wildfire/24_chap18.html

<h1>CHAPTER 18</h1>
<h2>She/Volutionizing "Process"</h2>
<p>Process figures prominently in feminist parlance these days. A belief in process is both a belief that old habits don't give way easily on this planet yet and an expectation to have to repeat the same new lessons many times before they supplant our former tapes, to have to experience and practice new feelings and behavior many times before they become automatic.</p>
<p>But many of us sigh with impatience even as we think this. We are tired of "process"; we want fiats. We talk about how some day, when we have advanced in our development on this planet, change will occur spontaneously. We remind ourselves that if time is not linear, process is an illusion, must be an illusion. How, we ponder, can this be made to fit our sense of the reality of process?</p>
<p>I suspect that one difference between process and instantaneous change is that whereas process is along a two-dimensional continuum - from point A to point B - instantaneous change is three- maybe four-dimensional, global: we are <i>in</i> the change, we <i>are</i> the change, all aspects of the persons and circumstances involved are connected and cross-connected in every possible direction, across planes, through dimensions, not just held together by one tenuous horizontal line.</p>
<p>After a speech in Cincinnati in January 1988, in which I mentioned my preoccupation with this puzzle, the audience and I began discussing the possibilities of instantaneous change. One woman offered the thought that perhaps instantaneous change is a natural law that women once understood and lived in accord with, a law that over the length and increasing depth of our history as slaves we have forgotten.</p>
<p>Later, out in the lobby, another woman proposed a model for independent event versus process: "Think of it this way," she proposed. "A chicken grows inside an egg, finally getting big enough to begin pecking its way out. It pecks and pecks and one day its beak breaks through the shell. That instant, the beak's breaking the shell, is an event, not a process."</p>
<p>This meshed with my perceptions that any point in the sequence of events we call "process" can be viewed as a unique event, that what we call process is the sum of unique events that are connected in ways that are not obvious to us. Perhaps experiencing "process" is strictly a function of perception; perhaps if we weren't thinking in linear-time, cause-and-effect terms, we wouldn't see such occurrences as "process," but would judge each moment alone and as equal with the others, causing change to appear essentially instantaneous.<a href="#fn1">[1]</a> Janet Blaustein talking about this at Womongathering in Pennsylvania in June 1988 added that because we see linearity in some events and some circumstances, perhaps we pick up the false idea that the linear model is true for or applicable to everything.</p>
<p>In that same lunchtime discussion, I suggested the possibility that each point in our lives can be viewed as an end in itself, as enough, as our having arrived. That is, that perhaps one difference between process and instantaneous change is that there is no goal in the latter model - or that if there is, we reach it every moment.</p>
<p>I remembered something Jane Mara from Seal Rock, Oregon, had told me nearly a year before as we puzzled about this in my kitchen in Virginia, trying to figure out how to <i>think</i> about there being no linear time and what that meant about change.</p>
<p>How could one even imagine spontaneous change, given the "reality," for instance, that baby chicks and vegetable seeds have to develop along a time line, have to go through a "process," are apparently caught in linear time?<a href="#fn2">[2]</a></p>
<p>Mara told me about another woman in Virginia, Machaelle Small Wright, who had become acquainted with devas, or nature spirits, at Findhom in Scotland. Putting her knowledge to work in her own garden in Virginia on her return home, she subsequently wrote a book in which she tells about carrots growing instantaneously from seeds into six-inch plants before her eyes.<a href="#fn3">[3]</a></p>
<p>Months later, I admitted to Mara on the phone that I was still grappling with the problem of instantaneous change versus process. During that conversation, I tentatively offered the idea that perhaps we go through process because we think process is necessary, the "way things are." Perhaps belief in process <i>produces</i> process, and that if we believed in instantaneous change instead, we would get <i>that</i>.</p>
<p>She replied that she had not only thought of that already, but that she had become aware that she <i>chose</i> process over immediate change, that in fact <i>her process was resistance to immediate change</i>. "Instantaneous change is overwhelming, very frightening," she told me, "so I devise a process to take me slowly, to acclimate me to change. For instance, though I'm certain I could do it if I weren't afraid, right now it's too scary for me to zap myself into your kitchen, to find myself suddenly there in your house with you. I think I may opt for the process of <i>getting</i> there instead of just <i>being</i> there because otherwise I would discover how powerful I really am. That discovery would obligate me to change my whole life, it would put incredible responsibility upon me that I don't feel ready to accept. So I take the plane, I take the safe, comfortable, powerless way out, I make small 'reasonable' demands upon myself, out of fear I remain blind to myself, to my potentialities, my capacities."</p>
<p>If it is true for the rest of us that our process, like Mara's, is resistance to instantaneous change - and I think this is probable - then like her we are all likely to hold on to process until we become braver, until we dare experiment with the frightening possibilities a little at a time and a little at a time face the implications of the fact that we can change reality with incredible rapidity - instantaneously.</p>
<p>Perhaps in an already overwhelmingly complex sensory world, and one with the potential of infinitely greater complexity, we also choose process because it orders and categorizes experience, because it simplifies, because it reduces ambiguity and tension. Clearly, without our silent agreement with one another and with the universe to follow certain principles of organization, life might be inordinately confusing.</p>
<p>But also fascinating. Personally, I am becoming bored and very impatient with the restrictions I daily impose upon myself - believing I must pick up the telephone to communicate with someone at a distance, for example.</p>
<p>The use of technology best illustrates our firm belief in process, the belief that we need some intermediary - such as a telephone, an airplane, a computer - to do the things that we could do far quicker and more efficiently ourselves.<a href="#fn4">[4]</a> If we altered our profound belief that we need such technology, such clumsy, slow, imperfect, limited intermediaries, alternatives would have the space and the energy and the permission to appear to us. I believe we must begin to believe in our unaided selves in order for those selves to reveal to us their stupendous powers.</p>
<p>Peace Pilgrim made such a discovery for herself years ago when she first began walking for peace. For the first few years she wore only a scarf and sweater in the winter, and then discarded even them as unnecessary. She writes, "I'm now so adjusted to changes in temperature that I wear the same clothes summer and winter, indoors and out."<a href="#fn5">[5]</a> Apparently, this is common practice in less technologically-minded, less left-brained societies, such as exist, for example, in Tibet and Nepal. That this is obviously possible opens the mind to the existence of all kinds of amazing possibilities.</p>
<p>I am preparing myself for what is commonly thought impossible, knowing that impossibility is created by disbelief. I am getting ready for anything, everything, am open to any possibility. I accept that anything I can imagine is possible; more than that, that my thinking it, my believing it, <i>creates</i> the possibility of it.</p>
<p>But I also accept that I can never imagine freely, wildly enough to reach the limits of possibility. We have, for example, hardly begun to imagine, to say nothing of to invent, the world that many of us will live to see.</p>

<hr>

<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Conversation with Susan Horwitz, June 1988.</p>
<p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> Mara is working on a book, <i>Emotions: Use and Abuse</i>. She has been accused of having process as her middle name.</p>
<p><a id="fn3">[3]</a> Machaelle Small Wright, <i>Behaving as if the God in All Life Mattered</i>. Perelandra: Jeffersonlon. VA, 1987. pp. 119-120.</p>
<p><a id="fn4">[4]</a> Conversation with Susan Horwitz, February 1989.</p>
<p><a id="fn5">[5]</a> <i>Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words</i>. Ocean Tree Books: Santa Fe, NM, 1982, p. 56.</p>