The Slacktiverse

This week in The Slacktiverse, May 7/8 2011

The Blogaround

Last week Sarah posted a follow-up to hir Slacktiverse article Camden Resurrected.

aravind reports: I wrote up a bit of a unitarian response to a lot of comments I've seen lately (including David Barton the daily show) that really equate unitarianism with trinitarian Protestantism (or view unitarianism solely through trinitarian Protestantism).

mmy posted a number of book reviews this week including Ankle Deep and further (and less measured) take on the recent Canadian election, On the inside looking out.

Nick Kiddle writes: I have an allusive post trying to compare the celebrations of bin Laden's death to my own attempts to find satisfaction in the humiliation of someone who hurt me.

This week Lunch Meat posted two articles Victory, yes, but for whom?, which challenges the claim that Osama bin Laden's death is somehow a victory for Christianity, and Table for Two: A Parable (Part 1), which is the first part of a parable sort of inspired by the idea that Jesus returns as a woman.

This week Sarah posted a reflection on Osama bin Laden's death.

In an open letter to her Congressional representatives, Literata proposed the No Taxpayer Funding for Viagra Act. This satire was the only way she could think of to express her anger, fear, and frustration about the fact that a similar bill manipulating the tax code to make abortion care unaffordable and less accessible recently passed the US House of Representatives. She also explained why some advice about how to deal with potential "curses" is harmful.

Michael Mock wrote a book review on David Roche's The Church of 80% Sincerity, which Slacktivites might find of interest.

Ana Mardoll posted a new Twilight entry on her blog Twilight: First Impressions, Rigid Judgments (Trigger Warnings: Infertility, Miscarriage, Stillbirths, Racism.):
Is it narrative convenience or human frailty that prevents Bella from ever revisiting her initial judgments of her classmates and the lovely Cullens? Whatever it is, you never get a second chance to make a first impression on Bella Swan! Come join us as we plumb moral relativism and the many and varied motives behind the action of adoption. (Trigger Warnings: Infertility, Miscarriage, Stillbirths, Racism.)

The former conservative blogger writes: This week I criticized a blog poster's critique of Rob Bell, which ended up with him coming and commenting on my blog, which started a long and very interesting discussion on hell which went for over 100 comments, took a look at one of the more ridiculous reactions to Bin Laden's death and a delicious muffin recipe, critiqued someone's rather impassioned feelings about the KJV and of course another Mike Savage piece.

Laiima posted adventures in amplitudifying my comfort zone, and reaping the benefits thereby in journeying to self acceptance and most things don't work.

This week Ruby continued her review of Soon. Paul is continuing to be an emotionally abusive jerk in Soon: Chapter 13, so a poll is up to vote on Paul's worst statements. And Ruby is giving away an audiobook of another Jerry Jenkins book, Riven, in a drawing!

This week Leum posted G-spots and experiencing the divine which suggests that experiences of the divine are of something subjective, not objective and a follow-up post Being Respectfully Skeptical of the Divine which examines ways skeptics of the supernatural can respond to someone who's had a divine experience.

In case you missed this

mmy writes: This article about the lack of clear and definitive regulation of the "gluten-free" label on foods sold in the United States 3 years after deadline, FDA still hasn’t defined ‘gluten-free’ will be of interest to anyone to anyone who is (or has a family member or friend who is) a celiac and who in the United States or plans to visit the country.

(Trigger Warnings: Rape, Rape Culture, Misogyny, Victim Blaming.)

Launcifer submitted a link to an article about the Supreme Court of the United States refusing to hear the appeal of young woman who protested having to cheer her rapist.

CZEdwards writes: This article, Phoenix Gay Dads Adopt, Raise Twelve Happy Kids, is pretty interesting on its own, but Arizona does not allow same-sex marriage, same-sex adoptions, nor second-parent adoptions.

 

Things you can do

Derek writes: a self-proclaimed Baptist VP at a public university has acted to deny tenure to a qualified faculty member because of her transgendered status. More specific information can be found at the following links:
Trigger Warning: Transphobia
(Transgender Oklahoma professor denied tenure and terminated
and
Public University in Oklahoma Openly Discriminates Against Trans-Gendered Faculty Member in Tenure Decision
To sign the petition protesting this action click here

Médecins Sans Frontières encourages people to celebrate Mother's Day by making a donation that will help to provide obstetric care to women who would otherwise received none. Click here to send a Mother's Day e-card and make a donation at the same time.

 

__________________________________________________________________________________

The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)

On the inside looking in

Or how noticing the difference between Canadian and American coverage of the recent Canadian election taught me something about how conspiracy theories develop and why they thrive.

Or it’s (sometimes) more complicated than that.

Note: This article was originally intended to amusingly and wittily describe the many skills/jobs about which I had thought "this is the simple, logical" thing to do and then found out were both harder (and simpler) than I had imagined. The article was threatening to become a book and I cut out the descriptions of the parallel experiences but the ideas/experiences I am writing about are by no means exclusive to either politics or to things about which I have had a chance to "get inside."

For many years I was simply an observer of all things political. I read the papers (this was in the dim, dark days before the coming of the Internet), I listened to the radio and I watched television. One might even say I read, listened and watched more than the typical Canadian and that I was more aware than the average Canadian as to what was going on in the political world. Still I found much of what I saw and heard and read to be silly, pointless, annoying, trite, banal, repetitive, ill-advised and otherwise frustrating. How could these politically experienced men (and at that time politics was overwhelmingly a world of men) be so obtuse as to not say and not do what I was sure were the obvious things that would lead to the triumph of those who were right (supporting the policies I believed to be both ethical and beneficial to my country) and the downfall of those who were wrong? Was “the media” misleading their readers/listeners/watchers as to the true caliber of these politicians and did they have, in fact, few political skills? Were these men were actually skilled political actors working toward ends other than those they had shared with the public? Was it possible that both were true?

In other words, the more I read, listened to and watched politics and politicians the harder it was not to use “it’s a conspiracy” as an explanation for the political reality I was witnessing.

My understanding of the world of practical politics began to change the day that my spouse dropped into a local party headquarters during an election campaign in an attempt to get an answer to a question zie had about the party platform. When zie came back zie shared with me not only the answer to hir question but also the disorganized state of the room in which zie had sat. A few days later I dropped by the same headquarters and saw things for myself. Over the next few days and weeks I began to organize things: I drew up lists, charted assignments, answered phones, made appointments, copy edited the fliers, assisted in the silk screening, learned to re-ink the machine on which we printed the fliers, I canvassed door to door, drove people to the polls on election day and learned why so many political operatives get drunk on election night.

Politics would never look the same to me again.

Politics, like some so many other things from raising children to picking the right background colour for one's website, is seldom simple or logical. The speech that rouses the population of one town will fail to interest a crowd the next day and a few kilometres away. The slogan that thrills one person will irritate the next. The expenditure of time and money that wins the hearts, minds and votes of one group will alienate the members of a different community. The potential voter who tells you at the door that they like your candidate, your party platform, your fliers and even the colour of your lawn signs will go on to tell you that they have no intention of voting for your candidate because their family has always voted for a different party. And those people in the crowd who swayed to the rhythms of your candidate’s words, cheered hir and treated hir like a rock star may wake up on election day and go to the polls and vote for someone else.

Explaining "why" one did anything in an election makes you sound like you are covering things up.

I noticed that almost every time I answered good (logical/reasonable) questions it sounded, even to my own ears, as if I was quibbling and making excuses for either my own mistakes or trying to obscure the “real” reason for my actions.

•Why didn’t you use your advertising budget to pay for ads on THIS show not THAT one?
•Why didn’t you have your canvassers go door to door in THAT poll instead of THIS one?
•Why didn’t you use THIS slogan in all your campaign literature. All my friends think its a winner?
•Why didn’t you use THIS picture instead of that one on all the campaign literature? The one you used makes the candidate look shifty.
•Why didn’t you have THAT guy do the warm-ups at all the campaign events. He has a great voice and can really work the crowd.
•Why didn't you give the candidate a chance to get up and address the crowd as promised?
•Why didn't you say THIS during the interview / write THAT in the speech / put THIS picture on the flier?

I would have an answer to all those questions.

