What it means to stay open-hearted in a wounded world
Canticle Farm co-founder and Anne Symens-Bucher on grief, forgiveness and the wisdom of environmental activist Joanna Macy.
In this intimate conversation, Anne Symens-Bucher invites us into the sacred territory of being blessed and broken — the honest work of grief, forgiveness, and transformation. Guided by the wisdom of Joanna Macy, Anne reflects on what it means to stay open-hearted in a wounded world, to turn toward our pain for the world, and to find renewal through connection and courage.
Transcript
I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I’m here with my co-host Michael Nagler, and we are from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California. Today’s show is going to be about transitions: transitioning from one life to another and transitioning from one paradigm to another.
Now, Michael, you have a theory that right now we are trapped in this space, this sort of liminal space between paradigms where an old paradigm is dying and a new paradigm hasn’t yet fully surfaced.
Michael: What we are generally calling the old paradigm or the old story, sometimes it’s called worldview or frame of reference, has a title and that is reductive materialism. And that’s just a fancy way of saying that we think that first of all, the universe is basically comprised of matter with a certain amount of energy mixed in.
And that means that we human beings are primarily bodies. And that unfortunately means that we are, as I like to put it, radically separate from one another. By which I mean that I might come to believe that my happiness depends on your unhappiness: I have to compromise your wellbeing in such a way, in order to promote my own.
And the new paradigm– I’m being very simple here, but these are the basics. I believe. The new paradigm is one, not of separateness, but of unity. If you want to dig into it scientifically, it doesn’t say that we consist primarily of matter, we consist primarily of consciousness, which projects an appearance of matter in a changing world.
And that the important payoff there is that my wellbeing not only doesn’t depend on the sacrifice of yours, it depends on yours. It depends on the completion of yours. The best expression of it came from Martin Luther King when he said, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”
So there’s two basic assumptions here that I like very much. One is there is an ought. We are not complete yet. There’s a fulfillment that we could be striving for. And it’s really very inspiring to think about. The other part is, it is a communal fulfillment that even if I were to create for myself the happiest imaginable situation and other people need to suffer in order to make it work or even it will allow the suffering of other people, it’s not complete.
Stephanie: Hmm. Or other beings.
Michael: Or other beings. Good point indeed. There’s a wonderful short story by Ursula Le Guin called “Those Who Left Omelas.” Won’t tell you the whole story, but what it comes down to is you have this absolute paradise and idyllic civilization. Everything is hunky dory. Everything is copacetic, as we used to say. The only problem is it depends on one innocent little child being chained up in a basement. And then some people discover that, and some people say, well, you know, that’s the price you pay. Or rather the price that somebody else has to pay, but others just say, this is not acceptable. The world doesn’t have to be this way. And I don’t want to live in this kind of world, where other people have to make that sacrifice. So they, the ones that I just referred to, would be describing the new story or the new paradigm that our happiness, our fulfillment is not a competitive limited entity, if you want to call it that. But actually we are in a universe of interdependence.
Stephanie: Mm-hmm. We are all interconnected as we’ll hear our guest on today’s show reinforce several times. But when we say that we’re in this liminal space between paradigms, what are the signs that we are in that space? How do we know the old paradigm is dying?
Michael: One simple and very obvious symptom is, the enormous, growing violence and the dehumanization that accompanies it. You have people who have been trained to believe that they are separate from others and their wellbeing should be striven for by them no matter what it costs anybody else. And then those people are weaponized and they’re driven to violence by the entertainment media, and the paradigm is reinforced by advertising of which we often give examples in our presentations.
And it’s just inevitable that that kind of harm and separateness and alienation will occur. And now we know that someone who commits harm, suffers harm in the process. This is a very big discovery. It seems to have started roundabout the Korean War where an awful lot of veterans came down with what was then called PTSD, and it was later called by a colleague of ours, perpetration-induced traumatic stress. We found that this is not just widespread, it’s inevitable. It is impossible to harbor the intention of harming another human being. Not to even mention actually carrying it out, but in that very harboring of the intention to harm another, you create a world of radical separateness, which is a false world, and it causes a great deal of mental anxiety and distress. Now we can even point to some of the physiological pathways that this happens with mirror neurons and so forth.
So the fact that so much violence and dehumanization and materialism, economic disparity, and the rest of it, is mounting, not to mention climate difficulties; those are the signs of the old paradigm not working anymore. Deterioration.
As for the signs of the new paradigm waiting in the wings. A number of really visionary thinkers have been describing it. And, you know, Joanna Macy is one, Buckminster Fuller, there’s, you know, about a dozen or so, really well known people that have an audience that have been describing a world based on harmony, that’s our term here at Metta.
And, we have been finding, for example, small scale communities of different kinds where that has actually been implemented and people have lived in that new paradigm of interbeing, as Thich Nhat Hanh would call it, and interconnectedness and mutual support and cooperation instead of competition.
And these societies have been basically of two types. They’ve been indigenous– we find them in pockets all over the world. And then there have been deliberate attempts at reproducing that worldview in small, mostly rural communes. And there are a number of good books on how these have been explored even in America.
Stephanie: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, I also want to think about tipping points, and the movement between paradigms. So, as we know this idea of the 3.5% rule when 3.5% of a population gets involved in a movement, but it actually ends up turning out to be a little bit less in some instances, that it creates a tipping point for a movement’s success. And I’d like to explore some ideas. just maybe put a question mark there. If that 3.5% rule also applies to a paradigm shift, you know, when maybe we’re not looking at one specific nonviolent campaign, but more of the cultural campaign. How do we enact that shift? And I think that basically what you’re saying is that if we don’t adopt nonviolence; that paradigm shift isn’t going to happen, because nonviolence is the antidote to violence.
Michael: Yeah. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Yeah that’s exactly what I believe. And of course, all of this paradigm thinking goes back to a book called The History of Scientific Revolutions , by Thomas Kuhn, K-U-H-N. And that’s not a new book, that I think it was, came out in 1962. And he showed that science doesn’t proceed by you add a fact, and then you add a fact, then you adjust and you add a fact, and you adjust. No. It proceeds by accumulating facts, which build up a presumption that the whole model through which you have been trying to understand and explore reality is deficient and you need a new model. And then a very interesting psychosocial phenomenon occurs where the new model (we’re calling it now, the new paradigm) is adopted by some pioneers. I think Einstein would be a very good example, went completely beyond the new Newtonian concept and the Bohr atom, and really showing, as I understand it in my amateur way, that the fundamental underlying reality is not matter, but energy or eventually even, in Max Planck’s terms, consciousness.
So to get back to our story, so a few influencers, as we call them today, will adopt the new paradigm. They will start demonstrating that it explains observed phenomena better. And eventually, whether it’s 3.5% or probably something in that range, it becomes the norm and suddenly it can happen really very quickly. Ideas which were regarded as outlandish, idealistic, impossible, they suddenly become the norm.
Stephanie: Also, with that 3.5%, imagine (as our friends at the Department of Peace campaign and so forth, they do), imagine if 3.5% of the military budget were applied to enacting this new paradigm and supporting unarmed civilian peacekeeping, mediation, just the institutions in spaces, new curricula for nonviolence, we would definitely see resources invested.
And. last but not least, as we think about transitions and transitioning from one paradigm to another, we also have to think about our own transition from seeing who we are as human beings, as material objects, fulfilled by materialist desires, versus beings that have consciousness and are actually fulfilled through mutual care and support and realizing our interconnected nature. And so what happens to us as we pass away, as we move from one state of consciousness to another, where we leave these bodies behind; how does the new paradigm kind of reimagine who we are, and also then what happens to us as we’re, so-called dying.
Michael: Yeah. It’s at this point that the new paradigm starts to look not so new, because civilizations from time immemorial have refused to believe that we are just physical bodies. If we’re not just physical bodies, then when the physical body stops functioning, the condition which we’ve been calling death, something has got to go on. And, I don’t know if we need to even get that far, but one element that I think we do need to add, and you were alluding to it, is that there is an overall purpose in all of this, individual and collective, that the reason that the new paradigm has so much power is not just that it’s healthier for individuals who adopt it, but it is the future. And it is built into, you know, I don’t like to say the DNA, but I’ll say it here. It’s built into the DNA, the cultural DNA, of the human being.
