There I Met Us
lashing out and reaching out, harming and helping
Whidbey Institute, 2025
Checking in
Once again I am rogue learning at Evergreen during a break. I’ve converted a student lounge into an office. The campus is deserted.
I’m arriving tired, a bit sore, a bit anxious, but reasonably intact.
Quite a bit has happened since our last episode: I embarked on a series of grief ritual experiences, and an internship with the local county government. I’ve hosted two singer-activists at Evergreen, and assisted in a collaborative townhall event.
Much to my astonishment I seem to be becoming a community person. The sort of person who hosts events, facilitates song and grief circles, and works for the county.
All of my studies continue to point to our desperate need for community, precisely as much of the world seems to be sprinting in the opposite direction. I fear we are entering a long winter for community care and human services. And the stewardship of our living earth. And on and on.
I’m often swamped by anxiety. This spring I undertook transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), one of the last line treatments for treatment-resistant PTSD. And my PTSD resisted this treatment, too.
In my anxiety I often lose sight of the future, of my vision for a healing world. But it is people who bring me back. The extraordinary people I meet in different corners of our society’s torn safety net. The teenager in the youth prison who tells me he wants everyone to be heard. The school resource cop holding the hand of the young man with developmental disabilities. The big bear of a man in the grief ritual who turns to me and mimes a hug gesture, inviting me to hold him at the altar as he wails.
It is people who harmed me, and my fellows, and our world. And it is people who can be so extraordinary, so beautiful, so restorative. One of those “both-and” things.
Future Dreams
I continue to see a need for community “technologies of belonging” like singing and grieving. And group visioning and problem-solving work. Given the present tumult, I’m uncertain of the path. I was pursuing government and community-based organizations, but both are in retreat.
I see a need for grief work in prisons, for bereaved mothers, in victim-offender reconciliation work, in addiction treatment. I see a need for grief work in every neighborhood, every assemblage of people where grief is present.
I’m carrying a new vision of Johnny Appleseeding grief work in Europe. As far as I know, community grieving is limited in Europe, outside of the few places where the tradition lingers. It’s possible that Europe could be an incubator for the work – a place more likely to support, research, and grow the movement. A spring board for growing the work in the Western Hemisphere.
To that end I am planning to attend Tamera, an eco-village and community laboratory, in Portugal this fall. This will likely be the final piece of my studies at Evergreen.
In the near term I am attending three transformational gatherings in the Pacific Northwest: The Liberation Lab, Cascadia Songrise, and Manifest.
There I Met Us
This is a reflective piece that I wrote at the conclusion of the spring quarter of my internship with the office of Thurston County Commissioner Rachel Grant.
I used to be a cynical person. I made a brand of it: E.D.W. Lynch the satirist. I was published in the Best American series for a satirical project in which I wrote Yelp reviews in the style of (famously apocalyptic author) Cormac McCarthy. An excerpt:
Urban Outfitters
Union Square - San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Three stars.
And they come there in great numbers shuffling into that mausoleum that was built for them like some monument to the slow death of their world and among those tokens and talismans of that faded empire they forage like scavengers their faces frozen in a rictus of worldweary their clothes preworn in some tropical factory and they shop and they hunt with dullbrown eyes through that cavalcade of false trinkets and those shrinkwrapped mockeries laying there in silent indictment and they reach out to touch those trite things and their faces are slack but in their gullets a scream lies stillborn for they are the kings and the queens reigning over the death of their people and the world is not theirs and never was and the suffering and the horrors are not their doing but the work of their bankrupt forbears and before them stretches an abyss beyond man’s imagining and within their lifetime the promise of a coming reckoning measured in blood and in pestilence and they shuffle through that store near paralytic and finally they take a metal thing with a feather on it and they buy that thing.
I read it now and I still smile at the cleverness of it, the lyre bird mimicry of Cormac, cowboy death-poet. And I also hear, underneath, my anger at the world, and underneath that, my grief.
I’ve changed dramatically. I’m not sure 29-year-old me would recognize this 40something student, griefworker, writer. Irony has largely fallen away (my faculty advisor recently called me “incorrigibly sincere.”) Now I walk through life in the daily truth and pain of my anxiety, my PTSD, my grief. It’s excruciating but not for a moment do I want to go back to the old days, the buried grief, the ironic remove, the unspoken loneliness.
Younger me would be astonished that I am becoming a community person. I marvel at photos people have taken of me MC-ing events, participating in grief rituals, holding song circles. Even now I still struggle to map that guy over my internal felt sense, which is still often far in the past. When I was smaller.
