REDEMPTIONS AND REPARATIONS

​ARE WE STRUGGLING TO REPAIR WHAT'S BEEN DONE IN THE PAST, OR ARE WE NEGOTIATING THE PRICE OF ITS INTEGRATION?

Almas (Souls) by Christian Boltanski, 2014, Santiago, Chile

---

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

​- Rainer Maria Rilke
​

This  post is an experiment in resourcing collective  wisdom via social-media discussions. This and another few related conversations was had on my facebook wall in November of 2017.  Usually, such rich discussions eventually peter out and get lost in the hard-to find backlog  of old posts, the focus always being on the new and immediate. As a longing for the archiving of community wisdom and resilience, I'm making this conversation available again in this format and hope that it may serve as a resource for related research, conversations, and resilience.


ORIGINAL POST: 

Coming out of the richness of several conversations on here, I'm circling around an insight into two significant but different desires within social justice communities and those who want to take some form of action to engender a more just society. I'm feeling like at least a significant portion of inter-community conflicts that come up could very well stem from two very different goals, while those involved are assuming that they're working towards the exact same goal.

As always, the difference for me comes down to verbs and their etymology, which I feel often reveals the underlying relationships being advocated for or embodied by those concerned.

I see one desire or approach being that of Reparations.

The other desire or approach is that of Redemption.

I'd ask that you leave some space to not immediately go into the most popular contemporary associations of these words, like political movements in the US regarding the African slave trade, or religious/Christian undertones around redemption and sin, but to allow these words to have a life of their own and recognize that they have been around for hundreds, probably thousands of years at their roots, and that they signify two very different qualities of relationship and this is why we retain two specific words for each quality of relationship.

The etymology of reparations is clear in the word itself -- to repair, to fix, to mend. To me, this desire is already freighted with the narrative that something is broken, that something happened that shouldn't have happened, and that something needs to be done to restore that original unbrokeness or wholeness or rightness. It implies a potential for going back, for a redo, for fixing things and putting things 'right.' This gesture also implies that in seeking to repair, one knows what the reason for the brokeness is, and how to fix it, and how things 'should' be. I recognize this approach in a lot of therapy work, diagnostic models, and approaches to social justice that involve fixing society or culture. It places oneself at the centre of the narrative, as having the agency and capacity to fix things. I don't mean to shame or dismiss this desire -- I know it well in myself and it's by far the most familiar go-to impulse in the face of injustice.

The etymology of redeem is trickier...it means something like 'to buy back, to ransom, to release.' It places the emphasis on the thing, or person, or culture, or history that is being redeemed, rather than yourself. It also necessitates some form of exchange -- a transaction -- that you yourself must *give* something of yourself in order to buy back that which is to be redeemed -- you have some skin in the game, so to say. Something *must* be lost, in order to release the thing which you care about and desire to be redeemed. To me, this is also deeply relational, and intimately personal.

I feel that we have so few models of redemptive justice. And I'm wondering about the relationship between redemption and reparation -- what is the quality of grief required for one to forego a need for reparations, and to develop the capacity for redemption? It's an immense sense of dying in order to release the need for things to be fixed or set right or to happen some way other than how they already have.

I'm wondering how this knowledge and discernment in the face of conflicts or divergent tactics might support more understanding and compassion, and a recognition that people may be working for different goals, in their own way, in their own time and in their own process of development and capacity.

Thoughts, insights, feedback, comments, all are welcome as I work to untangle what this all means to me and my relationships to justice, trauma, activism and compassion.

Matthew Stillman quick thought - I love redemptive justice and all that you are conjuring around it... AND what if the earlier state that is being redeemed was broken and unjust? Transformative justice is implicitly invoked when talking about redemptive or restorative justice but it might need to be more explicit too.

