, no press allowed, no communiques, and all based on steadily developing trust. We exchanged eight delegations with China, held meetings in London, Beijing, Oxford, Geneva, Moscow, and even set up meetings between Indian and Pakistani military in New Delhi. These discussions laid the basis of eventual formal agreements, and earned us the three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.
From 2002 on, we built up an organisation called Peace Direct to support those working at the sharp end of conflict—the locally-led groups working nonviolently to defuse armed violence before it erupted into war. Peace Direct now works with partners in 44 countries, assisting those who risk their lives to build peace.
Daily, we are amazed and humbled by those facing terror, who nevertheless walk toward what they fear. Gulalai Ismail is one of them. She comes from northwest Pakistan, one of the most challenging places in the world to be a woman. At age 15, she started an organization called Aware Girls to enable females to go to school; Malala Yousefzai was shot in the head for doing just this. Gulalai, undeterred, has now trained 20 teams of young men and women in Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent other young people joining extremist groups. Using the tools of listening and dialogue, they have reached and dissuaded more than 500 teenagers ‘at risk’ of becoming extremist.
This demonstrates the impact that ordinary people can have to prevent and resolve conflict, and help make a peaceful world possible. Theirs are skills of self-knowledge that we can all develop, that enable us to prevent conflict in the workplace, in the community, and in the family, too.
Every one of us has a shadow, which can consist of things that happened when we were young—deep hurts and past experiences that may be largely unconscious. If they remain unconscious, they can trigger unexpected behavior. When we are willing to look at our own shadow, we develop a capacity for internal enquiry that enables us to meet and even develop a dialogue with our inner critic, the nagging voice that wants to criticize us most of the time.
If you are already on the path of your own inner work, you will know how a regular practice of self-reflection can be incredibly useful—not just to you, but to the communities around you, as well as to the wider world.
When you’re suddenly faced with a crisis, maybe a family crisis or a knife fight in the street, presence is required, which means being able to be calm in the face of turbulence, upheaval, fear, and anger. While it’s comparatively easy to learn the skills to do that, these skills have to be practiced to become second nature. They require deep breathing as an automatic reaction, going into one’s heart instead of one’s head, because the head tends to panic but the heart knows how to understand what’s happening in terms of the psyche of the other people involved. Once you can be present to what’s happening in the person who is causing the violence, you have a much greater chance of meeting them rather than fighting them.
Einstein warned us that we cannot solve a problem using the consciousness that created it. Humanity now has the chance to evolve our consciousness and develop a different understanding of power, namely power with others. That means rebalancing feminine intelligence with masculine. It means upgrading the value we ascribe to qualities like compassion, inclusivity, caring for the planet, outlawing armed violence, and replacing the use of force with mediation. It means insisting that women sit at all decision-making tables, at all levels, equally with men.
The age we are living through desperately needs people with these skills. To develop them requires that we wake up. Waking up means more than sitting quietly in meditation. It means going deeper into self-knowledge, into the value of integrating the wounded parts of yourself, and discovering how to take a stand for what you believe in.
Learn More
The Business Plan for Peace Online Course teaches the skills, outlined above, that are essential to effective work in the world. During that online course, you can understand the roots of contemporary conflict in the world; observe how others prevent, contain, and end violent conflict; and learn to transform conflict with your colleagues and community. You can identify opportunities where you can best serve, using your particular skills and consciousness, modelling and teaching what you will have learned, and build a powerful and supportive network of like-minded leaders-of-change. https://thebusinessplanforpeace.org/latest-news-the-12-part-online-course-is-about-to-start/
Big Lazy | Music for Unsettling Times
Cover Photo | Marco North
Stephen Ulrich is a guitar player, composer and leader of the band Big Lazy. Big Lazy is an instrumental trio from New York City. Their music dwells in the unmistakable landscape of gritty yet gracefully crafted American music. Simultaneously noir and pastoral, gothic and modern, Big Lazy conjures images of everything from big sky country to seedy back rooms. With sparse instrumentation—electric guitar, acoustic bass and drums—the trio creates richly evocative soundscapes with a distinctly narrative quality and an undeniable sense of place.
Stephen composed music for the HBO series Bored To Death and more recently, the film Art and Craft.
Kosmos | Stephen, what did you want to be when you were growing up?
