What is Faith in Ambiguity?

Faith: belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit,etc.

Ambiguity: doubtfulness or uncertainty of meaning or intention

Photo by Mike Adams

"What do you blog about?"

Again and again, at my first writer's conference, I was asked what my blog was about and what kind of writing I do. I tried answering this question multiple different ways.

"Oh, I write some funny stuff and some think-y stuff."

"I write about ducks."

"I write about my kids. My kids all have ADHD. I guess it's a blog about ADHD."

The most surprising thing to me was that when people heard "Faith in Ambiguity," they usually asked me if the blog was about my faith.

"No," I would say. "It's about my faith in ambiguity."

Obviously, this wasn't clear, even to me. I learned many things at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop, some of them tactical, some of them inspirational, that will make me a better writer and a better blogger. None were more important than this:

I am funny, but I am not a humorist. I am a writer who writes about an idea. That idea is faith in ambiguity.

What is faith in ambiguity? Faith in ambiguity is about asking questions, questioning assumptions and taking a second look. It is about carefully listening to both sides of an argument and then throwing both of them out the window to look for the truth that neither side has found, in the dirty, dark place everyone forgot to look. Faith in ambiguity is about making the joke that gets the laugh of recognition but that no one was brave enough to tell.  Faith in ambiguity is about owning every part of being human, every part of being alive–the illness, the pain, the addiction, the embarrassment, the fear, as well as the love and inspiration. It is about showing up, fully human, not knowing the answer to anything, and saying so, and then laughing until you wet your pants because it is all so ridiculously hilarious.

Why, you might ask, would all this uncertainty be good? People find great comfort in answers and the faith they hold that there is a reason and order underlying everything. Ambiguity–faith in ambiguity–seems to fly in the face of that comfort. And I really think that it does. People who want their bee hives to remain unprodded will probably not like this blog as much as people who are strangely fascinated by a sudden exodus of bees. That is OK with me. I stopped being comfortable years ago with the answers that were served to me like bland porridge, and started seeking my own. But, apart from personal temperament, I think there are some excellent reasons for having a little more faith in ambiguity, all around.

Not knowing means we can experiment. If we are already sure that the earth is flat and traveling to the end will cause a person to fall off into an abyss, there is no reason to circumnavigate the globe. It takes a doubter to come up with that. All explorers are, by nature, doubtful people–the ones who want to see evidence with their own two eyes–our kindred souls rejecting their breakfast pablum in search of more savory fare that may conceivably exist, if only they look far enough.

Science is a function of uncertainty. Whether or not you think you like science, my strong guess is that you enjoy electricity, access to emergency health care and Starbucks WiFi, all of which are the products of somebody at some point supposing that a) this is not really all there is and b) it could actually be better. People who push the boundaries of the world forward, causing creation to unroll in a direction heretofore unimaginable, are not contented souls. They have itchy minds, full of wonders and doubts and problems to solve. I write because my mind itches something awful and the only way I know to scratch it is to inflict the questions I have on the rest of the world.

When we don't know, we can ask. Asking is a profoundly powerful act–one that binds communities together in humble service and mutual respect of one another. In a family, in a church congregation, in a classroom, in an office, if you want to empower the people you find yourself traveling along with, ask them. Ask them for advice. Ask them how to work the TV. Ask them what they really want from their community. Then listen. We cannot ask if the answers sit on our tongue, melting like lozenges that make everything taste like oranges. Our mouths have to be clean. I have learned to ask children for help and to tell them I am not sure and, because of this, they see that they can become a person of importance with me. They are dying to be asked for their assistance, and I find adults to be no different.

When we don't know, when we are not sure, we can have compassion. I may think you were rude to me just now, but what if really you are in terrible pain? What if I misunderstood? What if your intentions, all along, have been aimed toward helping me and I could see you as nothing but a bully? Ambiguity makes me pause. The data is not clear. Is that child behaving this way in class because their parents are bad parents or because the delivery of my curriculum is not working for them? Is it ADHD or boredom? A terrible attitude or perhaps a crippled sense of self? If I am not sure, I look again. And again. Doing so makes me a better teacher, mother and friend.

