Home Rule for the Soul

The Question

We have been rowing. To the credential, the better job, the practice that would finally heal us. We pulled harder. We did everything right. And we never arrived.

The question carried into every room is how to row well. More efficiently, more sustainably, more consciously, with better leadership and a healthier crew. That is the question that gets funded, measured and awarded, and every version of it assumes the rowing.

The rowing is presented as what will happen anyway. Once it is, how well is the only question left, and it can be answered forever without anything stopping.

The question under it is whether. It is never on the agenda. It is the one that is yours.

No one here is telling you to come back when you have done the work. There is nothing to become ready for.

What is the smaller question?

What Was There First?

The wind is on your face. It always was. It was blowing before anyone put you to the oars, and it never stopped.

Something was in you before anyone trained you, credentialed you, corrected you, developed you. It did not come from them and it did not have to be installed. The prior resident never left. That is the claim, and everything on this site is the working out of it.

What is called development is largely the covering of it, and the covering takes continuous effort. The never-ending efforting is the part that can stop.

What was there first?

What is Being Established?

You were told the air is dead: that you can only count on your own effort, that some are born to steer and the rest are born to row, and that this is simply how things are.

That is not how things are. It is a religion, one religion, wearing three faces. It says this is nature. It says this is God’s design. It says this is economic reality. Press any one face and it answers in another. None of the three survives the record, because the record has dates and hands.

Someone wrote each rule down. A thing with an author is a construction, and a construction can be declined.

What is the Establishment?

A No That Held

Whether can be asked out loud, and the answer can hold.

When the gas industry told New York towns that drilling was coming either way, more than 170 of them answered with bans or moratoriums, using the same zoning authority that decides where a quarry goes. The industry argued the state had taken that authority away. In 2014 the Court of Appeals held that it had not. The state then banned high volume fracking outright.

That is home rule at the register of the town: a jurisdiction that was there before the institution claiming it, and a no that is lawful rather than advisory. Home rule for the soul is the same standing one level down. It is not a metaphor.

What is Home Rule?

Four Centuries

Jacob Böhme, a shoemaker in Görlitz, wrote down what he had encountered directly, and was silenced for it. His books reached England in the 1640s, into a country whose established church had just lost its monopoly.

Out of that opening came the Friends, whose founding testimony was that the encounter is direct and needs no one standing between. They were jailed, whipped, and in four cases hanged for saying so.

William Penn carried the same claim into constitutional form in what is now the United States, and he wrote privileges where a lesser claim would have written rights. A right is granted by an authority. A privilege, in his usage, is recognized as already there. The wind and the water were already yours.

What is the History and Tradition?

What the Exercise Is

The exercise is refusal. Not arguing for a better seat at the oars, and not refusing one demand at a time, which can be done forever. The exercise identifies the Establishment as construct: the rowing on command, the horizon as the only destination, the governor’s comfort as the price of your seat. It is the whether, answered.

RegenerativeLaw’s refusal is religious exercise, not attitude, and the difference is what makes it reachable in law. An employer punishing religious practice is reachable. An employer disliking a temperament is not.

The four centuries are what carry the difference. They are the evidence that this is a religion, and not a mood.

What is the Free Exercise Claim?

RegenerativeLaw

Codex

More than a thousand entries, each naming one operation, with dates and hands where the record has them. There is no order in which they have to be met and no place to start.

The Establishment

What is being enforced, how it presents itself as neutral, and why the enforcement of a theology by the state is an establishment rather than a metaphor for one.

Re-Fusion

What the severance divided, what it costs to keep divided, and what happens at the interval between the two when the interval is not being operated by anyone..

"History & Tradition"

Four centuries, documented, from Görlitz to the Charter of Privileges. Also the test the Court now applies to Establishment Clause questions, which is why the record is the argument.

Home Rule

The constitutional ground. A jurisdiction that predates the institution claiming it, at the register of the soul and at the register of the town.

Cessation

The answer to the prime question. What is being maintained, what the maintenance costs, and what obtains when it stops.

The prime question is not what do we do next.

It is not the wrong question. It is in the wrong sequence, and the sequence is geometry rather than development. There is no level to reach first and nothing to become ready for. The smaller question converts "whether" into doing well what should stop.

The prime question is whether.

Asked of a life, the question is how, then, shall we live.