Not Defense, Not Offense, but Adaptation

When you are different than the majority of your neighbors, it can feel very vulnerable. On some level, we are always under scrutiny. While we don't often fear for our physical safety, the mental and emotional readiness to defend our choices is exercised regularly. In short, people want to know why we live as we do – are our beliefs somehow a threat to their own freedom to live as they choose?

If this were a clear cut challenge of defending our families and homesteads from an invading enemy, our response may be more in line with historical examples of defensive structures and offensive maneuvers. But these are our neighbors, our friends, sometimes even our extended family. It would break our hearts to close ourselves off from these folks just because we see the world through a different lens. We cannot allow ourselves the ancient mental/emotional armor of us-versus-them. When the only difference between people lies in the priorities or value system with which they make choices, then such tragic divisions are truly “all in our heads.” Instead, we admit that we cannot know for sure how people will react to perceived threats.

And if we cannot see for certain the dangers to our own way of life, our strategies cannot be primarily defensive or offensive. We must remain fully adaptive. Adaptive does not mean fickle, volatile, erratic, uncommitted, unstable, or unreliable. I know this for sure because of decades spent thinking and behaving as if it meant exactly that. I was the classic “pleaser” - trying to fit into my world by being whatever someone else needed me to be. Madeline L'Engle's novel Wind in the Door
cracked open this crazy assumption for me. A simple
challenge to one of her young characters to “learn to adapt while remaining wholly himself” stopped me in my tracks. I cried long and hard because I simply did not know what “wholly myself” even looked like. What do they say about the first step to recovery? In my case, I finally came to know who I am by a spontaneous list of who I am not. Extricating myself from the “Not” list became my path to a place unforeseen but somehow always known in my deepest self. Deconstructing a lifetime's worth of self-image and world view wasn't easy but the final, essential set of truths is an unparalleled gift. I'm still not confident saying what I will do in hypothetical situations but I know who I will be, what motivations will guide my choices.

So, like the community of Starhawk's Fifth Sacred Thing, we here at Journey School often start with what we know we don't want to do, and build from our Dedication to the Four Sacred Things in our response to sudden crises, possible threats, and just everyday living. This passage from the novel is an excellent example of such adaptive strategy:

“After the uprising, we found ourselves caught in a dilemma. We knew that war was responsible for shaping the world into all the forms we wanted to change – and yet there we were, surrounded by hostile enemies who might, at any moment, attack and destroy us. This was the dilemma that every peaceful culture has faced for the last five thousand years, at least. And this was our one advantage – that we had history behind us. We had seen all possible solutions played out, from resistance to retreat to acquiescence, and we knew none of them worked. That saved us a great deal of time. We didn't have to waste our energies stockpiling weapons or drilling troops; we could jump right to the heart of the matter, which was magic.”

“In what sense?” Madrone asked.

Lily nodded at Maya. “You remember that Dion Fortune quote you've always been so fond of? That magic is the art of changing consciousness at will? You can look at a war as a massing of arms and material and troops, but you can also see it as something else – as a delicate web of interwoven choices made by human beings, made out of a certain consciousness. The decision to order an attack, the choice to obey or disobey an order, to fire or not to fire a weapon. Armies and, indeed, any culture that supports them must convince the people that all the decisions are made already, and they have no choice. But that is never true. So, odd as it may seem, this is the terrain upon which we base our defense of this city – the landscape of consciousness.”

“...But I ask you, what is practical? Would it have been practical for us to devote our scarce resources and human energies to building weapons and recruiting a standing army, when we needed every scrap of earth and drop of water and the power of every human hand for survival, for healing the earth's wounds? War is the great waster, as much in the preparations for it as in the waging of it. We learned that, at least, from the last century, as that same military drained the country and destroyed our true wealth. But we have nothing left to waste. We would have traded an uncertain future for sure misery and still not have been able to withstand the armed might of the Stewards.”

“And where does that leave us, when armies come marching up the peninsula?” Maya asked.

“It leaves us with what we have built of this city and this watershed, which is in itself a possibility not counted on by those who would attack us. That is where our hope lies. We are what we wanted to become,” Lily said.