BENDING THE BOW How Ordinary People Spark Visionary Social Movements By CHRISTINE MARIE MASON BENDING THE BOW I Copyright © 2019 by Christine Marie Mason All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. Paperback ISBN 978-0-9977277-8-4 eBook ISBN 978-0-9977277-3-9 Published by Mt. Tamalpais Press www.xtinem.com II BENDING THE BOW To John Shiva and his work for the Earth. Thank you for the countless ways you show your love and devotion. BENDING THE BOW III IV BENDING THE BOW Acknowledgements Deep thanks to Charles Rickarts, who in 2017, served as a research assistant on five of the individual movements in the book. Charles was meticulous with dates and details, and in working with me to research motivational underpinnings in historic source documents, public reports and academic works. We have at least two hundred pages of supplemental material that couldn’t be applied to this work, and another 200 pages on the network around Dr. King, which we ended up not using in Bending the Bow. We were on an accelerated learning curve together. Jeff Greenwald, my long-time editor and globe-trotting, science-fic- tion-loving friend, helped bring clarity to my language and pushed me on weaknesses in the book. His enthusiasm for the work buoyed me. Jeff is responsible for suggesting the addition of our section about rights for disabled persons, I Am More Than My Capacities. The artists in the book were found through the global sourcing movement: The lady M’dina from Pakistan did the hand-colored portraits, and Katrina Sinkeviciute in the EU crafted the infographics. John Shiva Gray and Colin Cook were sounding boards throughout the process. It’s wonderful to have a creative pod that makes an effort to support each other’s writing and artwork and ventures. Thank you to Kokoe Johnson for lending his insights. 4 months into writing this book, I had a near death experience and was saved by the team of emergency room doctors and staff at Lenox Hill Hospital. During the recovery months, I had several transcend- ent moments which gave me a felt and prolonged experience of unity consciousness—not just a mental concept of it. We really are emergent beings, coming from a unified energy field, wholly interdependent with the earth and the atmosphere, to which we are perfectly adapted. Mark Whitwell, a conduit of true yoga, taught me that idea many years ago, and with this experience, I finally understood it in my body. A similar BENDING THE BOW V connection to all-that-is came through Madhukar in this time period, who made me laugh from my feet, told me there was nothing to prove, and in deep silence offered a taste of freedom and bliss. In addition, I carried these people in my heart throughout this process: The amazing love activist and author Sonya Renee Taylor; the embodi- ment of “a love supreme” and public intellectual Dr. Cornel West; Robin Cullen for his example of decades of patience and fortitude; Transform- ative Justice leader Jacques Verduin; Thomas Huebl; the poet-artist-muse Tamsin Smith; my beloved soul friend and singer of the divine names Adam Bauer; and the mystic Christ, who gave me a deeply felt sense of the possibility of all of our human systems. It’s been an honor to get to know these people in our collective history who have held a better vision for the world. I remain in awe of each of them. One Love, Christine VI BENDING THE BOW BENDING THE BOW VII VIII BENDING THE BOW Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................... 1 Uncommon Possibility .................................................................... 5 I Am More Than My Race ............................................................ 25 I am More Than My Gender ......................................................... 45 I Am More Than My Sexuality .................................................... 63 I Am More Than My Age .............................................................. 87 I Am More Than My Ethnicity ...................................................109 I Am More Than My Religion .....................................................135 I Am More Than My Capacities .................................................161 I Am More Than My Species ......................................................191 The Work is Seven Generations Long ........................................213 Mapping Your Own Pod ..............................................................235 Bringing the Stories Alive in Us .................................................245 Conclusion: Indivisible ................................................................253 Appendices ....................................................................................257 Bibliography ..................................................................................296 BENDING THE BOW IX X BENDING THE BOW Introduction Introduction For the last two decades, I’ve been investigating the question of how our inner lives relate to our material circumstances and our cultural systems. I’ve worked on multiple projects in this direction, including Indivisible (which looks at disconnection and violent systems), The Invitation (which looked at women’s intimate body shame and social structures based on devaluing the feminine), and 52 Churches (how what we hear in our deep receptive worship state shows up in our politics). Between these projects and my personal practices in consciousness, I’d concluded that all separation is a lie. Moreover, it seemed inevitable that humanity would stay on this trajectory toward sovereignty and self-de- termination for all beings- justice was our inevitable arc as a species. In 2016, however, while Indivisible was hitting the shelves, the political and cultural reality that was concurrently showing up in the United States (and the world over) seemed to be recursive. In the US, political discourse was full of “pussy grabbing” and neo-nazi rallies and the reinvigoration of white supremacy. This created an immense dissonance for many people, including me. I heard myself saying: Are the forces of domination and oppression going to rise again right here? Can’t we just forego the suffer- ing of innocents? Let’s just skip it this time, and remember that we’re all connected. Let’s just leapfrog to that time in the future when the full potential of each person is magnified, regardless of the conditions of their birth. To a time when we no longer put up structural impediments to each person’s potential. We know we are going there eventually, anyway. I thought, then, about all the times that have come before, when we were in much worse places with regard to human justice, and how someone went first... how someone stepped out to abolish slavery, or get women the vote, or invite civil rights for gay people. I decided to look at some of the great social justice movements, and investigate their commonalities to see if there is a blueprint that we can use to sustain ourselves in our own missions. With this in mind, I chose eight movements, two of which are still in their infancy, and selected one person in each movement to BENDING THE BOW 1 investigate. I was interested specifically in the people who, 20 to 30 years before a movement became mainstream, began to speak out and move the needle in the direction of a cultural policy shift. The people that brought a conversation about injustice out of the shadows of dinner table rumblings or covert micro-rebellions- who were they? I also wanted to look at the pod that surrounded them. Not all of the profiles follow this model, but most of them do. In each movement, there were often concurrent other pods, many times not known to one another in the early days, doing similar things, but to take away a personal learning, it seemed best to focus on one group at a time. Who were the people who could see a vision of a future that wanted to be born, what was at work in their inner life, and who did they surround themselves with? In some cases, the subjects I chose were part of the oppressed class, stand- ing up for themselves, and in other cases, there were people who were part of the dominant class but acted for justice. I was wary of “savior complex” people, who got their worth from being seen as doing good, masking an imperial colonizer attitude, rather than knowing themselves as worthy inherently and then acting from a heart of what’s right and what’s needed. But, even though I tell the stories of the individuals, which are quite inspir- ing, it’s more to illustrate the point on the commonalities between them. Bending the Bow doesn’t give a full history of any social justice movement. Each of the movements featured here has inspired many books about their original inception and evolution. For example, while Harry Hay was a pioneer in the gay rights movement on the West Coast of the US, surrounded by an exceptional pod of allies, he was not responsible for many other victories of the nationwide and international gay rights movements—including the advances for lesbian, trans, or other sexual orientation rights. We might also have profiled Del Martin and Phulilis Lyon who did so much for lesbians and women. I chose Hay because he was an excellent example of how one person and 2 BENDING THE BOW Introduction the pod around them coalesced, and how their inner life and external circumstances came together to make that happen. Each major movement developed not from the work of a single pod in one location, but on many groups—often operating concurrently, sometimes with little knowledge of what the others were doing. Each of these people invites us to co create a new future. They aren’t just inviting us to tolerance, to diversity, to civil justice and an equal playing field. They are inviting us to a love story! They are inviting us to fall in love with the possibility in all creation, the potential in each being, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.