“Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories
and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation.”
- Katie Cannon (in The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, MD)
In
January1999, I attended a peacebuilding course at Eastern Mennonite
University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I was a fish out of water –a
Jewish mediator come to learn about conflict transformation from a
group of innovative, intrepid churchgoers. Harrisonburg is a small
town studded with contrasts. To get there, one flies into Washington,
DC and drives south and west through famous Civil War battlefields.
Once there, it is common to pull up at a stoplight alongside a horse
and buggy driven by Mennonites in top hats and tails, long dresses
and lace caps. The folks that run the Conflict Transformation Program
there are modern pacifists with a history of volunteering in disaster
relief and what they call ‘accompaniment’ in places around the
world where there is great
suffering. After
WWII, they decided that there must be something they could do before
disaster struck. Pro-active peacebuilding was born.
My
roommate Jean, and her husband had been missionaries in what was then
called the Congo. We
both arrived late at night, weary from our long journeys, I from New
Mexico she from Minnesota. Explaining that she wanted to take a bath,
Jean stepped into our shared bathroom to run the water. I remember
how the steam billowed up into the cold night air, and the thrumming
of the water as it poured into the old porcelain tub. The bathroom
was accessed from a tiny, low-ceilinged hallway that linked our two
bedrooms. Across from the bathroom door was a cubby with a black
plastic dial phone, where I sat waiting for a call from my boyfriend.
I felt awkward and trapped, intrigued in spite of myself as Jean
stood in the doorway, steam rising behind her, and began to speak.
Her husband was a church elder whose job included receiving war-weary
local church dignitaries and listening to their stories. Sometimes
Jean served tea or sat quietly nearby. I remember the adrenalin surge
of my dislike of missionaries (still have it, but softer now) and my
impatience with her gentle equanimity. Perhaps I sensed something
ominous taking shape. Too late, the story was pouring out of her, so
I listened.
Most
afternoons, she and her husband would sit outside in the shade with
their Congolese church guests, at a low formica table with broken
chairs. One by one the men told their stories and began to weep. As
they spoke, their tears became so copious they flooded the tabletop.
Tears sheeted into their laps and poured onto the ground. As her
husband leaned in to listen, Jean would wipe the table and wring out
the towel. When Jean finished the story she shrugged. We may have
hugged, I don’t remember. I sat,
stunned, as she went into the bathroom, turned off the faucet, and
closed the door.
During
the next several years, I returned frequently to Eastern Mennonite
for their Summer Peacebuilding Institute, where grassroots
peacebuilders from more than fifty countries gather to teach and
learn the art of building peace: In South Africa, Mennonite
peacebuilders worked behind the scenes to build ‘human safety nets’
because they anticipated – correctly – that the fragile
negotiations between Mandela and de Klerk would likely fall apart. In
the US, peacebuilders from EMU helped sensitize both prosecution and
defense lawyers in high-profile capital cases so that victims and
their families were not re-traumatized. Liberian peacebuilder S. G.
Doe explained his work with child soldiers and warlords in the civil
war that was still raging when I met him. He told me, “…We
must deliberately move into the field and lavish love on those
incapable of loving.” I realized that, as I slept, someone on the
other side of the world was awake and working for peace.
In
late 1999, as a result of meeting some of these extraordinary
ordinary people, I founded the non-profit everyday
gandhis
in hopes of making their stories more widely known. Five
years later, I found myself in Liberia, in the wake of the civil war
that had just ended there. I
was soon to learn that even the best ideas born of the human mind
benefit from collaboration with unseen sources. On the eve of that
trip I dreamed that the dead from the war were asking to be properly
buried and mourned.
I
am standing with two colleagues on the banks of an underground river.
On the landing where we stand, near the water, I see three small
suitcases that become three coffins that turn into three wooden
boats. On the other side of the river is a burning tower, like the
Tower card in the Tarot. In front of the tower is a Liberian friend
whose name is Roosevelt. He stands quietly, holding a shaft of gray
light. Ours eyes meet. He says, “Everything is ready.”
A
few months later, I dreamed again:
I
am on the battlefield of Gallipoli, walking through heavy artillery
fire. I seem to be in a parallel reality. Bombs explode around me,
clumps of earth and gore are bursting at my feet. Bullets whiz past,
zinging right next to my ears. I walk, safe from injury, witnessing
everything in slow motion. As I watch, a circle of women appears. One
by one, they step onto the battlefield. Each of them claims a fallen
soldier - a husband, a brother, a son tenderly kneeling by the
corpse, lifting him into her arms, caressing his face as she weeps.
