Love or Power in Friendship

Summer 2022

I was watching One Piece with Reemo the other day. She’s caught up with the latest episodes and the manga. I’m holding off because I’d rather watch the entire Wano Arc in one go rather than deal with the impatient anticipation of weekly snippets of the next part of the story. We started talking about what we like best about the show. Reemo gravitated towards the heart and life of the show, the bonds that Luffy and his incredibly unique crew shared. She especially loved how each one of the characters was on their own mission, driven by their will to hone their skills, called on by the spirit of adventure and each call sounded slightly different. Luffy was to be the King of the Pirates, Zoro the greatest swordsman in the world, Sanji wanted to find the deep blue, Nami was mapping the world, Usopp dreamt of being a brave warrior of the seas, and Robin wanted to find the mystery behind the ponyglyphs and the lost Century. They all had such different goals, their own direction, a unique melody to their call to arms, and yet, they all shared the same metronome, drummed to the same heartbeat. They were united by Love, bound together by friendship, driven forward and challenged in their personal quests by the camaraderie that wove their destinies together. While I saw the wonder of this honest and genuine emotive engine that propelled the Sunny to the seas, I got caught up in the transformation of these characters rather than the drive that pushed them to become this strong. They all came such a long way, dug deep into their spirit, worked hard to pus their skills forward, were tested again and again, and become more powerful every time. Like WTAF is Zoro in the Wano arc!! AND LUFFY’S 4TH GEAR!!? I was drawn to the power they’ve seemingly appaerated out of thin air ( maybe because my initial attraction to superheroes came from a place of powerlessness), but neglected the real strength of the Straw Hats, their Love. When they disappear for 2 years after Saba Odi, they worked relentlessly, to protect those they cherished, to help themselves and one another, in the same breath, get closer to their goal. One is all and all are one, only if love binds them together, only if its real. A lone wanderer will never reach their destination without companions to enjoy the ride with, without a sense of purpose, a ’why’, to drive them forward. No goal is worth the struggle if our friends aren’t there to welcome us home, if we aren’t there to struggle along side Them. 

Power in our common understanding of it is just an illusion. Foucoult argued that power is circumstantial, it isn’t agential, it’s wielded in and by the circumstances, the role we find ourselves in, but it is put down and evaporates just as soon as we depart the situation or structures that enabled it. Will power however, love, those are uniquely personal to us. There’s this beautiful strength that is felt in a community, the help and support you receive, the sheer belief in your passions, the attestation to the dreams you bring to life. A person can go anywhere when the harmonies of our loved ones amplify our voice.

Capacity, Power and their Natural Origins

The fun part is not the ideas we find, but how the ideas fit together, what we find when we play with the ideas. The fun part is not the powers you were given, but what we do with those powers, those fruits of a loved labor, a labor like all others, but one made special by what we find in the process of honing these powers, having fun with ‘em, how we make these powers our own by imprinting who we essentially are in the stylistic and pragmatic choices we make with our powers. 

What I mean by power here is capacity, or potential to do something cool. I mean your skillz, passions, hobbies, anything you care for, preferably a capacity through which you incrementally grow in or enjoy engaging. Your power could be tapdancing, finishing really long shows and staying invested, making your people laugh, whatever it may be, the fun part of having this capacity is not having it in store somewhere where it doesn’t see the light of day in the actual and living world. A capacity isn’t much more than an idea if you don’t act on it, and choose it consistently enough that it becomes part of your volitional character. 

We usually take power to mean the relational power we may hold in community with other people. Just because you have a power, this doesn’t give you power over other people. Systemic and organized power can only be understood in social or public context. A nark has agential power in a public square because they wear a uniform, they hold a gun licensed to them by a state department of security and defense with a monopoly over the legitamate use of force in a given territory. That same cop, without the uniform or the license to maim off duty, is just a person walking around, as ‘powerful’ as the next person in line at the comics store. The role that this off-hours cop fulfills on shift carries with it a social context of organized power distribution, no matter who fills it. The power they wield for those 8 hours isn’t essential to the nature of their wills, it’s accidental to the set of circumstances that lead to them getting that job or being on shift that day. Now the police force is, questionably, an agreed upon legitimate power structure that we’ve entered in by accepting residency in this territory, under these particular social conventions. 

