An Elegant Disintegration*

Leny Mendoza Strobel

A note about storytellling: In this piece, I write as a Filipina woman in the diaspora; as a privileged middle class professional in a mostly white suburbia; as a decolonizing and re-indigenizing settler on Turtle Island. This is the only place and position I could write from. From here, I invite you, dear reader, to look for the threads that connect your story to mine. If All is Sacred, if All is Relative, if All is Connected—I trust that we will meet each other.

Elegant disintegration: I borrowed this phrase from the mythteller, Martin Shaw. He writes that when we allow ourselves to be claimed by Story—stories that emerge from a people’s relationship to Place—there is a loosening of sort that happens. For me, it’s a loosening of my grip on Certainty.

In my life, there is a loosening going on and it feels… Right.

This is not a small feat for me.

I’ve spent most of my life in search of truths in big “T” and small “t”. I grew up on a theology that promise Absolute Certainty: God intervened in History only once in the person of Jesus Christ. It is an Elegant story. In my angst-ridden youth, I was soothed by the promise of being loved unconditionally: God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. In my youth, I remember sobbing over my sinfulness and being comforted by the promise of salvation through grace. I had a personal relationship with Jesus and I lived a straight and narrow life. I tried my darn best to be a perfect child of God.

This “trying to be perfect” lasted many decades. The “trying” part gave way to: a teenage marriage at 17, a broken marriage at 25, single motherhood for 5 years, and then a second marriage to a white guy from Montana and moving from an island to a continent. Admittedly, I must not have been trying enough.

In my 20s, this path kept getting interrupted and challenged by friends who became concerned about what they perceived as my rigid adherence to a severe and un-fun belief system. Really, you believe that through Logic and Reason alone you can prove the existence of God? (In reference to the book, The God who is There by Francis Schaeffer, the go-to book of evangelicals in those days.) Why is your view of the world so narrow? Are you sure it is a sin to get divorced when you are in an abusive relationship? Are you sure that Jesus is the only way, the truth and the life? Are you sure that sex is sinful outside of marriage? Are you sure that Buddhists won’t go to heaven?

These questions were posed to me but I always had an answer. I was an avid C.S. Lewis reader, after all, and he is considered to be the best Christian apologist. But girls just want to have fun and I have to admit I yearned for a bit of fun in my life. When my friends wanted to take me to a casino they hesitated—Let’s not take Leny with us; she makes us feel guilty. In my desire for social acceptance, I learned how to drink cocktails at jazz clubs and I picked up smoking with them at the office but after office hours, I went to bible study groups led by white missionaries who became my really good friends. I was a good disciple and became a bit self-righteous and judgmental of the “unsaved” ones.

My straight and narrow life began to crack as I started to See that my friends, who were atheists and agnostics, were actually more compassionate, generous, kinder, more open-minded, and accepting than I was.

In my 30s, I uprooted myself from my homeland and came to the U.S. via an interracial marriage. We were both divorced with kids and we were both evangelicals and politically conservative. We started our life together in the bosom of the Presbyterian church. We sang in the choir; sent our kids to Christian camp in the summer and to youth nights; we served as deacon and elder. But I was a restless stay-at-home Mom and none of the biblical mandate of wifely submission wasn’t making me happy nor did it give me peace.

I started feeling unsettled by the way people looked at me. Did he pick you out of a catalog? (read: are you a mail order bride?) Can you take care of my kids? (read: are you a nanny?) Can you clean my house? (read: do you clean houses?) I didn’t know yet then what it meant to be racialized, stereotyped, and other-ed. The Christian faith that I thought was universally practiced wasn’t. I began to ask a lot of questions about how Christianity is shaped by culture and historical events. I began to question the received faith of my family from Methodist missionaries as the U.S claimed the Philippines as a formal colony in 1898. I began to interrogate my personal history and how it was embedded in larger historical narratives of empire and colonialism.

I went into therapy trying to make sense of my feelings of alienation and non-belonging but the white therapists didn’t know anything about my history and culture so I dropped out and went back to school instead. Don’t go to the university, you will become a liberal! exclaimed the folks at church. Leaving church wasn’t actually that difficult except that I worried about my Methodist pastor-father’s disapproval.

My straight and narrow life cracked up a bit more. Through the crack, a narrow shaft of light now shines through—a golden ray on the wall of my fevered struggle to find an answer to the question as to why God has brought me to this continent only to suffer much humiliation.

I realized that I had to undo so much of my colonial education and indoctrination. In my 40s and in graduate school, I began to find authors who liberated my voice, helped me make sense of my personal history. Colonial and imperial projects were wedded to the faith of my childhood. I began to understand my faith and its undergirding theology; how it shaped an entire culture and civilization that claims for itself superiority over other humans and domination over all of creation.

In the books I was reading—Paulo Freire, Vine deLoria, Franz Fanon, Ashis Nandy, Carter Woodson, Linda Hogan, Derrick Jensen, Charles Mills, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Cornel West, Albert Alejo, Virgilio Enriquez, NVM Gonzalez and many others—I found my voice and a new way of seeing and understanding. I learned the language of postcolonial and postmodern discourses although I have to say that the language also felt alien and disembodied to me most of the time. I understood the power of deconstructive arguments but have had to translate my learnings in my own language.

In my 50s I began to write, publish, and teach about the process of decolonization. In the university courses I taught a radical version of multicultural education and taught about dismantling white privilege through the transformative pedagogy of Paul Freire. I began to have an inkling of the power of this process when one of my students said: This course has saved me a lot of money that I would have paid a therapist to treat my depression!