Stephanie: Mm-hmm. And one person in particular that we’d like to honor today is the visionary Joanna Macy, and everything that she’s done with her life to teach and guide so many people into that new paradigm. And we’re very lucky to have on the show with us today, Anne Symens-Bucher, who first encountered Joanna Macy and her work in 1984, and she’s actually been her executive assistant for 20 years. And then Anne, who is a visionary herself, with her husband, founded something called Canticle Farm in Oakland, where what she’s learned from Joanna also melds and dances with what she learned from St. Francis of Assisi. So we’re very lucky to have Anne with us today on Nonviolence Radio and we invite you into this conversation.
Now, let’s hear from Anne.
Well, thank you for being here at this time and, and sharing in all the work that you’re doing for this transition from an old story to a new story. And we just really would love to cultivate some of your wisdom on today’s call. You first met Joanna 41 years ago. Can you talk about that first encounter?
Anne: It was sometime this month, July of 1984. And, I was actively involved in a faith-based nonviolent campaign attempting to stop nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada test site. And I had a lot of experience from my own growing up in a social justice, Franciscan based faith container that took me to the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day. So I had a lot of experience in my own young life to put those two things together. But the thing that hadn’t really been in my experience was a place to be with my just deep grief and heartbreak being, you know, what I would say, born in 1957, the first generation born under the threat of the bomb and knowing that growing up in my body in some way. And so I saw this workshop and it was entitled “Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age.” And I didn’t know who Joanna was, but Bishop Tom Gumbleton was one of the presenters. And Diane Thomas Glass, who I knew from activism in the Bay Area, Ecumenical Peace Institute. And I thought, oh, I should go to this.
And it was at Rivers Bend in Mendocino County and it was a life changing experience for me. Joanna’s work again, really did change my life because it was the first place where there was space created for me to encounter my deep grief and my broken heart and my fear and all the feelings that were flowing through me, which Joanna helped me to understand, was a really normal response to being in a world under the threat of nuclear weapons, but also just a world where there’s just lots of suffering and that suffering, you know, is something that we feel because we’re not separate.
So that was my initiation. And then over the years, I continued to be influenced from afar and then eventually from near. So it’s been one of those things that you look back over your life and you just feel awe. And that’s how I am feeling this morning, given the circumstances of Joanna’s transition. So there’s my answer to that question, Stephanie, thank you.
Stephanie: And we’re here with you and holding you in this time. So thank you so much for being here. And thank you also for sharing your grief in this moment as well. And I just want to make that space for everybody to connect with you in that too.
Anne: Yeah, well I’ll just, say, you know, I’m touching into it, in this moment, and I’m so grateful to know that my grief is my love, because that’s one of the things Joanna teaches, you know, that we only grieve what we love. And I feel the grief and the love touching so closely that they’re inseparable.
The joy and the awe and the grief are inseparable because I have learned so well from her to be in love with our world and all of it. You know, I made up a word, eventually made up a word, that is blessken, B-L-E-S-S-K-E-N. It’s important to spell it like that because it’s what happens when you put blessed and broken together.
And for a long time I was kind of thinking, well, you know, everything’s blessed and broken, and I tend to talk with my hands like Joanna, and I would say, oh, on one hand everything’s blessed and everything’s broken. But then I’d be like, well, it’s really more like you can’t take those two things apart. So I put my hands together like it’s like this, like you, the blessings and the brokenness and the brokenness and the blessing.
And then I realized it’s really blessken. You gotta put, you have to have one word because we cannot, these things are inseparable. And so, you know, even as my voice chokes, you know, I’m just like so in touch with my gratitude for this beautiful world. You know, the sun is shining here and things are blooming.
And, you know, again, Joanna and others along the path have just taught me to see with the eyes of the present moment and even with, you know, that we can hold the Great Unraveling and the Great Turning, you know, these terms that have come through that help us to see that they’re happening simultaneously and we get to have a choice about where to put our attention. That’s Joanna again. You know, gratitude doesn’t depend on external circumstances, and I would say that’s true of nonviolence and faith and love. But we always can choose to put our attention there and it’s our intention, you know, that we lead with the feeling that you’re hearing it contains all that. And I feel so grateful to be in a moment of a global community who is tuning into this moment of Joanna’s transition that is about Joanna and how each of us, in a very particular way has been influenced by her, whether we met her in person or read a book or somehow encountered her work.
