In downtown Rochester, on the outside wall of Rochester Contemporary, a community arts center, artist Gianna Stewart installed three large panels that spell out the word “BELONG.” Each letter is made up of the words that are banned from our current government’s websites, documents and grant applications. Last week, Writers & Books, our local community literary center, gathered people to write about our responses to this public exhibit. I walked up to the display and found my life--my being and my values--in every banned letter.

I know these words aren’t yet censored from public discourse, but this list tells you what and who matters to those in power. Here’s my experiment: I’m going to tell my story and flaunt every restricted word that applies. I will bold these words so you can see what this Administration would like to scrub.

First, I am a woman, an elderly one. Being female has of course exposed me to the blatant oppression of sexism. (Sorry, it’s a no-no to talk about either sex or gender.) It wasn’t enough to be constantly immersed in harassment and threat. In my first male dominated job, females were paid less tan males for the same work, yet feminism is a bad word. Equal opportunity wasn’t on my employer’s radar. I eventually decided to be my own boss.

In those years, I didn’t understand that I was suffering from inherited trauma. I knew that my parents and grandparents had survived genocide, and I knew the family horror stories about it, but I didn’t know how that was affecting me. My ethnicity, it turns out, is a lens through which I see the world, and it’s central to how I make life decisions. I’m Armenian; I was born in Casablanca of parents who were Lebanese citizens. We became immigrants to he U.S. when I was six. It took me years to come to a feeling that I belong. It helped that I grew close to people of diverse backgrounds, minorities like Black, hispanic, and LGBTQ folk. These were the people who first recognized that my family history was traumatic and launched me on my healing journey. I’m lucky my support groups were so inclusive.

I was very glad that I found a body-centered way to address and heal trauma in myself and in the clients and students who came to me. Also happy to have an answer to my old question: “What’s WRONG with people?” I concluded that trauma is what’s wrong.The effects of unhealed trauma make us dysfunctional and stupid in the way that threatens the whole planet. For 25 years, I enjoyed a person-centered therapeutic bodywork practice that supported my clients’ mental health.

I have two other passions: spending time in nature and writing and teaching writing. My first essays illustrated how experiences in nature sustain and uplift us. I was desperate to get people to understand that environmental quality matters not only to our material survival but to our souls. This was in the years before scientists had figured out that the problem isn’t merely pollution or air pollution but climate change. I was impressed when we passed the Clean Air and Water Act and technologies were developed to produce clean fuel. These days, our federal government is disavowing solar energy, wind power, sustainability, carbon sequestration, nuclear energy, or any advancement that acknowledges that we are in a climate crisis. They are not into carbon emissions mitigation, using climate smart agriculture, or promoting an energy transition that we need so desperately before it’s beyond too late. I’m back to my old question: what’s WRONG with people? Is it just greed or is it despair?

My beloved career ended with a crash because of Covid 19. Then I witnessed the murder of George Floyd and turned my activism toward racial justice, which is intimately linked with environmental justice. I joined Showing Up for Racial Justice; our programs went beyond recognizing implicit bias to how to respond to racial inequality. I wrote a book about healing from racism. I examined my own race and ethnicity in relation to my white privilege--Armenians were once subject to Jim Crow laws and not considered “white” enough for citizenship. Allyship came easily to me. I learned about the origins and history of racism in the U.S.--carefully orchestrated so-called “privilege” for whites designed to mask their real socioeconomic status and vulnerability to the super wealthy with their tax breaks and corporations with their tax subsidies. I soon learned that the facts of history and current circumstance would be scrubbed by calling them critical race theory.

I love to teach writing classes, but today I’d have to worry if any organizations I work for relies on government funding. They would be discouraged from providing facilities that are accessible to people with disabilities. I would be restricted about teaching pronouns. I’d have to censor the memoir student who wrote about her peanut allergies, not to mention those who examine their identity or cultural heritage. No storytellers could be victims of injustice or mention dealing with housing affordability or barriers to education or employment--because no one has been marginalized. Gosh, I don’t know what I’d tell those who who are members of Indigenous people or communities or have a tribal heritage they want to write about.

These days my husband and I are dealing with health issues that seem to have less to do with diseases for which we can get vaccines (like measles) and everything to do with how our bodies get compromised by the U.S. agricultural and food production system. Our government won’t fund projects that deal with soil pollution, agricultural water, water treatment, or water quality, or any contaminants of environmental concern, including microplastics. These include PFAS and PFOAs, “forever pollutants“ found by evidence based science in our food, water, packaging, clothing, cookware--everywhere. We’re following strict dietary guidelines and avoiding ultraprocessed foods.

At this point in my life, I’ve had to switch from teaching people how to heal from trauma to trying to stop the trauma from piling on. This list of scrubbed words reveals who the targets are because you are not allowed to name them: there are no disadvantaged, underrepresented, under served, or undervalued, no vulnerable populations. None of this has to do with hate or ideology. Banned

is mention of issues concerning pending legislation, topics of federal investigation, topics that have received recent attention from Congress, or widespread or critical media attention.

The banned list makes it clear to me that I am not welcome to be who I am: an elderly, immigrant woman who cares about trauma, the environment, and social justice. So glance over the bolded words and see if you find yourself, or things you care about. (Also notice who is NOT on the list.) It’s time to reject a regime that doesn’t support the use of words like green or equity or community. The bolded words here are a fraction of what’s on the list. If I excluded a term relevant to you, I’m sorry. You’re likely to find it in the photographs or on the list provided by Pen America at pen.org.

In this era of rampant and overwhelming bad news, I’m here to offer some really good news. To counter current trends toward increased anxiety, depression, and ill health, life offers us two healing activities that are absolutely free. These have been shown in research studies to:

-lower stress chemicals such as cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline and shift your nervous system from “fight or flight” to “rest and digest”

-reduce blood pressure and resting heart rate

-boost your immune system for weeks or months

-decrease rumination or repetitive negative thinking

-help you retain information and think more clearly

-increase social and emotional well-being

-help with healing from surgeries, wounds, and disease.

So what can you do if you want all those benefits? To feel better and do better, 1. take a walk in nature; 2. write your deepest thoughts and feelings in a journal. I have gone elsewhere into great detail about the mechanisms for how these activities help, so I won’t elaborate here--though I am glad that science backs up my lifetime’s experience.

I’ve been seeking solace outdoors for decades, and I’ve been writing about it and about healing. My big boost in that direction came in the late 1980’s from an essay by Barry Lopez called “Landscape and Narrative” in his collection Crossing Open Ground. He spoke straight to my heart, to my half-formed ideas about why I was writing about taking walks at night to see salamanders or watching loons all day.

“Forest bathing” (as benefiting from nature has come to be known) and storytelling are deep kin in how they affect humans. “Inherent in story,” Lopez writes, “is the power to reorder a state of psychological confusion through contact with the pervasive truth of those relationships we call ‘the land.’” And he defines “the truth” as “something alive and unpronounceable. Story creates an atmosphere in which it becomes discernible as a pattern.”

According to Lopez, the exterior landscape heals the interior landscape, and that kind of healing is the purpose of narrative. So, he gave me permission to do what I was trying to do: write essays about experiences in nature that would help people heal.

Have you ever had an experience that was so far beyond merely enjoying the beauty or feeling the calm in nature that it changed how you view yourself, the world, and your place in it? These extraordinary moments come unbidden and often. They happen to people no matter what religion they have or don’t have. For that reason, Corinne G. Dempsey, in A View from LIfe’s Edge: Discovering What Really Matters with Older Women Across the Globe, calls these moments “frameless presence events.” They are not framed by previous belief systems; they are simply what is. They have a profound effect, connecting us to something deeper, something “unpronounceable.” Yet we try to tell the stories of these mystical moments because they matter more than thoughts and beliefs; we know this in our bones, in our spirits.

Together, landscape and narrative make us more whole. The science behind how this works matters to me. I can’t really separate that from the spiritual experience of being so intimately bound to trees that the chemicals they give off enter my bloodstream and help me live. I abide in a state of wonder.

Here’s another miracle: I teach writing at Rochester’s community literary organization, Writers & Books, which owns a beautiful retreat center in the Finger Lakes. There, I will offer a workshop called Nature Writing: The Inner and Outer Landscape Converge-right in the woods, next to a stream by the meadows overlooking a view. On the afternoon of August 1, we will gather to collect both outdoor experiences and ways to find words for them (indoors in the lodge with huge windows). We will do as Mary Oliver suggests in her poem “Praying”:

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris. It could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

If you want to join us, here is a link to register: go to Adult Workshops at writersandbooks.org.

My life used to have a plot--a really cool story arc of overcoming obstacles and reaching a pinnacle of success, living exactly as I wanted to. Then a career that gave me life was ended by the pandemic. Other attempts (writing a book, creating an online course) seem to be stalled. As far as a direction for moving forward in my life story, the lights may as well be off.

Enter the twenty-third Rochester International Jazz Festival. I don’t have an extensive musical education, especially in jazz, but every year I attend. It’s a week unlike any other in the year. Downtown is filled with the sound of music; multiple indoor and outdoor venues offer 300 performances. I go with the hope of uplift, and I get it. Uplift from divisions, from life getting ordinary, from my own limitations.

One of the first performances I attended this year was by Paul Cornish and his bandmates on bass and drums. I had never heard him before. The piano was set up so that he had to sit with his back to the audience. His first act was to turn around and look at us, wide-eyed. “So many people,” he said. “Thank you for coming. Maybe there aren’t other shows going on right now. Thank you.” (There were at least nineteen other shows to choose from!)

Once he started playing, I understood that his lack of ego was the requirement for the vulnerability it takes to play as he did. He introduced what he called a “composition,” but he played each note as if he had never heard it before. His body and even his ear leaned in, cocked to the keys, as if he were taking in this new sound, checking it out, seeing what would happen next.

