No Systems

I have no system to offer you.

Only suggestions.

For building basic skills I’ve found helpful when navigating the webs of systems built by people who have outsourced their basic skills.

‪I talk a lot about “culture,” mainly as a way of dissolving the systems people really seem to want to refer to as tractable, bounded “religions.” And the number 1 question I get from people perplexed by this is, “What am I supposed to do if I don’t have a [robust] culture?”‬

What, indeed? “Religions” are (apparently) something you can just go get, and then have. “Culture” is, like, luck of the draw.

Perhaps it’s more helpful for me to frame it this way: “Religion” is an imposed system. “Culture” is the stuff you don’t HAVE to systematize.

I hope this illustrates the way these are not alternatives but really OPPOSITES. If you want to orient your life with “religion” — by which I mean chosen systems — you’re going to be constantly RESISTING culture, MAKING yourself AND OTHERS understand where you’re coming from.

Whereas, you may not feel like it’s much to go on, but “culture” is the expression of basic lifeways of those around you — an expression of their basic skills — and basic skills can be cultivated and used to navigate that skillfully, which simultaneously strengthens the culture.

Now, this might not be the most aesthetically appealing move to you, and I sympathize with that. I avoided my native culture’s aesthetics for a long time. But I came to find that cultivating basic skills generates basic beauty all around, which those around can appreciate.

Maybe you don’t live in or around the culture you were born into. That’s a quintessential human experience, and it’s also one that can be intentionally created, which people do all the time. Physically moving is perhaps the most powerful force of cultural change that there is.

Conversion to Judaism is sort of an exception that proves the rule here. I often have to explain to religion/systems-oriented people that it’s better understood as “immigration” than “baptism,” because Jewishness really ISN’T “religion” but rather the CULTURE of a VIRTUAL PLACE.

But that is, as I said, an exception with a whole other repair to do. The point is culture and place. I celebrate the widespread language of spiritual “embodiment,” but always with the cultural group-body and the land-sky place-body as INTEGRAL to the body and its basic skills.