Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness

On the advice of several people I have been reading Vanessa Machado d’Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and I have reached the end of “The Most Important Chapter” which outlines the seven key tools that d’Oliveira invites the reader to use as they navigate the text. The seventh tool is an invitation to a kind of lectio divina (my framing) on a text called “Co-Sensing with Radical Tenderness.” I invite you to visit that link, read the text and follow the exercise there, which is different from the one in the book.

As I am working my way through each of the seven tools, I am reminded of the various lessons I have learned in my life especially working in a with Indigenous communities. These are lessons that throw my own position in the world into uncertainty and knock me off centre constantly. I can find how each of these seven tools has come into my life in different ways in the voices of different people who have schooled me, often publicly, in ways that were humbling. D’Oliveira says that this book is written for people in a situation of low intensity struggle, where we have choices about how to benefit from, respond to, and perpetrate the violence of modernity. That’s a useful perspective, and a better term than ‘privilege’ which implies that all is well in a person’s life. Low intensity struggle is a thing, but it’s useful to see it in context. The pedagogy of “learning this from a book” is itself firmly rooted in modernity.

The book is not a simple exercise. It is uncomfortable to read, and even through I wrestle with paradoxes and entanglements all the time, it still places me in a slightly uneasy position, an unsettled position, as it were. And it is remarkable in being able to hold me there, suspended in being unsettled, which I have always said is exactly the place where settlers need to be in order for a post-colonial world to ever have a chance at life.

For reference, the seven tools are:

• Mastery AND depth education: about different ways of knowing and having wisdom and intelligence
• Wording and worlding the world: about how we use stories
• The bus within us: about the different voices we carry inside us
• Low- and high-intensity struggle: understanding what choices we have, especially important for folks in lo-intensity struggle to understand.
• Generative disillusionment AND excited capacities: yeah, it’s falling apart. So now what? (Dave Pollard’s writing has helped me to understand this from my perspective.)
• Co-sensing with radical tenderness: see above.

I don’t know where this book is going. Parts of it don’t make sense to me. Some of it seems performative, some of it seems like the real wisdom is hidden from view, probably because I don’t have the eyes for it. I think this is the intention of the book. It does not bring comfort, it does not make sense. It is directed at me NOT as a teaching guidebook per se, but as a lesson in what I will never know as much as it is a set of invitations about what I can learn. It reminds me very much of the hula ceremonies we were in 16 years ago on Hawai’i as I was walking in an immensely tense interface between Americans and Hawaiians and we were confronting these very same questions about modernity and what it would take to work from a platform of reverence.

We didn’t get that quite right, either.