Year End Reflections
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
A wise person said that when you don’t know what to say the place to start is “thank you.” Sitting here trying to put this challenging, painful, and profoundly illuminating year into perspective, I know I have a lot to be thankful for — my own health and that of my family and loved ones. Continued employment and being part of a community in which I can exercise my creative gifts. I’m grateful for the prodigious efforts of the medical and scientific communities in battling this pandemic and all the essential workers who are treated as anything but as they put their lives and well-being on the line in the service of our sustenance.
But what of the future?
Whether from inheritance or training, for most of my life I’ve looked to the future with more hope than apprehension. Some blend of optimism, idealism, and naïveté (seasoned, I know, with a bit of denial of more apocalyptic scenarios) was my “normal.” It was the stance I tried to embody while moving through the world.
2020 has presented quite a challenge to that bright-eyed view. Processing the overwhelming personal suffering and loss as well as the larger cultural and societal upheavals, I’m dismayed at the pernicious power of fear and ignorance to pummel and divide us and daunted by the volume of challenges ahead of us. I’m also acutely aware that I am just one human being in the vastness of the world. I live in a body that will not last forever, and my days here do have a number, even if I don’t know what it is.
Despite this, hope still pokes its head through. I feel it when I witness the resilience and passion of my students who persist in their desire to learn and grow in the face of isolation and unprecedented educational challenges. I am reminded of it when I experience the creative generosity and ingenuity of my artistic peers and colleagues who continue to find ways to share their gifts and their labor to heal our hearts and minds. It surges as I marvel at the transformation of my son into a young man and re-kindles when I feel the genuine allyship of white people willing to acknowledge privilege, lay it aside, and clasp hands in solidarity to create a more equitable world. In these moments, the path we are on seems a bit clearer and the transformation needed a bit less implausible.
A Nez Perce and Cherokee colleague spoke to me recently about generational memory. Honoring the ancestors and preserving the world for the generations to come is not an intellectual aspiration for her. It is part of her core narrative, an intrinsic element of the culture she inherited.
I’m wondering what my ancestors might be telling me?
Certainly that the “normal'' that we talk about is an illusion best left in the rearview mirror. It was built on a mythical narrative that buried vast swathes of lived experience and is sustained by injustices that once known, cannot be un-known.
That our survival depends on figuring out how to make a "we." The problems we face as a human family are too large for one country or people or political faction to overcome alone.
That the mantra of resistance has been and may continue to be necessary. But so is acknowledging that there are limits to where resistance can take us.
To open my eyes and mind and breathe in deeply the world around me and to act for the benefit of my great-grandchildren and yours.
To keep my eye on what matters more and to trust in love.
