The Baby Waterfall Conventions

A small offering for healing conflict, revoking consent to atrocities, and incarnating as love.

… it is the thing that we did this past week— first when Hamas attacked Israel, and then when the Israeli military attacked Gaza back.

We logged on.

The Creekmasons were generally not excluded from this observation by The White Pages’ Garrett Bucks. And certainly, in-keeping with Bucks’ analysis, logging on was an experience that we each seem to have manifested for a purpose: to clarify our own relationships with conflict and community. 

Also, perhaps, to clarify our own relationship to the vague, impersonal tendency that egregores formed by organizations of humans seem to develop. One that leans toward discord, domination, infinite expansion, and destruction.

For the Creekmasons, logging on even developed into an opportunity to grapple with the possibility that Beauty might still exist in a world devastated, deranged, and generally degraded. 

An opportunity to decide, through alignment to Beauty, we could revoke our consent to the faceless systems that spin like flywheels perpetrating endless, cyclical violence in all its forms. 

Might that weaken them?

I woke up to the server on fire.

It was a matter of time before something like this happened. All communities come with conflict.

We may not have been prepared to handle it perfectly in the moment it was occurring, but I am proud of the meta-conversation that resulted. Online conflict can get nasty; that we had our kumbaya after was inspiring.

It was one of those “multiple people are typing…” moments where there seems to be a persistent miss in communication. Heated people arguing: talking past each other or not even about the same thing. People talking to their projected idea of who the other person is, rather than responding to the text on the screen exactly as written, much less as intended. 

It was emotional. 

Insofar as online communities can be, it felt unsafe. Could be because I’m one of those adult children of divorced parents, but for me, conflict always feels life-threatening. 

It sometimes tickles my terror as if a looming threat of condemnation might lead to banishment. 

That triggers something primal, I think. The humans launched into the wilderness on the reality show Alone don’t make it for more than a couple months by themselves without arriving at the doorstep of starvation. 

We need our tribes.

What went wrong in the Creekmason Server? A lot. There was a general need to validate human life. To empathize with suffering. To actually say the part that seems to “go without saying.” And to say it without equivocation or distraction, even though it might feel uncomfortable—suffocating even—to have to vocally affirm that we would never seek to justify or even defend the horrors humans are capable of.

There wasn’t nuance to the indefensible acts, they were and are indefensible. That’s true regardless of whether there is nuance to the conflict generally. Regardless of whether I can’t be personally certain that with the same neurons, experiences and memories I wouldn’t be doing similarly horrendous, inexcusable things. 

There was a general need for space. To breathe. To remember and express explicitly that we’re ultimately on one human team, together. In a planetary sense, but also in the immediate community of the server.

How could it have been prevented?

When things cooled down—disappointingly only after a person I consider a real friend, despite only knowing them online, decided they needed a break and bounced—there was a lot of remorse on the server.

We took turns analyzing what might have gone wrong during the flaming from a practical perspective. 

We took turns apologizing. 

We shared our values. We were vulnerable. We shared empathy for one another.

We shared our aspirations for what Community might best embody.

Eventually, the conversation coalesced into talk of uncovering a new rule that might prevent people quitting in frustration in the future.

• Something about assuming the best in others and not implying threats of exile through demonization? 
• Something about decorum and gentleness or prioritizing promoting safety over speaking freely? 
• Something about engaging in conflict with the honest intention to discover/uncover our common values. Searching with the presupposition that we’ll certainly find them and should go upstream/meta/abstract to whatever degree is necessary to get there?
• Something about being willing to abandon your debate position temporarily to make sure the person you’re in conflict with feels unequivocally heard?

These suggestions seemed too prescriptive. Too limiting. The sense I got was that we could begin to outlaw each and every specific behavior that resulted in unacceptable levels of conflict without ever getting to the actual root. Without developing a methodology of communication—a general stance of Lucid Participation that Creekmasons could emulate and embody—we’d be damning ourselves to infinite rule explosion.

Here’s a pitch from The Book of Innocence by Paul Selig:

What stands before you today, in an awareness of an awakened state, is the realization that you have contributed to the chaos you see around you through your disregard of others and the True Self that must express as them regardless of what you think or see. When you decide another is worthy of your attention or love, the human being you see is actually transformed by that agreement. When you deny another love, you agree to an aspect of them that believes themselves to be unworthy of love or care. Each agreement you make with another human being is an idea that you support your relationship in. The idea that they are worthy, can be loved, claims an alignment, not only for them, but for all that may ensue in the relationship.

So we asked ourselves: what are the practical tools that will allow that kind of loving posture to naturally emerge when conflict is rising?

We landed on electing a moderator and implementing technological and procedural solutions that might engender space and reverence. This moderator, which we will be electing soon after this post goes live, will be responsible for enforcing Slow Mode—which prevents people from typing more than, say, one message every two minutes—so that people could talk with greater intention behind their words.

While in slow-mode, there will be a mandate to become much more intentional with what we type.

An example outline:

1. What I think you’re saying.
2. Why I think that.
3. How that affects me.
4. What I need you to know going forward.

Another, from Nonviolent Communication, might be:

1. What I think you’re feeling. Am I right?
2. What basic human needs I think that emotion is trying to communicate. 
3. What I’d like to try to do to meet those needs.

