Naming the Electrons in Your Electronic Orbit

Every year or two, I do an assessment of my social atom as a sketch.

The social atom, created by Jacob Moreno, founder of psychodrama, is a diagnostic tool to help clients identify the people in their lives they feel close to. Placing themselves as the nucleus in the center, with their friends or family around them at different distances from the center, the atom provides a snapshot, or an embodied sculpture of the client’s interpretation of their personal relationships.

I use an adaptation of this activity on paper to reflect on the current status of my social network, to notice and name the people who are in my life, and to recognize those who are no longer central in my life. I use a big enough page to place some people in outer circles or orbits, if I still consider them part of my life, but not part of my immediate social atom. I’ll come back to this, as there are at least three layers or circles.

Relationships are fluid. People come and go, some return, some depart, some remain, and new people enter, in a movement that sometimes feels like the ebb and flow of the tides, or the spiraling movement of the stars.

I find it helpful to draw a social atom periodically for two reasons: to name and appreciate the people who are currently stars in my orbit, and to let go of the people who have moved on (and to set them free in my mind and heart). Sometimes this activity reminds me to reach out to people I’ve lost touch with, so that we can reconnect, if that’s wanted. Looking at the shadow side, the social atom helps me to acknowledge when a relationship has become non-reciprocal or hurtful, so that I can decide whether to evict them or hopefully let go gracefully. By creating a social atom, I acknowledge the changing tides, and by naming the electrons/people in my orbit, it gives me a real-time reality check, and helps me to clear my mental/emotional/relational house.

There are many variations on this activity in group work, e.g., building constellations in addition to atoms. On my drawing I place people farther out from the nucleus who are still in my orbit, and others even farther away if I still consider them as part of my galaxy. But I mainly focus on the immediate social atom in my life: the people I feel close to who love, support, and include me and vice-versa.

One of the challenges of the Covid pandemic is that it forced us into isolation, which scrambled a great many of our relationships and the patterns we perceive as making those relationships meaningful, such as singing or working together in close proximity, hugging, or dining out together. The political divisiveness in the US and other countries, and the war in Ukraine have further isolated us or damaged our sense of trust, sometimes breaking up families and friendships, as if the pandemic’s death toll, financial strain, and the long-Covid illness that many have experienced weren’t difficult enough. To say nothing of the attacks on human rights, the shifting sands of social media platforms, and the ravages of climate change.

However, one of the positive outcomes during this time has been that our electronic network became stronger, at least for those of us with access to, and the ability to use technology. The adaptation to Zoom and other platforms has allowed us to connect with people from all over the world, forging new alliances and friendships, some of which are profoundly meaningful, intellectually stimulating, and/or emotionally close. When I think of my “circle of friends” today, some of them are in different countries or different states, but we greet each other on our computer screens regularly, with great affection, and we dive hungrily into conversations, meditations, or creative work. After nearly three years of social isolation, I am out of the habit of seeing friends who live much closer to me, and it occurs to me that these electronically sustained relationships have become a saving grace for thousands of people, and deserve to be recognized on our social atoms.

When my husband worked from home for 18 months during the pandemic, we expected things to eventually “go back to normal”. But instead, we created a new normal, and a new “community” that is broader, globally, yet also more intimate because it comes right into our homes. Our meeting spaces do not require us to travel long distances, or for our houses or offices to be immaculate, nor do they require us to wear suits or heels, if we prefer not to, or masks, or to pay extra for parking, lunches, or highway tolls.

We’ve become more informal, but also more available to our online friends. In fact, the relative ease we have in connecting online now, also makes it easier to identify the relationships which have drifted out with the tide, because it’s simple to connect, electronically, if we choose to do so. This isn’t a judgement on those choices, because obviously there are numerous challenges and demands on our lives which can limit our social time with friends, family, or colleagues, and all of us are free to move on to different star systems whenever we please.

Still, it matters little from the perspective of the atom, whether a person has vacated their spot because of extraneous pressures or personal displeasure, if their absence creates a vacuum. It is important to consider those circumstances, however, before relegating these “electrons” to a different section of the page, or removing them from the page altogether.

But it is worth noting that there’s been a sea change in our lives over the past three years. The tides of time have rearranged our communities, taking some people away permanently, and bringing new people together dramatically, by which I mean swiftly, efficiently, and often across great distances.

In my social atom this year are the names of half a dozen people who are friends because of the magic of electronics. I’ve never met most of them in person. I am buoyed and enriched by their presence in my life, which would never have happened except for the pandemic. I’m deeply grateful for the people in my social atom and in my orbit, electronically and in person. And I’m grateful to Jacob Moreno for giving us this mirror to reflect the stars in our lives.

The seed remembers
The seed, the stem, the water in each cell,
the chemical magic of light turning to chlorophyll.
The seed remembers all of this in its tight knot of DNA,
in its dreaming as the rain drops trickle into its core.

