Facebook Publication Date: 8/31/2021 16:08

The Six Tenets: Tenet 4 – Grow In

https://laceonrace.com/groups/the-bistro/forum/discussion/the-six-tenets-tenet-4-grow-in/

Interior Work Ensures Effective Outward Praxis

The tenet we are going to speak about now, Grow In, is an important element; it’s in what could be a tagline, right next to our North Star.

It’s crucial. It is what differentiates Lace on Race from other spaces. Our insistence that interior work is a linchpin of an authentic and durable racial justice practice, is so often something that people, at least at first, nod to vigorously.

They nod, until they really come to the realization of what we are asking for. Or, more accurately, they nod until they come to the realization that this tenet isn’t only about ‘all of the others’– that it applies to them too.

As always, I get it.

Those of us who have, to whatever degree, bought into a praxis of racial justice often feel that we are ahead of the game. We have the worn sneaker rubber and the sunburned backs from marching 5k to show for it; we know the names of all of of our legislators, *and* their phone numbers; we have shown up and stood up at work (or at least we thought about it, or at the very least we sidled up to someone who actually did in the empty hallway and murmured our support). We have a ‘Black Lives Matter’ flag planted in our yard or apartment window (or at least we honk in solidarity when we see one–maybe); we now know the actual date of Juneteenth, we have read all, or some, or at least two books (one of which is not even Robin DiAngelo).

We have given funds on Facebook at least once, we know all the lingo and slang and words that have suffered from mission drift for their overuse, and more concerning, from their misuse.

We have made tentative approaches to people of color in our workplaces, the stores we frequent, our houses of worship, our neighborhoods–when we can find a person of color to approach. We have wondered why the dearth, at least for a moment, before moving on.

Maybe five years ago, just after that fateful election, we bought a pack of bright shiny safety pins, using exactly one, getting annoyed at the hole it left in our good blouse, before discarding.

And now, when we contemplate those five years since most of us became interested in sustained racial justice praxis–or maybe it was barely a year ago, when George Floyd and Brionna Taylor captured national attention and collective consciousness and conscience– we wonder about the lack of gains; about the issues and oppressions that stay extant, about what can seem to be the futility and wasted efforts of the last months and years.

And we look for something, someone, anything and anyone to blame.

Compassion fatigue which led to donor fatigue. Unbending governments. Resistant corporations. Family and friends and neighbors and coworkers; all still in deep slumber. Entrenched logical fallacies which stunt dialog and can reinforce biases and errors.

The tyranny of tradition: this one is good, and worth highlighting. It is hard to reverse course when something ‘is as it has always been’.

And the deep ambivalence which surrounds and informs and imbues (and can infect) durable and authentic change. The world, or, more accurately, a significant minority of the world, for whom the status quo has brought great benefit is ‘simply not ready’ for the world it says it wants.

Welp.

Sound familiar?

All of the hindrances and barriers to effective and durable change displaced onto external forces: systems and institutions; bad actors, historical inertia, which leads to ennui, and even despair, are true for us too.

The many initiatives for change which we have seen, as long as 67 years ago with Brown vs. Board, and as recently as last year with the so-called ‘Black Spring’, have absolutely not resulted in deep and durable transformation.

So it is with us.

In the article in Vox Magazine from last summer (https://www.vox.com/2020/6/3/21278165/george-floyd-protests-social-media-blackouttuesday-lace-watkins-on-race-interview feel free to embed), I talked about the Stages of Change, which is, for our purposes, all about gestation.

We like to see showy shoots and even grander leaves. We prefer our gardens straining with the weight of perfect plum tomatoes; our trees to be heavy laden. We want our flowers in full bloom.

All in veritable blink. No effort needed. We want ‘mature’ landscaping; pleasing to the eye. We don’t buy seeds, we get plants already on their way. We hire others to do the planting.

We are once removed. We are overseers, not workers. Our hands remain clean and soft–but, what a view!

We want Optics.

Mystic and Courage, though, much prefer below ground.

Let me stop here, just for a second, because what comes next could well seem to be a contradiction of what I have said earlier in this series–that we needed skin in the game, that we needed to ‘put our backs into it’, that we need calluses and sweaty brows and holy overalls.

That’s still true. We need all those things.

But as Mystic and Courage would both gently (Courage, welp– not so gently) insist, we need to look to the interior, even as we do the work.