If you play jazz as if you are creating in the moment, you are being completely vulnerable. It’s just raw you showing up having a conversation with the instrument. The unknown is life-giving rather than frightening because there is a deep trust in honesty, in genuine, embodied response. I loved one online commentator’s description: “That gentle, relaxed, unforced, patient touch is mind-boggling. It’s almost like the next notes aren’t up to him, but rather he waits on instructions from a force we can’t see that is actually guiding him...” That’s the energy that carries you forward. You the musician, you the audience.

Sometimes Cornish lingered on each note in a way that made me feel I was sinking into it, curious, inquiring. I felt as if I were discovering music for the first time. The inner substance of me was deepening and expanding. I was experiencing something to trust that was not a plan.

Apparently, my response didn’t just come from my lack of musical sophistication. After Cornish’s show, my husband spoke with a pianist who was in the audience. He, too, was blown away: “I’d expect him to go in one direction next, instead he’d go in another. I never knew what he was going to do next. And I don’t think he always knew either. Everything he did was new. That’s what jazz should be.”

Playing like this is like writing an essay, I thought. It’s an attempt at wrapping your mind around something to see what you think. The miracle (to this lone writer) was also that two other people were doing it with him at the same time, accompanying and supporting the journey.

For the rest of the week, I heard musicians with amazing virtuosity, groups that were practiced professionals working tightly together (as well as some who were disjointed), soloists who brandished jaw-dropping skill. They entertained me, sometimes annoyed me, and on occasion almost led me somewhere. But I kept waiting for the Paul Cornish moment when I felt I had entered another dimension, felt a deeper meaning in my life. It’s over a week later now, and that unique experience still reverberates in me.

At the same time, I’m still in a life I don’t have direction for. That’s when I take up my journal, where what appears is a fan letter to Paul Cornish. “Maybe I can live the way you play music,” I write, “grounded in what you know but committed to what new thing each moment offers up. Maybe I don’t have to make effort to resolve the unknown but I listen to it deeply.”

How does one do that? I can see Cornish’s ear turned to the notes he’s playing, as if there’s more present than the ear can hear and the eyes can see. That’s my model, which makes me willing to dwell with each moment to discover what is being built. After all, that is how I found my calling years ago. Going forward, the lights may be off, but instead of lamenting my blindness, I can listen to each step, follow an inner knowing that has nothing to do with expectations, and live my life the way Cornish plays jazz.

But for decades there has been one consistent passion that always gets me animated. Ask me what I can talk about for hours, write articles and books about, teach to curious audiences, and I’ll tell you about what happens to our bodies during trauma and how to heal it. I know how to work somatically with individuals; I know how writing can heal damaged nervous systems; I obsess over what needs to change in our culture/politics/economics to prevent trauma from happening.

This has been the trajectory of my life. First, years of searching for how to “feel better.” Discovering that I am a trauma survivor and how to come back home to my body after a lifetime of dissociation. Passing on the healing and teaching others how to do it. All the while, writing in my journal, writing essays, teaching writing.

I recently taught a six-week Craft and Cure: Writing to Heal class. When it ended, the dozen women didn’t really want to let go of each other. They had found a safe space in which to be real, to take risks, to use writing skills to tame their hurt. I may have gone overboard in my enthusiasm for the neurobiology of trauma and healing, but they used all of the writing prompts to advantage. So many surprises along the way, mostly about how a simple prompt can connect the dots, make a shift, show a next step.

This was the second time since the pandemic that I taught a live class. (The first time, I caught Covid!) It reminded me of what I’ll never get tired of: the group cohesion, the community that gets created when a safe space is created. I love seeing people learn how to accept themselves and each other because they know they are not being judged. But for years I had to avoid people, shut down my private bodywork practice, and do the writer thing alone at home. I had to reinvent myself. The result was a book manuscript (now with an agent) and the creation of an audio course.

I had as much fun generating that course as my other “love affairs” with creativity. It’s for people who want a science-based grounding in why and how writing works to heal trauma. Since trauma severs connections between our body knowledge and our conscious minds (that’s called dissociation), the course is full of prompts that bring those two back together again. For healing trauma, knowledge and insight are inadequate. The nervous system heals through experience. The right kind of writing provides the experiences necessary to rewire a damaged nervous system.

I was amazed at the final product that the producers of the audio course made. It has music! It has sound effects! It has supplementary resource materials and and a transcript! I invite you use it as a way to access healing for yourself or for clients you work with. It’s available at my new website, penaspathway.com.

Every year my friends, a justice worker married to an environmentalist, hold a solstice ritual. Those who gather end up sharing something deeply meaningful to them--events in their lives, feelings, aspirations. Part of the ritual is for each of us to name something we want to let go of. Then, as we go around again and name what we’d like to bring in to our lives, we each light a candle. The room fills with more and more light. Thus, our lives are directly linked to what’s happening between earth and sky.

This year, our hostess asked a slightly different question. She asked us, “What gives you hope?” I was stumped. “Hope” is a mystery word; I’ve never quite understood what it means. Is it a feeling? A way to think? Does it mean wish or desire, perhaps with a pinch of assurance of the outcome thrown in?

I know why my friend asked. As we fight for justice, do we get overwhelmed and depressed? What sustains us? Many people I know say that they lose sleep at night with each day’s new outrage in the news, each day’s new assault on decency, on rights, on education, on health care, on the arts, on the environment...Why don’t I lose sleep at night? I don’t think it’s because I limit my exposure to the news. I think it’s because most of the time, I fit into my own skin. I’m grounded in my own body and my immediate surroundings. I have myself; I have others. When I don’t, then I get discouraged and even lethargic.

When I experience myself as congruous and whole, the need for hope is either immaterial or already fulfilled. When I lose track of that presence, I suffer. I look for something missing; perhaps that’s the search that is called “hope.” But really, I believe it’s hopeless to look for hope. It’s either what you’re made of because you’re you or it’s a fantasy. Maybe when you need hope, it’s better to search for connection--to your body, to someone’s love and support, to inspiration from art or nature, to your own creativity--better than yearning after an abstract concept. All I know is that when I have some or all of these deep connections, hope isn’t an issue.

And what about hope for the world? My life’s work (learning about trauma and how to heal it) has taught me that traumatized people who have not healed behave in ways that recreate trauma. This is called history and has been going on for thousands of years, ever since the type of men who want power over others took it. Male rule became the way of civilization, leading to where we are now: in the process of planetary collapse. It looks pretty hopeless.

When I examine what I mean by that, I realize that it’s a thought, a projection in my head, a logical conclusion to the arc of history. My body, on the other hand, has no choice but to remain in the present. Here, well-being is to be found, and the profound assurance that there’s a path for healing; I’ve been through it and midwifed others through it. And, now that I’m paying close attention, I find something else inside: defiance. That’s not hope, but it’s an energy that sustains.

At solstice, I ended up saying that both hope and hopelessness are irrelevant to me, because we still have to do what we have to do to stand up for justice, and a humane culture. We still have to replace oppressive values and structures with life-affirming ones. I won’t see that world before I die, but I’ll spend my life working for it. In my mind, I keep seeing the image from the Titanic movie of the ship’s orchestra on deck as they sank, playing their instruments all the way down. The only choice they had was to continue being themselves.

When someone plays or sings the blues, the lyrics and the notes themselves embody pain. But the performance--that’s a human being saying I AM with their whole being. If you can sing the blues, you don’t need hope because you’re already here.

I recently read Imani Perry’s Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People and perked up when she wrote about how important it is to preserve “the sensibility that is the blues, that of living as a protest...Spiritual sustainability is a natural condition for those on the underside of empire.” Let’s face it, we’re all “on the underside of empire,” or we wouldn’t be worrying about earning enough money to make ends meet, or about climate change, or all the rest.

What sustains us? I think it’s something tougher than hope. I think it’s the choice to transition into a better future, to build the right kind of “chrysalis” as Perry calls it, “so that you can emerge with your natural human holiness intact.”

My first intimate encounter happened when I was in my 20’s backpacking alone in the Catskills. One night as I was sleeping on the floor of a lean-to, I felt something. You know what it feels like when you’re napping and your cat walks up your body and settles on your chest?

I opened my eyes and there I was, face to face with a porcupine peering down at me. I didn’t move, but it started chattering slowly moved off me and out the open front of the lean-to.

I wasn’t scared. But I was worried. I’d heard that these creatures like to chew salt off your boots, your backpack straps, your camera...I had to protect my gear. Therefore, I had the brilliant idea of setting up an early distant warning system. I took all the components of my mess kit and laid them across the front of the lean-to--tin cup, tin plates, pots and pans, canteen, etc. If it came back in, I’d hear it and wake up.

I went back to sleep and woke up not to long after, to a new sound. Here’s the porcupine, completely avoiding the front entrance of the lean-to, but entering by climbing the side wall. I’ve been outwitted.

Well, a porcupine makes a fine roommate. After spending a night with one, I stopped being afraid of the natural world.

Animals are not necessarily afraid of you. They maintain their dignity and communicate. I learned these things from a great blue heron who was fishing along the Erie Canal. There it was, leaning patiently over the water, perfectly still. I decided to park myself along the water too, about ten feet away. Blue took one step away from me. I took one step closer. Blue took one step away. I waited a moment and took one step closer. Blue took one step away. This is it, he said. This is how much space I need from you. I don’t care if you’re there, just don’t come closer.

I’ve come to believe that if they’re not hungry or scared, an animal’s primary emotion is curiosity. Walking along a stream in Algonquin Park, I noticed a pair of otters spotting the humans on the trail. They acted like they had never seen such a sight before, and were utterly fascinated. They followed along and kept looking at us, chattering to each other. Same with a pair of baby beavers who once caught sight of me in a canoe. They swam as fast as they could toward me, bobbing their heads out of the water every now and then to take a better look...until Mom caught them doing it and scolded them and they rushed right back to her.

One night I took a walk at dusk and decided to wait for the stars to come out so I could look at the moons of Jupiter with my binoculars. This was the days before ticks in our area, so I lay on the grass and fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, there was a ring of deer faces peering down at me. Curious.

One of the biggest lessons came from little birds. This time, I was alone in the Adirondacks, sitting over a ravine, surrounded by bare-branched trees. This was April. The world was so breathtakingly beautiful that I found myself wondering, isn’t this the Garden of Eden? Did we really get kicked out, or do we only think we did? This was actually another way of asking myself, do I really belong here? Does my human presence here disturb the other creatures? Am I a part of this?

No sooner than I thought the question, than this pair of pine siskins flew right over to me. The male sat on a branch to my left, about 8 inches from my head, singing his heart out. I stayed perfectly still. The female descended to a branch to my right, an inch from my shoulder. Then I felt her fluttering around my neck, my head-- landing for a moment--then fluttering around again. Then the two of them flew away, he still singing, she with two strands of my hair in her beak. Nest-building time. I was being woven right into the world.

It was as if a bolt of lighting descended from the sky to answer my question.

One of my most profound lessons came from Jasmine, an all-white part husky, part wolf owned by a friend who told me what a compassionate counselor Jasmine was, putting a paw on her when she cried and staying by her side. Jasmine walked with calm, alert attention; she reminded me of a Buddhist monk.

One day we took a winter walk in Clark’s Gully. A gorgeous day with blue skies and new snow piled on every twig and branch. Jasmine and her companion husky ran off from their human friends, frolicking in the snow. We were walking along the frozen creek along the bottom of the gully.

One moment we look up and see the two dogs 40 feet up, looking down at us, silhouetted agains the sky. The next moment, I hear my friend scream. I see Jasmine’s white body in midair, cascading down like a waterfall. She must have slipped on ice.

We run as best as we can through deep snow to where Jasmine fell. She’s lying on her side, her breath heaving. No blood. We kneel and put our hands on her. I’m thinking prayers. I’m imagining her bounding up and trotting off. Her eye looks into our eyes. She is still as present and dignified as that Buddhist monk. Then the light lets go of her eyes, and we have our hands on something that is not Jasmine.

That quality of hers, that calm, alert presence, stays with me. Some years later, I saw it again, watching loons for hours. I kept trying to put my finger on just how the loons were living--just being--when I realized it was exactly how Jasmine was dying. Same thing. All there, calm, present.

Animals have taught me how to live and how to die. I am deeply grateful.

Last weekend I went to two protests, wearing a cowboy hat with dangling, sparkling stars hanging from its rim and a sandwich board which said “Patriotism 101: America = No Kings” on one side and “Love America” on the other. Along with the unicorns and frogs, I had fun. Among fellow Americans who are joyfully fighting to hold on to democracy, it’s easy to forget the outrage and terror that propels my actions. After all, my family fled violence, wars, and genocide to come to these shores because America was the land of the free, ruled by law—the place on earth safe from the whims of tyrants.

Two experiences keep me from the paralysis of fear or despair: letting nature heal my nervous system, and taking action. If it weren’t for the beech tree, how could I handle the disintegration of “the American experiment”? Not to mention the planet as we know it? When I juxtapose the two states of being I experience--awe and gratitude for the beauty of the world and dismay and rage at the stupidity of where male dominance has led us--this leads me to a place with no words. Staying aware of this place, holding contradiction in my awareness, has a profound effect. Oddly, it makes me feel grounded, the way that, when you’re grounded and relaxed in Aikido, you are ready for an attack. You are ready to not be thrown but to deflect energy the way you want it to go.

So I join the groups and take the actions that push back against authoritarianism. On top of that, there is something else that is mine to do, something that addresses the bigger picture. I believe we are in this mess because of trauma, trauma which perpetuates more trauma for generations. I don’t think our DNA dooms us to violence; I think social/political/economic structures that oppress people do. The job I’ve given myself is to be one voice in how to heal, one voice in changing the conditions that cause further trauma. In the big picture, it’s a tiny voice. But it’s what I have.

I’ve been busy. In the past year, I’ve revised the manuscript for my original book, Saving Ourselves: How Writing Helps Us Heal From the Trauma of Racism to turn it into two, possibly more, volumes. First, I wanted to examine how traumatic events damage our nervous systems, and how the principles of the craft of writing can address this damage. The working title of my book, now being submitted to publishers, is Craft and Cure: How Writing Helps Heal Trauma. In addition, I think racism and misogyny are the cornerstone of all attempts to maintain a class hierarchy that harms people and planet. These topics deserve their own healing book(s).

Because I don’t know how long it will take to get this book launched, I’ve also collaborated with The Author’s Leverage to create an audio course that people can take on their own schedule. I met Parchelle and Portia Osumare last spring and was utterly taken with both their enthusiasm for my project and their expertise. The course we’ve created together should become available before the end of the year. All this made me get busy creating a new website, penaspathway.com. Please check it out and sign up.

These projects are an explanation--an excuse?--for why I have been silent on Substack for so long. I’ve been busy, but the truth also is that our current situation kind of leaves me speechless. What am I supposed to say? That place of no words I mentioned earlier--it can either shut me up or allow me to go deeper. Even my desire to be a writer contributes the unexpected. Today, I was rereading Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer when I came across an expression of exactly what I’ve been trying to put into words for months. It comes from a John Cheever story called, “Goodbye, My Brother” about a brother who sees the flaws and darkness of everything. The narrator asks, “how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless?”

My mind wants to grapple with the contradictions in that passage; I just want them to resonate in my body. When all the leaves are fallen from my beech tree, it will stand shining silver in moonlight. I’ll be dumbstruck again.

When I saw Speilberg's movie of it, I was disappointed and a bit embarrassed. Oh well, movies are never as good as the book...

Then, to my horror, someone made a Broadway musical of it, one of my leasts favorite genres. I vowed to stay away. How can you cheapen such a profound book by turning it into song and dance?

Last Saturday night, I attended the final show of  my season tickets to a local theatre. It was The Color Purple, a musical. I dreaded it, but I went.

It opened with a sung prayer. People busting out of their skins with joy because it was Sunday morning. Merely because it was Sunday morning.

This is what I've been after! I thought. This capturing of joy, insisting on joy, in the midst of life, no matter how difficult life gets. Now I think back and realize how this first scene is the emblem of the whole play. I know what's coming: abuse of every sort, child rape, heartless betrayal, separation, misogyny, racism, and also, step by step, getting a self back, defying the givens, creating a new life because there is love.

The singing and the dancing held the whole thing. The cast was so good they broke my heart. Celie gave us a couple of songs in which anguish and triumph were indistinguishable. And I understood that this is how the oppressed and depressed make it: they deny nothing, they omit nothing. They can look at the color purple in a flower and be uplifted straight into being an essential part of creation.

There wasn't a moment of this production that did not teach me how to live, especially in these times. This week, the news from Gaza continues to be unbearable. Twelve jurors found Trump guilty on 34 counts, and now the right wing is threatening violence. No matter who wins the election in November, democracy has already been and will continue to be threatened. I used to be an optimist about human nature, our ability to heal, and that the "arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice" as Martin Luther King, Jr. said. But I must admit, I keep seeing the (mostly) men who run the world keep making the same mistakes they have for millenia. Only now the stakes are higher. No one is getting smarter.

Maybe I should go to the musical of The Color Purple again, just to be reminded of the possibility that one can be in the depths of oppression and despair and find one's way back to empowerment, creativity, and joy in life. Maybe I should sing and dance. Maybe, after a month of silence, I should write something.

Let me repeat (from the last post) that Dr. Murthy finds increased risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, depression, anxiety, and even early death from loneliness. I know that loneliness is a stress and exacerbates other stresses, and that stress leads to all kins of physiological breakdowns. But the view put forth by many researchers goes beyond this. Neurobiologist Dr. Daniel Siegel conceives of our brains,  minds and bodies not as independent entities but as functioning as part of the milieu of  relationships we're in. "Interpersonal connections shape neural connections....Empathetic relationships help the immune system function well." Relationships alter our cells down to how our genes express themselves (or get turned on and off). For example, the genes that cause inflammation are turned on 50%  more in black people than white because of experiences of racism and discrimination. Poverty and racism also affect our telomeres, the structures at the end of our chromosomes that keep the chromosomes from unraveling. The longer your telomeres, the longer your life.

I'm applying scientific data to something well all know intuitively: some people and circumstances make us sick. Some make us feel better. It's because their biology interacts with ours, and experiences become biology. The "miracle" part of this story is that this is true for healing and well-being as well as ill health. The first time I had a scientific explanation for something I had repeatedly observed in my private practice, I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I was working with trauma survivors who had not yet integrated some of their memories. I knew that if I held them in deep connection in a safe environment, the memories alive in them could shift from implicit to explicit. That means that instead of re-experiencing them as happening now, they could talk about them as in the past, like we do with normal memories. How does this happen?

Researchers working with animals and humans have discovered that shortly after you retrieve a memory, some the chemical bonds holding it in place become unstable for anywhere from ten minutes to six hours. This is when the brain can experience new learning.  Let's say you're in the presence of someone who is paying deep, attuned attention to you while you retrieve a problematic memory. This causes the release of a neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA for short, whose function is to soothe, to bring sensations of pleasure and comfort. “Research suggests that GABA-bearing fibers—literally fibers of comfort—[grow] from the orbitofrontal cortex into the terror- filled amygdala [the part of the limbic system that detects threats and processes fear]. This kind of vertical integration... bring[s] the neural network containing the representations of the trauma into the embrace of interpersonal care.” (That's according to therapist Bonnie Badenoch in Being a Brain-Wise Therapist: A Practivcl Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology.) Even when people remember an original experience, this memory is stored separately from the “emotional learning” they derived from it—that they are worthless, helpless, invisible, that the world is never safe. These emotional effects of the memory change without changing the actual memory.

