Orphans of Our Own Making

Separatist nightmares, or visions of a reconnecting world?

I’m checking in from a classroom at Evergreen. The campus is silent – spring break. Every few minutes the energy saver lights turn out and I perform a hand dance until the motion sensor turns the lights back on.

I’m not supposed to be here. During summer break I was escorted from a classroom just like this one by the campus police: Learning without leave (LWOL).

Updates: Places, people, revelations

There’s too much to tell, too much has happened.

I could tell you about the places I’ve been: A restorative justice circle in a juvenile courthouse in Tacoma, an art show in a prison on the coast of Washington, a retreat for grief ritual facilitators on Samish Island, a community dialogue about masculinity held in a Portland church, a restorative conversation with my own mother.

I could tell you about how I am grieving Squirrel Dialogues, that I have not made a video for the past year. And how I’ve been holding a brainstorm: Squirrel in prison.

I could tell you about the chaos and learning of five-and-a-half quarters of the Evergreen Changemakers Lab, and my decision to leave the program.

I could tell you about my upcoming internship with the Thurston County Council, where I will be helping to launch a series of community townhalls on mental health.

[throws hands high in the air to activate motion sensor]

I could tell you about the people I’ve met: The young men graduating from a restorative justice diversion program, the Evergreen alumnus who survived a lost decade with meth to become Thurston County Commissioner, the powerhouse First Nations woman running a local peer support hub.

I could tell you about P., who made a terrible mistake in their 20s and has spent the past 26 years in Washington State prisons. And who said to me the most unlikely phrase, “Prison has been a blessing in my life.” And then they relayed a question to me for the outside, for us: “What can I do to repair the harm?”

I could tell you about the older woman at the grief ritual who came to me with tears in her eyes and said, “Would you hold me and caress my hair?” And how easy it was to say yes. And how I cradled her at the altar and held her and caressed her hair for as long as it took. And how, as the time passed, and my body ached and complained, and I poured my attention on her, that I settled into the rightness of that moment. That there was no better place for me to be, no better thing to do, no better way to be, than to hold this woman in her grief.

I could tell you about a troubling and revelatory thing I’m learning about trauma, which is that we are thinking about it all wrong. We do not have a trauma epidemic, we do not have a PTSD epidemic, we do not have an addiction epidemic, we do not have an incarceration epidemic, we do not have a loneliness epidemic. There’s something underneath all of it.

I could tell you about how the western focus on the individual trauma survivor, the individual addict is woefully blindered, not nearly big enough. How our interventions will fail until we get to the root.

As Nature Tending to Herself

The first big revelation in my life was my discovery, in my 30s, that I am trauma survivor. The second big revelation was my discovery, recently, that my trauma is really an expression of a vast rupture in the ecosystem.

In prisons, incarcerated people talk about the moment of their imprisonment by saying, “when I fell.” Most of us fell a long time ago, generations back. We fell from our state of grace, which is that we are deeply connected to everything, that we are contiguous with life on earth, that we ARE life, we ARE nature.

Before Squirrel stopped talking this is what he said, over and over:

I heard a Skokomish elder fairly growl, as she asserted her belonging to the land: “From the bowels of the earth I came.”

If you reach back in your lineage far enough, your people said that, too.

I’ve read an indigenous critique of Western attachment theory that goes like this: When we think about attachment, the primary caregivers are just one small facet. What about our attachment to community? What about our attachment to culture? To land? To our plant and animal relatives? To ancestors? To spirit?

Our frame is not nearly big enough.

I could tell you about my new theory of trauma, which is this: Trauma is not caused by the bad thing that happened to us. Trauma is caused by our state of disconnection before, during, and after the bad thing that happened to us.

I recently read that for nearly all of our history, the natural state of humanity has been collective suffering.

It has been hard to be human for these hundreds of thousands of years. But we are immensely resilient creatures when we are in deep connection. We survive, thrive, and are often happy in collective suffering. Mental health complaints decrease in war zones. People come together in solidarity during natural disasters. Our ancestors, who lived in unimaginable danger and discomfort, did not suffer from PTSD like we do, did not suffer from addiction like we do, did not even know what loneliness was.

A few weeks ago, at the Evergreen Tacoma campus, I heard a young woman of Gullah ancestry give a presentation on her study abroad. The Gullah are an ethnic group in the American Southeast who are descended from Africans taken from West Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. This woman went to Sierra Leone to reconnect with her lineage.

There was a moment in her presentation where she faltered, her voice cracked. And she said, “I can’t really talk about this yet.” But then she described how, during her monthlong visit, she was never, ever, alone. She was hosted by a village. A quartet of young people shadowed her everywhere. They picked her up from the airport. They accompanied her day and night. When she napped, they came inside and napped with her. They took her back to the airport.

In her ancestral home she did not know what loneliness was.

Our state of grace is connection. And collective suffering.

The present crisis is not the many-headed hydra we think it is. It is that we are in rupture. We are in rupture with ourselves, with each other, with the rest of nature, with this beautiful planet. We are orphans of our own making, spinning tales that this is the way things are, when in truth, we are fever dreaming in the arms of our own mother.

We are held by mother earth even as we poison her waters and ravage her forests. We die of loneliness in the densest assemblages of human beings that have ever existed, in cities and states beyond the imaginings of our forebears. And we reject our own animal bodies, we silence our feelings and knowings. With the same eyes that regard a wobble-legged fawn with tender adoration, we look in the mirror and hate what we see.

We are the part of nature that can regard itself. It is a strange and glorious thing to be able to witness life’s unfolding with this thing called consciousness. To express and channel life’s energy, which is to say, love.

But it is a blessing and a curse. The same charismatic and ingenious ego that evolved to keep us alive can expand like a supernova and consume our entire world. It can a weave a tale of egoic supremacy so thoroughly convincing that we can walk on the land on which we were born and think we are this other thing. This thing outside nature.

We are the part of nature that can believe we are not nature. We are the part of nature that has choice. We are the part of nature that can dream. We are the part of nature that can make dreams real.

We should be careful, then, with what dreams we indulge in. Are they separatist nightmares? Or visions of a reconnecting world?

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So if you have trauma in your body, know that you do not carry it all alone.

We, the children of the earth, are feeling the pain of the earth.

Our healing is simple. We must turn towards each other, and our earth. And we must look in the mirror and see nature staring back at us.

And when we act toward the preservation of life on earth, we do so not as humanitarians or environmentalists, but as nature tending to herself.

Commonplaces

Here are three books that have informed my frameworks around collective trauma:

Tribe, Sebastian Junger. See his related TED Talk:

Coming Back to Life, Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown

What It Takes to Heal, Prentiss Hemphill. Checkout their podcast Finding Our Way.

And, given the present crisis, a Substack: The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook.