Connection and Communication
To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Newton’s laws of motion
Newton’s laws of motion are three laws that describe the relationship between the motion of an object and the forces acting on it. These laws, which provide the basis for Newtonian mechanics, can be paraphrased as follows:
- A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force.
- At any instant of time, the net force on a body is equal to the body’s acceleration multiplied by its mass or, equivalently, the rate at which the body’s momentum is changing with time.
- If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions.
The three laws of motion were first stated by Isaac Newton in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), originally published in 1687. Newton used them to investigate and explain the motion of many physical objects and systems. In the time since Newton, new insights, especially around the concept of energy, built the field of classical mechanics on his foundations. Limitations to Newton’s laws have also been discovered; new theories are necessary when objects move at very high speeds (special relativity), are very massive (general relativity), or are very small (quantum mechanics).
Inertia
Dad would constantly insist that he was right about everything. I met his desire to dominate every conversation with his opinions, monologues, and sermons with quiet resistance.
I believed he was wrong.
To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The irresistible force paradox (also unstoppable force paradox or shield and spear paradox), is a classic paradox formulated as “What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?” The immovable object and the unstoppable force are both implicitly assumed to be indestructible, or else the question would have a trivial resolution. Furthermore, it is assumed that they are two entities.
The paradox arises because it rests on two incompatible premises — that there can exist simultaneously such things as unstoppable forces and immovable objects.
Authority and Autonomy
I challenged my father’s authority with my own autonomy. He responded to my challenge with exclusion and isolation. This was not in any way motivating for me, since I already felt like an outsider in this family.
My father declared war against me, excluding me from access to the wealth he inherited from his mother. My youngest brother has his inheritance. My other brother and I do not. He is excluded because he has been declared mentally incompetent. I am excluded because I have been declared ideologically unorthodox and spiritually heretical.
My parents dedicated everything to God. They regard me as ungodly because of my disobedience of their authority. For the longest time, I tried to understand their God by working for churches, parachurch organizations, and Christian-led agencies and institutions. I found their leadership to be morally bankrupt, lacking integrity.
It didn’t help that my brother assumed the management and ownership of most of my father’s properties and resources, enforcing the policy of exclusion from God’s resources.
So, I have responded with a rejection of God and religion. If God cannot love me and if my family cannot love me as I am, in complete disbelief of a story that justifies genocide in the name of God, then I will find love somewhere else.
Love is a basic human need. My parents withheld their love from us, because we defied their edict that we should never leave their house. So, we left. And we have paid the price ever since. My father has held this grudge for over three decades.
I learned that I was on my own. I learned to be fiercely independent. The cost has been exclusion and isolation.
Emotional Annorexia and Abandonment
Underlying emotional anorexia is fear of abandonment, a universal, primal fear that can become powerful enough to cause your primitive emotional brain to erect involuntary defenses aimed at protecting you from emotional harm. For emotional anorexics, this means avoiding closeness.
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Emotional anorexia can extend into your social world, walling you off from friends, family, and anyone else who tries to get close or express love. Hackles of fear go up. The very thing you need most creates the greatest fear and necessitates building the thickest walls to avoid the risk of abandonment.
Emotional Abandonment
My emotional abandonment began with my father’s entrepreneurial adventures. He was involved in many ventures that included a pediatrics practice, a day care, a book store, a medical research program, a mainframe computer time-share company, an evangelistic event centre and children’s camp, combined with the apparent affluence of equestrian sport. Barred from speaking, my father directed his energy to becoming his own research program into the biochemical pathways that affect behaviour, learning, and health.
He was focused on the integration of the physical and the metaphysical in his medical practice. He had two gospels: his diet and his religion. It was hard to know where one started and the other began.
Dietary restrictions were paired with an ever expanding diet of religious fanaticism, as my father was in the habit of collecting audio and video recordings of his favourite evangelists and televangelists, including Watchman Nee, Bob Birch, Bernice Gerard, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Billy Graham, David Mainse, Benny Hinn, and John MacArthur.
Because my father was acting more as a minister and evangelist of his faith in the fear of bananas and the fear of Hell, he did not notice that his children might have emotional needs. My own father’s emotional needs were not something that really registered within his own experience. He was a Chinese man living in a white world. His so-called friends were those who noticed his wealth and were in his circle of acquaintances to take advantage of his generosity.