Ready for another miracle? The key to the kind of change described above is a certain kind of attention when you are in connection with someone. Attention itself effects if and how your neurons fire and how they connect. Paying attention to yourself or giving someone attention means being present with curiosity, observing and perhaps reflecting what is going on, and being so attuned that you pick up levels of experience deeper than words and consciousness. It does not include advice, judgment, or trying to make something happen. As a practitioner, I've learned that my job is to create the conditions in which the client can experience that kind of attunement.

I take it for granted as a practitioner, but I recently had an experience as a client that really taught me what connection is and does. My usual mode of operation when I'm not doing well is to try to figure things out and fix them. This does not work. My practitioner had to wrestle my attention to have me realize she is there. Like all of us, I had to let down my usual defenses to connect, to operate in an unfamiliar way. What we're not used to is entering an unknown moment, a space full of nothing but attention to each other. No agenda, no effort, just being together. This allows something to happen, something that we can't name consciously because we don't know what is going to emerge. But an alchemy happens, causing a shift in the nervous system, in the ability to be yourself. This is how babies grow their brains and nervous systems, and how adults can bring their bodies back to self-regulation.

Many scientists are now seeing the brain not as a separate, independent thing in your skull, but as "physiologically coupled to its surroundings" as Alan Jasanoff writes in The Biological Mind. No wonder loneliness leads to disease. "A society that fails to value communality--our need to belong, to care for one another and to feel caring energy flowing toward us--is a society facing away from the essence what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue." (Gabor Maté in The Myth of Normal) No wonder Dr. Murthy emphasizes policies that can help people connect.

"As long as human beings continue to believe that we are separate entities rather than parts of a whole, we will continue to live in the midst of collective trauma." (from How We Ended Racism) We need to live in a world where we can be who we are as individuals, and expand our definition of me to include the we such that both can be respected and loved. I am not me without you.

Just how much do I dislike America's romance with the myth of individualism? I discovered something called the Culture Orientation Scale, which measures individualism and collectivism in a given culture. I took the test to see where I stood. I was surprised at how high I scored on having my individuality and autonomy matter to me. I also scored high on "seeing the self as part of a collective but perceiving all the members of that collective as equal." (Fetzer Institute) I wasn't surprised that I was low on valuing hierarchy and competition. The test helped me see my values: I want the freedom of individuality and I want that for others in the collective because our well-being depends on the well-being of the whole.

What's unclear to me is exactly who this "whole" is. I used to feel that I was part of a community, largely consisting of a friend group who all knew each other and acted like family for special occasions such as birthdays and Thanksgiving. We were there for each other during the hard times, too. New people would be welcomed and absorbed into the community. In addition, I participated in three organizations that added meaning to my life.

I'm not sure when and how that fell apart. Now I have a bunch of scattered friends and a family I married into (thankfully). The organizations either became dysfunctional or no longer met my needs. Covid added a layer of isolation that I'm just possibly emerging from. I've been looking for community, checking out new organizations, cultivating new friendships, but I'm still asking, "Where's my tribe?"

Apparently, I'm not the only one feeling too alone. According to the United States Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, we are in an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. He says, "Across many measures, Americans appear to be becoming less socially connected over time." Comparing levels of time spent alone, numbers of friends, time spent with family and others, "between 2003 and 2020 we see that social isolation has increased for many Americans." Dr. Murthy is concerned because this results in increased risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, depression, anxiety, and even early death.

Loneliness isn't a health hazard just for individuals, but for communities. Dr. Murthy says that "communities where residents are more connected to each other fare better on several measures of population health, community safety, resilience when natural disasters strike, prosperity, and civic engagement."

I'm not sure we know what connection is. I recently came across an article in a magazine I can no longer locate (alas) but the content so shocked me that I remember some of it. It offered tips from therapists on what to do to mitigate loneliness, things like start a gratitude journal, go out to a coffee shop to read your book, people-watch in mall, etc. What struck me was that not one of the five tips included actually interacting with people! If that's how the experts are telling you to reduce loneliness, no wonder we are a lonely society.

I love how the authors of How We Ended Racism deepen and elevate the conversation about connection. They say we are neither "all one" nor "the other." "Interconnection  is the wrong word to use to create a reality without racism because it refers to the desire to connect "separate parts," which automatically infers an assumed and inherent disconnection...the truth...is that we are part of one larger collective ecosystem with each component affecting another." They borrow from neurobiologist Dr. Daniel J. Siegel to assume intraconnection--the connection between parts of something that is already whole. The assumption at the bottom of the Iceberg Model would be that instead of seeking oneness with others, we recognize that we and other human beings "are also a part of this larger organism that we are also a part of" like organs in a body. "As long as we human beings continue to believe that we are separate entities rather than parts of a whole, we will continue to live in the midst of collective trauma."

Exactly. To end our collective trauma and loneliness, the Surgeon General's Advisory suggests six "pillars" for advancing social connection. These would be the structures to put in place that foster certain behaviors, as the Iceberg Model lays out. In the next post, I will build on his final suggestion to explore what connection actually is. His "pillars" are:

1. Strengthen social infrastructure like parks, libraries, playgrounds, and programs and policies that bring people together.

2. Enact pro-connection public policies like accessible public transportation or paid family leave.

3. Mobilize the health sector to assess patients for risks of loneliness.

4. Reform digital environments so they don't detract from meaningful and healing connections with others.

5. Research research the causes and consequences of social disconnection and the effectiveness of efforts to boost connection.

6. Cultivate a culture of connection.

A medical doctor is telling us we need connection because he knows that the nature of our relationships and environment become our biology. That's how much we are intraconnected. Next post, I'll explore some of the mechanisms of how quality relationships affect the cells in your body. This never ceases to amaze me.

It took centuries to come up with the idea of a white race, much of it based on pseudoscience so ridiculous you  have to laugh. Where did our notion of white, black, red, and yellow races come from? Remember the  medieval theory of "humors" or bodily fluids--blood, phlegm, choler, and bile? The great taxonomer Carl Linnaeus,  attributed "humors" to various people around the globe; attributing temperamental characteristics to physical descriptions is where "race" turns into racism and continues to this day.

Our next giant step forward in scientific racism comes from a student of Linnaeus, Johann Friederick Blumenbach, who published On the Natural Variety of Mankind in 1775. He had some science-based thoughts, theorizing that skin color depends on climate and that all humans are members of one species (unlike the beliefs of others at his time). By 1795, he had revised Linnaeus'  classification to create some terms that are familiar to us today. His humankind was divided into these races, in hierarchical order: Caucasian, Mongolian, American, Malayan and Ethiopian.

Blumenbach is where we get the term "Caucasian" and where things get really interesting for me personally. My people, Armenians, come from a spot between the Caspian and Black Seas--the the Highlands of Armenia, right by the Caucasus Mountains. The symbol of our homeland close to every Armenian heart is Mt. Ararat, where legend has it that Noah's Arc landed after the Flood.

Blumenbach spent years meticulously measuring skulls. His most "beautiful" specimen was from the Caucasus mountains. And it was white! (Never mind that all skulls are white.) And because Noah's Arc landed on Mt. Ararat, this must mean that the human race began there and was originally all white. Whites are  the most beautiful for two reasons: because of his beautiful white skull, and because whites can blush.  (I'm not kidding. See The History of White People, by Nell Painter, p. 80.)

And so white people became Caucasians. Except for Armenians, who are from the Caucasus and who have white skin (unless they're tanned) but who were classified as "Mongolian" in the U.S. until 1925. If you still have doubt that race is a made-up thing, keep reading.

I'll jump forward to 1899 when William Z. Ripley, economist, anthropologist, professor at MIT and Harvard, published The Races of Man. Now we're trying to determine how many races there are in Europe. More skull measuring, which told you about the personalities of the various races, and which had everything to do with who got to be white in America. Here is Ripley's schema:

"Teutonics: tall, dolichocephalic (i.e., long-headed), and blond;

Alpines: medium in stature, brachycepjalic (i.e., round-headed), with medium color hair

Mediterraneans: short, dolichephalic...and dark." (Painter, p. 216)

The trouble was, anthropologists who measured these characteristics found that you could have short people with round heads, and tall people with dark hair, and so forth. Poor Ripley. He was, he wrote, "tempted to turn back in despair" from classifying people. But there was a solution: "Rather than deal with people who did not fit the pattern...race-minded anthropologists them deemed {sic} 'disharmonic' and then just ignored them." (Painter, p. 217) Ripley couldn't figure out why some Jews didn't have Jewish noses, and some non-Jews did. As for the Irish, they were shown to be black in the "Index of Nigrescence" accompanying his map of the British Isles.

The original 1790 Naturalization Act says only "free white people" (meaning men, of course) can become naturalized. What was meant by "white"? Let's ask Benjamin Franklin. The French weren't white. Not Spaniards and Italians. Not Russians. Not Swedes. These are all "what we call a swarthy Complexion," Franklin writes. Neither were Germans white, except for Saxons. Franklin was upset: "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of us Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language and Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion."

So, you have to be Anglo-Saxon to be White. Whatever that means. Archeologist Duncan Sayer, who excavated several Iron Age and Medieval sites in England and tested the DNA from  skeletons, discovered that the "DNA evidence points to an integrated people of mixed ancestry who lived side by side ...and shared what we consider Anglo-Saxon culture.” They weren’t a race.