We remember in our atoms that we are light and love.
We know this in our essence, our smell, our pudgy flesh and our graying hair.
We remember in the song that lives in us, even when we can’t hear the words.
The seed of Life remembers how to laugh, how to crow,
how to stretch upward yawning open to the sky
to the stars which sing their lullabies to us to keep us hoping and guide our direction
our compass points in the dark.

The seed remembers how, with help from water,
to break open the husk when the time is right.
To form new fingers and arms, lifting up through the soil, to what is life,
to the Holy Yes calling us ever upward to breath.

The seed remembers its grandmothers and the vast continents of green.
The seed remembers the songs of the ancient ones
and carves them into a secret place
for the next thousand generations of seeds, of life, of sustenance.

The seed remembers how to take root in rocky soil,
even in the bombed out, scorched out and scarred bits of earth.
The seed remembers, singing:
“Life, Life! Come back to us. Live here. Bloom. Sustain the children. Feed them.”

The seed remembers how to survive in deep winter freezes and deserts of baked earth,
in cracked, clay fissures with golden spires of light reaching down to illuminate the dark.

The seed remembers how to restore a broken world,
To replenish what was lost with vast blankets of wheat, corn, and sunflowers.

For those of you who’ve been grumbling about 2021 and the prospect of 2022, I want to offer another perspective. Because despite our cynicism about the state of the world, and even in the midst of cultural and climate challenges, there have been blessings, and there has been progress. Let’s not lose track of this. Our vision may be clouded by fatigue, but there’s a baby in the bathwater, and it’s ours.

Yesterday, on a zoom call with friends, we began with our usual a five-minute meditation, to simply “arrive” in the present moment.  As soon as I settled in, however, I found that I could not “empty” my mind, because my heart was overflowing with gratitude.

If you haven’t read Heather Cox Richardson’s year end summary of events on Dec. 30^th 2021, please do. She went over the accomplishments and errors of our new administration. I’ll post a link here, so you can look at it. But my sense of gratitude and optimism goes beyond politics. And it obligates me to respond.

I think the hardest part of 2021 was watching the fabric of our society being ripped apart. It wasn’t just people in government, it was our neighbors and family members, our school boards, and our first responders. We’re going to have to work hard to repair this, to re-weave the fabric, in order to bring compassion and public safety and human dignity back together as a society. And that’s a lot to do.

But IMHO 2021 was a vast improvement over 2020. This gives me a glimmer of hope and a sense of momentum that I haven’t felt for years. Here are a few examples for those of us in the United States:

First, we got a humane new president, who finally put together a plan for addressing the pandemic, for getting people vaccinated, and a lot of people DID get vaccinated, including children.  It’s not perfect, but we didn’t even have a plan before 2021.
We pulled out of Afghanistan, even though a LOT of mistakes were made.
We rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement.
We passed the Infrastructure Act.
We passed the American Rescue Plan, which brought millions of children out of poverty.
We began to reunite children with their families, children who should never have been separated in the first place.  That continues to make my blood boil, but we’re starting to pull things together.

And then there are the multitude of unforeseen consequences that sprang from us being so isolated. We found new ways to connect to the bigger world, through Zoom and other platforms. We started meeting people we never would have met before, because taking classes online gave us a way to find kindred spirits around the globe. We found new ways to perform, worship, study, and engage with each other socially without leaving our homes. Despite our isolation, we united during this time. We adapted and improved our artistry. Our social networks grew. We were able to express the things that mattered, and let go (for the most part) of things that were broken and unfixable. We began to plant seeds of hope, to develop plans for a better future, for economic and social justice, and for improved technology. We even witnessed new improvements in electric vehicles and space exploration.

Although we’re tired, our sense of justice has not diminished, and our need to defend the rule of law to include ALL people has grown stronger, not weaker. We’ve begun to see that this baby is ours, and we’re going to need to protect her, feed her, and wrap her in a strong, soft fabric that we ourselves must weave together, because she’s worth it.

I know there’s a lot of crap to be upset about.

First, we’re still in a pandemic, and people are still being stupid about it, as though it were not real, and as though their personal comfort and preferences outweighed the good of the whole. The rest of us know this is bullshit, and we’re sick and tired of those who prolong this situation by denying it.  We wish we were more like New Zealand.

Second, we’re also sick and tired of the big lie, and of the actors and instigators of the insurrection. In addition, we’re impatient with how long justice is taking to jail or punish those who have tried and continue to try to overthrow our government. These may include some of our neighbors or family members as well as the usual suspects. We’re embarrassed by them, ashamed, angry, and tired.

Third, the climate crisis is scaring the bejesus out of us, with wildfires, tornados, floods, snowstorms, drought, and devastation to our communities, our sacred and wild places, our wildlife, crops, animals, and economy.

