Adaptive Change
Adaptive Change: A Year of Pandemic
March 11, 3:00-4:30pm ET
March 11 marks a year since the World Health Organization declared a Global Pandemic. There is light at the end of the tunnel. But there is no question that we are still in it.
Let’s come together to honor our dead, reflect on what we are learning and re-imagine the future. This is a continuation of the series of Adaptive Change conversations we’ve had this year. You can find a bit of information about them below.
We will be joined by Luana Morales, one of our medicine women, our death, birth and healing doula. The United States has already lost more lives to this pandemic than were lost during World War II. It is an important time to learn to tend to our dead.
Dominant American culture is quite immature about death. The toll of the pandemic comes with an opportunity to grow up. To face our own mortality. To honor the dead, and to learn to live better in the process.
Luana’s work was recently featured by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Learn about Spirit of the Earth Carry Me Home, a project in response to the Gardner Museum’s Farnese Sarcophagus.
Let’s join Luana in this work of reclaiming our ancestral practices to restore all of us to wholeness.
We want to seize this moment. We see the potential for adaptive change. On our last call we looked at the values, beliefs and assumptions of the dominant culture. We sought the wisdom of our ancestral cultures. And we talked about the culture that we want to birth right now. Let’s dive deeper. How will we practice our way into what we are trying to build? Let’s deepen our connection. Let’s come together to seed the future.
This global pandemic is a “pattern interrupt” of historic proportions.
We get to break out of the “consensus trance” that holds dominant culture together.
On March 30th we invited you into a call to talk about what adaptive change looks like in this moment. You brought your hearts and your wisdom. This is a synthesis of our conversation. This post brings together the reflections that you shared using zoom’s chat function during the call.
We sang, we moved, we shared, we prayed. We turned our gaze to what is possible now that was not possible before. Let us cull from what is being learned about how and what to practice now, in these days.
How do we breathe and live our way into the future that wants to emerge?
How do we do all of this while also holding space for grief, and opportunities for mutual care?
We identified binary thinking as a key characteristic of the dominant culture. Win or lose. Right or wrong. Good or bad. It is simplistic. And it denies the inherent complexity of co-creating a culture together.
Hierarchy is another defining characteristic. Hierarchy of knowledge, experience, value, opinion, worth, etc. The hierarchy of human value, the myth of human supremacy and it’s right to dominance is something that came up often. This is understood against the dominant idea that wildness is bad or unproductive. Wildness as something to be tamed, shaped, extracted from. This leads to the belief that our current economic system must be protected. Even at the expense of human health, life, dignity, the ecosphere itself.
We are burdened by the cult of productivity. Don’t slow down. Keep going. Thrive or die. Be perfect. Pausing is not ok. There is a need to be in constant motion. We are never enough. We have to keep achieving, accomplishing. This is how we define our worth. While we dismiss the inherent worthiness of our collective humanity.
We have been hurt by the hierarchy of mind over body. We are trying to live from the neck up. Losing contact with the animal wisdom of the body. Losing our connection to nature. Heaven. And Earth.
Surrender is seen as weakness. We miss the ways it can lead to strength. Vulnerability is a weakness to be exploited. Compassion is considered a feminine quality. And the feminine is seen as less. But compassion and empathy are like a muscle. They need to be stretched and flexed in order to develop and grow. This is not a practice that is widely taught.
There are powerful lies that hold the culture together.
That race is real
That land can be owned
That privilege can protect you
That rugged individualism can thrive
scarcity, comparison, nationalism, exceptionalism, patriotism
Consumption. Consumption. Consumption. We don't know when we have enough. What is enough? Happiness, security, dignity are defined externally. These are attained through wealth. An idea of wealth that leads to competition and extraction.
We are outsourcing our creativity, feeding the expectation that we can buy solutions to our problems, while our own inherent capacity is atrophied.
Our perspective is ahistorical. We place an excessive value on newness.
We structure our society around the nuclear family. Caring for our elders is not prioritized. Community and interdependence are not nurtured.
We have been fooled by the idea that all ‘things can be known.’ But we’re waking up. What we didn’t even realize that what we have accepted to be true was just the dominant culture! This moment is revealing instincts and habits. Some of which have been conditioned. Some of which are true to us.
Rev. Mariama White-Hammond, Pastor of the New Roots Church in Boston, led us in two songs:
Adapted from James Cleveland
I don’t feel no ways tired
Come too far from where I started from
Nobody told me the road would be easy
And I don’t believe you’ve brought me this far to leave me
No, I don’t believe you’ve brought me this far to leave me
Let the Life I Lead
Based on “May The Works I've Done” by Keith Wonderboy Johnson
Let the life I lead speak for me (x2)
When I’m lying in my grave
And there’s nothing more to say
Let the life I lead speak for me.
Let the love I share…friends I make… work I do… songs I sing…kids I teach…
There was such beautiful resonance in our answer to this question. This is wisdom that lives inside of us. It lingers in our stories. It is held by the indigenous people of the world. And by the stories of our elders.
Our ancestors survived imperfectly. They survived any way they could. This often included following the rules of the colonizer. Syncretism. Blending in.
It included adaptive moves like the development of protective practices such as anxiety and selective memory.
It certainly included faith and unrelenting hope.
“I don’t believe you’ve brought me this far to leave me!”
We survived by the assumption that we do for each other. It was more than value or belief. It was something we had to do. We took care of each other. We shared space, food and any bounty. We cared for each other’s children.