Even now, there are emails coming in with people who don’t realize she’s in a dying process, who’ve just discovered her work and are expressing their gratitude. So there is this beautiful thing happening in this moment in our world, which feels so potent and perfect. And one of the gifts of this time, this particular time in our country, here in the United States, but also globally, that Joanna is bringing together this global community through the CaringBridge site, where she has a page to remember, not just Joanna, but what she points to, so that we can also do that at the same time that Joanna is in her particular life, you know, has been done. What was hers to do in such a gorgeous and exquisite and far reaching way, and yet it was always to point toward something bigger, which is our world, our suffering, our beautiful suffering world from which we are not separate. So that’s also really something I’m holding deeply in this moment.
Stephanie: Joanna is a light, she’s the flame that so many people are lighting their own candles from, you know, and carrying that light into their work into the world. And all of us together are illuminating together that this picture of getting to see the world as interconnected through all of us shining this light that’s been passed along to so many through Joanna and it’s so important and special to honor all of the work that comes around a teacher and works with these great transformations, these great in these very humble ways as well. A simple light, a simple idea of truth illumines the mind, illumines the heart. And we see things all of a sudden differently. And we see our purpose in meaning in new ways. And it’s so powerful.
Anne: Yes. That, that would be the spiral, the Work That Reconnects, which is this archetypal framing that Joanna started to notice in the workshops that she was creating and offering around the planet. She started to notice that it moved, the workshops moved in this beautiful spiral that wasn’t linear, but that their movements were coming from Gratitude, Honoring Our Pain for the World, Seeing with New Eyes and Going Forth, and we can actually inhabit all four in the same moment.
When I heard you just speak now, it reminds me of that Seeing with New Eyes, which is a place we can’t get to unless we Honor Our Pain for the World, which was really the big gift that Joanna gave to me and to so many of us that we don’t have to pathologize our pain and our sorrow that we actually, it’s our humanity. It’s our evidence of our being a part of the world that we’re, you know, we’re not separate from this world. Even the word nature, you know, reinforces there’s nature in us, but we are, that is us. We are earth and we belong. And so this work we can do when we actually allow ourselves to be accompanied by our outrage and our fear and our heartbreak and our uncertainty and our grief, we find that we see with new eyes, which is this internal thing that can happen.
They’re old eyes, but there’s also us understanding that we are not separate and we’re reconnecting with ourselves and each other in the more than human world and inhabiting, you know what Joanna knows, called our ecological self, our true self. And from that place, there’s nothing to do. But then go forth.
We go forth, you know, to love and to serve our world in the way that each of us is called to do, which is, Teilhard de Chardin says, unity differentiates. So it’s what’s mine to do is not the same as what’s someone else’s to do, but I have got to go do what’s mine to do because nobody else can do it. And the beautiful symphony that gets created when each of us acts out of that calling, our vocation, our soul work, the thing we’re here to do, that something more than the sum of its parts, you know, is emerging.
And we can see that in movements for nonviolence. We can see that in all the efforts, all the communities, all the ways that people are showing up to, you know, bring forth their gifts in this time of crisis and uncertainty.
Michael: Anne, hi by the way, you casually used a phrase in the first part of your conversation, which I want to hold a little bit. You said we’re not separate, and that is the other side of the coin from the main criterion for the Great Turning that in the old story we are separate, so therefore I can exert force on you for my own benefit. And Stephanie and I once passed a big billboard on our way into Petaluma. One morning they were selling real estate and a big red band across the top of the billboard said, “our pain is your gain.” So, you know, just selling real estate, but perpetuating the old story; and the fact that we are not separate is of course, the other way of describing the defining characteristic of the new story. Yeah, I just want to put that in. because Joanna was very helpful for me as well as Marshall Rosenberg and some other people when I was starting to develop my ideas about nonviolence, which were by no means obvious at that time.
Anne: Yes, absolutely. And I think, you know, I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about, about this notion of the separate self, the story that’s in our DNA at this point, and then the, you know, the story, the interdependence of all living things and the ecosystem that we are and what it looks like for us to know our place as, Mary Oliver would say in the family of things in that ecosystem.
