The Food Solutions New England 21 Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge for 2021 is moving into its last week and shifting from the theme of “Reckon and Repair” to “Regenerate.” And it just so happens that the Revolutionary Love Conference happened this past weekend, providing amazing array of speakers, deep wisdom, inspiration and what feels like a rich transition that aligns with where the Challenge is heading (both thematically and in its encouragement of learning and action that takes its thousands of participants from 21 days to 365). This year’s theme of Revolutionary Love was “The Courage to Reimagine,” and while I was not able to attend all of the gathering, what I did catch was nourishing, and the social media stream (#RevLove21 on Twitter) was on the best kind of fire. What follows is a harvest of 21 quotes from the presentations and conversations.
“We have become a people who accept racism and poverty as conditions, when they are actually crises.” – Rev. Traci Blackmon
“We all know someone who is more outraged by Colin Kaepernick’s knee than Derek Chauvin’s… No one hates like a Christian who’s just been told their hate isn’t Christian.” – John Fugelsang
“Public confession without meaningful transformation does nothing.” – Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
“Too often, our framing of God prevents us from moving toward a just society—just as capitalism uses theological vocabulary but centers predatory self-interest.” – Otis Moss, III
“How can we retrain the eye to see all others as part of us, one human family. We can train our eyes to look upon the face of anyone and say, ‘You are a part of me I do not yet know. I will open myself to your story. I will let your grief into my heart.” – Valarie Kaur
“White people need to stop being white and start being ethnic again. When you leave the US no one is seeing you and saying “Oh hey you’re white!” They’ll want to know where you’re from, ethnicity carries stories – what is your STORY?” – Otis Moss, III
“I would like to get rid of words like inclusion and say democratization. I’d like for us to get rid of words like diversity and say democratization.” – Ruby Sales
“We must demand a society that will not withhold from others that which we would not want withheld from ourselves.” – Dean Kelly Brown Douglas
“I want white evangelicals to stop talking about reconciliation and talk about justice and repair.” – Robert P. Jones
“I want to stand as a bulwark that things can be different, even in the most stalwart, white supremacist, bigoted families.” – Rev. Rob Lee
“Change is possible when we stop seeing others as needy and start seeing each other as necessary.” – Rev. Traci Blackmon
“Speaking truth to power isn’t only about taking on the President or the GOP, it’s also about taming the power of our own ego.” -Irshad Manji
“Too often, our acts of moral courage go unacknowledged—even by ourselves. We don’t realize the impact we have on others who observe us, and benefit from small mundane acts of resistance in the face of unimaginable daily horror.” – Wajarahat Ali
“I love my enemies for purely selfish reasons. It moves me toward a cure for the life-denying disease of returning hate for hatred. Love may lead to defeat. It may lead to death. But it will not let hatred have the final word.” – Dr. Miguel De La Torre
“White relatives, we’re not asking for a handout of charity. This [reparations] is an invitation—a lifeline to your own humanity and liberation.” – Edgar Villaneuva
“This is a time of reckoning and reconstruction, and policy is my love language. . . . There’s been hurt and harm legislated for generations. Long before our pandemic, our nation was already in crisis.” – Ayanna Pressley
“What would you do? What would you risk, if you truly saw no stranger? How will you fight with us? … It is the practice of a community, and we all have a different role in the work at any given time.” – Valarie Kaur
“Love is always asking: How do I tell this truth and still stay in relationship?” – Krista Tippett
“Think of how much change we leave on the table when we assume that the other will never see things from our point of view, so we must get in their face and humiliate them. Think of how much social change we may be leaving on the table.” – Irshad Manji
“There are so many awesome people in every political party, every demographic of age, sexuality, gender, etc. – these awesome people have GOT to find each other.” – Van Jones
“Racism is a putrid, festering hole in our nation’s soul, and that will only change when we have the courage to love a different way. That love must become an everyday spiritual practice, like flossing or brushing our teeth.” – Dr. Rev. Jacqui Lewis
“Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. … Big, undreamed-of things – the people on the edge see them first.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
I have used the above quote in a number of cases to illustrate a network principle of thinking and action – Don’t get stuck in the core, make the periphery the norm. As we come to the end of 2020 (as arbitrary as that calendrical designation may be), I am thinking about Vonnegut’s words in different and perhaps more expansive ways.
Seemingly many of us have been asked to live (in some cases, even further out) on any number of edges over the past several months – political, economic, psychological, social, spiritual. While exciting in certain cases, it has also been quite exhausting and for some it has been a push to and over the brink.
It is also the case that many have woken or are waking up to the realization that life can only continue in some form or fashion at various edges, especially in times of considerable change. The Aboriginal artist and complexity scientist Tyson Yunkaporta reminds us that from an indigenous perspective –
“Sedentary lifestyles and cultures that do not move with the land or mimic land-based networks in their social systems do not transition well through apocalyptic moments.”
