Power Colours Memories Identity Fighting
Power Colours Memories Identity Fighting
….Memórias
…Pinturas
……..Lutas
Caminhos
…….Identidades
……Forças
…..Cores
…….Histórias
“Quem somos? Somos mulheres que faz da luta melodia.
Somos as que retomamos a terra roubada, as que insistem na festa
sem se esquecer que permanecemos em guerra”
Vamos nos ajuntar ecoar, em um só grito,
Território é nosso útero
Nosso corpo nosso espírito.
A terra (território) é mãe
É identidade é cultura,
Quem tem território tem
Lugar para onde voltar
Tem colo e tem cura.
Somos mulheres colorida
Somos um arco íris de cores,
Lutamos e dizemos não a violência
pra manter nossos valores.
Os valores que eu falo,
Vem de força ancestral,
Fazemos nossos debates
Respeitando a organização social.
Mulheres estudantes
E também da militância
Já dizia nossos líderes
Diga o povo que avança.
Somos mulheres Indígenas
Estamos no centro oeste, no sul e no sudeste,
Ainda tem as arretadas que vem
Do Norte, do leste e do Nordeste.
Mulheres indígenas, negras
Mulheres tradicionais,
O que inspira nossa luta
São as forças ancestrais.
Somos mulheres do cerrado, da Amazônia
Das veredas, caatinga e pantanal
Mulheres camponesas ou pescadora artesanal.
Tem mulheres parteiras benzedeiras, tem indígenas politizadas
Fazemos o enfrentamento ainda que não sejamos belas e recatadas.
Não somos recatadas
Muitas vezes não somos e nem estamos no lar
Nós temos um pé no chão da aldeia
E o outro do lado de cá.
Tentaram tirar nossas pinturas do rosto,
Nossas terras não nos deram mais,
Nos chamaram de preguiçosos e ainda de incapaz.
Porém não desanimamos, aí que lutamos mais.
Mais de 1500 anos se passaram
Continuamos a resistir,
Mesmo tentando pintar Brasil de cinza
Resistimos pra colorir.
Pois não se consegue desbotar
pele e almas coloridas,
Assim como não consegue apagar
Nossas histórias já vividas.
Em tempos tão sombrios
Precisamos alimentar de mais arte e poesia,
Pois temos a capacidade de fazer da luta melodia.
Somos mulheres que resiste
Com a força do cantar,
A orientação do pensamento
Vem da força do cocar.
Inspirada em uma mulher Indígena
Uma mulher entendedora,
Que direito é aquilo que se arranca
Quando não se tem mais escolha.
É na força da pintura presente no pigmento
Urucum tempera a comida
E nós mulheres temperamos
O movimento.
Resistiremos até a última indígena
Não deixaremos colonizar nossos corpos e nossas mentes,
E não adianta tentar nos enterrar
Porque somos mulheres sementes.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………….
…Power
…Colours
…Memories
. … Identity
Fighting
“Who are we?
We are women who make melody out of our fight.
We are the ones who recapture our stolen land, the ones who insist on celebrating without forgetting that we remain at war”
Let us stay together and reverberate, in one single cry,
Our territory is our womb,
Our body, our mind.
The land is our mother,
She is our identity and our culture
For one who has territory,
always has a place to return,
take refuge and heal.
We are colourful women,
a rainbow of colours,
We fight against violence
To keep our values.
The values we hold
come from ancestral wisdom,
We have our debates
respecting our customs.
We are women who study,
Our fight is political,
As our leaders would say,
“Power to the people”!
We are indigenous women,
We are in the South and Southeast,
And we have those that threaten us
Coming from North and Northeast.
Indigenous and black women,
Women of legacy,
Whose struggle is fueled
with the power of ancestry.
We are women from the cerrado, from the Amazon,
from the veredas, caatinga and swamps,
Peasant women, fishing with our hands.
Midwives, healers, women who are politicised,
Yes, we struggle, we are not modest housewives.
We often find ourselves far from home,
But we always have one foot in our village soil,
Even though so far we roam.
They tried to wipe off the paintings from our faces,
Our lands they gave us no more,
We are indolent and helpless, they swore
But we don’t lose heart, that’s when we get stronger,
More than 1500 years have passed
And we continue to resist,
They try to paint Brazil grey,
But with colours we insist.
Because colourful skins and spirits never fade,
As our lived stories they cannot erase.
In these dark times,
We need to feed poetry and art,
As we make melody out of our fight.
We are women of resistance
With the power of our chants,
And our thoughts are guided
by the strength of our adornments.
We find Inspiration from the indigenous women,
women with the wisdom, the power to rise
Who know that fighting for rights
is the alternative to demise.
The force is present in our dye,
The Urucum flavours our food,
And we flavour the revolution with our cry.
We will resist until the last indigenous woman,
In colonizing our bodies and minds they will not succeed,
And it doesn’t matter if they bury us,
Because we are like seeds.
“And it doesn’t matter if they bury us,
Because we are like seeds.”
Waiter, there’s a problem with my paradigm!
Waiter, there’s a problem with my paradigm!
This article is part of the #CuraDaTerra essay series, focused on Indigenous perspectives and alternatives to industrial capitalism.
Certain humans have plotted for centuries to kill the Amazon. Photographic evidence confirms that this scheme is now reaching a flaming, thundering crescendo, with tens of thousands of intentional fires and bulldozers tearing through the Amazonian rainforest, destroying acres every second.
We hasten to add that other humans are innocent bystanders, while yet other humans go further and have a plan to save that vast ecosystem.
But we have gotten well ahead of our story; first let’s enjoy a delicious bowl of peach-palm soup. For us, the soup’s richness dominates the culinary experience. In both aroma and color there is a suggestion of squash, but that hint of sweet flavor is secondary to the dense, opulent texture that coats one’s mouth like whipped butter.
Or when we’re ravenous and need survival calories, we just stew the fruits in salted water, peel them, and eat what seems like the world’s finest roasted chestnut. We have a farm on the Caribbean slope of Costa Rica, and in that nation it’s easy to find stewed peach palms on street corners or in mercados. Just don’t call it a peach palm. In Costa Rica it’s called pejibaye (pay-he-bah-jhay), but we don’t try to pronounce it when our mouths are filled with the delicacy.
But what does this culinary excursion have to do with an investigation of Amazonian ecocide? Truth be told, it’s not a detour at all. It’s an important part of the journey, for us and for the pejibayes.
Pejibayes are historically the most important palm of the Costa Rican humid tropics, offering up both fruit and palm hearts that fed the Indigenous peoples of this Central American paradise. Indeed, when European conquerors first came to Costa Rica, they observed upwards of 30,000 pejibaye trees planted in Costa Rica’s Talamanca region by Indigenous peoples. These trees, in turn, were brought to the land from the Amazon by the first human settlers of this region. In many ways, the indigenous Amazonian settlers on the Caribbean slope of southern Costa Rica were People of the Pejibaye, and this Caribbean slope is a northern extension of the Amazon.
But thirty-thousand pejibaye palms were, for the conquistadores, thirty-thousand too many. The conquistadores wanted to plunder gold and enslave those Indigenous peoples, and the last thing the Europeans needed was a well-fed populace that could find food everywhere in the forest. While there wasn’t any gold to be stolen (turns out that Costa Rica was a misnomer), there were people to be enslaved and the Europeans had the idea to cut down the pejibaye trees. No food in the forest meant the Indigenous communities would either starve or be forced out of hiding and easier to subjugate, so down came the peach palms.
Let’s review the evidence: some folks planted peach palms in a way that enriched the genetic diversity of the rainforest. Others simply ate the fruits and palm hearts. And the conquistadores? They’re the damn fools who tried to chop them all down.
You see, it’s not humanity that’s at fault. The criminality is not an immutable characteristic of the species Homo sapiens sapiens. Rather, the ecocidal behavior is borne of the paradigm of domination and exploitation that, over time, has resulted in the total destruction of approximately 20% of the Amazon and the degradation of far broader regions.
The Amazon today is depleted, imperiled, and at the cusp of losing functionality as a viable forest ecosystem. And when that happens, what will happen to all the lifeforms that rely on the rainfall, oxygen, and medicines created from this glorious region? Are you prepared to find out if we humans can survive the loss of the world’s greatest rainforest?
While pondering that question, let’s also ask ourselves this: If the European colonial mindset of domination and exploitation drives the destruction, are there other mindsets or mythologies that lead to regeneration and rainfall? To begin to answer that question, let’s refer back to the Amazonian settlers of the Caribbean slope of southern Costa Rica. As we’ve noted, when those Indigenous peoples came to Central America, they brought with them pejibayes, together with other culinary treasures like acai, sapote, and cacao.
The Indigenous Amazonian settlers created functional art that consecrated their sacred relationship with those fruiting trees.
And they flourished. While we once pictured Pre-Columbian America as an unpopulated “First Eden”wilderness, we now understand that Indigenous peoples numbered in the tens of millions and created rich and complex societies. Their history (not at all pre-historic) teaches us that with the right mindset, we can have our forest and eat it, too. And that right mindset is finding modern expression in the many agricultural practices that fall under the broad term “regenerative.”
Regenerative agriculture is growing food in a way that, year after year, enhances the ecosystem. This is not a new concept: Indigenous peoples of the Amazon were intertwined with a paradigm that led them to “anthropogenically” manage the forest by enriching its soils (“terra preta” or “Amazonian dark earth”) and agro-ecologically plant Brazil nuts, cacao, pejibaye, ice-cream bean trees, tree grapes, and other species. Large portions of today’s Amazon are scientifically recognized as “anthropogenic,” just as much a human invention as the grim monoculture farming grids now occupying what used to be the Great Plains.
The difference is that Indigenous peoples of the Amazon figured out that it made long-term sense to improve soil fertility, whereas current agricultural malpractice is destroying soils and ecosystems so rapidly that the United Nations predicts the planet now has only 60 harvests of food left before the soils can no longer support food production. The concept of a “Last Supper” takes on urgent modern significance when you realize that our children and grandchildren might not have enough soil to sustain their existence.
What would happen if we eradicated the destructive, extractive, and exploitative mindset that is ravaging the Amazon and replaced it with one based on regenerative agriculture, a template for ecologically rational food production that, as we wrote earlier, was co-created in the Amazon? Imagine all of Amazonia – all of its now diverse population – devoted to soil and overall ecosystem health. Imagine the Amazon becoming a model of planetary renewal and regeneration and how that could inspire a planetary revival.
What, then, can we learn from the early Amazonian settlers who came to Costa Rica with their pejibaye, acai, and cacao? They met that ecosystem on its terms and didn’t try to turn a forest on the Caribbean slope into a savannah. In some deep way they appreciated that biodiversity was the friend of long-term survival. And they did survive, for thousands of years, until they were deracinated by murderous European colonizers bent on exploitation and enslavement.
Can we recreate the extraordinary success of the Original Peoples of the Amazonas? Is it possible in the Amazon and forested areas around the world to produce ample food based on tree crops that enhance an ecosystem? Of course, and regenerative successes abound throughout the Americas and across the globe. If you research terms like agroecology, agroforestry, syntropic farming, or permaculture you’ll tap into the exciting explorations of this generation’s food producers who are going “back to the future.”
All over the world regenerative farmers and ranchers are learning that thrilling lesson – work with Nature instead of against it and you will improve your land and economic benefit. And you will no longer be dependent on expensive synthetic inputs to grow your food.
a maturing nutmeg tree in our regenerative food forest
Many of us in the regenerative movement are re-learning how to farm like the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon farmed: using time-tested and solar-powered photosynthesis to convert atmospheric CO2 into carbohydrates (a/k/a sap) and letting the countless infinities of soil microbes working at the root tips turn that liquid sunshine into the life-sustaining soil organic matter upon which all enduring civilizations have been built. We’re following the emerging science, which shows that regenerative agro-ecology sequesters forty tons of carbon per hectare per year, helping the planet respond to the climate crisis that is now upon us. We’re rebuilding soil so that our descendants will still be able to produce abundant and nourishing food for generations to come.
We’re grateful to the Indigenous peoples of Amazonia for being custodians of the ancient wisdom of regenerative food production. There is a reason the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon are described as Cura Da Terra – the Cure of the Earth – as they holding the living possibility of human beings as a companion species within the global ecosystem.
And we’re grateful to pejibaye, cacao, and myriad plants for offering nourishment to sustain human culture. Their survival is our survival. May the life-force of Amazonian dark soil be a blessing to all who love the forest and strive to live within its essential embrace. May the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon, and indeed, globally, continue to lead us back to sanity.
Photos | Courtesy Finca Luna Nueva, and Shutterstock
What Indigenous Wisdom Can Teach Us About Economics
What Indigenous Wisdom Can Teach Us About Economics
This article is part of the #CuraDaTerra essay series, focused on Indigenous perspectives and alternatives to industrial capitalism.
The crises of the modern world verify what Indigenous cultures have always known: that all phenomena are inextricably interconnected. As the Amazon—one of the most vital organs of the Earth—is razed to fuel the global economy, a virus borne of disrupted ecosystems assaults the lungs of human beings. As economic policies are enacted in Washington, Brussels, and Beijing, people are uprooted and ecosystems destroyed thousands of miles away.
Over the past 40 years, awareness of our interdependence with the natural world has steadily seeped into the dominant cultural narrative, and with it has come a greater appreciation for non-Western cultures and Indigenous peoples. In virtually every sphere, ecological and socially conscious initiatives have sprouted from the grassroots. From ecopsychology to ecological architecture, from human rights campaigns to support for the underprivileged, people have demonstrated their desire to develop kinder, gentler, more sustainable ways of living.
However, in this same period, the global economy—initially propelled by colonialism, slavery, and racist genocide—has continued on its same trajectory. Just as colonisation accumulated wealth primarily for global traders, the relentless globalisation of the economy is serving an ever-smaller handful of multinational corporations and banks. Under the seductive guise of “progress,” this system continues to undermine land-based economies of interdependence, replacing them with anonymous and unaccountable global supply chains.
As this system rapaciously invades Amazonia, the resulting humanitarian and ecological tragedy ripples out across the globe. With the rainforest giving way to industrial agriculture and desertification, massive amounts of carbon are being released and the global hydrological cycle is breaking down.
As Yanomami leader, Davi Kopenawa, memorably puts it: There is only one sky and we must take care of it, for if it becomes sick, everything will come to an end.
This message has not yet reached our political leaders. Instead, some are becoming demagogues spouting fairy-tales of endless economic growth. Their message is “your job depends on growing the economy, and we will do whatever is necessary to make that happen.”
This can be appealing to the expanding ranks of people made economically insecure and left psychologically insecure by the omnipotent propaganda for consumerism. Frustrated and confused, many have become vulnerable to the xenophobic rhetoric of those who point the finger of blame toward “greenies,” leftists, immigrants, black and people-of-colour, and any cultural “other” rather than the out-of-control economic casino in the hands of the power elite. In their framing, bulldozing the Amazon for its resources becomes a reasonable price for our economic survival.
Heads of state and business elites on both left and right have remained blind to the social and ecological effects of the global economy. As the system has expanded across the entire world, and as econometric thinking has become more and more narrowly specialised, almost no one has recognised the true costs of globalisation.
The truth is that globalisation doesn’t improve the lives of the majority—even in the short-term, let alone the long-term. Of all new income from global growth, only five percent actually goes to the poorest 60 percent of the global population. Look beneath the figures of GDP, and the situation is even more dire: thanks to the global economy, the majority of the world’s people have actually been made poorer in real terms.
In the less industrialised world, the process of “development” has pushed and pulled people out of self-reliant, community-based, local economic systems onto the lowest rung of a very unstable ladder. Generally, they become involved in producing for the global North, whether on monocultural plantations or in sweatshop factories. While they might be making a cash income of a few dollars a day, they are, by and large, experiencing greater deprivation than they did in their village economies.
Even in the so-called ‘rich’ countries, the middle classes have to compete ever more intensely and work ever longer hours just to stay afloat. All the while a propaganda industry pummels them with thousands of advertisements a day making them feel unworthy and perpetually desirous of more.
How has this happened?
Over the past 35 years, in the name of globalization, “free trade” treaties have dramatically increased the power of multinational corporations and banks to take advantage of cheap labour and resources anywhere across the entire planet. The deregulation of these multinationals has worked to the disadvantage of job-rich, place-based businesses, because it has resulted in overregulation, over-taxation and unemployment at the local, regional, and national levels. Global banks and corporations have become the most powerful entities on the planet, effectively giving national governments their marching orders.
To reverse these trends, we need to link hands with our Indigenous brothers and sisters to build up broad, peoples’ movements, united in their call for a renegotiation of trade treaties, this time with civil society at the table. We need to insist that governments stop using taxes, subsidies, and regulations to favour high-tech, resource-intensive industries that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of global monopolies, and instead direct those supports toward more localised businesses.
Reaching out across the left-right divide is critical. The people who vote for Bolsonaro and Trump do so largely because of the cultural and economic marginalisation imposed by economic globalisation—a process that has reduced many once-cohesive communities into isolated backwaters plagued by depression, addiction, and unemployment.
Now is the time to offer new political narratives—inspired by Indigenous ways of knowing, living, and being—that speak to a flourishing of ecologically-rooted communities and genuine prosperity. Now is the time for economic localisation. It is the way human beings can become part of the Cure of the Earth, the Cura da Terra, as Indigenous peoples have been since time immemorial.
By strengthening local economies, we keep wealth circulating within the community where it boosts local businesses and jobs, instead of allowing it to be siphoned off to distant corporate bank accounts. By shortening the distances between producer and consumer, we prioritise diversified production for local needs rather than standardised commodities for export.
In this way, we move away from monoculture toward diversity on the land. This is essential for genuinely ecological stewardship, for restoration of the soil and for increased productivity. At the same time, we decrease our reliance on centralised, fossil fuel-dependent, automated systems, in favour of employing people with diverse skills. And, most importantly, through economic localisation we support long-term, intergenerational relationships and deep community ties—the cornerstones of psychological security and wellbeing, as traditional cultures have always known.
There are already countless grassroots localisation projects, from São Paulo to Sydney, that are demonstrating the way forward. From farmers’ markets and consumer-producer cooperatives to local business alliances and community finance schemes, people are reweaving the fabric of local interdependence from the ground up. Out of common sense and heartfelt intuition, they are finding innovative ways to step out of the consumer rat race to live local lives at a human pace and scale.
These projects demonstrate that, by scaling down and localising economic activity, we can reduce our ecological impact, create more meaningful relationships and livelihoods, restore our relationship with nature, and increase the accountability of business. We can re-embed ourselves in intimate connections with the complex, animate world around us—a process which not only leads to greater individual fulfillment and joy, but also informs wiser, more humble decision-making.