In Ben Franklin's time, The U.S. economy was largely agrarian, but in the following century, industrialization took over and with it, the need for cheap labor. Business leaders and industrialists were eager to allow the waves of immigration that started in the 1840's from people fleeing European poverty, starvation and oppression. The first wave was Irish, fleeing what we call famine but amounted to genocide by the British. Are Irish white? Not according to the 1851 Harpers Weekly, which described the Irishman as "low-browed, brutish, even simian...with black tint of skin."

How about Italians?  Italians not only did not look white, they didn't act white. They accepted jobs that were relegated to Blacks, like farm work. They lived among Blacks and even intermarried. If you came from southern Italy or Sicily, you were a savage, a rapist, and a criminal. (Do these words sound familiar?) The 1924 Immigration Act barred most Italians from entering the country.

Who else?  Greek and Italian copper miners in Utah were classified as "nonwhite." White steel workers in Pennsylvania refused to take "hunky" jobs. This term could cover Hungarians, Poles, Slavs, Croats, etc. Polish people in the U.S. did not consider themselves black or white and so did not participate the Chicago riots of 1919. Irish street gangs put on blackface to attack Polish neighborhoods so Poles and other Eastern Europeans would join them in being white and fighting against blacks.

Are Finns white? They are a good example of how Whiteness is determined in this country. When I look up  photos of Finns, most of them look like Swedes or other Northern Europeans to me. Perhaps their race changes if they wear traditional costumes? Not until Finns became labor organizers did people take them to court for being of Mongolian descent and therefore subject to the Asian Exclusion Act.

The famous Plessy v. Furgeson Supreme Court Case of 1896 had determined that a Negro, Homer Plessy, who looked white, could legally be ejected from a whites-only car. So now you were black even if you were white.

The full silliness of racial categories displays itself in relation to people we call Latinos, who didn't exist as such until the 1980 census. Before that, they were Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and people from Central America. "Think of the Latino category as fabricated and flexible rather than as immutable and fixed. Like all racial categories at their origin, 'Latino' is a political and social construction rooted in a particular time and place" writes Laura E. Goméz in Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism. Most Latinos are Mexican Americans. When the U.S. invaded Mexico as part of its westward expansion and desire to add slave states to the Union, it acquired most of what is now our Southwest and California. It did not decide to acquire all of Mexico because that would include too big a population of people who were not considered White.

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo purported to give Mexicans, who without having moved now suddenly found themselves in the United States, citizenship. This would have meant that they had to be considered white.

All of these exclusions or assimilations into whiteness have two issues in common: who will be given citizenship and property ownership rights? And who will receive adequate wages? Immigrants to the U.S. quickly learned that if they wanted to avoid the trauma of being treated like Black people are treated here, they had better become identified as American White in their beliefs and behavior. Assimilation becomes fitting in to the racist structure of this nation. Many immigrants took their cases to court to be declared White.

From 1878 until 1944, the courts, in a series of "prerequisite cases" had to decide who could become a citizen on the basis of being white and therefore capable of self-governance. In 1909, four Armenians who had been denied citizenship because of being Asiatic, aka Mongolian, took their case to court. Remember,  we are from the Caucasus Mountains: Caucasian, right? Judge Lowell of the US Circuit Court in Boston decided that the average man on the street would have no trouble seeing them as white, that same average man who would "find no difficulty in assigning to the yellow race a Turk or a Syrian with as much ease as he would...a Chinaman or Korean." (cite.case.law in re Haladjian)  Mind you, Armenians, Turks and Syrians don't look all that different from each other, and Arabs were deemed to be Caucasian at the time.

Shortly after, Congress decided that Armenians, along with Syrians and Jews, were exceptions to the "Asiatics" rule and therefore could become citizens. So why did the Armenian, Tatos  Cartozian have to show up in court in 1923 to show how white he was before they approved his naturalization? And why did the Attorney General's office file suite to revoke his certificate? Cartozian took this to the Supreme Court, which found Armenians to be white, so we've been White since 1925--no longer subject to Jim Crow laws, unable to buy property or move into any neighborhood we wanted.

Not everyone who got to become White stayed that way. Syrians, for instance, were declared white by the courts in 1909, 1910 and 1915, but not white in 1913 and 1914. In 1922, a Japanese man with white skin was denied citizenship because he was not Caucasian. Three months later, the same judge denied citizenship to a Caucasian because he was from India and did not have white skin. "Mexican" was put on the Census as a race in 1930, so Mexicans wouldn't compete for scarce jobs during the Depression. In 1970, "Hispanic" became a thing on the Census, but because Latinx people can be white, black or brown, what they check on the Census forms is a response not to color but to "what strategy they use to combat the discrimination they faced." (www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014). Today, what "Hispanic" means depends on what state you live in.

Whatever your ethnic background, you could look up how you came to be white in the U.S. (e.g., How Did Jews Become White Folk? by Karen Brodkin Sacks). Whiteness depends on nothing natural or genetic, but on how people see you in any time and place, which could depend on your religion, what courts decide, what each state decides, what hogwash racist anthropologists have cooked up by measuring skulls, or how an industrialist wants to pit cheap labor groups one against the other.

So, the Supreme Court said I'm white, because that's how most people see me. Therefore, I get all the advantages of whiteness in the U.S. So I'm white. If I Anglicized my name, would that make the transformation complete? Would I magically forget the culture and history in my bones? Would I automatically prefer McDonald's to the 3,000 year-old recipes taught me by my mother? Would I never hear an American friend who hears me speak my native language for the first time say, "NOW I see you!"? Would I end up feeling less like myself instead of more like myself in an affinity group of white people vs. people of color?

I'm still exploring this issue. I guess my current conclusion is what I've always whispered to myself: I'm passing as white. That gives me white privilege. Therefore, the next question is how to be white in the U.S. in a way that maintains my integrity and moral values? This is something all white people should be asking themselves.

Writing prompt #8:  If you're a White American, it's likely that your ancestors faced racism when they got here and took on whiteness to protect themselves. (This is a privilege not afforded to people with darker skin.) How long have your people been deemed White? How did they get that way? Answering these questions requires learning some history and facing the trauma of past generations.

The mental models that we use to build structures and behaviors can often be unconscious ones, or ones based on ignorance or misunderstanding. Sometimes they don't even match our stated values. I want to examine a basic assumption that many of us make, and that is that you can divide up the human species into various "races" and assign characteristics to each race. We've lived with this idea for so many centuries that it seems natural and obvious.

If you met me, you'd say that I am obviously white. However, I've been confused my whole life about which race category to fit myself into (more on that next post), so I got curious. I discovered things that shocked me and changed my world-view, and I want to share them with you.

First, race does not exist in nature. Homo sapiens has more in common among all the supposed "races" than the superficial differences that show up in appearance. The equivalent of creating "race" out of minor differences would be deciding that your friend with blue eyes is of a different race than you because you have brown eyes. The cover of the April 2018 issue of National Geographic has a photograph of a black girl and a white girl. They are twin sisters.

In the accompanying article, it says "All non-Africans today, the genetics tells us, are descended from a few thousand humans who left Africa maybe 60,000 years ago." In other words, all our ancestors were black. For the people who stayed in Africa, there is more genetic variety among them than between any African and European. Because the migrants settled in such diverse landscapes, pockets of people, through random mutations, developed characteristics that were helpful for survival in their geography. For instance, those who live in high altitudes have differences that help them with low oxygen levels, or those (like the Inuit) with a largely marine-based diet had to adapt to digesting fatty acids.

Early Europeans were dark-skinned. (As a matter of fact, the artists who made the astounding Lascaux cave paintings were blue-eyed, brown-skinned women.) "The human genome consists of three billion base pairs--page after page of A's, C's G's and T's--divided into 20,000 genes...In one position, where most-stub-Saharan Africans have a G, Europeans have an A."  (National Geographic, April 2018, p. 40) About 8,000 years ago, people from the Middle East came into Europe with this mutation. What is it good for?

When you live near the Equator, you need protection against the sun. When populations move further north toward the poles, they don't need the melanin in skin to protect them; they need to be able to produce more Vitamin D. So one tiny mutation in one gene (one change in three billion pairs!) turned people white-skinned so they could absorb more ultra-violet rays, in regions where that was helpful. No one's race changed.

"Race" turns out to be a made up concept with changing definitions over the centuries, none of which has anything to do with genetics. Here in the U.S., it started when America became a British colony. The only reason to have a colony is to create wealth for the colonizers. Thus Jamestown, the first permanent settlement, was founded by a commercial trading company called the Virginia Company, most of whose investors stayed in London expecting to make money on lumber and gold. After a disastrous beginning when nearly all the settlers died, the English Crown created a policy of offering vast tracks of land (as if no one lived here) to the already wealthy.

Now the wealthy owners needed a labor force, so it was a good thing for them that Britain, by privatizing common lands, had managed to create a huge population of paupers.  They could easily be gotten rid of. For instance, "In 1618, the City of London and the Virginian Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children...Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children--a quarter of them girls--were sold into field labor...Of the 300 children shipped [to Jamestown colony]...between 1619 and 1622, only 12 were still alive in 1624." (Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People, p.41)

There were three classes: the land-owning, ruling elite, the other free people who were tradespeople or tenant farmers, and the indentured servants. I found this hard to imagine at first, but historical records paint a picture of life In Virginia and Maryland before 1676 with no evidence of racial attitudes like ours.  People were not classified by race but by ethnic origin or religion. So the free and bond people were of mixed heritage: many European, some African, some "Indian." I learned about indentured servitude in school and thought it sounded fair enough. I had no idea that for the first 40 or 50 years of the Virginia colony, conditions were so atrocious that not one in five laborers survived to achieve their freedom. 

