Braiding Skywoman, Eve, Our Stories | by Brooke Summers-Perry

Sometimes text conjures an image. Sometimes an image inspires a story... this morning Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass puts words to my digital collage that celebrates my Irish and Oneida Earth mothers.

"And then they met- the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve- and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: "Sister, you got the short end of the stick..."

I take this as a challenge to find a way for my time here to be a time of love, healing, and the curiosity it takes to be creative. To learn from the past, be fully present to what is, to bring light to what can be in the future.

Grace in, Peace out, 

Brooke

Distilling Dowd | by Holly Hudley

During the Michael Dowd lectures, someone issued me a challenge: Distill Michael Dowd into 3 take aways for your next blog post. (Probably a joke, but I’m one to dive straight in to a challenge, so I accept!)

Big Idea #1: What is reality? Or What is God?

(Really, Holly. You’re going to start with that one? Yup!)

The interplay between God-us-reality is an ever turning loop, or spiral. 

• Reality/God is not separate, or “out there.” If Reality is the natural world around us supported by undeniable facts, it is our source, sustenance, and end. Our participation in this reality in a life-giving, pro-future way matters.

• Reality/God is in the star and in the stardust, and the stardust is in us. The gifts of death are the atoms of stardust in our bodies.

• Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, does not go away. 

Big Idea #2: What does it mean to be Pro-Future?

“We are nature becoming aware of itself...The earth was once molten rock, and now it sings opera.” -Brian Thomas Swimme

• I kept thinking of a video of starlings taking flight in Rome I recently saw. They fly in intricately coordinated, swooping patterns called a murmuration. Did you know that each starling takes on the care of 7 starlings to its left and 7 starlings to its right? In this way, all starlings in a flock are accounted for and all are engaged in a mutually protective dance. I related this to Dowd talking about 7 generations forward and back. We look to our ancestors and ask for wisdom and guidance. We live in the now with a mind toward our descendants, in wonderment of what they’d like us to give. I loved his analogy of the Trinity as the interconnection of the Past, Present, and Future. The entire past is present here as is the entire future. It is here. Now. It is not Other than this. 

• We don’t end and we don’t begin. We evolve. The stuff we are made of is the same stuff of the first star, of the dinosaurs, of Jesus. We breathe the molecules of their air. That same stuff will become part of other matter - soil, plants, stars in a distant galaxy, and even more up close: our children and our children’s children.

• How we live is a mirror of how we treat ourselves, others, and all that we view as sacred. To understand this truth in a deep way leads us to live on behalf of LIFE. 

Big Idea #3: What do we do? (My own musings included...)

We sing. 

We sing at the top of our lungs or in a still small voice about the large and small realities we are part of. From the microbiome of our own being to the vastness of the cosmos we offer up our songs. 

We do one small thing on behalf of life starting today. Starting right now. Maybe you’ve never recycled. Time to start. Or maybe you watch a monarch caterpillar munching away at milkweed. You can hear it if you get close enough. Or maybe you consider your investments and whether any of them could have a deeper impact on the environment or economic equity. The little things add up. The little things become easy and they amount to more little things and suddenly you are living a transformed life.

Suddenly you are living on a transformed planet. 

I do believe this is possible. We haven’t hit the tipping point...not yet. We reside in the in between. We have choices to make and songs to sing and great great great grandchildren to consider. What is it, small ones, you would have us do to hand you a life that is full?

Until Love is Mainstream | by Brooke Summers-Perry

If Katsushika Hokusai can draw and create a wave over and over for 30 years, then I think I can keep working on my I am brook poem for the rest of my life. It is unlikely it would ever have value to anyone other than me. That is perfect.

I am brook, simple and small,
part of the cycle,
returning to sea.

I am love.

I collect, I gather,
for the return.
Even a great wave
starts small.
Drops fall through the canopy and
gather in the brook.
No one needs to wander out
and look
where it starts
drops gather.
the water is clear.

The momentum picks up.
Rocks split the stream.
The brook gathers the currents
They move on bubbling,
carrying the leaves,
rolling the stones.

Always moving,
building, gathering.
She is in her prime when
others worry, when the
rain is harsh and the
winds blow.

Her purpose,
she bubbles, she darts.
Making new paths required
to stay on task.
She widens, zigzags.
Working angles
and pitches

Whatever it takes to
speed up the process to
honor the system.
Without anyone’s attention
she gathers, she grows.
She lives with meaning,
no one knows.

Where dark and light dwell | by Holly Hudley

Over the weekend, Josh and I took a short pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama to visit the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. We started at the museum on Saturday morning. It was crowded. It was a beautiful, blue sky kind of day.

