On response-abilities, healing howls, and hummingbirds
A love letter to the peace ed class of 2024
Dear readers,
Today I share with you the love letter I wrote to my peace ed class of 2024, part of what is becoming my pedagogy of love letters (which will definitely be a title of a forthcoming post :). We just wrapped up our introduction to peace ed class, and these are the words I left them with.
In the meantime, I hope you continue to show up for Gaza, call for an immediate ceasefire in every way that you can, and I invite you to support this fundraiser organized by a Palestinian colleague, Ayman Qwaider, whose story and words I have shared about in previous posts.
And finally, this letter is really meant to be read aloud, so today I am reading today’s post to you. I hope you enjoy it :)
(Please note that only the letter is read, not the whole post, such as this part!)
Dear Peace Ed Class of 2024,
I know I said I would give you everything I’ve got in three weeks. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
Yes, I gave you, without a doubt, every single thing I could give you in 3 weeks time.
But.
That is not all I have to give you.
It’s not all I want to give you.
So.
I hope we can see this as an opening, a beginning.
This marks a new phase of our learning cycle where we will be taking what we have learned and sitting with it and letting it stir within us and it will take us each in different directions and I am here for it.
I am here for you.
You are why I am here, on this campus, at this institution. This program. YOU. Each of you. ALL of you.
Yesterday, I had the experience of a student in another program stopping me to introduce themselves. They shared how much they had enjoyed my foundations lecture. They said they wished they could take a class with me, but it didn’t work out in their schedule. Then they said something like, “I walk into the hut and I see the words you have written on the board, and it touches me, and I am so glad that some students here are getting to experience that space.”
The small things we do have ripples far beyond what we can see. What we do here together has ripples.
Leaving words on a board can leave ripples.
An offhand comment can leave a mark (a glimmer or a trigger).
We can’t plan magic, but we can make space for it.
We don’t know how we will affect people. You will complete your course evaluations and today we’ll reflect on our learning, but I hope that ten or twenty years from now you think of something you learned in this course, or it informs what you do. I hope it is still moving in you and through you in unexpected ways.
When we teach, we have to let go of the results.
We make our offerings, freely, and we have to let them go.
Honoring that we gave everything we’ve got, and it was enough.
Casting seeds, and seeing what grows from them, what gets composted, or sent on the funny loud truck that goes to the dump.
That what was meant to stick will stick, what is meant to stir will stir, and what didn’t was meant to return to the earth like raindrops.
I gave you everything I’ve got, now I have to let you go, but not quite yet.
I get to have you here for the rest of the year and I just want you to know that I am here for you.
I am here to plot and scheme with you.
I am here to dream with you.
And not just on campus, but beyond.
And I hope we can make space for lots of magic, not just this year, but in years to come,
For once we are a part of each others lives, we are bound together. We are woven.
Being in community, sometimes the threads fray, or get tangled. Words hurt. Conflict happens, But our work is to untangle and reweave over and over and over again.
To be brave, and keep working side by side.
Being in community is the most important and the hardest and most beautiful work that we do. I am here to support that untangling and reweaving as you need it, individually and collectively. You don’t have to do it alone. We can’t do it alone.
I find every cycle and semester has different themes, and for me, the themes of this semester (not just this class, but this period of time, these months) have been responsibility, (em)power(ment), and agency (they are almost always about power).
Where is my responsibility and where is the institution’s? What is my responsibility and what is the students’?
Where do we have power, collectively and separately, that we are not taking or not stepping into, that we can reclaim?
Where do we have agency that we might not realize?
Where is it my responsibility to say, “you should probably start working on this sooner,” and where is it yours to look ahead and be able to see that on your own?
As Mars makes its cazimi with the sun today, I want to harness this energy to say:
I claim my power.
I take responsibility for what is mine - not more, not less (because it actually can do harm in either direction).
We each have different responsibilities depending on our lives and relationships. Our passions and our gifts. Our callings and our positions, locations.
The responsibilities of this moment are great.
The world is crashing around us. On fire. Engulfed in violence and chaos.
You are here, at this University for Peace, with its beautiful, lofty mission. In this beautiful mostly tranquil setting. You are among a very small group of people in the world who have the time and resources and energy and attention to study peace - and not just that, but peace education - at this moment.
With this privilege comes great responsibility. We have the responsibility to do the best we can with what we learn here from and with each other. And I don’t mean that in the sense of go save the world. (Please don’t try to do that).
I mean it in the sense of:
What are your responsibilities?
Where do you have power and agency that you can claim, step into?
Who and what are you responsible to? Who are you responsible for?
And how can you really step into those responsibilities?
So that is my invitation to you today, my last invitation for this course. We began with invitations, and I reviewed them yesterday and I feel like we did an amazing job with those overall. We fully stepped into them.|
My invitation today is to be responsible.
Response-able.
Able to respond to the great needs of the world at this moment, the ones that are in front of you and the ones that are far away. You don’t need to tend to all of it, but you need to respond to what you are able to, to what touches you.
Donna Haraway describes response-ability as being “about both absence and presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying—and remembering of who lives and who dies” (p. 28).1
Response-abilities emerge within relations.
Who and what are you responsible to?
What and what are you respons-able to? Able to respond, to? To whom and to what is it your duty, your obligation, to respond?
And I see that you already are.
In the holding of grief and babies.
In the feeding of campus.
In the offering of your gifts.
In the tending of your relations.
In showing up as who you are again and again and again, inviting others to do the same just by being you.
I find that in every course, there is a song that plays on repeat in my mind at some point, and this becomes my offering at the end of the course. For this course, it was the song Hummingbird by Wilco, one of my favorite songs on one of my favorite albums by one of my favorite bands of all time. One day while I was sitting in the hut preparing for class, which for me always includes preparing the space with the energy of music, Hummingbird came on, and it made me very happy. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, and since it came on that day it has been in my head.
I was at Tulsi yesterday looking in the gift shop. For this class, we have been using a heart-shaped stone I bought at Tulsi, because the stone I had bought previously, I gave to my peace education students in Colombia, with the instructions that they take turns with it, pass it along to each other, take turns being responsible for it, as a tangible remembrance of our collective energy and our time together, all that was shared as we passed the stone, the hard and the beautiful and the good. From our hearts.
I started looking at the stones, and if they had had enough, I would have bought one for each of you, but they only had three.
One was a hummingbird.
So today, in what now officially becomes a peace education tradition, I gift you with your class stone. I invite you to choose among you2 who will be the first keeper- the one responsible for the stone- and I invite you to pass it along and take turns being the caretaker of it. The one responsible for it. Maybe even someday it can make its way to Canada, or Switzerland, or South Africa, or China, or even take a visit to SINA in Uganda when we all take a field trip there together 🙂
May the stone be a reminder of your response ability, and your responsibilities, to yourselves, to each other, to your calling, to your relations.
I return to the brave space poem we read on the first day. This space wasn’t always safe, but when it wasn’t, it was named, and that is brave. That is what a brave space is - to name the hurt when it happens, and to keep working on it together. And maybe there is still hurt that needs to be repaired or things that need to be said, but we keep working on it, even after today.
Today is the last day that this particular configuration of humans are present together, for now at least. In all likelihood, even if we were all to gather together in the future, it will be different. We will be different.
So let’s honor what this particular container has been.
Let us celebrate all we have given it and received from it.
Let us celebrate each other and all of our learning and unlearning.
And let us dance and sing into the next stage of unfolding and emerging.
And with that, I offer you a karaoke rendition of Hummingbird :)
With love,
Professor Stephanie
Link to gratitude playlist in background of selfie here :)
After this, we had space for offerings and sharings, and closed with a dance party to Whitney Houston which was absolutely perfect, and then three howls, healing howls.
I learned from my beloved friend Minna a grounding and centering of three breaths, which I often do at the beginning or end of classes.
The first breath is for yourself.
The second breath is for the group.
The third breath is for the wider whole of which we are a part.
To close our class, we did three healing howls.
The first howl for ourselves.
The second howl for our class community.
And the third howl, for the whole, the wider web of relations.
May the healing howls reverberate and send healing energy wherever it is needed, for right now, feels like everywhere.
As the semester winds down, I have a stockpile of writing and a long list of things I have been wanting to write about but haven’t had time to while in the throes of teaching intensives. So you can probably expect more for me in the coming weeks, including an end-of-year process series for paid subscribers. I hope you enjoy :)
With love,
Stephanie
PS My Mars cazimi intentions include:
finding more spaciousness in my morning time by not looking at phone messages and social media until after I write down my dreams and meditate, and
Beautify Enchantable (try to create some custom images, logos, and settings for it, which, if this is something you are good at or know something about, I welcome your input!
Just needed to say those out loud!
If you need to say some intentions out loud, for Mars cazimi or otherwise, reply or share in the comments below!
Donna Haraway, 2016, Staying with the Trouble
a much more synchronistic process ended up happening which was very beautiful :)