Hello y’all,
How are you? How is your breath? Here it’s chilly in the ways this ecosystem loves and that brings relief. Is there something you notice in your watershed, your bioregion, that is singing its aliveness to you? I can’t believe Solstice already came and went and here we are in July. May geologic time hold us as human time churns us.
Thank you for making your way here today. I feel held by your presence and I hope you feel mine too.
With love,
Rachel
Man-Kind: In image of – Lucille Clifton
We learn what it is to live
inside the enemy’s skin:
ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
the spirit lodged in us
like a stone
riding out the difficult light
At a young age, I understood that the world of my inheritance was violent. I didn't have to learn it, I didn't observe it as an abstraction. It was palpable at the very core of my being. My portal into suffering opened young, and that translated into an acute sensitivity to the suffering all around me, everywhere.
I saw people categorized, caged, denied, deprived, starved, abused. I saw humanity forced into fragments. Being Jewish meant sporadic yet frequent bomb threats on the school and synagogue I attended (this was before mass shootings became the more popular choice). Men held positions of power, stood at podiums and on the bimah, wore the uniforms, had the badges, carried the guns. Unimaginable poverty proliferated on one side of a chainlink fence crowned in thorns, that eventually became a wall, sanctioning an arbitrary border severing families and communities. As obscene wealth exploded on "our" side, America taught me that to celebrate this tragedy was a patriotic duty.
I later learned that all of this had names: patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, antisemitism, colonialism, nationalism... But I knew it before I could label it. Violence was the secret everyone knew and nobody talked about.
My spirit was at war with this cruel, claustrophobic brutality normalized as an inherent feature of incarnation. I didn't realize at the time that I wasn't meant for this world of violence. None of us were, no matter how manipulated we've been to believe that it is inevitable, intractable, or further, that we must rise to the top of its toxic scaffolding if we're going to be worth anything. I think often about one of the foundational patriarchal dogmas emphatically embraced as Truth: "survival of the fittest". The feminine knows it is "thrival of the nurtured”, and I trust that somewhere the healthy masculine, the one that can exquisitely architect and honorably protect, knows this too. This is is the world we're meant to remember, to reanimate in present time.
I'm starting with this today because I want to express that despite the abject horrors of life on Earth right now, I have actually never felt more at home here nor more optimistic about our future than I do now because awareness is change. And I believe the crises feel so acute because they are no longer invisibilized beneath countless veils of deception. We see it now. We feel it now. At a scale that can actually transform and transcend.
In this soul-nourishing essay by adrienne maree brown, she says:
"We live (and die) inside of systems that were imagined centuries ago by those ambitious and narrow minds of colonists and patriarchs. We live inside the lineage of relatively ignorant imaginations.... But we know so much more now. We know each other’s pain and complexity now; we know we are one interconnected ecosystem—so far the only planetary development specifically like us."
Violence is no longer held as a secret. Violence is no longer what happens out there, elsewhere, in "those" neighborhoods, in "those" countries. Violence is increasingly and appropriately being linked to its birthplace amongst white, colonial, imperial, male impulses for control and domination.
Trust in the integrity of this nation (and of nationstates generally), in the possibilities of capitalism, in organized religion, and in the potential for technology to solve all of our problems for us is eroding. The number of people who benefit from whatever dirty privileges these systems afford continues to shrink as increasingly few skyrocket (literally) to dominance. Empire is ending. This is the death gasp.
As my friend brontë says, "this is not our apocalypse". We are not in end times, and we are not victims to these times. We are witnessing the great fall of everything built to deny, desecrate, separate. And we have the opportunity and the responsibility to ensure its demise.
The last several thousand years have enshrined a world order that has normalized violence, but when I can I lift my gaze to a higher perspective, what I see is not actually a world built on violence, but a world built on compounded, unresolved, unintegrated trauma. I believe violence itself is a trauma response and a survival strategy. As I wrote here, seeds of trauma propagate from one generation to the next if they are transmitted, not transmuted. This is how hurt becomes so diffuse it becomes a cultural characteristic and pain so vast that it becomes an entire politic.