Just as Indigenous wisdom is rooted in a myriad of complex and reciprocal interactions with the community, the land and water, the animals and plants, localising makes visible the threads of interdependence that hold the living world together.
Indigenous Languages As Cures of the Earth
Indigenous Languages As Cures of the Earth
This article is part of the #CuraDaTerra essay series, focused on Indigenous perspectives and alternatives to industrial capitalism.
I’m going to step into the box for a minute rather than indulge the tired cliché of American innovation, “think outside the box”. This box is not one of metaphor or entertainment but one of already understanding that this place has no logic to explore; rather, its logical explanation is an illusion. We are asking questions as if there were answers to everything, and we are somehow entitled to know these answers. Think of this article as an exercise in wondering aloud, exploring the parameters of the political-media-corporate complex that attempts to define “modern reality”, as if such a thing can exist.
What if the nameless copper-tanned toupee’d man living in a house built by African slaves was to be the last president of the so-called United States of America? What if we have reached some kind of expiration date, as the Earth recalls and repossesses an unpaid debt, re-framing the initially callous idea that all life matters? Would we approach our politics or our identity as Americans differently? When we truly face the end of our current illusionary period, will we start entering into a deeper dialogue with the living planet that holds the wisdom we seek.
Some believe the orange man has been “sent by god” in a troubled time –– a savior of democracy ready to do what’s necessary. What the deluded New Age and their uncomfortable bedfellows in the Alt-Right don’t fully explicate is what is it that they believe is necessary? Rolling back environmental protections? Scapegoating immigrants and people of color for the failures of the alleged “free-market”? Concentrating wealth even further into the hands of a tiny, plutocratic elite? Assassinating black men in the streets without trial or due process? Savaging Indigenous lands for more oil and fracking extraction to feed a dying system? Make America Gag Again is a more apt statement of purpose than the official slogan of state fascism.
Perhaps this is the moment in our collective history where we move beyond jingoistic platitudes to expose the apologetic predators, and the predatory aggressiveness embalmed in Eurocentric, Western belief systems. Behind the apologies, excuses, finger-pointing and other victim-perpetrator behavior lays the desires of certain psychopathic power-elites waiting to resurrect themselves with the blood of peoples and of sacred lands such as Turtle Island (now called the USA) and Amazonia (which includes Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana). We know that the ‘isms’ of modern parlance are systems designed to mentally, physically, psychologically, religiously, scientifically, and politically weaken and break our intuitive spirits into a simple reactive biometric database thought process; a reaction of cause and effect that can be understood by the manipulators to further their purpose. From these formulas of non-thinking and belief come the related next steps of consumption, employment, entertainment and other forms of distraction that help adjust and acquiesce us to conform to the material comforts of an addictive, cannibalistic culture. These contours and conditionings help make us “normal” right-angled order takers.
Enter Jair Messias Bolsonaro, a physical and spiritual desert who holds many parallels to the copper-toned totalitarian of the north and has an equally lustful desire to wreak havoc and terror on the lands of the Original Nations of the Western Hemisphere. He too is the “best product” of his culture and the broader globalized culture of capitalist modernity. The selected president of Brazil and author of destruction, through his authority of dogma, has unleashed the brave hidden agenda of Nazi refugees in Latin America dating back to the mid 1940s. So those who see and call out conspiracies are the targets and inheritors of ad nauseam genocide and ecocide. There’s nothing to hide anymore. Sadistic satire in broad daylight is popular among populists.
While the masses are being fed the latest election results, the newest climate change denialism, the “trust science” data of epidemiology and a shake-up in racial tensions, the noble officers of the matrix vaccine (no proselytizing needed), will eventually mandate their “solution” for all good citizens.
We all rush in like fools to find more solutions, better remedies, fix-its from the profit makers, and fuzzy warm language to comfort the addicted aspects of ourselves. We make films, Facebook pages, petitions, we ask politicians to do our bidding, we cast votes virtually because we have to save our country, save the world, save the Earth, save the whales, save anything, but our own sanity.
What is the role of Indigenous peoples in all this saving, all this complexity, all this running away from the very forces that led us into this treacherous moment in the first place? Could it be that the current moment of late-stage capitalism and the collapse of “progress” are related to historical actions?
You kill Indians to save the man, you kill the man to save the citizen, you kill the citizen to save the slave, you kill the slave to save the master, you kill the master to save … the Indians?
The word “Indians” is a moniker embedded in the European languages detailing the very denial languages used by those in agnosia or acutely colonized. The history of ‘Indians’ began when Columbus arrived and refused to call us Human Beings and the history of the Western Hemisphere is a continuum written into every constitution influenced by the Papal Bulls of 1493. The use of the name Indians disassociates Original Nations from Being aspects and the Being aspect is in relationship with Earth, with Amazonia, and with the web of Life and Interbeingness.
The Amazon is a sacred place. Human Beings do not make sacred places, they acknowledge them, recognize them, and sustain them without developing them. We honor them with languages taught to us by the Earth herself. The Original Nations of the Western Hemisphere understand sacred places where Earth has directed their sensitivities to pure energy being in place. These multi-dimensional quantum physics of Earth languages of the Original Peoples are also a part of the sacred places. They are part of the Cura Da Terra, “Cure of the Earth”, to borrow a phrase from the First Peoples of the Amazon.
As Vine Deloria, Jr. stated in his seminal book, God is Red, “Unless the sacred places are discovered and protected and used as religious places, there is no possibility of a nation ever coming to grips with the land itself. Without this basic relationship, national psychic stability is impossible.”
Earth languages are not lies or manipulation to serve political, religious, economic or scientific rationalizations. They are not invoked, entrusted or gifted to be placed within linear boxes of data. They are spoken every moment as cures, where all praise goes to the Earth. Tokahe Makxa Ina (think of Earth nurturing first). Conscious languages do not require a logic of believing but rather, a trans-logic of knowing that the Earth does not lie and only speaks the truth with conscious respect for all Beings. It is up to us to learn how to listen as the Earth who listens to us has taught the Indigenous peoples.
A Dark Night of the Soul and the Discovery of Meaning
A Dark Night of the Soul and the Discovery of Meaning
Anyone may go through a period of sadness or challenge that is so deep-seated and tenacious that it qualifies as a dark night of the soul. Not long ago I was giving a talk at a university when a man shouted at me from back in the crowd: “I’m terribly depressed. It’s been years. Help me.” I shouted back my email address. In his voice and body language I could see that this man was not caught in some passing depression. His life was broken by some loss, failure, or long-forgotten emotional wound that left him in a desperately dark place.
I reserve the expression ‘dark night of the soul’ for a dark mood that is truly life-shaking and touches the foundations of experience, the soul itself. But sometimes a seemingly insignificant event can give rise to a dark night: You may miss a train and not attend a reunion that meant much to you. Often a dark night has a strong symbolic quality in that it points to a deeper level of emotion and perhaps a deeper memory that gives it extra meaning. With dark nights you always have to be alert for the invisible memories, narratives, and concerns that may not be apparent on the surface.
Faced with a dark night, many people treat it like an illness, like depression. They may take medication or go into counseling looking for a cause. It can be useful to search for the roots of a dark night, but in my experience the best way to deal with it is to find the concrete action or decision that it is asking for.
Engaging the Night
A dark night of the soul is a kind of initiation, taking you from one phase of life into another. You may have several dark nights in the course of your life because you are always becoming more of a person and entering life more fully. At least, that is the hope.
One simple rule is that a truly deep dark night requires an extraordinary development in life. One outstanding example is Abraham Lincoln. With his early life surrounded by death and loneliness and his adult life weighed down by a war in which thousands of young men died, he was a seriously melancholic man who, in spite of or through his dark night, became an icon of wisdom and leadership. One theory is that he escaped his melancholy in his efforts for his country, but another possibility is that the very darkness of his life—he once said, “If there’s a worse place than hell, I’m in it.”—was the ground out of which his leadership grew.
As a therapist, I have worked with people profoundly sad and discouraged, and I join with them in looking for ways to transform that heavy mood into a weighty life. Contemporary people often don’t take their lives seriously enough. This tendency might be an aspect of the cult of celebrity, where we lose sight of our own importance by making too much of it in others.
In the archetypal psychotherapy that I practice, we always say: Go with the symptom. I don’t look for quick escapes from the pain or good distracting alternatives. I try to imagine how a symptom, like a long-standing dark night, might be re-imagined and even lived out in a way that is not literally depressive. As far back as the Middle Ages at least, dark moods were considered to be the work of Saturn, a spirit symbolized by a planet far out in the solar system. He was cold, lonely, and heavy, but he was also the source of wisdom and artistic genius. Look through history and you will find a great number of creative men and women who have struggled with the Saturnine humor.
This ancient idea that a dark night may be connected with genius and inspiration could help us today as we try to be constructive with a Saturnine disposition, like Lincoln’s, or a period of smoky moodiness. We might imagine it as the root and basis of an engagement with life that could give meaning and purpose. This doesn’t necessarily mean that eventually the dark spirit will go away, but it may have a counterweight—some extraordinary creative activity and involvement in life—that will make it more than bearable and may diminish it.
With our contemporary view of anything that looks like depression, we think: I’ll never be happy, never have a good relationship, never accomplish anything. But with the medieval image of Saturn, we might instead tell ourselves: A dark night is the sign of a high calling. My pain and loneliness will prepare me for my destiny.