When I walked in, I did not experience the kind of punch in the gut threadbare shame and grief I might have expected. No, what I experienced was the pain of black American humanity laid bare for me to witness. Immediately I was drawn into the suffering of individuals with names, faces, families, and stories. The museum, for me, demanded that I not use a large blanket of generalization to look at slavery and the horrors it created as something fixed in time and place, now complete. It is what Ida B. Wells called “our country’s greatest crime,” and the aftereffects of it are not yet resolved. The museum exhibits demanded that I personalize it, that I see a human story, a particular experience, and that I acknowledge the pain a system of bigotry and violence has reaped on individuals and on a nation whose basic founding tenant, ironically, was freedom.

Black people who were enslaved in our country were mothers, fathers, lovers, children, artists, thinkers. They were people who laughed, cried, sang, and also lived in fear of what might happen to them if they did any of those things too loudly. 

I was particularly struck by a photograph taken of a lynching in Oklahoma. The photographer must have stood on a bank of the river some ways down, or maybe sat in a canoe. There was a railroad bridge over the water, supported by warren trusses. Dozens of white onlookers stood on it, watching. From the bridge, from barely visible ropes, hung two black bodies - a mother and a son - as if they were floating in mid-air. The clues that they weren’t were their arms by their sides and their clothes hanging limp, not ballooned as floating might entail. Their names were Laura and L.D. Nelson. They were lynched by a mob who entered their jail cell in 1911 the night before their arraignment for allegedly shooting an armed white man who trespassed on their property. 

Laura and LD Nelson. Mother and Son. It is said that Laura had a baby girl with her in the jail cell when she was dragged from it in the night.

The photograph of the lynching was reproduced as a postcard. I imagine it served as a warning to black folks and a statement of power for whites. A postcard. To send to people. Can you even fathom, passing through Okemah, Oklahoma and sending such a postcard with some glib “Wish you were here” scrawled on the back?

I am reminded of James Baldwin’s story “Going to Meet the Man” in which he traverses the psyche of a white boy, the son of a sheriff, who first witnessed a lynching at age 7. Baldwin miraculously evokes compassion for the little boy, showing us the twisted family and societal  values he is part of that evoke murderous bigotry and racism. He grows up in a system that shows him no other way. He was “caught up,” as Bill might say.

I summarize the story not to okay it, not to draw upon our sympathies for murderers and bigots, but to round out that the hater and the hated are both affected by a sick system. Racism and bias is passed on from generation to generation just like a great-grandmother’s wardrobe. The Legacy Museum really implores us to ask ourselves how we have perpetuated it. Turning away is allowing; active participation is enacting; working against is necessary. Not courageous, necessary. 

Atop a hill, half a mile away at the memorial, we walked into a descending labyrinth of hanging corten steel columns, symbolic of hanging bodies. They are lit from below in the evening. The walk over was quiet; so noiseless we could hear the whispers of leaves like voices carrying on the breeze. The memorial felt haloed and sacred, a listening place, a remembering place. Over the course of ten years, the Equal Justice Initiative researched and inscribed names and dates of those lynched between 1808 and 1945. The columns are arranged alphabetically by state,  then by counties within the state. Harris County has one. The known lynched are: 

JOHN WALTON     07.30.1890

   BERT SMITH 09.21.1917

    UNKNOWN 10.27.1919

ROBERT POWELL 06.20.1928

Researches documented 4,000 names; they suspect there are thousands more whose bodies were destroyed or unrecorded. They continue to search. Most of the names belong to men, at least two lynched for falling in love with a white woman. 

While the terror of lynching no longer pervades the south, I left feeling keenly aware that we are still in the not yet. We have not yet dealt with our legacy of slavery and its after effects of economic, social, and legal inequity. We have not yet achieved a society where all feel equally valued, seen, and heard. We have not yet dealt with our ghosts or created the world in which we wish to live. The memorial paves a way for us to acknowledge, pay homage to, and pave a way forward. It’s an invitation to reckon with old ways and dream up new ones. The memorial, while it holds space for grief, is also immensely hopeful. Both the shadows and the light are there. We are between the two. 

For further reading, go to: www.eji.org

Listen to: Reconciling with Old Ghosts

A Gentle Touch

As I sit here staring at my grandfather’s scrolling desk calendar, trying to find the words to describe the practice of updating this everyday, focusing on the way he touched this everyday with attention and intention, thinking about how he lived his life that way, I am pulled out of my studio by the plea of my 16 year old son, “Mom, I remember what I was going to show you!”

I sit down on the couch beside him and he shows me this image on his phone. It is a digital sketch he made for art class. He says, “Do you know what it means?”

