Questions of purpose arise in times of chaos, both personal and collective. When my partner suddenly passed away more than five years ago, I was catapulted into a deep investigation of meaning: within my life, his, and life itself.
What does it mean to be alive? To be human today? How do the events that unfold in my life connect to those of my ancestors? What meaning exists within our shared connections, with those we encounter and with whom our lives are intertwined? What does our planetary experience—our home upon the Earth—have to offer our understanding of consciousness?
Three days before Donald passed, we were on a plane to Mexico City. Our daughter was asleep in my arms when he pulled a tattered book out of his bag. He asked if I wanted to read it with him, sharing that he had just started it, and that he would start it again from the beginning if I liked. It was a rare and generous offer, to read together. It would mean him holding the book up between us and waiting at the end of each pair of pages for me to catch up before he turned the page.
We spent an hour or so in rapt with the ideas as they unfolded from the text. The basic premise was this: this life and all of its events and encounters are a game.
Stay with me. From our intimate friendships, to our interactions with store clerks and strangers, to the larger relations between nations, everything can be seen through the lens of game. There are, then, games within games, and games within games within games.
There are two kinds of games: finite games and infinite games. And just so, there are two kinds of players: finite players and infinite players.
To put it simply, a finite game is played to be won or lost. An infinite game is begun and engaged with the intention of continuing the game. A finite player plays to win or lose; each move the infinite player makes is to serve the ongoing game.
We exchanged glances between paragraphs as our minds lit up with resonance.
No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others.
Simultaneously the others with whom we are in relation are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character. This is not to say that we live in a fluid context, but that our lives are themselves fluid. As in the Zen image we are not the stones over which the stream of the world flows; we are the stream itself. As we shall see, this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons. Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.
It was this image of life as a stream that flooded back to me in the days after he passed. I have written and shared elsewhere about this, that in the moment of his passing I was drifting off to sleep in a Yucatecan hospital waiting room when I felt what can only be described as pure peace flow through my veins, like a river, from crown to toes. When I opened my eyes a few moments later to the doctor standing before me, I knew what he had come to say.
Two days of deep grief, psychic dismemberment, pain, disbelief, and necessary coordination with family, friends, and embassy grabbed hold of me, and hard. I had forgotten the peace, the sense of deep interconnection and entwinement, a link to the stream that connects us.
And then beauty began to unfold. It’s difficult to describe the poetry and symmetry in those days after his death. The impossibility of articulating the pure gift of it all is why I have chosen to write about it in verse in my memoir. There are things that only poetry can attempt to convey.
What I can say clearly is that I was invited to spend some days at the hacienda where we were married, some short distance of that Yucatecan city. And there, surrounded by fireflies, palms, and birdsong, and held by the friends and families who gathered there, I remembered our vows.
A: We will join together not as two fixed halves of a single whole, but as two streams join into a river.
D: We will not merely be joined, but mixed, so when we come upon hard times we will not crack, but will flow through cracks;
A: And when our paths must part, we will not be parted, but part of me will flow with you, and part of you with me.
D: And I will flow in you until we rejoin that vast endless sea.
A: Until we evaporate again—
D: Until you return to me as a summer storm—
A: Until you return to me as morning dew.
This image of being joined as two streams brought back that distinct feeling of peace: our deep entanglement. But it also reminded me of the book and that Zen idea of life as a stream. As I located the book in his bag and thumbed through the pages we read on the plane, I revisited phrases which had given us pause, some of which we had even read aloud together.
Where the finite player plays for immortality, the infinite player plays as a mortal. In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires complete vulnerability. To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.
Death is a defeat in finite play. It is inflicted when one's boundaries give way and one falls to an opponent. The finite player dies under the terminal move of another.
Although infinite players choose mortality, they may not know when death comes, but we can always say of them that "they die at the right time" (Nietzsche).
Returning to these ideas, I was deeply stirred by the timing and significance of his sharing the book with me. We had not spoken much of death, not even when his father passed of cancer just one year earlier, and though he grieved.
More profoundly, I recalled something he said as we looked up between paragraphs on the plane: that he had started the book some time before, that he wasn’t ready for it then. What flooded back to me, then, was an image of that ragged book there with us at the hacienda, some two years before. It had been there on the bedside table, next to our marital bed.
Symmetry: what my poet husband called those moments where timelines collapsed, where inner and outer collide in an wild and penetrating instant, giving birth to new meaning.
This experience of symmetry I came to understand as what Jung termed synchronicity. Synchronicity posits a pattern to our lives, rooted in archetypal unfolding. We are part of a cosmos, spiraling out into space, returning again and again to the same ideas, the same quarrels, the same shapes, the same play. Only the masks change. As the Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote in The Bow and the Lyre, “I have been here before.”
If we are part of a stream of life, as Zen philosophy intuits, then life itself is eternal. We participate in the stream as particles of water, feeling ourselves as separate, but in fact, joined to the greater body, and ultimately inseparable .
I’m not sure where I’m going with any of this. Perhaps it is to say that war feels familiar. That this kind of immense human brutality, and vengeance, and the illusion and attempt of control over fellow human and planet feels as old as time. That this heartbreak we feel is ancient. Perhaps it is to remind us of the infinite game of which we are all a part, if we can see it that way. That, to be infinite players, we must enact a radical vulnerability that makes permeable the borders and boundaries of our consciousness—those qualities we see as distinguishing me from you, us from them—and realize our profound interconnection.
In the wake of the brutal genocide playing out in Palestine, it is becoming increasingly clear that the toxic patriarchy which has guided us here, and by which we are blinded, has reached its peak. It is this virulent imbalance of power, the ideologies and dogma, the adherence to firm logic and a paradigm of mechanism which has landed us in this place. We have forgotten our shared source of the Earth, our shared planet; we have forsaken our Mother. We take up arms against brothers, against children. And for what?
Some say we are witnessing a real evil at play; I do not believe in a literal evil. No, it is clear we are held under the clutches of the unconscious. When horrors such as these flood into reality from the darkest corners of our human fears and dreams, it is the ruthless grip of a collective complex, one guided by the deepest primal wounds. When seized by a complex, we act impulsively, as if we have no other choice.
No, I don’t believe in evil. I tell my daughter that no child is bad, that no human is bad; but yes, sometimes we do bad things. It is important to me that she understand this, that she doesn’t mistake actions for the inherent value of person and of life. When I fall short of how I want to be and act as her mother (which I often do), I try to see where some deep and hidden wounded part of me took hold of the reigns. I am open with her in this as I ask for her forgiveness and patience, and in this process, we are both reminded that we are human, that we are mortal, and that compassion—for ourselves and others—is truly the best medicine.
With the unconscious always at play, we do not always act from our conscious intentions. This does not make us wrong, but it does require us to look deeper, to tend to what grips us, and to grow. It requires us to do the difficult work of making the unconscious conscious.
The duality of right and wrong is a natural, simplistic model we learn as children. It is the framework through which we begin to establish our values. Duality, more generally, serves to help us understand the world around us, to categorize our insights in useful ways. It helps us to establish our personhood: I am me, and you are you.
It is our deep human need for belonging that, paradoxically, enables and sustains our sense of separation. In order to be accepted within the order of the clan, of family, of culture, and society, we begin to push certain qualities and behaviors into the shadows. We establish ourselves to be a particular way, a way that has served to keep us specifically in tact with the greater order, and unconsciously, we consign all else to the realm of Other.
The work of making the unconscious conscious is ultimately about recognizing the ways in which we have been blinded to the living complexity of our world. That right and wrong are simply labels (and oftentimes implicit), that there is a spectrum of story and idea that have built our particular viewpoints. That each polarity is made up of opposites which inherently mirror the other. That wherever identity lies on a spectrum, it contains the full range of everything else.
To make the unconscious conscious, we have to be willing to let go of who we think we are, to let go of our foundational worldview. This is a groundless place which tends to invoke a sense of deep fear. Can we let our shadows in to play?
What I am getting at is that this genocide is not just out there, in Gaza. This immense collective drama playing out is not simply the effects of deep systemic issues. Yes, it is symptomatic of a dying imperialist and capitalist paradigm, but systems and paradigms also emerge out of the psyche. This genocide lives within us all.
Where do we enact control over the Other in our lives? And not just in literal ways, over the embodied human Other. Going deeper, we might ask, where and to what extent have we pushed away and contained our own indigenous nature? In what ways have we imprisoned that part of us? Where have we severed our connection to Earth, to living spirit, to deep ancestral wisdom and story, to the heart? Where do we push away our imagination, our dreamscapes, our childlike nature, and our wildness? All these things we fear because they seek to threaten our sense of logic and certainty, our constructed sense of order and our impulse to control.
To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.
We have been pushing down and down and down the unconscious. We are witnessing the immense bloodshed spewing out from our own psyches. We have all committed this genocide.
But, a revolution is happening now. We feel it. We are all primed for this emergence, we are ready. Palestine will emerge victorious and free, even as she mourns her children. She will reign as we unchain her. She will take root and blossom in all of us. She will be a flower, a great and ancient tree. We will gather around her, we will hear her children sing.
This is the infinite game. We are all here, together. We have been here before.