I’ve loosely been following the Writers Guild of America strike, which has now been joined by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. I feel like I’m watching a dystopian movie but here’s the kicker, it’s all really happening.
The CEO of Disney, Bob Iger, said during an interview at the Sun Valley annual conference, which has been touted as a “summer camp for billionaires,” that he thinks those on strike are “unrealistic.”
“There’s a level of expectation that they have, that is just not realistic,” he told CNBC. “And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.” He added that while he respects the right of the unions to “get as much as they possibly can in compensation for their people,” they must “be realistic about the business environment, and what this business can deliver.”
Maybe Bob Iger should be realistic. Photo by Blogging Guide on Unsplash
How about some context? Iger recently took over again at Disney and he has the potential to earn up to $27 million in 2023, his first full year as returned CEO. Let’s break that down a bit further. He is paid $74,175 per day whereas Hollywood writers earn on average $69,510 a year. Abigail Disney, a documentary producer who is also the daughter of Roy E. Disney said in a tweet, “You can only call your workers and partners ‘unrealistic’ if you cannot see beyond the confines of the very narrow and morally bankrupt business ideology that has set your company on this long track toward exploitation and injustice.”
Amen! Actor Sean Gunn had this to say about Iger’s comments: “I think when Bob Iger talks about, ‘What a shame it is,’ he needs to remember that in the 1980s, CEOs like him made 30 times more than what the lowest worker was making. Now Bob Iger makes 400 times what his lowest worker is and I think that’s a f***ing shame, Bob. Maybe you should take a look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, ‘Why is that?’ and not only why is that, is it okay? Is it morally okay? Is it ethically okay that you make much more than your lowest worker?”
Apparently, we as a society think it is. Iger isn’t the only CEO to make hundreds of times more than the lowest-paid worker. An article in the Guardian from a year ago found that in the top 300 U.S. companies, the wage gap is 670 to 1. CEOs are making an average of $10.6 million while the median worker is getting $23,968.
I can’t really conceptualize a million because it just sounds like a really big number. To break it down into something more understandable, 1 million seconds is approximately 11 days. How much do you think 1 billion seconds is? It’s more than 31 years. Years. Billionaires can’t possibly spend all the money they have – and you can try using the calculator https://neal.fun/spend/. Billionaires can purchase multiple mansions, make multiple movies, buy multiple yachts, purchase the Mona Lisa, and still have a lot of money left over. A LOT.
We don’t have to be so inequal. Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash
No one person should have that much wealth and that’s why we need a maximum wage. We have a minimum wage, why don’t we have a maximum on how much one person can earn? I know, I know, everyone in the U.S. thinks they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires so fine, put the cap at a million dollars and make sure the lowest-paid worker is earning more too. In cooperative business models, the wage gap is much smaller. The highest-paid executive at Mondragon Corporation makes six times that of its lowest-paid employee.
Lest you think this is some kind of mom-and-pop operation, Mondragon employs around 80,000 people and its businesses include schools, a large grocery chain, a catering company, 14 technology R&D centers, and a McKinsey-like consulting firm. In 2021, the network brought in more than 11 billion euros in revenue.
You can succeed in business while also being more equitable and Mondragon is an example of that. To bring it back to the writers’ and actors’ strike, what I fear will happen is the studio execs will raise prices for consumers in order to keep lining their greedy pockets. But what I would like to happen is for our country’s artists to say, “No, Bob, you don’t get to make 400 times more than I do,” and then force a maximum wage on him. Stranger things can happen. This is Hollywood we’re talking about after all.
I dream of a world where there’s a cap on wealth. A world where one person isn’t allowed to accumulate billions while others must work multiple jobs just to survive. A world where the highest-paid worker makes no more than 10 times the lowest-paid one. A world where we remember there’s enough for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
Summer is a season that elicits nostalgia like none other for me. I long to recapture the lazy, sun-soaked days of my childhood when time stretched like Silly Putty. I want the carefree aesthetic portrayed in media – beach days, fireflies, and ice cream. In my mind, everything was great way back when. Except…it wasn’t.
It’s a quirk of the brain that we misremember the past and downplay negative events. We drop the bad stuff – sunburns, rain, fights with loved ones – and only remember the highlights. When we do remember the bad stuff, we reconstruct it to make whatever happened more enjoyable and entertaining. The time you broke your toe while hiking becomes more exaggerated, more colorful. It’s a yarn you trot out at parties to elicit laughter and pity. But there’s still some wistfulness about the past.
Nostalgia creates a warped view of things. Much like a view-master! Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash
Researchers call this “rosy retrospection” and we do this not only in our personal lives but also when we fantasize about how society was better “back then.” In a recent poll, six out of every 10 Americans said that “life for people like them is worse today than it was 50 years ago.” But as University of Calgary instructor Paul Fairie demonstrates in his Twitter thread, “A Brief History of Things Were Better 50 Years Ago,” we’ve been saying this since 1890!
To be clear, all humans do this and have always done this because it’s how our brains work. It’s not a relatively recent development dating back to 1890. We all fall into the nostalgia trap but the important thing to remember is it’s not true. There is no idyllic utopia in the past. Things were not better back then. Some of the bigger societal things like climate change and wealth inequality, yes, they were better years ago, but our day-to-day lives were not.
I put this to the test by rereading some of my journals and the time periods I thought were great were anything but. I was insecure or heartbroken or uncomfortable or not sleeping through the night. I was stuck or broke or irritated. In short, I was experiencing the entire range of human emotions because that’s what it means to be alive. There is always something stressful or bothersome happening just as there is always something fun or joyful happening.
A time when everything is perfect doesn’t exist except in snippets. We have perfect moments, hours. If we’re lucky, perfection stretches to days but never months or years. It’s just not possible because the nature of life is to change and move. It’s why my spiritual teacher says, “Here in the universe, nothing is stationary, nothing is fixed. Everything moves; that’s why this universe is called jagat. Movement is its dharma; movement is its innate characteristic.”
The best we can do then is feel gratitude for the perfect moments life grants us and keep our eyes trained ahead, not behind. One more quote from my spiritual teacher: “You are to look ahead, you are to look forward. If you look back, if you look behind, you are wasting your valuable time.” And time, as we all know, is precious.
I dream of a world where we remember that rosy retrospection is real and it’s likely we’re misremembering the past. A world where we understand things weren’t better in our personal lives five years ago or 50 years ago or 500 years ago. A world where we remember to keep our eyes trained ahead in order to avoid falling into the nostalgia trap.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
I, like many, have a lot of feelings about the smattering of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions. And then there are the bills targeting the LGBTQIA+ community. The trend I’m noticing is more divisiveness, more separation, and more hate, frankly. Is this what human beings are destined for? Are we doomed to splinter off into smaller and smaller groups and engage in constant “us versus them” culture wars?
Maybe yes, maybe no but according to neuroscience, our brains are wired for connection and cooperation. Neuroscientist Matthew D. Lieberman, director of UCLA’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab wrote a book called Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect. He says, “To the extent that we can characterize evolution as designing our modern brains, this is what our brains were wired for: reaching out to and interacting with others. These are design features, not flaws. These social adaptations are central to making us the most successful species on earth.”
There can be unity among diversity. Photo by Georg Eiermann on Unsplash
There’s also a study out of Emory University led by Gregory Berns who learned that when pairs of volunteers cooperated with one another, the reward circuits of the brain were activated. These are the same regions that are activated by drugs. The activation happened only when paired with a human – when the study participants were paired with a computer, they didn’t have the same response.
Volunteers were hooked up to an fMRI scanner and invited to play the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game. Each volunteer pressed a button to indicate when they were ready to play, and then each simultaneously pushed another button to indicate if they wished to cooperate with, or betray, the other player.
The most common outcome was volunteers mutually cooperated with one another. Berns suggests people are hard-wired to cooperate because the brain associates cooperation with reward. Others are quick to point out that correlation is not causation but I’m inclined to agree with Berns because regardless of whether it’s due to our brains or something else, we want to connect with other people. We are wired for oneness.
What so often gets in the way is exactly what we’re seeing now: socio-sentiment. Socio-sentiment means loyalty to a particular social group to the exclusion of other groups. You already know what a world dominated by socio-sentiment looks like – we’re living in it. What’s the solution?
My spiritual teacher says, “To liberate society from this unbearable situation, consciousness will have to be aroused among the people; their eyes will have to be opened by knowledge. Let them understand the what’s, the why’s, and the where’s. Thus, study is essential, very essential.”
In other words, biologically, we want to connect with others, we’re made for connection, and what’s getting in the way is cultural conditioning that says this group is good and this group is bad. We all do this. The challenge then is to see every person as a human being, not a label. Personally, I do this by practicing empathy and guessing what someone else is feeling and needing. And when I do, I feel even more connected. It’s almost as if my brain is wired for oneness and spurring me on.
