It’s been three months since my last update here. A lot has been going on, both in the world and in my little microcosm. I’ve watched violence unfolding in communities near and far as I study how to collaborate with other (messy, complex) humans in the healing of this world, at the Changemaker Lab at Evergreen.
Sometimes it feels trivial to be practicing consensus decision-making and design thinking in a hippie school as the world burns. But I’m inspired by the concept of emergence, in the Adrienne Marie Brown frame: Big change is a fractal of many smaller changes. Learning to collaborate peacefully in school will fractal out to the world at large.
I’ve written several drafts of this newsletter, essays on Israel-Palestine, childhood trauma, non-traditional education…None have felt quite right, and as time elapses the list of things I want to tell you has grown long, too long for a newsletter.
I’m reminded of a prompt I’ve heard in talking circles: “I could tell you about…”
I could tell you about the civil war that occurred in my house in the 1990s, a verbal and psychological war between me and my father. And what it taught me about hatred and the will to violence. And how I called it, in those years, the intifada.
I could tell you about attending a family of choice Thanksgiving last week, and the big bear of a man who held me as I wept. And the queer person who held my feet, and whose sympathetic tears I received as warm rain on the parched ground of my grief.
I could tell you about one of Evergreen’s core tenets: Learning across significant difference. And how I have come to love the young military veterans in my class, despite our sometimes wildly different worldviews. And how one of them told me of receiving frequent late-night calls from his platoon mates, desperate calls for help that would send him racing across base. And how he would sit with his comrades as they cried and confessed that they didn’t want to live anymore. And how I knew, that for all his hard-edged bluster, he and I were talking about love.
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Squirrel News
“It's like you have your paw on my pulse 💗”
-- ScriptorMalum
Squirrel continues to broadcast from the temperate rainforest of the Evergreen campus. As the world convulses in violence, Squirrel has spoken to hope in the face of ugliness, to grief and love. I think back to my early videos on anger, and nonjudgment. Perhaps it is time to revisit.
Nearly 200 people have supported me on GoFundMe, and we raised nearly $11,000 for Squirrel and my Evergreen journey. An old friend also recently sent me the largest single gift of my life, which has greatly eased my financial precarity and made it possible for me to buy an eBike and a new camera/phone.
To continue to sustain this work and my role as a student I’m shifting my focus back to Patreon. As a thank you to my patrons, episodes of Squirrel Dialogues now premiere on Patreon. That means my patrons will see Squirrel videos before viewers on TikTok, Instagram, etc.
Also, Patreon patrons will have exclusive access to special Squirrel Dialogues episodes, particularly those that cover commonly banned topics like self-harm and addiction.
I remain committed to sharing Squirrel’s message free of charge. If cost is a barrier, you can now access my Patreon for free. And for those of you who have some financial abundance, your support allows me to devote the hours necessary to do this work. So please join me over on Patreon today.
Regardless of how you show up--with kind comments, shares, or financial support--please know your energy is gratefully received by me and Squirrel.
Black, White, and Gray
This fall I was talking to a friend about the wonders of a sawmill, and he said, “There’s something so human about making a circular thing into a square thing.” From a state of nature into straightline rationality. Complexity to order. Spectrums to binaries. So comforting, and yet…
Richard Rohr talks about the world as not black and white, but gray. And in his cosmology, true spirituality is an encounter with the gray. Belief systems that hew to binaries let us down. And believers who dwell in simple binary worlds are engaging in a kind of spiritual kindergarten.
After the January 6 riots, I saw a profile of one of the rioters, a military veteran, who friends described as having a “Manichaean world view.” I had to look this up.
Manichaeism was a Middle Eastern religion contemporaneous with early Christianity. It was based on a rigid, black-and-white, good-and-evil dualism. I’ve talked about this before:
Just over a week after the October 7 Hamas attack, as Israel-Palestine fell into violence, journalist Ezra Klein posted a short podcast about the unfolding crisis. In his piece, he drew comparisons to the post 9/11 political moment, quoting the words of author Spencer Ackerman:
“…the essence of the politics of 9/11 was, quote, ‘to make scandalous the presentation of context.’”
The roiling storm front of world politics, of harms stretching back generations, of millions of human actors, distilled into: The Coalition of the Willing versus the Axis of Evil.
Does it remind you of a certain black-and-white cosmology?
And as the violence unfolds in Israel-Palestine, I hear many opinions, many voices, but really one simplistic narrative: Good guys versus bad guys.
And confusingly, the narrative is divided into two mirror images, depending on whom you ask. Their good guys are our bad guys, and vice versa. The only choice, the only question offered is: Which side are you on?
To which I say: Unask the question. Ask a better one.
In the Zen tradition there’s a word for this: Mu (I’m paraphrasing from a glorious On Being interview with peacemaker poet Pádraig Ó Tuama).
Which side are you on?
Mu.
The very question has in it the self-satisfying logic of warmaking. Because we need an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ to have a war. To accept this question is to accept warmaking.
Ask a better question.
Without sides, what is left?
Humanity, suffering at scale. Parents mourning children, children mourning parents. Who cares what language they speak? They cry the same.
Grief contorted into rage, and expressed through the steel mouth of the rifle and the screaming missile that seeks warmth.
Violence in all its wrongness, clothed in flags and speeches, entangled in the dizzying labyrinth of our big systems.
A tired old myth—that we can kill our way to peace.
And another old story, convenient for violence, that we are somehow separate from one another.
Zoom out enough and all you see is a single species of primate killing itself.
Ask a better question.
How about: What is possible here?
Healing is possible here. Wherever there are humans and harm, there is the possibility of healing.
From small wounds, like a breach between loved ones. Or massive wounds, like decades-long cycles of community violence.
This is the world of transformative justice. We are capable of this. We’ve done it at scale, in conflicts that span decades and centuries. South African Apartheid was brought down this way. The civil war in Northern Ireland.
But such a process cannot begin until the participants embrace complexity. Until they concede there may be more than one story at play. Until they loosen their grip on good guy--bad guy stories, on the insatiable logic of revenge.
Because transformative justice is not about judging human beings or enacting retribution. It is about transforming harm into healing. Both at the human scale and the society scale. In pursuit of this, transformative justice seeks to uplift not just the person who was harmed, but also the person who caused harm. It seeks to transform patterns of harm-doing (those big systems). So that there can be healing, peace, human thriving.
This requires a kind of spiritual marathon of its participants. A singular, unshakeable focus on healing. One that can survive harrowing stories of harm done and harm received. One that can outrun our human desire to simplify, to cut a circular world into a neat square. One that quiets the Old Testament God in each of us, the judge who sorts the sheep from the goats. The part of us that vainly tries to balance the violence of the world with more violence, be it bombs or dehumanizing language or a closed heart.
Or, as Rumi said:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
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Links
My friend Shilpa Jain wrote this beautiful piece on our crisis of violence in her new Substack, which you should subscribe to.
A few people have asked me to publish a spoken word piece on grief work, which I wrote after a grief ritual this spring. So here it is: Thank you for grieving.