Rowdy Prisoners

Cages or Keys

“The small man

builds cages for everyone

he knows.

While the sage,

who has to duck his head

when the moon is low,

keeps dropping keys all night long

for the

Beautiful

Rowdy

Prisoners.”

Hafiz (14^th century Sufi poet)

Barbara Brown Taylor read this wonderful poem by Hafiz at Awakening Soul. According to her, critical realizations emerge out of dark times, whether personal or societal. Barbara Brown Taylor said, “God does God's best work in the dark.” We, like the Hebrew people coming out of captivity in Egypt, are traveling through the desert in a zigzag pattern following a “cloud of unknowing.” We have built so many cages and taken so many prisoners that we are captives in our own labyrinths. There is a way out. We simply have to want to find it so badly that we never stop looking.

The cages we've built have signs on them—black and white and brown, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, rich, poor, smart, not smart—an endless list. We have a cage for anyone who is different from us, whether that difference involves race, gender, political leanings, sexual orientation, socioeconomic group, ethnicity—and on and on. We are wired to discriminate based upon the assumption that whatever we are is preferable to whatever “they” are. It's not just human nature, it's animal behavior. It seems to me that we blind ourselves to that reality, or at least, we don't add it into the equation of why things are the way they are. We haven't lost our reptilian brain just because we grew a cerebral cortex—we're still wired to strike at whatever is “not us.”

Overcoming our tribal mentality will not be easy. It takes intentional consciousness. We have to become conscious, first, that we are reacting from that primitive structure, and that the reaction we are having is only one possibility in a gamut of options. We can override our instantaneous instinct to oppose the source of our frustration. We can choose to listen and respond in a way that does not escalate the rancor we feel inside ourselves and in others. It is a choice. We, not "they," have to choose. At the moment, it seems we are choosing to be tribal and oppositional; in other words, we have put our primitive brain in charge. Our options are pretty clear: Do we continue down a path of putting people in cages, or do we make it our business to drop keys?

                                                          In the Spirit,

                                                               Jane