The free people had the same rights and status, regardless of skin color, and not a hint of Jim Crow. These rights included the right to vote, make contracts, go to court, own land, congregate in public places, travel, marry whomever they wanted. In other words, your rights and privileges depended on your wealth, not the shade of your skin. Some people of African or Indian descent owned bond servants (of any color); marriage between the races was common and accepted. Even a European woman who married an African man did not lose status. Both African and European people who served the same master were treated the same way.

The ruling elite eventually decided that the way to get wealthy was to grow tobacco, a labor-intensive endeavor. They soon saw that they could not make a profit on tobacco unless they changed the laws. For instance, tenants were restricted in how much tobacco they could grow (so they couldn't compete with owners), forbidden to plant corn so they had to pay high prices to buy it from the elite, and denied their rights to landownership upon completion of their contracts.

Eventually all laboring people could be arrested if they did not carry a pass signed by an owner or other authority. To lower maintenance costs, workers were forced to subsist on corn and forbidden to hunt for food (in case they ran away to the Indians). Terms of servitude were extended for any reason the owners decided, and also transferred to another owner. The lives of servants and apprentices were completely controlled by their masters. Family life was outlawed. Masters could choose any reason they came up with to break the terms of a servant's original contract and extend their servitude.

In essence,  the treatment of the mostly Britons, Scots and Irish who constituted the work force is indistinguishable from slavery. Some of the ways they were treated (e.g., a pregnant woman flogged to death as she gave birth) is, to me, indistinguishable from psychopathology on the part of the ruling class.

I never understood the White man's obsession with Black sexuality until I understood its economic origins in America. In English law, a child's status derived from the father. In America, a 1662 law made it so that all children born here derived their status from their mother. Now a White owner could increase his capital by raping an African woman, because his own children became property to be bought and sold. 

You can't mistreat people and create conditions which make it impossible for them to survive without backlash. In Virginia in 1676,  laborers of every origin, bond and free, joined together under the leadership of  Nathaniel Bacon and rebelled. Bacon was a wealthy cousin of the Governor, fighting with him about which Indians to kill.  He headed 500 men who burned down Jamestown and forced the Governor to flee. Even though the rebellion eventually failed, it was a turning point in creating racism and embedding it into law.

For the plantation class, the issue became how to prevent unity among the people they were exploiting. You had to find a way to separate people according to categories that were not flexible, like religion (one can convert) or bond or free (one could become free).

        The planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort
	to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed
        greater access to Native American lands, white servants were allowed to police 
        slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free                              labor would not be placed in competition with slave labor. ...Poor whites suddenly 
	had a direct and personal stake in the existence of a race-based system of slavery. 				        (Wilkerson, Caste, p. 31) 

To further distinguish people who had not been previously separated, and because bi-racial people had the right to become free, anti-miscegenation laws had to be invented. By 1691 and 1692, Virginia and Maryland had created the first anti-miscegenation laws, which is when the category "white" appears for the first time in law. If a "white" woman had married an enslaved man, that was great for the slaveholder; now she and her children became his property.

Laws were created that did not improve the conditions of "white" people, merely made things worse for blacks. A new kind of slavery came into being: a new law had to be made that African slaves could not be set free, and another law that made slavery hereditary. Think about it and be shocked. It wasn't always the way we assume.

Free blacks could no longer vote, hold public office, take  part in the armed militia, or own "Christian" (read, white) bond laborers. They could no longer hold and raise livestock. Whites got "privileges"--you couldn't whip a white servant while he or she was naked without a special permit; Africans and Indians servants were excepted.  An African could no longer testify against a white and no longer had the right to self-defense against a white.

To really guarantee the loyalty of "white" people, lawmakers seized and sold all property owned by "any slave" (now that blacks were permanently slaves), using the profit for aiding the poor. The law mandated that any planter who freed a white servant provide him with 50 acres. (Talk about affirmative action.) Furthermore, slave patrols became compulsory for non-slaveholding whites, putting them in the position of aligning with the elite class by enforcing their laws. It wasn't easy to make such a deep change in social structure. Laws had to be read aloud in churches and at courthouses. People had to be made to see that being "white" gave them privileges--or at least less terrible treatment.

American ideas of race and racism were invented by a particular class of people at a particular time for their own economic benefit.  Although slavery had existed since ancient times, this form of slavery was never the basis of an entire economy prior to colonization. Though slavery is always cruel and exploitative, other kinds of slavery weren't as depraved. Slaves were still people, could be freed or ransomed, had rights in some places, and in some were even adopted into the family. Chattel slavery is unique in that slaves are the possession of the owner, who can do whatever he pleases to his property--property, not human beings.  Slaves cannot be made free, and their children become the owner's property as well. This is what is meant by chattel slavery.

Now I'm faced with the notion that whiteness itself came into existence in order to create chattel slavery.  This fact takes my breath away. The wealthy class actually figured out how to change the bottom layer of the iceberg! They redefined humanity into categories people never saw before and built laws and structures that forced people to accept the new reality. And we are still living with the consequences to this day.

What if we stopped believing in the notion of race altogether, or at least redefine what we mean by it? (See Sheena Michele Mason’s substack, “Theory of Racelessness”)What if a white person is just a person like the rest of humanity, not the Overlord in the great chain of being with a delusional conviction of superiority? What kind of structures would we build to create a culture and civilization?

There's more to the story of how we came to believe in whiteness. In pursuit of an answer to the question of my own "race," I learned things I'd never been taught in school and which explained some of my own dilemma. More on that next post.

For subscribers:

Writing prompt #1: Did you notice your bodily reactions as you read the history in this post? Can you name what you were feeling? As you let all the information get absorbed, write about your reactions—both emotions and thoughts.

Writing prompt #2: Do you have to reconsider any basic assumptions you’ve made (along with the rest of us)? Is there any change in parts of your worldview?

Writing prompt#3: If your ideas have changed, are they now more or less aligned with your values?

If you’ve already read my post on the Iceberg Model, these writing prompts follow up on that. If not, it appears below.

Prompt #1: I learned a useful freewriting prompt from Natalie Goldberg years ago. Set your timer for ten minutes and keep your pen moving following these two first words: “I believe.”

Equally interesting is the outcom…

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A news announcement comes on. Martin Luther King, Jr. has been shot. He is dead. I burst into sobs. And then my body freezes; I am hearing a sound I can't believe, a sound that can't be possible, a sound coming from down the hall where my fellow students have gathered in the student lounge around a TV set, the most dreadful sound I have ever heard: clapping and cheering! Like someone's team just won the Super Bowl.

This freeze state is all too familiar--just like what I felt as a child witnessing violence on the street in front of our house in Casablanca. No gangs, no gunshots, just men beating or kidnapping females as the cops watched, laughing. I was young when I learned that there is no help to go get. The best thing to do is go hide.

At 18 years of age, I'm supposed to be in the safe country (at least the Moroccan cops weren't cheering) and I feel surrounded by enemies. I want to stay in my room. What's really weird is that these people look like me and assume that if I walked into the student lounge, I would join them in their celebration. Maybe they've never heard of starving Armenians or why they were starving. Maybe no friend of their family ever told about being sold on an auction block to the highest bidder. There is no way I am going to walk down that hall, enter the lounge, and yell at a bunch of young White men. Just how alien am I, barely passing for normal with my unpronounceable name and to-be-made-fun-of food? And what are my roommates doing at this moment? Are they cheering too? Am I all alone in a very bizarre world?

Many years later, when I told this story to a Black friend, he said, "You were surrounded by enemies." Maybe that's why he was always so tense.

When I consider what racism costs White people, I, naturally, start with myself. The racism in that dorm cost me belonging to people who look like me. It forced me to be ever alert: my roommates, it turned out, were just as aggrieved as I was, thank goodness--but you never know.

Countless times, I have felt the tension of being surrounded by White people in public places and feeling as if I've stepped into a pseudo-reality. For instance, at a concert or a play in Rochester, N.Y. everybody is pretending that the obvious isn't true, while I'm wondering where are the rest of the people? Where are the brown-skinned? Where are the people who are fluent in languages other than English? Where are the different styles of clothing? Where are the people who would be swaying or clapping or dancing to the beat, even here in this formal hall? Sometimes this segregation feels as if everyone is walking around with a disfiguration that were all pretending isn't there. It's all normal.

I don't know if this estrangement from the world of White Americans comes from a childhood in multiple cultures and multiple languages, or if it's one of the openings in white racial identity development that all Americans can experience. (At one stage of racial identity development, some White people don't feel safe around other Whites and want only to befriend People of Color.) But it leaves me with a constant longing for people I have to go out of my way to meet. The cost to me, to all of us Whites, in separation from other people is missing out on their cultural wisdom, on the ways in which they may be free from the ways our culture limits or distorts us, on the joy of giving love to them and receiving love from them. These are selfishly oriented emotional and psychological costs. I grieve them.

Yet the true cost is deeper. It has to do with identity itself. My name is Անաիս, Anaïs.  I couldn't get anyone to say it right when I started school in the U.S., so I gave up. I let them call me "A NYE us"or "Ann" or "Anna" or whatever they liked. The first time I realized what this was costing me was when my parents took me to a Sunday school I mistakenly thought was in an Armenian church. I boldly introduced myself as Anaïs Salibian (I even said my last name correctly), and all hell broke loose. The boys, especially, were undone by the impossibility. I was mortified. I knew immediately that I could not be myself there; I had to be a made-up American self.

This isn't merely an immigrant story. I believe that our culture of white supremacy does this to all of us on some level. What unnatural-to-us self do we have to become to go along with such separation and loss? What did all those ethnic groups who gave up huge chunks of their history and heritage have to give up to melt into the melting pot? Some gave up their names, some their customs, most their language, their rootedness in the history of their people and their land. I don't believe we need to become blanks to become Americans. The true beauty of America is that it IS cosmopolitan, it IS where you can meet people from all over the globe and be part of the same vision of creating a culture of democracy, human rights, and human progress. No one would want to give that up just to call themselves White if the consequences of not being White weren't dire.

