If you have been subscribing to this newsletter for any length of time, you are not unaware of the confrontations that we've had (I've had) with late stage capitalism and its domination thoughtforms, as we've navigated a host of potential collaborations from which we withdrew because the institutions we were considering partnering with tried to exert power over us.
I am passing through my latest brush-up with capitalism and its prerogatives, this time in the form of a stand-off with JP Morgan Chase, which acquired, for pennies on the dollar, our old bank, First Republic, and is attempting unsuccessfully to foreclose on a line of credit we have with them. Tracking myself across the Autonomic Spectrum, my initial response to the foreclosure attempt was fight (F*ck no), which morphed through pragmatism into negotiation with the bankers I have known for years (Can you believe what the expletive-deleted people who acquired you are trying to do? They could not believe it) and alliance-building. We are still at this stage of alliance-building, and while I am optimistic that when they are presented with the opportunity to act reasonably their acquirers will do so, I am also preparing more confrontational strategies should they be required.
While this entire occurrence, over the past couple of days has been within the ordinary orbit of the challenges I've faced running the company and conducting my life over the summer, e.g., re-stabilizing it and our own finances, I have been handling this in a moment when we are finalizing a complex real estate transaction, the purchase of the land we have been stewarding for the last several years, and that I have recently discovered may require a downpayment about a hundred thousand dollars larger than we had initially surmised. Neither of these facts were, in their own right, really that upsetting to me: the silver lining of this summer of existential fight is that my nervous system has become accustomed to fighting– is, as the therapist I recently sat with duly noted– expecting a confrontation behind every door. And although I'm not sure why (there is probably some good cosmic reason) is in fact enjoying certain kinds of confrontation– a good dust-up with affluent entitled white men principal in the category of the kind of confrontations I like.
The reason I sat down to write this is because what did upset me, last night, about an hour before I attempted to go to sleep, was a text message I received from the owner of the land, who I had contacted the day before seeking to sit down with and clarify the points of our negotiation, and who responded graciously but ambiguously, which touched a nerve of uncertainty about the place that I was not prepared to have touched. If you don't know this, I was removed from the place (a tiny rural New Hampshire town) and community that I loved at the age of seven, and spent 38 years, from the time of that occurrence in November of 1982, until September 5, 2020, the day the lease was granted on the land we are stewarding, trying to get back to the forest. (Again, as an aside, I did not fully know I had spent this intervening period of decades attempting to return until the morning the lease was granted, at about 5:30 am, as I was sitting on the land before dawn, and the grief that I had never been able to confront directly about being abducted from the place I love surfaced in plain view, striking me with such force I collapsed to the ground, under the sincere impression that I was going to die).
And so it was not until I had crossed to the far shore of an ocean of loss, and was dragging myself up onto the bank of a new land that I fully grieved what had been taken from me as a child, and perhaps in this there is some universal teaching about the transmutation of trauma. Said slightly differently, it wasn't until I was safe again, in a particular way of having a place I was wildly in love with to attach to, that the loss of the place to which I was primarily attached could fully reveal itself to me. Said again, differently again, the healing of the loss of the place I was taken from was in grieving it fully, which I was constitutionally unable to do until I had found a new place that I was taken to.
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