Stephen Ulrich | Music was always a natural place that I thought I might end up. When I was a little kid, I remember looking at the Beatles’ album, Rubber Soul, and thinking they made it for us personally, that there was one album and it was for our family. I also loved the album cover itself. It could have been shot in our driveway, the pine trees, it just felt like a family portrait or something. That’s the connection I had to music. Playing music started relatively late, at 13. I thought about being an anonymous studio musician because those are the kind of people I studied with. Guys like Sal Salvador, legendary guitarist in New York, part of the RCA Orchestra. Not a rock star, but just earning a living playing music.
Kosmos | What influenced you to focus on instrumental music?
SU | I studied and played jazz, and that’s where I was headed. My mentor, Sal Salvador, taught in a dusty back room in the Ed Sullivan Theater and instrumental music became part of my DNA. I listened to Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery, classic stuff. I got into punk rock because I felt like jazz was somebody else’s music. Punk was the music of my generation. The incident that turned us into an instrumental band was a gig at CBGB’s Gallery in 1998. We had been working with a singer, Dino Ray, again reinventing by putting words to these dark, atmospheric tunes. The singer didn’t show but we went on anyway. Suddenly, it just felt natural. Within the first song, the crowd came right to us. It was a random act but it wasn’t an accident. Playing strictly instrumentals felt like a bit of a curse at first but it evolved into more of a blessing because now I license music and I write for films.
Kosmos | I’ve heard listeners describe your music as ‘the soundtrack to my life’. It connects at a visceral level with people who are experiencing turmoil in their lives. There is a raw honesty at the core of your work.
SU | Thank you. Yeah, the music is not consoling. It’s saying, ‘everything’s open and everything’s gray, not black and white’. The songs don’t have a happy ending. They don’t have a sad ending. You get to make up your own ending. I also get the description ‘good driving music’. It’s about the trip – telephone poles passing – not necessarily the arrival. There’s an element of human resistance and the power to act when you can actually write your own script.
Kosmos | There’s a yearning in the music, and also in your performance of it.
SU | There is an unresolved quality to the music which gives it a sense of danger but also sadness. Most of the tunes are in minor keys and to our Western ears the minor key lacks resolution. That quality of danger attracts film makers to use the music in dramatic situations. What I love about composing music is I’m using math – music theory – to affect people’s emotions.
We’ve gotten much better at performing this music over the years. It’s not exactly party music, although people do dance at our shows, but it does celebrate life and a has a how-goes-the-struggle? element.
Kosmos | Who are your fans?
SU | We have this new generation of punky kids that like the band and come to shows. They remind me of myself, approaching bands in 1980. When we were on NPR years ago, 1999, or thereabouts, on the show Weekend Edition which aired on Sunday mornings, I received thousands of letters. Thousands. I still have them, – they’re in boxes. The letters were from a whole variety of people. NASA people ordered the CD. Farmers, cops, film makers, skate punks, just the craziest mix of people. Maybe that’s NPR but I felt like the music struck this chord with people, and it just went across the whole spectrum.
Kosmos | That is archived at NPR. Here is a link
SU | Ooh thanks – I need this.
Kosmos | What is the role of the artist in these precarious times?
SU | People have told me this music enabled them to write their own script. I suppose that could sound like escapism, but it could also be about taking control. In that sense, there is an element of understated compassion to the music. The world’s just held together with duct tape right now. It’s hard to not be political personally, but in my music, it’s more of a crusade to stay free and not be beholden to these powers. The word noir is used a lot in our music. What is noir and what does that mean? It literally means darkness. It could be guys in trench coats but actually, I think the music has an underdog quality to it that appeals to people.
Kosmos | The licensing of the music and the work you do scoring television and film, is that a solo project of yours, or do you do that as a band?
SU | Originally, it started out with the band licensing material. We put out a six song EP, Amnesia, and the entire album was licensed by NBC for use in the crime drama Homicide: Life on the Street. We also appeared performing onstage in an episode. Later, I wrote the music for the HBO series Bored to Death. The director, Alan Taylor, was a fan of the band and he used a bunch of songs in the pilot. HBO was like, “Let’s just hire this guy whose music we are already using.” It led to some odd moments where HBO would want me to copy ( industry term: ‘knock-off’) my own composition! The initial interest in licensing came from the band, but as far as scoring for film and televison, I’m a one-man operation. I do however bring the guys in to play on them.
