Ta-Nehisi Coates writing to his son, in the book, Between the World and Me:
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren.
h/t to the Centre for Action and Contemplation, from today’s Daily Meditation.
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I was reflecting today with a friend on the nature of the world right now. We were discussing some of the story collections I have from the early part of the pandemic when I was running Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects with organizations seeking to understand the effects of the pandemic on their services. It’s hard to remember that time, and it’s very hard to remember the “before-times,” as people call them. But reading these stories reminded me of what we all did together all of a sudden. It was meant to be a short-term intervention in our lives. It wasn’t.
I think the pandemic has fundamentally altered our reality. I remember the 2010s as a time when we were starting to get some things right, and for me, that positive aspect of the decade really took shape in the way public transportation was developing in the Vancouver region. During the 2010s, Vancouver built a light rail extension to the airport, began building a subway across the Broadway corridor on the west side of the city and rapidly increased the number of express bus routes and connections, even out to the suburbs. This whole era seemed like one where the focus was on connecting people for a larger public good. It symbolized a collective and concrete commitment to our region’s well-being.
But when the pandemic began, much of that progress halted, and we lost many of those public services because people stopped commuting and meeting in person. On our little island, a successful community-operated express bus ceased running downtown. Our late-night water taxi service disappeared. Deep in the city, streets were taken over for patios, and folks started living outside a little more leading to the establishment of more bike infrastructure. But the return to public transit was slow and still hasn’t reached pre-pandemic levels (as of last year, anyway). People are Uber-ing and using car share programs like Evo, but we’re not getting in the bus. We don’t have to. Lots of us work from home now. It is getting more and more individual.
And that’s what seems to have captured the shift for me. I have no data to back this up – maybe you do – but this shift has led to a diminishment of shared public experiences, replaced by individual, isolated realities. Ironically, while we aimed to work together to to protect each other from the virus, the measures we took dissolved the sense of collective public good into fragmented personal experiences. In fact, I think the reason that so many people feel manipulated and react with a strong desire for “freedom from the government” has to do with the fact that the response to the pandemic required us all to participate but left no space for us to co-create, at least not by the second half of 2020. The early weeks and months were full of community effort locally and our skills were all called into action. Being a person with online hosting skills meant that I could offer a weekly zoom call for local businesses here to keep folks apprised of the supports that were available to them and help them connect to efforts that were ongoing to keepbrikcs and morter businesses solvent during the March – June closures.
That began to change towards the end of the year when folks started getting fed up with the restrictions. We longed to be left alone. We resented governments telling us what to do. We started to see a massive rise in the rhetoric of separation, whether it was deeply individualistic calls for action or movements that pointed fingers, blamed others and backed into relationships to form movements, like the Freedom Convoy in Canada.
As we slowly emerge from this period, it’s evident that our minds and ways of thinking have been irrevocably changed. The information we consume through our devices hasn’t helped us make sense of this transformation; instead, it often exacerbates the confusion and sense of disconnection. We don’t want anyone telling us what to do. We are forgetting how to make things together, other than networks of outrage.
On top of the health crisis, we’ve faced a kind of psychological and cultural trauma. This hyper-individual experience of a global event has left many feeling helpless and detached. Change-making, which requires us to act together to serve a public good, often fails to recognize the deeper, collective nature of our challenges. We see many individual actions without much organizing, connection or collective effort to work with power, policy and resources. Outrage is close at hand. This disconnection and frustration manifest because people feel they’re doing something significant, yet it’s hard to see how these actions fit into the larger picture of systemic change.
Moreover, this period’s grief and unresolved emotions linger in our collective psyche. Many of us were forced into self-reflection during the lockdowns, confronted with who we are and what our lives mean. There is a ton of lateral violence out there right now: people taking out anger and aggression at others for small or even presumed transgressions. We can probably all tell stories of being on the end of a tirade from someone, and probably many of us have stories where WE lost it against someone out of proportion to whatever irritation provoked the outbursts. This unresolved grief remains within our systems as we try to “return to normalcy,” highlighting the need for deeper healing and integration of these experiences.