And I think I just want to say something about forgiveness, because I’ve been thinking a lot about forgiveness. I think that in our movements maybe, and rightly so, we’re sort of re-looking at that. What does that mean? You know? And for me anyway, there’s the act of forgiveness and then there’s the process of reconciliation, which, you know, can be two steps forward and one step back, and sometimes can take time and has to certainly have a deep reckoning with what I’ve done and what somebody else has done in a restorative context. And one that, to me, is about nonviolence. And I think it’s what our blessken world is needing right now is, a resurgence, a recommitment, a going back to the roots, a radical notion of what it means to forgive. And, that we are in separate self-consciousness, I think only, can maybe decide if we’re going to forgive or not forgive.
And it seems to me that when we know ourselves as not separate, we can’t not forgive. It’s just a different conversation because we know that that forgiveness flows through everything. And so I think that the movements where we’ve seen that happen in South Africa, just the one that’s immediately coming to mind, or anytime we hear the stories of people who are able to forgive great atrocities done to them or their family members, I think people are perhaps inhabiting that consciousness of not being separate and understanding that, you know, we’re all connected. And so the forgiveness that flows from me to you, from you to me is, is in that flow. And I want to bring with every moment of my day these days, you know, in my commitment to nonviolence, which stretches back to those days, those early days in the eighties, and with Louis Vitale and others, creating this nonviolent, faith-based campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing that we bring this radical idea of forgiving everyone, everything.
Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest, who is the founder of Homeboy Industries, saw that on a bumper sticker someplace and made it a title of a book. And I’ve been carrying that book around. And when Joanna was in the hospital after falling and breaking her hip and her subsequent surgery, I had it in my bag with me just, of course I just happened to have it and she saw it and she was holding it and we were both just like, yeah, you can’t just say enough about this one. “Forgive Everyone Everything.” What does it look like if we practice that as our commitment to nonviolence and to getting out of the idea of the separate self?
Stephanie: These are radical ideas and yet they’re so the most natural thing that we can do is what I hear you saying, that that is also part of our deep humanity, is this kind of forgiving energy to allow it to move through us. And I also want to tie that into what you were saying about holding grief and the blesskenness of us all. How do you see that healing and through the grief and grieving process as part of opening up the space for that forgiveness to come through? Or do you think that it’s just so powerful that it is the force itself that does the healing?
Anne: Well, if I’m listening to you ask Stephanie, it’s occurring to me again that it’s the spiral when we actually can be with, let these feelings move through us and notice that they are evidence of our interconnectedness, and they teach us that we’re not separate when we allow that to happen.
Which of course, the spiral is not something you go through once and it’s a fractal and we can be in all places at the same time. But it’s that movement to let ourselves feel. One of the Rilke poems that’s been living me lately, because Joanna and her dear friend Anita Barrows were cotranslators of much of the body of his work.
And there’s this poem, “You Who Let Yourselves Feel,” you who let yourselves feel. And so here we are letting ourselves feel, and it’s that radical act, which wouldn’t have been before and at some point we lost some capacity to do that. And as we let ourselves feel, then we are able to inhabit the phase of Seeing with New Eyes.
And I think that to tie back what I was just saying, that’s where we can understand forgiveness because in our ecological selves inhabiting our true age and our true size, there’s nothing else to do because we, it’s a necessary step to do anything for the Going Forth, whatever it is that we’re here to do, comes out of the consciousness of our larger selves, our connection to our larger body, and we can think about that, all that we’re learning in this time about trauma and healing in a way that neural pathways work. And it’s so exciting, isn’t it, that all of this is medicine right now in our times that we can access to understand how to access our prefrontal cortex, our true selves, our higher selves, whatever you want to call it, our ecological self. It’s from that place of knowing we’re not separate, that forgiveness can happen.
Stephanie: And because basically, when we’re going through the energy of forgiveness, it’s the awareness that the action that ruptured that relationship came from an old paradigm, a dying paradigm, a paradigm that …
Anne: Yes, it also occurs to me to quit, I don’t think we can do it on our own. So it takes in my Catholic Franciscan tradition, you know, I call it grace. You know that to forgive. Yeah, it’s something that I have to inhabit my ecological self, my, you know, where I know that I’m not alone here. That I am connected to those who have gone before me, who actually want to heal and want to be there for that healing, for whatever they did, you know, in their lives that wants to heal now through mine and that I act on behalf of those who are coming after me. And I act in harmony in concert with those who are here now and with the more than human world. And from that place of grace and connection, then we can forgive. And now, you know, I don’t think I can do it without that because the separate self-consciousness just keeps me in right/wrong thinking, in good/bad thinking, in us/ them thinking and taking sides thinking.