I engage in the world in a new way. I work to set aside old patterns of cynicism, know-it-all-ism, and distance. I come in close, and undefended. I hold people in their grief. I ask people what they see. I sing, so that others know they can sing too.
And the problems, the problems I have always been tracking (as sensitive souls are want to do, and trauma survivors doubly so), I walk towards them now. I apply my ever-busy brain now to systems theory. Newly relational, I engage others in this inquiry.
But it is vision that has changed me the most. I have a new animation, a new fire. A mature hope that seeks to see the world as it is and stubbornly orient and walk toward a better world. And it is the vision of the better world that fuels that hope, that fire.
A coach once offered me the phrase: Nevertheless, I am willing.
In generative somatics, they use the phrasing: I am a commitment to...
I am a commitment to the repair of this broken world, to walking with my fellow humans as we heal each other and our living earth.
In this internship and study I walked into the local community. Into the rabbit warrens of local governance, non-profit offices, and clinics. Into Zooms and council meetings. Into prisons and schools.
There I met us. I met us struggling on the roadside, “Ran outta dog food.” I met us walking the streets with a backpack and a first aid kit. I met us dopesick in the clinic parking lot. I met us in our youth, caged, ostracized, forgotten. I met us in our business casual attire, at our council table, looking at slideshares, asking, “how do we do it better?”
I met the systems we have built, however incidentally. I saw the gaps and the dysfunction. The separatism, the petty human squabbles. And I also the complex systems of care, the triage programs, the slideshares, the radio dispatchers.
I see us conflicted: Do we care for each other, or do we hate the Other? Jail or crisis stabilization clinic? Criminal or trauma survivor?
There is a loud voice in America that speaks one side of this conflict. It says, Every man for himself. Trespassers will be shot. Lock them up and throw away the key.
It is the voice of the reckoning we have yet to have, about the stolen lives and lands on which we still reside.
It is the voice of the wounded parts in all of us that would lash out in anger, in bitterness, and ultimately, in deep grief.
There’s good news in the grief. It means all of us, on some level, are paying attention. Our innermost knowing witnesses the travesties of our world--the suffering of our neighbors, of our children, and all our relations, the living earth. The outrageous omission of our birthright: To live as social animals, in tight communities, in villages and tribes. To endure life’s unavoidable hardships in our natural state of grace, which is together. Never alone. As a collective, as us. And nestled in the larger family: All life on earth, from which we bear no real separateness. And if that is not big enough, the biggest frame of all. Our place in all of this, in this solar system, galaxy, universe. In whatever holds this universe.
In the Changemakers Lab, every new student is greeted with the same question: What do you see?
I can tell you what I see in the South Sound region. I see a disconnected, fractured semi-community of human beings. I see people falling through the many, many cracks of this society. I see that we have largely forgotten how to be with each other. I see that we are under the influence of loudmouth doomsayers and intoxicants digital and otherwise.
I’ve spoken of this trauma voice that tells us that we are separate and something like an enemy can exist. I hear that in my community sometimes.
And I hear another voice that tells a different story. That we are all in this together, that we must take care of one another. In our collaborative townhall people talked about a community where we have empathy, where we take responsibility for each other.
The truth is that this community already exists, in scattered fragments, like a broken mirror. Amidst the systems of separateness and oppression there are systems of togetherness and care.
I won’t frame it as a battle, a conflict between sides. Binaries are part of the old story. But I see us in the struggle, in the question. I see us enacting our grief by lashing out and reaching out. By harming and helping.
The present moment feels like the crack of a whip wielded long ago. I hope it is the death rattle of something old and tired and almost ready to die.
I hope we continue to wake up to each other. I hope we turn toward each other before it’s too late.
I’m going to keep walking that way.
Nevertheless, I am willing.
Collaborative townhall on mental health, Lacey WA, June 2025.
Links
Further reflections from my spring quarter:
There I Met Us - reflections from the collaborative townhall
Trauma can crush a soul, make it coalblack and diamondhard. It is these poor, crushed beings who become the bad actors in our society, great and small. They enact the trauma in our ecosystem on themselves, on others. They organize and do so politically, systemically, institutionally. There are entire government edifices shaped this way, political parties, nation states, cataclysmic historical events. Things happening right now.
Some of these survivors, though, they don’t drown in the waters. They don’t burn up in hatred and destruction. They get up, wounds and all, and they turn around, and they extend a hand to the person behind them.
Officer Howard, Project SAFER Townhall
She told us that, in her grief and fear, she wished we could all hold her.
I took note.
So that an hour later, when we opened the grief ritual, I went up to her and said, Would you like us to hold you?
For one of the sharpest voices in the emerging field of community grief tending, checkout Holly Truhlar’s newsletter:
