By Ren Koa

 

Audio read by author

2160

Ren~

Your body exists in grounded wholeness; you rest in multiplicity, both in space and time. Turn towards the permeability and dynamism of the group boundaries you speak of. Where your categories of community are troubled, we stretch and shift, reimagining and queering racial-ethnic identity. The social landscape you speak of is not fully mapped.

These social constructs of identity are not as clearly defined and concrete as you believe them to be; they were never static. We create a world that nourishes the both/and: words that happen to be, in and of themselves, of connection. This expansive and embodied sense of belonging and community holds, with care, those of “multiple” experience.

There is something transformative, mystical, and beautiful about that which is regarded as indeterminate; it triggers expansion. Rather than your body being stretched between entities, your body fills cultural spaces in 2020 that are yet to be mapped. And, they will be(!) Recognize and cultivate trust in this unfolding process.

What does this cultural space feel like? Your body evades and obscures social dissections not due to brokenness. Your body is connected to and located in identity constructions that embrace multiplicity, duality, and manifold boundaries of the self. Your body knows its location and is simply now creating the language that would make its location recognizable to others.

There are other ways for you to commune with your self, to feel into these intimately known and yet unmapped spaces. 

We are with you in this space and we hear you. 

In Belonging,

Descendants

 

Audio read by author

2020

Dear Descendants,

I’m writing from a time when racial, ethnic, and cultural identities serve as blueprints for finding an immediate sense of community in this world: how to exist within a group “we.” These blueprints are drawn from largely monoracial understandings, a colonial lens of assumed mutual exclusivity and separateness. As someone whose ethnic identity stretches across groups in East Asia, Polynesia, and beyond, I find myself perpetually placed in borderlands. My existence is relegated to the liminal spaces where these discrete group identities meet. The multiplicity of my body troubles conceptual community boundaries. 

My being feels noisy, 
my identity: unintegrated,
an amalgam I am only allowed to understand through discrete parts. 

My physicality feels split between designated entities,
Not existing as a distinct entity in and of itself.

Seeing my(?) body and my(?) being unsettle + destabilize 
cultural categorizations, assignments, and structures 
             births a self-image of paradox and ambiguity.

My location spills into an undefined void in cultural space, neither here nor there; I am too similar to “the other” for each community’s comfort. I am received at once as “not enough” and also “too much.”

The paradox I carry 
disrupts, cannot-be-contained, mathematically troublesome
Can a sum somehow render its parts invalid?
Sum < parts
             Sum = none of its parts?
My mixed-ness seems to trouble, disrupt, disconcert
            Clear, knowable categories drawn by social consensus 
To some, perhaps my body is a reminder of rapid globalization
Or of historic, current,
Tragedy evoking real sensations of loss–past, present, impending

I experience rejection/alienation from the same communities my parents and grandparents were born into; I name this simply to note it as a confusing or strange disorientation, and not as a claim that this should not be the case. While racial, ethnic, and cultural identity are such vital points of connection and found community for so many, I wonder how this sense of belonging transforms to hold those of us who exist “in between,” currently unclaimed and without a tangible cohort.

Yours,

Ren

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Ren Koa (23 years old) is a multiracial lesbian who grew up in Hawai’i. She is a community organizer, researcher, and psychology student interested in the psychophysiology of trauma and resilience. Some of her favorite adventures include the summer she backpacked the Arctic Circle, the winter she studied theology in India, and the summer she served in the Hawai’i Youth Conservation Corps. She is also a member of the fifth Earth Leadership Cohort.

by Sam Van Wetter

Audio read by author

Each spring since the unraveling the students at the school interview the Beforers and make a play about how it used to be. Wade directs it. He’s a young Beforer, relatively, and he once paid to get a degree in theater. He’s good at it. It’s a different play every year and he’s made it a tradition to reanimate some piece of Before junk on the stage. He’s made prop drones and a slot machine with real flashing lights. The kids write the play and they always give him a little part at the beginning, a soliloquy or an old-man dance number and he goes along willingly. He knows it’s funnier when he buys in, too.

The kids think the Before is hilarious. They giggle about overnight shipping and write scenes set in Zoom. They can’t get enough stories. Wade tires of telling them, though, and tells them to work with what they have. It’s amazing to him that they don’t yearn for the Before like he sometimes does. He knows this is an indication of their great fortune: that the excesses of his youth are not envied. At last they have all that they need.

   Every year while they’re researching a student will ask some variation of the same question: “What is most different between the Before and now?” Wade pretends to think, like he’s spontaneously crafting the answer even though he’s said it repeatedly and he thinks it most true. “We’re on time now,” he says. “We all show up when we say we will. Back then, you could be as late as you wanted. Everyone used excuses. Apologies didn’t mean anything. And sometimes,” Wade’s voice drops, “people wouldn’t show up at all. If you waited all day, you were the schmuck! Not them!” The kids act outraged or shocked or a little skeptical. They ask why, with alarm clocks and taxis and meteorology, anyone could possibly be late. Wade never has an explanation that satisfied them. The whole idea becomes funnier.
     

    Wade had long ago learned to stop thinking of the Before when he didn’t have to. He could tell the stories, answer questions, and then shut down memories. Otherwise he got sad, sort of nostalgic but tempered by a pragmatic conviction that things would never revert and it was better this way. The duration of his lifetime, as far as he could hope, would be safe and simple as it is now.

   The other question the kids always asked was: “What parts are better about living now?” Those answers are innumerable and easily found.

    Tonight is the play. Almost the whole town walks a little way from town center down what was once the highway. Infants and old Beforers ride in handcarts. Everyone is on time. Initially, the students had wanted to perform fifty miles out in the desert after Wade made the mistake of telling them about site-specific art. “That would be real Beforing,” they’d said. “A hundred miles for just one night.” Wade convinced them that it was too big an ask and they might not get an audience and, besides, they could find a good piece of slickrock nearby. He’d suggested a crook of the creek at the base of the mesa. They begrudgingly agreed, muttering about artistic visions unrealized. But Wade had been eying this spot for a few years now and it turned out to be the perfect plinth for the play. They’d created worlds of laughter here, rehearsing and anticipating, culminating in this one particular twilight. The sun drags down as disbelief suspends. It could be no other place but here.

     The audience is streamside on the grass, spread and lounging on blankets and low-slung chairs. The stage is on the other side of the creek, where the variegated blonde sandstone begins to steepen. Wade and the crew had set fires strategically about. With their glow and the last burnished daylight the set is pearly. Kak and Rey sit among instruments stage right, a fire shining in their faces. Rey pulls at their accordion broadly. At center stage hulks the automobile, this play’s chosen zombified junk. Its rubber tires are flaky and flat and most of the windows gone. In the flickering hypnosis of the theater, however, it looks almost drivable. The pulley system is invisible behind bushes and the track only noticeable if you know where to look. Wade does, but he will be watching the audience when the car’s moment comes. He wants to see their reaction as the engine splutters and the crew tugs from offstage, the car chugging across slickrock. He’s seen it enough. Watching the audience is always the real show.

     Jeene has sold all of her popcorn. Dust and Chake’s barrel of beer is divvied up, dispersed among individual mugs. Everyone is seated. Some are already beaming with delight. Mourning doves in the nearby cottonwood fall to silence. The actors are set and ready to play.

Wade knows that someday the Before will not be so important. It will become ancestral, no longer the living memory of anyone still alive. In a hundred years it will be pure story. He feels the detached hope that they will keep being told. Tonight he’s recreated visions from the Before. In the future they will become, finally, myth. The proscenium he borrowed from the stream will be but the stream again. The small fires won’t be stage lights. The sooty sandstone underneath only that: red rock and ashes. Wade looks at the car. He cannot see it as less than its memory yet. Someday, it will be made up entirely of imagination and component parts.

     The kids in the wings might remember this story. That, Wade thinks, is the way fables begin. He promises, briefly, to keep improving this place so that some might evade the great turning that the Beforers endured. May the children live easily. The most optimistic future possibilities require heavy, continued work.

     Wade leans back into the darkness. Kak’s fiddle joins Rey’s song. There’s nothing new under the sun. The turn of the world is inevitable. And yet, somehow, Wade’s sure he created a bit of it, made it better. In that moment, he knows it’s all he’s ever wanted to do. Just beyond the light of the fires more beauty is promised. There’s more light and more song and more food. We can always be improving. He thinks the word Curtain! and steps on to the stage.

---

 

Audio version of biography

 

Sam Van Wetter

Sam (26) is an organizer, outdoorsmyn and organic farmer living amid sandstone and sagebrush in South Central Utah. He is buoyed by ideals of community resiliency, food sovereignty, and his cows Winston and Pumpkin. A tadpole in a pothole recently asked him whether or not the end-summer monsoons will return. They were both disappointed with his answer: “We will know when it comes.”

by Cara Michelle Silverberg

Audio read by author

Cells are so smart. They remember. They carry the imprint of lived experience – mine, yours, ours.

So many people think that bodies are mechanical and unfeeling. It’s only nerve endings that feel pain or pleasure, they say. But you and I know that is not true. We know our bodies exist in a wholeness of self-experience that expresses and celebrates and armors and defends in a profoundly intelligent way. We know that wounding and resilience are deeply embodied experiences. We also know that we pass embodied knowledge on to future generations. “Cutting edge scientists” of your day called the biological dimension of intergenerational trauma transmission ‘epigenetics.’ I call it being human. I carry your stories in my bones, blood, and tissues – stories of wounding, as well as stories of great courage and strength.

You knew that the way your body was clutching to wounds – those inflicted during your own life and those passed on to you from your family and ancestors – were holding you back from showing up in the world the way you wanted to, from doing your part to tip the scales of justice in the Great Turning. You knew there was a relationship between your personal healing and collective transformation. You understood that the trauma responses patterned into your nervous system kept you in survival mode. You understood that the trauma responses patterned into collective systems (like organizations and communities you were part of) also kept those bodies in survival mode. You sought to shift those patterns into something more generative and celebratory.

You knew that bodies were hurting, and you worked so hard (maybe sometimes too hard) to heal that pain. The trauma of displacement, the trauma of sexual violence, the trauma of witnessing mass death, extinction, and suffering…you held that and so much more in your body. I remember how your back spasmed and depression swept over you when the intensity of intergenerational Jewish trauma was too intense for your body to contain. I remember how the rash on your right arch became inflamed when the toxicity of familial shame and silencing could not release itself through your skin. I remember how you got a bronchial infection when immigration policy threatened to tear a dear friendship apart.

In those times, the earth told you, “Lay down upon me. Give your pain back to me to turn into new life.”

The oceans told you, “Feel the waves wash over your heart. Soak your feet in saltwater with tea tree and calendula. Swim.”

The wind told you, “Allow new life to be breathed into you. Trust in the newness arriving.”

The fire told you, “That statuette wants to go through the fire three times. It will transform something in you. Tend your fires with humility.”

You followed those instructions. You held faith. You persisted with patience. You danced. You sang. You offered a flute song to the night birds. You rested when you needed to. Your journey required great endurance. You mourned for the dead and praised the living. You apprenticed to both pleasure and pain and emerged with ever fresh ways of perceiving the worlds around and within you. You went forth and shared what you could with others. The world’s soul healed a little bit through your work. I am grateful for your dedication. I hope you feel proud.

Thanks to your dedication to somatic transformation and intergenerational healing, I no longer have to carry those same wounds. The rage, grief, and pain of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers and so on do not plague me the way they plagued you. I danced freely right out of the womb. I was born into a world still feeling the pulsations of earthquake and drought that even seven generations cannot undo (earth time is much longer than human time). But even so, I was born into a community of people who remember the literal earth they came from and the teachings of their ancestors – teachings that continue to foster this Great Turning. Ancestral healing in your time was fringe, occult, “New Age.” Genealogy research was something retired old people did. Many people of your time, especially white people, were so disconnected from their cultures and places of origin that they scoffed at such explorations and heartfelt commitments to ancestral healing. Because you and people like you did that work despite the scoffers, many of us now are free from the clutch of hungry ghosts. We still mourn the dead and remember their stories and spirits, but we do so with an embodied spaciousness and liberated reverence that the collective body of your generation simply could not.

There is more joy in the world now. More caring. More compassion. We embody these qualities, instead of the fear and greed that drove so much of the conquest and industry eras.

We can feel water moving in our bodies – not only the energetic quality of water, but literally the undulating and flowing molecules that make up over 70% of our bodies. We can feel the marrow in our bones, dense and thick, moving inside the hollow of our limbs. We can discern one lung from another and support our own breath through consciously toning our organs. Knowing our bodies is not a superpower. It is a birthright.

While many people’s eyes glaze with confusion at the “abstract” concept of embodiment, you and I smile with the secret that our bodies are the most tangible things we know. Humans – particularly those who lost their cultural knowledge through trauma, displacement and assimilation – are finally remembering how to listen to the wisdom of their bodies. They are remembering that our bodies are earth body, and that our stories are connected. This remembering has been integral in the Great Turning. May this wisdom never be lost again.

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Experiential Practices

 

Practice Notes:

• As you do these exercises, if any sensations or feelings become too intense or feel unsafe, move away from those sensations and towards something that gives you a feeling of centeredness and resilience. This could be a memory (real or imagined) of someplace that brings you peace and calm, an imagining of something that brings you joy, or a person/being with whom you feel safe or protected.
• A few other tricks for finding a sense of grounding are: gently stomp feet back and forth to feel the earth under you, touch left hand to right knee and right hand to left knee in a back and forth pattern (10-20 touches on each side), hum or sing a song for 30 seconds, or count 5 things each that you can see/hear/smell/touch around you.

 An Open Sentences Practice:

Begin by centering yourself in your own body. Feel some part of your body connected to the earth, directly or through the floor. Without forcing anything, take a few conscious breaths, allowing your exhale to be longer than your inhale. What sensations (e.g. warmth, coolness, tension, ease, pressure, numbness, tingling, twitching, pulsating, no sensations at all) do you notice in your body? What feelings arise with these sensations? Can you be present with these sensations and feelings, without judging them?

With a practice partner, take turns with the following open sentences. Set a timer or act as timers for each other.

1. When I imagine (something that you feel gratitude for), I sense/observe in my body…
2. When I imagine (something painful), I sense/observe in my body…
3. When I imagine being alive in a life-sustaining society, I sense/observe in my body…
4. What needs to open or shift in my being in order to embody this life-sustaining society is…

A Movement Practice:

Find something alive, for example a tree, a stone, a star in the night sky, etc. Take several conscious breaths, allowing your exhale to be longer than your inhale. Notice this living thing. How does it move, breathe, exist? What sensations (e.g. warmth, coolness, tension, ease, pressure, numbness, tingling, twitching, pulsating) does it stir in your body? What feelings arise with these sensations? Can you be present with these sensations and feelings?

As you feel ready, find the shape of this object with your own body. Allow any and all feelings and sensations to inform your shape. Close your eyes if helpful, or keep sight of this being and the space around you. Give yourself as completely as you can to this shape. Then find another object and repeat the shaping process a second time (and as many times as you’d like after that).

When you find completion in shape making, notice what you are feeling and sensing in your body. How did it feel to make those shapes? Were they familiar to you? Unfamiliar? Desirable? Uncomfortable? Are you aware now of any sensations or default shapes in your own body that you were not aware of before? What does this tell you about your embodied patterns?

Feel if there is anything from this experiment that you want to take with you and remember for later. If so, symbolically hold what you want to remember in your hands, give it an intention, and then touch somewhere on your body where you want to store that feeling, that knowing, that remembering.

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A few resources for exploring the nexus of embodiment, justice, and healing:

 

• Curious about how racial identity and white supremacy shape our patterns of thought, behavior, and physical comportment? My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem offers both theory and practice in a practical and accessible format.
• Ever found that sitting meditation is triggering, or that paying close attention to your body makes you anxious or afraid? Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness by David Treleaven can really help to unpack why and empower you to explore mindfulness and embodiment without getting triggered.
• Curious to learn about how the body-brain holds trauma and how it can be repatterned and released? Check out The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van der Kolk.
• Want to learn to feel water in your cells and discern one lung from another? Check out Embodyoga with Patty Townsend: https://embodyogablog.com or her classes at https://www.yogacenteramherst.com. (She is one of the author’s teachers.)
• Want to explore the concepts of ‘collective bodies’ and the ‘trauma of whiteness?” Check out Tada Hozumi on Cultural Somatics: featured on Eric Garza’s podcast Healing Culture, #47: Healing Bodies and Healing Cultures: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-healing-culture-pod-30055116/episode/47-healing-bodies-and-healing-cultures-30750891/

 

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Audio version of biography

Cara Michelle Silverberg (35) is a somatic educator, camp director, writer, mover, and herbalist living in Nipmuc and Abenaki homelands (also called Western Massachusetts). She is enthusiastic about fostering community experiences that help people to explore and express themselves, their relationships with place, and their relationships with each other. Dedicated to trauma-informed experiential learning and wholistic leadership, Cara aims to co-create a more just, caring, courageous, and playful world. She designs and facilitates curricula for environmental/agricultural educational initiatives, land healing projects, and leadership development programs. Cara works in both Jewish and secular communities, with both youth and adults. Her favorite times of year are autumn, maple sugaring season, and the Jewish period of time called the Omer in early Spring. She was a member of the first Earth Leadership Cohort in 2014. You can check out some of her writing at www.onthefringesofplace.com.

by Gwyneth Jones

Audio read by author

My friends; I stand here before you as a woman born in the year 2140 in a small settlement on the island formerly known as Britain. I was chosen to travel to your time in order to warn you of the great suffering and disaster that lies ahead in the hope that you may be able to avert at least some of the worst effects of it.

Our oral traditions tell of your time; among the greed and chaos and violence, there were a handful of people who called themselves Shambhala warriors, Bodhisattvas, or eco-warriors.  We honour the sacrifices that they made in trying to defend life on earth, but their efforts were not enough. The majority of people remained ignorant, silent, and clung to their old Ideas.

I know that this is not what you want to hear, but around a hundred years before I was born, the island on which I live suffered a great series of disasters. The Great Pandemic had already wreaked havoc on the population, on their systems, and on general morale. Then the floods came, and it didn’t take people too long to realise that their leaders had no intention of coming to the rescue. They disappeared in their private helicopters, seeking higher ground while the majority of the population were left to fend for themselves.

My great-grandparents told of a time of great violence and bloodshed, as people fought over food, clean water, and dry land. In the absence of real leadership, the former titles and systems that had been in place for so long crumbled into obscurity and small bands and tribes started to form.

You want me to tell you that everything was OK; that somebody figured out an ingenious way to desalinate the seawater that flooded our shores. That some young genius came up with a way to turn the depleted and cracked soil into a source of nourishment and food for everyone, or that our collective will and love for the earth was enough to heal the pain in all of our hearts – the unresolved wound that cried to us “our grandparents forsook us; they didn’t care about us at all”.

When you grow up on stories of selfish, callous ancestors who valued their own pleasures above the lives of their descendants, it hardens the heart and causes its own type of apathy and callousness. My grandparents saw things, experienced things, even did things that would haunt the dreams of even the hardiest warrior – all for the sake of bringing food and clean water to their own tribes.

But what about peace, you ask? Yes, we eventually came to peace. We eventually worked out what had gone wrong, and it is for this reason that I come to speak to you today. But do not think that the fact that we are at peace now means that you can relax, safe in the knowledge that everything works out OK in the end. We are still heading into extinction.

We, as humanity, are barely surviving in pockets around the globe – some of us in communication with each other, but we suspect there are far more of us who are unable to find a way to connect. Most of the waters are still poisoned, most species extinct, and there is still disease, famine, and weather so unpredictable that it is almost impossible for most people to rely on crops. We live more akin to the hunter-gatherers that roamed the earth thousands of years ago.

But yes, there is peace. Some of our elders tell us that this peace came about because of the Great Dream. It was a moment, they tell us, when the majority of the remaining humans received a simultaneous message from the Earth that filled their hearts with love and told them to lay down their weapons. But the more cynical of us, the younger of us who were not alive when this happened, suspect that the fighting stopped because everyone was too malnourished to pick up a weapon. We also have no idea what the majority of the globe is doing; we are able to communicate with parts of the world using relics from your time powered by the Sun, but it is nothing like the tsunami of information that you are familiar with in your time.

But what of the Great Turning, you ask? We do not remember it this way in our oral tradition. There is only the Great Collapse. But I have been given the magnificent task of guiding you in how you might steer your ship differently, so I will tell you where we went so wrong.

The main problem of the 21st century was not fossil fuels or toxic waste or overfishing, but willful ignorance.  Your people turn off their hearts and minds to what they know is happening around the world; from what is happening to your oceans, to what is happening between your neighbours. From what is happening in the farms that collect beans for your coffee, to what is happening to the most vulnerable members of your own community.

We are told that people used to sit and beg for scraps of food on your streets, while others adorned in jewels and expensive fabrics would walk by, avoiding their eyes. It is not that you do not know what is happening, or that you do not understand the effects of climate change, poverty, discrimination, or mass species extinction. Your world is drowning in facts, figures, and statistics – the problem is that you cannot bear to look at those facts. You cannot bear to look at the beggar on your street in his eyes, because you fear the pain that it will strike inside your heart.

Is it true that your society seeks pleasure, bliss and happiness in a way that is almost manic and desperate? That is your willful ignorance. Happiness is not a destination; it is a fleeting state of mind that we must welcome, but trying to live in constant bliss is madness. Is it true that those of you who allow the pain and suffering into your hearts were labelled as defective, and sent to doctors or given medicines to try alleviating the visions? Those are your prophets and sages. Nurture them, listen to them, care for them and give them the space to train their gifts. These people are valued within my community, because they sense things that others can’t and are vital in planning our next steps.

Your world is upside down. You venerate your insane and lock away the only ones who truly see things as they are. Your leaders are tyrants; they hoard wealth and resources for themselves while living in complete disconnection with the land and with their own hearts. We cannot understand how you allowed them to rape the earth for the fleeting benefit of a few; did they do it in secret? Did they distract you? Did they keep you so poor that you had no time or means to fight back? Or was it just your willful ignorance?

But opening your hearts to pain and fear is not enough. You need to open your minds, too. The Creator gave you a brain capable of producing miracles, and yet you fail to see that without electricity, your nuclear facilities will fail and pour toxic waste into the oceans and waters. You fail to consider the long-term impact of your actions, or to ask yourselves what will happen to the thousands of satellites in your sky when the systems that tell them where to go finally fail. When we hear of the amazing technology that was available in your time, we can only ask ourselves – was this truly a lack of intelligence on your behalf, or was it willful ignorance?

My friends, I hope you will not turn away from my words with that same willful ignorance that destroyed the planet. If my words sound harsh, then that is precisely a part of the problem – your world has trained you to tune out things that cause you discomfort, and to seek only the warm embrace of praise and validation.

When you open your heart to the earth’s pain, you will receive far more than you expected. You will receive the full blessings of living with an open heart; an existence far more colourful and deeper than you can imagine. To risk heartbreak is also to live fully, and it is only if you allow yourselves to live with open minds and hearts, rather than trying to avoid the discomfort, that you will have any hope of altering the course of history.

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Audio version of biography

Gwyneth Jones (33) grew up in the magical lands of North Wales, although she currently lives in Prague, Czech Republic. She considers herself a hippie, science nerd, amateur gardener, eco-activist, Positive Psychology and Emotional Intelligence Coach, writer, Work That Reconnects facilitator, host of The Way We Connect podcast, and founder of the Reconnection Revolution group. Gwyneth hopes that we can transition away from the industrial growth society that is destroying our planet and towards a compassionate and sustainable world, but only if we reconnect deeply with ourselves, each other and Nature. (www.gwynethjones.coach)