They seem like rules that would help in any situation where there is misunderstanding or hurt, don’t they? Create space. Create reverence. Communicate with intention.

So why haven’t we, as a civilization, implemented them?

Not least: there do seem to be Forces that oppose them. 

You fasten all the triggers

For the others to fire

Then you sit back and watch

When the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion

While the young people’s blood

Flows out of their bodies

And is buried in the mud

Come You Masters of War by Bob Dylan

The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

To me, the question remains open as to whether the apparent gravitational pull of cycles of retribution and violence is grounded in material reality, in metanarrative, or in quasi-gods of man’s own creation. Maybe it’s human nature. Maybe it’s human nature cast into the Shadow—shamed and resisted and repressed. 

Most convincing to me? Perhaps this depravity is exploding from our souls because we try to cover it up, like the violent spray of a garden hose partially occluded by your thumb.

We’re comically soaked, and maybe we can still do better.

What do we wish to collectively instantiate into our organizations? Do we want our governments to be responsible for domination, infinite growth and monopolizing of revenge? 

Or do we want our communities to be driven by different intentions?

In the aftermath of conflict, would we prefer the broader systems of organization into which we bubble up to employ the kind of kumbaya meta-discussion the Creekmasons did? One about space, forgiveness, empathy, and protection of one another?

It’s obviously much easier in a close knit online community dedicated, fundamentally, to same core values. The values of Liminal Trickster Mysticism provide a fairly safe common ground on which we can stand and assume the best in each other.

The same is not true in wider conflicts. Particularly those on the national level, where you don’t have a relationship with the people you’re opposed to. Particularly when you are encountering an Other who you project to represent a faceless monolith of apparent evil.

These larger machines are so complex, with their moving pieces and narratives so inextricably interwoven, that it is baffling—maddening—to even attempt to comprehend the evil we’re collectively capable of.

So how can we ever hope to throw a wrench in those gears?

It’s a both/and situation. Collective action is necessary for sure, but too often we beat ourselves up for not having control over the broader sweep of historical events.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that international communication and news encourage us to form opinions on issues over which we have no practical influence. We feel compelled to opine on the right thing for people around the world to do. Or for people with immense systemic power. But we don’t really know and can’t really change a thing.

It causes despair. A sort of learned helplessness, similar to what the victims of abusers feel when they can’t escape unpredictable horror.

So, again, what can we do?

The metaphor of Indra’s Net, in which every being is a shining jewel connected to every other jewel by a vast network of fibers, comes in handy here. 

The jewels are so brilliantly reflective, that they each contain their own mirror image of the net in sum. This means that if you scratch any one jewel, you can’t tell which jewel is scratched.

And if you heal the scratches on your own surface, you heal the net as a whole.

Here’s a new Creekmason’s proposal for just such a ritual. 

It’s based on the following TikTok… Won’t you try it with us?

@_weloveyou__ Tag a good thing #friendship #wholesome #hopecore #wesanderson #positivity #forest #redwoods ♬ To be loved Is to be changed – gosiahballer

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I’m a newbie when it comes to casting magic but here is my attempt to formalize the Baby Waterfalls Convention. 

It is a radical individual and communal act of  Non-participation with the numerous inhuman (though deeply human derived) entities intent upon employing my attention toward harmful ends. These entities would insidiously persuade and justify acts of violence as a means for group survival, property expansion, capital growth, or ethnic supremacy.

I would say no to these entities. I would formally decline my consent.

But because my every word, every minute, and every dollar are already used to perpetuate the covert aims of these entities, I must use direct personal magic to Undo their force in and around me. With this magic, I hereby relinquish a false sense of shared responsibility for their actions even while my words, minutes, and dollars remain theirs.

Convention(n): 1) a way in which something is done, 2) an agreement shared between groups of people

A – Note and name one of the controlling entities at play when I feel an emotion about being under its direct influence. (ie. “oh, this helpless disgust I feel is toward the industrial military complex that is partly driving this war.”)

B – Isolate that emotional sensation in my body, allow its physical expression to expand some, and imagine it gaining the full employment of my body (ie. “I actually feel like puking.”)

C – Turn my attention immediately to something that has vitality in my vicinity deserving of my tender care and focus for a full minute on a sense of nurturance for it. (ie. branches of a tree, sound of the wind, coolness of a shadow, creases on a stranger’s face) You can fake this if you don’t really feel it.

D – Reach my hands out toward that vital relational object and then fold them to my chest. A gesture of receptivity and acceptance. A reminder of my unique power of consent.

E – Say Aloud “Yes, please.” “Beauty is.” or hum “Ommm” as a final act of transmuting this act into the collective.

What do you think? Can a small act of personal magick transform the landscape of current events? Might these little rituals be the building blocks of the miracle that thinkers like Daniel Pinchbeck and Douglas Rushkoff have begun to recognize is our only possibility of deliverance from the disaster that we’ve collectively set in motion?

Would love to hear your opinion, here in the comments, or on the Creekmason Discord.