On cultivating spaciousness in the cracks
Being vs. doing and meeting this moment without needing to fix it
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen, Anthem
Dear beloved readers,
I am emerging on this Sunday morning from an intense period of doing, having been teaching, facilitating, or planning nearly nonstop since March, multiple public-facing engagements in addition to teaching (such as the Start Where You Are talk - see link for the recording if you missed it!), a lot of space holding (including beyond my professional life), a lot of output (a forthcoming article or two!), many offerings, all imperfect. The teens from the Young Leaders for Peace program travel home today, and I hope to dwell in the exhale of feeling like the inaugural cohort of the program went tremendously well.
This concludes the teaching-intensive portion of the first half of my year. I will get to take a break and a breath, and I will also get to be held in some spaces (check out EdJam 2025). I will be trying to cultivate some spaciousness for myself, in myself - less doing, more being, more allowing.
From this spaciousness, I will have more to share, more to offer. The next time beyond campus that I will be holding space for others is on July 30th for the Cultivating Spaciousness in the Cracks workshop that I am co-hosting with my friends and co-conspirators Chel Viteri and Zia Kandler of Mazorca Facilitation. I hope you will join us in this exploration! Chel and Zia are engaged in ways of working, living, and being that deeply inspire me, and it is an honor and joy to create and collaborate with them. This offering is from the heart and an expression of how we are trying to meet this moment, collaboratively and collectively.
On that note, Zia co-authored this beautiful piece on Waging Nonviolence about lessons from the international accompaniment movement and how these lessons can help us meet this moment. I believe this is one of the most useful things you can read right now, and I hope you will check it out. It will also give you a sense of the incredible wisdom and experience that Zia brings to this collaboration.
As I begin to unravel from this intense period of doing, and start to put the doing down, I am sitting with questions:
Who do we choose to be during this time?
and
What might happen if we let go of fixing?
Right now, I think the question many of us are asking ourselves is, “What can I do? How can I show up to meet this moment?” These are beautiful and important questions. These are the questions I was trying to respond to in my recent lecture for the Maryknoll Monarch Initiative’s nonviolence series, and questions we are also holding for our upcoming workshop.
But what if the question is less about doing, and more about being?
My teacher Margaret Wheatley asks this question in her book Who Do We Choose to Be? The book is about collapse and cultivating qualities of what she calls warriors for the human spirit, who can meet this moment just as it is. She describes these warriors “not as activists to change the world, but as compassionate presences and trustworthy companions to those suffering in this world. We embody compassion without ambition.”
My teacher Thich Nhat Hanh also talks a lot about being and doing. In The Art of Living: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now, he wrote:
"We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. We think that when we are not doing anything, we are wasting our time. But that is not true. Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be loving. And that is what the world needs most."
What if the question we need to be asking ourselves is not “What do we need to do to meet this moment?” but rather, “Who do we need to be in this moment, for this moment?”
Who do we need to be?
What is the quality of our being?
Who are we showing up as?
How are we showing up, for ourselves, as ourselves, for and with each other?
Maybe what the world needs most right now is our full, alive, compassionate, and loving presence - to cultivate spaciousness within ourselves. Only when we are as present as possible and meeting the world as it is (not as we want it to be) will we know what to do and how to act and what to do.
The other question, very much related to the first, is:
What if we let go of fixing?
This question is present in many areas of my life, and is a guiding question in the course I am taking with
on Confronting Education (learn more about the course here). What if we let go of trying to fix our relationships, our systems, or institutions? What if we sit with the mess we find ourselves in long enough to truly see it? What if, instead of trying to do something about it, we just let ourselves be with it? What would this look like, and where might it take us? In the words of the Leonoard Cohen lyric, what if we forget our perfect offerings?This is at the heart of our workshop on cultivating spaciousness in the cracks, our offering where we intend to create “a space to breathe, be together, hold and witness one another, and strategize ways of building worlds otherwise through mapping out our agency.” What does this mean, to cultivate spaciousness? What are the cracks? What does agency look like for each of us in our contexts?
Back in 2022, I wrote an article for the Ecoversities Alliance about my dissertation as a crack, and this is a tension that I continue to live in beyond the dissertation, trying to teach about and create space for re-imagining education from within a system (higher ed/academia) that we designed to reinforce, amplify, perpetuate and promolgate the status quo and dominant culture. In this article, I describe how
Many decolonial thinker-practitioners – Catherine Walsh, Maria Lugones, Bayo Akomolafe among them – have spoken and written extensively about cracks as spaces of possibility and sites from within dominant culture/institutions where we can plant other ways of being/knowing/doing/thinking. In imagining the dissertation as a crack, in the cracks of the modern-colonial apparatus of academia, I am attempting to bring these conversations about decoloniality and decolonial pedagogies into this space, to amplify voices of some people who are practicing with them, and to widen the cracks ever so slightly as to what is possible within this dissertation container, and to plant seeds for an otherwise. As one of my research conversation partners, Chelsea Viteri of Pachaysana Institute, noted, these conversations have to reach different spaces, so this is a way of bringing this conversation – and hopefully more than just a conversation, a disruption, an invocation – into the space that I’m in and have access to, where I am presently standing and located.
I returned to this article to write today, and I smile with delight seeing this quote from Chel, knowing that this is what we are trying to do right now, four years later, with this workshop - to allow these conversations and practices to reach different spaces. Chel was one of my dissertation conversation collaborators, who shared her deep wisdom and experience around decolonial education with me then, and it is joyful to see this conversation and collaboration continue in this new form of offering “a spacious space for spaceholders” together.
If these questions light you up, or if even they unsettle you, come join us in exploring these questions and your own in the workshop. The workshop itself is a crack, in which we will explore the cracks we are dwelling in and how we can plant otherwises within them, expand them, find spaciousness within them and within ourselves among them, together.
I am mesmerized by the way life cycles around, the way things come full circle, the workshop being one such example. Next week, I am joining the Peace Boat for its leg between Jamaica and Puntarenas. I will save the full story for another day, but Peace Boat is what inspired me to attend UPEACE in 2009, and it has been a dream since then to join the boat, so I am having a beautiful full-circle moments all around, cycles returning, conversations happening, dreams coming, seeds planted long ago sprouting and bearing fruit. These are also reminders that sometimes these cycles are long, and seeds planted 4 or 15 years ago might still be germinating in the dark.
I invite you to join us for cultivating spaciousness in the cracks. I hope to see you there! Please reach out with any questions you have. You are welcome just as you are.
What questions are you holding, dear reader, about the cracks, about the workshop, in your life in general?
Also, if you know others in your networks who would benefit from this space, will you do me a favor and please share the workshop with them? Sharing is caring :)
I’ll end today with the poem from the Pedagogies of Howling article I co-wrote with some students from the class of 2024 cohort, where we also talked about cracks and howling into them:
We make our offerings but we don’t ask them to be perfect.
We embrace the messiness of creating a more peaceful world from within the violent one we are currently hospicing (Machado de Oliveira, 2021).
We stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) of what that entails, and commit to not giving up on each other.We operate as vines within the cracks of the colonial architecture of the Westernized university (Grofoguel, 2012), planting seeds of possibility amidst the crumbling ruins-in-the-making of these institutions.
We conclude our class with healing howls, an act of rebellion and release.
Like bells of mindfulness, our howls echo across campus and into the valley, into the cracks to create more space within them for revolutionary love, healing, and collective care to grow.
I sense there will be more to say about cultivating spaciousness in the cracks, and more on my full-circle moment with Peace Boat, coming soon. Stay tuned!
Sending you spaciousness, with love and infinite care,
Stephanie
P.S. Here is a previous post where I explored the elusive balance of being and doing:
P.P.S. Here is the Leonard Cohen song referenced at the beginning. Enjoy it as today’s song of the day! Also, thank you to those who collaborated on the Enchantable community playlist. I delight each time I open the playlist and something new has been added - it feels like waking up to a present! You can continue to add songs using this link (and if you just want to listen, go here).