• Christos Galanis Isn't the very notion of redeeming or restoring a prior state in itself impossible? One can never return back to something that has already happened, or recreate something that has already unfolded.
• Christos Galanis I'm wondering on the very ideas of reparation, restoration, return...how to understand them alongside an understanding that stuff happens, stuff has already happened, and there's no way to change what has already happened?
• Matthew Stillman Christos Galanis sure, but often that memory of 'the way it was' is our only context for restoration so it is possible to get caught in a groove there despite best intentions. This is why this skill is probably best employed in a villaged context so that the primary players don't have the only voices about 'what it looks like'
• Matthew Stillman Christos Galanis it's no accident that where we find examples of restorative /transformational/redemptive justice is from indigenous or decolonized spaces that have a very different notion of time than western civilization has.
• Dare Sohei its unfortunate that the word redemption might imply a "going backwards". i dont see it that way. redemption is a going forwards, integrating the wound as "gift", but i can see the trickiness when it enters the colonized mind. perhaps transformative both includes redemption and allows room for new words and ideas about how to move forward well....but i would like to speak more on "what it takes to get from reparations to redemption"

Christos Galanis Matthew, your insights remind me the absurdity of restorative conservation projects along the Rio Grande in New Mexico that I was involved with for a while...the Pueblo people wanted to reintroduce tree and plant species that pre-dated European contact. The hispanics wanted to reintroduce species that predated Anglo conquest. Hunters and libertarians wanted to restore peregrine falcons that had not been seen in the area for over 100 years. Conservationists wanted to reintroduce a species of tortoise that hadn't existed in that landscape since the Pleistocene era. 

My point being I suppose that all acts of memorial are in themselves political, and this is why I'm fascinated by this idea of redemption as something that can only be based in the present and in direct relationship between oneself, or a community, and the thing being redeemed in the exchange. There's some really tricky stuff around the nature and metaphysics of time and temporality in here that i won't go into right now

• Dare Sohei christos, can you and i "go into" time and space because the type of mythopoetic transactionality you are speaking of is literally the only way i've had things actually work in my own trauma healing.
• Christos Galanis Yesssss -- temporality has been central to everything for me for a long time (no pun intended) I'm super curious to hear of your own healing inrelation to mythopoetic time. I've also gained much insight from the book Blackfooot Physics if you're interested in the metaphysics of time and space from an indigenous perspective as understood and explained as best he can by an english physicist.

Dare Sohei im writing this with the intent that it will help me get clear on the transactionality of grieving:
the fundamental technique here is journeying/trance work, in relation with what the Aboriginals call the Dreaming, what i am calling The Imagination. the capitalizations are important because this is animism, and these are alive places, not some ability we own. there is no "my imagination". there is only The Imagination and i have the capacity to access it. 

Access in this context is the "cure" for the 'crisis of imagination' that trauma incurs.
another important principle here is something i got from jodorowsky: "the past wants the future to make sense, but it's the future that gives meaning to the past." to me, this "explains" how mythopoeisis "works".

In trauma states, one can cognitively grasp that there are other feelings available, but one cant seem to access them "in real life".
somatics and other forms of journeying work create a Temporary Autonomous Zone where access is re-enabled.

the tricky part of birth and early childhood trauma is that we lose access early to some fundamental connection to "source" before we have a chance to really encode the skill of it.
journey work allows access to the felt sense of our "original self/selves" and also our "future self/selves" at the same time.

journey work specifically dealing with repairing the health and building good present time relations with the ancestors allows access to a felt sense of belonging, which is a core component of what i am calling Nurturance.

in my experience, it's this mega-meta-prima-state of nurturance that creates what we call resiliency.
in order for me to have felt sense access to this, i had to move through a lot of grieving, become a channel for grieving, and learn to surrender to grieving when it arises in my experience. (this is not easy because surrender and grieving are direct relationships with Death, who is an alive being)

aka the more i want to access a healed state, the more i actually have to release and let go of: my opinions, my desires, expectations, etc.

this overview isnt complete but it is a start. in closing, what i want to say is that this kind of animism, that includes sensory awareness of other kinds of beings, is radical AF to colonial thought. it literally kills it with kindness.

