The Mindful Activist Episode 15 – Monica
Matt Ready: That’s an orch- a vineyard.
Monica: Is that the neighbor’s vineyard?
Matt Ready: Yeah. Yes it is. Okay, we are now live on YouTube. No one’s watching, except maybe the YouTube technicians, and I’m showing right now is pictures of different things, so they’re hearing us.
Monica: Okay.
Matt Ready: Well, if they were listening, they would be hearing us.
Monica: They’re hearing us if they’re hearing this.
Matt Ready: Yes, and anyone in the world could be listening and watching this little video if they have access to YouTube.
Monica: True.
Matt Ready: So, shall we introduce ourselves?
Monica: Let’s do that! [Laughs]
Matt Ready: Who are you?
Monica: My name is Monica Bell. That was my given name, and I live in Port Hadlock, Washington State, in the USA, on Planet Earth.
[Laughter]Monica: Who are you?
Matt Ready: My name is Matt Ready, and I also live in Washington State [laughs], but I have a lot of identities. I normally list them off at the beginning of my —
Monica: Go for it!
Matt Ready: Well, I’m like a politician. I do tell people that.
Monica: An elected politician?
Matt Ready: Yeah. I’m a Hospital Commissioner.
Monica: Wow, flash that card.
Matt Ready: Yeah, but that’s not like my primary identity. I’m a activist, actually I think of myself as a philosopher as my primary identity, but I do have a B.A. in Philosophy but I think a lot of the philosophers out there would not want to say I’m a philosopher with a B.A. in Philosophy, although I did publish a book.
Monica: On philosophy?
Matt Ready: Well, on mindful activism, which is a very philosophical topic.
Monica: Okay.
Matt Ready: I mean I’m a philosopher in the spirit of like Thoreau, you know. In any case, I’m the developer of the hive1.net platform and the host of The Mindful Activist webcast.
Monica: Where was your mother born Matt?
Matt Ready: My mother I think was born in Massachusetts.
Monica: Okay. What’s her name?
Matt Ready: Mary Ready. Why do you ask about my mother?
Monica: I think about, we talk about — we’ve been talking a lot about power and vortexes, and it’s an interesting thing in our society that’s very patriarchal, that we don’t honor the female bloodline necessarily, and I was once part of a — I went to a panel where a civil rights elder who passed away a couple years ago, Vincent Harding, asked this question of all the youth on the panel. They were talking about violence and racism in the inner city, and he asked them all to introduce themselves by saying their name and their mother’s name, where their mother was born, and it brought a different spirit to — we all came through our mothers. They’re like the vortex we came into the physical realm through.
Matt Ready: At that meeting you are bringing everyone’s mother into the room, right there. It’s like you’re bringing the spirit of mother love and relationship and all the complexity that is there.
Monica: And honoring it.
Matt Ready: Through everyone’s mind, which forces — say’s your mother’s — you could have just said, ” Say your mother’s name,” but say your mother’s name and where she was born, now taking it back to her mother, you’re invoking two levels of mother power to go through that person speaking before they say anything else. I love that as a warm-up exercise.
Monica: So Mary in Massachusetts?
Matt Ready: Mary, yes, and she’s no longer with us.
Monica: She’s passed.
Matt Ready: Yes.
Monica: Sorry for your loss. How long ago did she go?
Matt Ready: I think it might be over 10 years now.
Monica: Okay. Well, you’re with us right now, Mary.
[Pause]Monica: So Matt, what do you want to talk about?
Matt Ready: Well, for you to be a qualified — to be able to say you are a guest of The Mindful Activist I have to ask you the one question I ask every guest.
Monica: I like that.
Matt Ready: Which is, do you consider yourself an activist?
Monica: I do not self-identify as an activist. Nope. I don’t. You want to know why?
Matt Ready: If you want to tell us, sure.