Fourth, Fifth, and so on, we’re pissed off that anyone is messing with our voting rights, our reproductive rights, the rights of people seeking political asylum at our borders, and we’re also pissed off about the crisis our healthcare workers are in, because they’ve been coping with a relentless and preventable nightmare for the past two years.
I get all of that.

And I am grateful because I am starting to see the fabric coming together again.  Like a beautiful woven scarf. The threads of which are acts of kindness and reconnection. They are kind words and generous actions, people showing up to do the work, people listening to each other, people saying yes. This is not a flimsy fabric: it’s a warm woolen blanket on a winter night, it’s a parachute, a sail, and a tablecloth set before us on the table. It is social and climate justice work, a vigil, a meal, a phone call. It is the practice of law and the letters we write to hold people accountable. It is acts of courage and determination and words of encouragement. I’m incredibly grateful to be starting the year 2022, and to recognize that this baby is ours to care for.

Thank you for all that you do, and please keep up the good work: keep working for justice, keep writing the letters, keep calling, keep showing up. Let your voice be heard! Keep writing, keep weaving, and especially, keep loving.  We are the ones who will carry this forward.

p.s. Thank a nurse today.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-30-2021?r=gjvdn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

I’m not a firefighter.  I am a women’s advocate.  I have worked with survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault.

There are different kinds of fires in our lives, so the metaphor won’t apply to every circumstance, but here is how it does apply.
To stop most fires, you have to cut off the supply of oxygen (or fuel).
You can pour water on some fires, but that creates a lot of smoke and damage.

Chemical fires tend to get worse when you pour water on them, like the containers which burned on the Straits of Juan de Fuca on October 24, 2021. The containers were carrying a combustible powder: potassium amyl xanthate.  Exposure to heat and moisture causes it to burn or explode and release poisonous gas.  Unfortunately, the crew, (which was rescued by the Canadian Coast Guard), poured water on the containers to put out the fire, and that turned out to be a bad idea. You don’t want to do that.

To quickly extinguish small fires, you want to suffocate them by removing the oxygen.

Here’s what I mean:
Giving an abusive person, especially a manipulative narcissist a lot of time to talk is like giving the fire more oxygen. It’s like fanning the flames.
The quickest way to stop this kind of fire is to simply not engage.

Let me repeat that.
The quickest way to stop allowing abusers to continue VERBAL abuse or arguments, is to simply not engage.  Don’t answer phone calls or texts. Have them go through a third party, if you can, like your attorney. Or keep conversations as short and unemotional as possible.  Stick to facts, but don’t argue or debate.

Verbal and emotional abusers want to dominate and control their intended target by luring them into absurd and twisted arguments, by saying ridiculous things, by accusing their target of being bad and wrong or mean, in order to elicit a defensive response and keep the argument and the conversation going.  They enjoy this.  This gives them the satisfaction of engaging the person and throwing them off-balance.

Don’t get sucked into that.

It’s important to keep an eye on the fire for your own safety, but you don’t have to let them know what you’re doing, because they thrive on the attention.

You may not be able to prevent a fire (sorry, Smoky), but don’t give it fuel or oxygen.
Spare your breath for breathing.   Be safe.

Somewhere back in time
a younger version of myself
stronger, with muscles build up from biking and playing
with arms strong enough to climb trees
with good balance, and hearing so accurate
that I could hear the fall of a leaf or the snap of a twig.

Somewhere back in time I’m climbing up the madrona tree in our front yard.
The one my swing hangs from
the one that looks out across the neighbor’s hedge, with a view across the harbor.
My hands and feet are nimble
I’m light, slight for my age, and I can tell instinctively
which branches are strong enough to support me
and which ones are not.

It’s tricky to maneuver in this big tree.
The peeling inner bark: papery bits of it fall away
revealing the green of the inner trunk, smooth and slick.
The limbs are far enough apart that sometimes
I have to stand on tiptoe to reach the branches above me,
and I scrabble with my feet in tennis shoes on the rough outer bark
to clamber up to the next level.

The breeze in the leaves laughs along with me.
“Yes!” It says.
I’m in a state of pure delight. I can see over the top of the house now,
and I’m almost to the upper branches of this dear old friend.

She cradles me in her arms
though like any wild child I barely hold still long enough to return the embrace.
The sweet smell of the leaves
and the open sky somewhere above the umbrella canopy of the boughs
cheer me onward.

I see my big brother walking along the street.  Ha!
When he steps into the driveway I shout “Hi Jim!”

He looks around, baffled.
I can’t contain my laughter so he finally sees me and talks to me for a minute.
Then he goes into the house.

Soon after this my mother comes out and says:
“Debbie, come down now.  You’re scaring your brother.”
She goes back inside.

This is too wonderful to bear!
I clamber down, all smiles,
until Mom forbids me from

EVER CLIMBING UP THERE AGAIN.

But see?
I just did.
Just now.