• Matthew Stillman Dare Sohei <stands and applauds slowly>
• Eric Chisler Yes, the way we view time is so central to all of this, in every way. Not just time, though, but a general inability for macro-micro dilation as well (which I think largely rests on the foundation of linear space-time). I mean, the fact that both of these words are "re-" formulations kind of highlights how impoverished our ability to inhabit time is -- it's like a cultural stutter, where we get stuck on the past's discrete events *rather than the past's ongoing presence*. Of course, this is the kind of predictable march that proceeds from having the span of your life isolated from the span of your culture's life, and your culture's life from the world's life; when the world ends when you end, your ability to bring big time into your sliver of life is almost completely truncated.  So, the question for me is how do we inculcate deep time into activist circles? My answer lately is that there has to be a change in perception to kinship (what made me, what makes me, and what continues after me?) and memory (how we structure the scaffolding for kinship in our days). Without the ability to carry more days than your own, more lives than your own or those most similar to your own, there won't be an ability to do much besides minor, isolated, immediate action to repair not the world even, but repair HOW WE FEEL about the world. Which is what's really at the heart of this.  Reparations says, "Shit feels bad for me now, and has for a while. Shit should feel good for me now, and as long as I'd like."Redemption says, "Something that feeds me is ailing. I owe it what health I can give it." These are fundamentally different ways of understanding time, causality, agency, responsibility -- and until those understandings shift, it's going to be difficult to turn the collective eye to redemption. Redemption does not have a personal payout and it will not be chosen unless it seems to be the corner we've been backed into. I think that's why Christian "redemption" tends to happen as someone hits their mythic bedrock and has nowhere rational to go with their troubles -- it's only in the collapse of the world-denying program that the world can rush back in. Now, how we do that...well...
• Christos Galanis Dare Sohei awwww man --- so so much here. Yeah, we should probably talk at some point. Myself and several friends on here have been studying with Stephen Jenkinson at the Orphan Wisdom School and Grief is quite central to Stephen's teachings -- I've also loved the teachings of Martin Prechtel and appreciate that he always binds together Grief with Praise, and that's something I consider fundamental to such transactional ancestral metaphysics -- which is that I don't think it's enough to simply grieve, or let go, or surrender, or be open -- but that we must also *create* beauty and express praise for what sustains us and use our unique skills as human beings to use our talents to celebrate and give back through both grieving what once was, and praise it for its ability to touch us and sustain us -- both are really the same thing in many ways. I feel that trauma is, partially, stemming from the inability not only to grieve, but to praise as well, and i'm not sure how well understood that connection is, but my time in art therapy certainly helped me understand how important creativity and expression are in healing and integrating parts of oneself that have been cut off.
• Christos Galanis Eric Chisler "Reparations says, "Shit feels bad for me now, and has for a while. Shit should feel good for me now, and as long as I'd like."   Redemption says, "Something that feeds me is ailing. I owe it what health I can give it.""  Shit, I love this. I might steal it.  Also, I wouldn't necessarily accuse the prefix 're' of being an impoverished habitation of time -- I feel I could just as easily understand 're' as occuring within spiralling time in which change happens but there is simultaneously a continuity of citation and iteration that connects through the spiralling itself...so it can be both linear in one sense, but also also now and always present in another sense..
• Eric Chisler I suppose I shortchanged the observation: what re- has become for English speakers has made its presence in a word the ghost of "the past".

 
 
Christos Galanis Perhaps the grief undertaken in the face of letting go of the idea of restoring or fixing the thing you perceive as broken is in itself an essential component of the price you're willing to pay to redeem something/someone...

• Matthew Stillman <faints and dies at the virtue in this>

 
 
Jared Williams Who is we? I guess this brings up Bethany's response from the previous post thread. Is what you're alluding to agreed upon methods for redemptive, reparative or restorative ritual of sorts? Because other than throwing money at a thing it's hard for me to imagine any agreed upon method for these things that would be meaningful across any spectrum of cultures or experiences. I'm not saying all hope is lost or anything but, prior to the globalization of the past 100+ years, each and every culture had agreed upon methods for healing, punishing, cleaning, redeeming and renewing a person, a village, a spirit, a landscape and, though many of them were imperfect, they largely worked because the isolation of that culture allowed for it to be true to everyone involved.... we don't have that anymore really, and in the places that do, there's the internet, so that will soon end it. I think there might be a way I just can't see it, especially w how fast things are changing. I mean, there are hardly even agreed upon representatives of groups anymore so who even organizes a thing?? Perhaps there is a way though... I will chew.

