Chris Zydel is a gift to the entire planet.  She is the Grand High Priestess of Creative Juices Arts,  an expressive arts maestra, an astrology wizard, a fountain of love, wisdom and bawdiness and one of my favourite people.    Chris has been a soul sister since i connected with her online and then in person... it was like a homecoming meeting with her.

In these times of darkness she is not the flimsy "just turn to the light" kind of heroine but a gutsy truth-teller who is committed to wholeness, realness and the truth of what love and being human is all about.  

How better then to help me usher in my new work Facing the Minotaur but to chat with Chris in her home in San Francisco while i sat in my bed in Whangarei?  

Join us for this loving chat about shadow <3

Photo by Marie-Louise Myburgh.

 wh The other day I was driving back home after a meeting that was both sweet and heart-wrenching.  I was full of emotions and trying to listen to what was stirring in my heart, that i might discern just what was mine and what was not, just where i wanted to head and what i needed to be alert to.  I was trying to listen to the quiet voice inside me that knows but that is so often lost in the clamour of what i am seeing and dealing with that I miss it's instruction.

Without warning, from the left hand side of the road came a Kotare or Kingfisher and it flew straight into the car.  I heard the thud as it hit and looked to see it tumble, lifeless, into the middle of the road.  

When it was safe to do so i turned around and went back to it, stopped and got out to retrieve it from the road. If it had stayed there it would have got ground into the tarseal and i could take it home and bury it with kindness instead, it was the least i could do.

Glorious in its shimmers of blue and green, buttery gold and cream the limp little bird fitted easily into my hand, its black eyes wide open, it seemed so recently dead that life had not left it.

I gently placed it on my lap and covered it with a soft cloth bag which was in the front seat and i said a little prayer to say sorry. I drove off, turning off the radio to make it quiet and soft in the car. With my hand gently on the bird i could feel its warmth and suppleness and after a few minutes was amazed to feel it begin to wriggle a little.

It was still alive.  I thought it must have been very damaged by the impact and although i would usually take it to the amazing Bird Recovery Centre this time i decided to take it to a quiet area close by with trees and ready supplies of water.  It wouldn't be too far from its territory if it by some miracle recovered.

I talked gently to the bird until i got to the safe spot and carried it bag and all out to some shade under big totara trees.  I quietly removed the bag from its head and propped it up, rearranging its wings and smoothing its feathers.  I didn't want to stress it anymore so walked away wishing it well and headed to town to pick up my girl.

When i told Isla she was happy to go and check so half an hour after dropping it off i stopped the car and made my way back to the totara.  There was the bag but no Kotare.  The bird had recovered enough to fly away.

The blessing of this in the midst of this tumultuous time made me rapturous and because i believe that "life is oracular" to quote Fabeku Fantumise , I began to mine this gift of life for messages.  

Although hit, it might not be the end.
Moving away from imminent danger gives us a chance.
Rest and waiting can be powerful medicine.

I also understand the Kotare is the holder of the quality of vigilance in the Wisdom of the Four Winds cards which i highly recommend.  

Some of us are made with hearts that are full of hope.

They are able to return again to barren spaces with seeds and watering can, trusting that of course there can be new growth, of course there will be spring.

Those hearts are precious and to be emboldened by a living and hopeful heart is one of the greatest gifts of my life.

A wise woman i know recently said that without hope there would be no life, no reason for life.  We need to, in our darkest moments have a sense of hope that things will get better.  Knowing the cycle of life (and to extend the garden metaphor) there is a season of burgeoning growth and fruiting and there is a season of decay.  When we are in decay we must trust in the fruiting that will follow.

I am also coming to see how there is a special brand of hope that my Pollyanna tendencies were not prepared for.  I have labelled that toxic hope.

Toxic hope is the kind of hope that keeps you standing in shit with your forehead bloodied from banging on the same wall over and over again, hoping that you'll break through to the clean clothes, shower and soft bed you trust is on the other side.

Toxic hope keeps you in a situation, keeps you manipulating the truth in your own mind, so that you will be able to turn up again to something that is hurting so badly, in the hope that this time it will change, or in three more times it will change or next year or....

Toxic hope is the kind of hope that drains your tank and asks you for more, that does not nourish anything inside you to flourish but only keeps that weedy hope alive to the detriment of most of the other things in your garden.