And what I see anyway is where that’s gotten us, you know, in this country is on the brink of, we don’t even have to talk about that. With whatever language, you know, whatever you want to say or how you see it, what does it look like to love our enemies? What does it look like to see myself reflected in, pick a person, who is my shadow for the parts of me I don’t want to see? And I don’t know how to be a person of nonviolence without doing that work. And so that requires me to forgive myself and to forgive others, and to see the parts of me, you know, playing out in them and vice versa. So how in the world can I do that? You know, in a separate self-consciousness? It’s impossible. It’s just too painful. It’s just too painful. And the violence just keeps resurfacing.
Stephanie: I also see that when we’ve done something to break apart that human fabric, there’s a desire to want to repair that harm when I come to the awareness of what I’ve done; that repairing the harm is part of that process. And I find that it’s quite interesting the way that the world then begins to offer so many different opportunities to fix that harm to work on. If I’ve done one thing that has ruptured a relationship, there’ll be opportunities to repair and atone. And I wonder if you could talk about that sense of both needing accountability, forgiveness, and the need for people to atone when rupture has happened and, and how do you see that in your worldview?
Anne: I really appreciate you asking that. You know, the first thing you have to do is name it. And so, at Canticle Farm and canticle means song. And we take our inspiration from the canticle of Francis of Assisi, who in his own life taught us, like as Joanna, that gratitude doesn’t depend on external circumstances because he wrote the Canticle of Creation where he was singing praise and gratitude for all of the created world at the time in his life when you could say it was The Great Unraveling of his own life.
And so each week we have a liturgy, which is the work of the people that is based on the eucharistic tradition of the loaves and fishes, which is the tradition of abundance. And everyone matters. And everything belongs. And part of what we do every week is, we make this acknowledgement and commitment where we say, we name that we live in a nation created by enslavement and genocide of people, the taking and the destruction of their lands, and the justification of these acts by the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, white supremacy, Manifest Destiny, and the divine right of kings. We acknowledge that some of us continue to benefit from these injustices. Some of us continue to suffer from them, and some of us experience both. Through grace and humility, we invite healing as we ask forgiveness for what we and our ancestors have done and failed to do. With their help, we commit ourselves to transform rather than transmit the trauma. And so we say this together each week knowing that it’s the work of the rest of our lives to do this, that we start with acknowledging it and we call out because there couldn’t be a stanza short enough that we could say, I mean, it would be too long, in other words, to say all the places where the genocide and enslavement and destruction still continues. So we call out into the circle some of those places, knowing that, naming some of them names all of them in that way, and we hold all of them.
And so we say that and we make that acknowledgement, we make that commitment and we do the next thing. You know, we just do the next thing that is what is ours to do. And that is, it doesn’t get any better than that to be able to live a life of meaning and purpose of staying true to one’s vocation, which of course, we didn’t get born with little bracelets around our ankle with operating instructions of what we’re supposed to do. So we have to be listening through feedback, through grace, through shadow work, you know, through all the ways that our lives get lived for us, that we can show up and know what’s ours to do at any given moment, including the present one. And we do that, you know, with the power of that, all of that I’ve been naming of the ancestors, the future ones, the people here that we can join hands with the more than human world and take whatever step is ours. That comes out of the naming and the accountability process to do that work of restoration of right relationship. One, you know at Canticle Farm we say we are a platform for returning one heart, one home, one block at a time, which is just another way to say one step at a time in each of our lives.
Stephanie: That idea that a part of the process then of forgiveness includes addressing accountability and holding it with the grief that it deserves, the harm that has been done and continues to happen. Holding that with grief and also the power that comes from the acknowledgement of that harm is really, it’s important. I would love it if we would be in a place where anything, if we had that kind of deep, deep wisdom where anything bad that happens, we move on and forgive. But yeah, those accountability steps, I think are important to draw out from these ideas too.
