December 27, 2018
“I need love
Not some sentimental prison
I need god
Not the political church
I need fire
To melt the frozen sea inside me
I need love.”
– Sam Phillips
I started this year with a post focused on love, and this idea that 2018 would be the year of love. This thinking wasn’t offered through rose-colored glasses, but from a shared sense and conviction that love would be required to see the year through. And not just any kind of love. In that original post there were a few definitions and quotes that we have been playing with at IISC, including these:
“All awakening to love is spiritual awakening… All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic.”
– bell hooks
“Justice is what love looks like in public.”
– Cornel West
“To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him [sic] an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.”
– William Sloane Coffin
“Love is seeing the other as a legitimate other.”
– Humberto Maturana
“The ultimate act of love is allowing ourselves and others to be complex.”
– Nora Bateson
Well, all I can say is that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Turns out that the writing of that post was a step into a full-bodied exploration of what love really is. And it has been profound.
Around about mid-February, the bottom fell out for me personally, both emotionally and spiritually. My head could no longer protect my heart and soul from what continues to unfold and be revealed around us, and I was taken into a world that I did not remember having experienced before (but that I now know I have known very intimately) – fear/terror, grief, guilt, overwhelm. I was fortunate (very fortunate) to be able to engage some skillful supports that, rather than lift me up, took me deeper, into old and age-old wounds.
I was reintroduced to the wisdom of the body and feeling. I took a hard look at damaging dynamics of internalized individualism, defensiveness, hyper-productivity and over-work. I was invited to take seriously the importance of self-care, and perhaps more importantly, community care. As I got more courageous to share with others what was happening, I found the unexpected grace of support and resonance in friends, near and far, seen and (previously) unseen.
And I met amazing contemplative teachers, including Father Richard Rohr, whose writings (including his book Falling Upward – thank you, Melinda Weekes-Laidlow) consistently call on seekers of spiritual maturity to follow a path of “descent” into the shadows, the “false and small self,” the fuller truth of historical and present suffering and injustice. With that came new awareness and experiences of trans-generational and vicarious trauma. Little seemed solid or certain or assured anymore. Following that, staying with that, held and witnessed in that, I have been guided to feel some glimmers of a deeper underlying ground. It’s hard to name it exactly (The Growing Edge. God. Creation. Life Itself.) though I know it has everything to do with love. And it’s still revealing itself, step down by step down.
What it has required is an excruciating letting go of what I thought sustained me, survival skills for a different time and me. It has also required an opening to others that I didn’t know was possible. And at this point and from this place, love has less to do with words and thinking and so much more to do with being.
“True love is radical because it requires us to see ourselves in all people.”
– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
I am grateful for the amazing leadership and modeling of my colleagues at IISC, which has invited us as a collective over this past year to lean more boldly into spaces of feeling, of honesty, of vulnerability, of slowness, of spaciousness (see Kelly Bates’ recent post on why creating space is crucial to the work of justice), of love (see Miriam Messinger’s post on how we have been bringing love to work). And we are not alone!
At the recent Facing Race conference in Detroit, Michigan, racial equity OD practitioners collectively articulated a need to practice courageous and fierce love in these times and around our work for equity. So 2019 is bound to be a further venture into love as it relates to racial and other forms of justice, to sustainability, to regeneration, to well-being and to what it means to be human in the best sense and as a species worthy of survival.
Thanks to Jen Willsea for turning me onto the following prayer from Reverend angel Kyodo Williams. Pass it along:
Warrior-Spirit Prayer of Awakening
May all beings be granted with the strength, determination and wisdom to extinguish anger and reject violence as a way.
May all suffering cease and may I seek, find and fully realize the love and compassion that already lives within me and allow them to inspire and permeate my every action.
May I exercise the precious gift of choice and the power to change that which makes me uniquely human and is the only true path to liberation.
May I swiftly reach complete, effortless freedom so that my fearless, unhindered action be a benefit to all.
May I lead the life of a warrior.
(From Radical Dharma p.93-94)
October 9, 2015
This week we lost Dr. Grace Lee Boggs. She was 100 years old. The long-time Detroit political and labor activist, author, and philosopher was a source of inspiration for many of us at IISC and in activist circles around the country and world. Dr. Boggs’ life and work is the focus of a documentary film called American Revolutionary, which POV is streaming for free until November 4.
The following quote appears in a piece written by Olga Bonfiglio on the Common Dreams website, which profiles this remarkable (r)evolutionary. Read More
September 16, 2015
“We are … interested in generating stories, visions and futures that are hard and realistic and hopeful.”
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to sit in on a session in Detroit with Adrienne Maree Brown, writer, editor, facilitator and consultant to social movement organizations. Adrienne’s offering was on the potential of “radical science fiction” to realize empowering visions of a just and sustainable future. After sharing some of her own writing, she encouraged participants to play with a sense of imagination grounded in realistic projections of current social and environmental conditions and trends.