And it would seem we are at an apocalyptic moment, if we take that term to mean a great revelation, along with a call for reckoning, healing and re-creation. “The Great Turning,” maybe, allowing that transitions take us to the edge, because that is where qualitative growth lies.
“Look well to the growing edge. All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge.”
– Dr. Rev. Howard Thurman (philosopher, theologian, educator, civil rights leader)
Earlier this year I joined a beautiful community stewarded by Joe Weston, which has been brought together by a common desire to cultivate deeper shared capacity among people for what Joe calls “respectful confrontation” and “fierce civility.” The Weston Network is grounded in a set of practices drawn from martial arts, mindfulness and somatics, which help practitioners cultivate four core pillars – grounding, focus, strength and flexibility. These pillars support people to express and get their needs met in ways that can contribute to co-evolution (my word, not Joe’s), or mutualistic growth in groups and communities. I can really vouch for the power and the personal test of the practice!
A helpful concept that Joe introduced back in March at an in-person workshop, just before things started to close down because of COVID, was the idea that our individual and collective growth is found at “the resilient edge of our resistance.” The idea is that people tend to be resistant at the edges of their comfort zones, for some good reasons. And yet it is also true that staying hunkered down is not always helpful, and may even be dangerous. People also have the capacity to become more resilient at and over the edges of their perceived comfort zone. Life, in fact, requires this!
“Evolution is what happens when patterns that used to define survival become deadly.”
– Nora Bateson (filmmaker, writer, regenerative thinker and educator)
Through the Weston Network, I have been learning more about how to read resistance and sense its invitations beyond, “Don’t move. stay safe!” … feeling these messages in my body and a complex mixes of emotions, along with the dynamism of dancing on different edges. Resistance when met with a combination of respect, rootedness, receptivity, and recreation can build muscle, confidence, and open up new possibilities. How many people have I heard say that one thing they have learned this year is that they are in fact stronger and more adaptive than they might have thought? Or that they have found meaningful connection in struggle and disruption?
“We don’t have to resist entropy … or push the river. We just need to learn how to get out of the way and cooperate with the direction.”
As I have gone and been pushed to my growing edges this year, seen myself and the world from new vantage points, and tasted “resilient power” (Joe Weston’s words), I’ve been contemplating what this looks like as collective practice. And I’ve been dabbling a bit with both the Weston Network practices as well as those of the PROSOCIAL community in a few different groups and networks.
The PROSOCIAL community is rooted in extensive field research (including the commons-focused work of Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom) and evolutionary and contextual behavioral science. PROSOCIAL offers tools and processes to support groups in cultivating collaborative skillfulness and the critical capacity of psychological flexibility, including the application of Acceptance and Commitment Training/Therapy (ACT) techniques.
The ACT Matrix (see above) is a tool that individuals andgroups can use to name what matters most to them, along with aligned behaviors, as a way of laying a foundation for transparency, agreement, support and accountability. The Matrix also helps people to name andwork with resistance found in challenging thoughts and emotions that might move them away from their shared values. In essence, this helps to normalize resistance and when used with other ACT practices (defusion, acceptance, presence, self-awareness), can encourage more sustainable, fulfilling (over the long-term), and mutually supportive choices.
I’m eager in the new year to lean more into these different practices with others, knowing that more of us are moving with intention into the “omega” (release) and “alpha” (reorganize) phases of the adaptive cycle (see below). While letting go and stepping into the unknown may not be a very compelling invitation to everyone, I’m hoping that the prospect of finding our resilient power and cultivating regenerative futures will be incentive to keep moving to meet, greet and play on our edges.
I just finished reading Douglas Ruskoff’s Team Human and found it very provocative and timely. As I find myself in more spaces where it feels like there is a tendency towards breaking as opposed to bridging, I and others with whom I work are asking, (1) What is really going on here? and (2) What we can do to better hold things together, while respecting diversity and difference? Team Human offers some insights by lifting up how the digital-age technologies in which many of us are engaged are making dangerously simplistic abstractions of our world (and of people) and appealing to the worst of our humanity.
Rushkoff uses 100 aphoristic statements in what amounts to a manifesto that speaks to how forces for human connection have turned into ones of isolation and repression. This includes algorithms that constantly direct our attention to what outrages us and sound bite biased social media undermining democracy by encouraging people to spread incendiary partial and untruths (because they outrage us!).
The book is certainly a wake up call to understand the manipulation behind digital media and to go beyond false appearances and reductionist reactivity to embrace prosocial behavior and make contributions towards regenerative patterns and flows. I highly recommend the book and have pulled some of my favorite quotes, which you will find below:
“Whoever controls media controls society. … Social control is based on thwarting social contact and exploding the resulting disorientation and despair.“
“Engineers at our leading tech firms and universities tend to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution.”
[Under capitalism] “people are at best an asset to be exploited, and at worst a cost to be endured.”
“We’ve got a greater part of humanity working on making our social media feeds more persuasive than we have on making clean water more accessible.”