I dream of a world where we promote unity instead of division. A world where we recognize we are all humans with the same feelings and needs. A world where we stop propagating socio-sentiment and instead recognize we’re all in the same group. A world where we remember we are wired for oneness.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
The mind is a powerful thing. I’m pretty sure every spiritual tradition touches on this using different phrases such as, “magnifying mind,” “as you think, so you become,” “what you focus on grows,” etc. The question for me then is what am I focused on? Am I keeping my mind trained on greed, envy, cruelty, anxiety, fear, or selfishness? Or am I turning toward higher ideals such as love, generosity, and communion?
What’s interesting about the mind is that it’s the “cause of all our sorrows and predicaments, and it is the cause of our supreme bliss,” according to my spiritual teacher. “It is the cause of bondage, and it is the cause of liberation,” he adds. The mind is capable of both bondage and liberation and it’s up to us to direct our minds toward freedom. He has a beautiful metaphor for this and says the mind is a tat́asthá shakti.
What are you focused on? Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash
Tat́a is the line where water touches land. If you move toward the water, the next moment you’ll be underwater. But if you move upward, you’ll reach dry land. The mind is like that — if it moves upward, it will be transmuted into spirit. If it moves downward, it will be transmuted into matter.
I think it’s pretty clear what we as a society focus on, where our minds are at. Take what happened recently in our oceans. When several extremely wealthy people went missing to view the remains of the Titanic, we exhausted numerous hours and resources searching for them. There was near-constant media coverage and updates. However, when a boat sank near Greece with 700 refugees onboard, we didn’t expend nearly the same number of resources or grant the same amount of media coverage.
Keep in mind, the International Organization for Migration called it one of the worst sea tragedies in the last decade. So, you know, a big deal and certainly worth covering extensively. Many people, including Barack Obama, pointed out the discrepancy so it’s not as if no one cared about the refugees but repeatedly, we’ve shown there’s a difference between lip service and action.
Many Republicans, and some Democrats, repeatedly offer “thoughts and prayers” after mass shootings but don’t actually enact change because it benefits them financially not to. They care more about lining their wallets than saving lives. I could keep going with examples but I won’t because I made my point: our society’s collective mind is moving toward the water, so to speak. It’s focused on material goods and worships at the altar of materialism. However, I know it’s not beneficial for me to focus on negativity and tout doom and gloom so I won’t. Instead, I’ll say there are pockets all over the world where people are focused on “land,” they are training their minds toward spirituality, and pretty soon, we’ll reach a tipping point.
I’ll quote my spiritual teacher again who says, “[H]uman beings should always be optimistic. The cimmerian darkness cannot retard your progress, cannot cover the light of the human heart. The spirit of your heart must move on and on against obstacles. Kick away your obstacles like pebbles from your feet – you are stronger than your obstacles.”
I dream of a world where we remember our minds are powerful and we focus them accordingly. A world where we understand the mind can either move toward bondage or liberation and the choice is ours. A world where we each focus on higher ideals and bring a better world into being.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
We humans like simplicity. We want an easy-to-tell story and we want it to be logical. But the thing is, real life is rarely like that. Real life is complicated and hard to turn into a soundbite, no matter how much we try. For instance, the common explanation for Juneteenth is it’s a day to celebrate when slaves learned they were free. However, that’s whitewashing the truth.
Robin Washington reminds us in Forward.com the tale we’ve been told isn’t accurate. The story goes like this: Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, to inform enslaved African Americans they were free. As if they didn’t already know. However, historian Gregory P. Downs has firsthand accounts from people demonstrating they did know. Galveston’s Blacks knew they were free and so did their slaveholders, who nonetheless kept them in bondage using brute force.
That means General Gordon Granger didn’t read off from a scroll and let slaves know they were liberated. No, Granger and his soldiers let the slaveholders know the slaves were liberated – at the barrel of a gun. They used force to say, “Let these people go.” Not only that, June 19, 1865, isn’t when all slaves were officially freed. In October of that year, white Texans in some regions still claimed and controlled slaves as property, according to Downs.
The truth matters even when it’s bruised and battered. Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash
Why does the true account of Juneteenth matter? Because the sanitized version doesn’t acknowledge how people actually behaved and continue to behave. The truth matters because without it we can’t do anything to change it. In 12-step communities, we say the first part of overcoming an addiction requires awareness of the addiction. Truth is awareness and truth ultimately leads to liberation.