We shared responsibility, a collective sense of wellbeing. We gave of what we had. Welcomed newcomers, built community. Made food for everyone. We worked through the uneasy tension between competition and cooperation. Both of these served as survival strategies. And this is still true today.
There was routine to our way of life. We ate together. We grew food and made everyday things. Many of the things we think we have to buy today. We were deeply connected to nature and its cycles. Each season had its energy and meaning.
We lived in communion with the earth. Connected to place. Cultivating in sustainable ways. We knew how to heal one another through nature’s gifts and its medicine. Midwifery was integral. We learned deeply from the natural world. We understood trees as elders, ancestral teachers.
Our ancestors were connected to their ancestors. They understood their place in the cycle of life. They knew that they were responsible for the wellbeing of their descendants. Ritual and ceremony held the community together. These allowed us to commune with the great mystery and with the myriad spirits and deities of the living world.
We sang and danced together. We built fires and gazed at the stars. We also knew to honor silence. We knew how to listen across the planes of existence. We celebrated birth. And knew to honor grief, we had ritual, time and practice for it. Our cosmology was held in story. As well as our lessons for how to live. These were stories of archetypal realms. Stories that held the big human questions that bring us together “How & Why.” How did we get here? And why are we here?
These songs, stories and rituals defined the values, beliefs and assumptions that have led to our survival. They included play. Acting. And enacting. Embodying the teaching with all of our senses. Many of these earlier practices are now called “pagan.” They centered the feminine. Honored the elders. And held the highest place for our grandmothers.
We knew to hold a long perspective. Physical bodies don’t need to survive but story and cultural artifacts do.
We survived through migration. Through exploration and longing for freedom. Migration is part of all of our story - we learn to live with and from new lands. Folks migrate! We move! We learned to understand that it's okay to move if it means you will survive and thrive. Even if there is guilt and longing associated with that.
Our intention is not to over idealize the past. Our ancestors were far from perfect. There is much good we know today that would not make sense to them. But we have also lost too much. Modernity came with genocidal violence. We have decimated the ethnosphere. And deprived ourselves of wisdom that we’ll need to make it through.
Paloma McGregor, director and co-founder of Angela’s Pulse led us in an embodiment practice.
Paloma led us in movement that brought our attention to our hands. Understanding our hands as a contested space during this global pandemic. It was a reclamation. And a way to call in ancestral energy.
Inspiration came from the work of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder of Urban Bush Women. By Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s speech - What’s in Your Hand. And by the Sweet Honey in the Rock song Hands to Struggle
“ Dad you’ve been on zoom all day! I want to play baseball!
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In your words: There are times when gravity is suspended, how do we use this opportunity before gravity returns?
We ask ourselves, what do we value? We ask, how do I tally more love based choices than fear based choices in this time?
We hold the awareness that our inner world, inner-connectedness, is reflected in the outer world. That our inner work - our inside - is a hologram of what we experience outside. We honor spirit. We listen to the wisdom that comes from beyond. We learn to find comfort in mystery and the unknown.
We practice equanimity. We learn unconditional love for ourselves. We give our love to others. We appreciate our connections with family and colleagues in ways that we used to take for granted. We honor our elders, we listen to their stories, we treat them well. We understand that we will also be there. We bring our attention to the young. We teach, support and hold them. And we make sure to learn from them.
We tune into this desire and need for hearth. We build fires. We do ritual together. We sing, dance, pray and tell stories that hold meaning for what’s next.
We keep moving beyond binaries. We allow ourselves to find our curiosity in complexity.
We bring back the matriarchy. We open up to feminine consciousness. And to the qualities of the sacred feminine: flexibility, connection and empathy, the relational and interconnected, the flexible and the adaptive. We value care work. And we allow ourselves space to just be. We become human beings instead of human doers.
We practice solidarity in our shared vulnerability. We build mutual aid societies, practice mutual care and support. We give of what we have, food or whatever it might be. We build relationships with physical neighbors. We learn to meet each other within our needs and within the experience of caring for each other.
We come to understand that we are planetary citizens. That borders and nationality don’t mean anything.
We pay attention to what is surfaced in crisis. We seize opportunity. That which has long been denied, what we have long advocated for, suddenly becomes possible.
When we are sequestered, as we are, it is important to find ways to hear the voices of those most vulnerable, and ways to assist them.
We practice direct and constructive communications. We unearth hidden truths that can contribute to collective healing. We make room for generative conflict. We allow hard things that arise. We understand conflict as necessary and undeniable, especially now. We make it generative. We allow ourselves and our networks to be changed by it
We meet anxiety with a spirit of growth and creativity.
We birth a world that is just and sustainable, one that centers empathy and is nature based. We take responsibility for our actions from the perspective that everything is interconnected. We see all of our structures as ecosystems. And we focus on connection at the local level. We nurture our resourcefulness. We learn to solve problems without buying stuff.
In order to attain any of this. We need to slow down. Slowing down is how we will learn to listen. Slowing down is essential to notice and identify the kinds of rituals that can supplant the ones we are so used to.
We need to rest before we are tired. Or, we need to rest because we are tired.
This is the time to return to our body. Our body holds the intelligence that will allow for our survival. It holds the wisdom of our ancestors. And the most primal animal wisdom that connects us to the magic of a living planet. It holds our mammalian instinct to always honor the mother.