Each of them is singing her lament. A beautiful, terrible keening
rises up, columns of wailing and grief.
These
dreams and others led to everyday
gandhis hosting
Liberia’s first post-war traditional Mourning Feast. During a
Mourning Feast, the extended family and community of a deceased
person gather to resolve their differences and put any lingering
conflicts to rest with the dead, who are then sent ‘across the
river’ with drumming and dancing, taking the community’s
conflicts with them. The ceremony concludes with a communal feast
during which the act of eating from the common bowl is an oath of
reconciliation. (I found out two years later that local dreamers had
dreamed that the dead had told them: We,
the Dead, have come together. We are united. It is time for you, the
living, to do the same.)
As
in most traditional/indigenous cultures, in Liberia it is well
understood that if it weren’t for our ancestors, we wouldn’t be
alive today. Therefore it is our pleasure and our obligation to honor
them. But, since the war that consumed the country from 1989-2004,
over 250,000 bodies were left scattered helter-skelter across the
land. These rites had not been performed and the deaths had not been
grieved, leaving the country in the lingering paralysis of unhealed
trauma and unexpressed grief along with the anguish of failing to
honor their dead.
‘Our’
Mourning Feast was peacefully attended by more than 5,000 people. And
it catalyzed the community to continue with many, smaller feasts –
for children, women, healers, the land, the forests, the animals, the
birds and the water. One man, a traditional herbalist who cannot read
or write and has never traveled beyond Liberia’s capital, Monrovia,
dreamed that a goat was to be sacrificed at a particular stream in a
particular village so that the blessings of peace (carried by the
blood of the animal as it mixed with the water) would flow to Europe
and the United States. After the ceremony, I was able to trace the
stream on a map – barely a trickle at the site of the offering—and
saw that, indeed, it flows into the Atlantic Ocean.
In
Liberia, as in much of Africa, animal sacrifices reflect a deep and
conscious covenant with the natural world – not unlike the
spiritual partnership of traditional hunters, in which the animals
‘agree’ to give their lives to feed the human community in
exchange for mutual respect and devotion. In Liberia, the blood of
the animal that is offered is understood to be a potent conduit for
human prayers to reach the Other World (similar to the rising smoke
of sacred herbs in Native America such as sage and tobacco).
Suffering in the
human realm is understood as evidence of imbalance in the unseen
world. Therefore, the ritual work that restores balance in and with
the Other World is the foundation for peace in this one. Throughout
Africa, the peacemaking process is a time when apologies are offered
and accepted. It is considered a serious affront to the community and
to the spirits to refuse a sincere apology because this perpetuates a
state of imbalance.
These
activities engender an exchange of respect and humility, creating
tangible results in daily life, as can be seen in the way the
Mourning Feasts inspired the community and released pent-up grief.
More importantly, these rites create a dialogue with the Other World
and among human beings in ways that acknowledge and engage with
Nature and the spirit realm as the primary nexus of those
relationships, seen and unseen, that establish peace through
heartfelt exchange and mutual accountability.
Nature
responds. Often, Nature initiates the communication, through dreaming
and synchronicities – inexplicable coincidences too numerous to be
attributed to mere chance, too timely to ignore, and cohering into a
clear message or discernable pattern. It is our responsibility to
learn how to pay attention and how to interpret the signs. Master
General, a rebel commander who considers himself to be a traditional
man and is also an Imam and a Pentecostal preacher, told us that,
according to traditional understanding, elephants are considered to
be a sign that peace is coming. Three months prior to the ceasefire
that finally ended Liberia’s civil war, Master General and his
troops were on their way to attack Monrovia. In the forest, he saw a
mother elephant and her calf. “I knew that God had spoken,” he
told us. “No more war in Liberia!” He commanded his men to lay
down their arms on the spot, and decreed that anyone using a weapon
from that moment forward would face a firing squad.
“How
many men were with you that day?” we wanted to know. “How many
men laid down their guns because of the elephants?”
Master
General thought for a moment. “Thirty-six thousand.”
By
following the dreams and listening to the community, a huge wave of
creative energy and local wisdom was unleashed and successfully acted
upon in ways that laid the groundwork for growth and development in
the ‘tangible’ realm. One unexpected result was the profound and
life-changing training that my colleagues and I have received over
the years. It is intriguing to consider that Nature and the Other
World seem to have undertaken (ha) the radical project of seeding
change where it is arguably most needed: among westerners. This is
accomplished, in part, by recruiting the least likely among us into
experiences that broach no doubt whatever as to the luminous agency
of the spirit world. Go to any bookstore and you will find shelves of
books filled with the stories of unwitting westerners who have
stumbled into sacred indigenous teachings.
