Dear Prea,
One of the joys of expecting a baby is that we get a chance to organize our lives, much in the same way we are doing to our closets and our house right now. Part of that organization is physical, something they call nesting. We’ve been organizers since we were younger of course, but nesting feels different. We are not only cleaning house, we are also preparing to add a third person to the house! But beyond the physical organization, it is a chance for us to organize ourselves psychologically and spiritually too: what are our values and priorities, our religious commitments, our communities, our emotional baggages? It is a time to lighten our load, reorganize, repack, and prepare for the future.
On that note, I’ve been thinking about our spiritual transformation over the years. Well, my transformation, your witnessing and informing of that transformation, and your unending patience with me as I worked through a lifetime of conditioning… heh heh. Nevertheless, we’ve grown in our own way together these last few years, and while we can both agree that our “Hinduness” is no longer a priority, it begs the question to think deeply about what the values are that we might build our own religious practice on. This letter is the start of my spiritual nesting process. Please add or subtract anything you like!
My brother recently asked me, when I shared these values with them, why it was important to “codify” our personal religion. It was a fair question – Won’t it then be susceptible to what all religious practice succumbs to? That is, won’t it stagnate and lose meaning in favor of ritual? I told them that this isn’t a “codification” as much as it is a reckoning, which means that it is open to change and growth and adaptation. But the purpose in identifying these values seems to me to be that we can then be intentional about our practice. Rather than have our values be abstract, and therefore impractical, if we know what they are, we can start to develop our own practice around them and have that practice be meaningful to us. Perhaps we can even encourage future generations to think of and develop their own set of values on which to base their spiritual practices.
So what are these values? Below I list what I have observed us place value in; things that inspire us, things that we are attracted to, things we feel are important:
- We value each other. I think we both acknowledge that this relationship is sacred. It took such a long time and so much individual hard work to get to this point that it is on our “critical highest priority” list. I don’t think I need to explain this one more.
- We value family. This is another way of saying that we value community. Family has always been a solid community for us, but importantly, we understand that we do not exist as disconnected individuals just wandering in our own boat on this vast ocean of life. Instead, we exist as an interconnected web of interdependent relationships that sustain and nourish us. Developing these relationships is such an important part of our own growth as people. In Adrienne Marie Brown’s book Emergent Strategy, she emphasizes “critical connections over critical mass”, which means that it is not the number of individual elements, but the depth of relationships that determine the strength of a system. For our system to be strong, therefore, we must prioritize deepening our community. It’s not about having 100 friends, but about having deep friendships and relationships.
- We value honoring our ancestors. It matters to us that we remember where we came from and know what our ancestors did and went through for us to be here today. When we honor our ancestors, we not only connect with our past, but we also are imbued with gratitude for their sacrifices that allowed us to have the lives we have today (which includes simply being alive). It has a philosophical profoundness as well to think that there is an unbroken lineage of reproduction tracing back from us in the present day all the way back to the first life forms on earth — there could never have been a break in the line, otherwise we wouldn’t be here! Thinking about these things deepens our relationship to ourselves, each other, and the environment.
- We value kindness. I’ve talked about kindness in a previous post (in my first letter to baby!), so I won’t expand on this too much now. But we know what this means and why we value it. It certainly helps to deepen our relationships, as in number 2.
- We value justice. We want to prioritize and center the human being in our spirituality. I have been through the phase of prioritizing my grand cosmic beliefs over human life, but no longer. It is not hard to see that human beings all around us are suffering because of material circumstances beyond their control. We do not attribute this suffering to some unverifiable divine process like karma or a god. We recognize that the material reality surrounding us is not simply the product of our own choices, as though we are individuals living in an unconnected vacuum of a world, but rather is a product also of social constructs and the particular capital we wield (or don’t wield). Thus, it is important to us to work towards changing the social constructs that produce these material circumstances which favor some and disadvantage others.
- We value art and beauty. Whether that be in the form of production or consumption, music, dance, poetry, painting, sculpture, or otherwise, we are here for it. We recognize the value of art in breaking us out of our mundane experience of the world into a world of imagination and possibility. For immersing us in a vision of our lives beyond what is immediately apparent. For presenting us with a radical concept. It has the capacity to induce emotion in us, to make us feel, and in so doing, to reinforce the fact that we are here. Beauty is not some arbitrarily set social standards for how we should look. Rather, it is the product of a carefully crafted piece of art. A story or argument in a book can be beautiful. A rug can be beautiful. A relationship can be beautiful. We value such beauty that is the result of hard work and careful creative power, but it can also be found in nature. Flowers are beautiful. Mountains are beautiful. Forests and rivers and spiderwebs are beautiful. We prioritize the vigilant awareness of such things, for they soften our hearts and urge us to interact with the world through kinder eyes.
- We value a life of contemplation. Meditation and contemplative acts are integral to our development as people, for when we sit down and meditate on new concepts and new insights, we can internalize them and grow as a result. Just being exposed to a thought is not enough for it to wash over your mind and change you. One must sit with it, as we have done with many things in our lives, in order for one to transform. After all, we are where we are today as people and as partners in this relationship because of the contemplation we have done in our past to get over certain hurdles in our thinking and to change our material circumstances. Meditation is also a way of processing trauma and big experiences, which is an essential exercise in balancing oneself.
Having identified some of the things that we value and wish to prioritize in developing our own spirituality, perhaps we can start to intentionally cultivate practices that are based on these values. What would that look like? Is there anything you would like to add, remove, or modify from this list? I am so interested to see where this takes us…
Love,
Varun