The Way It Is.
We have been taught culturally that there is a right side and a wrong side. The idea that evil is OUT THERE. That there are indisputable heroes and that it is their duty to save people. That we are "good people" and therefore our actions are without interrogation. That things exist in opposites: genders, good vs. bad, dark vs. light. We have been taught that land can be owned, that items can be owned, that money is real.
All of these things, and so many more sit underneath our justifications for our actions. We use them to judge others and to make ourselves feel more comfortable. It is easier to believe that we are right and good and those people over there are bad and wrong, than to unpack our own beliefs.
Our world is a reflection of many normalised patriarchal colonial ideas. This is not a criticism of men, or white people. White people are not colonial culture, we too are victims of it. Men are not the patriarchy, they too are victims of it. The idea of private ownership spread over the world with colonisation. Somehow it created the idea that something was only worthy or valuable if it was owned. And one should only be responsible or take care of something that one owned. Collective responsibility for spaces, for seeds, for each other slipped away. The elderly became a burden, rather than wise and our collective responsibility for care. We started to feel burdened by all the things we owned. We laughed at first nations people for not understanding that land could be owned. We took away the places in which they made sense of themselves. We used Christianity as a narrative for taking over new landscapes. We decided it was our mission to "save" first nations people from their savagery. We dismissed their knowledges as primitive. We punished them for their traditional practices. We made them our servants. We claimed we were saving them. We made them feel shame for who and how they were. These sad things happened. They happened to all of us. We are all traumatised by these stories. White people too, but not like people of colour and first nations people. Their inter-generation trauma sits squarely in their bones, unfurling in their DNA. And yet, after all this time, so many first nations people still reach out with kindness, offering knowledge to us. Supporting their elders, finding a way to survive in a world that tells them they are not good enough. In a world that says they should've tried harder to be like the coloniser. They stand strong in their cultures, or perhaps barely grip onto its tail strings as it unravels away from them, as languages that teach other ways of being and thinking are lost, as ways of being a member of an ecosystem are harder and harder to practice.
These stories, they are not in the past. The sit squarely in our world view today. They affect our ability to care for one another. They affect our ability to see our own depths of wrong doing. They place the evil outside of ourselves. As we move towards greater and greater understandings of permaculture, of systems of resilience, there is much to understand about how these stories are not resilent stories. Like the very hungry caterpillar, they need more and more to feed upon until its world must either implode or transform. Maybe both.
Whenever we tell stories of "the way it is" - that people need hierarchy for things to happen, or that it's human nature to be greedy, that seeking power and dominance is natural, while trying to set up new ways of being in the world, we reinforce these same old ways of being in the world.
How easy it is to find a new "thing" a thing we consider to be THE answer, and apply this same way of thinking. Our sense of rightness and superiority in our permaculture practice. Our investment into the idea of "productivity being king" if we believe in something strongly, of exhausting ourselves in the name of our causes. Our condemning of people who vaccinate, or don't vaccinate, or people who eat meat, or don't. Our obsession with minimalism or our proclamation that localised food systems are the answer, without understanding that many people cannot afford localised food or that most people who live in food deserts (or food apartheid) are low from socio economic contexts and people of colour. Our obsession with new versions of democracy, or new ways of being more democratic, without unpacking the fact that democracy continues to marginalise the marginal, a perpetual population vote, where marginal voices continue to be silenced.
We must strip back old ways of telling stories. We must unpack our own cultural stories and recogise them for what they are. Everything you have ever felt inadequate about is tied to these stories, every way you have every judged someone is tied to these stories. And I do not have the answer, the magic bullet, of how we can tell new stories. I know we can learn from first nations people, marginalised people in our society too, people who have had to eke out an existence with little or nothing, the epitome of resilience. And we will honour this knowledge for what it is, and we will support this knowledge and treat these knowledge holders with the dignity they deserve. We will hold these survivors of trauma within our hearts and honour their work.
But I do not have the answers. I have come to realise that perhaps the answer is far away, perhaps it is generations into the future, because after all, quick fixes are a story of colonisation. Perhaps the work we do, unpacking our own stories and feeling their pain, realising that in casting others as our enemy, those people out there, those bad people without morals we fail to see each other's humanness.
These musings are not THE truth. They are not about how people are bad or to blame. They are about the story of my feelings of loss as I rip old stories from my bones. About stories I told about my own goodness and my own intentions. They are about my desire to be a hero, to save others. They are about all the things I have ever hated about myself, my body, my social anxiety, my struggle with others, my shame around having taken drugs, or struggling with alcohol consumption. They are about me digging into my own sense of white supremacy, about unpacking my own ideas around power and goodness.
And as I feel my ideas unravel, my sense of who I am, my gripping onto ideas of truth, justice, fairness loosening... I watch them fly away without knowing where it will all leave me. It's an uncomfortable feeling. I know that's what we're all afraid of, why we cling to these stories, who will we be if we aren't the hero, the saviour, the good person? And then, under all of this, over all of this, we must hold our precious hearts. We must hold ourselves in kindness, forgive ourselves and forgive each other. Compassion is not weakness. Oh my loves, healing of trauma does not happen overnight. The beginning is when we name the stories, when we see the trauma. These stories they are our trauma. They have stolen our joy and our connectedness. They have stolen so much more from so many. This is not an essay about communism or socialism or political correctness gone mad. This is an essay about hope beyond stories. This is an essay about beginning.
Interested in learning/thinking more about these ideas?
Check out these:
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
The More Beautiful World that our Hearts Know is Possible, Charles Eisenstein
The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Emergence Magazine
Gather, a film directed by Sanjay Rawal
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