Widening Circles
Notes on connection from the DRC Social Innovation Summit
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
-Rainer Maria Rikle, Book of Hours, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrow
Dear reader,
I don’t know where to begin today, so I will begin with where I am.
I am in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
I was invited here for the DRC Social Innovation Summit, which has been an amazing event full of hope and inspiration, new connections and networking, listening and sharing.
I was invited by a long-time friend-colleague-collaborator, Symphorien Pyana, who I met while working for Teachers Without Borders, who is one of the main organizers of the event. He invited me to speak on a panel about pedagogies for social innovation.
I am blown away by the widening circles I am tracing in my life right now.
One of the gifts of getting older is to be able to see these circles, these things and people and places and passions that we come back around to, that come back around to us. Seeds cast years ago that have been growing all that time.
This past year, I have been thinking a lot about my return to UPEACE as a widening circle, having been a student in 2009-2010, and returning as a professor last year, returning with the life I had gathered in the intervening 12 years - the love, loss, grief, learning, unlearning, motherhood, all of it. Returning, both the place and I changed and the same in different ways. The Rilke poem quotes above, which is also inspired a Rising Appalachia song, has been circling my mind all year.
In May, I received an invitation from Symphorien to attend this summit that he was organizing. My immediate response was, “Yes!”, and what an honor, but then internally, “How can I do this?” I would need to bring Daphne. There is no DRC embassy in Costa Rica where I can get a visa processed. All summer, the word KINSHASA? sat on my white board, not knowing how or if I could make it work.
“Why is there a question mark?!” my colleague asked me. “Why are you even thinking of not going?”
“It feels complicated,” I said. And it was complicated, but the visa came through, we made it, we are here, and I am so glad we are.
There is so much to say about this trip, and I don’t really want to go into the travel blog dimensions of it right now (like how arrival to the airport was unlike anything I have ever experienced, for starters). But what I am thinking a lot about are these widening circles of relationships, connections, collaborations, and places, of coming back around to each other to find each other again.
There is another layer of widening circles that emerged here. While I was a student at UPEACE, I started interning for TWB while writing my thesis. We developed a teacher professional development program in peace education, and when we released it, they received such great interest they needed to hire me to manage it. Two of those people who immediately responded were Symphorien and Ted.
Symphorien was one of the first people to reach out. “We need this here in the DRC,” he said. “How can we make this happen?” Symphorien is the kind of person who makes things happen- so many things, like this summit, like his organization AgroMwinda, like those workshops, all while he is pursuing his PhD and working with the university here. And we did, he did, run a series of teacher workshps on peace education in the Bukavu region.
Another one of the first people to reach out was a high school teacher named Ted, based in San Diego. I happened to have just moved to Costa Rica, and was so excited to see his email signature day Chula Vista. “Let’s meet,” I said, and since he was teaching, instead I met his wonderful wife, and again, years of friendship and collaboration were born from that moment, that one email response.
Ted then decided to take a sabbatical to go to UPEACE. As I recall, he had been thinking about it before we met, I shared about my experience and encouraged him to go, and their whole family went for the year. While there, he met a classmate named Etienne. At the end of the year, Ted traveled to Uganda for a few weeks to help Etienne start a social innovation alternative education project called SINA Academy.
SINA is a part of the Ecoversities Alliance, and I ran into their work again through that movement-network. When Symphorien asked if I had recommendations of other presenters, I suggested them. I didn’t know them personally, but knew of them through Ted and Ecoversities. They were invited as presenters and Etienne and I got to meet at the conference, and it is incredible to see what this work has evolved into in the intervening years, and Ted’s influence of project-based learning across the region in the SINA hubs.
We never know what the seeds we cast will grow, or how they will grow, or how long they will take. And sometimes they grown in unexpected ways, in directions we could not have fathomed when we planted. At this summit I was able to see the growth of seeds cast by so many friends and colleagues, seeds we cast together, and the way what we have planted has grown alongside each other, and become entangled again. I was mapping out these connections- UPEACE, SINA, Ecoversities, TWB- and amazed at how they have brought us to each other, here in this moment in Kinshasa.
In my classes I use this Rilke poem to talk about Paulo Freire’s concept of praxis, the cycle of theory, action, and reflection that he proposes in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We talk about widening circles of praxis, and how this ongoing loop (and the stages are not separate from each other - theory acts upon the world, and you might be reflecting and theorizing while acting) is widening, a never ending process of learning and growing and failing or succeeding and trying again, or growing again through the next loop, learning, unlearning, relearning, and acting.
I’m also thinking about these widening circles of relationships, how we return to each other and through each other, meet new people and places, weaving ourselves together in an increasingly vast web of relationships. And perhaps that’s why events like this are so important. We make new connections. We have conversations over lunch at a park while on safari about possible collaborations. We meet face-to-face after knowing each other for 13 years. What a gift!
There’s an astrological dimension to all of this that I’m tracing as well. The earlier time period I’m referencing was when Jupiter was in Aries and Taurus, and Jupiter had returned to Taurus earlier this year- my sun sign, which falls in my 9th house of teaching, learning, travel, and spirituality. I see the expansiveness Jupiter is bringing to this area of my life, and I am learning from astrology how these cycles show themselves in our lives if we pay attention and work with them. Astrology is one of my other great teachers of these widening circles and cycles.
Tomorrow we travel home. I’m dreading the airport but hopefully it goes smoothly (appreciating any energy you can send for smooth travels :). Tonight we will hopefully get to meet Symphorien’s family. More on all of this, I’m sure, and there will be widening circles of action and reflection and theory as I return from this trip. This is the kind of trip that changes you, that will be etched on me forever, that has undoubtedly expanded my understanding of the world and peace and conflict and life on this planet. One immediate outcome I see happening is organizing a webinar with UPEACE to showcase some of the work of people I met here like Symphorien, Etienne, and others. Stay tuned for that!
For now, dwelling in the mystery and magic of these circles and cycles, the delight of new connections and collaborations, and so much gratitude for getting to be here.
Signing off from Kinshasa,
Stephanie