As much as people like to say we live in a “post-truth” world, I don’t think we do. I think we live in a world where we want to have masks and create neat and tidy narratives but the truth always comes out. In Sanskrit, the unchangeable entity is Sat. The external manifestation of Sat is satya, or benevolent truthfulness. My spiritual teacher said, “Only satya or truth triumphs and not falsehood. Whenever there is a clash between truth and untruth, truth’s victory is inevitable. … Untruth, being a moving phenomenon, may attain a temporary victory on its march, but never a permanent one. … Falsehood does not win because it is relative, it is ever-changing.”
Sticking to the truth means a victory in the long run. It means liberation in every sense of the word for everyone, no matter the color of their skin, immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, or anything else. The truth is more stable than a lie. And the truth is worth sticking to, even if it’s messy and uncomfortable.
I dream of a world where we value truthfulness. A world where we remember as much as many would like to say the truth doesn’t matter, it does. A world where we understand that truth always triumphs in the end. A world where we stick to the truth because the truth means freedom, for ourselves and others.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
With flowers bursting into bloom seemingly overnight, it seemed fitting to recycle this post from June 2018. Enjoy.
If you read my blog regularly, you know that patience is not my strong suit. I want things to happen quickly like a thunderstorm – swift and noticeable. Instead, things happen like a seed planted in soil – slow and subtle.
Here’s a true story: In January, I planted California poppy seeds. In March, everyone else’s poppies started to bloom. Mine did not. I checked my poppies frequently, searching for signs of buds. Each day I stared at verdant green leaves, but no hints of orange. Finally, in about mid-May, the first bud appeared, and then suddenly, a flower. It thrilled me to see orange after so many months of waiting. I beamed from ear to ear and pride swelled within me. But note, it took months, MONTHS, for my poppies to catch up to everyone else’s.
Right now, I feel like those poppies, behind the times. Many of my friends are progressing in their lives. They’re buying houses, getting married, having babies. Things are not perfect – I am privy to their challenges as well as triumphs – but big milestones are happening in their lives. The same is not true for me. Instead, I am a poppy plant with no hint of a bud.
A part of me thinks something is wrong that I’m not cycling with my peers. I’m not blooming while they are. However, I’m reminded of what my spiritual teacher said regarding movement. Movement is systaltic, like a heartbeat. Do you know how a heart pumps blood? I learned this ages ago in AP Bio. A heart is like a syringe – it fills up with blood, pauses at fullness, and then pushes all the blood out. In all of life, we experience this cycle. It’s the natural order of things to expand, pause, and contract.
I think I’m still in the expanding phase. I haven’t reached fullness yet. I’m still pulling nutrients from the soil. When I look at those around me, it’s hard not to compare myself with them. I know, I know, comparison is the thief of joy. I know compare usually leads to despair. I know I’m not doing myself any favors by comparing my life with anyone else’s, yet, I’m doing it anyway.
Instagram makes it hard not to think everyone else’s life is so much cooler than mine. I’m envious of what they have. But when I think about my poppies, when I think about life being systaltic, I feel a smidge better because I’m reminded I am in my own cycle. It may take longer for things to bloom, but that doesn’t mean they won’t.
I dream of a world where we remember we each have our own cycles. A world where we realize sometimes things happen quickly and sometimes things happen slowly. A world where we realize there’s not much we can do about timing other than to take the required action and let go of the rest. A world where after waiting and waiting, then there’s a bloom.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
I’ve lived in my apartment for eight years so I’m familiar with what’s usual and unusual. On Saturday, something strange happened. I walked into my bedroom and a giant beetle crawled on the outside of my window. I’m on the second floor, not next to trees, kudzu, or anything nature-y that would warrant a giant beetle crawling on my window but crawling it did.
As I watched this beetle, it occurred to me this creature was likely completely unaware of my presence because the windows are slightly tinted. Yet, inches away I stood, observing. This beetle reminded me that the way I watched it is the way my loving higher power always watches me and guides me, according to my spiritual tradition.
It’s easy for me to forget this concept, and sometimes believe it, especially when life doesn’t go how I want it to. When I don’t get my way, I’m convinced my higher power doesn’t care at all but that’s not true. Sometimes I need to wait and then I’ll understand why things unfolded the way they did. For instance, earlier this week, a client asked me if I was interested in a rush writing job. I said yes but then they gave it to another writer who responded quicker than I did. I was upset because I need the money, like really need the money. Like, I’m-having-to-use-savings-to-pay-rent need the money.
This is the beetle in question, in case you were wondering. Photo by Me.