Monica: A long while ago I was going to a university that had as its motto Educating Minds And Hearts To Change The World, and that’s part of why I applied to go to that University. It’s like, wow! That’s a great motto! I want to be educated, my mind and heart to change the world, and that’s something you say a lot also, I’m going to change the world, change the world for the better, and I was really focused on school, very motivated, getting really good grades, working my butt off, and after I graduated I was living in San Francisco, in California, and I was dating a man who — after all my studies I decided I wanted to go away from the city and go learn how to grow food, and part of that is that I really wanted to have sense of self-sufficiency and that was something I was really passionate about at the time. This person I was dating didn’t want me to move away from the city because he likes dating, and he was comfortable where he was, and was afraid he was going to lose our relationship. So getting around to the activist part, in the heat of a conversation where he was feeling really afraid I was gonna move, he got really frustrated and just said, “You can’t change the world!” And I said to myself, “That is the wrong answer.” [Laughs] In my mind I was thinking, I went to this school where we’re focusing on changing the world, and I’m absolutely going to be part of changing the world, and who are you to tell me that I can’t? Then after thinking about it for even more time, I started realizing this whole notion of changing the world or not changing the world is so silly, because by being in the world we are changing it, by being human beings. Even if we were rocks, we’d be changing the world because wind would be blowing against us, we would be sinking into the soil and compressing things, worms would want to hang out underneath us. We can’t not change the world. So when I think about the world, the word activist, I have the same feeling of like, we are all active, we are all playing a really important part, and sometimes I feel that the word activist is used as a way to judge or evaluate someone’s efficacy in changing the world in a positive way, and it tends to be used by people who have the time, like the monetary privilege, and the time, and the energy to do things that are community-oriented, that are not feeding their family or sheltering their kids. So I don’t call myself an activist because I feel that everyone is playing a really important part in creating the world that we all want to live in together.
Matt Ready: It’s kind of like, you know, you look at what Martin Luther King said, it’s like you’re not going to remember the actions of your enemies, you’re going to remember the inactions of your friends. It’s like, if you’re not an activist, are you standing still ignoring pain and suffering around you?
Monica: You’re saying you want people to be activist.
Matt Ready: I say, I actually say this at the commission meetings ’cause I get — several times other commissioners said, “Don’t bring your activism in here,” and I’m like, “Activism just means trying to take action to make the world a better place.” I think that’s what every human being is doing, it doesn’t make sense to say don’t bring it in here. I mean we’re in a position of power over a hospital district, we should be actively trying to make the world a better place, thus activism… I don’t understand what you’re saying. Anyways, I brought this up in there, and on my show. I consider myself an activist for the exact reasons you consider yourself not an activist [laughs] because whatever it is we’re talking about, we’re all that, you know?
[Laughter]Monica: We’re all agents of change. We all have a lot of power.
Matt Ready: Yeah, and you might be sitting there like a lump, but your sitting there like a lump is causing an effect in the world, just like a rock, like you said, rocks have power. You sitting there like a lump in your position of power, or in your position in your community, or in your friendships, or in your whatever, it is affecting the world. Your lumpiness is affecting us, you know?
Monica: [Laughs]
Matt Ready: If nothing else, your lumpiness, ’cause we have to drive around you and [laughs] have to go over you.
Monica: And your counted in the census, or you’re pooping and your waist is being — I mean maybe you’re pooping, you’re probably eating, maintaining homeostasis you’re ingesting certain — we will get into that later.
[Laughter]Monica: I have a lot of feelings about human fertility cycles.
[Laughter]Matt Ready: I love that, for the exact same reasons you say no, I’m not an activist, and I say, I am an activist. It kind of makes you a wonderful co-host for my show. Just like they have sometimes a show with left, right, and center, a left-wing, right-wing. You and I are activists and not activists, yet the only real difference is how we choose to define a word.
Monica: Language is so powerful.
Matt Ready: It puts us on different sides of a coin, which is all you need for a good conversation, two sides of a coin.
Monica: Nice. I like your framing there.
[Laughter]Matt Ready: So I’m here with — this is very personal to me, the activist word. I was at an activist meeting in Port Townsend a couple years ago and it was to study the Constitution, study the history of Supreme Court laws and judgments that slowly gave corporations power over the evolution of our country. One of the things they asked in the room was, “Tell us about your activism,” and my dad was visiting, Jim Ready [laughs].