Finding the Gift in Darkness
There are many examples of men and women who endured unimaginable ordeals and yet contributed in a striking way to humanity’s progress. Nelson Mandela was in prison for 27 years under harsh conditions, yet he never lost his vision and sense of destiny. One of his younger fellow prisoners said of him: “The point about Nelson, of course, is that he has a tremendous presence, apart from his bearing, his deportment and so on. He’s a person who’s got real control over his behavior. He is also quite conscious of the kind of seriousness he radiates.” This is dark night talk—presence and seriousness, the key gifts of Saturn—as a long tradition holds. Mandela’s dark night was an actual imprisonment, not a mood. Still, he teaches how to deal with a dark night. Don’t waste time in illusions and wishes. Take it on. Keep your sense of worth and power. Keep your vision intact. Let your darkness speak and give its tone to your bearing and expression.
As strange as it may sound, there is a temptation in a dark night to slip into enjoyment of the pain and to identify with your emotions and moods. “I’m a lonely person. I’m depressed. Help me.” One striking quality we see in men and women who are dealing with their dark nights effectively is a lack of masochistic surrender to the mood, which can be forceful and dominating.
Mandela had “control over his behavior.” He didn’t succumb. It’s important to live through the dark night, acknowledge it, notice its qualities, and be affected by it. At the same time, it is not useful to be too attached to it or to let it dominate. You don’t want to be the hero who slays dragons and tries to obliterate the darkness, but you do need all the strength of heart you can muster.
While giving a dark night its due, you can also cultivate a love of life and joy in living that doesn’t contradict the darkness. You can be dedicated to your work and your vision for humanity and also feel overwhelmed by the suffering in the world. To do this it helps to have a philosophy of life that understands the creative coming together of conflicting moods. The rule is simple: Human beings can do more than one thing at a time. You can acknowledge your darkness and still find some joy.
An example of the dark night leading to a transformative presence in the world is Maya Angelou, who went from not speaking for five or six years as a child out of guilt and the wounds of abuse to reciting the inaugural poem for Bill Clinton and inspiring millions to make something of their own dark nights. In all her public appearances, Angelou showed both the pain and the joy that shaped her mission in life. She carried her pain throughout her life and yet her joy seemed to increase with her impact on men and especially women around the world.
Angelou’s experience demonstrates in an intriguing way how a dark night might take away your ‘voice’ and then give it back with added power. The question is, how do you go from a dark night to having a positive impact on the world, thus giving your own life purpose?
The first step is to embrace the darkness, take it to heart, winnow out any subtle innuendos of resistance. Then find any images that are trapped in the thick dark mood or situation. Those images may hold the clue to your release and future service. Angelou lost her voice, a fascinating symptom and a strong image, and then became known worldwide for her voice. The cure lies in the illness, the hint at future activity within the symptom. If you tone down the dark elements because they are painful and discouraging, you may also hide the gifts that are there for you.
Another important strategy is to avoid making the dark night too personal, too focused on yourself. Yes, you feel it intimately and alone. But it could still have more to do with the suffering of the world than with yourself. Maybe dark nights are generally less personal than they feel. At any one time, beings on the planet are suffering. The planet itself is suffering; it is going through a dark night constantly. If you live in a place where children are hungry and dying in wars and in domestic violence, you are within the realm of the world’s dark night. Listen to political leaders deny climate change and you worry about the future, not of the planet on which you live but the planetary being of which you are a living part. If you can stretch your moral imagination to perceive this suffering, then you will have the energy and focus to work toward a transformation.
Waking Up
By definition, visionary people imagine utopia, a word that means both ‘no-place’ and ‘good-place.’ It is an imagined state of the world in which people are free of their struggle, where at least the basic insecurities and inequalities have been dealt with. But oddly, it takes the pain and despair of a dark night to envision utopia.
Think about it, you wouldn’t be compelled to imagine a perfected life unless you were steeped in its imperfection. The emptiness of the dark night transforms into the no-place of a wonderful world. If you don’t feel the hopelessness of a dark night, you will probably float through life identifying unconsciously with the values and expectations of the culture. You won’t know that there is something wrong, something that calls for a response from you. Personally, you may not feel your being. You may eventually decide that you’re a nobody, for you become a somebody by identifying with the world outside you. Self-realization is not a private psychological achievement managed by a strong will and a hygienic attitude. A strong sense of self emerges when you own and activate the awareness that you are your world. A mystical sensibility and social action go together. Through an essential shift in imagination you realize that you are not the one suffering; the world is.
The real stunner is that when you begin to serve the world, your darkness changes. It doesn’t go away completely; nor should it. It continues to feed your vision of utopia and your frustration at the imperfection of it all. But your personal darkness converts into anger at injustice and then into compassionate vision and effective action. The darkness and the vision are two parts of one flowing movement.
Maybe it isn’t that your darkness eases but that your ego investment in it diminishes. It feels as though it goes away because you’ve been grasping it. There may be a degree of love for the darkness and a disdain for hope. You don’t want the challenge of being alive and engaging the world. It may be easier to sink into the pit. Some people resist participating in the transformation of the world because they glimpse the challenge in it. They will have to give up a long-held philosophy of easy, comfortable pragmatism and, maybe for the first time in their lives, feel the world’s suffering.
You see this pattern of waking up from pleasant unconsciousness to awareness of suffering in the story of the Buddha, and one of the key words Jesus uses in his teaching, not often pointed out by his followers, is ‘wake up.’ But waking up is also entering your dark night instead of remaining in the oblivion of avoidance. You do wake up to a joyful message, the meaning of the word ‘Gospel,’ but the dark night is always part of the picture, the other side of the coin.
The best source in classical spiritual literature for describing the paradox of darkness and vision is the Tao Te Ching, where on every page you are invited to live without polarization. Chapter 14 is a good example: “Above, it is not bright. Below, it is not dark.” ‘It’ is everything. Below, where you might expect darkness, it’s bright. Above, where you think you’d find light, it’s dark. Keep this paradox in mind and you will be neither a sentimental idealist nor a cynical pessimist. You will be part of the transformation of it all because it is happening in you.
Reprinted from Kosmos Journal, 2015. See the original, with many reader comments.
The Return of Aliveness: The Dark Night of the Soul
By Eckhart Tolle
The ‘dark night of the soul’ is a term that goes back a long time. Yes, I have also experienced it. It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life… an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event—some disaster perhaps. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death—for example, if your child dies. Or the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.
It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster, which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before. Really what has collapsed is the whole conceptual framework for your life. That results in a dark place.
There is the possibility that you emerge out of it into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.
They awaken into something deeper. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual. It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died—only an illusory identity. Now, it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realize that they had to go through that in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.
You arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness. Or one could say a state of ignorance—where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on.
Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning. It looks, of course, as if you no longer understand anything. That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it. It can bring about the dark night of the soul. You now go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively, as an innocent presence. You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness. You sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.
Note: from Eckhart Tolle Newsletter, October 2011. Edited by Kosmos.
www.eckharttolle.com
Leading In Unknown Terrain
Leading In Unknown Terrain
Many second-generation Holocaust survivors grow up learning that adversity can contain opportunity. This was certainly the case in my family.
My mother, Dr. Edith Eva Eger, survived the atrocities of war and the Auschwitz death camp to become a world-renowned psychologist and author, turning her own trauma into liberation and success. Dr. Eger travels the world preaching her message of love and forgiveness, describing how she turned her worst moments into something positive. In her bestselling book, The Choice: Embrace the Possible she tells us “we have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for is up to us.”
In early March, our world entered a period of uncertainty as the spread of COVID-19 pushed us into our homes. The shelter-in-place orders will be lifted, and our lives will resume. But the effects of social distancing and isolation will remain. The question is, how will we move forward?
“This crisis is a transition,” my mother says. “It’s a rebirth that will make us stronger and better.”
Jakob van Wielink and I have spent our careers in leadership development. We have worked with company leaders to streamline productivity while helping their employees find meaning and purpose in their work. Over the years, we have observed and assisted through challenging and high-stakes situations, but no one has experienced a situation of this magnitude. The leaders we’ve worked with during this pandemic have noted rapid changes in day-to-day business and how anxiety has creeped into the minds of employees and employers.
We share the view that while adversity creates disturbances and deep emotions, it also offers opportunities for individual and organizational growth and change. Deep emotions are understandable in our current climate, but they present danger to productivity and mental health if we remain trapped by them. This is a moment for leaders to emerge and offer hope and inspiration.
Speaking with my mother made us curious about how leaders across the globe are dealing with this crisis and how they find ways to instill confidence and optimism for the future in others. As the gates are re-opening, how do we prepare ourselves and the people around us for what lies ahead?
“Don’t tell people what to do, show them,” Dr. Eger told us. “They won’t follow what you tell them to do. Rather, they will follow what you do. Instead of asking why me, ask what now?”
Vivien McMenamin | ‘A Golden Thread’
Before Vivien McMenamin became the Chief Executive Office of Mondi South Africa — a world leader in packaging and paper — she survived an uncertain time in her country on the front lines. For nearly a decade in the 1980s, McMenamin, who was in her 20s, stayed underground as the apartheid government pursued her, looking to defeat her message of an inclusive South Africa and a freed Nelson Mandela. She was arrested and beaten with no certainty that her fight would get the desired results.
She and her country won that fight, and she was able to work side-by-side with Mandela as a member of his economic task force.
“At the essence of crisis are the principles of self-leadership,” McMenamin said. “What anchored me in that situation was the deep values I had around courage. And I wonder now, as you face this crisis, what values are anchoring you?”
In her 30s, McMenamin was diagnosed with breast cancer and doctors gave her a 50% chance of surviving past the six-month mark. Her daughter, Julia, was 8 years old at the time of her diagnosis. McMenamin asked for the most aggressive treatment so she could fight for her future and a chance to watch her daughter grow up.