When I didn’t get the job, my first thought was, “How could you do this to me, higher power? You know how broke I am and you’re going to dangle this carrot and then snatch it away? Really? Really? That’s so mean.” I kept fuming, not being in faith, and the day I didn’t get the rush job, as well as the day after, and the day after that, I was so low energy I struggled to make dinner, wash my dishes, and do other grownup things.
It’s not because I was depressed about the money situation. It’s because I’m a spoonie so this happens to me from time to time. Instead of having energy reserves, when I’m out of energy, I’m out and cease functioning. If I received that rush job, would I have been able to finish it? Would I have felt even worse and pushed my body to do something it literally could not do? Probably. In other words, this was an instance of my higher power doing for me what I could not do for myself. Higher power said “no” for me because I wouldn’t have said “no” given the chance.
My spiritual teacher says, “The Macro-psychic Entity [aka, Higher Power, God, the Divine Beloved] is omniscient … There is no special endeavor, and no necessity for special effort, to know anything because all things are within [It] and all are within [Its] ectoplasmic dispersion …. Everything is [Its] internal mental projection, intra-psychic projection. That is why [It] knows everything and will always know everything.”
The Divine Beloved knows everything and will always know everything. That means this force understands when it’s in my best interest to work versus rest. This entity knows what the future holds for me before I even have an inkling of it. This entity is always there, always watching over me as if I’m a beetle crawling on Its window.
I dream of a world where we remember we are always being watched over by benevolent beings. A world where we recognize the Divine Beloved is omniscient, which means It knows all and sees all. A world where we trust even if we don’t understand why something is happening, there is likely a good reason for it and if we wait, we may learn the answer.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
An annual sow thistle “volunteered” to grow in one of my pots and I let it. I nurtured the pseudo-dandelion and it was thriving for a while. The bright yellow flowers blossomed in abundance. Green leaves unfurled and stretched toward the sun. And then the plant started to die, for whatever reason. I’ve deadheaded the blossoms, removed the brown leaves, and continued to water it according to the guidance of my plant app. But the plant is still dying.
Some people would say, “It’s a weed. Why even bother? Just let it die,” but I have trouble with that. As I’ve written about before, it’s hard for me to let things go. Here’s a perfect example. For years, plural, I conducted a group meditation where oftentimes I was the only attendee. I made a salad, packed up plates and utensils, and walked 20 minutes up a hill to a yoga studio hoping someone else would show up. Sometimes they did but many times they didn’t. On the times they didn’t, instead of turning around and heading home, I continued singing, chanting, and meditating as usual.
Death also has its place. Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash
I kept trying new things, new ways of encouragement, new schedules, and even launching a Meetup group, but they all failed. Whereas some people have the story, “I meditated alone for six months, and then people started turning up,” my story is, “I meditated alone for three years, and then Covid happened and I tried meditating in the park and online with local people before giving up and doing that with people who live far away instead.”
In other words, even the first year of the pandemic didn’t deter me and frankly, it was only the allure of meditating with 20 people, albeit online, that was appealing enough that I was willing to give up trying to make a local group meditation happen. One of my life’s lessons isn’t perseverance, it’s knowing when to quit.
These days, I’m learning to quit old ways of thinking and being. The ground beneath me feels shaky as if I’m walking on the beach and the sand is shifting beneath my feet. I don’t know what the heck is going on and I’d like to go back to the way things were. I want to keep watering my metaphorical sow thistle and revive it but the message I’m getting is, “Let it die.”
Leaving behind the familiar is extremely difficult, especially when it used to work. A part of me says, “Wait, I don’t understand! It was working! Why can’t it work again??” but just like with the sow thistle, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you do everything right, you haven’t changed your behavior at all, but the circumstances have. The outside world is different and that means you have to change too.
My spiritual teacher says, “Here in the universe, nothing is stationary, nothing is fixed. Everything moves; that’s why this universe is called jagat. Movement is its dharma; movement is its innate characteristic.”
I wish the universe didn’t keep moving, but it does, and that means I have to move with it. That means I have to let things die even when I really, really don’t want to.
I dream of a world where we understand nothing is static, stationary, or stale. A world where we understand this universe of ours is constantly moving and that means we must move too. A world where we recognize as painful as it may be, it’s important for us to let things die.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
I’m currently in Washington, D.C. visiting friends and it feels surreal. I went to university here and am visiting my old stomping grounds. I half expect to run into my younger self on the street because the memories are so visceral. The ghost of young me is present in a way she hasn’t been on previous trips. Maybe it’s because my college friends and I are approaching 20 years of friendship, or because they all have kids of their own and I’m recognizing how much things have changed. Whatever it is, I’m acutely aware of something my spiritual teacher says.
