Carol L. Flinders - The Values of Belonging: Rediscovering Balance, Mutuality, Intuition, and Wholeness in a Competitive World

CAROL LEE FLINDERS

The Values of
Belonging

Rediscovering Balance,
Mutuality, Intuition,
and Wholeness in a
Competitive World

To Tim

From sedge grass roots, willow shoots, and the bark of the redbud tree, stripped, peeled, painstakingly treated and cured, women of the Pomo tribe in Northern California wove baskets of extraordinary beauty and complexity.

The fact of those baskets and the women who made them, fasting and praying, as scrupulous of their mental state as they were of the coiled bundles of root and bark with which they worked, sustains me.

I am no weaver, and no basket maker. I deal in words and wild notions, and I can only barely imagine what it might be like to see a glowing length of fabric take shape in my hands, or the perfect ellipsis of a canoe basket, pale gold, traced over in a fine, reddish-brown design called quail tip or grasshopper leg or even deer scat, or perhaps a design no one has ever seen that came to me the night before in a dream.

As a writer committed to making what sense I can of this world and of my place in it, I treasure what I know of the way those artists worked. That knowledge steadied my hand and nerve as I dealt with the several separate strands of this book and my desire to weave them into a meaningful wholesomething sturdy, capacious, and serviceable. The weaving wasnt easy. There were moments, in fact, when I felt as if I were the one being stripped, peeled, treated, and cured. Throughout the process, Pomo baskets worked for me as both symbol of and touchstone for realities too deeply felt and too elusive to be seized straight-on. I am grateful to their makers.

When we want to understand something, most us begin by trying to isolate it. This approach can make perfect sense, but only as long as that isnt the end of the inquiry. Everything exists in the midst of something else, and before you can know anything for what it really isanimal or artifact, religious teaching or Utopian visionyou have to be able to see it in context: figure and ground, all of a piece and interactive.

Im acutely aware how difficult it can be to see the part without losing sight of the whole. I know that it can stretch ones cognitive powers to their limit, because I had to do something like it as a small child, and the memory of that struggle is locked into my neuromuscular system.

When I was just a few months old, it became apparent to my family that my left eye had no burning interest in entering a working relationship with the right one. Normally, the brain takes in information from both eyes, and as long as their readings differ only slightly, it can collate them, so that when we look at a tree or a face, we see just one tree, just one face, but we see it whole and in three dimensions. If the difference is extreme, though, and the brain cant reconcile the two images, it effectively ignores one of them.

In my own case, it turned out that the right eye was doing most of the actual seeing, and since the information coming in from the left eye was more or less random, my brain favored the right eye and the left one got weaker and weaker from disuse. If nobody had intervened, my visual world would have been one-dimensional and, because my ability to gauge distances was impaired, treacherous as well.

Fortunately, my parents and the best ophthalmologist they could find did intervene. Corrective treatment started when I was three or four years old, with a patch I had to wear over my right eye: this was the only way the left eye would find out what it could do and become strong enough to work in tandem with the right one.

I described the treatment once to a friend who teaches ballet, and he nodded in immediate understanding. When a dancer is learning a new position or routine, he said, he or she begins by performing exercises meant to strengthen each of the specific muscle groups that are involved.

First you isolate, then you integrate.

And indeed, once the left eye began to get stronger, my mother and I started paying weekly visits to the doctors office, where I would sit for an hour at a time in front of a series of machines that worked the muscles in my eyes much as a room full of exercise equipment works the muscles of todays eager body sculptor.

The machines were of several kinds, but the one I remember most vividly involved a lion and a cage. Through one eyepiece I could see a cage, through the other a lion, and my job was to turn the left eye in and hold it there for a few seconds so that the lion was inside the cage. There were several similar exercises. The uniting theme wasnt so much cage the beast as place the free-floating entity in an appropriate context.

The integration phase of the treatment was desperately hard work, bordering on painful. Even now, when I think about it, my breathing becomes a little labored. But in time, everything fell into place. My wandering eye settled down so that I could see quite well with glasses, and I still do. But because of what I had to go through to become binocularand because on a couple of unnerving occasions eyestrain has put me back at square oneI never take it for granted.

The language we use to describe how we learn and think is drawn by analogy from the language we use to describe what our bodies do: we may not grasp a particularly complex idea at firstmay not be able to absorb or assimilate or digest it immediatelybut once we do, were able to run with it and even build on it.

Maybe, though, by analogy is too weak a term. Perhaps the time we spent as a species learning to walk, climb, run, and throw was an actual apprenticeship for what our intellects would have to do further down the road. While the ability to coordinate the input from our two eyes develops in most of us without conscious effort, our having acquired that skill as a species, over vast reaches of biological time, may have constituted a long, drawn-out rehearsal for a task we would face over and over and over as we ceased to be foragers and moved out into ever more complex relationships with one another and the natural world, entering that phase of our collective existence thats commonly called history

The ability, and before that the willingness, to embrace complexityto see things with both eyes, isolated and integrated, and address them in their wholenessis perhaps the essential task of human understanding. Its invariably hardat least as difficult as putting lions in cages. Ultimately, it requires that when were constructing a hypothesis, that hypothesis must account for all the available data (even when the bits and pieces seem to contradict each other), and if its a society were constructing, that society must accommodate the whole range of human truths and human typesthe fact that we are, for instance, relational and ambitious, reverent and innovative, idealistic and pragmatic, playful and industrious.

The easier thing always is simply to shut out information that doesnt fit. The easier thing always is, and always has been, to limit ourselves to what we can see out of just one eye.

The purpose of this book is to offer a fresh way of looking at the basic storyline of human history and what is usually called prehistory. That sounds a bit grandiose, even to me, but in a sensethe sense in which I hope to be takenits what we do all the time. A poem, an op-ed piece, or even a bedtime story plants a stake boldly, saying in effect, This is the thing not to forget