It’s another fight she won.
“All these (experiences) gave me a sense that I can manage no matter how difficult, even if I have no clue what’s on the other side, I can keep my core identity together.”
After cancer, McMenamin had yet to face a tremendous loss. In June of 2015, Julia died in a car accident at age 21.
“I’ve been thinking of her a lot during this time,” McMenamin said. “I am having a lot of dialogues with her right now. In my mind I am asking her how she feels about the situation. She was quite rebellious, and next to our having a good time together, she would have definitely been fed up with staying inside for so long.”
Through her grief and the moments of triumph in her life, McMenamin said she has grown stronger and more direct. But it took practice to find steadiness through chaos, a skill that has made her the leader she is today.
“If I’ve carried a golden thread, it would be that the harder the circumstance, the simpler the message needs to be and the simpler the method needs to be,” she said. “I’m involved in the practice of resilience. I know the steps to take when faced with very difficult circumstances. I’ve taken those steps before, and I anchor myself back to those steps each time. This helps me now in leading Mondi through these rough times.”
George Kohlrieser | ‘We need a tribe to heal’
George Kohlrieser, a distinguished professor of leadership and organizational behavior at IMD business school – located in Lausanne, Switzerland and Singapore – agreed “emotions need to be expressed.”
“There needs to be gentle exploring into what people are feeling and experiencing,” he said. “There needs to be that connection in times of uncertainty.”
According to Kohlrieser, a leader must be courageous and strong in acknowledging the current threat. Being emotionally available and vulnerable builds trust and inspires those around you.
“Building trust is essential in times of threat, anxiety and uncertainty,” he said. “The leader must be emotionally available to hear the losses, the pain and the frustrations of the team members and those they are working with. We need a tribe to heal.”
Geert van den Enden | ‘I cannot do this without you’
Geert van den Enden has been forced to adapt as a leader over the past month while his Netherlands hospital — at the epicenter of the Dutch outbreak — was being stretched to its limits by the surge of COVID-19 patients.
Van den Enden is the CEO of the midsized Bernhoven Hospital, which found its ICU pushed to the limit with almost triple its normal capacity. He put the crisis on his back and he and his middle management team pushed each other to find solutions for the tidal wave of COVID-19 patients about to present themselves to the hospital. But his normal leadership attitude was not what the situation required.
“I am naturally stable and calm,” he said. “But I discovered that some interpret it as not caring, and people needed a moment to deal with how they were feeling.”
In a particularly heated argument during a staff meeting, an employee told Van den Enden that they did not believe he was truly affected by the current crisis.
Van den Enden, who was shocked by the reaction, stopped the meeting. He expressed his fear and doubt to his staff and spoke about how he had been struggling to sleep because of the spread of COVID-19. He then allowed his staff to express their own anxieties. “The trust issues were immediately resolved,” he said. “We all wanted the same things and offered different perspectives. It united us, and I was able to let go of control. I gave them freedom to do what they know how to do.”
Van den Enden later reached out to one of his directors and asked him to be his right-hand man through the crisis.
“I told him that I cannot do this without you,” Van den Enden said. “He teared up and said, ‘You need me?’ I realized — and teared up as well — what that meant to the both of us to say that.”
Boyd Blanchard | ‘Appreciating Your Imperfections’
Values, reputation and legacy have always meant everything to Boyd Blanchard, a 30-year-old Vice President at his family’s Blanchard Machinery Company that sells and rents Caterpillar heavy construction, power generation and mining equipment in Columbia, SC. Blanchard is part of a youth contingent that has been pushed to the front lines of leadership over the last two months.
“I want to continue to build upon the reputation that my great grandfather started,” he said. “Reputation is big for us. This is the time to show what we are made of, when our core values come to life. We want our customers and partners to be proud to do business with us.”
Blanchard said he has had to adjust the way he interacts with employees during this time of crises. It has been a company priority to take care of our people, Blanchard said, and that in turn has increased collaboration and improved our customer focus.
“I see young leaders that find themselves with a gap between their experience and responsibilities, tend to put emphasis on confidence to feel more comfortable,” he said. “But during this crisis, I have found that focusing on my vulnerability and empathy has made the biggest impact, as it has connected me to my team on a deeper level.”
His youthful optimism has also kept him steady during this time of change. He believes, although we’re separated, there has been a new wave of connection that will lead us into the next phase of business. This time-out has also given him a chance to reflect on himself and how to be a future leader.
“I’m learning that the keys to being successful is understanding yourself and appreciating your imperfections,” Blanchard said. “I wasn’t comfortable enjoying my successes. Now it’s a true passion to learn about myself and others to adapt to be the best leader I can be for the future of this company.”
Follow the call
The thread running through all our conversations with these leaders is recognizing this crisis as a transition, or even a rebirth as Dr. Eger would call it.
Many are questioning their true calling during this “time-out,” as they experience that being overly attached to roles and activities does not lead to true joy. To use an analogy posed by David Brooks, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and author of the bestselling book, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, we may be on a quest to our second mountain: The mountain of fulfillment, service, moral integrity and indeed, that joy we seek.
This time creates an opportunity to learn about ourselves and how we look at and connect to the people we live and work with. It’s an opportunity to ask, who are we? Who do we want to be? How do we want to be remembered? Parents can ask themselves about their involvement with their children, spouses about their engagement with each other and employees about the meaningfulness of their work and how they carry out their tasks.
How would you like those around you to look back on how you led them through the crisis?
David Thompson also contributed to this article.
Freedom and Energy from Healing White Racism
In the U.S., we are reeling from yet another round of white people killing Black people. Hateful. Horrendous. Heartbreaking. Again. In a recent post on Medium, Corinne Shutack put together a helpful list of 75 things White People Can Do for Racial Justice. As a white man, I am grateful for her effort and care. Most of the items are about white folks educating ourselves and advocating for changes in racist practices, both of which are essential. Friends of color tell me they want primarily two things from white people: to show up for justice and to do our own work with white people at dismantling racism. So to the list I would add “healing” — healing our own personal trauma, and our generational trauma of white on white oppression beginning hundreds of years ago in Europe, that conditioned European colonists to take up oppressive roles toward Indigenous and People of Color early on, and continues to infect most white people today. Racism is not inherent to human beings. An early teacher of mine used to say that white racism is like dog manure on your sneaker. Notice three things, he would say: it’s not an inherent part of the sneaker; it’s very hard to scrape it off from all those tiny crevices on the sole of the sneaker; and everywhere you go, it stinks the place up! What an apt image. Furthermore, race is not biologically real. It is a constructed notion used to separate and hurt us all. The label “White people” was invented in the mid-1600s in colonial America to justify a system of exploitation and domination, and to divide low-income Europeans from low-income Blacks and Indigenous folks. (See the video “Birth of a White Nation.”) In addition to the visible and invisible system of oppression, racism and white supremacy are also held in place significantly by unhealed hurt. A white child, treated with respect, taught compassion and connection, educated with an honest and full version of U.S. history that includes what was done to the Native peoples and enslaved black people, and allowed to feel their feelings as they grow up, would never grow up to willingly participate in or agree to the oppression of anyone. But most white children never get that upbringing since we get born into an oppressive system that pits many groups against each other for the purpose of protecting the wealth and power of the few. So racism and other oppressions keep us fighting among ourselves rather than unifying to transform a corrupt, unjust system based in greed, fear, and insecurity. In my work with white people who are just beginning to understand whiteness, one exercise I developed offers an accessible ramp into this territory. It’s called “Beginning Anew with My White European Ancestors.” In pairs, each person shares about three things: a) What do I love about my European ancestors or heritage? What are the positive contributions my people have made to humankind? (All cultures have contributed good things, and this round helps counteract white guilt and validates positive aspects.) b) How did my European ancestors or white heritage harm people of color? Specifically? What are white people still doing today that is profoundly harmful? What breaks my heart in relation to all of this? (This round often brings up grief and anger.) c) How did I unawarely benefit as a white person from the harm that my ancestors did to Indigenous and Black people, and how may I now be perpetuating the ongoing oppression that exists today? What do I vow to do personally from this point forward to help heal the harm my European ancestors and the current dominant white culture and misinformation have done and are still doing to people of color? What do I vow to do to help change the systems that perpetuate that on-going harm? Try to be specific. (This round asks for personal change.) (Note: There are any number of ways of exploring and healing internalized white racism. For whites who have done a lot of self-work, this exercise may feel too simple. It’s just one starting place.) Each of these rounds can evoke deep feelings. In this work with white people, I’ve discovered that underneath white defensiveness or guilt is usually broken-heartedness. Why? Different reasons. Some whites, as children, had friends of color whom they loved, and from whom they got separated because of racism. Some had a nanny of color whom they loved as much and sometimes more than their parents, and were later separated from. Many young whites saw unjust treatment of people of color but could not stop it because they were too little and powerless. Some white folks carry the inner shame of times they caved in to peer pressure and didn’t speak up against a racist joke or other racial mistreatment. Some white people were raised in such a segregated world that they never had a black or brown friend and therefore feel ignorant and separate. Many white people feel a lack of ease in their relationships with people of color, a discomfort, a fear, maybe a guilt born of the legacy of racism and white supremacy. Many white people know at some deep level, that the privilege we enjoy because of our skin color is inherently unfair and wrong, and is built on generations of brutal exploitation and oppression. Furthermore, in