From Whence This Comes
Several of my most admired colleagues* have relied on an orienting process that goes like this:
Where is here?
How did we get here?
Where do we go from here?
It has become fundamental to the way I think. And I think it’s helpful framing for introducing this project.
Where is here?
We have every indication that the next 30 years will consist of rapid social, political and ecological change. With little chance that any of that change will be for the better.
When I die the world will be suffering the calamitous and deadly side-effects of our human impact, and the infrastructure of our country (at the very least), will be significantly eroded and increasingly dangerous. It’s undeniable that our national fable has been resoundingly exposed; the bubble burst. How long it will take for the collapse to complete, however, is unclear (to me.) That alone will make many of you stop reading. That’s ok. This isn’t for you then.
I don’t know what this future means for me and my life. I want to survive, and more than that I want to live. I want to experience the joy and wonder that make me love not just the experience of living, but the world itself *and* the people who live here. I’m awed by the magic of nature and forces bigger than I can comprehend. And I lust for the sheer and often inconceivable creativity that my fellow human beings display daily. They deserve better. We deserve better. And yet, we are determined to make better impossible.
Still I don’t want to sacrifice one minute of living. I also want to meet the reality of today, and our future, with clear eyes. What’s more I want an ever-expanding understanding of this thing we call life. I spend a lot of time considering this: How do I continue to push my own understanding, contributions, and capacity during increasing challenge and uncertainty? Not because it comes with reward or even a promise of change or dramatic improvement. Because, it seems, that that’s what living is.
What keeps me up at night though is the children. Mine, of course, and everyone else's. I was born into the false prospect of relative security and prosperity. While it was not true it nevertheless set my expectations for childhood and also parenthood. So it’s not so easy for me to answer this: how do I best parent children who full well know, or will quickly come to learn, that they are growing up during a period of collapse and awakening? Who need both wonder and wariness in order to weather the significant shifts ahead? Who will undoubtedly live with constant valid existential worry?
I don’t really know. But in part that’s what this is about.
What will be useful to them? What would have been useful to me?
For now and most simply, I’ve decided it’s a different or more particular set of stories.
They need stories that help them not just deepen their ability to see things the way that they are, but also how they could be.
I think that surviving collapse and striving towards possibility would require extreme clarity about the always/often/once been and also the never yet/not quite/could have been or be. How do history and fantasy lend themselves to cultivating such a view? Which histories and fantasies are instructive for the challenges and choices they will face?
I want them to have access to more stories that help them grapple at the intersection of self and other, space and place, the here and then.
To me this means more contextualized personal narratives, humanized and relevant accounts, instructive passages from wise and dedicated thinkers, records of what it *was* like and practices for recording what it *is* like.
We do not live in a time where we hurt for information, or content rather.
But we do live in a time where we hurt for context, purpose, and sense making.
So all I know to do is establish more deliberative practices for story curation, collection, and creation. Stories that help us understand our roles (past, present and future), our places (past, present and future), our legacy (past, present and future), and our experience (past, present, and future.)
It’s not that my particular experience or perspective is remarkable. They are no more valuable than another’s. They are infinitely limited and just as unique as the 7.5 billion other people on the planet.
But they are what I have to share, and most importantly they are the thread of context and continuity that I have to offer my children as they grow into the fullness of their own human existence over their lifetimes.
In many ways I’m still waking up and learning fresh what others have known their whole lives, and more importantly, what people have been warning and saying and generously sharing for generations.
In other ways I’ve been ahead of my time or others around me. I have and have had the experience of shouting truths about our collective experience and fate into the wind - truths that others could not or would not hear. People have been warning, but not enough of us have been listening.
How Did I Get Here?
I was born in January of 1980. Which, it turns out was a pretty significant turning point, although it was hard for most to see it at the time. In the course of my lifetime one of our two major National political parties has become extremist and increasingly authoritarian. They have dismantled and hacked at the mechanisms undergirding our (never perfect) Democracy to the point of ruin. The extremists and fundamentalists in our country have waged 40+ year strategic wars on reproductive freedom, people of color broadly (but most significantly black men), as well as those who practice faiths other than Christianty (often with the collusion and help of the other political party.) They have consistently recycled their attacks on the right to vote to keep up with technological advancement. We are now in a place where truth doesn’t matter, principals are held up like mirages, and words have become so politicized that they’ve completely lost their original meanings. They are proxies for allegiance and extreme ideologies. Well-documented hypocrisy is the rule not the exception. Consequences never seem to stick to those in power and accountability is not valued. And have I mentioned the pandemic which has currently claimed more than 650,000 700,000 Americans in the last 18 months alone?