Last
week, I met a man who will soon come to a circle being offered by my
community here in the U.S. to speak the stories that haunt him from
his time as a volunteer fireman – the water-swollen corpses he has
pulled from rivers and ocean, the charred remains trapped in
burned-out buildings, the mangled bodies of young drivers in wrecked
cars. He is bursting to tell his stories into the container of the
circle. He has had nowhere to put them. His sense of isolation has
pushed him to the brink of a nervous breakdown. His first question
about the people in our circle: Do
they do any drumming?
It turns out that neuroscientists are discovering what the Ancients
knew, what Indigenous people have always known, and what our broken
hearts tell us if we will listen: that storytelling, theater,
collective ceremony, rhythmic sound and movement heal trauma. This
knowing is instinctive, primal.
At
one time, our interactions with the natural world were also
instinctive and primal. In the world of animal tracking, there is
something known as ‘baseline gait’. It is the relaxed, unhurried
movement of a contented animal moving through its environment,
looking, listening, gathering the information it needs to thrive.
This gait is visible in its tracks. But we humans, with our
unrelenting electronic assaults on our nervous systems and the
chemical assaults on our physical bodies; our shoes and our concrete;
our computers and our planes and our cars, have lost our baseline
gait. Our brains compensate by taking a zillion snapshots of the
world around us, frantically cobbling together a partial but
distorted composite picture of reality in a desperate one attempt to
inform us of where we are, what is going on and what we must respond
to. From this fragmented hodge-podge, we make our decisions and
plans. To this scramble we add trauma and unmetabolized grief.
Perhaps this scramble is
trauma and unmetabolized grief.
Proper
grieving is one of the key indigenous technologies that open the
doors between the worlds. The willingness to grieve engenders an
emptying that creates space to listen and to hear. Grief, the
dictionary tells us, is: “Deep sorrow, misery, sadness, anguish,
pain, distress, heartache, heartbreak, agony, torment, affliction,
suffering, woe, desolation, dejection, and despair.” It’s odd
that we have so many words for something we tend to so little.
Strange, too, that the word loss
is not included, for grief is fundamentally about the loss of someone
or something we love.
Untended grief is
cumulative, immobilizing. Traumatic. And what, exactly, is trauma?
The dictionary says it’s, “A deeply distressing or disturbing
experience.” I would add: …
that permanently alters
our lives for the worse, such that the world we once knew, and
ourselves within it, become unrecognizable. It
is this rupture of meaning that makes trauma so potent.
If
not addressed, trauma hitchhikes from generation to generation, our
constant companion, co-author of our lives. It will have its say,
invited or not, whether or not we choose to hear its message.
As a case in point
Liberia was founded in the 1820s by freed slaves sent to colonize the
land from which their forebears had been torn. The civil war there,
similar to wars elsewhere, may have been the inevitable implosion of
multi-generational trauma stemming from slavery, abduction,
displacement, repression, colonization and exploitation.
Trauma
is stored in our bodies and in specific parts of our brains.
In response to trauma, our bodies try to protect us. We become numb
in that part of our brain that allows us to feel, to think clearly,
to put things in perspective, to make life-enhancing choices.
Everything bends to the will of trauma. It is as unmistakable and as
uncompromising as, say, a pedophile, a torturer, or a terrorist with
a bomb. Chances are, the people driven to these extremes are,
themselves, victims of severe trauma and so the cycle continues and
escalates.
In
addition to the assaults on our bodies and our nervous systems, the
renaming or misnaming of what we know to be true makes us crazy.
Whether we call it ‘spin,’ or marketing or rewritten history, the
result is the same. Our felt experience is the cornerstone of
identity and meaning; when we are told that what happened didn’t
happen, that we aren’t who we know ourselves to be, that our voices
do not count – that corporations are people – our sense of
reality crumbles. Remember that, in addition to stealing and renaming
the land that was kin, one of the key strategies in the genocide of
indigenous North American culture was to forcibly remove children
from their families and send them to residential schools where they
were given western names and forbidden to speak their own languages.
Like
each of us as individuals, collective global culture arises from the
history that formed it. The sedimentary layers of ancestral anguish
have been sealed and fossilized, but are clearly visible when we
drill down or when a disaster exposes a cross-section of its layers.
