Unfixable

I recently searched the internet for, “the opposite of transcendence” and received the following results: 

• Be inferior

• Fail

• Fall behind

• Lose

• Surrender

I was startled by the internet’s hostility toward non-transcendence. Our language is steeped in dualities of good and bad, wanted and unwanted, male and female, heaven and hell. Through perception and social reality (culture) we invent the boundaries between these states of being, between self and other, as an attempt to experience stability. Yet, in the words of Octavia Butler, “God is change.”
 
Our obsession with transcendence is connected to the fantasy of separation, the idea that it is possible and desirable to leave the metabolizing tangle of relationships we call Earth. The story is that this would be the ultimate win, a one-way ticket to heaven that will allow us avoid the whole domain of pain, shame and loserdom listed in the online dictionary.
 
Yet, many wise human animals believe and have believed that it is the very struggle to transcend – to solve once and for all – that perpetuates suffering by propagating cultures and behaviors of domination and extraction, where a few climb the escalator while others are left on the empty floor of a dying mall. 
 
Much is made of the brokenness of our nation and our big divides. Surely this is true. But perhaps our search for final solutions is what keeps us from practicing more beneficial ways of being. If the system is broken, we should throw it away and try a new one, right? But what if systems are meant to be broken because breaking is always happening? The breakdown of structures redistributes their energy and materials, making these available for the growth of new bodies and behaviors. Let’s compost our system.
 
A flag in modern times is a symbol of a nation state or a community. It is a blanket that symbolically covers difference and represents kinship, geographic boundaries, and other types of relationship. With its limited geometry, it is the veil that allows some in and keeps other out. Like all symbols, a flag can be simultaneously flimsy, wraithlike, flammable and imbued with the power of life and death.
 
The American flag represents part of a vast continent made up of countless instances of place-ness that we experience with our moving bodies in community with a complex array of other living beings, minerals, liquids, and gasses. It also describes the most fortified relationship between industrial capital and military power that has ever existed on Earth. At the same time, it is an attempt to short-hand a large-scale, multi-level experiment in creating and revising a heterogenous community that self-propagates by way of representative governance. All this with just three colors and few stars and stripes.
 
In Boa’s Repair Shop Flag Repair, we approach the construction of a flag from the inside out. We propagate relationship among symbolic self and community by tapping our deepest individual and collective resource – imagination. We do this by cultivating presence through group mediation. Over the course of this meditation, we bring awareness to our experience within our bodies and the way our bodies connect with the earth below, the sky above, and all the other beings and materials that are also connected, have been, and will be connected in this vast awareness. We journey to an imagined home, find its shape, and invite a tool that may be of use here. We bring these symbols out of our meditations, develop them, and use them to create a flag together. I lead this journey and you breath its life into our shared experience.