Microdosing Truth to Power
Spring is really picking up the pace here, friends. It’s not yet at a full gallop, but I’d say we’ve moved beyond a trot into a canter. The grass is greening, flowers are blooming, trees are leafing and blossoming, everything everywhere is pollening, and I am sneezing. Oh, yes... and critters are mating. The other day at the pond, I witnessed an epic rumpus between four geese that I’m 99.99% sure had to do with hormones. Hormones and perhaps a nest. And the day before that, a little red fox and I had a stare-down at dusk.
“The fox condemns the trap, not himself.” [Quote by William Blake; Photo by Sunguk Kim on Unsplash]
This lithe little fox was trotting purposefully across a quiet cemetery path when it spied me. It froze, I froze, and we locked eyes. A few seconds later, it trotted on, then stopped and stared again. It did this several times, eventually disappearing over a slight rise. I thought that was the end of that, but then it looped around. Trot, stop, stare. Trot, stop, stare. Finally, it just plunked itself down on its haunches and drew a bead on me, so I slowly beat a backwards retreat.
This fox and I had an understanding. It wasn’t about to back down or let me out of its sights, and I respected its resolve. I feel you, fox. The vast majority of humans in this cemetery are long gone and six feet under, not strolling about gazing at the delights of twilight.Truth be told, I get it as to why any undomesticated animal might side-eye a non-indigenous human. With little exception, we’ve mostly been a wily bunch of colonizing brutes, backed by the flimsy authority of human supremacism.
Not a fox, and not exactly a side-eye, but the disdain is approximately apropos.
I digress, friends. All the foregoing is to say that no matter what might have been going on for this fox about me and my incursion on its turf, I walked away from the scene with one whopper of a reminder about the power of standing (or sitting) one’s ground. And not a moment too soon, because I’ve been getting ample chances to practice inhabiting this kind of power lately. A lot of this practice has been dealing with the stonewalling of elected officials. And also the simple act of allowing my targeted trans body to be visible in the world.
But what I really want to tell you about all of this is that I got a pointed object lesson in patient perseverance the morning after I communed with the fox. It arrived in my mailbox as an unexpected letter from my least favorite pen pal, The Man. It read, in part:
Friends. I had paid this tax, paid it in full and paid it early. Yet here was The Man, fairly screaming a DEMAND that I pay it again and following it up with what is commonly known as a THREAT. There were other rude bits to this letter that DEMANDED I pay a penalty fee on top of the assessed tax. Sheesh, right? Sheesh with a large side helping of WTF.
Since I’d paid the bill, it could and should have been a simple matter of clearing up what was obviously a mistake, a misunderstanding or a mishap. But somehow the check that I personally slid into the locked drop box outside my town’s municipal building — the very one I’ve used without incident for years —apparently vanished into thin air. So there we were. I had paid, The Man said I hadn’t, and The Man almost always has the last say, with added penalties and interest for emphasis.
Off-gassing governmental gaslighting: marginally cathartic.
Well. I took one look at The Man’s demand and decided it was time to hang up my tap shoes. The ones that, historically, I’ve spontaneously strapped on when I hear that tired old tune known as the demand dance coming out of the organ grinder of authority. That’s right, friends. I knew, sure as I have known anything, that the time had arrived to hang up those shoes, reel my locus of control back inside myself and tune up my vocal chords.
Who knows. Maybe my decision was catalyzed by the extreme overreach of Trump 2.0. Maybe it was fueled by the vitality of spring coursing through my veins. Or maybe it was the the result of years of carefully cultivated self-agency having at last ripened.
Probably it was some of all of this. But in any case, the moment had arrived, and I marched myself over to the town municipal building to have a little chat with The Man’s representative. It went something like this:
Me: I received this demand notice in the mail after having paid my excise tax in full on March 1st. I personally put a check in your drop box, and I’m guessing that it got lost in transit between the box and your office. I’m here to write a replacement check, if you’ll kindly waive the penalty and interest on this bill.
The Man: I’m sorry, we can’t do that.
Me: Why?
The Man: blank stare
Me: head cocked, eyebrow arched
The Man: We don’t have any record of your payment.
Me: I’ve lived here since 2014 and never been delinquent on a tax bill, which is a full decade of precedent that I pay. It’s against that backdrop that you’re penalizing me for a check lost somewhere in your chain of custody. Is that right?
The Man: blank stare, leaves the counter to discuss with superior
Me: silently reciting serenity prayer
The Man: I can waive the fee, but not the $.51 in interest.
The eyeroll of acquiescence
Despite The Man having had the final word, I counted this as a win. The Man backed down, and the final word cost me a measly $.51. Yet the increase to my self-respect, self-trust and overall self-regard was 100% priceless.
Another part of the win for me was the illumination of some much grander-scale questions:
How do we hang onto ourselves when standing our ground puts us at odds with dominant authority or even the culture at large?
Or when complying with demands requires us to abandon our own sense of truth and integrity?
What about when *not* complying results in punishment, penalty, or some version of abandonment?
Well, of course there is no single pat answer here. If anything, there are probably limitless options and examples throughout history as to how, for better or worse, we might navigate what boils down to this: the struggle between love and fear1.
Yet even in the vast expanse of options and models of how we might respond or react to this struggle, one option stands out to me as singular. Why? Because when I feel it in, peace settles over my body. A big blue sky peace (dragon flies possible, but not guaranteed), balanced by a sense of spacious grounding.
“Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.” [Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson; Photo by Amy Baugess on Unsplash]
This option, friends, is to do the loving thing — that is to say, the thing that feels most aligned with our own values, our own inherent sense of “true” and “right.” And, (and this is a crucial and) to do that thing simply because it is organically and essentially aligned for us. Not because we’re strategically trying to exact or extract some longed-for outcome.
This is, dare I say (and yes, I dare do), an exquisitely radical choice, friends. It requires knowing ourselves and trusting that knowing. It also calls on us to continue acting from the love place, because we will, in all likelihood, feel some amount of discomfort when other people abandon us or react negatively to our choice. And when that happens, love will be the only thing that enables us to stand our ground for very long at all.
Love’s roots are deep and sturdy. Fear’s roots are shallow and fragile.
Loving myself in this way has meant sitting with the intense discomfort of feelings like loneliness and grief. Yet this kind of discomfort is nothing like the ache of having abandoned myself, which compounds over time like interest on a capricious penalty.
And there’s something more than our own individual comfort or discomfort at stake here. There’s a collective impact. When we each choose to act in alignment with our essential integrity, instead of bowing to the insatiable demands of perceived authority, we stop enabling dysfunctional dynamics and systems across the board. We start a quiet revolution, one little mundane moment at a time.
You may have caught some echoes from last week’s post in all of this. You’re not wrong. The thing is, I keep getting similar messages from the Cosmos, choreographed slightly different each time. This week’s message, co-sponsored by a fox and The Man, was to stand. Not against anyone else per se, but with and for ourselves. The good news is that standing doesn’t have to mean grandstanding. It can mean taking small but mighty steps. Microdosing truth to power, then standing rooted in that truth.
“Do not be silent; there is no limit to the power that may be released through you.” [Quote by Howard Thurman; Photo by Andre Alexander on Unsplash]
1 I’m using “love” and “fear” here as umbrella terms that encompass myriad of subtle nuances. For example, “love” might include things like truth, beauty, justice, equality, respect, belonging, and trust. And fear, well…fear might include things like scarcity, greed, selfishness, doubt, distrust, and what I’ll call the sticky residue of existential trauma.