this white supremacist culture, white people have been conditioned to feel dominant, superior, and entitled in relation to people of color, which in turn generate feelings of shame, guilt, fear, and grief, whether recognized or not. Over the years of this work with white people on white racism, I have observed that most white people are aware of the monstrous effects of racism in the world and on some level fear that if they are open to their complicity in racism, that they too will reveal themselves to be at fault. They also sometimes feel defensive since they never intended to be or act in a racist way and don’t want to be accused of being evil when they think they have been innocent bystanders. However, underneath these fearful or defensive reactions, if the conditions are safe enough, what most white people find is a broken heart, a deep well of grief and loss at being separated from people of color in our lives, of feeling betrayed by mis-education, of feeling disillusioned about our country whose ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were not delivered to all people and were built on genocide and slavery, and feeling inadequate to change the conditions. Transforming racism and white supremacy is a long, multi-layered, complex struggle. One necessary piece is healing both our individual and collective suffering from and within racism. For me it’s also been an honor and a relief to recover part of my humanity. Healing happens in many ways. One effective form that I’ve practiced is a co-listening partnership. Each week, for the past 35 years, a friend and I have offered each other 45 minutes of warm, focused, respectful attention. He listens to me for 45 minutes without interruption or advice, then I listen to him for 45 minutes. This allows us to go below the thoughts to the underlying feeling. Tears and feelings of anger, fear, despair, powerlessness, discouragement, or confusion get released. Also feelings of joy, gratitude, love, and excitement about life. This process has allowed me to think more clearly, love more deeply, and act more boldly over the years of releasing old distress. In the safety of these weekly sessions, I have been able to acknowledge and heal much of my own white racism, and understand how I have unconsciously perpetuated harm by assuming and acting within my unearned white privilege. Most social justice activists understandably focus their work on the external structural policies and practices that they think need changing or to be created. While doing this, I think it is crucial to also put attention on healing the inner, personal habits and hurts that limit our humanity and dull our thinking, and keep us divided and acting small. These patterns include our feeling unloved, or disrespected; our conditioning to feel separate; our ignorance, powerlessness, and internalized trauma that prepare us to take our place in the oppressive structures that surround us. The process of healing also includes loving ourselves as inherently valuable and worthwhile human beings, while increasingly coming to love and respect all others. As a young white boy, I was thoroughly saturated with white culture. I was raised with working class parents who struggled to make a living and had alcohol issues, so I was not immune to suffering. But everyone I knew was white, so that’s all I knew. Furthermore, I grew up loving my country, proud of it, and believing in the ideals of liberty, justice, and equality. Then in my teens and early 20s, when I began to learn about the underbelly of US history, I felt betrayed, like I had been lied to, hoodwinked. A deep anger and grief arose in me. I had to re-learn so much, including about whiteness. I came to understand the truth of the anti-apartheid chant used in South Africa: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” I now know in my bones that my liberation is linked to the liberation of everyone. People of color cannot end racism and white supremacy by themselves. Nor should they have to. The active participation of white people is required. In simple terms, I see this as having two major parts that go hand in hand. One is recovering our full humanity from wrong views, miseducation, and hurtful actions around race. This is the inner healing journey. The second part is to unite and act in concert with others around a strategy to challenge and eventually dismantle white supremacy and create the beautiful society we believe is possible. The racial upheaval of the past several weeks is a cry of suffering and a surging call to us white folks to join whole-heartedly in this monumental and heroic human struggle for freedom. Fortunately, many white people are stepping forward in visible ways. One concrete step on this journey would be to find a co-listening partner and continue transforming ourselves from within. As Martin Luther King, Jr said, “All lasting and meaningful change begins on the inside.”Freedom and Energy from Healing White Racism
Of course, individual healing is not sufficient to transform the system. We must also stop the harm, gain political power, implement structural and policy changes, and create beautiful new community-building initiatives to address the problems facing humanity. But if we do not also do the healing work, then our rigid and irrational old habits and patterns of oppression will infect the new world we are working so hard to build.
Hitching for Hope, with Ruairí McKiernan
Hitching for Hope, with Ruairí McKiernan
Ruairí McKiernan is a popular podcaster, renowned social campaigner, TEDx speaker, and was recently named one of the top 10 changemakers in Ireland. In his new book, McKiernan embarks on a hitchhiking odyssey with no money, no itinerary, and no idea where he might end up each night. His mission: to give voice to a people emerging from one of the most painful periods of economic and social turmoil in Ireland’s history, known as the Celtic Tiger economy. Hitching for Hope is a manifesto for hope and healing in troubled times.
Julian Guderley | We are in special times. It’s the middle of May 2020 as we’re recording this. A lot of people have been in isolation for a long time. So what are some of your practices that give you strength, clarity, and hope on a daily basis?
Ruairí McKiernan | I’m living on Zoom a lot of the time. And that’s a double edged sword, isn’t it? At one level, it’s so stimulating and exciting. And then on another level, it’s so draining and not life affirming. One of the practices that really brings me alive is sea swimming and jumping in the sea. It’s pretty cold, which why it’s so invigorating. The other big one is meditation as a basic, as a staple diet. It’s like air at this point. If I don’t have it, I know that something’s wrong. Well, you can get away with it. Unlike air, you can get away with it for a few days, but it’s a bit like that old analogy of not brushing your teeth and you’ll start to feel a bit grotty. (Not that I’ve never not brushed my teeth!)
Julian | I hear you. I experience meditation in a similar way.
Ruairí | And once that baseline practice is there, I think it diminishes and prevents a lot of unnecessary trouble in the world for me. And I would feel that at a global, national, and social level, the more of us that can practice, the more harmonious each day can be. Now, I am fortunate that my wife is a meditation teacher, so I have a built-in reminder in the house every day.
Julian | That’s better than any app.
Ruairí | Yeah, big time. And better looking as well!
I mean apps are great, and technology is great, but human beings are where it’s at. And I’m all for technological innovation, but there’s also a reminder of how we miss each other and how we need each other. And I think in forced isolation, if anything good is going to come out of it, it might be a resurgence in connection.
Julian | Beautifully put. It’s like we get to learn to become literate about how to use media and how to use our digital tools. Because if we don’t know how to put them away, they turn into a different form of imprisonment. I’d love to start speaking and sharing about your book a bit more and understand this journey that you had a little while ago—hitchhiking around Ireland with no set route. The main theme is hope. And I think a hope is something that is more than ever relevant right now, but what are we actually even hoping for? And is it enough to be hopeful?
Ruairí | I guess people have different understandings of the word hope. It can be attributed to religious practice, it can be attributed to, I guess a passive sentiment, taking a step back and hopig something good is going to happen or the world is going to improve magically, almost. And to an extent, I do believe in that magic—the magic of possibility, the magic of the unexpected. But on the other hand, I also believe in agency. I believe in seizing our power to make things happen and, you might even say, ‘co-create’ the magic.
My understanding of hope comes from that. It comes from a knowledge also of history where we’ve seen how change happens, and how wonderful things happen even in our own lives. I think when we connect with the essence of that truth—of how positive change can occur—then it creates a foundation for hope that is more grounded. It’s not just a naive hope.
When we think of social movements, for instance—whether it be the end of slavery, or the civil rights era, or women’s liberation, or the current rise of the youth climate justice movements—people hoped for those things to happen, and other people got out and made them happen. And I think the more of us that are participating and active, at any level—through conversation, campaigning, podcasting—the better we can weave a quilt of hope around the world where we’re in a hopeful dance.
Rhonda Fabian | In your book, Ruairi, you meet a gentleman who says that he was feeling quite hopeless and then suddenly he met a woman and fell in love. His point was that “hope can be just around the corner.” And it really caused me to contemplate this link between love and hope. You were talking a little bit earlier about meditation practice; I think that hope is also a practice. And so I’d like you to maybe speak about openness and love and hope as practices. What was this practice like for you, of going around Ireland and opening yourself up to strangers?
Ruairí | Thanks, Rhonda. I think you make a very good point around hope as a practice. And a practice implies that it needs tending to, it needs cultivation. And I think that openness does as well. And so thinking back in my own life, I grew up in a rural part of Ireland in the Northeast. And hitchhiking was a practical means of going from point A to point B for many people. It was a country that was less developed, less urbanized, quieter, what some might call poorer, but only by one standard of economic measurement.
And I guess it was a friendly place as well, and openness was very much part of my culture. And there was a collectiveness around how we looked after each other. So hitchhiking wasn’t even a thing. It was just integrated into how we operated. I suppose that informs my worldview and how I traveled elsewhere in the world and how I approached people over the years, in that I just always had an openness to me.
However, I think something happened in my 20s, or a range of experiences occured, similar to what we all experience—when our trust is broken, or we’re let down, or we allow ourselves to become co-conspirators or complicit in our own… ‘closed-ness.’ If you take a compassionate view of that, it’s because we got hurt and we don’t want to feel that again. Well, the edge to that is that we might think we’re protecting ourselves, but we’re actually denying ourselves further enriching experiences.
So, I did recognize that in myself. I’ve seen so much burnout, and that’s a big theme in my book and how it starts off—burnout. And as a founder of a charity in Ireland for many years, I thought I was getting away from that corporate way of being but, in a way, I created the same thing for myself.
That old song, what is it? There’s a song that’s like, “You do it to yourself.” And so we can blame governments or we can blame the ‘Man,’ but sometimes we are the Man that’s creating our own prison.
