Today we're featuring the cover story from our current print edition (less than 5 copies remain!) by playwright and contributor Onyx Hartwell.
At the heart of our spiritual journey to wholeness is an empty space. A silent stillness.
This awareness was not a lightning strike. I think it has been with me all along, waxing and waning in my consciousness as does the moon. I can point to an early crystallization at the age of 9:
Alone in my room, making a solemn vow to do whatever it took to be an amazing wife and mother, contrary to what was being modeled to me at the time. I would learn to love properly. Whatever it took. I knew even then that it meant embarking on a deep inner journey.
It is my belief that we demonstrate to others who we are through our actions—through our doing. But that we know ourselves best by cultivating the relationship with our inner silence.
We know ourselves in the deep being.
It is impossible to create ourselves as whole and integrated personalities, that happy marriage of doing and being, without first wading through the quagmires between us and that blessedly silent hole at the center of our universe.
Perhaps this quest is the very point of our human journey. This marvelous and terrible adventure of consciousness in a body. This gift, this curse, this unimaginable miracle!
I am sure many people would be eager to debate me on this metaphysical argument.
Perhaps why we are here does not matter so much as the absolute truth that we MUST go on that journey: to travel through the Hole that is the gateway to the Whole.
Because.
It is beyond impossible to create the collaborative Utopia we dream of without addressing our inner worlds first. To walk the path is the very road to Hell.This idea is not born of the heart’s imagination: it is fact.
I can see Karl Marx, his eyes seeing some of the same injustices we see today … His rage and hatred bleeding through his pen onto paper as he dreamed up his Worker’s Paradise. A Manifesto read by so many, convinced the Ideal is attainable.
Could Karl Marx see his works writ later, large in the world? Did he bless the Russian enterprise with a paternal kiss from on high?
What exactly did he feel to hear his name shouted in veneration by people who went on to bloody their knives with human blood?
Given the opportunity, would he go back and change his heart after seeing children die in the Gulags?
No matter how holy or justified the rage, we cannot create justice from vengeance.
Like many of us who suffered through the no-longer-liberal arts in the University system, I was indoctrinated to despise capitalism and say things like: well, the Russians didn’t do communism right. I was encouraged to see the virtue in hating straight, white, Christian men.
I was led to believe it was possible for me to tangibly cultivate a better world, coming as I was from vehement conviction. A conviction I realize now was barely staying afloat on its sea of fear, aggression, despair and ignorance.
As a white woman, I jumped off the Woke Train when I was told my simple existence was violence in the world.
I heard people express their hatred of me for being white make the simultaneous argument that it’s not hatred at all, but a deep truth that will lead us to a more fair and equitable future.
I can see how demented that thinking is now. But I could not perceive that same insanity in myself.
I thought I was doing and being“good” when I despised and criticized.
To be fair to myself, there were prior good acts on my part. Years before the seismic culture slaps of 2020, I stopped identifying with the harsher points of feminist rage: it did not feel right (or righteous) anymore.
Still, though, I was the depressed parrot they wanted me to be. This slogan over here, that slogan over there.
This stepping off of the decades long training …
I experienced the tremendous upheaval of leaving a cult. The
bottom-dropping-outrealization that I had outsourced my sense of self and knowing, reckoning with the shock and shame of seeing how much hatred and contempt before investigation I had justified … and being totally alone. Because all my friends were still in.
All the sweet inner work I thought I had done was a sudden ash in the mouth. I was a hypocrite and worst of all, a stooge. I had let myself convince myself that I knew the almighty Truth. When I was really serving an agenda that we see trotting on all the news cycles nowadays: the Postmodern ethos undoing every tradition and value, seducing us into the same Gulag-haunted slavery we should have all learned long ago how to avoid.
