Considering Alignment, and Weeding—Plus a Roundup of Light

By Melanie P. Moore

Friends have checked in on me this week. A trusted soul friend shared that in her body she feels a sense of threat “knowing I am out of values alignment with the majority.” She expressed concern for how I might feel. As an out, queer, Christian woman I had written about the power and danger of visibility during the first Trump administration, (Invisible Woman: A Reflection on Being Seen in America).

This week, I think a lot of people may be feeling what we queer people have always felt—that we exist in a sometimes-hostile world where the majority does not understand us. Maybe this is a moment when queer people can be the light. Many of us have been oppressed, taunted, physically assaulted, or cast out even by our own family members. Which is why queer people refer to each other as “Family,” as in “she’s Family” in pointing out one queer person to another. We have always had underground codes. We’ve been here a long time.

I keep reading and hearing people say it is a dark time. Yesterday I had the great misfortune of accidentally subscribing to—and reading—a spiritual Trumper’s Substack post. But what I read, as ideologically incomprehensible as it was to me, was a view into how the majority of Americans apparently feel. They have felt darkness for the past four years and now they feel, ironically, joy. They feel seen I guess. For the past four years they felt oppressed by being categorized as uneducated, crude, etc. They felt oppressed by having vaccine mandates and “wokeness … shoved down [their] throats” by the federal government. They felt they had no choice, no agency.

Right or wrong (reality-based or not—and I do think their grievances are not at all the same as actual oppression), it’s like that quote from Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maybe the key is in the language, “made them feel.” Can someone else make you feel? I think so. I certainly feel afraid of angry young men who say out loud, or carry signs saying, “Women are Property” as they did at Texas State University on Wednesday. I am “made to feel” fear by active, in-my-face xenophobia, antisemitism, and racism even though I am a white, cis-gender American Christian. But I am also queer.

Even if someone “makes me feel” something, isn’t that really just my reaction to what they say or do? Generally I’m talking about emotion but it is also physical. Our bodies react to threat with physical changes, not to mention the deadly harm people like George Floyd were “made to feel” by the physical force and inability to breathe from being held down under the knee of another person. Yes, others can absolutely “make us feel.”

But, emotionally anyway (though physically in the case of martyrs), it’s not being “made to feel” but rather what I then decide to do with my feelings that changes my experience. Free will, that conundrum in a universe where we are actually so small and powerless, I have come to see as the freedom to manage, to choose how I react. It takes practice to choose how to react. Physically, for example, when I jump into a 76-degree pool (or 68 degrees in the case of our beloved Barton Springs), I have learned over time to embrace the shocking chill as the beginning of a workout that, later, makes me feel so good (after all, I chose to jump into the water in the first place!).

Likewise, I believe we feel in our bodies fear, dread, and oppression—which more specifically feel like fight-or-flight when a guy across the street at night grabs his dick and yells at you and your girlfriend that you are “lesbos” who just “need a big dick to straighten you out.” This type of hand-to-hand combat, as it were, creates an immediacy of danger which makes it hard to control my reaction to the physical and emotional ways he “made me feel.” But with practice—and having lived my life in Georgia and Texas, I’ve had a lot of practice—I can use my own personal “atmosphere,” as Cynthia Bourgeault terms it, to buffer the cruelty aimed directly at me. And, because of the grooves created within me by regular spiritual practices, I’m able, almost in the moment but at least fairly quickly, to find loving comfort and safety inside myself. At least that’s my goal and sometimes I get close. I imagine this must be something like what saints and martyrs have been able to do. With years of practice, and the knowledge that this physical body is in the end merely a host (Star Trek reference!) for their true selves, they can shroud themselves in the Divine love within them to let their physical bodies be given over to their captors, tormentors, murderers. Perhaps this sounds extreme or hyperbolic. But I think Divine love is extreme. I believe we all have the capacity for this level of inner peace if we are willing to risk the cold plunge of regular spiritual practice every day.

The other piece of this, for me anyway, is regular weeding of my garden. On Wednesday, the only thing I could return to throughout the day was pulling weeds out of my yard. I realized, again, how satisfying it is to pull a weed just right so that the entire root comes out. It’s especially satisfying with those tiny hackberry tree sprouts which have surprisingly long roots, way bigger than the above-ground part. I looked up the definition of “weed” to find that, according to the Bureau of Land Management, a weed is “…any plant growing where it’s not wanted. … Legally, a noxious weed is any plant designated by a Federal, State, or county government as injurious to public health, agriculture, recreation, wildlife, or property.” In many ways I guess I’ve been a weed growing in small towns where my kind is not wanted. I think the definition of a weed varies. What may be a weed to me may be something beautiful or edible to someone else. We each can decide. We each can bloom where we are planted, as they say, even if the wind carried you to far-flung places before you were finally planted.

In my process of weeding, random lyrics from songs popped into my head unbidden: “He’s got the whole world in his hands…,” “Have you heard about the lonesome loser, beaten by the queen of hearts every time…,” “the strength to carry on…the hero lies in you….” Other thoughts, recollections, ruminations were more clearly from things I had just read. I wanted to clear my mind of those though, to control not just my feelings and reactions but the recordings of them playing in my head. My insight (duh!) was to control what I consume in the first place. A “social media diet” I’ve heard it called. But I also want to choose with intention the books, Substacks, and magazines I read in order to create from within, to let my light shine. In doing so, and keeping to my daily spiritual practices, I join the vibrations of other unitive spiritual practitioners in being present to this moment, helping metabolize the lower-level energies of cruelty and vengeance into higher level vibrations of peace, love, kindness, and healthy growth.

(Editor’s note: There is language in part of the preceding piece that some may find shocking or vulgar, or both. The language was used to represent the experience being described, which was a shocking and vulgar experience.)

A Roundup of Light

Walter Brueggemann takes us Beyond a Fetal Position.

Roxane Gay tells us everything still has to be okay. 

Cynthia Bourgeault helps us remember to not be afraid.

Simran Jeet Singh encourages us to Challenge the Darkness.

Diana Butler Bass finds David Whyte helpful during a “Midnight in America”.

Elizabeth McCracken gives us her Midmorning Barton Creek swim report.

Carl McColman brings inspiration from Julian of Norwich

Maria Popova shares A Lighthouse for Dark Times.

Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule takes us Down the River. 

And, on Facebook Rebecca Solnit and Barbara Kingsolver remind us that we have a role and that love and truth have been smacked down before.