Day 83 Listen is An Anagram; and, A Purposeful Silence

“On #BlackoutTuesday, artists go quiet to focus attention on protesters’ message” read the headline. Millions of people worldwide are heeding a call for a day of silence on social media to amplify black people’s voices under the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday.

Maybe every Tuesday should be #BlackoutTuesday for a while?

Leave it to the artists to do something simple, clear, and immediate. Always. Always it’s the artists who lead us. If only we could remember that, and look to them instead of the political arena for leadership.

As I read slowly through this morning’s news media, I kept wishing I knew how to make a video for the Internet. Here is my storyboard, if you will:

A black background with white serif lettering reads: LISTEN.
Two words are added: is an
Another word arises: anagram.
A second black background takes the letters of listen and scrambles them to read: SILENT.
The End.

LISTEN
is an
anagram

SILENT

This is something I realized many years ago. It showed up again in my intuitive translation of the Tao Te Ching called Tao for Now. Two ears, one mouth; the ratio matters.

The Editorial Board of The New York Times wrote this morning, “Rather than just condemning or applauding protesters, Americans should listen closely to what they’re demanding.”

Listening requires silence. Ah. A clarification: Genuine listening requires silence.

Facebook employees staged a virtual walk-out to express their dismay at Mark Zuckerberg and the C-Suite’s handling of the Inciter-in-Chief’s violent messaging. “In the post to the internal message board, the dissenting Facebook employee ended his comment with a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the slain civil rights leader. ‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter,’ the quote read.”

The social silence about police brutality and racism has been broken. It is a vital, necessary, overdue breaking of the silence.

Joe Biden, in a virtual speech he delivered on Friday “urged Americans to grapple with the fact that the country’s long history of racism was not history at all, but a ‘deep, open wound.’ The pain is too immense for one community to bear alone. I believe it’s the duty of every American to grapple with it, and to grapple with it now. With our complacency, our silence, we are complicit in perpetuating these cycles of violence.”

I have written before silence fosters violence. It is not a new refrain.

Charles M. Blow once again writes straight-up truth. “American violence is learned violence. It is the American way. White people in America have rioted, slaughtered, massacred and destroyed for centuries, often directing their anger and violence at black people and Native Americans, to take what they had or destroy it, to unleash their rage and assert their superiority, to instill terror, to maintain power.”

I am not calling here for the silence that fosters violence. I am calling for the silence—and make no mistake, I do not mean silencing of protesters in any way—I am calling instead for the silence that fosters listening.

Playwright and filmmaker Melody Cooper is Christian Cooper’s sister. Two days ago she wrote “Chris Cooper Is My Brother. Here’s Why I Posted His Video. We grew up in a family of activists. I wanted everyone to see his calm bravery.”

He was calm. He was brave. He was also instructive.

Ms. Cooper suggests, “If you’re an ally, what can you do? Stand with us. Bear witness. Continue the discussion and support legal action. Refuse to accept racism in your midst, even in small ways—call out a cruel joke or rude behavior. Be brave and challenge it all.

“You can transform your own world through how you teach your children, and how you speak to your neighbors and co-workers. It is up to you, not to a leader nor any single protest or petition. Your everyday commitment is what will start to bring the change you want to see. Start small, step forward and let your action join with others’ to become a rising tide that cannot be stopped.”

A friend wrote to me this morning saying she’d gone through the 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice list and done some of them immediately. She planned to go through it again later, and do more.

I submit that there is a first step, a step that must come before these good and necessary actions, and that is to be, to stand in Purposeful Silence.

Stand in Purposeful Silence and open your heart. Receive the experiences of those who are not you.

Joe Biden called it grappling.

Don’t. Not at first. It’s easy to grapple. In fact, we can grapple as a form of by-pass when we talk too much and listen too little. What he’s really talking about is examination of conscience. We must ask ourselves, all of us must ask ourselves eventually, how have I contributed to this racism? And then we must correct our own thoughts, words, and deeds.

I say, first, be still. Open your heart. Be silent. Then listen. Receive the sadness, the sorrow, the grief, the rage, the horror, the pain. Of now. And of history.