I've learned the history. I've learned why, when Whiteness was first invented, it was imperative for ordinary people to learn to identify as White--your life depended on it.

Some White people are still acting as if their life depends on it. I think there are many ordinary citizens (like Travis and Gregory Michaels) who think they have a perfect right to chase down a Black jogger (like Ahmed Aubrey) and kill him and are surprised to get convicted. I suspect there is a link--through intergenerational trauma--between the fact that the Michaels family has been here since colonial times, and Gregory's belief that Blacks are "sub-human savages." I think there are thousands, if not millions, of them out there itching to start what they call a race war, because one-third of Americans have bought into the "Great Replacement Theory" of a conspiracy to replace Whites with People of Color in a "white genocide." I think America's core wound has gotten so festered that a young White man like Dylan Roof can be invited into a Black Bible study group and see, instead of people sharing their faith with him, people who are about to kill him and therefore he must kill them first. This Replacement theory is behind the mass shootings (in which 44 people were murdered) in a Buffalo grocery store, a Pittsburgh synagogue, an El Paso Walmart, and a Poway, California synagogue.

We may think of such people as outliers in our society (even though some of them are now in Congress), but I see them as particularly overwhelmed by aspects of our culture that disfigure all of us. Although Whiteness confers advantages, its essence is a spiritual wound to people who have white skin. On page 128 of I Bring the Voices of My People, Chanequa Walker-Barnes writes, "At the heart of whiteness...is a great moral injury....Literally everything--laws, religious beliefs and practices, educational systems--had to be carefully organized in order to maintain a brutal and utterly unnatural system [of slavery]. This included a careful cultivation of the White psyche so that White people could accept the brutality with which they were surrounded and in which they participated on a regular basis....they had to be enculturated into whiteness. This...did not end post-Civil War...With the rise of color-blind racial ideology,  many people stopped using overtly racial language, but the culture into which they were assimilated remained the same in every other way. After all, at no point in the history of this country have White people on a societal level asked the questions, "Who have we become? How do we need to transform ourselves and our  culture?" (bold mine)

By the time a week had gone by, I started looking online to see if I could find a phone number for one of her sons. Instead, I found her obituary.

In Memory of

Rev. Dr. Gay L. Byron

1961-2023

Biblical scholar, womanist theologian, professor at Howard University, researcher into Ethiopic early Christian texts—cut off from life in the middle of working on her next book.

I still don’t know what to say or what to feel. It seems impossible I’ll never talk with her again. We’ll never again encourage each other in our endeavors, celebrate successes, and giggle as girlfriends do. She was the only person whose spiritual counsel I could listen to and believe in. Constantly, I wonder what her sons are feeling, wishing I could ease their grief.

I have no words. I’m going to let Mary Oliver speak for me.

                         IN BLACKWATER WOODS

                Look, the trees
                are turning
		their own bodies
		into pillars

		of light,
		are giving off the rich
		fragrance of cinnamon
		and fulfillment,

		the long tapers
		of cattails
	        are bursting and floating away over
                the blue shoulders

                of the ponds,
		and every pond, 
		no matter what its
		name is, is

		nameless now.
		Every year
		everything
		I have ever learned

		in my lifetime
		leads back to this: the fires
		and the black river of loss
		whose other side

		is salvation,
		whose meaning
		none of us will ever know.
		To live in this world

		you must be able
		to do three things:
		love what is mortal;
		to hold it

		against your bones knowing
		your own life depends on it;
		and, when the time comes to let go,
		to let it go.

What do you do when you're in pain, or when you get a sudden fright? Most of us take a sharp breath in and hold our breaths, which omits the relax part of the cycle--the exhale. Then we sip in as little air as we can survive on and continue the pattern. I've had clients whose breathing is always so shallow that they can't really feel alive. Some of them want it that way, because to feel alive is to be more vulnerable than they can stand.

The diaphragm is, of course, your breathing muscle, attached to your lower ribs. When you inhale, your ribcage expands, then sinks back down on the exhale. This should not require a lot of effort. Breathing as we were designed to do is not something most of us do well in this culture, which does not want us to be our fully human, empowered selves. We control our breath to hold back feelings, to fit in to a pattern of behavior demanded of us, and to not know our true responses to what's going on around us. I had no idea how intimately connected how we breathe is to how authentic and free we feel.

Two pieces of information about breathing astounded me when I learned them. The first is about what free breath is--that is, breath that is not mechanical or controlled, natural breath that we evolved to have. When your diaphragm is breathing freely, each breath is different from the one before and the one after. Some are shallower, some are deeper. Some have a short pause between, some a longer pause. Some are smooth, some are jagged. This is because breathing is part of maintaining homeostasis, giving you what you need moment to moment. Each breath is a response to the current moment in your inner and outer environment. Each breath can give you insight into your own internal state.

However, we live in a culture that discourages self-awareness. We have all been conditioned to control our breaths as if we are programmed machines. Then we're supposed to counteract this by performing breathing exercises, which is simply controlling your breath some other way. That's not free breath either.

Why does it matter for your diaphragm to have its full range of motion? Here's the second astounding fact: there's a feedback loop through nerves between the diaphragm and the amygdala, the part of your emotional brain that registers danger and calls the alarm. Think of a sudden shock: your diaphragm inhales sharply, which sends a signal to the amygdala for you to find the danger and deal with it. So let's say calling for help, or fight, flight, or freeze did the job and you got safe. Now the amygdala can tell the diaphragm to relax and return to a normal breathing pattern.

But if you didn't get safe or get help, some contraction remains. You walk around with a tight diaphragm all the time, which is constantly sending the danger signal to the amygdala, which is then looking around to find it. Sure enough, many of us do--even if it's not there. It takes input from the frontal cortex to tell you that stick on the ground is not a snake or that man walking up from behind you isn’t mugging you. Trauma survivors who haven't had the opportunity to process their experiences end up living in this danger feedback loop. Then you add the actual dangers of living in a racist, sexist , homophobic (etc.) culture, and masses of us live with hyper-vigilance or depression or other symptoms.

Now, the exciting part: what calms down the amygdala? Putting words to feelings. What helps your diaphragm let go of unconscious holding? Discovering and speaking your truth, meaning articulating your actual experience. It's as if there's a hidden part of you that wants to be known. This is one way that writing helps heal trauma by reintegrating the nervous system. Have you ever had the experience of feeling better when you "got something off your chest"? In other words, you gave words to something that was disturbing. You may even have experienced more relief from saying something that you didn't know you were going to say, which often happens when you write. This means something unconscious became known, which always relieves tension. I don't care how awful the unknown thing was; it was worse when you had to spend all that energy suppressing it and not living your truth. It's as if with a tight, inflexible diaphragm, you carry around danger inside you everywhere you go.

What we're really talking about is recreating safety within ourselves. We can't always do this by ourselves; we need a safe container; we need other people to be with us empathetically. In research studies about writing to heal, the physiological healing benefits happened even when the writing was not read aloud to anyone. But I've seen in countless classes how sharing creates community, which allows everyone to feel safer and to go deeper.

I invite you to pay attention to your breath without messing with it. Just notice if you are holding or controlling your breath when you have the option not to. Get out of your own way. Notice how you feel inside yourself when your breath is freer. Notice what happens to your breath when you write. Free breath means the freedom to be authentic.

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If you read my first post, you know that war has always been my issue. World war, genocide, civil war, revolution--these have landed in my blood and my bones, causing the Post Traumatic Stress symptoms I lived with for 45 years. Then something amazing happened. When I stopped dissociating, when my body and soul reunited, when I could notice all of what goes on inside me without freaking out, I found peace. Peace was inside me. That's a radically different way to live. I'd discovered that there is nothing inside me that is the enemy--no thought or feeling I have to repress or criticize or reject, no aspect of myself that does not deserve unconditional attention and care.  Once there was inner peace, the outer world looked very different--safer, more benign.

For example, my worst "enemy within" was my inner critic, which was really good at shutting me down. I paid attention to what was going on right before I shut down. First, something potentially disturbing had happened, and then I heard a voice inside my head with the ability to rip myself to shreds. When that voice is going, I go numb. So once I realized that my inner critic had a purpose, I listened deeply to it.

This started when I followed a writing exercise suggested by Natalie Goldberg--spend ten minutes letting the inner critic have its rant, with no holds barred. Just let it blast you about what a terrible writer you are. My critic had a field day. It began with the usual attacks that everybody hears: You have nothing to say; Alice Walker already said it better than you; No one is interested;  You're ugly. Your writing sucks. Quickly it became  something more specific to me: Shut up. Your kind should have been wiped off the face of the earth like the vermin you are. Don't speak; your tongue should be cut out!

Holy shit. It was vicious! No wonder I had trouble getting words on the page. And is there nothing in me that is not related to genocide? I'd been told that my great-grandmother was unable to speak Armenian because if she did, her tongue would be cut out. I realized that the critic had the voice of an imagined Turk, just as my clients are shut down by the internalized voices of their abusers telling them they're stupid or crazy or deserve to get hit if they complain. You mean, my writer's block, my internal critic, is intergenerational trauma?

I did an experiment with a writing class. I assigned them Goldberg's 10-minute critic's blast in class. Then I shocked them by saying we'd be reading them out loud. Of course they hesitated, but by the fourth or fifth reading, we were laughing out loud. The texts were practically identical. We have all absorbed from our environment messages putting us down and we put them to use to shut ourselves up. We do this, even to the point of not letting ourselves know certain truths, to protect ourselves. We all have internal enemies, parts of ourselves we don't like and would like to get rid of. They exist for a reason, often trying to be useful to us. Unless they are allowed to be present with compassionate attention, they can't get integrated into a whole nervous system.