Kosmos | Is scoring different than making songs for records?
SU | Totally different. When composing for an album I’m relatively free, but film composing is all about being in service of the film and director. At times you’re writing not so much what the actor is saying but what they’re thinking, or linking the scene to an earlier action. There’s a whole underlying structure that the viewer will sense but might not be fully conscious of. The best film music pulls you into the film emotionally; you don’t always keep track of what the score is doing. I once sent in a piece of music, and the director was having trouble with it. He commented, “This character is about to be in danger, but he’s not in danger right now. Okay, go. Send us something.” There are so many layers as opposed to writing music for an album where you’re just free. When I’m writing for a film, they’ll say, ‘We need a tango by 4:00 p.m.’ Done!
Kosmos | To what degree does licensing your music keep the lights on and the Big Lazy machine rolling?
SU | That’s where the money comes from, and that definitely keeps things moving, especially for me because I have a very large catalog of music that is used in a lot of different places.
Kosmos | As leader of Big Lazy, do you feel like the business guy, the conductor, the producer, the artist, the guitar slinger or all of the above?
SU | It’s more like cheerleader, cab driver and production designer. I’m constantly the one that says things like, “We’re going to drive 400 miles, but it’s going to be an amazing transformative night.” We’re a band of good friends. They love what we do, but I have to sell them on stuff. The music is obviously front and center but there’s also the presentation, the aesthetic, how everything’s defined, the fonts, just crazy detail.
Kosmos | It’s funny because on the cover of that early EP you referred to, is a picture of you wearing a bunch of hats.
SU | That’s funny, yeah. I never thought of that!
Kosmos | As part of a group, was it difficult to define and refine your low-fi film noir style? Was this something you had to sell them on or did the band members contribute to that?
SU | The original band was called Mild Thing, it was me, Paul Dugan on bass and singer Mark Rounds. This was 1990. We played despairing but humorous drinking songs. We added drummer Willie Martinez, Mark left us and we became Lazy Boy, playing moody instrumentals with too much reverb. We started dabbling in writing music for films and touring. The touring experience made us into more of a rock band, I was just feeling the need to make a racket instead of playing music that made people stare into their drink. The music became less theatrical and more visceral. In 1999 we were sued by the La-Z-Boy chair company for copyright infringement and with the addition of drummer Tamir Muskat, we became Big Lazy. We cultivated a kind of raw, bluesy sound full of fire and recorded 4 albums. After a hiatus starting in 2007 I reignited the band with Yuval Lyon (drums) and Andrew Hall (bass). The lo-fi film noir style was a slow and painful evolution!
Kosmos | Growing up in the punk rock era, we used to plaster the town with our DIY posters to create a visual and a band awareness and announce gigs. Has social media made things different for getting the word out now as opposed to how we did it back in the day?
SB | I’ll never forget that feeling of having a big stapler and an armful of flyers, and making Xeroxed artwork. I did that in early Big Lazy. Nowadays, with social media, everyone’s posting pictures of their sandwich. I use it sparingly. It’s really helpful if you have a gig in Nashville and you need to contact people. On the other hand, I feel like I’m taking part in the Evil Empire. It’s supposed to be about reaching people but there’s all these strange limits to it.
Kosmos | Do you feel like social media is helping you to build a community of fans?
SU | Yes, but in a way, email feels a little more respectful. “Here, we’re playing. If you want to come, you can come. You don’t have to respond.” A lot of what we do is completely done on our own. It’s just another tool.
Kosmos | To what degree has crowdfunding and crowdsourcing provided artistic freedom for your band?
SU | It’s not that different for us. We’ve never been beholden to a record company in terms of what we do artistically. What I did with both crowdfunding campaigns was, I individually emailed 2,000 people. Each time, it took me a month. That’s been the most connective thing I’ve done in terms of social media. I actually had hundreds of conversations with people through email, sometimes on the phone. In that way, it was a transformative thing, connecting to everybody directly.
Kosmos | Where do you go when you perform music. Can you describe your inner landscape at all?
Stephen Ulrich: When I write a tune, I almost always have this sense of place where the tune the piece lives. It could be my mother’s attic, or a parking lot that I was in once but somehow, the piece dwells in a specific location that haunts the song for the rest of it’s life! So I have a faint sense of that place when I’m performing. On a great night I just walk off stage and think to myself, “Where was I for the last hour?”
Kosmos | Nice. You have a new album coming out too, right?
SU | We do! It’s called Dear Trouble. It’s coming out in mid-October and we’re really excited. We brought in a bunch of New York luminary musicians as featured guests; Marc Ribot, Steven Bernstein, Peter Hess and woman named Marlysse Rose Simmons who’s a keyboardist. Checkered Past Records in Chicago is putting it out. It’s actually the first time we’ve used a label.
Kosmos | What about touring or gigs in support of that? Any immediate plans?
SU | Initially, we’re doing Northeast states; Philly, Boston, New York, New Haven, Connecticut. We just did a southern tour and we have plans to go to France in the spring.
Kosmos | Thank you Stephen. Just to leave you with a thought regarding the power that you wield, I found a quote by Ludwig van Beethoven. He said, the guitar is a miniature orchestra in itself. I thought, ‘Wow. That sounds like Stephen.’
SU | That’s great! Thank you!
VISIT | http://www.biglazymusic.com/
Kathy Thaden | An Inner Fire
‘At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.’ (Episcopal Book of Common Prayer p. 370)
These words from the Eucharistic Prayer articulate the environmental focus and inspiration for much of Kathy Thaden’s mosaic art. She writes, “As an artist, my work is informed by my Christian faith – expressing awe at creation and the Creator, as well as responsibility, a divine call to stewardship of all that we have been given. As a mosaicist, I treasure glass and stone scraps or discarded items from our ‘throw-away’ consumer culture. It is important to me that nothing be wasted, finding beauty in what was once broken.”
Linking her art to her faith Thaden says she tries to be always open to God’s possibilities, giving rise to sacred art formed in prayer. “How do I discuss the impact of environmental issues – on both our natural surroundings and the rest of humanity? What can I contribute to the narrative of healing and restoration? By imagination and inspiration, I believe as artists we can be truth-tellers.”
Using found objects, discards, and glass remnants or other unique materials Thaden creates something new. Mixing a variety of materials enables her to tell a visual story. “Working with these fragments is transforming. The pieces are broken, change shape, fit together, and then made whole again. There are no leftovers. This is my voice, my vision, my life – exploding with precious bits and pieces assembled over time.”
Thaden’s study of fine arts and degree in Commercial Art first led her to a career in broadcast design. For 25 years, Thaden worked in television as art director, animator, and graphic designer, winning numerous honors for design, including seven Emmy Awards. Seeking something more tactile she was drawn to contemporary mosaic art 17 years ago, finding her way back to fine art.
Thaden often crafts her mosaics on hand-formed substrates as with Rising and Fragile Earth. The irregular shapes offer a more organic sense to the pieces.
Incorporating natural elements such as fossils, twigs, tree bark, river stones, slate or shells also speaks to the beauty of Creation as in Living Water, inspired by the fight for water rights at Standing Rock. Fragile Earth and Earth in Pieces were born out of the Eucharistic prayer above regarding this, “our island home.”
In Oasis the three gold pieces of smalti on the horizon are a reminder of the Trinity. The spiritual desert is lonely, foreboding place. But within the solitude, there is a sense of the Creator, glimmers of hope, and the realization that we are never alone. Sanctuary offers a sacred place of refuge, shelter and protection.
“The Lord built his sanctuary like the heights, like the earth that he established forever.” Psalm 78:69
Found objects can include a zipper (Ripple Effect), or bits of broken auto glass (Rising), or colorful magazine paper bits as in Living Water and Fragile Earth. Thaden does use more traditional materials as well, combining stained glass, smalti (both Italian and Mexican glass), millefiori, beads or marble as in Oasis, Sanctuary and Ripple Effect.
What You Cross the Street to Avoid
You assume that a blind man can sing
and that he can afford a guitar.
You say, “Less is more”
to a woman whose children need new shoes.
You don’t listen to your daughter’s questions.
She stops asking them.
The one time I went without eating
my thoughts ran away from me.
Handed a bowl of soup, I felt its weight.
I nearly dropped it.
W.C. Handy’s song about St. Louis
doesn’t mention his empty belly
or how stiff his back was
from sleeping on cobblestones under a bridge.
He sang of a man whose heart
was a rock cast in the sea.
A Long Convalescence
It is the small things tell you you are home—
cotton sheets, linen clouds, Dutch rabbits
nibbling greens. It is close to sunset
when you remember why you went away.