•Because the audience is made up of people who already vote for us or live in another riding.
•Because the last time we canvassed door to door in that poll we brought out more people to vote for the other candidates than we did for our own.
•Because your friends are already planning to vote for us but that slogan actually annoys many of the people who just MIGHT vote for us.
•Because the candidate got asked the other day by a voter why zie is using a picture that shows all those split-ends and phoned me at 3 in the morning to tell me never to use it again.
•Because the guy who does great warm-ups has a tendency to use extremely foul language when zie gets excited and we have had people walk out of events he emceed.”
•Because he was drunk/stoned and last time we let him speak while in that condition he made insulting comments about an importnat constiutency among our voters/supporters.
•Because I was sleep-deprived and punch-drunk and could barely function any longer. I am human. I make mistakes.[1]

But I couldn’t answer the real question. Why didn’t the candidate I believe was clearly the best win? Sometimes because I didn’t know myself and sometimes because the answer was heartbreaking and unwelcome. That candidate didn’t win because we could not raise enough money, because we didn’t have enough volunteers or because some of our best canvassers decided that the needs of their children, spouses or parents must be put above the needs of the local party. That candidate didn’t win because most of the people in the riding didn’t like them or didn’t support their party or didn’t agree with that party's platform or thought that a vote for THAT party or THIS candidate would be wasted.

I came to know my own riding[2] well. The number of people who voted at each poll was small enough that I soon was able to deduce who voted for whom on the basis of changes in vote totals following THAT family selling their house and THIS family moving into the neighbourhood. I knew all the little peculiarities of each neighbourhood and had a good sense of how their residents would respond to particular people, speeches and platforms.

When I was working in other ridings I found myself asking the same questions of the local organizers as outsiders had asked of me when they came in to help. I would apply the experience and expertise gained in one community to campaigning in another and find that it didn’t work as well as I expected. In fact I soon came to realize that outside “specialists” are often as much a bother as a boon. Yes I knew how to organize a door to door canvas in the middle of a snow storm but I didn’t know what all the painful sore spots of local life were. I didn’t know the secret, unwritten history of the community. I had no feel for the rhythm of their lives and listen as hard as I might I couldn’t quite hear their internal voices.

I could walk down the street late at night in one of the communities of my home riding and tell you how the people on that street would vote. Everywhere else I went I could listen only to the voice of the numbers that came back from the surveys and the canvassers. I love statistics, but they tell you a story about the group not the individuals that make up that group.[3] And in the end elections are about what individuals do alone in the voting booth.

It has been a long time since I worked in Canadian elections and during much of that time I worked in the United States and spent more of my time following the intricate details of American than Canadian politics and so over the election campaign during the 6 weeks that preceded the May 2 polling date I watched the campaign both as an insider and an outsider. I noticed with interest the placement of local lawn signs and billboards and made educated estimates of the health of the various candidates' campaigns but I was no longer privy to the insider information that might have prepared me for what unfolded on election night.

On the evening of Monday May 2 I sat in front of my television (with the elections canada website loaded up on my computer) and watched the results roll in.[4] They took my breath away. This is what the Canadian political landscape looked like after the 2008 federal election.[5]

The Conservatives (right-wing party) formed a minority government with 143 seats and 37.6% of the popular vote. The Liberals (centre-left party), with 77 seats and 26.2% of the vote formed the official opposition. The Bloc Québécois (separatist and a force only in Quebec) had 49 seats and 10% of the vote and the NDP [New Democratic Party] (left-wing) came a distant 4th with 37 seats and 18.2% of the vote. The Green Party (environmentalist) won no seats with 6.8% of the popular vote.

By Tuesday morning May 3 map of Canadian politics looked quite different.

The Conservatives had won a majority as the party gained 24 seats while increasing their share of the popular vote by a mere 2 percentage points. The Liberal party plummeted to a 3rd place finish for the first time in the history of the party (which is as old as the country) with 34 seats and 18.9% of the popular vote. The Bloc Québécois fell to only 4 seats and lost official party status. The Green Party’s popular vote dropped to 3.9% but the party won a seat for the first time in its history. And the NDP, which had never before won more than 43 seats in a single election, garnered 30.6% of the popular vote, 102 seats and became the official opposition.

