New Kosmos! Summer Issue, podcast and more
July 18, 2023 Kosmos Community News
Dear Reader,
Lots to share. Our second issue of Kosmos in its new format is here, The Gift of Grief. Our constant exposure to distressing news can lead to a sense of overwhelm or desensitization. Emotional detachment becomes a way to protect ourselves from the constant barrage of painful information. Yet, this numbing can prevent the radical shifts and healing most needed. Most of us are cut off from collective grieving practices or shared ceremonies that can help us. The Gift of Grief points to this need and offers examples of courageous healing.
It is a joy to present the second episode of our new podcast series, Deschooling Dialogues, with Alnoor Ladha in collaboration with Culture Hack Labs. This conversation with V (formerly Eve Ensler) inspired me deeply. I hope you will listen. Plus, an update on the Kosmos Listening Tour, Kosmos Circles…there is as a lot going on. Enjoy!
The Gift of Grief | Our Collective Healing
click to access the issue
READ THE INTRODUCTION, by Rhonda Fabian
“Opportunities to share our collective grief are rare. If we are so numb that we can’t even feel the suffering of the world, surely it will eat us alive. To enumerate the ways this is already happening is just to numb us even further. What then must we do with our collective pain, all this garbage and brokenness?
featuring…
Being Taught by Sacred Pain
By Cash Ahenakew (Ph.D.)
“In an attempt to keep us feeling individualized and separate from the land-metabolism, modernity takes away our sense of the unquestionable value of life and instead creates a fundamental void that we associate with worthlessness. To feel a temporary sense of self-worth, we are made to produce stuff that modernity recognizes as valuable. To feel a sense of completion, we are made to accumulate stuff that we believe can fill the void. This stuff becomes an embodied prison, clogging our pores, our air, our blood, and our drain pipes, damaging our heart pump and blocking possibilities for us to sense and relate differently.”
Hope Leans Forward | The Body as Grounded Wisdom
By Valerie Brown
“For years after the miscarriages, I felt barren and broken by the loss, shame, and guilt. There was a ragged, dispossessed part of me that I couldn’t shake. Here in the cold spring dampness of Kōya-san, my loss and grief were acknowledged and shared…I sensed that those in the cemetery around me understood and made space for the grieving to be and to breathe. The Japanese people recognized and honored the grief of miscarriage and abortion through this cemetery and these healing rituals, which said to me, ‘What happened to you happened to us. What you’ve done, we’ve done. You are loved here. You can heal here. All of you is accepted, loved here.’”
Deschooling Dialogues
Episode 2 – Alnoor Ladha with V (formerly Eve Ensler)
Today we’ll meet with V, formerly Eve Ensler, the founder of V-Day, of One Billion Rising, of so many important organizations and non-organizations, movements in the space of social justice and beyond. She’s also the co-founder of City of Joy, which is a physical healing center and space in the Congo. She is the author of Vagina Monologues, The Apology, her latest book Reckoning just came out. We’re going to talk about that today and so much more. You can Google her and you’ll find out all the things she’s up to in the world and all the relationships she’s been weaving for 30 plus years.
“It’s like we drug people in this country. We overeat. We’re addicted to everything. The opposite of disruption, it’s to keep everyone anesthetized and numb and sleepy and not believing they have any rights or ability to advocate for another way of being here. And it’s not accidental that the pharmaceutical company has made so many drugs and so many people are hooked on those drugs. So they’re not feeling their rage, they’re not feeling upset, they’re not feeling like the level of which they need to feel in order to create a revolution. It’s all just numb. So I’m really big on disruption.”
Reemergence of Animate World Experiences
a more-than-human perspective
By Geneen Marie Haugen
Many contemporary people understand that other-than-human beings are intelligent and saturated in subjectivity, but the understanding might be more intellectual than experienced, because the dead universe worldview – with which most Westerners are deeply, though perhaps unconsciously, rooted – shapes perception. Those who seldom regard the Others as alive and intelligent may reflexively exclude from our embodied awareness any hint that suggests otherwise – even if we long for wildly intimate, reciprocal encounters and interactions.
For those unlearning the Western worldview, awakening perception of the musky, multivalent, psychically active, slow-breathing world can be a practice.
One way to re-animate perception is through our manner of engaging with, or writing and speaking about, non-human Others – including those generally not considered as organic or living, such as rocks, poems, or dreams. In his poem, “When I Met My Muse,” William Stafford creates a world where not only is the Muse engaging; it’s a world where sunlight, eyeglasses, ceiling and nails have agency:
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off—they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.