Bringing The Unspoken Into The Light For Examination

(this title belongs to The Misbehaved Muse)

Nov 07, 2023

(As noted, the title belongs to

in whom I’ve discovered many things in common-she’s great so go check her out.)

Welcome to the Tuesday Edition of Morning Meeting. I hope you all have had exceptional weekends and excellent Mondays. This piece is going to pull from past articles and root around into the darkness a bit.

Here we see the cycle.

There are sprouts and baby trees in the skeletal remains.

What is there but winter into spring into summer, fall and winter again?

What is there but an unchanging cycle of change?

Sex to birth to life to creation and living and creating and losing and eventually giving in to death to absorption to expulsion to destruction and over and over again.

I met my life in 1969 when I was born, and in some ways one part of my life ended on January 10, 1978 when my father died in front of me, quite suddenly, in the car after a walk. It ended in one way, and it began in another. Innocence gone. Trauma marked. A sharp left turn from a normal little childhood to carrying my own mother through active grief. Parenting the parent.

Death found me young and paid attention to me ever since. Some people have more intense experiences, but many more have less brushes with it than I have had. It’s a weird kind of gift, seeing death. While I believe it was too early, and it came at a cost, it also gave me insight about how life works. It does begin.

And it does end.

Every damn time.

It can end and change on a damn dime.

I started having birth dreams not too long after my father died. These vivid and realistic dreams aligned with grief but also my impending menarche. I associated coming into womanhood with giving birth and losing life, not with sexuality per se. Odd right? I think, if I look back on it, I learned things in a very backwards way. Or out of order. Something.

I’ve always been fascinated with sexuality, birth, death. Simply put, change.

Through my life I’ve lost a number of people from natural deaths which were sudden and overwhelming, to suicides which were still-shock, cold ice-water on the soul and the effects linger still, no matter how much inner housecleaning I’ve done. I’ve experienced one long and lingering death, that of my mother who was dying for over ten years in bits and pieces from dementia. I’ve had cancer (early, and tended to) as has my husband, and he is in the nascent stages of recovery.

On the other end of things, sexuality? Yes. I’ve fought for it, spoken of it, written about it, produced shows on the topic, from vanilla to the most spicy. From monogamous to polyamorous. From sexual education to erotic exploration, I’ve been a spokes-person, advocate, and activist. I’ve enjoyed sex and feared it and fought with it and been bored by it and find it all endlessly fascinating.

And of course, rounding it out, I’ve had two babies and those experiences were so like the early birth dreams as to shock me, and the experience of motherhood created a new version of me, yet again. There was birth of them, birth of a new me, grief for what “me” was lost, and because of how my mind reacted to such change, near suicide from post partum anxiety and depression. I walked very close to that line, dancing right on that cliff’s edge. I lived though. And I value that look into my own darkness.

Those experiences have all helped focus my life path, both vocation and avocation.

In undergraduate, I focused on theater which, comic and tragic, is an expression of the most holy and ritualistic pieces of us all. We are birthed and also die on stage. We channel the gods into us to express the truest truths in illusory forms.

In my graduate work, it was organizational development which focused on leadership, healthy group systems, and change management. What is change management if not understanding how to hold, witness, and support birth and death? We channel people into holding space for organizations to be born, grow and die, hopefully while serving the common good and we watch those organizations go through their life phases sometimes ethically and well, sometimes toxically and with dis-ease.

I’ve helped organizations grow and progress, and helped individuals birth projects from stage to screen. I’ve birthed my own work, and also grieved the loss of my creative drive. It seems to be reappearing in a new way and I am thrilled for it. I’ve also been there when a project or business had to end, move into stillness. And in the middle, there is always change-an employee moves on, a new one joins. A mission shifts, resources end or begin. How the organization (and the people within those organizations) grapple with change with that (birth, life, death) cycle can make or break the place and the people within.

Birth, sex, death-all are change.

These things are, as my Muse-y peer has stated, unspoken or unseen things and indeed, death, sex, life, change management (even if its good and not trauma)…things just don’t really get examined. I mean…they do? We do talk about the surface of death, of sex, and so forth, but really bringing the deeper dynamics to light for that examination, accountability, and understanding is something that gets short shrift.

How many people have I (or you) talked in a workplace that feel like the stories of their lives are simply not acceptable to tell?

Those that have experienced any number of abuses and they need accommodations.
Their workplace has strange policies that really leave employees in a dark place after a birth or a death (three days funeral leave????? Really? You should get much more time because no one is functional after an immediate death in the family).
Unpaid family leave (which I think should be extended to any caretaker, married or not parent or not)? It’s truly unconscionable not to have it.
Equity in benefits, salaries, cost of living, travel, childcare. Who gets to really go to work easily? Who doesn’t?
Equity in understanding, culture, DEIA, and more, not just brushed up under a rug, but met with curiosity and openness.
Generational needs and where those generational dynamics impact the systems that are actually in place (working remotely vs in office as a key example).

We dash by the reality of what that life change requires and it gets all wedged down into our inner makeup, and then that affects the human system at the workplace. Would we ultimately make better lives, and more wealth (of all kinds) if we had more open systems and healthier conversations?

(I’ll offer that there is another topic truly unexamined that’s money. Interestingly, I’ve worked in the field of fundraising, an unspoken and strange world if ever there was one. Money is rarely discussed out in the open-who has it, who needs it, why keep it, who rents, owns, borrows, loans, uses or abuses it, who gets to control it or the people who don’t have it. Those unspoken dynamics also add up in organizational dynamics and governance policies which affect the human beings working there, which then affect how well the organization can actually work.)

Death, Sex and Money. If there wasn’t already a podcast on it…well there is and thank god for it. But could we use more of us talking openly about all these things and then applying them to our working organizations? I think so. I hope so. I think talking more and more means less shame, less fear, better policies, healthier people and healthier systems. The whole of the life cycle-the messy, hilarious, erotic, terrifying truths of them from birth, sex, and death, are not just for individuals but for collectives, and I see them as rings inside and outside of rings.

Death comes, life comes again, winter is true and spring never skips a beat, even if we do. Change happens, those things we don’t speak about are still there, so why not talk about them, especially to make our workplaces better? What’s the worst that could happen?

Thanks as always for reading, and if you feel so inclined to comment, share, restock or other, many thanks.