Monica: Your dad!
Matt Ready: My dad! I made him go to this thing with me. I gave him the option, I said, “I’m going to a thing, you can leave anytime” and he’s like, [deep voice] “I’ll check it out.”
[Laughter]Monica: Deep voice for dad.
Matt Ready: No, that’s his voice. So we go in there, and everyone’s talking about their different things they do, and I’m ready for Jim, and I describe how I was an activist with The Occupy Wall Street movement, and these different things, and I’m running for office—and don ‘t know what I was doing back then—when I hand it to my dad, and I’m, “What the heck is he going to say?” He’s like, “Yes, I’m a celebrated lifelong inactivist.”
[Laughter]Monica: Oh, dad!
Matt Ready: Which is so true! He is like a lump in the Democratic left-wing, you know? He’s like, “I will vote, I will read, I will watch debates, but do not ask me to go march in the street or write a letter,” or you know. I don’t know where the line is for him, but he’s a lifelong inactivist and for me that’s saying something very different than what you’re saying, as you’re like, “I’m not an activist,” but you’re over there with Jim Ready in a sense.
[Laughter]Monica: Well, okay. Here’s another piece of it. Yeah, it does come down to economic and material privilege and intellectual privilege because a woman or man, someone who has children or nieces or nephews, and gets in the morning and helps that 4-year-old learn how to make breakfast, tie their own shoes, say please and thank, who listens to their stories, in my mind that person is doing very important work. So if we’re talking about activism as really important work, then I think about the framing of like, who gets to decide whose work is important? I think throughout the lifespan, people have different phases where they have different freedom to transgress against existing power structures, and so someone who maybe never had a stable place to live, or didn’t have enough education to get a job that could just be part-time and then has time to go and go to City Council meetings—I’m not going to say that person is not doing really important work. Often times I’ll find people who are white, who inherited money or property, or had access to higher education, have had a lot of material privilege, economic privilege, start marching around or like stomping and shaking their fists at people for not being activists without really looking at all that they have inherited without their own work. When a person like that gets in the face of or starts disregarding the contributions or the work of someone who didn’t have the same kind of privileges, I think it’s a very limited perspective and it can divide people, when people start thinking of themselves as their work being more important. It’s a big — language creating reality of activists/not activists labels.
Matt Ready: Yeah. You’re fading into, away from even — whether or not you’re talking about activism, you’re just talking about like the worth of a human being and when you look at a person and say — I mean I don’t do this to people, but when people—I’m going to reflect it back at you—when people look at you and they’re angry, and it’s like, “Why are you doing that, why aren’t you doing this,” I understand your life and your world enough to judge what you’re doing and why you’re doing it right now, like I’m, you know —
Monica: Like you were doing to your dad? [Laughs]
Matt Ready: Sure! Like I was doing to my dad or like parents might do to their child, you know, it’s like [laughs] — and if I learned it somewhere, I learned it from my parents.
[Laughter]Monica: yeah.
Matt Ready: I mean that’s a big, that’s a total tangent, but I’ve never thought about that, the evolution of a child, ‘cos I’ve seen it other children, they sort of have a wisecracking father and then it’s like, wow! Then they get to 16-17, they could be smart enough to wisecrack right back at the dad and it becomes this very interesting male son, father-son dynamic.
Monica: Women can do it too.
Matt Ready: Yeah. Like with mom or with dad, are you specifically saying like daughter-dad?
Monica: I’m not saying that it’s gender-specific. I think those habits — I mean labeling, limiting, dismissing someone’s experiences, feelings or thoughts, or capacity in the world is not gender-specific. Humans do that across the world sometimes.
Matt Ready: I guess it’s my personal history. It traveled heavily through a male, my male experience.
Monica: Jim, not Mary.
Matt Ready: Oh, yeah, I mean she was, Mary was not — she loved everything I did [laughs].
Monica: So here’s an interesting thing on that too though, like if your parents as a unit raising you, your dad would dismiss your ideas, or your agency, or feelings, your mom permitting him to do that was also an agent in that dismissal, like if she didn’t check that behavior and balance it out, then she was complicit.