“The internet reinforces its core element : the binary. It makes us take sides.”
“Memetic warfare, regardless of the content, discourages cooperation, consensus, or empathy.”
“If we don’t truly know what something is programmed to do, chances are it is programming us. Once that happens, we may as well be machines ourselves.”
“There is no ‘resistance’ in a digital environment/ only on or off.”
“We reduced ideas to weaponized memes, and humankind to human resources. We got carried away with our utilitarian capabilities, and lost touch with the reasons to exercise those capabilities in the first place.”
“The long-term danger is not that we will lose our jobs to robots. … The real threat is that we lose our humanity to the value system we embed in our robots, and that they in turn impose on us.”
“We must learn that technology’s problems can’t always be solved with more technology.”
“Might the apparent calamity and dismay around us be less the symptoms of a society on the verge of collapse than those of one about to give birth?”
“The first step toward reversing our predicament is to recognize that being human is a team sport.”
“Happiness is not a function of one’s individual experience or choice, but a property of groups of people.”
“Evolution may have less to do with rising above one’s peers than learning to get along with more of them.”
“Challenging the overt methods of separation is straightforward: reject that hate speech of racists, zero some economics of oppression, and the war mongering of both tyrants and neoliberal hawks.”
“We can be utterly in charge of the choice not to be utterly in charge. We can be fully human without being in complete control of our world.”
“It’s neither resistance nor passivity, but active participation: working in concert with what’s happening to make it down river in one piece.”
“New experiments have revealed that after just a few moments of awe, people behave with increased altruism, cooperation and self-sacrifice.”
“True awe is timeless, limitless, and without division. It suggests there is a unifying whole to which we all belong – if only we could hold onto that awareness.”
“If we are not going to follow the commands of a king, a CEO, or an algorithm, then we need unifying values in order to work together as a team to work toward mutually beneficial goals.”
“Unless we consciously retrieve the power inherent in our collective nature, we will remain unable to defend ourselves against those who continue to use our misguided quest for individuality against us.”
“The future is not a discontinuity or some scenario we plan for so much as the reality we are creating through our choices right now. We just need to observe the flows, recognize the patterns, and apply them everywhere we can.”
“Find the others. Restore the social connections that make us fully functioning humans, and oppose all conventions, institutions, technologies, and mindsets that keep us apart.”
|Photo by diveofficer|http://www.flickr.com/photos/diveofficer/2224496557|
Metaphors can be very useful in helping us grasp and work with otherwise complex issues and difficult circumstances. I’ve been working with one particular image lately as I’ve been doing change work on both personal and professional fronts. As we all know, it can be very difficult to move from where we are, even when we know change would likely bring something better. Of course, there are many different sources of resistance, and something I’ve been thinking about lately is how the reality of our current situation, while being an impetus for change, can also become all-consuming in a way that obscures other possible paths forward. I liken this to the image of standing under a bright streetlight at night. Where we are is fully illuminated, and beyond that, the dark is that much more obscured in contrast to the brightness in which we are engulfed. This can make any movement beyond that glow, as glaring and unpleasant as it may be, somewhat daunting. We can’t see the alternatives! But if we were to venture slowly out beyond the edges of the lamp’s light, what would we find? Over time our eyes adjust. Gradually, we are able to see more clearly that there are in fact viable alternative paths forward. Perhaps thinking about and allowing for this adjustment will embolden our stepping into the shadows.
|Photo by aldoaldoz|http://www.flickr.com/photos/aldoaldoz/2340226779|
Since February I’ve been experiencing back pain in a constant and distracting (though not quite incapacitating) way, a result of having poor posture at the computer, not taking enough breaks while sitting, lifting too many small children, and being another year older. A couple of months ago I went to a chiropractor and he did his best to wrench me back into alignment. This worked for a few days, and then things were back as they were. I enlisted the help of a “deep tissue” masseuse who went after my back muscles with steady steam rolling force. Again, for a few days I was on top of the world, and then it was back to square one. Then, about two weeks ago, I started seeing a physical therapist, who has given me some gentle stretches and postural shifts and done light massage on my left shoulder. Et voila, real progress! Small and subtle shifts have yielded major and lasting results.
|Photo by John D. McDonald|http://www.flickr.com/photos/psychoactive/2943294866|
Science has confirmed what many of us feel, that we are each more than one person. We are minds and bodies, left brains and right brains, controlled and automatic responders. This last division is due in part to the fact that we each have more than one brain. Our old reptilian brain is what we can depend on to keep us safe from physical harm most of the time. Our newest brain is what gives birth to the wonders of critical thought and creativity. The amazement I feel about the evolution of our higher thinking is dampened somewhat by my understanding and experience that my multiple brains are not often well coordinated. I walk into a meeting on the one hand (or brain) excited to facilitate, while on the other I am anxious, my more primitive wiring believing there’s a saber toothed tiger in the corner). Welcome to what Seth Godin calls “the lizard” inside.
