The Summit is not the Point

Welcome to The Porch - a community of transformative storytelling in a slow conversation about beautiful, and difficult things. We offer our writing here at no cost to read, but if you can afford it and want to support meaningful work on how to live in challenging times and call forth the best in ourselves, we gladly welcome your support. And if you like what you see here, please share this newsletter with others.

Thanks, friends. 

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The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred until the sacred in them remembers. - Sarah Durham Wilson

A good friend went backstage at a gig last week - he’s friendly with the lead guitarist, so got to join a small meet-and-greet crowd. The band are stratospherically famous - think 20,000+ capacity venues - and they stood around to say hello. My friend remarked that for some of the fans it seemed what they really wanted was to touch the stars. It was almost as if they expected a miraculous healing. The touch would be accompanied, of course, by a selfie - evidence of the healing, of being brought into a circle of magical belonging. Which, unless it becomes a mutual relationship, is really not much belonging at all. 

Even so, wanting to touch stars is a completely natural impulse, and one that I share. For one thing, it’s good to want to tell someone that their work has made a difference in your life. If you’ve lived with that work inside your mind then it’s perfectly understandable to experience the person behind the work as if you are already in a relationship. But deeper than that is the way in which celebrity encounters resemble the yearning for the sacred. 

We are all made of stardust.

We all want to go home.

Why wouldn’t we want to touch stars?

Of course, as with everything we do, the underlying need may not be met by the strategy. Getting a selfie with a celebrity does not meet the need for transcendent connection. 

In fact, it may create more problems - especially when we reduce our own value by projecting it onto someone else.

I was once about to speak at a church when one of my favorite actors walked in. He was someone I’d loved since I was about twelve years old, one of whose performances had led me to rethink my life. I texted Brian to tell him that a Famous Elder Statesman of the Movies was in the church. Brian responded with response, classic gently finger-wagging-but-supportive wisdom:

That’s nice. Focus on the job you’re there to do. 

Without that intervention, I think I would have been distracted by the presence of Famous Elder Statesman; worse than that, I might have tried to impress him, perhaps even tailoring my words to make me look good. Instead, I focused on the job I was there to do - which was to tell a story about how the stories we tell shape our lives for good or ill, so we should take stories as seriously as food, water, air, and shelter. 

Part of the story that we must give ourselves to is the one that says that each human being, each of us - that’s you and me, is a universe of indescribable value. No-one is worth more or less than any other. So, when I looked out at the congregation, I allowed my projections of the star in front of me to remind me that everyone else in the room was just as just as sacred as he is. 

I’m sometimes slow to learn the most important things, but honestly: it worked. I would glance back and forth between the star and the strangers in the church, and gradually I saw those strangers revealed as stars too. 

The antidote to unhealthy celebrity projections is not to devalue public figures, but to elevate our perception of everyone else - including ourselves.

I know writers with beautiful books that almost nobody has read, singer-songwriter friends with exquisite music and no profile beyond their local coffee house, poets whose soul-excavation has been witnessed only by their closest friends. I know provocative artists attuned to the common good who after decades of work their names have not been spoken in the galleries of New York or Basel. Many of these magnificent people read The Porch. (Hi friends! Glad you’re here.) 

We’re humbled by the folks who read and sometimes collaborate with us - the Pulitzer winners and the folks being published for the first time, all of whom have awakened to the fact that they’re in the same slow conversation about beautiful, and difficult things.

I want to say four things to all of those friends, and to me too, because I need to be reminded:

1: The “success” of your work in the world does not determine its value.

2: While some “success” comes because folks are doing work of surpassing quality, “great” and “successful” aren't the same thing. “Success” - at least as defined by the marketplace - is very often a matter of chance; and chance can come in the form of good luck or tragedy.

3: People have always discovered good work through other people telling them about it. The scale of that telling often depends on who you know; but the quality shouldn't.

4: The deeper need than “success” is mutual recognition.

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I am a grateful believer in the value of mentoring, because I’ve experienced it. The first of my mentors was a university professor whose class I signed up for because I had misread the syllabus, and who later took me on as his closest colleague: chance and relationship at the foundation. The second was a Kiwi activist priest who once stripped to his boxers at a city council meeting to illustrate what proposed zoning changes would do to the dignity of some people experiencing homelessness. Later he was the first person I heard calling me a writer. Now I see that what he was doing was calling forth the stardust in me. Without him, I don’t think I would have found the confidence to believe I could write, and the conversation I’ve had with him and other mentors has shaped how I see writing itself as a conversation too: not only with readers, but with myself.

I am grateful to participate in such a conversation - and I do see it as participation, joining in the flow of the evolution of a story much bigger than any of us. 

