Finding Your Frequency: A Series of 3 parts

Part 2 Meeting the Maven, and getting out of the shadows

I don’t fit in this world.

What I mean is that I look at what we have built, what we celebrate, what we ignore, what we are willing to let die in the periphery of our attention… and I do not recognize this place as a world that good people would make.

We mark our big life moments by releasing balloons into the sky and detonating fireworks over the trees, and the balloons come down in the stomachs of sea turtles and the fireworks send birds off their nests to die of exhaustion, and we call it a celebration. We can recite a stranger’s batting average and a celebrity’s marriages and we do not know the first name of the person who has lived next door to us for a decade. We have built a use-and-discard culture so complete that it now includes living beings, and we barely blink.

People are rounding up wild horses right now. Helicopters over Callahan, running them until the foals drop. There is a move underway actively redefining “harm” under the Endangered Species Act so that destroying the only place a species can live no longer counts as hurting it…as though you could unhouse something out of existence and call your hands clean. There are rich men hunting whale families. There are governments taking buy-outs to let wildlife crime run. There are whole communities buying lies about the medicinal value of keratin and pangolin scales, and it has become a race between whether they learn the truth first or kill the last of a species before ever understanding who those animals were and what they were truly worth.

In Detroit, two dogs made the news cycle after dying in the heat this week. Hundreds more met the same fate and were never counted, not just in Detroit, but all over the globe. And many others are being dumped daily on the streets and in the woods, far outnumbering the humans who are coming to try to save them.

And we are in the middle of a mass extinction. Not a coming one. The middle of one.

We are a culture terrified of death…and our answer to that terror is the next skin cream to keep us looking youthful, the next weight-loss shot to give us the appearance of health, the next pill or procedure that puts dying a little further off. We will do anything to hold death away from our own bodies while stepping over the carcasses of everything else on our way to the counter or clinic. We have decided that death is unbearable when it is ours, and invisible when it is theirs.

I am angry every single day. I am devastated every single day. And I have not shown that, because I truly believe that condemnation builds nothing, that aggression closes the door I am trying to open, that people should be met as wounded and treated with patience and tenderness. All of that is true, and all of that is genuinely who I am.

But somewhere in being tender, I mistook not being aggressive for not showing anger. And I stopped being honest.

So here is honest: I am furious. And underneath the fury, in the shadows, is something dangerous; what is true in that space is that there are times that I have started to wonder whether goodness is the outlier. Whether I am the outlier.

I want to believe people are good. I want to believe that human nature bends toward love, that evil is the aberration and kindness is the baseline. I have staked my entire life on that belief.

But, in the shadows, I find myself asking:

Where is the evidence?

Because from where I stand, in the dark places I go, the evidence looks thin.

And I think we are all feeling that thinning of our humanity.

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What the dark does to us

In the first part of this series, I wrote about the parts of us that this work buries; these are the parts that we lose completely and have to go in search of again and unearth.

But there is another thing that can happen to parts of us.

Sometimes instead of getting buried, a part of us stays in full view…but darkens to survive.

Erwin McManus, in The Seven Frequencies of Communication, describes seven native ways of moving through the world. The Motivator who inspires. The Healer who sees you. The Challenger who tells the hard truth. The Commander who gives direction. The Professor who teaches. The Seer who envisions what’s coming. The Maven who brings about new realities.

And every one of them also has the potential to cast a shadow. The same frequency, when inverted, turns from giving to guarding, and becomes a kind of darkness itself.

The Motivator becomes the performer. The Healer becomes the cipher. The Challenger becomes the manipulator. The Commander becomes the dictator. The Professor becomes the diminisher. The Seer becomes the perfectionist. The Maven becomes the nihilist.

When we look at the landscape of animal care, these shadow parts are everywhere.

We know them. We have worked beside them. We have been them.

We are the ones who go into the dark places. Into the crawl space, the wooded lot, the crate in the alleyway, the lab, the transport ship, the house that smells like death before you’re through the door. We go because there’s an animal in there and nobody else is coming.

Nobody walks that far into the dark that many times and comes back unchanged. The dark comes with you. It gets in the car with you. It lies down beside you at night. And after enough years it isn’t around you anymore.

It’s on you. In you.

We have been in the shadows so long, saving what needed saving, that we are now wearing the shadows and inhaling them inside of us.

And consumed by the dark, we can no longer see ourselves or each other.

The story this culture tells is that animal welfare is full of difficult people. Bitter people. Too-much people. Untrustworthy people who do not care about animals at all. I have watched us say it about each other for years, and I think we have it entirely wrong. What we are looking at is not bad character. It is some of the best people alive, standing in their own shadow, unable to find the light switch.

The dictator was a Commander who watched too many things fall apart and reached for force to hold them together. The perfectionist was a Seer who was relied on so much for their vision, that they came to wield it and their competence as a shield they could never put down. The cipher was a Healer who felt so much unbearable pain, she had to revert to feeling nothing at all. The diminisher was a Professor whose knowledge became a chasm of facts that alienated them from true relational connection.

Every shadow in this field has the exact shape of a much-needed gift beneath it.

