To Dive Deeply Into Each Other

There are some aches witch hazel can’t assuage; for those, we need each other.

-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

I like to think of myself as someone who turns towards whatever is in front of me. I want to be the kind of person that will face everything and avoid nothing. This is a big part of what I’m bringing to my work with the Better Men Project. And my partner often tells me that it is one of the things she admires most about me.

I’m trying!

And yet still, I fall short.

Something about these last two shootings. I’ve caught myself looking away. It is an experience of impotence and despair. It is hanging on the hope that it doesn’t happen to anyone I love.

There is a darkness in this world. Seems like it’s always been with us. Our myths and ancestral stories are all about contending with this darkness, this evil.

Modernity robbed us of our stories. And its way of reason keeps falling short. Post-modernity has left us with a gaping void. We are bereft of the human tools to make sense of darkness when it comes. We lost too much when Myth was taken from us.

I am really interested in what it will take for us to bring our gaze towards this darkness. To contend with the evil among us, and how it shows up inside each of us.

The people who read this newsletter tend to have a clearer sense of social evils, of the way structures oppress. We tend to be more concerned with ways to make structural change. And this feels like the right bias.

But we need to do a better job of contending with the darkness of the human heart. There must be a moral call that demands something great to happen inside each and everyone of us.

There has to be a call for growth, transformation, deep, personal betterment that can shift our relationship with life itself.

Please note that I am in no way talking about ways to perform wokeness. I am talking about cultivating wisdom and developing character. About living in integrity. About finding ways to tend to our inner light so that it becomes self-evident to anyone we encounter.

As deep and personal as this work is, there is little of it that we are called to do alone. We do this work with each other. We also do it for each other.

I am blessed to be in community with Boston City Councilor Kendra Lara, and I’ve been holding on to words she recently spoke to an intimate group of us:

“This is the world I want to live in, where our response to the wickedness going on around us is to dive deeper into each other.”

This is how I want to face Uvalde, and Buffalo, and the threats to our democracy, and life through the Sixth Great Extinction. I want to face it knowing that I don’t have all the answers, but that I will not hide from anything. I want to look at it squarely in the face, committed to my inner work, and diving deeply into each other.

I want to turn towards you. And I want you to turn towards me. I want us to know we are not alone. And I want us to bond through something deeper, more meaningful than fear, resentment or rage.

I want us to be able to tell a new but ancient story about what it takes to live together in times of heartache and darkness.

I want your help as I find my way towards my Self. And I want to hold you and lift you up as you become more awake. I want to know your troubles, and the struggles you have with yourself. And I want you to know what I’m wrestling with, how I’m trying to get better, the ways that I want to grow and the meaningful places where I want to go.

We gotta turn towards each other. Dive deeply into each other. Hold each other close as we pray for our descendants. Showing them ways to be together as we find light in the darkness.

Abrazos,

Gibrán

PS This newsletter was written before the Supreme Court’s decision to take away a woman’s right over her body. Please know that I am committed to working specially with men to meet this fateful moment in our fraying democracy.