The second  in a two part interview with Carl Anthony (CA) and Paloma Pavel, Ph.D. (PP); this part features Dr. Pavel. 

M. Paloma Pavel, PhD, is an educator, ecopsychologist, and international consultant, President and Founder of Earth House Center, an environmental and social justice learning center in Oakland, CA,  and co-founder of the Breakthrough Communities Project.

Interviewed by Molly Brown (MB)

MB: Welcome, Paloma.

PP: It’s an honor to be here. You and I bring a strong history of respecting and supporting each other’s work. Psychosynthesis work in general has been a robust system that you and I took to places where people had not seen it before.

MB: You have been listening to my conversation with Carl.  Would you expand on how you see your work with Breakthrough Communities in relation to the Work That Reconnects?

PP: When I think about Deep Time and wonder what we can contribute from our body of work, I think about a man at San Quentin who feels connected to the story of the universe in Deep Time; he feels his presence connected to the story of the universe. He comes not from an identity of the mistake he may have made in the last few years, or even from the feeling of being controlled by the framing of colonization and racism in America since 1492, but feels connected to all of life and its evolutionary spirit.

This sense that all of us are being called to a Great Turning is extremely exciting, knowing in your bones that your identity from the start is made from the stars. We have been touched and moved by young people who realize that their reality not defined by just by West Oakland, the assaults from the port, or the diesel emissions. They sense that they actually belong to this universe; their world can expand. What I love about the Work That Reconnects, especially how Joanna has carried it into the world, is getting people up and engaged in social change in the community, listening even beyond our comfort zone. The focus is not just where you are meditating but whether your cushion is sitting on railroad tracks transporting ammunitions and the nuclear waste.

The Work That Reconnects gives us a bigger identity. The limitations, struggles, or hurdles are not disavowed but we are not exclusively defined or confined by them. We are excited that it offers a sense of time and identity that includes our particular challenges and redefines them as assets. In our social movement, we have all of time to draw on and we have all the innovative possibilities of life. This we have learned and so feel a deep gratitude for the Work That Reconnects .

The Work That Reconnects redefines power, gives us the understanding that our power lies in our ability to connect, to open like nerves in a neural net to more information, not less.

In fact, vulnerable communities often have more information. When we play the “power shuffle” game, where we take one step forward or one step back based on a sense of advantages, the people who are ahead don’t see the people behind them. The ones in the back, the vulnerable communities, know the whole of the social situation because they had to know it in order to survive and make it through. The Work That Reconnects’s redefinition of power has been an invaluable tool.

MB: Joanna talks about the idea of power over versus power with.

PP:  Yes. Comparing the power of billiard balls that hit against each other versus the power of opening to transmit larger bodies of information and knowledge. Communities where people must depend on each other have not had the benefit of, for example, being in a gated community. Although this is usually considered a privilege, the gated community has also created armor, protection, lack of information, ignorance, and isolation. As we rediscover the power of the neural net in Deep Time and the Work That Reconnects, we open to limbs in our body that we hadn’t been able to use, cut off from each other by spatial apartheid and racism. We are reclaiming the whole body of our society as people from different communities re-connect.  There is a mutual co-arising. The transformation is thrilling: across boundaries, mutual benefit co-arises across race and class and geography.  We wrote something about this in Carl’s book The Earth, the City,  and the Hidden Narrative of Race (2017), in Breakthrough Communities (2009), and in the new book, Climate Justice (2018). People are transformed in this work. Across generations, too.

The youth are so informed about sustainability and climate processes. They are learning to be co-investigators, such as how to take air samples when there is a flare-up near the refinery. Middle-schoolers gather evidence in their bucket brigades that is admissible in court. People do water testing and become citizen scientists.  Learning these tools is happening in our front-line communities and schools. This is very aligned with the Work That Reconnects.

MB: It makes me very excited to think about joining Work That Reconnects people with the work you are in doing in San Quentin and Richmond and other places. 

PP: Yes! In any metropolitan region, spatial apartheid has separated us. As we reclaim the larger body, Gaia, and understand that, just like in the Council of All Beings, we reach across all species identification, so we move across cultural and racial identification.