• Dare Sohei we can build it/craft it using observation of what works in mammalian biology/nervous systems
• Jared Williams Dare I'd love that and would love to see how that would look. How to take a somatic and biologic approach to reparation into the larger western societal reality is another puzzle I suppose!
• Dare Sohei yeah, this the whole game as far as i'm concerned

Murambi Genocide Memorial, Rwanda

Bruce Hooke I'd be interested to hear a bit more about how you have seen those two models coming into conflict. In the process I'm closest to right now it does seem like "reparations" is being used to mean something closer to "redemption" (based on your definitions of these terms) but I have not (yet) seen that lead to conflict.

• Christos Galanis I feel that I witness a lot of energy in social justice circles being spent on encouraging/demanding individuals or certain identities to take responsibility for past injustices committed by people who they identity with or are identified with, and hoping/encouraging/supporting/demanding them to do something to make up for that injustice, to contribute in a way that rights the wrongs that have been done, and essentially 'fixes' the system. I understand this as a quality of reparation, of repairing or fixing what has been broken. In most cases this is ancestrally based, as we're talking about mutli-generational systemic injustices that we've inherited through being born into particular cultures in particular times in particular places. I'm suggesting that redemption of those injustices, or specifically those individuals or ancestors, is fundamentally different from reparations for those injustices -- the tricky part, some of which is being beautifully teased out in this thread, is what exactly redemption might look and smell like in such contexts.
• Jared Williams Christos YES. In fact I'm not sure ancestral reparations ever work because they imply a healing of trauma that happened to others long ago and that never really feels 'true' and never undoes what happens - especially cross culturally. The only place I've ever heard of this working successfully seems to be in clans of a singular tribe ( through trade/inter-marriage or sacrifice of some kind + a ritual) or tribes that share the same root people, or villages of a singular culture- because again, they all speak the same god-language/village-language and redemptive-language. The idea of taking that idea out into the global world seems to only work temporarily and only for the specific people that were there for the 'healing'... once they leave the room or the world, the scars reappear.
• Bruce Hooke I feel like it's important to draw a distinction between what my ancestors did wrong and what my life has been like because of who my ancestors were. Yes, my ancestors were white and did bad things to people who were not white but what I hear being talked about is very clearly not what should be done to address those wrongs but rather what should be done to address the benefits and advantages I have right now as a result of having had white ancestors. The operative "past" here is not the past of my ancestors, it's my own past: what I and others around me did last week and last year and what benefits I and other white people accrued from being white.  I'm also still not seeing the actual conflicts arising from reparations vs. redemption.   I do agree that just trying to "fix" the system is not likely to be a productive way to think about things. It's also a very white way of thinking. Applying a "fix" also implies that once the fix is in place we can go on living as we always have, which of course isn't true. Racism isn't a leaky pipe. But in the circles I'm in I don't feel like I'm hearing about it being talked about as if it is.
• Jared Williams Bruce thanks and you're right, I agree with you. I was merely addressing the past-wrongdoings piece not the privilege/benefits aspect which is more important (and maybe more destructive) . It's definitely true that we are not even CLOSE to a place of making up for those benefits (particularly for the indigenous of the world) but it's also hard to know how to level a playing field when we have such dissonant ideas of 'normal' and fair AND is the playing field ever level if you are dealing with the kind of generational suffering that requires THIS kind of reparations anyway?... but anyway, I think you hit on the/a BIG thing which is that the powers that be, or those that have benefitted from the powers, have to give something up and, until we do the work, we can't yet exactly know what that will be - and that's scary as hell- and the fear of that unknown thing that will go away or be lost that has made life so easy for some is enormous.
• Christos Galanis Bruce Hooke I think this is the crux of it for me...not that I don't understand your argument, or the value in steering one's life and meaning towards co-creating a society in which everyone has the equal opportunity to flourish to their full capacities. It's the part about being born into a certain positionality, within which you may or may not benefit unequally from, and feeling, or being held to, a responsibility for making a better situation for those born into a positionality which accrues them less power and access and potential. My question then becomes, what are our debts, what are our responsibilities based on the past? Are we as homo-sapiens collectively responsible for outcompeting Neanderthals? Are those who partake in civilization responsible to hunter-gatherers and nomads of the past and present? Are all US citizens responsible to Mexico for stealing a third of their land in 1848? This issue has obviously been explored to great depth within Germany and the aftermath of WWII on the culture, and I've had brilliant conversations with German friends about that process. I guess I'm wondering, what is any one individual, or community, responsible for in the way of reparations, and at what point (if ever) do we stop being responsible for the past? And if we are responsible for the past, how do we redeem it, if at all?
• Jared Williams I remember talking to someone in college about this as I was on a tear about my ancestors and about reparations to native peoples and they said- then should we give back all of south dakota to the lakota the way we found it with no trains, no phone lines, no hospitals and no infrastructure? would that be better than integrating them into the very society that murdered them wholesale? Or would that simply leave them at the mercy of being out of step and isolated from the 'new world' and the inevitability of all of their young people leaving eventually anyway... it's a stupid example- but it came to mind- and it shows the futility or at least complexity of even beginning to talk about this stuff. My sense is our generational past is unredeemable and the privileges some of us have should be a acknowledged (sometimes shameully) but not apologized for... but I'm not sure where to go beyond that right now
• Christos Galanis I agree that guilt and shame are not ways to satisfy the very real longing for reparations and/or redemption...