Digital sketch by Link S-P, 11/8/18

I talked about the seasons of life and he said, “But do you know who this is? It is Steve and I.”

This morning I will make this post brief and ask, has a grandfather, or someone else, touched your life in a way that makes you want to touch life differently? Do you pause and hold that feeling in your body?

Grace in, peace out

Team S-P

Parts of a Whole | by Holly Hudley

Bach is in my living room. Really. He is. The notes of his Cello Suite No. 4 float off the record and dissipate into my space. He wrote the suites around 1720. Pablo Casals recorded this version in 1936. In 2018 they are both here with me. Sometimes I turn the records up really loud, lay on the floor, close my eyes, and listen. 

Dust glints in the light offered through the window, elegant in its slow drift. What particles of life, ancient and new, come with it? I am trying to remember Bill’s exact words to me in a recent conversation: “Everything is happening everywhere all the time.” We are stardust, we are dinosaur bones, we are Bach’s cello suites, we are our past, current, and future selves. We are  everywhere, all the time. 

I wonder what would be possible between us if we thought of ourselves like grains of sand - each distinct but part of a greater body. A single grain makes no noticeable difference, but together they make a beach, an ocean floor, rocks, minerals, and mountains. If grains of sand could talk they would look at each other and say to the ten grains of sand on either side of them, “I can’t make this beach without you.” That little murmur would spread in all directions from Mexico to Texas to the tip of the Florida Peninsula. On and on it would go. The sand does not know whether it is Mexican or Floridian. What could we learn from them, where each one matters as much as the whole?

It would be a small miracle if we really got that, if we realized we are distinct but not separate. It is true in the universe of our body. Each part, from the skin cells to the organs to the blood and oxygen flow, must work uniquely as well as in tandem to keep us alive. If we are small holograms of the universe itself, this must also be true on a cosmic level. Consider for a minute the possibility that folks like “the Buddha and Jesus, while separated by language, geography, and five centuries, are nevertheless deeply connected in the spiritual world, and devoted collaboratively to the evolution of humanity” (from Robert McDermott’s book Steiner and Kindred Spirits). Again I wonder, if we saw ourselves as part of everything everywhere all the time, what could we do? We just might change the world. 

from Molly Gochman’s Red Sands installation at IAH: www.mollygochman.com

Caravan of Hearts | by Brooke Summers-Perry

Currently, my formal practice is sporadic. Sometimes the pieces come together in a rush. This happened this week. Michael Lerner of Commonweal recited Ibn ‘Arabi’s poem, A Garden Among the Flames, in Ordinary Life class and at the Jung Center’s annual event. The words and voice speaking them lingered with me. I chose the poem to use as our centering practice in Conspire on Sunday. While I let the words sink in, spending more than enough time to read each word and let them sink into the crevasses and open parts of me, I gathered the words that spoke loudest. I let them rearrange as I remembered a specific moment in time where I felt buoyed by love. I let them turn into a new piece that sings a song a gratitude for one of the toughest and most graceful moments of my life. I went back to the day my stepfather died, the horror in my mom’s mourning wails, the grace that held my arms wrapped around her, and the moment I felt us both giving way to the weight, when my step-brothers and sisters arrived at the very moment I needed to be held and replenished. Yesterday I visited the Menil Collection to work with a team of writers to prepare for this year’s field trips of creative writing excursions. One of the Rothko pieces caught my eye. Often we use color as a starting place for writing about emotions. A large piece with bright red dissected by a thin white line gave me a writing prompt. If red is anger and fear, then what is this white line? This morning as I reflected on Bill’s talk, Conspire practice, and the Rothko piece, I realized that the poem, the words I collected from Ibn ‘Arabi’s poem, gathered all the fragments in a piece I could share today.

Caravan of Hearts

A garden among the flames

A meadow of faith

Hearts, a caravan among the flames

Cloistered in a heart of love

A garden among the flames.

Here is Ibn ‘Arabi’s poem

A Garden Among the Flames

O Marvel,
a garden among the flames!
My heart can take on any form:
a meadow for gazelles,
a cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka’ba For the circling pilgrim,
the tables of the Torah,
the scrolls of the Qur’án.
I profess the religion of love;
wherever its caravan turns along the way,
that is the belief,
the faith I keep.

Lean Forward | by Holly Hudley

On a monthly basis I participate in a conversation with projectCURATE striving to build toward racial justice. It is a Leader-full organization with some of the most brilliant and passionate minds I’ve been around. To learn more, I encourage you to visit the website here and consider joining us. 

