Of course, both things still being true, in less generous environments and the throes of end-stage capitalism, those people who are working at healing full-time are going to need compensation if we don’t want them to quietly and politely starve to death. How they work out that compensation is their business. We can all, regardless of our sources of income, be aware that the American Dream—newer, bigger, shinier, more—is a snare and a delusion, because no amount of money and stuff can fill a howling emptiness inside. And we can always bear in mind the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, which tells us that those who know they have enough are rich.
Years ago, at a workshop led by Sandra Ingerman, during a walk I went for on my own I had a vision of a kind of mass production of shamans. When that comes true, with any luck we’ll have enough healers to go around, and no one will have to worry about burnout or overwork to the point of not being able to support themselves otherwise.
Ongoing practices
In ordinary conversation, try not mentioning the arbitrarily defined group people are slotted into unless it’s actually relevant. The fact that your friend or acquaintance “happens to be Black” certainly has bearing on their experience of catching some White-racist hell, but what bearing can it possibly have on their practice of molecular medicine or their opinions on the proper mechanics of batting in baseball?
The compulsion to identify the arbitrarily defined group that people who aren’t arbitrarily defined as White “belong to” is related to another compulsion, namely, What are you? This is a question that people whose ancestry isn’t obvious get a lot: Are you Latino/a? Are you Middle Eastern? Are you Native or are you Asian? Are you Jewish or Italian? Are you a mixture of different arbitrarily defined groups, and if so, which ones? This is a set of questions we might stop asking if we stopped to think of the question behind the question, namely, Where are you supposed to be slotted into the kyriarchy? I need to know, because if I don’t know, I won’t know whether or not or how much I’m supposed to oppress you. Help! The answer we already know is, everyone is a person, a kyriarchy is no place for a person, and no one has any business oppressing anyone else. Simple.
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