Yet that sense of history and excitement was not something you would have gathered from the coverage of the Canadian election results on Tuesday in The New York Times Conservatives in Canada Expand Party’s Hold or The Washington Post Harper says he won’t move Canada hard to the right after winning coveted majority in election. The name of the new leader of the loyal opposition (Jack Layton) was not even mentioned in The New York Times article and in The Washington Post piece occurs only two times (and more than half way through). I understand why. This was a look at Canadian Politics from the outside looking in. This was an article picked up from the Associated Press and designed to run in any newspaper in the English speaking world. It presumed no knowledge about the intricacies of Canadian politics or even of the distortions of seat distributions in a first past the post electoral system. To the Canadian reader of the American newspapers the coverage might be taken to indicate anything from a wilful misrepresentation of Canadian politics to a conspiracy to slight the leader of the “socialist-leaning” NDP to cultural arrogance. Or perhaps it is just another example of how different things look when you are on the outside looking in.

The reasons why something happened are often so long, complex and confusing that only an insider would know of them and only an insider would understand why they are important. Thus, when the confused (and suspicious) outside observer asks “Why?” the answers may seem a long and unconvincing set of excuses.

The reasons why something happened as sometimes simply unknowable. Why, after spending years working in Canadian politics did Jack Layton suddenly connect with so many of the voters in Canada in general and Quebec in particular? The insider knows that there is no good answer to a question like that.

Although it’s usually more complicated than that it is sometimes more simple than you would suspect.

To the commentators on the Canadian news broadcasts I watched on Tuesday morning there were a plenitude of “reasons” for the seismic shift in the Canadian political landscape. To the American news writers it was simply “a shift to the right” in response to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s handling of the recession.

To the Canadian reader of American newspapers their coverage of the Canadian election might seem consciously misleading. To the American news editors the same coverage might seem to contain the only information that their readers really needed or wanted to know.

The simple answer to the question "Why does coverage of another country's election mislead / miss the point / leave out information you believe to be important?" may be "It's usually more complicated that than." The reasons(s) might include: most of our readers wouldn't have been interested; other stories deserved more room on the front page; there was better use for our time and resources; and even, we disagree that it was misleading, that the information left out was important and that we missed the point.

*************************

I love statistics. I dream statistics. My moment of greatest epiphany was in a statistics class.[6] I find comfort in knowing that "sometimes shit simply happens," that not all things can be explained and sometimes there is simply no one to blame because neither intent, knowledge nor foresight could have changed the outcome.

I find comfort in uncertainty. In my own experience learning about the "inside" of almost anything has simply meant that I more able to explain what the "odds were" that something would work but it never allowed me to state with complete certainty "this will happen if you do that." Thus I can always hope that despite the odds things might get better at the same I believe that the odds are that they won't.

But that is what works for me. It comforts me to believe that much of the evil (and good) that happens happens without intent.

For others living in a world of meaning and intent, even evil conspiratorial intent, may be more reasonable / rational / comforting than the idea of inhabiting a stochastic universe.
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[1] Political organizers DO conspire all the time. They conspire to hide their own weaknesses and failures and the personal weaknesses and failures of their candidates. Their motivations in doing so are often little different than the motivation of a parent to hide their child's weaknesses from others or the motivation of a spouse to hide the failures of their loved one from eyes of the critical world. Political organizers hide their own mistakes and the mistakes of their candidates for the same reason that employees hide their shortcomings from their employers. An organizer who cannot keep a confidence is unlikely to be hired in the next election.

[2] For the American reader a riding is the parliamentary equivalent of a congressional district. The author’s local riding had approximately 73,500 registered voters. Ridings are divided up into hundreds of polling places. Ballots are paper and their size and shape as well as the order of candidate names is determined by national regulations.

[3] One of the commonest mistakes people make when making deductions on the basis of statistics is known as the ecological fallacy, “the assumption that something learned about an ecological unit says something about the individuals making up that unit” (Babbie, E. (2008). The basics of social research. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadswort, pg. 109.)

[4] In Canada election results cannot be broadcast in a riding until the polls are closed locally. This was not difficult to enforce previous to the satellite television and the Internet. It is more difficult today to enforce this media blackout and the country has moved to staggering the times at which the polls open and close to minimize the problem.