Anne: The grieving is a very different response than guilt or defensiveness. Right? And I think that when we actually worked the defensiveness, which is part of the process, especially for those of us, you know, who come from the lineage of the colonizers and the privilege and that have benefited from ways in our own lives. When we work through that, then, when we feel like the deep regret and the remorse and just understand, that, yes, something very good can come from being in that in terms of how we are then going to, what does it look like to do repair, which is not, I don’t think performative or just ticking off a box. We know lots of examples of that, right? Which, okay, you know, we take whatever step we can and if we have to start out with stuff that may seem more performative, at least if we’re trying to get there, you know, we all start where we are and move from there. And it’s unique and in particular, and there isn’t, you know, one recipe for it and there are some ingredients for sure and you’re pointing to them too.
Stephanie: You brought up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. That was what really inspired me to start looking for different teachers in nonviolence and how I ended up coming to connect with Michael in this work. But really that was about amnesty. Those people would come and there would be truth and people would say, “What happened?” You know, if they, if they committed a crime, if they harmed another human being so that people had the truth and knew where their family members were, if they were still alive. It was never a “forgiveness” process as such. But then that’s that grace that came part through the beautiful leadership of Desmond Tutu, of being able to hold the space where when people saw that somebody was broken in front of them for what they’ve done, that they could then bring in that forgiveness. And so nobody was expected to forgive anybody in that process, right? So, I just really appreciated the way that forgiveness came in as that grace, as that gift, and as the most natural thing for so many people, even in those horrific stories.
Anne: Absolutely. And you know, I think Michael was mentioning Marshall Rosenberg, and he would tell the stories of working with people all around the planet, you know, who had had really terrible atrocities happened to them and sitting with people for hours, days, weeks, sometimes. And then there would be a moment where he started to be able to recognize that a shift was happening, where the person who had been harmed would even be screaming, “How could you do this? How could you do this?” And he started to understand that you could only ask that question, even screaming it if you saw the humanity of the person across from you and no longer saw them as a monster. And so what was that process at its core is about deep listening. You know, like what happens when we can really show up unguarded without defenses built that block our ability to hear and really let people tell their stories, really deeply hear them. And as we hear them, you know, we’re also changing as it’s impacting us. When we’re deeply listening and hearing, we can’t not be changed by it, which then will lead to our grief.
Stephanie: And this conversation feels so good. I just want to thank you for being here and I, we want to keep you here a little bit longer, if you don’t mind.
Anne: Oh, I’m happy to be with you too.
Michael: I want to take a minute and to add a dimension to this question of forgiveness, which we have barely touched upon so far, and that is forgiving oneself and that it’s very interesting to me, I hadn’t thought about this before. It’s very interesting to me that we have now a concept called moral injury, which describes harm that people do to themselves when they’re harming others. Now, this reaction, this response has been with us as long as we’ve been human, but it’s very interesting that it’s only very recently been named. Moral Injury has only recently become a category in veterans affairs administrations and so forth. And I think that’s a sign of the turning. That in the old story, we had no way of understanding that if I injure another person, I’m also injuring myself. But in the new story, because of the connectedness that you alluded to several times, it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Anne: Absolutely.
Michael: And if I could mention one other thing, Anne, thank you, that has come up for me. We’ve been talking about the spiral and having new eyes to see the world with, I think that is again, a critical formation we have to go through. If we don’t see things in the correct way, we see them as a circle going around and around and around getting nowhere. But once we begin to understand that a basically benevolent process is working through all of this, however horrific it may seem at the present, then we suddenly understand that this is a spiral. Yeah, we revisit episodes, but we revisit them on a slightly different level. Like what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza now can be pointed at as a crime against humanity, which is a category that didn’t exist before. So it’s still a very slow process and it looks, if you don’t look at it correctly as if we are not getting anywhere. But I think there are certain signs that human consciousness is changing and the Great Turning is a spiral. I may put it that way.
Stephanie: I want to return to your interest and your devotion to St. Francis of Assisi and how his life has inspired you to create with your husband Canticle Farm and, and what life in that, how did that get started? Just bring us into the reality of Canticle Farm. It sounds so beautiful at this point. And so what are some, for our listeners, what are some of the nitty gritty aspects of starting a community based in these, in these values?
Anne: It is always a choice point for me when people ask me, you know, “how did it start?, when did it start?” to pick a point to tell that story. Because I would say for me, it goes back to my growing up in the Fruitvale District of Oakland in St. Elizabeth Parish and a Franciscan parish and family, which shaped them for me and took me to the Catholic Worker and brought me back to start a Catholic Worker in Oakland. And then that took me to the Nevada test site and all of this, you know, it took me to Joanna, so all these things come dancing together. And Terry was really the first person who resonated with the vision. And we thought we were going to be doing something different, creating a community, and then we decided to get married and created a community that way.