Other times we may find ourselves in an illegitimate and coercive power structure, based on accidental properties of the empowered person rather than their essential ones. To this day we can frequently find ourselves in personally or systematically imposed, illegitimate, power structures armed with missiles, laws, pens, pushers and suits, actions and choices, gazes and the worst of all, weaponized love. A people can be evicted and erased, beaten and charred, by a slow and violent occupation of a foreign army. Others can be searched and seized, exploited and discarded, shuned or shoved by agents who embody persistent racial, ethnic and relegious hierarchies. You may be harassed, assulted, oggled, looked down upon, doubted and instrumentalized, objectified and commodified by People who employ the weight of their sex or gender and impose a reproductive hierarchy. You can even be picked on for being the smallest one in a group that establishes a height hierarchy in the distribution of jokes. 

Point is, in all these cases, the power exercised by agents by these militantly or volitionally authoritative power structures is always based on accidental properties this human being finds themselves responsible in rather than essential properties to their humanity or personhood. Their birth in an occupied country and an occupying country, which side of the gun each person stands on, is a stroke of fate. The continued choice of employing a suffocating occupation to enforce an illegitimate hierarchy, is a military and volitional act of cannibalism. The color of your skin is accidental, your religion is accidental, your sex or gender are accidental, your generational wealth is accidental, your intellect, beauty, sexuality, degree of capacitation or disability, your height too are accidental; despite systematic and social enforcement of social hierarchies being founded on accidental properties of our humanity, they establish lasting and unsustainable conditions of justice that violate the natural and essential properties of human life. In some ways the essential nature of every will is deeply personal and individuated, and in another, every one of us shares the same essence as living beings;  a shared signature which sources our biological makeup to the same point of departure as other humans, animals and plants under the Sun, the same ancestry that made our life here on earth possible. The same world Spirit which moves us towards our shared Horizon too.

Some baloney reflections on what I think a Shadow is

The Shadow is an obscuration of what we are in an effort to invert into the infinite realm of what we are not. When met with fear, resentment or doubt, this centre of gravity for the nhilation of the self becomes volatile. Rather than clarifying, it becomes an obscuration of who we are, who we are in the absence of light. When met with unobstructed and untampered Love, it flowers into its natural placement in the world, and flows down like a wandering beam from the Moon, streaming through… When we meet our selves with shame, we perpetuate our guilt in our actions, trapping ourselves in vicious cycles of pride and shame without once blinking at gratitude; at least thats my current emotional spectrum hahaha. 

There’s a black marbles door in the attic of my House of Self. It’s a deep dark hole I lose myself in sometimes. When I was younger I used to dive past its gates and soar through the nebulous clouds of my limited imagination. I pushed it onto the waters of my Heart, the waters I share with this incredible world, and my imagination found new heights. Our imaginations require a limitless emotive engine to support its limitless endeavours. When we’re children, no one told us what was possible or impossible for us yet, we didn’t stand in the way of the currents that flow through and from us, nor did we clasp onto them out of greed or insecurity. When we were kids we leaned towards love. It’s no wonder we always landed back there at the end of the day. 

“So if your sense of self relies on not looking under the carpet, it wont be happy when the shadow starts to emerge” - Deepak Chopra

Make peace with your sense of self, and your shadow lays still. The patterns you repeat are the product of repressed behavioral patterns. The behavioral patterns aren’t necessarily the problem, why they’re being repressed is. We have to acknowledge our imperfections if we intend on changing or accepting them. Change isn’t an incremental process, it’s the inevitable motion of an unfolding world. And yet, it can take eons to move an inch.