But - this seems obvious, though it isn't said often enough, so I’ll risk it: I am not a better writer than others, just because their books sell fewer copies than mine; and I am not a lesser writer than others just because their work attracts more attention. 

Neither are you.

The same goes for any other creative act - whether you write or perform or direct or convene gatherings or prepare community meals or counsel people: the value of your creativity is mostly about the integrity with which it is offered.

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This is important enough to state it again: “Success” is often a matter of chance - being in the right (or wrong) places at the right time; knowing the right (or wrong) people; a personal tragedy or unexpected endorsement, a software bug or pandemic (not) happening.

I know people whose writing is of such quality, and whose hearts bear such integrity that I wish entire publishing companies would be established just so you could read them. But even then, if “success” really is so much about “luck”, that might be a moot point. 

I’m not saying there’s nothing we can (or should) do to get our creative work out to the world, nor that the relationship between creativity and resources (either the ones we have when we create, or the ones that may come our way when we make our work public) is irrelevant. What I’m saying is that the value of your creative work does not equate to the number of people paying attention to it. 

The most challenging (and original) wisdom writer I know is unheard of outside small circles, the best new novel I’ve read in decades has not been a hit, the film I screen most often to people seeking cinematic medicine has been seen only by a fraction of the moviegoing audience.

I could go on, but you get the point: the value of our creativity is not best measured by how many people know about it. 

The question is whether what you’re writing or otherwise creating is life-giving, to you and to those for whom it’s intended. Is it woven into the common good (in both senses of the word - common as in everyday, and as in the things we share), is it imbued with a sense of the sacred or transcendent, and if it speaks about personal things does it take us somewhere beyond narcissism?

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The closing down of Tikkun magazine last month after forty years as the leading edge of progressive Jewish and interfaith thought and activism hit me hard. I’d long been a reader, challenged and provoked by its deeply humane and radically inclusive vision. I’d grown fond of Rabbis Michael Lerner and Cat Zavis and the Tikkun community, admiring their embodiment of the title of their magazine, which means to repair the world. They deserve our thanks - and I urge you to read the final issue, available for free here.

I found something there that has animated me for several weeks now, bringing into clarity something I’ve personally yearned for, and which helps describe a significant part of what The Porch is about. 

One element of the trustable story-shelter is the need for mutual recognition, so important that the spiritual activist and legal scholar Peter Gabel (Tikkun’s co-founder) identified it as the core lack in most social movements, and a fundamental necessity for all public policy - not to mention all encounters.

And I don’t only mean encounters between human beings. We may well begin with an encounter with ourselves, then the encounter with others, then also there is the encounter with the ecosystem of flora and fauna, Earth itself, and the mystery beyond. Of course this can happen in any chronological order - there may be no chicken and egg. Whatever the sequence (and it’s usually overlapping), we are born into an ecosystem and a mystery that we can choose to ignore (or we miss it due to the coerced autopilot of contemporary life), but that’s really just trying to deny reality. Better to surrender to our place in the ecosystem and the animating mystery; an invitation that will always gnaw at us, until we say yes.

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A few years after another of my mentors died a mutual friend told me something he had said to her about me not long after he and I had met. 

There’s this fella from Belfast who thinks he’s going to step into my shoes.

Well he’s not going to step into my shoes.

But we’re going to help him step into his own.

Hearing that was intensely liberating. It didn’t stop me admiring my friend's work, or prevent me being open to mentoring. But it distilled something I had often felt in his presence: the way he kindled the magnificence of others. 

If we step into the story that says we are stardust or sacred, none more or less than anyone else, and that we can actually call forth the magnificent spectacle of every person we meet, then what do we owe ourselves?

What kind of recognition can you give to another?

What kind of recognition can you give to yourself?

Are you willing to experiment with the belief that you matter as much as [insert the name of the most famous person you admire]?

Can you welcome yourself the way you want to welcome others?

What kind of shoes are you invited to step into?

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We will all, in the end, need to befriend our aloneness as well as become conversant in the give and take of mutually interdependent community. 

We will all, in the end, discover that the experience of the ordinary (figuring out what to do with the things we have, and how to invite support in the places we lack, helping people, allowing our bodies to sink into the underworld so we can be awakened to reality even when we sleep, taking life seriously without taking ourselves too seriously) is the miracle of life. And we will be affirmed in this story by mutual recognition with others on the path who are recognizing that stepping into our own shoes matters far more than “success”.

The Porch is a place where such mutual recognition can happen.

We see you.

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Quote of the Moment

“The summit’s everything to a summit-bagger. But it’s no big deal to a free-climber…People thinking summit, summit, summit blind themselves to the down. That’s why so many fuck up and fall and die.” David James Duncan, Sun House

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The Spirit of Mutual Recognition

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PS: We’ve just relaunched our movie podcast The Film Talk - check out our recent episodes on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and Challengers here.