Mohamad Chakaki

The history of the land that we call the United States is built on genocide, slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy. With that as the foundation, and navigating the variety of lived experiences of these truths, this year Center for Whole Communities (CWC) convened 21 leaders from across the country for a year of learning and transformation. Together, we have considered what it means to live, work and breathe justice as we wrestle with that legacy and our own responsibility for transforming it.

All of the elements of that legacy were present with us as we arrived at The Watershed Center, on Mahican traditional territory in Millerton, New York. For a few still-hesitant spring days of May, we sat together with the themes of land and justice, and the elements of transformation that emerged in our response to these toxic histories of dispossession.

Before that week, we had only met in ethereal terrain, via bytes and pixels on video-conference calls. This was our first encounter breaking bread; sharing the textures of breath, the sounds of a room, the wind in the trees, spoon-carving knives nicking fingers in small blood offerings to place. Drawn in by stories, by aspirations for ourselves and our world, by honest visions of one another, we shared space, showed up, and dug in.

I feel like I was given room to breathe into myself, to sit with questions that I am rarely asked.

Whole Communities Fellow

We were held in radical hospitality, guests of our new and deepening connections in that place: hosted by the Watershed Center, WILDSEED Community Farm & Healing Village, representatives of Schaghticoke First Nations, and adjacent farms. The community of streams, birds, stones, trees—and ticks—were as much a part of our conversations, contemplation, and dreams as the human dynamics in which we swam.

The clear acknowledgement of eldership was an honor in this multicultural setting… navigating the boundaries of difference of age, race, religions, sexual orientations, etc. requires a big heart and expanded consciousness…

Whole Communities Fellow

In this new evolution of CWC’s transformative change work, we introduced fellows to our principle practices: Dialogue, Story, Awareness Practice, Creativity, and Working with Difference. We set the table together for our year-long collaboration, and deepened our dialogue on the complex themes of land, justice, and repair. In those conversations, we have been indebted to our friend and colleague Mistinguette Smith who leads the Black/Land Project for calling our attention to the distinction between reparations and repair.

CWC was originally a land-based organization founded by a visionary couple with roots in, and a concern for transforming the historically white environmental movement. Over the last decade we have gone through our own transition from landed to landless, from having a deep connection to a particular place, to leaving that place behind. We have actively embraced the idea of “Center” as a verb, rather than a noun. We are now led by a team of people from very different cultural backgrounds, each with different relationships to land, justice and the environmental movement.

We have been moving through our own process of healing around these themes of land, justice, and repair. Part of that healing is the fellowship itself, and the opportunity it offers us to continue to grow and learn together in community.

One clear commitment that has emerged within the fellowship is to examine and uplift the possibilities for Black-Indigenous solidarity. How can we we actively work to transform dispossession, and uphold (re)connection to the land? For example, in considering reparations for the enslavement of African Americans, how do we also acknowledge the underlying genocide that opened Indigenous territories for colonial exploitation in those same places?

The retreat left me with hard questions to think about regarding land/home and relationship to it, as a mixed-race person with ancestry not native to here…

Whole Communities Fellow

These questions of solidarity, of land and justice have followed us—and led us—through this year of shared learning and healing with leaders in conservation, social and environmental justice.

We have continued to build and grow the connections among us. On a recent zoom call a fellow reflected on the importance of ritual, the pause in the usual press of work and life that has been created through this fellowship commitment.

This poem from Flint, Michigan-based fellow Jeff Bean speaks to the power of community. We share it with gratitude for you, the many supporters of our work, and with a wildly enthusiastic shout-out to the incredible cohort of fellows: in love and solidarity we are walking with you.

 I have a new community, a whole community
 Full of people who are unabashedly human
 Who are living to fulfill a promise they made to themselves in utero
 Who understand that language is how we communicate
 AND that the language we have was developed by the Colonizer
 AND thus is biased to maintaining the power of that colonization
 This is a community that realizes when they hear “We don’t even have a word for that”
 That it is a challenge and not the end of the discussion.
 We are a community of exploration of the infinite with a clear understanding
 That, while infinity spreads out forever
 It also goes inward at the same rate
 We are people who relish the idea that being in the middle of something
 Can put you at the edge
 We eat paradox for breakfast because we have no idea what will be served for dinner.
 We love quietly because it has so often been used as a weapon
 AND we are choosing to sit with love
 AND we will be together and apart, completely
 A new community, a whole community. 
-- Jeff Bean 

This blog post is the work of multiple contributors. Thanks again to Jeff Bean – and to CWC team members Mohamad Chakaki, Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey, Susannah McCandless and Kavitha Rao.

I’ve been reading a 17th century Muslim prayer-poem from Morocco entitled ‘The Prayer of the Oppressed.’ In his introduction to the English translation, Hamza Yusuf, a prominent American Muslim teacher and scholar, asks his readers to consider whether they could possibly be ready to wield social power if they’re not ready to accept that there will always be matters over which they are powerless. That gave me pause.

There is so much that I would like to see change in the world, even as I have to admit that there’s also so much of my vision for progressive social and environmental change that I am painfully powerless
to effect.

It’s not that I’m not hopeful, or don’t see the power in small, subtle shifts or concerted advocacy.

My point is simply that human suffering and vulnerability are real, as is our persistent desire to evade them. Working with feelings of powerlessness and fear is fraught. Yet they creep into our consciousness, sitting at the edges of the stories we tell ourselves about the power of our strategies and tools, waiting to be acknowledged.

My own story is that my parents left their native Syria before I was born, for reasons that were primarily economic. My late father’s grievances, however, ran deeper. He never returned to his home/land, a place now torn apart by the terrible violence of a complex civil war.

The work I do now with Center for Whole Communities is informed by the love of cities and of land that I’ve inherited from my parents. I’ve also inherited the loss and underlying grief that comes along with a dislocation from home/land. I’ve learned that stories about people and land – from urban neighborhoods and farms to parks and preserves – can celebrate that love and connection, or reflect exclusion and pain.

At a recent conference on climate change and cities, the question of ‘managed retreat’ (i.e. communities moving or being moved away from vulnerable coastal areas) came up as an increasingly more likely scenario for policy-makers and local officials to consider. My question in response was “what would ‘ministered retreat’ look like?” By that I mean looking at who will do the work of relocating communities – and what will that work look like? What would it look like to minister to the impact on human lives and relationships that is inevitable in that kind of dislocation from home/land.

I recognize that it isn’t easy to pivot from conversations on the science and policy of climate adaptation to the kind of heart-space that invites the stories of human suffering into our planning and professional practice. To say nothing of the possibility that we might not be able to end such suffering. And yet that is a crucial practice. We need to turn to that suffering, more frequently and with more intention, even as it reminds us of how limited our professional abilities are.

There are practices that can support creating and containing the kind of heart-space that acknowledges the full reality of human experience – from celebration and joy, to grief and pain – and they can be brought into our professional lives and work. CWC’s Whole Thinking Practices were developed with this in mind – namely, to acknowledge and honor difference and tension in human relationships with each other and the land. That’s why I’m committed to listening for community stories that acknowledge and work creatively with that difference and tension in ways that are productive, restorative, and life-affirming. Whether they celebrate connection or commemorate loss, these stories – our stories – remind us that the making and remaking of home/land is a radical act of hope and
of love.

Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness
as an integral part of life.

Parker Palmer

Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

Ben Okri