As an example, in a discussion this week about the state of the world, the subject of factory farmed chickens, aka concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), emerged as a microcosm of violent world-building. Yet no matter how grotesque and monstrous any system metastasizes into, “the lineage of relatively ignorant imaginations”, as amb says, can be traced through any “innovation”. Deep in the origin story of CAFOs is one or a handful of people that were trying to solve a problem. And what was the consciousness of those individuals? What trauma histories of famine were held in their bodies? What lineages of starvation were stored in their cells? What heritages of resource deprivation would conjure the ideation to hoard precious chickens en masse to stave out any possibility of suffering that way again, to the point that our bird kin’s dignity, their sovereignty could become an abstraction and enable this abuse to become the status quo? Capitalism as a system is both traumatizing and bred from trauma. Folded into the backdrop of our lives, disassociated into "the way we do things", depended upon because we’ve lost our connection to life-affirming alternatives — it all becomes too vast to resolve. We cycle and spiral in hopelessness, helplessness, despair, complacency.
Trauma, trauma, trauma.
When I see trauma at the root of violence, I no longer see those who cause the most harm in our society as villainous, as enemies, as demonic "others", whether it’s a mass shooter or Trump or Amy Coney Barrett, no matter how explosively devastating their behaviors might be... I see them as humans again. I see them as profoundly hurt, broken, unintegrated, unhealed, developmentally immature humans. I see them as injured souls who have undeservedly claimed, stolen, or been awarded power, whether that’s through a corrupt nomination or a destructive market that hands them a WMD instead of therapy. These are people living ~through~ the most painful places within themselves, weaponizing whatever torture they have not healed or integrated inside themselves through cruelty.
We know it is not safe to give a broken, wounded human a gun. It is not safe to give a broken, wounded human a military arsenal. It is not safe to give a broken, wounded human hundreds of millions of people to "govern".
» It is time for us to de-escalate this situation and act as responsible, mature adults to restore safety.1
» It is time for us to recognize our own violence we have inevitably caused by being raised amidst violent cultures, and participate in restoration and repair that ripples outward.
» It is time for all of us to pursue our own healing work so we can become truly liberated through personal responsibility and collective accountability.
» It is time for us to outmode the master's toolkit of incarcerate, vilify, ostracize, alienate, suppress, abandon, exile.
» It is time for us to recognize that it is not only ethically significant, it is a survival-level priority that we learn to face each other as human beings.
As my dear friend and fellow organizer Alex said: "We not overthrowing, we outgrowing empire."
In amb's essay, she goes on to say:
“The fragmentation that has resulted from colonial constructs of race, gender, class, and power has wounded many of us so deeply that we identify more with the wound than with any experience of wholeness or oneness. Because we identify with the wound, we fight against each other over differences that don’t need to be battles. We opt in to these constructs, often without conscious choice.
… I am tired of hurting and splitting and shrinking myself, and tired of requiring that from anyone else, tired of all the violence required in the denial of self and the denial of biodiversity.
The assessment I form from laying all this knowledge down on a page is that I am accountable for shifting massive systems, and one of the most important ways I can be accountable in the grandest sense is by being intentional and radical in how I behave, what I believe, and what I practice.”
Seeing trauma at the root restores our potency. When we heal, we grow our capacity, we live through ethics and values, not pain and injury. Healing trauma becomes a clear pathway into liberation by collapsing unwieldy, uncontainable agony of seemingly overpowering systems, and reminds us that humans are at the heart of whatever construct we have built to shape the conditions of life on Earth. No matter what is happening at scale, it is human beings that are constantly remaking the architectures and infrastructures of our lives. We can compost whatever worlds we've built and live in total alignment with The World, our sacred Earth.
It is time for the village to reweave itself. It is time for us say to one another: “I'm not here to judge you for your trauma, I am going to hold you in love and ask what might bring more spaciousness into the tight grip of fear so that heart-based discernment, not limbic overdrive might be possible, so that you can reclaim responsibility over your actions and tend to what aches, so that we can build cultures of safety, trust, and care and commit to the hard, gorgeous, holy work of healing?”
Everything happening on Earth right now is asking us to remember the coexistence of sacred individuality and inherent interconnectedness, of personal responsibility and collective accountability. We are parts of a whole. We each have a responsibility to re-member our bonds to one another, to see the traumatized beating heart at the center of every being who deserves to also be liberated from that level of pain and suffering, to commit that no one is beyond redemption and no one is beyond healing. Our work is to return to love.
Curiosity over judgment. Compassion over comprehension.2
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As Naomi Klein wrote this week, "the first rule of an emergency is that you do what it takes to end the emergency and get to safety. You don’t throw up your hands because the task is too hard. You certainly don’t let a gang of unelected, lifetime appointed political operatives — several of whom only have their seats because of trickery and lies — get in your way."
Alok V Menon in this exquisite podcast episode
Outgrowing empire