I think any kind of illness can create an opportunity for an awakening or a remembering, or some sort of profound change. And I think all of these things came together for me around the time of this hitching trip where I wanted to return to that version of myself that I once knew. So, that’s where the openness—and the desire—comes in. And that’s what I want in this world. But we all have to assess our own relationship and complicity in allowing the opposite to continue.
Julian | I’m really curious about that process of trust. I believe part of this current global planetary situation is that we have to relearn how to trust. And so is there something that you could crystallize that’s required for you to have trust?
Ruairi | I think as Rhonda was saying, it’s a practice. It’s a daily practice in humanity. I think you also talked about love. And my podcast is called Love and Courage because I do believe those are two primary forces that I want to hang on to in my own life, that I want to never let go of as an anchor. And I want the courage to remember to manifest that, to wake up every morning and remember who you are and that the operating system is not Zoom, and it’s not work, and it’s not money, and it’s not worry. That the system is one that we’ve signed up to call love. I think everything flows from there. I think that’s where the openness and the connection can come from. I’m not for an instant pretending that I do this well every day, because I am as distracted or more distracted than the average person. I’m attracted to knowledge and people, and that can also be my downfall because I spend my time buzzing around trying to capture all the ideas and have all the conversations, and so I do need to make way for that contemplation. Even as we speak, I have a deep need in me right now to have contemplative time in my life and I’m grappling with this.
Julian | So, we’ve been globalizing as an economy and as a world for some really good reasons along with some really poor side effects. Having cultural identity and rich traditions is one of the most important pieces because that’s what gives us this ability to connect with the Earth, with each other, and with our ancestors. And it seems like it’s getting a little bit lost in this hyper-technological world that we’re in.
Ruairí | There is an understandable desire for rootedness, but sometimes it takes a wrong turn in the form of extreme nationalism. I think we need to address the very real threat that it poses in many countries, whether it be Hungary, or Poland, or Brazil, or the United States. There are certainly echoes of it in the UK, and there are echoes of it in Ireland.
But I think that some of what’s informing it is an innate desire for people to feel more rooted and more connected and to have their primary needs better taken care of. I think what’s been happening over the last 30 years is that we’ve been offered 500 types of the same chocolate bar, and we’ve been developing a billion different apps to mind our mental health. We’re being promised travel, adventure, and happiness at the click of a button! But those aren’t really speaking to fundamental human needs in terms of tending to the garden of our own emotional wellbeing, our own spirituality. There are also the very real needs of healthcare, housing, etcetera. At the end of the day, all people desire are food and shelter. And if those aren’t being looked after, then never mind your 500 types of chocolate bars.
And I think there’s a great moment upon us now whereby all the rules are being disrupted. I would say rewritten, but they’re not rewritten yet. So let’s see what rules we want to put on the legislation books. What new legislation? It’s legislation based on love, on wellbeing, on humanity. And, for that matter, it’s based on the welfare ecology, because that’s the other perfect storm at play here.
It’s all coming at once. And so it’s a catastrophe on the one hand, but it’s also a beautiful moment if we reframe it as a point of a possibility, and I do believe in that. I am hopeful of that, but I’m only hopeful because I see people like you both and I’m connected with enough people around the world that give me hope.
Rhonda | Beautiful. And it reminds me of the phrase “we make the path by walking.” I think how we make our path now is going to define who we become for decades to follow. And on that note, I noticed in your book an emphasis on essential work. How can we learn from this experience to value the work of everyone and to help teachers, nurses, and service people of all kinds to be more seen?
Ruairí | I think what’s being glorified and elevated are in many ways false gods—people on salaries that are many multiples of the people that are deemed to be ‘under them.’ It wasn’t that long ago that the average CEO’s wage ratio to the workers was something like four to one, and then it became 12 to one, and now it’s nearly 100. Regardless of the specific statistic, you can glean the principle.
I guess that’s where the Occupy Movement came from. But the bottom line is a lot of it can be sorted out with income equality. Because income equality can also start at health, housing, and other fundamentals, and I think that’s where we do absolutely need to be careful not to spiritualize our way out of this and say, “We’re all going to meditate and levitate our way around all of this.” There is some hardcore organizing needed here. The worker’s movements have always done that and that’s where trade unions come out of, that’s where the notion of a weekend came from. Once upon a time people worked 80 hours a week, then they worked 60, and then they worked 40. The deal was that you would show up and do your thing even if you didn’t necessarily like it. What you would get in return was some degree of social mobility and time for your friends, for your family. And you could look forward to some form of a nice retirement. And that deal has been broken in so many ways. That’s because the guy at the top is running away with a lot of the loose change that belongs to the workers that helped create that wealth in the first place.
Obviously, many people now are working in the so-called gig economy with the likes of Uber and various other companies that employ people over an app with no proper conditions or entitlements. It’s just not good enough.
And what you can see in the statistics around the coronavirus is that there’s an absolute disproportionate infection rate among low-paid workers and racial dynamics at play as well. Particularly in the US, people of color, particularly African-Americans and Latinx, are massively disproportionately exposed to and affected by coronavirus. So that racial injustice shares an intersection with economic injustice. And Ireland also isn’t immune to this, in that, we’ve become in many ways a low wage economy because we’ve been following that particular, you could say it’s a US model. I don’t know if it’s fair to say it’s a US model, but it’s certainly a model.
I mean, everyone likes to talk about the Nordic countries, but there’s a very good reason for doing so because they have shown that you can have companies, you can have a competitive economy, you don’t have to impose Soviet-style communism. You don’t become North Korea and Cuba and all those places people like to reference. You can still be very open, transparent, and democratic. You can look after everyone’s basic needs and have a good life.
Isn’t what we’re all about—we want to have a good life? And then ideally, we have a good life that is also of service to other people that it’s not just about your own elevation and comfort. And so I’d like to see some of those social values and that conversation come back to the fore as to the vision that we want. And in some ways, this is an age-old campaign that we just have to continue on.
Julian | And it’s also something that we can now see in some parts of the world, like New Zealand for example, where suddenly metrics like ‘wellbeing’ have an influence on what was formerly just profit and capitalistic thinking. And so these values integrated into capitalism might be a great next step. And so my question for you is about your Earth vision and what you hope for that can happen on this planet. Is there something like an Earth vision that’s slumbering within?
Ruairí | I think John Lennon wrote a song about it, so that was good enough for me.
It’s funny—even when I want to go and say “peace and love,” they’re words that have been, in so many ways, almost ridiculed. Why can’t they become the mantra or the vision? I appreciate that a lot of cultural understanding can come from indigenous wisdom. I’m told that First Nations people in North America did think seven generations ahead. And so I like that they were trustees and caretakers of this Earth.
But fundamentally, ecologically speaking, I think we have a mental health crisis from the perspective of depression, anxiety, overmedication, so on and so forth. And that speaks to a very glaring disease at the core, which is ultimately the opposite of wellbeing. I’ve worked in youth mental health and I’ve worked in various mental health campaigns and health promotion, and I’ve seen a lot of the suffering that is out there. And suffering is obviously an innate and understandable part of life. But the level of suffering and the cause of suffering—much of it is unnecessary. So that vision for a society and humanity that is at peace with itself begins with inner peace.
Do we really want to get back to ‘normal’? For so many people, normal is not a happy place. Normal is like 20 hours commuting every week because they can’t afford housing in the city. And I know San Francisco is big on that and Dublin is the same. And it’s one of the reasons my wife and I moved to the west of Ireland because we were in that whole crazy rents routine. How do you afford those rents or buy a home as a younger couple? Essentially, you need to join a certain type of train that you can’t necessarily get off, even if you want to.
But the quality of life here is so rich because there’s a communitarianism at play, there’s looking out for each other. And there’s also a slower pace because there are fewer places to go and be entertained and less stuff to go and buy. So we have to make our own quality of life with each other. I’m not denying that cities are exciting, good places. I love cities, especially for their cultural diversity. But there is something that rural life can teach us. And I’d like to see cities teaching rural places and rural places teaching cities.
I do feel very hopeful about the United States, even though it’s a challenging time. I’ve met so many great leaders and thinkers in the US, including Joanna Macy and Noam Chomsky, and I’m optimistic. And I think it may be a case we’re experiencing some darkness before the dawn. And this is, as Joanna Macy talks about, the Great Turning. Let’s get out and help it turn.
Rhonda | Ruairi, at Kosmos we look at the world through the lens of transformation. And, for me, Hitching For Hope: A Journey into the Heart and Soul of Ireland is a model for the journey of transformation we all have ahead of us. That will be very much about opening ourselves to human connection. And so, thank you so much for the wisdom of your book and for your journey. We hope to see more of you.
Ruairí | Thanks, Rhonda. Thanks, Julian. And thanks to all the readers and listeners—lots of love to you all.
The Vitality of Paradox
The Vitality of Paradox
I started and quit French class when I was in eighth grade. I was confident that the word oui should be pronounced “oy”, but my teacher insisted on “we”—a sound that doesn’t look a thing like the spelling. What a ridiculous language, I thought, and she wasn’t inclined to see or hear things my way. After two weeks, I’d had enough, la fin, and signed up for art.
As an adolescent, I perceived rules and creativity as paradox. Now silver-haired, I understand rules and creativity as fundamental life forces, opposing yet complementary principles and energies. Rules and creativity are in constant dialogue in nature and human nature.
The bank says to the river: “You must stop here!”
The river replies to the bank: “I recognize your intent to protect, it is a worthy intent, but notice that if I meander over here and you surrender just a bit, the frogs will have a pool in which to thrive and they will eat the little buzzing mosquitos and, in the warm months, people will come to play. They will sit, legs dangling—trusting your firm and sturdy edge—look down and praise this place that is us.”