Anyhow, this semester we are reading Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown. It is, for all intents and purposes, a work of autocosmology. She explores the ways in which parts work together to create a unified whole, both in nature and in community. She borrows the mathematical concept of fractals, defined as “a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as eroded coastlines or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation.” 

Fractals, then, are everywhere. Think of the fern, a dandelion, a succulent, a cauliflower, a snail shell. . .It’s got me wondering: Are human beings a kind of fractal? We are geometrically and biologically similar, from the smallest to the largest one of us. We are individual forms -  my sense of “I” is separate from “you” - but I could not exist without you. We are separate, but we are also one. The word fractal originates from the Latin: frangere, meaning “to break, to crush.” Fractal means broken. 

I think of the concept of Tikkun Olam, in which it is said we were once all part of a single ball of light. That light exploded, breaking into trillions of tiny pieces, individual and separate in their new nature. In that fractured existence, the only way back to unity is through healing the heart of the world. So it is true for us: the only way back to our wholeness is through first recognizing we are broken apart, and then doing the work to heal those broken spaces. Fractals make beautiful patterns when they are pieced back together. If we are like dandelions, blown apart in the form of a wish, then each seed drifts in the wind, and eventually roots and grows into a new dandelion, a new potential wish. Each part has the capacity to grow an entirely new whole. Though I am not finished with the book, my so far sense is that we are being lead to ask ourselves what is our unique part in creating a whole world in which we wish to live? 

I closed my eyes last Saturday at CURATE and listened to Maya Angelou’s recorded voice read part of her poem “On the Pulse of Morning.” These words floated out to me:

The horizon leans forward

(un)wedded to fear.

lean forward.

Take it into the palms of your hands.

Lean.

Forward.

Mold

Sculpt

Lift

Pulse

Lean.

Serve Oneness | by Brooke Summers-Perry

What if I had the courage to trust my inner guide? What if I gave voice and authority to what came from my life changing sudden feeling of oneness? What if I had the courage to be guided by love and oneness?

This is the answer to what would happen if I had the courage to share how deeply I feel the love and interconnectedness I heard Michael Lerner speak of in Ordinary Life class and at the Jung Center event Monday night.

Since I experienced a sudden and immediate understanding of being part of humanity as a whole, a whole piece of a greater whole, I have wanted for each “other” to be filled with all they need. In a moment everything changed for me. I was left with nothing and everyone to hold. Since then, I have wanted for myself and for everyone to find and experience wholeness. I have been hurt and will continue to be hurt or, at the least, dismissed by those who see the human experience as a whole pie with slices to be fought for, stolen from, or deemed as a ‘reward’ from some magical sky God that keeps score of who deserves pie, determines what size, and who gets punished for even looking at pie crumbs. The complex structures that are in place to keep this pie myth alive are so loud and in earthly control now. It is so ridiculous to me that it would be funny if it wasn’t so painful to watch, if I didn’t feel so powerless against it, if I didn’t hear and feel the pain of the those who suffer most at the hands of the myth-boosters, if it wasn’t so hard to deny the soul within me that knows that these players and actors are part of the whole to which I am tethered, and will only thrive if I also honor their suffering.

I am on a journey to discover a place for my soul to rest and feel at home with this notion of oneness.

I am doing my best to find what is mine to do to serve oneness, even now.

As I practice, I notice where I am pulled into the myth of our culture and I allow my inner guide to remind me of the invisible tapestry, our interconnectedness. I practice letting go of the pain caused by existing in the world as it is. I practice forgiving myself and others. Much of the pain I have experienced in the last 5 years relates so directly with Bill’s content on the no longer and the not yet. 

I do not want anyone to suffer, even those I perceive as cutting me off or pulling at my fabric.

and yet, everyone suffers.

and, I believe in oneness.

Because I believe in oneness, I must resist the urge to hide, dismiss, or distract myself from the pain and suffering. I must allow myself not only to hear and feel the suffering, but to heal my own, reinforce the fibers of my being, and find the best way to serve the fabric.

I reject serving a humanly defined ‘one’ that divides our oneness.

I don’t know if I believe in a one. If I do, I may perceive it as the fabric itself that gives us being or if it is an intermediary, then, I perceive it is as one that feeds each and every. If I believe there is an intermediary, then I believe that a ‘one’ that serves oneness to the degree necessary to explain how my soul knows this, is a ‘one’ that is unfathomable by the human mind and so cannot be defined, or interpreted by humans, in other words, no one point on the fabric is able to define it for all other points in the tapestry.

Nothing in my body, mind, or soul allows me to believe in a ‘one’ that divides.