Take this brilliant description by Opinion columnist Ross Douthat, and jettison it. “Trump’s administration is Washington-based performance art for Americans who know the capital primarily as a television backdrop, a festival of lib-owning and deep-state bashing—and as of last night, bizarre tear-gas-and-the-Bible photo ops—that doesn’t even try to master the government it notionally runs. His reeling, staggering style of governance—once blackly comic, now deadly serious and disastrous—reflects not just the incapacity of its leader but also the insularity of his coalition, which doesn’t encompass enough of America’s diversity to claim a real democratic mandate or include enough of the administrative talent that it would need to competently rule.” Jettison it. Slough it off. Wash it out of your mind and heart. This isn’t the America we want. Nor is it an America that can be sustained.

Now listen to receive.

One of the reasons I very much liked the idea of #BlackoutTuesday is it made a lot of us—even the allied righteous white people among whom I count myself—hush. If someone asked me what to do right now as a person who doesn’t experience racism directed at them, that’s what I’d say: Hush.

Hush, Beloved. What is happening in our country is sacred protest based on divine discontent. We must treat it as the spiritual revelation it is.

We do not need to talk. By we here I mean, those who are not having this racist experience. We who are not the targets of microaggressions, we who are principally safe wherever we go, we who do not lose our loved ones to prejudice and brutality. We are the ones who need to hush.

And to stand in Purposeful Silence.

There will be those whose work is in the halls of law-making and justice who will make proposals and counter-proposals, who will convene hearings, who will offer ideas for legislation of police forces all over our country. Let that be their work. If that is you, receive a blessing.

Ours must be to open our hearts and receive through our ears what is happening.

The always-trenchant Jennifer Senior wrote in “What Trump and Toxic Cops Have in Common It’s us versus them,” “Derek Chauvin was by no means the first cop to gratuitously brutalize and lynch an African-American. But he embodied something essential about Trumpism: It’s us versus them. That’s the poison ethos at the heart of police brutality, and it’s the septic core of our 45th president’s philosophy. Neither a toxic cop nor Donald Trump sees himself as a servant of all the people they’ve sworn to protect. They are solely servants of their own. Everyone else is the enemy.”

Opening our hearts to receive the pain of our compatriots in this country, if it is done sincerely, without agenda, without defense, obliterates the label of enemy. Enemy is removed from the menu. It is not possible to have enemies when one feels the pain of those alleged antithetical forces.

Joe Biden, “asked Americans not to ignore their pain, but to use it ‘to compel our nation across this turbulent threshold into the next phase of progress, inclusion, and opportunity.’”

And always, I go back to the artists to lead us.

In 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, Marina Abramović “engaged in an extended performance called, The Artist Is Present. The work was inspired by her belief that stretching the length of a performance beyond expectations serves to alter our perception of time and foster a deeper engagement in the experience. Seated silently at a wooden table across from an empty chair, she waited as people took turns sitting in the chair and locking eyes with her. Over the course of nearly three months, for eight hours a day, she met the gaze of 1,000 strangers, many of whom were moved to tears.

“‘Nobody could imagine…that anybody would take time to sit and just engage in mutual gaze with me,’ Abramović explained. In fact, the chair was always occupied, and there were continuous lines of people waiting to sit in it. “It was [a] complete surprise…this enormous need of humans to actually have contact.’”

Us v. Them robs us of contact, Beloved. It’s agenda-ism at its very worst.

Listen is an anagram for silent.

This essay will be posted tomorrow to honor today’s social media #BlackoutTuesday. I used the image you see above when I sent out the announcement this morning.

I just now got an automated reply from a beloved friend at a music publishing company—artists, of course. It read: “[Our] offices will be closed on June 2 as part of #THESHOWMUSTBEPAUSED. We will be using this moment of silence to reflect on the actions that we can take to effect positive change in our world. We encourage you to do the same.”

Hush. Get silent. Open your heart. Listen. Receive. And then, prepare to be amazed at the changes you will see in this magical place we know as the world.

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com

If you have friends that would benefit by reading my words,
please feel free to forward this missive in its entirety.

If you are in need of support during this time of crisis,
visit here to start the process of working with me.