Art as a Way In

My Learning: Listening is a Long Game

Remember two weeks ago, when I asked, When has self-improvement gone too far? Well, the question applies here, perhaps even more so, given what is unfolding and crumpling and accelerating in our world right now. This post is going to be brief. I want to share how I found my way out of freeze and into engagement. I mostly want to bring in other voices.

Art by my friend Jen Bloomer with Valarie Kaur quote.

There are lanes of basic universal morality just as there are lanes of knowledge and experience. Expert I am not in anything other than my own life. I write from that place of curiosity and willingness to learn and listen. Increasingly, our world requires of us a deep, extended and consistent resilience. Most of us no longer live in villages where we hear just a whisper on the wind from a passerby about a war happening far away. No. It filters into our living rooms—filters, because it isn’t “in” our space, though social media and disembodied news reports (disembodied meaning rarely linked to actual individual stories and people) trick our bodies into thinking otherwise. But I don’t know the feeling of having lost loves ones in the way people are losing them as I write. I don’t know what it’s like to not have a moment to grieve because the threats are everywhere. I don’t know what it’s like to be in a war zone or what it’s like to fear for my life. That begs repeating: I DO NOT KNOW. Unless you’ve experienced it, you don’t know. I can only imagine.

The atrocity is heart-sickening, in all directions. No war crime is okay. I’m very aware of the ease of sitting in my warm and safe home writing about a devastation happening elsewhere. I am writing to you from the messy middle of my own learning, which will continue well beyond this post. I have no statement or conclusion and no arrogance that I know anything at all. I am talking to my elders, reading widely and diversely on context and present-day, and seeking actual people in my actual community from whom I can learn and with whom I can show up. Each day, I learn something new. It’s slow and steady and there is no end.

Because we are humans tied to each other’s liberation, this conflict, like all conflicts, impacts all of us and it also categorically does not. Not in the same way. Not in an immediate tangible way. Those in proximity feel it in proximity—which doesn’t absolve the others, like me, to not consider feeling into it ourselves. That’s part of our shared humanity, and this moment (which is a moment upon thousands of moments) is exposing again the deeper, systemic, long-term malady of valuing certain lives more than others.

As adrienne maree brown recently wrote (two lines from her poem):

In war I keep the dead unsegragated

I critique abroad what I critique at home

How do we evolve into our modern responsibility? How do we be humans whose hearts are vast but whose brains can only handle 150 relationships (it’s true) during a time when our world and media has globalized to accommodate more than that? When we have choice and aren’t in the peak-center of the trauma, how and where do we grow our own capacity to be with it and take action around it? I’ve learned that taking up residence in the trauma pit (glued to a newsfeed) only deepens it, and flitting around in the “it’s all gonna be okay” positive pit (ignoring) only deepens the trauma too. Yes, they are both pits. With different furniture. If you get comfy in one of them, as opposed to moving between the hard and the resourced, it’s difficult to metabolize what’s happening. But maybe we aren’t meant to metabolize it all. Maybe it’s simply about becoming people who can sit with the swirl of horrid sensations without numbing or escalating into a panic or fight. So that…. we can play our part.

What’s my way in?

I go in through art.

I go in through conversation.

I go in through women (usually) and earth-centered ways.

Yes, I educate myself by reading the news but it’s NOT my first entry point. I titrate in and out of it, talk to people, and then fill the other spaces with poetry, creations, and artistic expressions of people closer to the source than me. I couldn’t articulate this about myself until two weeks ago when I kept trying to find my way in and then eventually did—through art. I think I’ve been doing so without knowing it my whole life.

Here’s a thing: art is naturally soothing to our nervous systems—even when the content is crushing. When we ingest it as art, we can absorb it, hold it, tolerate it and even feel it more fully. Art brings us into both cognition and our sensory animal selves. Both. Then we are more able to engage.

What’s your way in?

A moment of seeing my two girls on a dock at a wedding weekend and feeling both over-flowing gratitude for their lives and dense dark grief for the lost lives of other children. All children are “our” children.

Here’s some art and conversation in my sphere this week. I’m always monumentally moved by people crossing over, bridging and humanizing others while standing boldly in their truth and the truth that there are always multiple truths, so that’s the flavor.

• Fariha Róisín on Islamophobia. I’m familiar with her earlier poems. Her latest, very recent book is Survival Takes a Wild Imagination.

• Morani Kornberg’s book Dear Darwish. It’s from 2013 (old now) and the book is en route to me; I haven’t read it yet. The framing and approach drew me in.

• Malak Mattar and her visual art from Gaza.

• Fadwa Tuquan and her poems (a different era) and Ziad Khaddash’s short stories.

• These 14 Israeli artists received an award to do their essential worker work of building bridges for social change during the pandemic. Scroll down at link to watch the 8-minute video and the way they introduce one another. Wow.

• Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye: Gate A-4 (thank you, J) and Before I Was Gazan

• The Slow Factory is offering a healing circle for collective liberation for people everywhere, “including Palestine and the whole SWANA region.” It’s October 27th at 12pm EST.

• Jewish Voice for Peace (*please see my note below), as well as V (formally known as Eve Ensler) and group of Jewish-American writers, artists and academics calling for a ceasefire in this article at The Guardian, as well as this article from Arielle Angel (thank you, C).

I want to stretch to meet these times—that is a kind of self-improvement I can get behind. Can we face the brutality and can we also touch into what is good and what is love so that we can be present to this moment? I probably got up and down to resource myself about 45 times while writing this short post. I don’t want to shut down and say nothing. I also don’t want to take up any space pretending that I know something about something I know very little about. So I am turning toward the artists. Show me. Show us. Let us support you in your showing, in your bravery, in your voice. *This also requires some sleuthing because only some voices make it out to the public for all the reasons we know. I believe that word of mouth across communities is the answer here—people sharing and broadening the web so that we can all learn from many voices.

Please share any other art you’ve followed or become aware of—from all the concentric circles.

Hi All, An addendum here: I've heard from three people (two American Jews and one Israeli Jew) regarding the Jewish Voice for Peace. Each said something a bit different, but the gist was that it doesn't feel representative of the Jewish voice for them and, in some instances, felt threatening. I want to name it here, because conversation with actual people, as opposed to faceless followers on social media, is the way. I’m still listening. I also know that there are many voices within one collective voice. One person in particular wrote a long email about how she feels devastation for everyone involved and that she knows the sides are nowhere near equal and that she isn't dedicated to nationalism or politics even, but that the Jewish Voice for Peace didn't match with my intention of sharing art or organizations that bridge. I am listening. I want to always be listening. And, categorically, a ceasefire, to me, seems like the essential move for all of humanity. One person wrote to me: "We need mothers to lead this world" and I couldn't agree more. Feeling the humanity in all of it. I support the human-to-human conversations.

With love,