Equanimity and the Gulf of Weird Fantasies
Maps, Monstrosity, and a Practice of Abiding
Light Hive offers essays on applied mindfulness for complex identities, the polycrisis, and the power of play. Subscribe for contemporary interpretations of Buddhist wisdom, through the lens of a recovering academic and queer, transracial adoptee.
We had one quiet year to prepare.
A maximum of 52 weeks before invaders calling themselves “heroes” would replace our ways of life with their own.
And how did we spend that time? We scrolled social media, got distracted by ventures into unmapped territories, and failed to implement any meaningful changes to civic institutions.
I’m referencing a playthrough of the map-making game The Deep Forest by Avery Alder and Mark Diaz Truman. This final essay in the Perfections series is about the ability to stay present with whatever arises.
Equanimity
Learning to abide with emotional distress.
Many discredit studying one’s own embodied experience as somehow basic, lesser, as if millions of lives haven’t been lost throughout history because men with power couldn’t sit with their feelings.
angel Kyodo williams writes, “embodiment is a practice, not a destination.” This has always been the case. And more so for people labeled “monstrous” by the same demographics that keep them marginalized. Kelsey Blackwell’s beautiful book Decolonizing the Body and Susan Raffo’s Liberated to the Bone are solid starting places for understanding how power structures factor into somatic experience.
That said, the practice of befriending your body and emotions cannot be absorbed from a book. The only way I’ve found is to engage, apply, do, with intention.
Engaging is key. Pema Chödrön offers this concise description of equanimity.
Pride without fixation is experienced as equanimity. The energy of passion when it's free of grasping is wisdom that sees all the angles. […] Thus we train in opening the fearful heart to the restlessness of our own energy. We learn to abide with the experience of our emotional distress.
I’ve seen a lot of language about what could happen in two years or four, forgetting we are mired in institutional and ecological affliction right now. And we’re entering a season known to exacerbate tensions in yet another climate record-breaking year.
Equanimity practice is always available, even if we’d really rather not be tested.
Let me show you an example.
The Gulf of Weird Fantasies
Map-making games tell the story of how land becomes place. They are also excellent places to practice equanimity.
Avery Alder’s award-winning The Quiet Year is about re-building a community in the single year after collapse and before the fall of winter.
In it, players represent factions on a shared, single map. When someone adds a feature, it affects everyone. Players draw cards representing weekly place-based challenges, collaborate on community projects, and build trust or contempt among themselves as they co-create what “survival” might look like.
Later, Alder adapted it into The Deep Forest (freely offered here) with Mexican-American designer Mark Diaz Truman. This iteration explores colonialism and queerness, collectivity and the right to name and claim.
Thematically classified as “post-colonial weird fantasy,” The Deep Forest invites players to grapple with a known outcome: “heroes” would destroy us. If history is written by the victors, the premise of the game is…well, we’re forgettable losers.
Indeed, the game casts the land stewards as “monsters.” Colonized, queer, and disabled bodies all have histories with monstrosity, circling feelings of social hopelessness, isolation, and internalized self-loathing.
And yet! From the book:
What we know is that right now, in this moment, we monsters have an opportunity for healing and self-discovery in our deep forest, away from human eyes.
This is all an opportunity for mutual recognition and regard. Diaz Truman writes
I wanted to design a game that drew out decolonization as a process of recovery, a slow growth from one mindset to another. It’s not what came before, largely because what came before was destroyed, but it holds the potential for a healing. Yet like many attempts at decolonization, we know it will be cut short long before it can truly finish.
I was SO excited to play this. What would it feel like? Could we build a sociocultural foundation with such integrity it might persist through lived repertoire, even as conquerors wave a “mission accomplished” sign over our toppled infrastructure?
I shared the game pdf with my friends and shook with excited anticipation.
Setup felt a bit off when folks disclosed their “monsters” were woodland creatures, but player agency, imagination, etc, so sure! Cool! Be a talking deer person.
The primary feature of our village was a dam that protected the crops below. One of our first crises was to repair a crack or risk losing our food supply.
I am not a dam fixer by trade, I mostly pet cats and try to use my words, so I requested community support. Some pitched in with mild enthusiasm before going on their own “off-grid/off-map” solo trips.
I can’t express how much this frustrated me. This is a map-making game. Had they even done the reading?
Note: No one had done the reading.
I would lead by example. The village might maintain a semblance of dignity if we established care and community defense norms. I drew a school with a big field.
No one cared. Turns out I was the only one who heard “weird fantasy” and thought “let’s reform k-12 education.”
I threw virtual contempt tokens, in-game indicators of community disagreement. My friends, busy narrating their off-map adventures, barely noticed the pixels.
Gentle reader, the impulse to say “CAN YOU PLEASE FUCKING FOCUS AND HELP PROTECT THESE KIDS BEFORE THE COLONIZERS COME”
was very strong.
“Railroading” happens when a facilitator forces players to articulate the tone or story they want. The facilitator becomes more of a ventriloquist rather than a champion of emergent expression and narrative empowerment. Railroading is often a trust-breaking denial of agency, inextricable from real-world power structures.