Bruce Hooke One way to approach this would be to keep bringing it down to the present. How have the ways I live my life (including the ways I've been able to live simply because I'm white) impacted other people alive today? You can't understand this without the context of the past but the final goal is not to address some uncertain time in the past but to address the present. This means that at a certain point, when so much history has gone by that it's no longer clear how a past act impacted present people then talk of reparations is no longer relevant. For example, while the Norman Conquest clearly still shapes the character of Britain today, it's no longer possible to parse out how some people alive today benefited while others are still on the losing side. On the Native American example, again, bring it down to the present. The idea isn't to try to make things the way were when white people first arrived in North America. The idea should be to say "wow, the results of how the white invaders treated the Native Americas is still being felt today. For example, the Native Americans were commonly forced off the good land and given the worst land." What can we do to give the Native Americans a better shot at a good life today, without forcing them to give up their culture? With African-North Americans (and African-Europeans) there are all sorts of ways in which past history impacts life today. Again, bring it to the present. If you stop with "what did my ancestors do" then it doesn't work. You have to ask "what did people who like me do in the past that has given me advantages in life right now and disadvantaged other people right now?"

• Jared Williams I dunno- I do ask those questions pretty regularly and (thankfully) most of my friends do as well, but it hasn't led me into any sort of solution place... other than increased awareness, and it's helped me understand the landscape better- which is good and important. But I'm not sure it's a reparative or redemptive place.
• Bruce Hooke What, exactly, redemption should look like is not an easy question. I quite agree on that point. But I feel like understanding the present impacts of past actions is an important step in the right direction. I've noticed small changes in myself already as a result of what I've learned recently.