[5] The Canadian political spectrum does not match neatly with that of the countries of most of our readers. In simplified terms:
The Conservative party -- the right wing of Canadian politics. The closest American analog (in economic terms) would be the Republican party however most Canadians who vote Conservative would be considered social liberals in the United States.
The Liberals occupy the centre-left of the Canadian political spectrum. The closest American analog is usually considered to be the Democratic Party although at this point in time a substantial percentage of the Democratic caucus in the American House of Representatives and the Senate would be on the far right of the Canadian Liberal party. In American terms the Canadian Liberals are both economic and social liberals.
The Bloc Québécois [7] is the federal wing of the Parti Québécois. The Bloc is generally socially and fiscally on the left of Canadian politics however the central platform of the party is to separate (by democratic means) from Canada. Their percentage of the popular vote is thus distorted since they did not run any candidates outside Quebec in 2011.
The NDP (New Democratic Party) is on the left wing of the Canadian political spectrum although not, at the moment, as far left as it has been at times in its history. In American terms the NDP are "socialist," "nearly communist" and "far, far left."
The Green Party are not only supporters of environmentalism they are also campaigning vigorously to change Canada's electoral system from first-past-the-post to proportional representation.

[6] The day the professor explained the Finite Population Correction Factor to the class.

[7] The Bloc's website is, rather unsurprisingly, in French only. There is an English portal with an official translation of some, but not all, of the material available in French.


--mmy
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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Board Business, May 5 2011

Time Sensitive News

BringTheNoise writes: For those interested, I'll be LiveBlogging the [May 5 Scottish] election results as they come in on my blog.

Sidebar Business

Readers may notice that two new items have been added to the sidebar. A "Read the FNEs" link has been added just below the link to the board FAQs. Below those "recent comments" section the reader will find a new blogroll called "Blogs of the Slacktiverse" which contains links to the blogs of those who asked to be included on the new sidebar. We apologize in advance for any missing links and encourage anyone who wishes to be added to the sidebar to email TBAT.

Regular Board Business

Don't forget to send in items that you want included in This week in The Slacktiverse May 7/8.

The three sections of the weekend post are:

The Blogaround

Any denizen of the Slacktiverse who has posted an article to their own website during since the previous weekend post is invited to send a short summary of that article along with its permalink to TBAT. That summary and link will be included in the next weekend blogaround. This will help to keep members of our community aware of the many excellent websites hosters by other members.

In Case You Missed This

Readers of The Slacktiverse can send short summaries of, and permalinks to, articles that they feel might be of interest to other readers.

Things You Can Do

Anyone who knows of a worthy cause or important petition should send a short description of the petition/cause along with its url to TBAT.

Please email all submissions to slackmods at gmail dot com. The deadline this week will be 2000 GMT on Saturday.

Urgent or time-sensitive announcements will be posted immediately rather than being held for the next regular "This Weekend" post.

Generating Slacktiverse content.

TBAT would like to thank all the people who have submitted articles and encourages posters who are interested in contributing regularly or irregularly to send in  material. Having a number of articles that are ready for publication allows TBAT to maximize the variety of opinions as well as be responsive to "real-world" events and concerns.

TBAT have been contacting individuals who have expressed an interest in submitting materials but stress that people should not feel that they need wait to be invited to do so before sending in articles.



__________

 

The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



Mutual Gifts

It’s strange realising that something you used to think was trite and preachy is actually worth thinking about.

In other news, I was just hugged by a homeless person.

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Growing up in Christian culture, you get very used to reading Inspirational Stories. (These being capitalised because, unlike stories that happen to be inspiring, these ones are likely to end up with glossy covers and the words “An Inspirational True Story of a Teen Who Found Her Way” emblazoned across the front. The inspiration is built right in.)

You hear about teens who succeeded at basketball and followed Christ, young adults who volunteered in the third world and followed Christ, and kids who preached the gospel to their classmates and followed Christ. Interestingly, the basketball, the volunteering, and the preaching are all equally unconnected to “following Christ”: apparently the way people follow Christ is by having a cool Bible and putting posters of Inspirational Poetry up on their bedroom wall – actions have nothing to do with it.