Like us, it seeks to cope as individuals and families do, repressing
painful memories, self-medicating, lashing out at the slightest
provocation or seeking to ‘soldier through’ by focusing on
routine or revenge. Perhaps the collective trauma we are carrying
dates from the ascendancy of the church and feudal kings (likely
already traumatized themselves) and their desire to amass ‘power
over’ rather than ‘power with’, pointedly expressed in
unrelenting attacks on nature, women and indigenous ways.
Who’s
to say how much heartbreak or trauma will push a person to violence,
or a culture to collective madness? It could be as straightforward,
as complex, as insidious as the ‘christening’ of unimaginably
large tracts of ancient indigenous home terrain with names that bear
no relation to those by which these places were originally known -
names that expressed an intimacy, a depth of relationship
unimaginable to those who imposed the labels. Dehumanization is a
potent provocation. To be abused, ‘othered’, or ignored is to
become invisible, non-existent, debatable. We are chopped down,
becoming the trees that silently fall in the forest.
My
Pakistani friend Hassan is a profound peacebuilder. I met him at
Eastern Mennonite, too. It was his practice to go to remote villages
where tribal violence had broken out. He would camp at the edge of a
field, fly a white flag, and invite farmers and warlords alike
(sometimes they were one and the same) to come tell their stories. He
once told me, ‘Violence, too, is a form of communication.’ It is
the communication of last resort.
As
with what cannot be spoken, what we cannot hear matters a great deal,
and not only in the human realm, where the silence of exclusion is
already overwhelming. “There is an information density…of
between one and ten million bits per half hour of whale song –
which is the approximate amount of information contained in Homer’s
Odyssey. In other words, whales are communicating each
half hour the same
amount of information as that in an entire book that would take us
hours or days to read.”
(And, because of their size, and the fact that they traverse the
ocean from surface to depths and along their epic migrations, whales
distribute vital nutrients across vast liquid expanses. In recent
years, the ever-increasing traffic of container ships and super
tankers is killing whales at alarming rates.) The cacophony of modern
life is devastating animals whose mating calls and echolocation
signals cannot be heard above the human din, interrupting vital
life-sustaining systems, and depriving us of essential, encyclopedic
realms of magic and connection. We find ourselves living a new and
terrifying creation story whose divine authorship has been supplanted
by machines. The trauma of separation from which we suffer globally
is not God’s banishment. It is our man-made exile from the Garden
of the Earth in all her resplendent, thriving, complexity. Grief is
the key that unlocks the gate to reveal the path that leads us home.
Home is our place within the entirety of Life.
We
are disconnected from our bodies, encased in our cars and offices and
cities of cement. Like rats in a cage, we exercise on our treadmills
and stationary bicycles; we spend our days in mindless, repetitive
motion on assembly lines, or frantically buying and selling and
making deals in offices high above the ground. At the opposite
extreme are those trapped in the backbreaking labor of subsistence or
drowning in the floods of displacement. In mechanized cultures, we
sit and stare at our numbing screens, connected primarily by social
media (friends: really? tweets: really?).
As a society we are doing exactly what a traumatized individual does:
engage in superficial, promiscuous false connection or edit, isolate
and shut down until we snap.
It
seems that the sheer volume of heartache pouring in has caused it to
stop pouring out. The escalation of atrocities made possible by the
sudden, depersonalized, mechanical efficiency of modern warfare has
replaced the undeniable reality of hand-to-hand combat and its
strangely personal code of honor. Colonization, the slave trade, the
holocaust, the nuclear bombs, the killing fields, the genocides, the
clear cutting, species extinction and now the impending collapse of
the global ecosystem have reshaped our shared landscape and our
responses to it. We are at sea in a toxic soup and trauma is at the
helm.
When
we face our demons together, they begin to shrink and transform. In
time, they can become our allies, and we theirs. American teacher of
Tibetan Buddhism, Lama Tsultrim Allione has revived the ancient Dance
of Chöd,
originally pioneered by an eleventh-century Buddhist teacher – a
woman named Machig Labdrön.
In this practice, we invite our demons to take physical form. We
enter into dialogue with them, eventually changing places with them,
and asking them what they want from us. We listen until we have heard
them fully. Then we dissolve ourselves to become the exact food they
crave. We melt into the nectar that feeds them most deeply, and they
feast until they are sated. When this happens, they often transform
from a demon into an ally. It is an ancient practice, so powerful
that in earlier times even epidemics could be stopped when monks
agreed to feed the community’s demons in this way, so that the
energetic patterns that gave rise to the illness – ie, that forced
it into a corner from which it could only snarl and attack – were
addressed with kindness and generosity.