 
 
Bethany Reivich a 'redemption' other than of the self smells of superficiality and commerce, so yes, letting go of these attachments/delusions seems wise, but there are always more where they came from.... And again, as Jared pointed out, the 'we' business continues to be the biggest hurdle in real dialogue. Dialogue doesn't stray too far from the minuscule, and the subjective; it connects the self to bigger, but it doesn't rest there -- that's always the work. my feel of the word 'redemption' (I prefer playful word use) is a powerful collection of jumbled messes that never before came together, into the recognition of my own soul and my particular, ecstatic value and meaning in this world, and in a exalted temporality that itself "repairs" the past... so yes, that's the long work of wounding, mistakes, disorientation, weaving, etc and the recognition (made possible by an unseen, but also somehow intimate hand) of one's place and meaning, and most importantly a physiological embodiment of soul -- a physical feeling/knowing, not only an idea. Which is organic , nonlinear, and multi-layered (and basically mystical). To work with this systematically has something to do with engaging intimately on public levels, of embodying and demonstrating sensitive, subjective dialogue that enfolds itself in nuance, rather than (for ex) well meaning and altruistic white-washings or wishings of premature unity. Also the reverse, of bringing the macro into the micro -- or larger questions/dialogue into intimate life. A figurehead, a friend, or a ritual (even a mundane performative act), can catalyze individuals, similar to a sort of shaktipat or laying of hands -- the expression of deep wisdom by another awakens our own, in all its intricacies, that the precise teaching of correct jargon or etiquette special to particular cultural identities cannot. That's just an example of somatic knowing. So yes, the point is the somatic sense rights itself when all else is lost. (Part of healing is to intimately visit the avoided wound, which collectively seems deeper and deeper down ... into its inherent emptiness? i.e. relating to our own madness) And maybe it wont right itself until all, in fact, is lost (our minds,at least, probably those dont get lost til other things do though_), because until then, the intellectual, abstract continues to distract radical embodiment, collectively.... And trauma (a type of loss) without a map to get out (intellectual disorientation), is itself a very important door into that somatic knowing

• Christos Galanis chewing on your words...my first reaction is the opposite of your first statement, that I feel the only thing one *can't* redeem is oneself, and that it always has to be conjured in relationship with someone else -- that ultimately we can only redeem others, and we do so by seeing them in wholeness, outside of their trauma or wounding. But I'm not wed to that understanding, just watching how it moves in response to this thread...thank you
• Bethany Reivich Yes, agreed...it's by an unseen hand, as I wrote. Which I guess it means something about the unconsciousness of the act...to work toward that in myself...redemption...but it is really a thoughtless act of another that brings things together. Which I guess is why I have an aversion to the Idea of it...does this make any sense?
• Christos Galanis i think i get you, and i think i agree? i feel like there's certainly fundamentally non-rational and mysterious about processes of redemption...certainly it doesn't come through willpower and logical intention...i'm not sure what it is you have an aversion to though?
• Bethany Reivich I don't know...Yea it doesn't come through a person trying to redeem another. It comes through relationship, but the moment of redemption seems to occur through self recognition, not by being redeemed. The sort of obsession with consciousness, causality and agency in healing and all the assumptions that go along w it, is what I have an aversion to. Someone sees you for who you really are, or the truth in an act that needs to occur...they are not doing you a favour, in a deeper sense, and the work of redemption comes through a personal affinity to be around truth in each one

 
 
Ben Spatz Just FYI
 
 Articles:
If ‘indigenizing’ education feels this good, we aren’t doing it  right
  
Becoming Indigenous: The rise of Eastern Métis in Canada

• Christos Galanis Thanks Ben. This first article, I feel, actually just reinforces my earlier points to you, and actually speaks directly to this particular post here about reparations vs redemption. The author is analyzing universities and indigenous studies programs from a managerial analysis in my view, and focusing simply on categories of identity. I have friends and colleagues who teach in and run the indigenous studies programs at U of Calgary and U of Alberta and I can say without hesitation that the programs are not about 'teaching about indigenous history' although that is part of it, but of actually enacting indigenous pedagogies and epistemologies -- again, the need for settler/inanimist cultures to begin to be able to comprehend an indigenous/animist ontology is crucial to educating the general public, and the feedback from students themselves has been extremely positive, both of first nations and settler ancestry. What I feel the author is addressing is tokenism and white-washing, which is obviously shallow and inauthentic attempts to meet administrative criteria, but I don't feel such an analysis actually reflects the reality on the ground, nor the importance of what it means to now have indigenous studies electives be mandatory for all undergrads at both U of Calgary and Lakehead Universities in Canada. And yes, compared to the US where indigenous studies courses were outlawed in Arizona under hate-crime legislation for 'inciting racism against white people' I think there is some needed praise for the Canadian education system and it's initial attempts to redeem the history of genocide and displacement in those lands.
• Christos Galanis Ben Spatz This second article likewise only traffics in politicized/racialized notions of indigeneity and doesn't come close to dealing with the complexities and economies of first nations tribal recognition. Kim Tallbear's work on blood quanta is great for understanding the negotiation of identity and power and ancestry inter-tribally:
• Article:  Narratives of Race and Indigeneity in the Genographic Project  And Rasmussen's great work on situated Indigenous epistemologies as opposed to indigeneity as an identity:  Qallunology: A pedagogy for the oppressor

  
Ben Robins Absolution: Dealing with an issue by making it go away. Resolution: Dealing with an issue by coming together.
 
 
Mandy Edwards Hmmm. Apologies if I have totally misunderstood the discussion. But have you ever heard/ read up about the practice of Ho’po’ono’ono? It’s a powerful construct used by certain communities where the tribe takes complete responsibility for the misdemeanours of ANY of its members. Regardless. They ALL reparate and there is a specific prayer that is used. Here is one link that explains it:http://upliftconnect.com/hawaiian-practice-of-forgiveness/. 

I don’t know if this adds anything. After being taught by Stephen (1 class in - next one in Iceland and I can’t wait!), I am only just starting to ‘wake up’ and feel my way in such things. I’ve never had the confidence before to form my own opinions on such matters. But now I can see how important it is to start thinking and having such discussions. An ant can move a mountain one grain of mud at a time. And the only way we can influence change is by first, exploring who we are and what we stand for in this world. I thank you for this opportunity

• Christos Galanis I think this gets to the heart of my original question, which is that most people don't belong to any deeply rooted or deeply practiced 'tribe' and what i'm concerned about is what happens when trauma/wounding itself becomes the identity around which 'tribe' is fashioned. In such an archicecture, it's possible that healing the trauma simultaneously would mean ceasing to identity with or be identified by the 'tribe' and so the trauma is potentially held on to as an impoverished means of maintaining a sense of belonging.
• Mandy Edwards Interesting. I’m going to have to sit with this one for a while. I may (or may not!) have anything more to add. But yes, I see what you are getting at. Certainly when one looks at the media today, the #metoocampaign, and other such social media frenzies, it does appear to trigger in some people a desperate need to ‘belong’ in some way. I believe Stephen often talks about the fact that we no longer initiate youngsters into the adult world with any ceremony, that there is a deep cultural trauma here for many of us. I can hear him saying that human life isn’t inherently meaningful. Rather being human is a mandate to make meaning. Yet how is this achieved without referring to such traumas...? Hmmmm. Thank you.
• Eric Chisler Christos, that's the rupture all bloody and exposed!

 

Alisa Esposito I can only answer addressing my people and my place. There has been redemption with the burial of my husband and our dear Z and kinship made through their bodies becoming our ground. I cannot speak to social justice movements or society or global anything. I have no caring for that, I cannot bear witness to an abstraction. I have no will to attempt to repair or redeem what I have no love relationship to. I trust other humans to manage work of obligation and love where they live. I have been woven in here and I didn't ask for it, I'd say work of redemption is not a thing that can be chosen but which chooses u. Like Martin Shaw has said, it's the point at which you understand that you are being dreamt, rather than doing the dreaming.....Through my being woven in here, painfully and beautifully and actually quite forcefully, I've been redeemed and my work is intensely obligated in tending to a deep hyperlocal relationship. I've become a midwife of land and people in a real place, seen and unseen. I don't know how to translate such into a more "just world." This cannot happen thru any kind of outside regulation or application of justice measures because that takes the trust and relationship out...it happens because it grows....and because you are Told to stay put and tend.