The Power of Paradox

Listen my beloved nothings, your seriousness will kill you! —Ilya Kaminsky

A filmmaker asked a Peruvian culture-keeper what she does with all the discarded plastic visitors leave at her rainforest retreat. The Maestra, a walking embodiment of ancestors and land, replied that it’s no problem. She simply collects it and burns it in ceremonial heaps. The smoke clears the dense energy that modern people leave behind, she explained. “I like the smell.”

One of my teachers advocates space for childhood aggression—toy guns, stick swords, whatever their imaginations require (within reason). “They should have the full array of things to act out what they need to act out,” he says. By resolving fate in childhood, maybe they avoid a prison sentence.

I joined a Facebook group to cosplay my supposed ideological foes. I get to say things like, “ONE GENDER UNDER GOD. 🇺🇸” Unified by typos and hyperbole, we gather to reclaim our casserole dishes from Carol, brag about our grandchildren, and rail against liberals. Our aggression is real, and our toy guns are CAPSLOCK.

All of us think our dogmas are the correct ones. This is good. This is bad. I am right. You are wrong. Before certainty set in, we played.

Now we ask how anyone can play as fresh horrors roll out daily, as the regime gleefully punches down, due process dies, and untold numbers of people face erasure, murder, and worse. In our inverted world, ecocide is “advancement, growth, and development,” while climate collapse levels us, literally.

What is the value of upending our perspective when the world is already upside-down?

Once, I entered a healing ritual with a Daoist priest. Before the ritual, he dismissed me (not unkindly). But as soon as we entered ceremonial space, he could see me. I physically relaxed for the first time. He created a symbolic “mirror” by making his hands into the shape of a frame, and examining me through it. Then he slowly rotated the frame until it was upside-down, signaling a shift in vision. Flipping the mirror grants access to an inverted plane where hidden causes can be seen and known.

Eclipses have a similar impact, thinning the veil between the visible (yang) and invisible (yin) worlds. Hidden phenomena surfaces clearly. From unresolved family drama to Bigfoot, everything comes out to play. Ultimately, eclipses invite integrity. They catalyze, through their alignment, the dual world dumpster fire.

How is it even possible that the Sun and Moon appear to be exactly the same size during eclipses, despite their tremendous differences in size and distance? As our founding father Nate Bargatze says, “Nobody knows.” We come into the world like eclipses do—chaotic, liminal, unbalanced yet unified through wildly astronomical odds.

I told a friend to check out the Facebook group so she could let off some steam by play-acting “the other side.” She recoiled in horror: “I would never do that.” Are we afraid that softening conceptual divides will degrade our ethical integrity? Do we think it will make us evil? For me, undoing the architecture of separation dismantles the blueprint for war. I take up the toy gun to stay out of prison.

I’m not telling anyone what to think or how to be. Paradox is easier for ultra-sensitive relational smears. As a Monkey, I mimic, I play, I provoke. I love unlacing the corset of moral panic. I enlist hilarity to see me through disaster. I hear that burning plastic works well for the Peruvian shaman, and I think, “Of course! Why not?”

Paradox is a mirror held up to the whole thing. The Daoist ritual would not have worked if the priest acknowledged only half of what he saw. We're already living in the ruins of certainty. How would it feel to look around and claim the chaos and contradiction, to flip the mirror upside-down, and finally see ourselves for the first time?