That is the Canadian way. That is the Doctrine of Discovery. White settlers “discovered” Canada to extract the natural resources on behalf of the British Crown. That policy is still in effect: the mandate to preserve the value of our Heavenly Father’s property by raping Mother Earth.
Vancouver’s racism is hidden by Canada’s propaganda around its national policy of multiculturalism. The reality is hidden behind the Residential Schools, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Canada’s resource extraction empire, where it has been estimated that 75% of the world’s mining industries are headquartered. Canada owes its power, wealth, and influence to the theft of land and resources on behalf of the British Empire to benefit the military-industrial complex of the American Empire. Canada has always been and continues to be a project of genocide. We continue to export arms to Israel to benefit the settler colonial project. Canada is friend and neighbour to the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful military empire the world has ever known. The U.S. is the successor to the Roman Empire, enforcing the peace by wielding the violence of the power of genocide — the only nation to have dropped atomic bombs on civilian populations.
To run an empire, to maintain peace, you need a monopoly over the use of force, a monopoly over economic power, and a monopoly over communications media. In other words: weapons, money, and propaganda. Or in other words: colonization, capitalism, and Christianity. It is syncretism, a sin if pagans engage in the practice, but self-righteous justification if Christians engage in the practice. Mix liberally with sex, drugs, and rock and roll and you have a monolithic culture that can be exported globally to dominate nature and rule the world.
When you have money, you can do whatever you want. Grab them by the religious, economic, and political rhetoric.
My father created his own religious, economic, and political empire by preaching about the evils of bananas and the deceitfulness of our demon-possessed society. He only talked. He never listened. I walked away. What else could I do. He gave me no opportunity to respond or to engage in conversation. That opportunity is now gone. I will never know what it is to have a father. The prospect of a Heavenly Father is not something I would ever want.
I have turned away from the faith of my father. In response, we ate bananas and were seduced by the Christian deconstruction movement. I am currently involved in the decolonization movement, a kind of animistic neo-paganism to regenerate Earth in an attempt to mitigate the scientifically predicted ecological chaos and destruction of anthropogenic climate change. I am in earnest searching for the Divine Feminine in the rematriation of Spirit.
Dad wanted to be my pastor, my doctor, my financial advisor, and my post-secondary admissions counsellor. I just wanted him to be my father. But he did not know how to be a father or a grandfather. He never learned that there is such a thing as emotional intelligence. He definitely did not model emotional awareness or lead with empathy.
I chose a different path, in contrast to my father’s — to learn how to design by leading with empathy. However, in all my attempts to be different from my father, I became more and more like him — a self-centred narcissist. He defied the establishment. So did I. We both felt the consequences, by being excluded from our professions and from community. We learned that we were on our own — alone against the world. Dad often cited the longest word as antidisestablishmentarianism. In his attempts to be different than the surrounding culture and to lead that culture to the promised land, he became the greatest proponent of the crimes of this land — the declarations of manifest destiny — as RCMP paraded around the grounds of his equestian centre, completely oblivious to the harms caused by this paramilitary force, designed for the destruction and genocide of the Indigenous peoples of this land that the British Crown stole from its original inhabitants for its own enrichment and the perpetuity of its empire.
Now, I watch the TV documentary that began as an Australian radio broadcasting and podcasting import, Stuff the British Stole.
Faith, Hope, and Love
In my ongoing work to understand life in the context of the built environment — the world we designed — I am shifting my perceptions of reality by creating a wider lens. In this way, we are shifting the focus from the narrow world view of human-centred design to the more holistic world view of life-centred design. We are asking the question, “What if Earth is alive? What if the whole universe is alive? Should we, like Buckminster Fuller, refer to the universe as a proper noun, as Universe?”
In this process of listening to Earth, I cannot help but return to the roots of the tree my father planted. Streams of living water feed this tree. The Tree of Life drinks in faith, hope, and love in the same way that our physical universe exists as a trinity of time, energy, and matter. The Trinity looms large in my philosophy as an inescapable reality. It then becomes a matter of interpretation, as I explore the meaning of connection and communication, from the human scale to the quantum scale to the universal scale.