I used to roll my eyes at all these Inspirational Stories. I still used to read them, though – because they were there, I was bored, and I secretly wanted to star in one of them.

(I will never star in one of them. Which is sad. But happily, I just got hugged by a homeless person, which pretty much made my day.)

There was one theme that kept coming up in the Inspirational Stories: that helping people is really not a sacrifice; it’s a blessing.

Volunteering at a soup kitchen? A blessing.

Helping tsunami victims? A blessing.

Being nice to people you don’t like? A blessing.

Working your arse off for people who won’t notice? A total blessing.

Giving all your stuff to charity? Huge blessing.

Apparently, the more self-sacrificing you were, and the crappier it felt, the bigger the blessing. Which made sense, sort of – you’d get character growth (a good thing, supposedly), and then a really cool reward in heaven (also good, if vague) to make up for not enjoying it one little bit.

I would read the umpteenth story of an Inspiring Teenager serving the world in unappealing ways, and gushing “It’s a real blessing, it really is!!!” And I’d roll my eyes, and wonder if I could convince them to act as my personal slave if I promised them vague “blessings” for doing so.

Because, really, “blessings” are all very well. But sometimes doing the right thing sucks, and we should either be doing it even though it sucks, or not doing it at all. Sugar-coated promises of blessings we won’t get are just patronizing.

That was ten years ago. I’ve changed a bit since then.

Today, I got hugged by a homeless person. This being because I
1) gave him twenty dollars
2) gave him an Easter egg
Not exactly earth-shattering, especially when you consider that I regularly spend more than that on junk food, silly hats, or dvds I’ll never get round to watching. But it’s much more than I’d have done a few years ago.

Today I am starting to figure out some stuff that teenaged-me would have rolled her eyes at. And one of them is that when people say that sacrifice is a blessing, they might actually mean it.

Giving up something – whether it’s money, time, anger, revenge, possessions, or whatever else – can be hard, but it can also be liberating. Realising that this thing I hold so tightly to simply doesn’t matter compared to loving the people around me is freeing, in a way I was never expecting. It’s wonderful being able to take something I have, and say “You know what? This really isn’t important. I’m going to let go of it, and make someone else happy in the process.”

It is, in short, a blessing.

---

Today I got hugged by a homeless person, because he thought I’d given him a gift that warranted a hug. I wish I’d been able to tell him that I felt the same way.

--Deird
____________________________________________________________________________

 

The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

At Patheos: TF: Waiting for my man

Fred Clark has posted a new Left Behind post, TF: Waiting for my man, at Patheos.

This week Fred writes about pp. 375-379 of Tribulation Force.

Excerpt:

The Antichrist is supposed to be a false Messiah — that’s what anti-Christ means. If he is to be at all capable as an Antichrist, then, he will have to provide a convincing impersonation of a such a Messiah. The whole point of this wolf putting on sheep’s clothing is that he’s trying to look like a sheep.

The Left Behind books are inconsistent on this point. They flip back and forth between portraying Nicolae as a credible, convincing impostor and portraying him as a transparent and obvious fraud. This inconsistency stems, I think, from an underlying contradiction regarding the culpability of those this false Messiah deceives. On the one hand, the authors say, the Antichrist will have the power to control the minds of others, forcing them to follow him. But on the other hand they insist that such people deserve damnation even for choices they were powerless to refuse, for actions they did not have the option of avoiding. Portraying the mass of humanity both as puppets unable to act autonomously and as responsible agents wholly accountable for their actions is such a huge contradiction that it runs like a faultline throughout the rest of the story

[Fred Clark, TF: Waiting for my man, May 3 2011, posted at Patheos.com]


Commentators who would like to share their responses to the new post with all of Fred's fans (old and new) can cross-post to both boards.

 

Charged with the grandeur of God

Trigger warnings: depression, childbirth.


I first learned to meditate in a cult environment. I didn't know it was a cult at the time, of course; people very seldom do. As far as I knew, I was signing up for a meditation course - then staying for evening meditation sessions after the course had finished, then going on short holidays to retreat centres, and so on. It sounds malign, and there were certainly dark things about the movement. But there are other things that I remember.

When I think of my childhood, it's dappled with light. There are autumn leaves, and green trees, and deep white snows; somehow it's never grey in my memory. My childhood landscape - the inner world of my imagination - was an English woodland, with russet foxes and sharp-footed deer and paths through the black soil. I remember other things from my childhood too, and not all of them are good, but I remember too the smell of autumn and the beauty of my country. When I was a child, I loved the world.

Meditation gave that back to me. I remember moments of utter vividness after I began that still stay in my memory. I hadn't been very happy when I started the course, unsurprisingly; few people take on a change like that unless they've reached a point in their lives where something has to give. I didn't like myself very much, didn't trust my own tastes. I'd become disconnected. I'd slipped my moorings. Beginning to meditate was a desperate challenge: how did I stay in the body I so disliked? How on earth did I generate a sense of compassionate love for myself? To feel even these simple things, I had to strip my mind right down to simplicity: I have as much right to happiness as anybody else. Whatever I think of my body, the way it functions is, like any human body, extraordinary. 'I am in the world; I am of the world.

When I think of those early days, light shines through soft black nights. I remember nights where the sky was crowded and tangled with stars. I remember searchlights stroking the sky, and walking the streets, calm and joyful, in search of their source, and walking back home reconciled when they proved so much further away than I'd guessed. I remember stopping under rain-gilded trees with streetlights shining through their branches, their filigree branches shining against the dark.

I remember beauty.

The cult was not a place I stayed, and I seldom meditate nowadays. But it was in that environment that I rediscovered the world, that I learned how to be mindful again.

The Gerard Manley Hopkins poem comes to mind: 'The world is charged with the grandeur of God...' It's a curious extract in context. A nineteenth-century man, Hopkins must have been using the word 'charged' to mean 'filled', as in 'charge your glass.' To a twenty-first century reader, though, it's hard not to read 'charged' and picture an electrical current: an invisible force running through everything, a resonant power that permeates every atom. I am not, in the doctrinal sense, a religious person: sincere agnosticism is my natural state. But I see something when I'm in what I think of as 'my right mind'. I don't have an explanation for it; it could be God, it could be chemical. To me, it doesn't really matter. What I should do about it, how I feel about it, would be the same no matter what the metaphysics. But it matters to me. The world is charged - somehow.

I've thought of this poem a lot recently. Because for a while, I lost the connection.

Eight months ago I had a son. A perfect baby, healthy and handsome and replete with virtues, a pride-and-joy child. But while my pride in him began a few minutes after he emerged - as soon as I held him, in fact, and saw how bravely and responsively he let himself be soothed after the crushed skull and cold light of birth - those minutes followed forty hours of induced labour, including an entire night where I was left all by myself in constant pain. That night, for a long time, snuffed out my joy.

Motherhood was one thing. I liked my son straight away, loved him as I grew to know him, felt that mother's conviction that so fine a child was he that to introduce him, however modestly, was to show him off - that the sentence 'This is my son' was an inherent boast. But while I could feel love and pride for him, I couldn't feel pleasure. When people told me I was a good mother, I grew uncomfortable, not knowing how to answer such a delusion. When people said, 'Look, he loves his mum,' I grew bleak, knowing that he didn't, couldn't possibly. When I stood over his cot after a few minutes' separation and saw his face light up - for my boy has a dazzling smile that charms strangers on the streets - and saw him thrash his small limbs in a dance of excitement, my only thought was, 'You poor child, you don't know any better. Some day you'll realise all my faults, and then you'll hate me for tricking you into thinking you loved me when you were too small and vulnerable to see the truth.'

In short, I had postnatal depression. It had nothing to do with my son, who was, in fact, an easy baby as well as a healthy and happy one, and it had little to do with me. I blame hormones and birth trauma; while I was familiar with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and all the ways you usually tackle the causes of depression, in my case I felt there wasn't a cause in my thinking. Yes, I had negative thoughts: I catastrophised, I disqualified the positive, I reasoned emotionally. Heck, I lay awake every night catastrophising; as far as I was concerned, the whole world was getting worse and worse and would always continue to do so, at least within my lifetime, and this was an entirely rational opinion supported by the evidence.