“First, do no harm,” jumps in my mind every time I witness the misuse of an image of a dividing ‘one.’

I don’t have any desire to tell anyone else what to believe. I desire that our beliefs serve to reinforce and feed our fabric, that they serve oneness.

I hope that the human desire to control suffering stops participating in constructing a ‘one’ who attempts to divide.

I wonder what this life would be like if everyone served oneness instead of a one who is a gatekeeper for who is and isn’t part of oneness.

I wonder what this life would be like if we stopped using a ‘one’ as a bypass to serving oneness?

What if we all served oneness, whether we believe in a ‘one’ or not?

What if we stopped making each ‘other’ suffer?

What if our participation in oneness lifted the fabric rather than pulling, ripping, or cutting?

What if we reinforce the areas where we’ve done the most damage?

If we all saw the fabric and served to support the entirety, wouldn’t this be clear to us? Wouldn’t our actions and interactions naturally serve, heal, and participate in oneness?

As I discern what I believe and what I am to do, I ask myself over and over again,

How will I serve oneness today?

How will I resist serving any ‘one’ who would divide?

Bodies are Sacred | by Holly Hudley

Over the weekend I got into a conversation with a really brilliant woman about what it might mean to be human right now, in this moment. If you heard Sister Ilia Delio speak a few years ago, you might remember her saying that in the 14 billion year unfolding of our planet, humans are the last word of an incomplete sentence in the last volume of history. We are a blip. We are babies in this whole evolutionary cycle. And yet we are conscious enough to actually understand deep time. While I take solace in knowing everything comes from something and evolution is unfinished, in knowing that I am a small part of something so vast, it is also troubling to grapple with purpose. As far as we know we are the only sentient creatures who use symbolic consciousness to make art and tell stories. It doesn’t mean we are necessarily superior, but it might mean we are called to use our consciousness in an intentional way. Maybe we are called to observe and record so that we can transform. 

If asked, I think most conscious beings have an opinion about how they want their bodies to be treated. Think even of the animal who bites back if it is abused. This is a form of protest. We don’t have an agreed upon ethic that all bodies deserve the utmost care, so it remains in the fuzzy arena of personal morality. In many cultures women’s bodies have varying degrees of say so in how they want to be treated. I read an article that labeled the #MeToo movement a feminist liberal agenda...as if only liberal women get raped, assaulted, or molested. We’ve just witnessed an incredibly intelligent woman be dismissed and even ridiculed for having the audacity to speak the truth about her body. She should have been championed. Not only because she spoke up 30 years later, but also because she kicked out and protested when she was first assaulted. Instead at least 51% of our governing body dismissed her experience as untrue or unimportant. She wanted her body to be dignified, and it was not. It is the same, I think, with black bodies. Our democracy was founded on harm done (first) to indigenous and (second) to African bodies. Poet and Playwright Claudia Rankine asked her friend what it’s like being the mother of a black son. “The condition of black life is one of mourning,” she said. That resonates with me. Though I am not black, I am raising biracial sons. As a woman I know the feeling of not having a total say in how my body is treated (I don’t know very many men who walk down the street and get unsolicited catcalls), but as a white person I do not live in fear of being suspect. I don’t want to create that fear in my sons, but I must also live in reality. A reality that too often falls short of our best hope. I want my boys to have a say so in how their bodies are treated, but I am aware that they might not always be afforded that dignity. The onus will be on them to have a stronger sense of self than anyone who might disparage them. A black man in America knows what’s at stake if he even remotely loses his cool with an unkind policeman. A woman in America knows what’s at stake if she wears a skirt too short. “They had it coming,” we will say. It shouldn’t be this way. 

The bodies we are given are our sacred forms. I don’t mean this in a puritanical, “don’t have sex before marriage” kind of way, but as an echo of the Aristotelian view of form. Aristotle is in a long line of philosophers who believe the soul is of the sacred “whole” that gives our bodies life. Call it stardust, call it God, call it cosmos, but without this little bit of the divine in us, our “essence” as it were, we would not know to seek our truest selves. Each and every body, then, deserves to be seen as sacred. Every time we disparage or harm a person’s body, we are dismissing part of their essence. 

In his time, Teilhard de Chardin understood the universe to be both spiritual and physical.  Matter cannot exist without form, and form is always spiritual. To be human is to have a form, what we call our body. Thus, our bodies are always spiritual.

What will make this truth matter to all of us? What will recall us to the very essence of being human?

At this point in time it is not enough to be non racist. We are called to be anti racist.

It is not enough to live on the earth. We must see ourselves as part of the earth.

It is not enough to have a body. We must love our body and speak from its essence. 

These are the bodies I honor today.