What does it mean to be able to connect and communicate with a father who has denied me that experience of being in communion with him? My last experience of communion with my parents further divided me from them. The blessing that was given that day was immediately revoked on asking and learning that I do not go to church and I do not believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour.
I told my mother that I cannot believe in a faith that has no evidence in reality. I am looking for faith, hope, and love. In this family, I have experienced dogma, despair, and disintegration. It is to this lack of a sense of connection, communication, and community that I am reacting.
It is a trauma response to emotional abandonment and emotional annorexia. My attempts to fit in failed. The void of the emotional black hole of family has sent me on a quest to discover where I belong. I am learning from Brené Brown that the opposite of belonging is fitting in.
That’s what teams and groups deliver. They deliver this thing that you’re not alone. … I was so shocked to learn in the research that the opposite of belonging is fitting in.
Because fitting in is assessing a group of people and thinking, “Who do I need to be? What do I need to say? What do I need to wear? How do I need to act?” and changing who you are. And true belonging never asks us to change who we are. It demands that we be who we are. If we fit in because how we’ve changed ourselves, that’s not belonging. That’s not belonging because you betrayed yourself for other people, and that’s not sustainable.
Our Shared Story
So, I am asking myself something different now. I do not want to fit in. I did not want to be like my father: alone, being taken advantage of by people who did not care about him. It happened anyway. People used me, extracted my knowledge, exploited my skills, and expropriated my experience, energy, and creativity for their own profit and gain, then discarded me as expendable.
Patriarchal, colonial white settlers capitalized on my desire to feel meaning, value, and significance in the world as someone who was contributing to the good of society. I did not realize that the foundations of our society were built on lies, theft, violence, and genocide. That is how I want to acknowledge this land that we are on. This is not our land. We live on stolen land.
If we have any hope for reconciliation, it begins by releasing our grasp on something that cannot be owned, by relinquishing our rights to property what we share in common with all of life on Earth. Crown Land is a lie. The empire is bankrupt. The religion is a farce. Canada is a corporation, an apartheid state built to steal natural resources by exploiting human resources by using land as a resource for designing, building, and maintaining empire — power and profit for the very few — the rich, the violent, and the powerful.
Capitalism cannot be redeemed. It is the demon that has possessed the minds and bodies of all humans on Earth and drives us to disconnect, dissolve, disintegrate, and destroy everything we try to grasp and hold onto. This desire to hoard wealth and secure it from those who might take it from us is the same desire that will destroy us.
I was taught in Sunday School that love is like a magic penny. If you hold it tight, you won’t have any. But if you give it away, you will have so many they will be rolling all over the floor. I look back on that experience with horror. They would pass around the plate to collect all our money. They were teaching us capitalism in Sunday School. We were being taught to be colonizers, capitalists, and Christians.
I was just listening to Nomad podcast. Tim Nash asked, “Has Christianity caused more bad than good?” Tim Beal replied, “Absolutely!”
Jayne asked me, “Has your father done more bad than good?” I replied that I could only answer from my own perspective. I don’t know what the experience of others has been. For me, over the five-and-a-half decades of my life, I have been trying to dig myself out of a pit of self-loathing and despair, because I have felt so alone, without a sense of family and community, even after all of my attempts to fit in, to please others, to be of service, to contribute to society, to fight the good fight, to be a defender of the faith. In the end, I felt unappreciated, betrayed, and accused for not fitting in.
I have learned that I already belong to myself, to Earth, and to Universe. I am enough. I am infinite. I am one. I am love.
- I am enough. My body is connected to the senses of the Earth.
- I am infinite. My mind is connected to the spirit of the Sun.
- I am one. My heart is connected to the soul of the Moon.
- I am love. My whole being is connected to the life of the Universe.
Luna Solterra is the name I gave to my true self. She integrates the sense of being connected to the metaphysical gravity of the celestial bodies of the Sun, Moon, and Earth. As my own centre of gravity integrates with the gravity of these celestial bodies, I can appreciate our shared sense of time and I can experience this life that we are together co-creating as this reality of mind, heart, and body integrated with time, energy, and matter.
This is what my father gave me, a connection to this Trinity. And these three remain: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.