We were never going to return to normalcy, though. We are in a different place than we were and I cannot put my finger on it. I’d love to hear your reflections on what it has been like. Many of us who work with groups as facilitators have noticed a difference in how groups work. I see fear and reluctance to engage. I think lots of us are regressing in our ability to sit face-to-face with one another and have conversations, especially around hard issues. While I have experienced tremendous healing in hosting conversations and participatory initiatives, I have also seen initiatives fizzle. Folks are increasingly asking me to host Open Space meetings because they just need to put ideas out there and talk about them.
I have a growing desire to understand this state of affairs and put my finger on it in a way others recognize. I have been reading novels set in other pandemic times, but it seems that none of the brilliant authors I have read have caught on to the psychological effects of the pandemic on the collective psyche. I’m not seeing it in films or TV shows, either. It’s as if what we went through has been erased or skipped over in our collective history. We aren’t really telling the story of it, nor are we telling stories that acknowledge it. Has anyone read a novel that spans the years 2019 to now? Let me know. How are you seeing what’s happening?
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I’m back in Tlaoquiaht territory on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This is a place I once described as The Land of Tsawalk as it is the cradle of a philosophy and cosmology of interconnection and interdependence that has been refined by centuries of Nuu-chah-nulth philosophers, leaders and families. We’re here to do an Art of Hosting with the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust and 40 or so local leaders and organizers. This will be the fourth Art of Hosting I’ve done here and they are always different, responsive to the land and the ocean and the people and the way time works here. We will plan tomorrow and then we will allow things to happen, and it will be, as it always is, a rich and abundant experience.
On the way here, Caitlin and I listened to some podcasts. Two of these had moments that spoke to the place and the quality of time and landscape, and this is the real purpose of this post.
The first is. A Radiolab episode called “Small Potatoes” is about how observation and reflection can transform the most mundane of things in our daily experience. One segment of this episode featured a clip from Ian Chillag’s podcast Everything is Alive in which the philosopher Chioke l’Anson plays “a grain of sand” in conversation with Chillag. l’Anson brings an incredible perspective to this interview, including these gems:
CHIOKE:
Yeah, I mean, I think that if there’s one difference between them and I… Sorry, I’m just having
trouble with the pronouns, you know, we’re doing this interview and I’m a grain of sand.
IAN:
Yeah.
CHIOKE:
But that’s not really the way I would think of myself. I think normally I would just say, “We are sand.”
IAN:
OK.
CHIOKE:
So, you see that there’s the mass noun thing happening and it’s weird to talk to you because you
don’t have a mass noun thing. Or you don’t seem to have a mass noun arrangement. So, you say
yourself that you’re a person, right?
IAN:
Yeah, I would say I’m a person.
CHIOKE:
So, like why aren’t you a grain of person?
IAN:
Like why do I not consider myself as like a fraction of all of humanity?
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like that makes more sense. It just seems to me like if you recognise the degree to which you
owed your existence to other people you might also be nicer to other people.
Or then there is this meditation on time and change:
IAN:
Right. Do you know how old you are?
CHIOKE:
Not exactly, no. I think, it probably would amount to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of
years. Like, I mean, I wasn’t always sand, right? Like there was a time when I was a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, yeah.
CHIOKE:
Yeah. So, you know, like do you know about the myth of Sisyphus?
IAN:
Yeah
CHIOKE:
Yeah, that’s a funny one to me because Sisyphus is cursed to roll this boulder up the hill for eternity,
but really the boulder would eventually erode. I mean, a hundred thousand years or so. It would be
like a little pebble. Like, just stick it out, Sisyphus. You’ll be done in no time, you know?
IAN:
Eventually it’s just going to be sand.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, exactly. And in addition, the hill will also erode. And so, you know, Sisyphus after some time
would have a flat plain instead of a hill and maybe like a marble instead of a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, so, yeah. So, he’s cursed for eternity, but really, he just needs to get through I don’t know
50,000 years or something.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like he should really stick to it. And then that’ll show the Gods.
Amazing.
In another podcast we listened to, a To The Best Of Our Knowledge episode on deep time, Ann Strainchamps interviews geologist Marcia Bjorneru about changes to our earth and climate:
AS: Do you think the perspective of deep time can help with any of the existential fear and dread that comes with an awareness of climate change and global warming? Does being aware of the many long ages of the planet put climate change in perspective? Or make it more frightening?
MB: From a scientific point of view, I can say that Earth will be fine. The Earth will deal with the changes in climate that we’re causing and eventually, new ecosystems will emerge.
But the human part of me mourns what we’ve done and the rapidity with which old, well-established ecosystems and landscapes have been changed. And I worry for humanity, for what the next decades or century will bring as we cope with a new set of rules. That’s the scary thing to me. We’ve been able to understand the way the planet has worked through the Holocene, but now we’re changing the boundary conditions and parameters, and so many of the models we’ve developed aren’t going to be very relevant as we go further into the Anthropocene.
The past won’t necessarily be a key to the future. And there’s real sadness there. Our cultures have grown up with a certain version of Earth, and it’ll be radically different.
These insights seem to hit so much deeper out here in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth territories, where a deep sense of time and a deep connection with the ancient marine and forest ecosystems are responsible for thousands of years of occupation and well-being. Indeed, Bjorneru’s observation about the new boundary conditions of life on earth brings added importance to preserving intact large amounts of wild and ancient ecosystems. In 300,000 years as a species, humans have never lived in an environment that is as heavily degraded as it is now. We were nurtured in the complex life-giving cradles of the very ecosystems out of which we arose. We have changed those conditions of life, and who knows what effect it will have on our survival, the survival of millions of other species and the evolution of new forms of life on Earth.
Out here, on the edge of the world, the principles of tsawalk compel us to engage these questions. The perspective of deep time and deep interconnection lies all around us.
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There is a swing on the path that leads up and over the headland from the village of Nazare. This is me on that swing last month. Happy.
We watched the first episode of the two-part Apple documentary on Steve Martin, which charts his early life through the development of his stand-up act, his early forays into television and movies and which ends in 1980 when he walked away from stand-up comedy, as he puts it, jumps off the train of stand up and onto the train of movies.
During the 15 years in which he developed and honed his act, he kept detailed notes about his experience and many of those diaries are shown in the documentary. Lovely notes and remarks about what worked and what didn’t, how he was feeling, the goals he set for himself and what he was learning as he tried to build a new approach to comedy on the shoulders of those who inspired him. It is very interesting to see how many of his bits are interpretations of bits by comedians working in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s.
Some of those notes deal with existential questions and in one he makes a note to the effect of “what if happiness is not the end, but rather the work is the end.” It was during this period I think that he started to develop gratitude that he could just do the work he is doing and not focus on happiness as an outcome. The trailer for the second part of the document seems to make this pursuit of happiness a big part of the story so I’m looking forward to that.
But that little throwaway line kind of lodged with me. Lots of my work is immensely satisfying in its own right, even when it’s challenging. I get to travel around and work with a huge diversity of issues and people. It feeds the way my brain works to be doing a bunch of different things, even though I sometimes can’t keep them all straight.
The work is the end. Happiness is generally there too. Are they related? Do they need to be?
What’s your take?
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What our local forest looked like 4 years ago
Walking this morning, the air and the light reminded me of that lockdown spring of 2020. By April that year, we were all in it together. People made art and music in their living rooms and shared it with the world. We were learning how to use Zoom and bake sourdough and Google different customs for personal hygiene from places where toilet paper is a novelty.
What stays with me from that time is the fact that there was real hardship in many places, as COVID-19 outbreaks caused a lot of death, suffering, and separation. If we were lucky enough not to be affected by what was happening in places like New York, Seattle, Milan, and Wuhan, then we only needed to do the simple thing and stay home. Governments worked furiously to implement a Universal Basic Income, which, to my surprise, they did, thereby accidentally solving child poverty for a short time.
I want to remember it as a time when we all were in the same boat around a global problem, doing what we could to look out for each other in creative and generous ways. It didn’t last, but I will go to my grave with the tantalizing knowledge that I saw it happen with my own eyes for a few short months that spring.