Matt Ready: Yeah, that’s really interesting, ’cause I could think about like my art. It’s a very simple microcosm of that. The thing about art is I don’t think I remember a single time showing them a piece of art at the same time. I would always do it sep- I mean that’s kind of, ’cause my art in a way was my way of judging other human beings, because I knew what was good and what was not. I was very snobby and snotty about art, so I was like when I liked it, I’d show it to people and think like it’s a test, like, “Do you like this? There’s a reason it’s worth being liked.” A little bit like getting feedback, but anyways, I was a very arrogant artist. I wanted to go individual, I don’t want you to be influenced by — ‘cos people are always influenced by other people that make their judgment first.
Monica: Okay, so you go to mom and dad.
Matt Ready: I went to them separately and mom was always incredibly positive, he was always negative but I didn’t even compare that, ‘cos I was comparing them to everyone that was judging my art. They were just like two drops in this bucket, and I was like — but a weird one, my dad is incredibly negative about all my art, more so than any human on earth that I’ve met that has looked at more —
Monica: If you’re listening to this right now, I’m going to post a few pieces on Matt’s art!
[Laughs]Matt Ready: Yes!
Monica: You have a chance to compete for most negative with Jim Ready.
Matt Ready: Try to say something worse than what my dad, and I’ll tell you what my dad said after —
Monica: We are out sourcing haters on Matt’s art! Love it!.
[Laughter]Matt Ready: Do you want to know what he said? I’ll tell you.
Monica: Sure!
Matt Ready: Well, it’s just sort of like, you know that Brad Pitt painting in my living room.
Monica: I do, I love it. Can we post it?
Matt Ready: Yeah! Absolutely. I’ve posted it, actually I posted it —
Monica: We’ll put it with this video.
Matt Ready: Yeah. He was just like, he just saw it, he just walked in and he was like, [ogre voice] “WHAT’S THIS!”
[Laughs]Matt Ready: He’s like, “Why can’t you just pain something normal, like a cow in a field,” [laughs] and I’m like, “A cow in a field? That’s what you really want to see Jim?” So I’ve been joking with Stacey, my wife, about it. I’ll just paint 100 cows and fields, I’ll do like a series dedicated to Jim Ready.
[Laughter]Monica: Cows with Brad Pitt’s head on.
[Laughs]Matt Ready: Yeah, Brad Pitt in the background with cows in front of — maybe my paintings could be in the field with the cows.
[Laughs]Monica: A picture of a cow with your painting. So many incarnations. Your dad’s kind of your muse though, I think in some ways.
Matt Ready: Yeah. Oh, and yeah! It’s like it’s taken me along time to just fully appreciate how just powerful that is, and I see that there’s other, particularly men in my life, that they’re just a part of that. It’s like this, I don’t know, this male wisecracking intelligent coyote type energy that I actually really feed off it. I love it, you know, because once in a while, they’re an ally. When they use that same energy that they can dig into you with, when they really use it to fight something that’s important, it’s so powerful.
Monica: It’s a powerful skill set to hone and to keep around, and not to vanish from the community.
Matt Ready: Yeah, and I’ve had to — anyways.
Monica: Well, I’m curious. Okay, so I asked you about where your mother was born and involved like the female vortex. That’s also something that has been — the power of that authority has been lost, because we’ve come through so many years of a christian, like an overarching christian, how do you describe it, like a religious framing in the world that says that women, that humans — let’s see, humans started with a man [laughs] and his name was Adam, and when he wanted a friend, he pulled his own rib out of his body [laughs] —
Matt Ready: So you’re saying that that story that is at the base of like all of Western Society [laughs] —
Monica: It’s a very — to quote the movie Captain Fantastic, “it’s a very dangerous fairy tale.”
Matt Ready: Yes.
Monica: In that it totally disregards the female agency in the creation of human bodies.
Matt Ready: Most dangerous fairy tale. We could have a list of most — this would be a great tangent, but one of the most the most dangerous fairy tales myths in our culture. That might be number one.