Toxic hope changes the soil conditions of your life so little else will grow inside you.

Toxic hope is turning up to a nuclear waste ground and expecting to grow some veges that will feed your family.

How do you recognise it?  You are diminished by your hope.  You are kept in a situation that takes and takes and takes and yet you make no discernible progress.  You are shifting your own goalposts for what you would like your life to be.

How do you change it? You have to change yourself.  Toxic hope is your issue.  The person/situation/problem/relationship etc etc you are hoping to change will either do so or not.  You cannot hold them accountable for what you hope. Yep, it's sucky and hard and it is your work alone. You have to change your boundaries.  You have to change your hope so that you put it in the light. You have to look honestly (not through your toxic hope goggles) and carefully at just what is in front of you.

If you are hoping for a better relationship for example, saying "I hope we can resolve this.  Are you willing to walk with me to take the next step and sort this out?"  is one step.  The next and crucial step is paying attention to the answer.  You will either get a yes or a no.  Your only way of rooting out toxic hope is to listen very carefully and act accordingly.  If they give you a yes and act on it you are golden.  If they give you a no then you have to act on it and you are golden (eventually).  If they give you a yes and do not act on it then you actually got a no and you have to act on it (and again you are golden, eventually).

How do you recover from it? When you see you have had toxic hope the first thing you might want to do is be kind to yourself. Toxic hope doesn't mean you have anything to be ashamed of or to be harsh with yourself about, in fact the richer your self care the less likely toxic hope is to reroot in your heart.  If you shame your lovely self you only make yourself more likely to turn to toxic hope when things get sticky the next time. My theory on this is if we are mean to ourselves we often hope (toxically) that someone else will love us more/better/deeper than we can love ourselves.  If we love ourselves generously that need to have someone else apply the love balm is not there. We can meet them replete and ready to give honestly and kindly. To turn away from a situation you have held in toxic hope requires an immense amount of patience with yourself - it's a deep groove (to quote Fabeku Fantumise) and you have a lot of digging to fill it back in.  Turn your capacity to hope onto something new. I hope, for example after my recent bout of toxic hope, to be present for rich and fulfilling friendships.  I am taking steps to hope that i can learn the skills, meet the people, practise the actions that will make this happen.

Toxic hope can kill people, it certainly maims hearts every day.  Please don't let it be you <3

If you have any experience with toxic hope i'd love to hear about it
with love
​j

ps if you would like kick start to self care that isn't about mani-pedis and shopping sprees you can try one of these.

Grief is something so personal i hesitate to write about mine.  It involves other people and i don't have their permission to write their story.  

And yet grief is also universal.  As much as our culture encourages us to run from grief, even going so far as to turn away from ageing women who are a reminder of the scythe of time swiping closer each day to the youth-is-all-there-is-that's-worth-aspiring to  myth.  Each of us are touched by grief.  Each of us shuffle a little closer to the end of the gang plank with each passing day.

This man, with his gentle hands and soft eyes was my Dad.  He died 5 weeks ago tomorrow and i am acquainted with grief the way we all secretly wish to avoid but can't.  Those we love will die.  There is nothing else really that we are promised.

We might feel like we are promised all kinds of other things - my big three are that if you try hard enough love will last forever, things are fair, and love will prevail.

Grief has shifted the first two of those to the not so true pile.  I have learned over the last 6 months that no matter how hard you try love may not last. I was taught years ago by a fierce and generous old woman that "Life is not fair my girl, no one ever promised that and the sooner you let go of that idea the better off you'll be."  She was right and yet i seemed to have a bulb of hope that sprouted after each winter in my heart , a flower that held fairness and hope in it's sepals.

I wanted so much, as i realised that Dad would die soon, to be able to love him Home.  To be able to put aside all of the detritus that had gathered in our path and return to the love that had me trust him so deeply. It was an imperative to me that i do that.  I had no map.  i had no idea what that would mean but i had to be with him in support as he found his way back.

It meant asking my separated husband to come back, leave his life and take over for an unspecified time.  It meant asking my girls to manage without me.  It meant being in a hospital, being with my birth family and all of the confusing and often difficult things that entailed.  But none of that seemed to matter as much as seeing Dad Home.  i had to trust my heart's urgency around this and do it.  I could have listened to the voices outside of myself and just gone and visit but my heart's insistence was strong. It was my Dad and it was all that really mattered.