I was doubly lucky. I'd seen depression in people I was close to; after a few months, I started to look at my suffocating moods and think, 'Wait - I've seen this before.' And it I hadn't been this way before the traumatic birth: I'd been pretty happy for a long time and had taken great pleasure in many things. Anhedonia - the inability to feel pleasure - is one of the foundation stones of depression, and it wasn't usual for me. I could compare, and compare to how I'd been relatively recently. As I slipped and slipped and everything seemed impossibly difficult and nothing seemed fun, as the part of me that felt like me seemed to be dying, I recall saying to my husband tearfully, 'I used to have a beautiful mind.' I didn't necessarily mean that I had a particularly wonderful personality or intelligence (though my self-esteem prior to the depression had been pretty solid). I meant that my mind had been beauty-full, full of beauty: that there had been beauty all around me and my mind had been able to take it in, hold it, participate in it. Now, the beauty wasn't there.

The experience was bizarre and frightening. I couldn't follow conversations: if someone spoke for more than a few sentences, I would forget how they'd begun before they'd finished. I couldn't concentrate: if I flipped channels on the television, I couldn't read the parallel texts of 'Now on' and 'Next' - an effortless double scan in better days. I spilled things, including water on my computer; I bumped into things. I'd always been a little clumsy, but now I was having more accidents in a day than I'd usually had in a week - and even when I realised that, I couldn't seem to stop doing it. I might resolve to concentrate, but I couldn't concentrate on the resolution. Next thing I knew, I'd bumped into another table.

And this was what was really frightening: I became somehow blind. I could see, but it wasn't sight as I knew it. If I made an effort and concentrated, I could see that there were things in front of me: the images were there and my eyes were working as well as they usually did. But I couldn't perceive properly. If I let my attention relax for a few seconds, I stopped seeing, because my brain just wasn't taking an interest.

Before, I'd seen a world charged with the grandeur of God. That's what things were, charged. Every tree, every fall of light, every shape and bend of reality had some thrum of magic running through it. Trying to be scientific, I might say that I took pleasure in the act of looking at things and that the pleasure of seeing was inextricably linked to noticing things. Bushes and gates and windows and paving stones all had a silent vibration of life in them, were in and of the world. But when the pleasure sparked out - when my brain stopped producing the chemicals it needed, or whatever was going on with it - my connection to that charge sparked out with it. And I couldn't see. Not properly. Happiness had cast a light, and now the world was dimmed.

It took some hammering on doors to get help, more than a less fortunate woman could probably have sustained. I was supported, experienced with depression, educated: when the first doctor refused me antidepressants because I was breastfeeding, I was able to make another appointment, ask to see another doctor, make an argument I'd carefully rehearsed with my supportive husband and hand over the print-out from the NHS's own website stating that certain medications were safe. Because of my past, I was able to diagnose myself and persist until I found a doctor who supported me. Previous doctors had talked about counselling, but that wasn't what I needed - or at least, it wasn't the answer. Thinking things through wasn't going to make me feel better: I knew what was the matter with me. I knew it was physical, and it needed a physical solution.

I was lucky, extremely lucky. The first prescription they gave me worked. Nausea tightened my throat, the taste of metal glittered on my tongue, my jaw clamped until it ached ... and I got better. Two months of medication later, with a bitter tongue and dry throat and aching cheeks, I am all right again, I am back to myself. The world is beautiful; the charge has come back. I lie in bed wrapped in a duvet, my skin buzzing with pleasure at the softness of the sheets. I hold and rejoice with my son, and believe he loves me now, and hope that he will still when he becomes a man. I walk through the world, and I see it.

I have become mindful again.

They say that most people who join a cult stay for about two years, drift away and feel their experience was mostly positive, and I'd probably put myself in that category. It was, if nothing else, a place where there were many seekers after beauty, be it the beauty of truth, of compassion, of people or of the world; you can unfold around such people. And part of me is terrified that a tiny pill, barely bigger than a rice grain, can make the difference between a blinded world and a beautiful one. But I know a little now of the gulf between one vision of the world and another; I know a little more of what it means to look through another's eyes. And some of our eyes look at the world through wounds - wounds that can happen to anyone.

To some eyes, 'the dearest freshness deep down things.' To some, 'all dark and comfortless'. And without the help of others, we may stay in the dark.

We have to help each other. We have to.

--Kit Whitfield
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