Monica: Okay, so invoking female agency in creating more human beings is really important, and so I think about your mom being born, or your mother choosing Jim Ready to have a child with, and then having, raising a child in an atmosphere where she, I guess, and we can’t ask her in the physical realm, but I would ask her what her experience was of raising a child with a man who often dismissed your ideas, or criticized your ideas, and I wonder —
Matt Ready: You mean her ideas?
Monica: I don’t know about hers, but yours.
Matt Ready: Yeah. [Crosstalk] I was one of three children, so it’s like there’s a dynamic there. He was not like that with her. They were, you know, I don’t know if I actually have a good read of what that power dynamic was but I felt, I’ve never felt it wasn’t something close to equal, and just very different types of powers.
Monica: I wonder if she ever felt like he would do that with her, but even if he didn’t do that with her, so here I am again with female agency, as a woman who — and it’s complicated in our society because we don’t, not every community, family, couple, upholds a woman’s right to choose whether to have children or not—another like mythological reality we’ve created that I think is really harmful to human beings in this society. So she’s chosen a nest to create human beings in, and whether or not he dismisses her ideas, he just dismissed your ideas in some ways. So I wonder… yeah, I think about the role of women and mothers in choosing partners, and the role of the village in protecting children’s — or upholding children and letting children feel welcome to express themselves.
Matt Ready: You’re making me try to like remember back and see if I can ever visualize actually seeing a power struggle between them or seeing her ever check his negativity.
Monica: I wonder how she felt about it.
Matt Ready: But she was not afraid to speak her mind or swear, or to yell, or to make jokes, you know, to flick someone off from her car. She was like, she had her mama-bear power, and I think that’s, in this world, with the incredibly different cultures, if you’re raised in a household where it’s at least there’s papa bear power and mama bear power, and they’re both strong and you know they are capable of standing up to one another, if you have it at least equal like that, I think it’s the healthiest, it’s a more healthy environment than if it’s imbalanced, if clearly there’s a male dominant or female dominant household, ‘cos you’re seeing weakness in the other whole dimension of the universe if you see that, if you have an imbalance at the top and you’re growing up in that.
Monica: Which is not to say also, like I’m not implying that your dad poking fun at you has ruined you, clearly it’s made you motivated in certain ways.
Matt Ready: That would be a bummer to say, you were ruined by your dad [laughs], that would have been a really —
Monica: How do you feel about that Matt?
[Laughter]Monica: Just more of exploring agency, I guess we’re talking about power and mindfulness and activism, exploring agency and relationships, and I feel like, all right, I notice that communities, the root is family and we all come through a family that forms our primary experience emotionally, energetically, and in terms of our power in the world.
Matt Ready: Do you have siblings?
Monica: I have two older brothers.
Matt Ready: Well, that’s a, I would assume that’s an interesting power dynamic to grow up in.
Monica: They are, I mean they all are, all of our experiences are interesting. How are we doing on time Matt?
Matt Ready: We’ve been 24 minutes into this conversation, so we could find a place to wrap. We went on so many — this would be a perfect conversation to have sort of mapped on the hive, like each topic we just let them branch out. (http://www.hive1.net/consensi.php?seid=412)
Monica: Yeah, where do we go. I love when they’re like videos where some animator, illustrator, draws all the pictures of that.
Matt Ready: Oh, that’s — we just need people to animate. Everything we talk about, like draw pictures and — I like that. I could put out like a reward, like a $50 reward for the best one, and you and I will choose the best one.
Monica: And it’s your 50 bucks [laughs].
Matt Ready: Yeah, yeah, you don’t need to get to it.
[Laughter]Monica: I’ll give you thumbs up!
[Laughter]Monica: And shouts out! I’m not funded right now to do that, but [crosstalk].
Matt Ready: I’m not either, but you know. All right, well thank you so much for being another guest on my show. I haven’t done one of my episodes for like three weeks, so…
Monica: I’m glad to be a part, this is fun.
Matt Ready: And we didn’t show any video. All we showed was images, it’s just all audio, which I liked. Creates a level of ease to conversation.
Monica: And then we can illustrate [laughs] with illustrations, whatever we want to do.
Matt Ready: Yeah. All right, bye for now!
Monica: Bye!