There are stories that people write in our work where Carl talks about our journeys to here. We ask people to do mapping where they chart their journey to here and see what it took to be on this soil at this time. We all bring something to take care of Earth in sustainable ways going forward. Everyone has a story; everyone has something to bring.

Another big part of the Work That Reconnects is systems and feedback loops. When we are not hearing from whole communities, when we have sacrifice zones, that is where parts of our body is going dead, where we are losing vital information that we need to make intelligence choices. Some people refer to the Titanic, where people in the hold had information about the glaciers that could have helped the whole if they could have gotten to the deck in time. It is like that. Vital resources and assets are in the communities, identified as problems but are actually the solution.

What does it mean to embrace to the whole system to open channels of information that makes us all more intelligent? It is amazing to see all the fear and energy that cuts us off from solutions. As we become more resilient and more sustainable, living by the principles of living systems, we see the light pouring back into our communities, not being afraid of each other, and being allies.

CA: You, Paloma, are bilingual in this, both WTR and the work we do. I wonder how many people are like that.  What if there were a group of even 20 people who have had deep experiences in both WTR and other domains? You are a leader, people of color need that spark, and your experience captures that. It would be wonderful to see that in broad daylight.

MB: Makes me regret to live so far away! Our two organizations together could do amazing work.

PP: These have been the root traditions that have sourced what for me has been the bodies of most wisdom in our time: the work I have had the privilege to do thanks to Joanna, you, all my brothers and sisters, and all the beyond-human beings in the Work That Reconnects, plus working with Karl on the ground, building racial justice, environmental and climate justice, where we put it into action.

We have a diagram that integrates deep time with the past and goes into the emergent future like a bowtie with a nexus in the middle, a place of grace, an exploding moment of now, when we get these intersections unleashing, not just the ideas but also the heart and the moving into action. When these things are aligned and starting to work in the now, when the ancestors are reaching out and trying to link with us, and also to the emergent, the future beings.

We are excited about the radical imagination of inventing our next future in a way that can work for all; we see this starting to happen on the ground, the more that we can amplify this and tell these stories. And share this: this is the emergent future that we need to align with.

MB: It can’t work for everyone if we don’t include everyone in the process of creation and imagination.

PP: We say in our community organizing work – if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.

For communities of color, this means preparing and getting yourself in a position to not just protest but to govern, to be leaders and decision-makers, and to help provide solutions for all society and expand spaces when we have them to include representation from all community.

As white allies, our job is to ask others to the table, to start with the DNA that is right, a full representation.  We need to ask ourselves, who should be at the table, who is missing? Be willing to shift to make it more inclusive, whether it is a panel, a group going to talk to a legislator, we must make sure it is representative. We all benefit when that happens.

We have struggled to share in a cross-gender, cross-racial way this kind of shared leadership. Thank you for including both our voices. I would like for you to hear more voices, the intergenerational voices, the literal rising waters, and more stories from the front lines.

CA: Sounds terrific!

MB: I am really grateful to both of you. Thank you!

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Paloma Pavel, PhD,is an educator, ecopsychologist, and international consultant whose work focuses on 1) the transformation of human consciousness and 2) large systems change to create a more just, healthy and sustainable world for all. She is President and Founder of Earth House Center, an environmental and social justice learning center in Oakland, CA, co-founder of the Breakthrough Communities Project, and former Director of Strategic Communications for the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative at the Ford Foundation. The success of her work at Ford is documented in her nationally acclaimed book Breakthrough Communities: Sustainability and Justice in the Next American Metropolis, (MIT press ) and in her PBS documentary series The New Metropolis. Dr. Pavel’s graduate studies include the London School of Economics and Harvard University. Her spiritual roots and contemplative practice are drawn from Eastern and western wisdom traditions .

She has circled the earth as the first North American faculty with the Peace Boat, and her book Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty catalyzed a national movement, with the 20th Anniversary edition winning “Peacemaker of the Year” award; Japanese translation by Shuntaro Tanikawa.  Her most recent book is “Climate Justice: Frontline Stories from Groundbreaking Coalitions in California” (2017).