For example, while acknowledging the reality of ecosystem-depleting capitalism, mass incarceration and climate change, we were invited to think about reality-based characters with “special powers” who might help yield more desirable means and ends. The intent was, as Adrienne explains, “to create innovative ways of understanding the world around us, paint visions of new worlds that could be, and teach us new ways of interacting with one another.” It is this impulse that led her and co-editor Walidah Imarisha to organize Octavia’s Brood (in honor of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler), “the first book to explore deeply the connections between … ‘visionary fiction,” and movements for social change through the vehicle of short stories.” The collection features a number of short stories by artists and activists.
Since that session, I’ve continued thinking about the practice of creatively reimagining futures that hover between dystopian (depressing, undesirable) and utopian (impossible, also undesirable) views. Then last week an article appeared in Nautilus entitled “An Astro-Biologist Asks a Sci-Fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene,” in which astrobiologist David Grinspoon interviews Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction and political novelist. Robinson’s recent book, 2312, “permits humans to survive near-extinction and populate the solar system over the course of 300 years.” In their discussion, Grinspoon asks Robinson what he sees as being keys to humanity getting through mounting social and environmental challenges. His answer struck me as sensible and breaks down more or less into the following:
- Understand and align with the carrying capacity of the planet and allow ecosystems to thrive
- Build new mechanisms for collaborative self-governance on local and global scales
- Organize more cooperative economic structures that are life-affirming
- Work continuously for universal justice and education
Grinspoon and Robinson also talk briefly about the Fermi Paradox, which points to the contradiction between the high probability of intelligent life existing beyond our planet and the fact that we have yet to see any confirmed evidence. One explanation offered for the paradox is that intelligent civilizations tend to destroy themselves, done in by the technologies and practices that contribute (at least for some time) to their so-called “advancement.” This suggestion should have us taking a hard look in the mirror and the facts, then, perhaps dusting off our visionary imaginations to push beyond the strictures of current thinking that seem to have us on a precarious path.
Embrace diversity
Unite–
or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.
From Octavia Butler’s “Earthseed: The Books of the Living,”Parable of the Sower.
April 3, 2013
“Structure is purpose expressed through design.”
– Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future
Detroit Voices: A Community Calls Out for Change from Phase 4 Media on Vimeo.
The new food movement, which is really several related but distinct movements, is a beacon of hope in this country. You can find evidence of this in many diverse settings, from Flint, Michigan to Northeast Iowa to northern Vermont to Oakland, California. While there are important distinctions in terms of emphasis and core players, one cross-cutting theme appears to be that we must create new structures to better nourish ourselves (calorically, economically, socially) through policy change, different land use patterns, new infrastructure, stronger relationships with ecosystems, new enterprises, and community building. From the growing number of food policy councils, to alternative financing mechanisms, practices like permaculture and agroforestry, and more intentional network building, people are setting the stage for some significant societal shifts. Read More
January 25, 2013
“It’s time for us to get together and talk about how we get more healthy food to people, how we bring our community back using local food, how we improve our community health using local food, and how we create new jobs. . . . We need to change our food system and the answers are in the room.”
– Stephen Arellano
I’ve been closely and excitedly watching and participating in the local food and urban agriculture movement as it grows both here in New England and in my native Michigan. Detroit has certainly been catching national attention, in part due to exposure via films such as “Urban Roots” and the good and ongoing work of the likes of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and the Fair Food Network. And my lesser known and native Flint is doing its own to grow what my friend Stephen Arellano has called “a human scaled economy” rooted in a reclamation of old industrial and abandoned residential lands for the purposes of equitably feeding the community, not just through good food, but through a grounded education and good profitable work. Read More
May 23, 2012
“Somebody’s gotta tell them, that we are not ghosts, that we are in this city and we are alive!”
– Jessica Care Moore
Feeling nostalgic, shaken, stirred, and inspired during my current trip to Michigan, and my first return visit to my hometown of Flint in 15 years. So much here has changed: foreclosures – 2,000 last year alone, 40% of all property parcels in the city are vacant or abandoned, jobs have disappeared now to the point of 25% unemployment, 36% of all residents live in poverty, half of the student population in the public schools has left in the last 10 years resulting in numerous school closings including my high school, of those students that remain 81% qualify for free lunch. And the flip side, there are anchor institutions, physical landmarks, and stalwart active citizens (thank you, Sylvester Jones and Harold Ford, among others!) that remain and provide some sense of backbone, continuity, and hope. Read More
January 26, 2012
It has been a heartening return to my home state these past couple of days while delivering a two-day Facilitative Leadership workshop with members of Michigan’s philanthropic community. Yesterday, we spent some time in the afternoon talking about power and how it plays out in different kinds of change initiatives. The point was made a number of times that those who are most impacted by the issues we are trying to solve must be in on the solutions, including the design and carrying out of the processes of problem-analysis, opportunity identification, and vision creation. Read More
June 21, 2010
It’s happening! Tens of thousands of people are just arriving in Detroit for what is an incredibly important and incredibly hopeful gathering – The United States Social Forum. It feels like all my friends are there and while conflicting responsibilities will keep me in Boston this week, I do want to send a blessing to all the courageous souls that are busy dreaming up new ways of being with each other. Read More
