Values as Mirror

How we meet ourselves through what we hold dear.

~ Join me on December 21 for Dreaming in the Dark, an Equinox expressive writing ritual ~

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Racialization is a value-forming logic that has given shape and form to the robust American capital project and beyond. This value-forming logic is saturated with distortions to land, to body, to creative and life force. Fundamental to this distortion is the strategy of disconnection and the rejection of interdependence.

~ Amber McZeal

What are you committed to doing and becoming? What are the qualities that matter most to you? Not only because someone else told you they were important, but because you feel the truth and significance of them? What shapes your priorities and your view of the world?

Our values are incorporeal mirrors, revealing us to ourselves through what we esteem. What we insist on protecting, and where we allow compromise. They determine who we consider worthy of care, safety, and respect. We express our values, in part, through the names and descriptions we place on each other.

Re-legions and rebellion

Much of our cultural conditioning around values, ethics, and morality has been imposed on us in a religious context. Religion has served as a source of comfort, a teaching tool, and a way to pass on culture. It has also been used as a form of control. In some religious cultures an external idea of the natures of faith and morality are imposed in a way that interferes (enter-fears) with people’s direct relationship with spirit/nature/life.

Religions embedded with oppression tell us we are broken and need to be fixed or saved, and only if we obey the ones telling us there is something wrong with us can we become “good.” We all want to belong, and we are trained to let an intercessor talk to god/the universe/life for us, who will conveniently demand our labor, resources, servitude, and compliance in exchange for that sense of connection.

And these types of religious leaders train people to think anyone who is not of their religion is misguided at best, or evil and unredeemable at worst. It becomes justifiable to harm someone with a different faith, even if the religions seem quite similar from the outside. Followers are recruited into a legion of social crusaders to further the ends of the few people in power. From spices and gold, to land and oil, to cobalt and gas, people have been doing the dirty work of empire under the guise of religious moral superiority for centuries.

Today’s most powerful religion is capitalism. Money has become the connecting agent between people, interfering with how we relate to each other. Worthiness and wealthiness have become synonymous, and the disenfranchised are sinners, having failed to sufficiently worship and receive the beneficence of the profit.

Modern capitalism values exploitation framed in a hierarchy that places some humans over others and all humans over other forms of life. Those closest to the top are expected to value and profit from greed, selfishness, and competitiveness. But to value what is illusory and built upon suffering only sets us all up for more suffering.

This is increasingly evident in the dehumanizing and minimizing way that governments and media outlets speak of the Palestinian people. In a broader context, weaving narratives that a group’s value is less than that of the group in power enables extraction and exploitation while circumventing our natural tendency towards empathy and cooperation. I wrote about news outlets spinning dehumanizing narratives in a previous post, and part of what those narratives attempt to do is influence who we value. Propaganda that villainizes drag queens and trans people and most books has similar ends - use people’s values and fears as a backdoor into controlling them.

We are living in a centuries-long pyramid scheme that perpetually needs more exploitation to keep bolstering up the people at the supposed top. Eventually it will collapse under the weight of its falseness, as we are already beginning to see.

Our personal values are held within a cultural container, and operating outside of that cultural frame is a form of rebellion. Liberation includes discovering our authentic values beyond societal conditioning and paradigms of domination. Liberation is woven of the true nature of our faith and the ways we each find our own doorways to spirit, whatever that means to each of us. Liberation lives when we remember and live the truth that all beings are our relatives and worthy of respect, care, and freedom.

Reclaiming our value(s)

We need values that are aligned with what matters beyond the pattern of theft and individualism. We get to include all of life in our values, remembering that separation is an illusion. We need to listen to our inner voices carefully to hear what is authentically valuable to us.

Like so many aspects of liberation this is a curiosity process, an inquiry practice, requiring that we meet ourselves anew and practice flexibility and wonder in places we have been told were solid and unchanging. Part of discovering self-generated values is asking yourself what you love, what you are committed to, and what feels more important to you than fitting in or being liked.

If some force outside of yourself were not dictating your priorities, how would you spend your time, what would you dream of creating, where and how would you share your resources, and what would you move towards? How would you treat the people who have less access to power and resources if you were not afraid? Are the illusions of comfort and false belonging more important to you than other people’s lives?

This moment, fraught, grief-laden, tumultuous, is a moment for us to redefine our priorities and choose to remember our place in the web. How inextricably linked we are. That we have access to a core integrity beyond fearful lies.

If we focus on what matters to us, we can make more aligned choices when faced with challenging decisions. If we choose to live in alignment with our values, we can turn the tide towards repair, and relearn how to collaborate with life.

We can begin with how we speak of ourselves, each other, and people who have been marginalized or oppressed. Choose the words you use to describe people carefully. Be suspicious of narratives that paint any human as undeserving of dignity and love. Tell new tales to cast healthier spells. Weave all beings into the web of your worth.

Our first storytellers were healers, or perhaps that’s the other way around. They were keepers of lore of leaf and bone, interpreters of stars and surveyors of seasons. They helped us remember who we are through symbols, not to oppress but to connect with the lineage of life ancestral and trans-species.

I want us to remember the numinous, the mysterious, the part of us that still believes in the sanctity of the night sky and honors our miraculous fractal bodies. That we can surrender into a faith that awakens our radical imagination, and empowers us to take values-led actions.

Faith is what helps us keep going, hold possibility, believe in what our hearts long to be true. Values reflect us, and help focus our faculties and steer our actions so we take steps towards bringing those possibilities into reality.

Photo by Pixabay