And so we had many years of being accompanied by beings who chose to come in as our children to teach us. And all along this vision was dancing there with what we were learning through, you know, teachers like Joanna and Marshall Rosenberg and Bill Kin and Dorothy Day, and so many experiences we were having our children, other people coming through.
And then about 15 years ago, there was sort of a moment where we could name what’s emerged, you know, and this is one of the things I love from learning from Joanna and the living systems theory, is this idea of emergent properties. And she would put her hands up in the air and they would dance together.
When hydrogen dances with oxygen, who could imagine that water would emerge? And so when all of these different philosophies and practices have been dancing together, Franciscan spirituality with the Catholic Worker, with the Work That Reconnects with all the beautiful people who have come with a real deep and growing, breaking down for Terry and me of our guilt and our defensiveness around colonization, with letting in like what that means, what it could look like in our community to do that work of restorative justice, of stepping toward doing that work which without, you know, I think that I want to point to that commitment again, that we are working to transform rather than transmit the trauma. So it’s a breathtaking dance that has had emergent properties all along the way. And right now we have several houses around a large garden that span two blocks and then a couple that are on either of the street and some 50 people in the community, both in Oakland, and we were given the gift of a Catholic Worker farm in Calaveras County, and the awareness that we are, you know, these places are all on stolen land and the work that we’ve been trying to do with the indigenous tenders of that land and ancestors of that land to dance around what is repair, look in the particularity, because there’s the big ideas of it and rematriation and all those, but then there’s, how do we take that in our particular circumstance and live that with particularity?
What does it look like to support people who have been incarcerated in our racist incarceration system and do repair there? So there’s, how do we accompany people who are, we could say strangers in this land? You know, I think of like what is the works of mercy to welcome the stranger, to break down the borders, to see that everyone belongs.
So we’re pulled in these different directions that come into by grace and some sort of beautiful design, that invite us to dance together and then Canticle Farm what emerges as more than the sum of its parts of all those things. So they’ve all been deep influences, and I would say of all the things that I had envisioned and Terry when we had these ideas about what a community, you know, an intentional community could look like, the thing that has emerged to be the most precious, most profound, most meaningful is the racial healing work that we continue to do. That keeps breaking me open again and again into a commitment to do what’s mine to do with the life I’ve been given and the years I have left, to show up in repair, in relationship.
It’s in relationship with particular people because I can’t do everything. And yet when I do what’s mine to do, it’s a part of the larger whole. So I’m a holon within the larger whole. And I know that that ripples out in widening circles as Joanna would say, the quoting Rilke, I live my life in widening circles that reach across the world, you know? So that work that each of us does is so profound when we tune in, as people are doing right now. I want to say again, it’s been so awe inspiring to see people who are grieving the death and loss of Joanna, remembering what they taught her and getting re-inspired to act on behalf of everything.
And everyone right now in this particular moment, you know, in this particular moment, even now, we can still do that.
Stephanie: Anne, thank you so much for being here and sharing your vision and I wonder if I might bring us back, as we’re starting to transition also out of this show to the spirit of Joanna, not that we ever left it at all, but just bringing back the intention, intentionality of focus for a second. And you have mentioned different poets and I, I was thinking about again, Mary Oliver, and I was wondering if I might share a poem called, “When Death Comes” from Mary Oliver.
Anne: Oh, please. We’ve been saying that one around Joanna and that’s one of my favorites, please. Yes.
Stephanie: Oh, okay
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Anne: Yes. Joanna can definitely say that she did not end up just visiting this world and the other, her other poem, long poem, epic poem, “Gravel,” that line in there, you know, grant me three wishes, unstring my bones. Let me be, not one thing, but all things. So that’s what’s happening here. That’s what’s happening with Joanna and with all of us. We can make that prayer, but it’s not one thing, but all things.
Stephanie: May we become all things. Anne, thank you so much for being here on Nonviolence Radio and we hope to stay in touch and again, thank you for all the work that you’re doing and all of the inspiration that you’ve shared on today’s show.
Anne: Thank you so much for the honor to be with the two of you. Appreciate it very much.