Honoring our pain for the world
On indispensible but insufficent actions, islands of sanity, and ceasefire now
Dear reader community,
How are you honoring your pain for the world1?
This morning I am honoring my pain by letting tears fall as I drink my coffee and read the news of today’s horrors, which get worse every day. I cry for the children who are all of our children. I have to read headlines multiple times because the words don’t belong together in a sentence. In no humane world do these words belong together in a sentence:
“Babies on incubators begin to die as Israeli forces besiege Al-Shifa hospital”
Babies. On Incubators.
Because electricity has been cut off and they were on incubators, as tanks and bombs circle the hospital. Running out of air in their lungs.
I sit in meditation, breathing. Imagining. Breathing with the babies and their mothers watching them.
Targeting hospitals is a war crime. Targeting children is a war crime.
Lately, every time I pick up my daughter, who is 5 and still likes to be picked up and carried, I think of the parents in Gaza, in Sudan, in the Congo, in so many other places, carrying their children as they flee violence. As they try to flee while bombs are going off around them. The weight, the heaviness, the endurance, the heartache. I hold my daughter and carry her down the stairs, or off to bed, safe and sound, knowing how lucky we are that these are the conditions of our carrying. Knowing all children should have these conditions. Yearning for that world to exist, knowing that it can, yet feels so far.
I am honoring my pain by listening. I am listening to the open letter from voices from the Arab world in response to the Ecoversities Alliance solidarity statement I shared a few weeks ago.
I am listening to the words of my peace education colleague Ayman Qwaider, who lost his sister and nieces in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Please take the time to read his words about the atrocities being committed against children and the education sector more broadly.
I am honoring my pain by continuing to write and call my political representatives and the president, over and over and over again. Signing petitions. Donating (this week, to Middle East Children’s Alliance).
Honoring my pain by repeating, ceasefire now.
I am honoring my pain by practicing with it. Last week, my post, Fresh morning, broken world drew its title from a Mary Oliver poem. Only after sending it did I realize the fragment, those two phrases, mirrored the little phrases or gathas we use for meditation in the Plum Village tradition.
Fresh morning,
Broken world.
Plum Village guided meditation usually follows a pattern of a longer phrase that gives instruction, followed by a shortened version that we can use as an anchor to rest our mind upon while we follow our breathing. For example:
Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.
In, out.
We repeat in on the in-breath and out on the out-breath to help our mind focus, to help our attention rest.
This week, as I have been sitting in the pre-dawn morning meditation as the world slowly wakes up, I have been dwelling with
Fresh morning,
Broken world.
On my in-breath, I am dwelling with the freshness of the morning - the fresh air, the birdsong, the light slowly shifting. On my out-breath, wrapping the world with my awareness, and my heart. Holding the freshness and the brokenness together. Both things can be true. Both things are true, here where I sit.
Honoring our pain for the world is one of the most useful teachings I have ever encountered, from Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects (WTR). I might say this teaching saved me. Before I first heard this concept, this practice, I felt lost. Numb. I was a young adult who had studied climate science and international development in the late 90s and early 00s, and was given the hard data of where we were collectively going (spoiler alert: it has gotten way worse than predicated at that time). I felt immense grief and rage in what I learned. After completing my degree, I felt fairly hopeless.
When I heard this teaching about honoring our pain, it felt like what my education had been missing. It named what I felt - pain for the world. It gave me a path through it - to honor it. I realized my numbness and hopelessness and despair were a very reasonable response to the information I had been given. It made sense to feel this way. In my academic studies, I had been given all the knowledge of the dire state of things, but hadn’t been given any tools for emotional processing, or the sense that I could do much to change the course or contribute to social change (which are later stages of the WTR spiral).
It is a useful teaching always, and for today. To honor our pain together. To feel the depth of the difficulty of this moment. To have the hard conversations and not know how we will get through them but to try anyway.
Last week I shared a poem that we worked with in class, Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness by Dani D’Emilia, Vanessa Andreotti, and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective. One of the ways to work with the poem is to listen and note which lines and phrases stand out. One of my favorite lines, that is ringing out as I sit here this morning, is
“Remember that our medicines are both indispensable and insufficient.”
This is a moment when our actions, my actions, feel so indispensable and insufficient. I have to call my reps, and I do, yet this feels so far from enough, since they seem to be doing nothing. I am doing what I can, and it feels so far from enough. Insufficient. Indispensable. Insufficient.
In her book Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira expands upon this:
We need to start from the assumption that no one has the answers to our current predicament, that we cannot not be together, and that each one of us is insufficient and indispensable to what needs to be done. We need a political practice of healing and well-being that call for maturity, sobreity, discernment, and accountability is for everyone; where no one is ever off the hook.2
I even feel this way about about peace studies and peace education right now. Teaching and studying peace feels more important than ever, and, such a privilege, and so far from enough. Education is a long-term solution - a response and intervention we need at all stages of peace and conflict - and we need urgent action from political leaders. Necessary, indispensible - but insufficient.
We need each other, in all our uncertainty imperfection and insufficiency. We need to honor our pain for the world, to listen to each other, to know our actions are indispensible and insufficient, and to know we need each other.
If you know me or have been following me here for a while, you already know that much of my writing dwells in the interbeing of joy and suffering, beauty and garbage, enchantment and disturbance. Things are heavy on the disturbance side at the moment, but I wanted to share you a few nuggets of beauty from this past week, including the sunset image above (one of the most gorgeous sunsets we had here in recent memory). Amidst deeply troubling times, I believe we need to witness the horror and destruction and do everything we can to stop it and prevent it, while also attuning our attention to life-affirming and creative acts, to remember that other worlds are possible even within this one.
This week in our class, when we were reflecting on peace pedagogies, our values, and attributes of peace educators, I returned to this quote from Meg Wheatley’s book, Who Do We Choose to Be?:
“Who do you choose to be for this time? Are you willing to use whatever power and influence you have to create islands of sanity that evoke and rely on our best human qualities to create, relate, and persevere? Will you consciously and bravely choose to reclaim leadership as a noble profession that creates possibility and humaneness in the midst of increasing fear and turmoil?”
I love her concept of islands of sanity, and I think it is helpful for this moment as well. How can we create islands of sanity within us and around us, with those we are in community with? How can we remember the best of humanity when the we are witnessing the worst inhumanity?
We can turn to each other to remember the best in humanity. Another antidote to despair is looking to people who are doing good, meaningful work in the world. This week, we had the joy of pleasure of having Etienne Salborn, a UPEACE alum and founder of SINA - Social Innovation Academy in Uganda, as a guest speaker for our peace education class. Etienne and I had the chance to meet at the DRC Social Innovation Summit in September. He shared the story of SINA and so many stories of the scholars who have moved through the Academy to solve social and environmental problems with innovative and entrepreneurial solutions, cultivating thriving lives along the way. I think for everyone, it blew our minds and hearts wide open to the possibilities for peace education and addressing social issues. I recommend checking out their work at the link above if you, too, are in need of some inspiration and reminders of the other worlds that are possible.
With that, dear reader, I leave you for now, sending you all my love and care with this note, with my deepest wishes for better worlds where all children and all people are safe, healthy, happy, and free. May our indispensible yet insufficient actions, together, take us there.
With love,
Stephanie
Joanna Macy
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity, 2021, p. 185