Radical Honesty

What do YOU stand for?

I just returned last night from a month of adventurous travels, and I’m afraid this post will need to be brief, as I am just landing. So I thought I would attempt to share some of what I am still integrating from my travels. I had the unique opportunity to spend a week working with a group in Tennessee who are co-creating a model community and Trade School (for teaching and sharing practical life-skills), centered around healthy hemp homes, growing their own food, and even creating some of their own economy. They have water security, with many natural springs, and they are working toward energy and food security. They are responding to the acute insecurities in the world today, and harnessing their energy for a positive new way forward.

I am so impressed by the beauty of their courageous, comprehensive vision, the quality of the people involved, the natural home-building, and the serenity of the spectacular mountainous rural land they have acquired for this ambitious project. I have not enjoyed working so hard cooperatively, or laughing so freely and spontaneously, in a long time. This is my freedom tribe, in so many ways! However, I was struck also by the fact that most of them view animal farming as a necessary component of sustainable, independent living. That was a discordant piece, for me. This project is strongly about protecting sovereignty (which I think is great!), and I would love to see that to include sovereignty for all beings. I know that we can get our nutritional needs met in a plant-based diet which causes minimal harm, and even in a cooler climate that can be accomplished with quality hoop-houses (which they will be using).

On the long drive home to Florida, I thought about how we each take a stand for something (whether we consciously know it or not). I thought about how we all have blind spots, even those of us who are critical-thinkers, and who strongly and purposefully choose what we stand for. And I considered how our blind spots make virtually all of us inadvertently hypocritical. I find it important to notice what I stand for, both intentionally and unintentionally - for example, I might intentionally stand for natural health, but then I frequently use a cell phone everyday - so I also stand for flexibility around living in our modern society. I suppose that flexibility is also quite intentional, so an example of unintentional standing might be the community in Tennessee, which stands for sovereignty and freedom, while dominating over other mammals. Perhaps this is an intentional separation, or perhaps it is cognitive dissonance.

My real point is, can we have the courage to practice radical honesty with ourselves and others, and openly own our hypocrisies? Can we do this with love and compassion, forgiveness, leniency, and where appropriate even a sense of humor? And in this spirit of openness and candor, can we help each other to discover the places where it matters most to stand clearly, firmly, and responsibly? And can we simultaneously grow to tolerate the fact that we will not all arrive at the same conclusions about what matters most?

To paraphrase and elaborate on a famous quote - a sign of an intelligent mind is one that can entertain opposing ideas without freaking out. In other words, can you expose yourself to different and perhaps conflicting viewpoints, and consider them all without feeling threatened or needing to ‘win’ a discussion?

Ideally, we have choice around what communities we live in and interact with most intimately, but ultimately we all have to get along in the bigger society. As far as I can tell, the only chance we have of co-creating a world in which we ALL enjoy the best opportunity for health, freedom, and well-being, is for us each to practice radical self-honesty, to share this practice with others, and to cultivate a mind with the intelligence to hold space for opposing ideas to co-exist.