Dad's circumstances had meant we hadn't been available to each other much over the last couple of years.  That was tough for both of us and i had begun grieving him long before, when the man i loved was no longer really "there".  But none of that mattered.

My family's circumstance meant that this time was hard on everyone in different ways.  That was tough but not in a way that really mattered.

So i continued to grieve while i turned up.  With my brothers we made a map of what we needed to do, how we needed to be, what worked.  We tended to Dad and to each other with kindness and care in a way that melted so much away.

I can't explain how it felt to be in that funny little room, it not really mattering if it was night or day.  Not really mattering if we washed or ate or slept.  I can't tell you all the things that happened in that liminal space but i can tell you what rose up and what sustained us was love.

So much love in fact that i think Dad stayed around a lot longer than the grim reaper wanted him to... he was bathing in that love, soaking it up.  Too bad if the dude with the scythe was tapping his toes and looking at his watch, Dad received and received and received.

I read somewhere that a Buddhist teaching says that we take our state of mind with us when we go and i believe that those last few days Dad had here in this body, meant that he went on with love. Replete with Love, his own and ours and i can't tell you what that means to me this side of it all.

And that brings me to the regret piece,  So often we regret what we don't do.  I wanted to write this because i have been aware that had i carried any regret about what happened for Dad, this grief would be intolerable.  

The gift of turning up for him full bore, nothing held back, in my true loving power has gifted me a clean grief.  Hell yes i miss him.  I wish i could hear him say "Love you" and feel the truth in those words one last time.  But i can turn to him and know he experienced our love for him clean and true and that regret-less state holds me up.

I know i am lucky to have had the chance to farewell him that way but it makes me think about the other griefs i have.  Things that are hard to carry and hard to lose.  If i can tend to myself and my life without regret i know, from my experience with Dad that anything that comes on the other side of that will be cleaner and easier to carry.  

I want to continue to live like that.  To love clean.  To turn up true.  To be alive to what my heart tells me and to act on that faithfully.  That regret-less life is not about being reckless but rather gifting myself the clean river of love that moves through me without the silt of "i should have.." that has clogged my heart for so long.

I miss you Dad and i don't regret a minute of loving you.

Once Upon a Time i went to see a Naturopath.  This man was calm and used a very soft voice with long pauses between his sentences.  He sat, still and considered, in his chair.  He moved slowly when he wrote or reached out to show me something.

I don't know what his prescription was or what i even went to him about but i do remember something he said

"If you do this, this and this, you will be calm like me."

That sat badly with me for reasons the younger me couldn't really articulate.

I think about it now in the light of so much i see on the internet being about being peaceful and forgiving and Marie Kondo-ing not only the interior of our drawers but our lives with a minimalist broom sweeping all the fuzzy and unfinished things out of the way.

I think about it as i tend to my soul and her shadow and her magnificence and i want to go back to that man in that room in Hamilton and say;

"But i don't want to be like you.  I want to be like me.  I want to be wonky and scattered sometimes, i want to be confused and worried sometimes, i want to be exuberant and loud other times.  i want to be me."

i have been learning so much about the subtle pressure applied to us to be something other than what we are as a form of control from the remarkable Kelly Diels,  www.facebook.com/kellydiels, particularly in her facebook group  "How to sell to women without selling them out."   

Kelly talks about Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand (or FLEB for short) that encourages us to aspire to white, thin, cis-gender, heteronormative, ableist tropes without our conscious participation.  It is a patriarchal bind that women seem to dive into (me included ) without a second thought.  I mean we all want success and to be seen as valuable, to be desired and seen as worthy right?  Through Kelly i am learning about how very narrow the definition of that is.  How very dangerous it is to aspire to be a thin white hetero ablebodied woman at all costs, about the carnage and the division that creates in the hearts of good humans.  I am waking up to the truth that i am outside that gate and that to aspire to that is to pour my energy down the bloody drain.  I am not every going to be all of those things anymore in one acceptable package, ever.
I am other than that.  And i realise now that doesn't make me wrong.  It makes me real.

I want everyone in the world who cares about their inner life to be able to be accepting of who they are in all their wonky glory. No comparison or measuring or judging themselves based on cultural paradigms that have little to do with them.  Look, i am sure Buddha was a stand up guy but i don't live hundreds of years ago in Asia, i grew up in Kamo in a moderately dysfunctional family and am making my way the best i can. i am not willing to perpetuate a system that is designed to divide us as humans, make us comply and shrink in order to fit.  

No siree. 
​
I don't want to be like anyone else.  I don't want anyone else to be anything other than what and who they are.  When that is clean we get to connect more fully and more richly.  When we own who we are we are free.

And that, Mr Naturopath, is fine by me.

These words are like an arrow to my heart.

How many times have i withheld a tenderness due to tiredness or inattention or hurt of my own.
How many times will i be able to reach into my heart and find these tendernesses from now until the end of my time here?  
Who knows how many chances i will get.

I began to berate myself at my meagreness and my incapacity.  The chaos in my heart at the moment has had me counting off the withheld tendernesses like a rosary of regret.  

But then i realised i was withholding a tenderness from myself.  

My tenderness for once needs to reside with me.  To not turn on my heart with the big "you should" stick and begin the familiar whacking that has not just been mine but i suspect is my mothers and her mothers and shaped by the hand of women through time and space.  My tenderness needs to rise like a soft blanket over my tender and bruised heart and say some thing like;

"Darling.  That hurts doesn't it.  Be kind treasure-girl.  There is no need to rush to make it better for them.  First tend to yourself and then reach out.  You will be kinder and stronger and more able to be generous if you do.  It's ok darling.  Take a breather."

And you know what, if i do there is a whole lot more tenderness to go around.  By being attentive to my own suffering i am less likely to cause suffering.  

I can see much of my suffering is caused by the lack of tenderness in my life.  That i am so busy giving in the hope that the equation will balance out one day.  I can be the one who is tender to myself.

The character in this very beautiful short story was berating herself and yet i am using that medicine like a poultice to draw out the splinter that longing for tenderness has left in my heart and i am using the balm of that tenderness back on myself. Tenderness is my Medicine.  

I have come to see that withholding of tenderness, not automatically pouring it out on others, but to first turn it on myself, is the permission to grow tenderness from within that i have always desired.  And denied myself in the hopes that someone will see what a good and giving girl i am.

I am a good and giving girl in my own eyes and that revolutionary thought is growing the wise and strong woman in me like a tap root in loam.

This beautiful woman died with her family and friends all around her and so much left that she wanted to do.  I was scared to be there even though i had seen death before.  I loved her and was scared to face her not being there.  Scared to support her family in their immense grief.  Vicki's death was scary and it was one of the most beautiful events i have witnessed. It has been a gift to me in so many ways; ways that continue to ripple out years later.  

Last week, thinking about Vicki, we hosted a movie here called Zen and the Art of Dying. It reaffirmed for me the possibility of a beautiful life making death.  Helped me to turn my gaze a little closer to lady death and nod to her there, some way off in my future.  Seeing her presence helps make me live a little deeper and it made me reflect on the gifts of knowing her proximity.

When we live in and comply with an overculture which teaches us that death is a distasteful something best avoided in both experience and conversation.  When it is someone else's job to tend to the dying, and their bodies and the way they are farewelled, we cheat ourselves out of the truth that to live is also, inevitably to die.

​

We all kind of doff our caps to death, knowing she is there, but we'd cross the street and get busy with our phones/work/achievements etc. etc. rather than look her in the eye.

There are, i think, many losses associated with this avoidance of death.  

We lose the focus that a dead-line (see what i did there?) to our life provides. Our lack of death knowledge kind of numbs us or anaesthetises us to the finite nature of things. But if we know, not just intellectually but down into our guts; body and soul, that we have limited time we allow that to galvanise us into our truth and our desires and we are more likely to step up and LIVE.  

We LIVE when we know we are going to, one day, die. We don't fritter our time away.  We don't waste our time.  We cherish our existence.

As individuals there is something about death that in many cases, melts away that which is not linked to beauty and Love and purpose.  We get real.  Shit gets real.

On a cultural level i think there is an echo of that anaesthetising which our patriarchal overculture puts to use.

​

When we don't have the exit firmly on our roadmap to life we act as if our actions have no consequences.   Like we can just keep going and see what happens.

When we don't hold death and endings as an immutable truth, we act as if we can take what we want, act as we see fit from our tiny perspective, do what we like.  There is something about the narcissistic view of "it's all about what i want that the child- like hands over my eyes i can't see death therefore it doesn't exist, nah nah nee nah nah" thinking that our culture perpetuates that damns us and our future to suffering, particularly when it comes to the environment.

Need water to irrigate crops that weren't meant to grow where you are? - Then drain the river.

Need land to run a potentially dangerous pipeline through? - Take it.
But what if that pipeline breaks or leaks and poisons the water source?  - This means jobs and infrastructure and support industry and... you can't stand in the way of progress, this is subversive behaviour.  Call in armed guards.

The rhetoric around industry and what we do to our planet as a result of this relentless take take take like there is no consequence (ie no possibility of death) is ubiquitous.  That greed and relentlessness is one face of not acknowledging that everything is finite.  That death exists.  When we know that death exists we accede that there are limits.

When we tend to the death of those we care about; get in there and have the hard conversations, sit vigil, watch the leaving, when we know the truth about a life extinguished we can no longer ignore the vast all encompassing truth of death.  

When you know and respect the immensity of death you know endings and how they are intrinsically linked to life. When you know death you know that you have not only the responsibility to live but some hand in where death comes.

When you face life knowing death can be drawn closer by your actions you begin to count the cost and the benefits of your actions.

As humans we have created needless death.  My rivers are unswimmable because of the consequence of deforestation, farming practises and poor guardianship of the health of the waterways.  Many species are extinct on my little part of the planet because of the actions of humans.  The talk of extinction can sometimes seem hypothetical (maybe because the immensity of that terrifies my tiny brain) but knowing that i can't healthily take my children to the local swimming hole is a sorrow for me it's a travesty and ... well, shit is getting real. Knowing Lions and Tigers and elephant and rhino are endangered in my lifetime is deeply sobering.

I have seen first hand the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef .  I have seen the utter destruction of the habitat of the Orangutan and countless other creatures in Sarawak

Our death making culture of greed and production is possible because we ignore the presence of death.  

It is like we have, in our addiction to the consumption/production/consumption cycle lost all awareness of the life/death/life cycle and in our addiction to that, we become blind to the death making nature of our process.

Day after day our culture takes actions that are like the equivalent of chain-smoking cigarettes laced with lead and we just don't seem to be able to stop.

When we as individuals take in the truth of death and live cognisant of that truth we live in the knowledge of the impact of our actions.  We are no longer able to deny the impact of our actions and we understand how each action either contributes to bringing death closer or keeping death in balance with life.  When we acknowledge that death is part of the equation not just for us as individuals but for our species and those other creatures whose lives are at our mercy, maybe then we will not act as if life and everything is an infinite resource.  

Because the truth is that life is not a resource to be mined but a dance towards decay and death.  We are partnered not just by this body, as miraculous as it is, but by our family, friends, antecedents and this beautiful planet.  We are, when lady death is swirling her skirts alongside us guiding and supporting our choices, able to know that we can act in life affirming ways.  And that is a gift.  

I hope in my lifetime we learn to open it wisely.

Yesterday i looked at the noticeboard at the supermarket.  I don't do that often but amoungst the cars and lawnmowers for sale i saw this.

It broke my heart.  

his kind of lonely sorrow is the thing that makes people desperate and angry and creates the kind of violence and crime that our western world seems to be particularly good at squeezing out of the lives of people who live enclosed by poverty and hopelessness.

​

Dear person looking for a trustworthy family,

Look into my eyes, right now, as i am holding you by the shoulders.

Ok, so let me raise your chin,
gently,
with my crooked finger.

There.

look at me, at my eyes that have seen some things and cried a lot.
look at me, imperfect, scared, lonely and brave just like you.

I know you are hurting.
I don't know why or how or who or when 
but i know you are hurting and you have every right to hurt.

Your family are untrustworthy.
That is the kind of injury that marks a heart forever.

I know that i know that you were worth more than that.
i know that they hurt you with such consequences that you are reeling

i know that it took courage to write your note.

look at me

I am no different.
All of these people walking past us with their busy lives and their trolleys either too full or not full enough,
the people with others, the people on their own
none of them are any different.

Each and every one of us have been hurt.
That is not to deny your pain 
oh no.
what you endured is something you deserve to be heard on and held while you heal from.
Nothing should ever diminish what you suffered

And know this too.  
You are not the only one.

We all hurt.
Each of us.

Some of us are just not wise enough or smart enough to call out in our pain and ask for help.
You were.
Some of us believe the bullshit that we should put up with it or that we have to make peace with it or worse and worse that we deserve it.

But you, 
wise and tender heart
You chose to ask for help and so i want you to feel me looking into your eyes and see the truth,

No one is unworthy of love
We might be injured broken confused suffering, wobbly, needy, angry, lonely, reactive, abrasive, scared shitless and a million other things that we have been taught to try and hide.
But the truth is that it is a miracle you make it here at all. 
It is a miracle that you had the courage to write your advertisement.

And i want you to know you are worthy of love and belonging that you can trust and if they can't give it to you then you go and find people who will.

You deserve good things.  You deserve to be held in trust.
Now i will let go of your shoulders and with one long look in your eye i will say.

Go and find kindness because it is your birthright.

​

Henrietta Lacks  born August 1920 died October 1951.  Ms Lacks was a working class African American woman who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in early 1951 and died later that year from metastases.   During her diagnosis and treatment, without her consent, cells were taken from both her healthy and cancerous tissue.  Cells from the cancer tissue were found to be particularly resilient in laboratory conditions and were able to be replicated outside the human body for the first time - the first "immortal cell line".  These cells came to be known as HeLa cells.

Since this time Ms Lack's cells have been reproduced in immense quantities and used for a huge variety of purposes.  

• 20 Tons of her cells have been reproduced.
• More of Ms Lack's cells have been outside her body than were ever in her body
• There have been nearly 11000 patents taken out using her cells.
• Ms Lack's cells were the first ones successfully cloned
• Ms Lack's cells were used in the development of the polio vaccination


• Ms Lack's family were only informed of what had been done with their ancestor's physical legacy when scientists contaminated the HeLa line and wished to get new sources.

Poignantly, this was the photo many family members carried around of their grandmother.

​

We live in times of great change and we humans seem to have a love hate relationship with change.  

We love change when it brings goodness, the things we desire, an end to suffering.  We hate it when it makes us work, face ugly truths, when it makes life harder.  It often takes a great deal of Buddha like foresight, patience, tenacity and willingness to well, suffer a bit to make our way through change.

I am not Buddha.  I am a flawed and wonky human and i just don't know how to get to that place where i am all Buddha-ish foresight and patience and all those other worthy things.  I find the more i exhort myself to be those the less accessible they are to me so in the face of all the hard that is going on right now - racism and homophobia being aired, destruction in Syria, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Turkey,and sadly Nice as we speak, on and on and on... - the more i fall into the trap of feeling too small, too flawed, to useless to do anything.

 i think that very sense of feeling inadequate to do anything is part of what keeps us stuck in the damaging ways of thinking and behaving in our world.

Instead i am asking myself to try.  I give myself permission to be clumsy.  To do what is within my reach right now.  I give myself permission to know that anger and suffering and guilt are likely to turn up and try not to let that derail my commitment to change.  I give myself permission to not expect to get it right the first time.  I give myself permission to notice defensiveness as it rises up in me.  I need to be alert to this because defensiveness is for me and i suspect many others, a sure fire sign that outmoded behaviour is digging in for the long haul.

The Long Haul.
This kind of change and i am going to talk specifically about rooting out and changing racism because that is front and centre for me at the moment, is about changing legacy, societal structure, power paradigms and my own thinking.  That change does not happen easily.   We are digging out that nasty root called racism and  that nasty root is just part of a more poisonous weed called the patriarchy.

Racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, genderism, consumerism, environmental destruction; all of these things are rooted in the system that values individualism, wealth and power over connection, fairness and sovereignty.

That's immense. And all i can do in the face of that immensity and my non-buddhahood is turn back towards myself.  I have to know where that root has its hold in me.  I need to learn about the ways i collude with the things that cause suffering.  i have to ask myself the gnarly questions.  Pull up from the soil of me some carcasses of things i have inherited or created in myself that stink to high heaven.  

Rooting things out.
Dr Estes, in her recent workshop ,taught us about the deep magic of asking the right questions.  In order to root racism out i have to learn to ask questions about where that poisonous root lives in me.  These include; How do i benefit as a person of white skin, from the culture i live in?  How am i advantaged?  What part of me feels entitled?  How does that play out?  Where does my sense of deserving disadvantage others?  What do disadvantaged people in my community miss out on that i take for granted? What can i shift in order for that to no longer be so? 

But that is just some puny inner work.  What the hell difference will that make if people are dying on the streets because of racism?

I think the patriarchy would like us to believe that one person's inner work, one puny human's efforts to see and transform inherited social patterning is laughable, too small, too miniscule to make a difference.  
I disagree.  If we take this inner work on as a part of our responsibility - part of the toll we pay for being human, then each of us have a role.  Each of us counts.  That's how social change happens; one person taking a stand, other people upholding that stand and making a difference.  What if Mandela thought "Fuck it, these white men are just too powerful i am going to hang out here on the Transkei coast and farm my goats instead".  No, each person, whether they can gather the power that Madiba had or not, has a responsibility to do their bit. 

I am not, quite frankly, smart enough to know where my piece in the jigsaw of life will fit but that doesn't mean i just give up.

When our interior life; the starting place for all our actions, decisions, and beliefs is changed, then our contribution to the world changes.

The patriarchy separates and in building connectedness both within ourselves and outside ourselves we rebell.  If we recognise our interconnectedness and our responsibility to one another we undermine the patriarchy.

"Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, to respond to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, like eveningtime or the common cold.” ~Audre Lorde


A note to introverts.
As an introvert in an extroverted world our natural "turn inwards" response is often maligned.  Yes action is required to overturn racism and yet as an introvert i value my innate inwardness as a gift.  For introverts, starting the  process with ourselves, doing the critical questioning, feeling the gamut of what arises, constructing something new and doing the inner work first means we are able to turn up in the world with a strength and a bridge from the old to the new.

Once our interior path has begun we are equipped to engage differently in the world.  We talk with family and friends differently.  Maybe one of those we talk to and shift is a scared policeman.  Who knows?  We write letters that may support and strengthen. Who knows what a difference we can make or how something might arrive at a critical time for someone else? We make art. Who knows what our expression might inspire or shift in someone. We can trust that the things us introverts do from our deep inner work moves things, that we begin to do things from that new inner place that shift the current.  Our outward contribution is deep because we have done our inner work.

Different=wrong is a bronken equation; part of the patriarchy and part of what allows the "isms" to flourish.

Doesn't that just let introverts off the hook?
No .  I think it puts us on the spot or on the hook if you are a fan of Innana.  It means we have to step up.  It recognises that to turn up strong for change we need to do our inner work.
It doesn't have to be either or.  You can do your inner work and protest.  You can do your inner work and participate in anti racism action.  You can do your inner work (and critically, i think) listen non-defensively and take action on what needs to change in you.  You can connect with your outward action extrovert cousins and then look at each other's contributions as valid because by maligning and valuing one as more different than the other you are just entering the same patriarchal paradigm of better than/power over.

Once you have assimilated a view from a different path you change yourself.  You live differently.  You act differently.  For an introvert, that is how change occurs.

"If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way, it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life, so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis, and become familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a minority, you aren't betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort." – Malcolm Gladwell

Of course making a change is more than interior work but for introverts this needs to come first. 

How to we make that happen?

I don't know the answers but there are two things that make change stick in me.

1. Notice don't judge.  If i can notice what arises and not leap to judgement i am buffered against defensiveness and the truth allows me to soften the hard roots of the patriarchy that makes them easier to pull out.

2.  Play to your strengths.  Trying to have an extroverted response when you are an introvert just wonks everything out.  Do what comes naturally but for God's sake do it.  We live in a critical time and we must dismantle this foulness wherever it lives in the world; our social systems, our services, our friendships, our families, our hearts.

But step up.  This broken system feels the urge to change right now and is roaring back.  Keep your shoulder to the work.  You are not alone.

Places you might like to look at to stimulate change and questioning.
Desiree Adaway - this woman is an activist and coach and is daily giving me much to digest and shift.  
Jennifer Davis  Artist and deep soul Jennifer creates openings and hearts... 
Heather Plett - this woman is a wordsmith who opens conversation with wisdom and grace.
Kelly Diels  amazing writer and thought provoker.
 
tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Homegirls-guide-to-being-powerf;search:Rukaiyah watch and learn 
read and learn www.jenniferpricedavis.com/blog/whats-love-got-to 

and when you ask the question what would love do? it is not always an easy answer but it is a question we have to ask ourselves especially in a time where hate is showing up so strong.



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