Dancing with the Keffiyeh

Look, and look again.

“You think you know how the world works. You think that this material universe is all there is. What is real? What mysteries lie beyond the reach of your senses? At the root of existence, mind and matter meet. Thoughts shape reality!“

- The Ancient One to Stephen Strange

One of the best purchases I’ve ever made is a red hat which upon first glance appears to be a Trump-supporting MAGA hat. But if you look closely, you’ll see that the white words in the middle actually say ‘Made you Look, Black Lives Matter.”

Both the MAGA supporter and the Black Lives Matter supporter would, of course, be triggered by seeing this. The MAGA supporter might first feel a bit of relief, then unsettled, then confused, then perhaps some low level anger. The BLM supporter might first feel angry, then unsettled, then confused, then very very relieved.

This fascinates me. I’m more interested in the rise and fall of that emotional landscape within the human being than “proving” an argument about the validity of BLM or MAGA. That rise and fall, which is constantly going on inside of our autonomic nervous systems as human beings, is exquisite; it is the stuff that music is made of.

And we remain mostly unaware of it, not only since it happens at the level of our bodies — aka our subconsciousness — but also because we have been taught and conditioned to perceive our brains, exclusively, as a repository of knowledge, and our “irrational” bodies as sin.

Maybe I’ll opine on the history of that in another post. For now, let me get back to the hat, which is, for all intents and purposes, a kind of spell. It is like the Fool or Jester in the tarot card deck whose mission is to play a joke on the reader and remind him that nothing is fixed, everything is changing, moving, and dancing always, at all times.

The Jester breaks the frame of all who see it. He undermines the perceived assumptions we hold, and reminds us — that is, if we are conscious enough to notice — that we are all actually making things up, all the time; and this doesn’t mean that nothing is real, but rather that we have real power as humans to make conscious choices and confer meaning of any kind on any phenomenon. And that meaning can be for healing or it can be for harm.

This capacity for meaning making is the reason the construct of race exists. We humans unconsciously crafted it as a way to numb and cope with our fear of the unknown — another word for which is darkness.

Because of our fear of the dark we turned light — an electromagnetic radiation — into a symbol of goodness and purity and darkness into a symbol of evil and corruption. (Seriously, go look up the word ‘darkness’ in the dictionary right now and read the second definition listed.)

Then we took that symbolism (which we made up) and projected it onto physically darker peoples. Hence black and white were transformed from descriptions of color on the spectrum of light to symbols of good and evil, civilized and uncivilized, desirable and undesirable.

Do you see? We are unconsciously making meaning all the time. To become truly awakened is to do so consciously.

Which brings me to the keffiyeh.

“Indeed, from the perspective of my bodily senses, there is no thing that appears as a completely determinate or finished object. Each thing, each entity that my body sees, presents some face or facet of itself to my gaze while withholding other aspects from view…This earthen vessel thus reveals aspects of its presence to me only by withholding other aspects of itself for further exploration.”

-David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous

Many people who are familiar with my work know of my deep love for the Jewish community and my work in the Israel advocacy space. For years I’ve spoken out against anti-Jewish harm and the need for a safe and secure Israel to ensure that the community — which has been persecuted for millennia by many nations who have been unable to deal with their own shadow — has the means to protect themselves.

So naturally in a post 10.7 world, when I donned a keffiyeh this past Saturday and sung a chant praying for the healing of the suffering of the Palestinian and Israeli people, some people in the community winced.

I get that because I have also winced when I’ve seen people wearing the keffiyeh. I do so automatically. It’s my body’s natural reaction to what feels like a threat. Through the prism of my own limited, singular experience, the first thing I feel when I see the keffiyeh is fear.

Given the number of times that people wearing a keffiyeh have made violent threats against Jews and have carried them out, the composite meaning a keffiyeh confers based on the accumulation of experiences I have had in associating with it signals danger, and invokes fear within my autonomic nervous system.

And sometimes I feel that fear festering and metastasizing into resentment and hatred for Palestinians and for the Arab Muslim world in general. That’s not something I want to carry or hold. And it also means that a piece of cloth has power over me. So my decision to play, jester like, with the symbol was intentional, a deliberate attempt to compassionately be with what is arising within me when I see the symbol AND to make new meaning out of it.

After all, I know plenty of people who wear the keffiyeh who don’t mean harm to Jews at all. In their limited, singular experience, the keffiyeh represents freedom. They simply want to create a world where Palestinians live a life of dignity, one where their hungry are fed, their sick healed, their poor are housed, and their children are bequeathed a future they can thrive in. So for them, when they see a keffiyeh, their autonomic nervous system relaxes, feels warmth and calm.

Of course, many Palestinians also wince when they see an Israeli flag, a symbol which generally confers calm for me and many Israelis who want the same things for their children that Palestinians want for theirs, but which invokes fear for Palestinians given their experience of destruction and violence which has happened under its banner. That fear can and easily does metastasize into resentment and hatred.

If you’re reading this and you’re an Israeli or in community with Israelis, you might find your rational mind running into judgement. So too, if you’re a Palestinian or in community with Palestinians.

“Chloé, you’re both sidesing this issue! How dare you!”

“THEY did do this to us! They are still doing this to us!”

“The keffiyeh does represent murder and violence!”

“ The Israeli flag does represent systemic oppression.”

Your reaction is a threat response which is understandable, given your lived experience. So what I’m asking you to do now probably feels like a tall order since threat responses happen on the level of our bodies; we then rationalize it after.

But if you’ve gotten this far in the piece, I’m willing to bet there’s no tiger around you lurking and getting ready to pounce you and eat you. Go ahead and take a moment to check.

If there is, then by all means, please get yourself to safety.

If there isn’t, then great. Remember that these are just words, tiny symbols on a glass screen you’re reading right now which somehow have the power to invoke voices, visions, and emotions in you. If your rational brain is “leaping” to judgement by fixing and freezing the images you see in your head and concluding, “this image means one thing, and one thing alone,” it’s because it wants you to get to safety. (That’s why we have the phrase “don’t leap to judgement.” It’s another spell-like phrase alluding to a time in the distant past when we would leap from one branch to another in order to get to safety. The body keeps the score.)

This, yet again, is the sometimes maddening-yet-exquisite rise and fall of energy moving inside your autonomic system. Contracting when you feel fear and expanding when you feel safe. It happens to me and you and to all of us. It is the rhythm of life itself. And if we can get still enough to listen, we’ll be able to glimpse the eternal dance happening at all times within us. Then we can choose to track that internal rhythm, (“Ah, would you look at that, I’m going into a freeze state. Is there a tiger around me? Nah. Let me get curious about this.”) compassionately be with the ebbs and flows of the emotions that pass through our systems due in part to millions of years of evolution, (“I’m currently feeling sad. It is so beautiful that I get to experience this feeling), and consciously choose to respond to phenomenon from that place of knowing.

After all, a keffiyeh is just a piece of cloth made of cotton, used traditionally by Bedouin men to keep themselves safe from the sunburn, dust and sand. So at its root, the keffiyeh is quite literally something meant to protect humans from harm. And it is up to us to either use it in that way, to heal, or to use it to harm.

The choice as always, is ours.

For a great chant/song to pair with this reading, check out the song All in A Dream by LP Giobbi, DJ Tennis, and Joseph Ashworth.