Remember, stories are vital in the truest sense. They hold the grammar of dreams. They define cause and consequence. Which subject gets to identify the protagonist who will verb the object matters. Stories are so necessary to autonomy, so threateningly powerful, colonizers trampled those of Others’ and deemed their own “better.” This is the power of story. This is why the original game is called The Quiet Year. This is why I wait for players to speak instead of rushing them, offer to roll on tables instead of providing line direction. We have been denied too many of each other’s stories already.
Given this view, it felt railroad-y to say, “Y’all hoof on back now to demarcate council districts in case our legal system gets compromised!”
And so my friends wandered forests, made social media companies for bears, searched for statues under waterfalls, found babies in baskets in the river. (As an adoptee, I immediately nixed the Moses/orphan narrative.) As with the dam, I did what I could for the school. I’m pretty sure I built trade routes to help secure future expatriation. The clock ticked.
I am not so advanced in Buddhist practice that, once liberated from our savage selves, I didn’t sit back and dramatically gripe: “well, that’s it. I guess we’re all dead.”
In the end, the thing we played based loosely on The Deep Forest offered excellent equanimity practice and, really, all of the perfections. Each wave of frustration with them, with myself, became a question: What would generosity, patience, renunciation look like right now?
Isn’t this a fascinating microcosm of organizing and collective action?
How do we work together?
Our individual capacity to stay present with challenging emotions directly impacts our collective experience.
This kind of practice prepares us for what's ahead.
A summer of affliction, affection
Things feel fucking shitty right now, don’t they?
We’re facing a season of affliction: personal exhaustion, political regression, planetary crisis. So alongside all this, we’re going to need a lot of affection: a commitment to interdependence and lovingkindness in a world that seems to reward cruelty.
Equanimity makes space for both. All.
Strategic action happens when we accept feelings like fear and rage, frustration and disappointment. This doesn’t mean to act from those emotions, but engage them with respect they deserve.
Scaled up, our movements don’t need to be perfect. These movements—whether through general strike, mass protest, boycotts, political action like calling your reps, or otherwise—also don’t need to be “big.” 3.5% participation from the general population is enough for a movement to make meaningful difference.
But they need to exist, be inclusive of newbies, and empower the “monstrous” for as long as possible because love is not naïve.
It’s the basis for courage to pick up an oar and start rowing.
Let’s meet in the middle of the Gulf of Weird Fantasies.
Takeaway Practice
A lot of things we later associate with regret happen when we’re not equanimous. A self-forgiveness practice can be really powerful.
Staci K. Haines’ offers the “even if” practice in her book, The Politics of Trauma.
Grab a piece of paper and, perhaps, a friend. It’s really powerful (and supportive) to do this kind of thing with a partner or group. Solo is totally good though.
Fold the paper “hotdog style” into thirds, leaving three columns to write in.
In the middle column, write down things you have done that make you feel ashamed, unworthy, unlovable. Things that make you “monstrous.”
Then, in the left column, write down “even if.” In the right column, write, “I am forgivable.” You can sub in whatever feels good to you. “I am lovable.”
Haines provides examples:
Even if … I lied, I am forgivable.
Even if … I didn’t fight back, I am forgivable.
Even if … I denied who I am, I am forgivable.
Even if … I didn’t tell anyone, I am forgivable.
Even if … I turned away from my community, I am forgivable.
Read it aloud. Let it sink in.
Tiny series wrap-up:
We did it! We completed the final Perfection in this list of ten! If you’ve followed along—and I know some of you have—I’m grateful to have you on this journey with me. I’m really honored that, in this attention economy, you keep choosing to read my work.
So what’s next: the 32 parts of the body? I may freewheel until I decide…and/but if anyone has a preference—8 worldly winds could be a series of four, the 5 precepts, 5 hindrances, 3 poisons, 4 distortions etc, etc—I’m also open to topic requests!
If you liked this, consider checking out:
Creative Coalition: June 9, 16, 23rd, 6-7:30 PT
Join Creative Coalition to practice with equanimity, play, and mindful writing.
In June, I’ll be offering a very simple drawing, reflecting, and sharing exercise based on Gene Koo’s The Bonsai Diary. You don’t need to buy anything.
Note: The game includes themes of transition (death).
Unlike the usual monthly gathering, this will unfold over three Mondays in 90-minute sessions. We’ll have a lightly guided sitting practice, followed by some prompts from the game. Instead of closing with a debrief (overview of how it went), we’ll close with sharing.
Base Rate: $30
Light Hive Readers may use code: Hive50 (50% off)
Paid subscribers get this for free! I’ll send the sign-up code in the paid chat later today.
No one is turned away for lack of funds. If the registration fee is cost-prohibitive, please email for the link.
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) holds a PhD in Performance Studies. Through Light Hive and as co-editor of Notes from the Inflection Point, they write to share reflections and practices amid ecological and social uncertainty. All they currently want is to go back in time and be a billionaire who rigs elections so they could have made Elizabeth Warren president and AOC veep. And Liz would wave her hands as she walks down some hallway giving some hokey line like “no no, this isn’t democracy,” or “I don’t have a plan for time travel,” and then Logan would insist please for the love of Moses just be the president, and then we’d be in a totally different world. Alas, Logan is neither a mental health provider, an authorized teacher in any Buddhist lineage, nor a time-travelling oligarch, so here we are and that’s the bio.