My internal enemy had been trying to be my friend all along. At the time it was born, it had been useful. (My first two years of school in Morocco were in a Catholic school where the nuns would shut kids up by clamping clothes pins to their tongues. It just now occurs to me how that must have reverberated with inheriting my great-grandmother's story!) But our survival patterns don't learn and grow, don't recognize that perhaps today we are not in danger. Their programming doesn't change with circumstances, unless we listen deeply and include them in our awareness.

Trauma literally breaks us apart, disconnecting neurons and neural nets. Healing happens when they are wired back together again. In order to reconnect, they have to be "in the same room," held in awareness together so the part of you that wants you to shut up can connect with the part of you that wants to express yourself. Let them both be. Sit with the discomfort. Don't buy into the either/or binary. You will likely get confused, so let that happen too. Keep breathing. Then the new thing will arrive, and it will be a surprise.

This is a description of what to do with the binary aspect of white supremacy culture. Allow two or more opposites to sit within the room of you at the same time. That way you can establish inner peace, not blame and shame yourself, and find new insight. Once I was called in by a Black student for not speaking out the moment racism had showed up in our classroom. It appeared in the writing another student was reading out loud to us. Instead of speaking out immediately, I waited until reviewing the section of her manuscript which contained the n______ word to challenge it. Why didn't I do that immediately?

It took a week of dialog between myself and the Black woman for me to even understand that that pause, including my reaching out a hand to her (as if she had the problem), was racist. What caused me to keep silent in the crucial moment? That's what I had to look into--where does that silence sit in my body, and where does it come from? I had to go inside to find out. The response wasn’t at first mental but came from the language of the body: sensation and imagery. And you may not be surprised by what I found: I got a sense of my great-grandmother, as if somehow I were inside her skin, risking losing my tongue. I never had a clearer lesson in the fact that healing our own traumas is what allows for anti-racist behavior, and not healing from them causes racist behavior. If I had still been in the mode of tearing myself to pieces for my mistake, I would not have helped myself or my Black friend.

One of the ways I got friendlier toward myself was by repeating Goldberg's exercise. After the initial vicious blast, my critic's tone eventually changed. It moved from If you say that, you'll get attacked; I'll keep you from saying it by telling you you're worthless, to telling me true things: You'd be a better writer if you just did it more; You don't put writing first in your schedule; The real start of your essay is in the second paragraph, etc. That's when I learned the difference between criticism and discernment to edit. There was something inside myself that I could trust to guide me instead of squash me.

We live in a world at war. Many of us live with inner turmoil, unable to make peace. There is an alternative, and there is a way to get there. Ultimately, that's all I write about.

This week, I want to offer to all my subscribers an example of what paid subscribers receive in addition to the post. The posts include information, my thoughts and opinions, and a new way to see things (the feedback I often get). Paid subscribers have the opportunity to engage more actively in a process--writing exercises that help us integrate our nervous systems and expand the range of experiences in which we can enjoy well-being. I would love to hear from you about the results.

  Today I'll offer four writing prompts all designed to expand your capacity to accept "enemies" that may be lurking inside yourself:

1. Try Natalie Goldberg's critic's blast. For ten minutes, pretend you are your inner critic speaking to you with no reservations. Goldberg's assigned topic was to criticize yourself as a writer, but you could pick another field of endeavor. Write in the second person and don't hold back anything you hear. This might be scary, so as you're doing it, keep your ears open to what part of the content is universal (You have nothing new or interesting to say), and what part may speak to something that actually happened to you individually (like hearing Who do you think you are? You're a nobody). Set a timer for ten minutes. Go.

2. Goldberg coupled this exercise with what she called an antidote. Write in the first person present your wildest dreams of success, as if they are happening now. Don't hold back.  Hopefully, this may take the bad taste of the critic out of your mouth. "I'm reading a contract from the publisher of my first book. They're offering me a $100,000 advance..." OR"I've published three books, and the latest one just won the Pulitzer Prize." OR "I just did a reading for an audience of 400 and got a standing ovation." Expand the story; write the scene in graphic detail.

That's dreaming wildly, but these things do happen to people who have put in the work. On the other hand, I have never loved "affirmations" that don't sit true in your body. Check in to yourself and write ten minutes from a grounded place describing your future success. What would be satisfying? What would be you having fulfilled your purpose? Again, first person, present tense.

Perhaps you’re someone who has already had great success. Can you savor it? Can you celebrate it? Can you let it inspire what’s next?

3. Another way to integrate the critic: write a dialog. First, can you imagine your critic as a character? Male or female? Wearing what? What expression on their face? Quality of voice? Listen to the critic, but also interrogate it: When were you born into my life? Why do you say the things you say? What do you need to stop saying those things? Have a conversation, written like a script. These kinds of dialog are one of the most powerful healing tools in your writing toolkit.

Another way to make friends with what you don't like is with the help of visual art, coupled with writing. This is a good way to expand your self-knowledge and tolerance. Here's the assignment:

4. Get some unlined paper and colored pencils or crayons. As you look at the array of colors, notice which ones repel you, which ones you'd never choose to use. Now pick three of them and make an image. This could be totally abstract or a bit representational. Let your hand do it instead of your head, perhaps your non-dominant hand. To make it easier and more to the point, make the kind of marks you usually avoid. In other words, if you usually like flowy lines, make jagged ones, or vice versa. If you're usually delicate, get fierce, or vice versa. You are likely to end up with an image you dislike. Excellent.

Now sit with your image and notice your reactions to it. Write them down. Then, if there is one color or one section or even a line that disturbs you the most, write a dialog with it. Start with a question: you ugly muck brown, what are you doing in my picture? Wait for an answer and let it speak; write it down. Continue with the conversation for as long as you want, until you find out something you didn't know.

You may want to do this with different parts of you picture, as well as the picture as a whole.

I was amazed the first time I tried this. I picked colors I hated, especially together--yucky olive green, a certain shade of orange, boring brown. Colors I would never pick for clothing or jewelry or home decor. My picture wasn't pretty. But when I asked those ugly greens and oranges what they were doing there, they told me they are the colors that are invisible behind the snow when it is melting. They are the colors of Spring before Spring blooms into pink and white and yellow and purple. They are the hidden and waiting ground of beauty. (I still tear up as I write this.) I was utterly surprised and fell in love with them. My favorite scarf has those colors in it; the accent wall in my living room is a deep rusty orange. And I have learned to get curious and welcome anything I may have an impulse to reject.

There's more peace that way.

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Nature and narrative both heal. Lopez had explained myself to me, articulated why I was trying to write, what I was trying to say. I went home and finished those essays; they were both accepted for publication immediately.

Recently, I offered a day-long workshop sponsored by Rochester's literary center, Writers & Books, entitled "One Flesh: Writing the Inner and Outer Landscape." We met at a country retreat center so we could spend time outdoors. I chose Lopez's essay as our launching-off point, followed by "Asters and Goldenrod," a chapter in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Both authors approach the landscape as both scientists and fully embodied humans. Both object to reductionist objectification. Both see meaning in beauty. After our discussion, I invited the attendants to write and share stories of experiences in nature that touched them deeply and informed their worldviews.

We were delighted to hear how people had been "spoken to" by trees, bears, birds, the light on autumn leaves. So many of us were in the midst of experiencing grief or fear--recent losses of family, illness, the horrible situation in the Middle East. There was a tricky moment in this workshop. One attendant spoke out her dismay and concern for what was happening for the people in Gaza. No one but I knew that she is Jewish and married to a rabbi. On a break, another person came to me shaking in fear and saying she can't take the anti-semitism going around right now, and can we just stick to telling healing stories about nature? I didn't argue that empathy for Palestinians isn't anti-semitism, or that the person who spoke is anything but an antisemite. This woman needed to feel safe, so I hugged her; I pressed my heart against hers and wrapped my arms around her body. I assured her that we would talk about healing. Later, she thanked me for "co-regulating" her.

The right conditions for creativity and for community begin with a basic human need: to be safe. When I teach, I notice to what degree we come into the classroom wary, checking out how much to reveal ourselves,  how bad a piece of writing we dare admit to, how we compare with others in the room. Too many people have been slammed in their educational experiences to suppress their talents and efforts. To me, safety means no one is going to judge you or reject you. No one is going to make a power play over you  or even give you "good" advice. I discourage "corrective" feedback but ask listeners to share their emotional responses and questions with the reader. This is plenty of feedback for a first draft to help the writer consider revisions. We're just going to be there, listening deeply, responding with our true selves, dreaming possibilities together.

This particular workshop brings together all my worlds--the healing I get from nature, the generation of healing writing, and the creation of healing community. I didn't quite realize until writing this post that what I try to do when I facilitate is creat a space where people can act outside of the characteristics of white supremacy culture as Tema Okun and others have described it. How can we act outside of the individualism (to the point of isolation), competitiveness, perfectionism, hierarchy, urgency, and shame that we have all been taught not only in our educational systems, but in our workplaces and organizations and even families? These traits are pervasive in our culture, and they are what keeps domination and hierarchy going. An important one to counteract in a workshop such as this is believing the either/or binary. Either you're a scientist or you see beauty in nature. Either you write a brilliant first draft or you're stupid. Either you don't support Palestinians or you're antisemitic. Either the world is a beautiful place or it's a terrible place.

When you bring ordinary, suffering people together to write about nature, you're faced with life's contradictions. How can we hold both the sublime truth and the terrible truth at the same time, because that is how life on earth is? How can we include our minds, bodies, hearts, and spirits? How can we treat each other in ways that contradict or defy white supremacy culture, that supports everyone's right to be who they are?

All these years of teaching, I had never considered that I was working out how to create a future without domination or exploitation, where everyone can thrive.