The long arc of justice is and always has been a function of the shedding of our collective assumptions. We don't think black people are lesser creatures deserving of bondage and abasement. We know they are. We know gay people are crazy. We know what kind of parents are the wrong kind. We know so much of which we have no experience at all. We are never free from the repetition of the same cruel injustice over and over until we stop knowing. If history is any guide, we should be very, very concerned about the things that we think we know.

Faith in ambiguity is the doubt of the mindful, the practice of asking "Why?" of everything, but most especially, of ourselves. Faith in ambiguity, is not, however, a license not to choose. The worst thing we can do, in my opinion, is fail to choose. In the absence of choice, Life drags us along by our ankle and we hit our heads repeatedly on the concrete as events fly by us, which we have observed but never been the author of.  Life presents you with decisions, and, if you are like me, you consider everything from the polarity of the earth to the astrological signs of the people involved, and then belabor that decision until it is worn down to a tiny nub of a thing, chewed through with agitation. And then you just select and live with the result. Every time you do, you end up upright, able to say, at least "Oh, well, that was not the best decision I ever made."

Faith in ambiguity is also not ignoring the facts. It is not sticking your fingers into your ears and saying that nothing is clear so you are going to ignore overwhelming evidence in favor of whatever inclination it is easiest to bear. Not knowing leads the scientist to conduct her experiment, a mathematician to find his equation, a philosopher to observe and enlarge on our views of humankind. It does not, on the other hand, alter the course of history in any meaningful way to throw out the controls, pretend that two equals three and suppose a new and implausible kind of human. It's just make-believe.  Faith in ambiguity is about facing the facts. If there is crap on the living room floor, it is about saying so, not imagining that really there is a Tootsie Roll. What is in question here is really the motivation of the dog.

I need to write to soothe my itchy brain, and I am so grateful that you show up and apply aloe. What I really want for this blog is to create a space on that internet that holds apart the crushing walls of surety and ill humor and allows us to laugh at silly, stupid things and to speak our mind respectfully without fear of retribution. I want to have this be a place where people come to take a second look, and sometimes to stop and giggle between those hard glances. So, I have this mission to spread a little faith in ambiguity out into the world–just cast out my little whirling dandelion seed of an idea upon its breezes–and see what happens.

Are you in?

What if we all just came out of the closet?

I wrote my post on Saturday in so much pain I could hardly see straight (in case that wasn't clear.) It is really hard to write when you are in pain, especially–I find–head pain. So, I really wasn't sure, when I hit "publish", if what I had worked on was written in English or in Klingon, or whether it was a good idea to write it.

I just knew these three things:

1. I needed to write about what I was experiencing or I was going to go insane.
2. I am supposed to post every day for NaBloPoMo.
3. I never promised anyone all my writing was going to be great.

Anyway, it was Saturday, and, on Saturday, I could publish nothing but pictures of LOL cats and links to mime porn, and it would be totally irrelevant because no one reads my blog on weekends.

However, it is Monday now and, in case you are  worried about me, I want to clarify a few things:

1. I am not suicidal. This may not have been clear. In my blog post, I talk about "stopping" or "folding". What I mean is putting the brakes on some or all the activities that I am maintaining that have the trappings of a healthy life–work, church activities, running kids around. How much of this do I continue to do? When do I cut back? When do I just...stop? The thought of wishing the lights would go down on the whole scene of day-after-day pain? Yes, it has occurred to me, but–no, not seriously. Not any more seriously than my thoughts of throwing my children off of Omega bridge, anyway.
   