As physical construct and metaphor, the maze and the labyrinth occupy this vital paradox. We typically learn of the maze as children, maybe at an amusement park or in a puzzle book meant to keep us entertained—quieted to parental ears—during long road trips. Mazes are complex. Getting from one place to another requires choices, changes in direction, sometimes a retracing of steps when a route comes to an abrupt end. By contrast, labyrinths are unicursal, they are designed to convey a single path that inevitably leads to the center. Intent and an aversion to edge is all that is needed for labyrinth navigation. As a general rule, labyrinths tend to be far less common landscape features than mazes and to walk one alone is often regarded as a spiritual act, a contemplative practice, not something to distract or amuse.
One Friday night while in college I joined a group of beer-groping friends in body-launching over the tall brick wall that surrounds the Governor’s Palace in the heart of Colonial Williamsburg. This was tradition. Every William and Mary student knows it, and every Palace security guard knows it too. The student’s goal: to make one’s way in the dark through the reportedly-haunted holly bush maze without getting caught. The guard’s goal: to flush the students out, to catch them, to avoid being tricked by ghosts, again. This is a rite of passage. This is initiation.
One cannot become initiated into an authentic adulthood without testing and breaking the rules, without violating the prevailing cultural norms. This requires an exploration of the extremes and there isn’t just one way to accomplish the task. Although the undertaking may be collective—a group coming of age—each journey is profoundly and obligatorily unique. It is a solo embarkation. Yet, at the journey’s end, there are stories told that reflect both the individual nuances of paths taken and turned away from, as well as the commonality of the conclusion—something distinctive discovered at the center, at the core of one’s being. Only when integrated do life’s metaphoric mazes and labyrinths become the inter-locking pathways necessary for expanding human consciousness.
Empirical research suggests that individuals who are rebellious by nature—less restrained by a perception of oversight authority—are more likely to serve as cultural creatives. Laboratory experiments have confirmed that people primed with rule-breaking stimuli are more prone to creative ideas. The key to a highly productive business might thus be to give the rebel a cause which has well-defined parameters. A business may be able reach its greatest potential by fostering an atmosphere of contemplative risk-taking; establishing that the rule is to break the rules, that chaos is to be nurtured as long as it is well-planned chaos.
And what of society? What of these times—this age? Do we self-isolate and play by the rules: masks, gloves, a distance of six feet between us? Do we flock to the beach in the season’s hottest bikini? Do we take to the courthouse steps, sword and pistol—or semi-automatic machine gun—at our side?
Do we walk the maze or the labyrinth?
And, the river replied: “Yes!”
Homo sapiens isn’t intended to remain on a pathologically adolescent course—one characterized by an addiction to distraction and entertainment. Nor are we intended to become so disassociated from individual empowerment that we aimlessly surrender to a rule structure imposed by a legally-entitled person, nation state, or framework for world order. The extremes of species expression have brought dis-ease upon us. All of us.
The ego says: “I want this to end as quickly and painlessly as possible.”
The soul says: “I want the experience of walking the labyrinthian maze.”
This is a rite of passage. This is initiation.
This is our opportunity to find a common language—one that may look different but, in essence, sounds the same. From my current vantage point, I can’t describe the lay of the land or how we will occupy it from one moment to the next, or for how long. I can anticipate ghosts. I can expect that there will be mistakes made along the way and that we will have an opportunity to learn from them. I can have faith in the nature of imagination and a rule of nature: that the living thrive when in service of something greater than self.
If we do make our way through, I can bank on there being stories told that reflect both the individual nuances of paths taken and turned away from, as well as the commonality of a new discovery—something of the core nature of the human being, our humanity.
And, so, whatever compels us, we must take the next step.
Oui?
Howling in Place
Howling in Place
During shelter-in-place, coyotes have been roaming the empty streets of the San Francisco Bay Area while some of its human residents have taken to howling.
For weeks now, many residents of Marin County, CA, where I live have been coming out on their decks at 8 pm and howling like our native coyotes. Quarantinees pause their Zoom calls and emerge from their dens, wine glass in hand, grateful their pajamaed kids gleefully abandon their video games and run outside to burn off their last burst of energy before bedtime. I eagerly drop whatever I’m doing to add to the echoing homage. Even my teenager jumps up to get in on the action.
In our neighborhood, it begins with a few scattered howls that quickly summon more until a high-pitched chorus rises above the shadowy hills. At this point, my cats run under the couch. Between the call and response of loud, close howls, a warbling harmony of wails from distant neighborhoods reverberates in the sky. As with real coyotes, you can’t tell from which direction the howls are coming. To hear this hypnotic refrain night after night is at once amusing, ominous, comforting, doleful and inspiring. It’s the five minutes of the day we’ve come to treasure.
Ostensibly, we’re howling to honor the essential workers putting their lives at risk. Mill Valley resident Hugh Kuhn promoted the idea on social media after hearing some kids howling one evening, and it just took off.
Lately I’m hearing a lot more howls – and more robust, realistic ones – so either my neighbors (and their dogs) are seriously getting into it now, or real coyotes are responding in kind. It may just be a flash in the pandemic that disappears when shelter-in-place lifts, but what if this custom is more than a thank-you, albeit well-deserved? I can’t shake the sense it must be serving an even deeper purpose, that the collective unconscious is slipping out at twilight for a moment with an urgent message. But what? And why?
Coyotes howl to find or call their pack. The purest explanation is we’re exchanging a symphony of howls with our fellow shut-ins simply to reassure us that we’re not alone: “I’m here.” “Me, too.”
Or it’s a time-out for a playful tension release. Coyote embodies the Trickster archetype, one of the oldest in indigenous American mythology, including Marin’s Coastal Miwok. A mischievous, supernatural, shape-shifting character wily in his deceit, the Trickster also foolishly creates misadventures for himself. When we take life too seriously, Coyote reminds us to embrace unpredictability and laugh at ourselves. It’s hard to howl with a straight face.
Then again, we might be channeling Coyote for more drastic support. Trickster Coyote likes to flout taboos, laws and social expectations so when people embody this archetype (or support a leader who does, by proxy), it provides a sort of catharsis from societal demands. But they can go too far – like empowering a toxic Trickster leader or defying social distancing too early – and become the fools who lose it all. Our howling offers us a compromise: rebel but shrewdly – embrace our primal, creative, pack nature without activating the hubris that never ends well.
Coyote is also known to be amoral, stubborn, conniving, cruel, two-faced and too curious for her own good and is often underestimated in the damage she can do. Remind you of anyone? We may activate this archetype to subconsciously process and combat the real-life Trickster characters we are most beset with right now: certain political leaders who shall not be named, protesters blocking hospitals or threatening state houses, even Coronavirus itself. Ironically, these Tricksters teach us essential lessons when they test our most sacrosanct beliefs, shake up our complacence or shatter our delusions.
A myth illuminates another possible motive for our howling: Coyote sees the Creator placing the stars in the sky in an orderly manner from a bag and asks if he can help. Creator says “sure, but keep it tidy”. Coyote, being a coyote, gets impatient and throws the whole bag up dispersing the stars haphazardly in the heavens. Creator scolds him for his carelessness; now Coyote howls every night when he sees the mess he made. This reminds me that, tragically, humans unleashed this pandemic; we haven’t shown nearly the respect for our planet to sustain life here. Ever notice, no creature ever howls downward towards Earth? It’s always straight up to the sky, as if pleading for redemption. Perhaps our nightly baying is subconscious lamentation of the mess we’ve made.
Coyote, like ourselves, has both positive and negative qualities that are especially instructive right now. One of the world’s most adaptable creatures, Coyote takes advantage of opportunities to explore and expand her territory – one once swam to an island off Massachusetts and another was captured in New York’s Central Park in 1999. Though we can’t travel right now, we must become more adaptable and resilient than ever before. Perhaps our yearning for freedom draws us to the spirit of hardy adventurers like Coyote. However, this time is our opportunity to explore and expand our inner territory – that of self-awareness, self-regulation, collaboration, innovation and reinvention – so we can emerge from this crisis having transformed ourselves and our world to cohabitate with this virus and all the vulnerabilities and trauma left bare in its wake.
As with the stars fiasco, Trickster Coyote forces change; if it’s positive, it’s usually by accident. Many people speak now of feeling paralyzed by the uncertainty of the future. Coyote’s antihero lesson here might be: rather than waiting for some silver lining, let’s galvanize our own personal and collective agency and proactively and intentionally create our new paradigm together.
Indeed, when something awful transpires that then generates healing or learning, some shamans call it coyote medicine. Maybe we’re all howling from that primal place inside us that yearns to transcend our shared darkness and finally create a culture that actually sustains the needs of humanity and the Earth’s ecosystem. One can hope — and howl.
Coyote Recording
Art of Elaine Thompson
Elaine was raised in a very creative home on the eastern end of Long Island. Days were spent building birdhouses with Dad, coloring at the kitchen table with her two sisters, or making cardboard castles with Mom. She fell in love with the simple pleasures of creating,later developing her skills in high school and refining them in college. She graduated in December of 2007 from the State University of New York at New Paltz with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing.
Elaine works mainly in oil paint and graphite pencil and is inspired by her love of all living things (especially the furry four-legged ones) and the delight of a good giggle. Painting allows Elaine to remain connected to her inner child and hopes that her work will encourage others to do the same. Elaine is currently living in Ellenville, NY, and shows her work at art fairs and festivals around the North East. Visit her website at elainethompsonart.com.