My own second frequency is the Maven, and she too has been in shadows.

The Maven is the one who brings about new realities. Who takes a theory from over here and a finding from over there and a truth from a field nobody thought to look in, and fuses them into a way of seeing that wasn’t available before. A Maven is a heretic, in a good sense of the word. She’s the one in me who looked at what our field calls “compassion fatigue” and thought: no. That word is far too small.

The Maven is mine to claim. But she became enveloped in the darkness that I have long been stepping into.

The Maven’s shadow is the nihilist, one who doesn’t believe in meaning or purpose. I never went all the way there; I have never once stopped believing in meaning. But a shadow doesn’t have to swallow you to fall across you. And the nihilist shadow is absolutely identifiable in the darkening of my Maven when I admit I have trouble believing that the world can still bend toward good.

I didn’t lose my faith in the work.

But I have struggled at times with losing my faith in people.

When that happened, all my Maven creativity and innovation went quiet in the darkness, too. I kept my Maven vision dimmed, safely inside the shadows. Instead of being a Maven and innovating new paradigms that don’t yet exist, I began seeing only what isn’t. But it’s time to bring the Maven out again.

For me, that means speaking candidly about the paradigm shifts I can see, and about the anger and devastation I feel, instead of dialing them down into something more palatable.

Any process of change first involves acknowledgement of what is currently not working. My Maven has a lot to say about what isn’t working.

That doesn’t mean she is going to condemn you.

I don’t believe condemnation has ever built a single thing worth having. I don’t believe aggression opens any door I want to walk through. And I know (I have built my whole life’s work on knowing) that most of the hardness in this world was put there by a wound.

But I am also not going to have the professional, toned-down, peer-reviewed tone of the Healer or the Professor either. As a Maven, I am an iconoclast, an outsider of a world that currently isn’t what it should be. And to build something new we first have to dismantle some things that are. There is demolition that precedes remodeling and remaking.

I acknowledge that the wounds that brought us to this broken place, and the discomfort of demolishing current systems are real and hard, but that is also not an excuse to stay where we are.

Whatever this life has thrown at you (and I have had my own share of that too, more than I have told you), you still carry the responsibility to take hold of your own identity, your own life, and to choose. To choose love. To choose good. Not because it’s fair that the burden falls to the injured, but because it is the only choice that builds anything, and because there is no one else who can make it for you.

So I will meet you with patience. I will meet you with tenderness. That is genuinely who I am.

And I will still ask you to get out of your shadow.

(And I’ll still feel a little angry if you don’t).

I'm asking you to reclaim your unshadowed self, the way I am trying to reclaim mine.

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None of us can afford to let my nihilist be right. Because if goodness really is the outlier, if the evidence really is as thin as it looks from where she stands, then I don’t know how to keep going. And I don’t want to be right. I want to be wrong.

So prove her wrong. Please. I am asking you to prove my nihilist wrong.

My whole Maven path back to reverence runs through paying attention to what is good, and I cannot manufacture that alone. I need there to be more good to pay attention to. I need evidence. And there is only one way that evidence gets made: collectively.

That means I need you.

I need you to be the evidence.

I need you to trust yourself enough to face despair instead of burying your head in the sand while everything dies around you. I need you to name the shadow you’ve been living in — the performer, the cipher, the manipulator, the dictator, the diminisher, the perfectionist, the nihilist — and follow it home to the gift underneath. And then I need you to bring that gift back out into the light.

Do it because the animals cannot advocate for themselves and ecosystems cannot move themselves out of the path of our choices. Because the world’s living beings do not need our hardened, guarded, half-given selves. They need the whole of us, and they always have, and they are running out of time while we stand here in the dark.

You are not an anglerfish

I ask myself constantly how so many people can be oblivious and indifferent to a mass extinction happening in front of them, how there can be more destruction and depravity and use-and-discard in our communities than anything else.

I think it’s happening because so few of us are choosing.

We have been deceived into believing that we evolved to live in the dark. That we belong down here and there is no other choice available. That we couldn’t bear the light anyway, couldn’t stand the discomfort of letting our eyes adjust to that much brightness.

But you are not a f&%*ing anglerfish.

You were not made for the pressure and blackness of the ocean floor. You were not built to be a sit-and-wait creature with translucent skin and one small bioluminescent lure, hanging a scrap of borrowed light in front of your own face and calling it enough. That is an adaptation to darkness so complete that the creature can no longer survive anywhere else.

Your potential is not on the ocean floor.

It is in the brightest and fullest and highest form of human capability and moral beauty this world could ever know.

I never lost faith in what people are. I lost faith that they would choose it.

Because my agony has never been that I don’t believe people are good.

My agony is that they refuse to see and live into how good they really are.

We need people out of their shadows.

Get in the damn light.

Let us be a people coming out of the shadows. Together, let’s do the thing we were made to do in the light.

Nobody is coming, unless we come for each other.

The rescue was never going to arrive from somewhere else. It was always going to be us, walking toward one another with the shadows falling off as we go.

And this too is rescue.

*In it together, for the love of all living beings.