   Is it worth it to go to work in pain if it means helping twenty-five kids to read that day? Maybe some days the answer is yes and some days it is no. Is it worth it to read a whole chapter aloud of The Magician's Nephew to my six year-old while suffering from a migraine and throat pain? Again–yes some nights, no some nights. These are the kinds of questions I am really struggling with.
   
   
2. I don't write a blog so that I can dump my pain into the public sphere for no reason. What I really hope is that honesty makes a difference. I want to be seen for who I am and for all that I am feeling–because that is what all people want, but that is a very small concern to me compared to this–I very badly want others to see themselves in my writing. I want to make an actual difference to someone who feels like I do, or loves someone who feels like I do. That, my friends, is something worth getting up off my pain-ridden ass every morning for.

Bloggers, especially bloggers much bigger and better than I, really make a difference. Reading Glennon Melton's heart-wrenchingly honest description of getting sober opens the doors for other women to try recovery. Jenny Lawson's frank and unflinching description of suffering from anxiety and depression allows anxiety to depression to be talked about, for people hiding in the dark to come out and lay claim to the miracle of their survival–publicly.

Pain is something that we hide. Hell, I hide my pain every day.  I do this naturally and without even thinking. How much more pain do I have because I am clenching, stuffing, composing myself so that I am presentable? I do not want to be the object of sympathy or pity. I want to be seen for who I am, for all I am–which is a survivor. 

Every day I am at war with the depression, indignity, discomfort and disquiet that pain brings to my life. And every day I put my head to the pillow after having mothered my children, imperfectly but with all my heart, done my job to the fullest of my capacity and lived to fight another day. I–and every one else fighting an invisible battle with their body or their mind every day–deserve a medal. We do not deserve to feel embarrassed.

What if none of us had to be embarrassed? People braver and more articulate than I have done a beautiful job already of starting to bring chronic pain out of the closet. 

I want to be a part of that. So, come out, come out, wherever you are, and join me!

"Recession" by my friend Patrick Kelly (ice receding on concrete)

My Husband is Saving the World with Faith in Ambiguity

Updated 1/16: I included the YouTube of his sermon below, so now you can actually watch it.

Despite being very annoying, and having a strange sense of humor, my husband sometimes does cool things.

One cool thing he is doing is delivering this sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe today.

He has written a lot of very good sermons, all of which can be found on his blog, All Things Reasonable, but this one is the best so far.

It is the best both because of his amazing development as a writer, which I can't say enough about, and because he is so right about what he is saying.

We live in a world where everyone thinks they know a bunch of things that they actually don't know. And so we fight with our spouses and kids. And so we go to war. And so our political system is broken. We don't know how to separate what we know from what we believe.

What might be possible if we could do this one, critical thing?

The story of how I accidentally and shockingly helped save a creek and now no one remembers but me and Amy.

Today's #ReverbBroads11 prompt: Is volunteering something you do regularly? If yes, where do you volunteer? If not, why not? via Kassie at  http://bravelyobey.blogspot.com/

Amy and me on the bridge, summer 2010.

Interesting you should ask. I volunteer at my church. I do two things there currently. One is co-teach a Sunday school class for middle school aged students, and the other is serve on our church's religious education committee. All of which is very interesting considering I am an atheist.  But...I digress. How about, in keeping with my usual form, I do this assignment wrong and tell you about something else, something I have talked about less.

Like the time I saved a town and a creek from near destruction.

I am going to cut to the chase here. If you want to become informed about watershed issues, you will need to read something else. This will be a nuts and bolts sort of description of how I was accidentally and shockingly charged with leading a citizen's advisory committee reporting to an actual government body. The mission: to create a plan with community buy-in to fix our fracked-up streamside beach.

The old bridge.