“A 5-year-old child is transformed in due course into a 15-year-old boy,” he said. “In 10 years, the child becomes the boy. Thereafter, you will never be able to find the body of the 5-year-old child. So the child’s body has certainly died.” He then mentions the boy growing into a man, then hitting middle age, then old age, until he finally dies and says, “The rest of the changes we do not call death; but in fact, all the changes qualify as death.”
We don’t recognize them as such but all the changes we go through are a sort of death. We can’t find the people we used to be except in memory and that’s what I’m getting in touch with on this trip. I’m not the person I was and neither are my friends, but we all remember each other when we were 18. We tell stories about our past selves, the shenanigans we got up to, how we met, who dated whom, and what happened when.
It’s fun to reminisce but it truly feels like we’re talking about people that are dead, just like my spiritual teacher says. None of us are the same as we were. A part of me wants to go back in time to those college days when my friends lived within walking distance. I want to travel in a pack to coffee shops and restaurants, where we took over large tables and other patrons gave us the side eye for being so animated. These days my friends don’t all live within walking distance. And when we travel in a pack it’s because there are multiple children in tow, not because we’re a group of 10 going out for dinner.
To quote my spiritual teacher again, “This expressed universe is nothing but a collection of temporary entities which are undergoing constant metamorphosis according to the sweet will of nature.” We are all temporary entities and we are all constantly changing. Nothing stays the same. Nothing. I have some sadness about that and at the same time as I wind down this trip, I’m enjoying my stay, remembering who I was and how I felt. I’m appreciating that I do have 20 years of friendship under my belt and for a short time at least, I can say hello to 18-year-old Rebekah.
I dream of a world where we recognize we are all temporary entities undergoing constant change. A world where we understand that as we age, our past selves no longer exist. A world where we remember who we used to be and take the time to grieve for those small deaths while also appreciating who we are now.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
I learned or relearned something recently about mothers and grandmothers. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries when she’s a four-month-old fetus, which means we spend approximately five months in our grandmother’s womb. It also means our grandmother was formed in the womb of her grandmother.
As Layne Redmond says, “We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.”
That’s pretty cool when you think about it. Because of how eggs are formed, there’s a chain that stretches far, far back, and connects us to our ancestors in a very real way. We have shared DNA and inherit traits such as eye color and height but we are also connected through the act of being there with them in the womb.
Our grandmothers carried us and now we carry them. Photo by Anton Luzhkovsky on Unsplash
As someone who didn’t know either of her grandmothers very well, this brings me comfort. I may not be able to tell a story about baking cookies with my maternal grandmother or her surprising me with a locket when I graduated from high school, but I am still connected to her. I am linked to her as I was in her womb receiving imprints, vibrations, and memories from the very beginning of my life. That may sound strange. How can an egg receive imprints and memories? But that’s exactly what epigenetics is.
Epigenetics is the study of how behaviors and an environment can change how genes work. Epigenetics change how your body reads a DNA sequence. For instance, rat studies demonstrated that exposure to THC (the active compound in cannabis) during adolescence can prime future offspring to display signs of predisposition to heroin addiction. In a human example, studies of humans whose ancestors survived periods of starvation in Sweden and the Netherlands suggest the effects of famine on epigenetics and health can pass through at least three generations. Nutrient deprivation in a recent ancestor seems to prime the body for diabetes and cardiovascular problems.
We like to pretend we live in a vacuum and are solely responsible for our lives or go to the other extreme and say everything is genetic. Neither is true – we are responsible for our lives and the choices we make affect our genes and the genes of our descendants, for better or worse. No one is perfect and I’m not interested in shaming anyone. Instead, on this Mother’s Day, I’m honoring not only my own mother but her mother and her mother and her mother and so on all the way back. I am connected to them and they are connected to me.
I am grateful for my ancestors, for the traits and skills they passed down, and as a descendant, I’m saying, “Thank you. I see you. I appreciate you. You’re not forgotten even if I don’t know your name. I carry you with me just as you carried me.” May we all be able to say that about our ancestors and our descendants, if we have any. And may we be able to say “Happy Mother’s Day” to someone in our family even if it’s not to our own mother directly.
I dream of a world where we understand just how connected we are. A world where we remember that we were with our grandmothers from the very beginning of life just as they were with theirs. A world where we understand there is a chain linking us all the way back to the first mother.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.