Let me tell you about Mystic first. A woman of the perfect grey-blonde bob, and of the most gentle eyes I have ever seen outside of North Carolina and Cathy DeBose. They are two sides of the same coin, actually. They are all about the doing–but they have long known that who they are as they do their crucial work of healing the world is always more important than what they do or accomplish.

Mystic has lived. Vermont; Montana; Texas–and now here, not 15 minutes away from me, close enough for coffee and pizza, close enough to gaze unwaveringly at me in our shared worship space, close enough for tangible love, and for modeling interior praxis.

Mystic knows pain. Mystic knows loss. Mystic has succored many. She has also lost many. She has shown me that grief is not ever a carveout. And yes, grief is indeed an affliction. Her gentle eyes hold multitudes, so when she counsels me, I know that her words come from a deep reservoir. And that they do not come easily.

Mystic has gone interior; has gone underground. Not at the expense of exterior praxis, oh no. She has gone into the interior in order to do her external work well. Growing in, as I contemplate Mystic, growing in means tending to her soil. Means nurturing what she cannot see. Means pruning what is gone to make way for new.

It means reimagining Self, even in the midst of unwavering conviction and call. It means, as she stays in the loamy soil, knowing what are weeds and what are nascent shoots. It means giving each new shoot a name, even as she gives them space to grow with her tending.

Mystic plants many things. Some will bloom only to wither. Some will feed for a while and then die. Some, she will never know, because the gestation and the young plants will come to fruition only after Mystic is no longer physically in the garden. Still. She plants without care for payoff and outcome. She tends without care for approbation or recognition.

Moving away from only metaphor for a moment, I know Mystic; know the tending she does for her children and grandchildren, and for people she may only see once, if at all. She holds their faces with her soiled hands, and her love sinks in. Hard won love. Quietly fearless love. Hesed love in a perfect bob.

If Mystic is quiet, Courage is a whirlwind!

In she comes, bangle bracelets jangling, curly hair windswept, full of life and love and stories which would curl your hair, and a truckload of good compost she dumps right by her tree, and then yours, and then yours. She also came to me from a map of the Americas; first Wisconsin, then Hawaii, now, again 15 minutes away (and so close to Mystic!! La Mesa/San Carlos grows good mentors. I am grateful.)

‘You all need the good shit!’ she says as she gets down to her knees and kneads and kneads the soil with the compost.

You need the shit.

I am well aware that we want this work to be stainless, free of the smelly, even bloodless.

Not with Courage around.

Courage has known pain. Not just the pain acquired from adulthood, but deep scars from decades past. Which she has faced, is facing now, and will face still more. Always compost to be mixed in.

I want to be careful, so careful, with this metaphor here. A lot of people make me cringe when they speak of adversity and people ‘overcoming’ it; what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, they say.

Bollocks. That is not it at all.

This demands a word study on strength as a virtue in and of itself.

Strength, full bore, without amending, is less than neutral; it is not automatically an attribute.

Strength is almost always in answer to deep pain.

So Strength, by itself, can become infected with self absorption. Worse, strength, left alone, can make for lack of empathy–’If I Did and am Doing The Thing, what’s your problem??’ Strength can lead to hard and cold hearts; for our purposes, it can lead to brute force.

So the query must be made–Strength yes, but in service to what? Strength with a cold brittle heart, or with a pliable and vulnerable heart of flesh?

Strength to hold and to heal, or to aggrandize toxic exterior forces?

People who, as they say in the world of sports, people who, like Mystic and Courage, ‘play hurt’, people who are wounded healers, people like me–and hopefully, people like you–need to hold two things in one hand.

Dualities; seeming contradictions–that every outward action demands concomitant inward depth. And one cannot ever be sacrificed to the other.

I have already said, and I do so hope that you agree, that exterior action without authentic and relentless interior work is neither genuine nor durable–nor ultimately effective.

Interior work, as much as I love it and exhort you to it, also has its sirens. Self absorption, yes, but also paralysis. And timidity.

You need to break bread with both Mystic and Courage.

It takes courage to do interior work well. It takes a sense of something greater than ourselves to begin and maintain the Hero’s Quest into the interior, to find and root out the weeds of ambivalence, of passivity; of arrogance (and of its cousin, false humility).

All of this, all of this, is why we simply cannot do this work alone.

I don’t. I simply can’t.

I am grateful I do not have to.

And neither do you.

Dig with Mystic Courage.

Grow In.

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