I
often wonder what would happen if we could spark a global campaign of
apology, of taking responsibility for and grieving the outcomes of
our earlier decisions and those of our predecessors - likely made
from that reactive, traumatized state that seeks self-protection or
self-medication above all else. Who would we become as we gazed into
each other’s eyes and atoned, together, for the world we have made,
for what we have done and undone? I am reminded of the dream that
came to a dear friend, a single phrase: Not
enough tears.
American
author, teacher and peacemaker, the late Fran Peavey, traveled the
world, sitting on public benches with a sign that read, American
willing to listen.
When did we stop listening? Are we willing to listen now? If so,
perhaps we will hear the sounds of our ancestors weeping, and
recognize that weeping as our own. Perhaps we will hear the weeping
of Creation herself.
Trauma
is suspicious of love and impervious to reason. It refuses to
negotiate. It has been cheated before and so it is wary and slow to
trust. But if we begin to dance, to sway our bodies and tap our feet,
it will dance with us. When we are moving together, trust will grow.
The rusty hinges of the heart creak open. Memory returns. At this
late hour, as the Ebola of greed devours us, I believe that all of it
– all of it—is traceable to the reservoir of trauma and
unexpressed grief pooling beneath us. When reference points (both
internal and external) disappear, what can bring us back into
meaning’s embrace? Because trauma can render individual meaning
unreliable, meaning that is communally embodied and expressed is
required. Because grieving is pro-active, it lifts us out of the
immobilizing torpor of trauma. If we truly want to change the world,
we must tend to our grief and, literally, return to our senses. These
are the modern, ancient tools of radical transformation. Let it rip,
Brothers and Sisters! The elephants will come. Balance will be
restored. Love will flourish. Do we have the courage to grieve deeply
enough to unwind trauma’s spiral?
My
friend and colleague, Bill Saa, lost his brother Raymond during the
Liberian civil war. Raymond was tortured to death - his body hacked
away piece by piece until he died. He was then buried in a shallow
roadside grave. For several years, Bill worked to learn the
circumstances of Raymond’s death, to locate the makeshift grave,
and to find Raymond’s killer. When he had found the grave, Bill met
with the local elders of the nearby village, then gathered friends
and family, including people from the community, to help unearth the
body so that they could bring Raymond back to the family compound,
bury him there and hold the requisite Mourning Feast. Though the
grave was a shallow one, the exhumation stalled. They were unable to
pull the remains from the ground. A local elder recognized the
problem. He cut a branch from a nearby tree and offered it to the
earth in exchange for Raymond’s bones. Speaking to the earth, he
explained that the people understood that after so many years, the
earth did not wish to relinquish her son, but that the people wished
to return the body to his human mother and father so they could bury
him properly in the family compound. The elder then offered the
branch in exchange for Raymond’s remains. When the prayers were
complete and a libation offered the body came free. The following
day, they arrived at the family compound with Raymond’s bones and
shreds of clothing. A great, deafening cry rose up from the waiting
crowd, a chaos of shrieking and shouting and anguished wailing that
lasted far into the night.
Meanwhile,
another brother, Nat, plotted to kill the murderer. A few of us from
the US happened to be in Liberia when Nat dreamed that he had found
Raymond’s executioner and was on his way to kill him. In the dream,
Bill put his arm on Nat’s shoulder and told him, “Please don’t
do it.” Nat vehemently affirmed his plan. But later that day, he
had a change of heart. He joyfully phoned everyone in the family to
tell them the news that he now wished to join Bill in forgiving
Raymond’s killer. A few weeks later, Nat and Bill met with the
killer and told him, “You deprived us of our brother and our
parents’ son. Therefore you must take his place in the family.”
From shared grief compassion is born. Deep grieving makes room for
miracles.
Last
night a friend told me a story of a poisonous plant he found growing
in a pot, in the corner of a room, in a home he was renting. The
plant had been left behind by previous tenants. (He left it, too,
when he moved out.) One day as he sat meditating, he felt his
attention being repeatedly pulled to the plant. At last he turned to
face it, and began to listen. He heard the plant say, “That’s
better. Now we can have a conversation.”
“What
would you like to tell me?” asked my friend.
The
plant said, “You humans are so very, very sensitive. Your bodies
are designed so that you can feel and hear and sense so many tiny,
exquisite things. But your ways of living now have caused your
receptors to become congested. You can no longer feel these things,
or hear or sense them. You have lost this capacity that is your
birthright, and so you have lost yourselves.”
“What
can we do to open ourselves again?” asked the man.
“Grieve,”
said the plant.
It
happened that someone had lent my friend an elephant tooth. He spent
the next three days sitting with the plant, cleaning that tooth, and
weeping.