Here is the real story:
Between 1998 and 2003, while I was in my early twenties, I was doing four things (besides chasing around little demons in cloth diapers):

• attending local Recreation, Park and Water Board meetings in tiny little rural town, population 700+
• taking part in the Dutch Bill Creek Watershed Group, which was an organization of local people; most of them scientifically trained environmentalists; organized around raising awareness of and creating solutions for problems in our local watershed, a tributary of the Russian River.
• taking transformative seminars that made me sure I could change the world and
• drinking too much coffee

The scenario was this: Camp Meeker had long been a summer resort town, whose single loveliest feature was a dammed up creek swimming hole with a Podunk snack shack and lifeguard. Since the turn of the century, this had been the case. The first year or two that I lived in Camp Meeker, that swimming hole was the best thing going on summer days, and a focal point for the community.

The swimming hole in Camp Meeker in the old days

Until the hippies ruined everything. Scratch that. Actually, it was the goddamned salmon! It turned out Coho Salmon, which are severely at risk, live and breed in Dutch Bill Creek, and that they can't actually jump thirty feet in the air to get over the dam that we had built. (Like I said, this is a not a very good scientific explanation.)

And the permit for the summer dam was withdrawn. Within a couple of seasons, what was left behind, was a gravel and algae-filled muck-pit covered with encroaching Himalayan blackberry and broken beer bottles. A sad spectacle of what was once the gathering place of a community. People felt resentful and, in a way, demoralized to have had an impersonal government agency come and take away what had been the heart of their community.

The environmentalists, who lived there, wanted a nice creek-side beach that was not a detriment to salmon as much as anyone else, but the government board and the watershed people were not really in communication, due largely to the fact that there are only so many meetings working people can go to in a month.

And I was the common link. Me and my best friend, Amy Lemmer, earth mother and community builder extraordinaire, who for some reason, took a back seat and decided to cultivate me as a leader rather than taking the driver's seat.

Winter flood over the old dam, circa 2003.

Somehow, through the process of showing up in all these places hyped up on caffeine and idealism and not being the other person in the room (who was a weirdo with a tape player that he used to record all the board meetings and then accuse the board members of everything from Brown Act violations to being secret members of the Illuminati), I was selected to get the environmentalists and the rednecks to talk to one another and recommend a course of action to the board.

Because I had no idea that this was weird, and I was a dewy-eyed idealist (as I've mentioned) I invited everyone in the world to the first meeting, including government officials working for relevant grant-writing agencies. And, weirdly, they came. The committee called itself the "Dam Plan Committee".

We met. We planned. We wrote two grants that failed. No one wanted to fund us without studies having been done. And no one wanted to fund studies. Let me make this clear: I didn't do the work. I didn't even understand the science. The committee included an engineer, a salmon geneticist, an ethnobotanist, a watershed workshop leader and wildlife biologist, an environmental educator and someone from NOAA. I didn't finish high school, and my major qualification for anything is that I am companionably bossy. I sent reminder emails, typed up reports, smoothed over ruffled feathers and kept holding up the vision of having a solution that worked for people and fish.

Then, even more strangely than anything that preceded, some drinking water was flushed into a body of natural water in our district, someone was fined, and a grant was created for $190,000 to give someone. And they gave it to us.

Because the person making the decision was the charming young woman, Leah Mahan, that I had invited from NOAA and subsequently befriended.

Then later, I got divorced, had a nervous breakdown, picked myself up, reinvented myself, had a new baby with a new man (my now husband) and moved away. And others stepped up, took the lead, took the project the rest of the way and...they finished it. They built this beautiful bridge and restored the creek bed. It is gorgeous. I have walked there.

They did it without me, but it couldn't have happened without me. You know what I mean?

So here's the thing: I don't care who you are and what your limitations are. Don't ever, ever let anyone tell you that you can't make a difference.

The new, salmon friendly bridge over Dutch Bill Creek, as seen on the Gold Ridge RCD web site.  

If you want the long version of the story, which is interesting and also makes me tear up, here it is:

12 min version: Summer Dam Removed to Create Fish Refuge - Camp Meeker Dam Removal from Ben Zolno on Vimeo .