Leaving organized religion, I found myself drawn to Poetry, to indigenous literature, and to the figure of the precolonial babaylan (medicine person) in the Philippines. Inspired by the history of the babaylan, I began to immerse myself in the indigenous histories of the Philippines and other indigenous cultures. I began to wrestle with development paradigms as my knowledge of the resistance and resilience of indigenous cultures through a long lens of history began to loosen my grip on the narrative of modernity, progress, and civilization. Slowly, I became convinced of the unsustainability of these paradigms.

My straight and narrow life has totally fallen apart by now and yet I feel more whole and alive than I’ve ever been. I do not regret, disown, or forget all the parts of me—the good colonial child and all of her stories of dismemberment—all belong to my big and beautiful Self.

An Elegant Disintegration,
No Small Feat

Looking back at my story as a postcolonial subject, I see that the journey of decolonization of the past three decades has led to an elegant disintegration. I couldn’t see it this way until I got past my oppositional consciousness. One wise mentor once said: Leny, you don’t always have to be oppositional; you can be creative even in the liminal spaces. And that is what I have done. Within the white walls of the academe I managed to create in the liminal spaces away from the surveiling gaze of institutional authorities.

Although my published works reflect a critique (and therefore, oppositional) of colonial and imperial projects (that have now morphed into corporate globalization), I was also slowly being drawn deeper into practices that called for a Third Way. This third way seeks to transcend dualities and polarities. My intellect’s well-honed penchant for reason and pragmatism has served me well professionally but I also felt a growing need to make space for the body’s sensuous knowing, the heart’s feelings, and the soul’s wisdom.

In the last two decades, this has been my phenomenological meditation. I am referring to this sacred wholeness that is shaped by Filipino indigenous values. All these indigenous elements: ancestral work, mythtelling and storytelling, community-building, dwelling in place, connecting to nature, dealing with the shadow of history, dream work, meditative qi gong practice, holosexuality—show up in my daily practice. Later on, in finding the concept of Ethnoautobiography, as developed by Jurgen Kremer, the pieces all fell into place as the story of my long body. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) concept of the long body refers to our sense of self that includes our past, our ancestry, other human and non-human beings; in other words, our long body is beyond our psyche and our skin.

All these practices have given me the gift of renewing my second sight—where its gifts often hide in alleys sidelined by a socially-condoned consensual reality shaped by what we are now willing to admit as failure of the modern narrative. I credit Arnold Mindell for the concept of “secondary processes” which deeply resonates with Taoist principles.

But I also feel this in my bones as my own indigeneity—Kapwa—the concept of shared self that is inclusive in the most expansive sense. Perhaps, my tacit understanding and experience of Kapwa is codified more succinctly by Taoism and Mindell’s process-oriented therapy. The reader’s unfamiliarity with the concept of Kapwa will, hopefully, be assuaged a bit by the more familiar ideas in Taoist practices. Mindell’s process-oriented therapy also references Taoism.

Kapwa constantly nudges my need for Remembrance of the wisdom in my bones and in my cultural genes that has always been there from beginningless Time. This is my medicine.

Ethnoautobiography asserts that the modern self is masterful but empty. Emptied of its connection to ancestors, myths, nature, place, history, storytelling, faith and spiritually, community, and dreams—it fills the emptiness with consumption of commodities (including spiritual commodities) that offer only a temporary salve for hungry ghosts.

Five centuries of colonial history is not easily erased in my cultural memory. It shaped the script of my life for many decades. Even as I am now able to look back at the elegant disintegration of my prior beliefs about what it means to be human, modern, civilized, educated, I see what lies ahead of me still. It is a daunting thought—all the work that I could still be doing—but this elegant disintegration is no longer about solving the dis-ease of my modern life.

For me it is about slowing down so that I may grow my own roots in a Place that I call Home. In hindsight, this is where my story should have begun. As a decolonizing and re-indigenizing Filipina in the diaspora, I seek to embody what it means to belong to a place; to be claimed by place; to be of a place.

What is my Place as a settler on Turtle Island? As someone who was uprooted from my homeland? As someone from a homeland where my settler-ancestors, a long time ago, also uprooted indigenous peoples? I realize that this ‘peeling of layers’ may actually be a perceptively limitless one seeking arrival. I do not seek an ontological answer. But in my process of embodiment, the imaginal and transpersonal realms where this elegant disintegration has taken me is a Place of what Wallace Stegner calls “an angle of repose.”

Daily practice of conscious root-growing acts is what Slow is teaching me. I am being released of the notion that I am a Time Being. I am not.

I am Present in the Here and Now as the inevitable consequences of a modern civilization is increasingly more palpable as we count the disappearing species in this sixth extinction crisis. When stated in this manner, the abstraction of language doesn’t really land on my skin.

But when I am sitting in my garden and I notice that over the three decades that I’ve lived in one place, there are fewer hummingbirds, no more murmurations of starlings, lesser buzzing from bees, the sadness of ancient trees as they are thirsty from this drought—I see this. I feel the grief sitting on my chest. I feel the tears welling up. Then I lay myself on the ground to look up at the blue sky, vast and limitless … and I disappear.

I am Present. I am Presence. In my elegant disintegration, I Am and We Are.

*This essay appeared first in Revolutionary Wellness Magazine, edited and produced by Rochelle McLaughlin.