I am grateful that my world and society are so diverse and I celebrate the many different beings and things that remind me of that wonder. I feel sorry for those that fear this difference, those that find it a threat. I would never want to live in a world where people all look like I do, think like I do or believe what I do. A founding statement that has always guided me is the Russian thinker/writer Mikhail Bakhtin when he states in the book: Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. trans. C. Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
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"Everything that pertains to me enters my consciousness, beginning with my name, from the external world through the mouths of others (my mother, and so forth), with their intonation, in their emotional and value-assigning tonality. I realize myself initially through others: from them I receive words, forms, and tonalities for the formation of my initial idea of myself. … Just as the body is formed initially in the mother’s womb, a person’s consciousness awakens wrapped in another’s consciousness. (xx)
Truth is not born nor is it found inside the head of an individual person; it is born between people collectively searching for the truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction." (110)
"I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou) … The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion. To be means to communicate … To be means to be for another, and through the other for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another … I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another." (287)
"Monologism at its extreme denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach…another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change everything in the world of my consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons." (Bakhtin: 292-93)
"The dialogic nature of consciousness. The dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open- ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium." (Bakhtin: 293)
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I seek to engage in a conversation with (speaking with and thinking with) the differences I encounter daily. To not be mindlessly afraid of what is different from me. To appreciate/understand the uniqueness of everything/everyone. I do not seek difference for difference's sake (when the cultivation of difference becomes another form of rout conformity and silencing of difference - when alternative becomes just another consumer fashion or how subcultures police the interests/expression of their adherents), instead it is the expression of authentic identity that produces something special and allows for others to do the same.
Meditating in my backyard I was gazing at the back of my fence where there is a collection of purple flowers and I noticed one in the middle of them growing from the same vine that was completely different, kind of an albino mutation that lacked the purple of the others, but had its own special beauty. I gazed upon it in wonder and thought on how did this special little flower come to be. An accident of nature or something else - who knows, it not only shined in uniqueness, it also brought into focus the beauty of all of the flowers. The contrast, the difference, enhances them all.
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