Never again, I swear on the Bible,
I hear you say to yourself as if no one
listens. Mama hurries the last crumbs
into a basket, sister sings her song.
However many hours He wore that crown—
that’s how long you lay anesthetized
while the surgeon scraped nerves and stretched bones.
Meanwhile the jackrabbit comes to blend in
against tan grounds and cottonwood. Windows
hold a million trees full of ganglia.
Accept that for now you will be going
between only two rooms—one with a bed,
one with a sink. Its grave porcelain eye.
New Spirit, Wise Action
Dear Reader,
The times we live in ask much of us. How can we know the best ways to respond to the converging crises we face? How can we live lives of deep meaning and joy in the midst of confusion and pain, and be catalysts for positive change?
If you practice on a spiritual or ethical path, you already see that chasing wealth, power, or egoic pleasure has lost the appeal it may have held earlier in life. You have been called in a new direction, your heart-strings vibrating to a more complex chord. And as activists, you have felt the recent shifts away from ‘sustainability’ and ‘reform’ to ever more sober purpose: resilience, restoration, ‘deep adaptation’, alliance-building, and taking personal inventory of what you are willing to ‘lose’, as you make space for the new. How will you integrate and transcend all you have learned? How will your metamorphosis unfold, and what will you become?
The Fall edition of Kosmos Quarterly explores the dynamic between our inner work and outer actions. Creating this edition, we kept our focus on emergent ways of being and doing in these challenging times. For veteran activists like Lisa Fithian, this takes the form ‘conscious organizing’; for Professor Jem Bendell, it is a personal set of skills for surviving climate despair. In the Nevada desert, ‘burners’ annually create and dismantle a post-apocalyptic city for artists and lovers. Gary Gach follows Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s Five Mindfulness Trainings – a global ethic for humanity. Extinction Rebellion uses Holacracy, a framework for decentralized decision-making developed by Brian Robertson. And enigmatic musical artist Kendra Smith, chooses life off-grid, ‘chopping wood and carrying water’.
Each of these actions, among others, is a valid response as we navigate the liminal space between the disintegrating ‘flat’ worldview of objective rationalism that allowed us to marginalize anyone and anything that did not conform to its model of progress, and the incoming convulsive energy of a new integral era. How we ‘show up’ now is nothing less than the greatest test ever faced by a known species. Unlike the dinosaurs, we alone have the capacity to awaken, to cherish our living Earth, and to recognize our interdependence with all Life.
Never have the stakes been so high, the choices so profound.
For elders like me, there is restitution to be made, an inner and outer reckoning for decades of naïve belief in man-made systems of modernity. The least I can offer now is my full being, in service to Life for all the days I am given. For young people, the test is far more severe. They know that a dark night of the world soul lurks on the horizon, to be endured and ultimately transcended, only by the wildest love and most creative, painful birth-effort imaginable.
Many young people tell me they are reluctant to bring new lives into the world. That is understandable, yet consider this – our care and teaching of children, in loving families and communities, is very likely the most important practice we can offer the world at this time. Laughter, joy, family, warmth, stability, ceremony. Each new generation is the prayer of Creation. Let us focus our loving attention on all children and work to protect all beings.
Our wise actions matter, and only our sincere inner work can reveal the way forward. It is the mission of Kosmos to walk together on the path of transformation. Join us!
Please join me also in wishing Nancy Roof, our beloved founder and Editor Emeritus, a very happy 90th birthday. This wise world-server is a beacon of light to anyone touched by her vision and her love.
In Gratitude,
Rhonda Fabian
Editor
God Becomes a Hairdresser
Things are going badly. Handbasket badly.
What sort of things? you ask.
The usual: the Red Sox season, war, those wild cells
proliferating to kill.
So God borrows scissors from the Three Fates
and opens a salon downtown, unisex, no less.
People come and sit in the chairs under nylon bibs
like agreeable oversized babies while God runs
His holy fingers through their hair.
He clips and snips and sprays them with lotions.
He twiddles and crunches and poufs, and holds
up a mirror behind, until His clients look and see
that it is good.
At 8 p.m, God combs out a last perm, accepts a tip,
and pulls down the shades.
So has His work made this world any better?
Beats me.
Previously published in Gold Man Review and How I Became An Historian, Cherry Grove, 2014.