I used to wonder how people did “normal life things” like go to the grocery store in Nazi Germany (which tragically was my most only and most repeated example of genocide offered in my schools growing up). Now I know.
The idea that many things (broadly stated I know) were better or at least more promising in 1980 than 2020 is something I will likely spend the next 40 years (if I’m lucky to have them) grasping.
I was raised in a professed post-racial, free, great, wealthy, opportunity-laden world superpower.
Only I wasn’t. That the myths peddled had been more true and more possible for my wealthy-enough but most recently-more-wealthy, WASPy, White, colonially-heritaged, and sometimes slave-holding ancestors made the foginess of the lie harder to see through. But it never made it true.
Those I would have expected to help me see what was transpiring (parents, teachers) were unaware, uninformed, or uninterested. Some of them are now also coming to their own awakening, hopefully also grappling with their role in the maintenance and obscufaction of the lie.
The more I learn about the events of my lifetime, the clearer it has become that the writing was on the wall. But too many people have felt individually shielded from or perhaps exempt from the consequences of collective behavior. Supremacy. Ignorance. Hubris. Exceptionalism. Distraction. Miscalculation. They are all in equal parts to blame.
I’ve spent the last 20 years deeply unpacking an essential component of my personal and political identity that went nearly uncommented on for the first 20 years of my life: my Whiteness. This journey has taken me deep into the depths of my family history, our national and regional histories, and also the epigenetic and metaphysical histories of people who oppress and violate, extract and enslave - as that is my ancestry.
During that time I also explored and cultivated practices of community building, mobilization, and activation. First among groups of women entrepreneurs seeking greater agency and autonomy in their lives. Second among (primarily White) parents raising young children during a time of significant racial unrest, uprising, and awakening. I’ve worked hard to help align and orient and move to action thousands of people (and often the systems they connect to) simultaneously and synchronously. I’ve often learned more about the limits of these efforts than the opportunities, and what doesn’t work and why instead of what does.
And now my focus has shifted. This shift is in part driven by the fact that I’ve been uprooted and will be relocating again soon. This disconnection to a specific geography and ecosystem of place-based activism is dovetailing with my own stretching curiosity and inquiry around inter-generational knowledge transfer. The shift also touches deeper though. The experience of the last two years has completely dismantled what little faith I had remaining in our education systems and media industry. They are unreliable bearers of truth and ill equipped to bridge collective knowledge gaps. That still says nothing about the specific, repeated, visible, and exacting harm they cause to broad swaths of our population. At this moment there is a well-funded national campaign to essentially ban the discussion of race, racism, and large swaths of American history from public schools. The penalties for transgression are steep - intentionally crippling for most systems. The organization I co-founded was named in the state legislation put forth in Missouri.
But, and, also…
Even if national and global calamity isn’t imminent…and radical social transformation isn’t likely, I still feel a deep call to chronicle and preserve a record to make available to my children. A record that will help them know me, as a person, in context with my choices and perspective honestly and clearly illuminated.
Why? Because on the deepest personal level I am a person (child) who suffers from a parental loss at a young age. While I really do miss my father as a person, I am probably shaped most by his very significant absence. I have lived my life with large holes where I know people and their stories and experiences should be. Today, 28 years after his death, my father exists in my head as a specific collection of memories and some very hopeful ideas. The older I get the more the absence grows. The more I understand that I don’t know, didn’t know, can’t know. I, like many children who have suffered loss, am left to stretch the same vintage memories out again and again…no matter the need or occasion. Trying to fill the void becomes an exercise of abbreviated fantasy, ending with a generic platitude… “he would be proud..or happy…or pleased.” But the truth is I don’t know. It sounds nice. But it dosn’t feel real because I know that he didn’t know me as a teen, a young adult, or a grown adult. He never met my spouse, nor his grandchildren. To consider that there’s even an unfulfilled relationship or psychic connection between them feels like pushing on a lingering bruise. I quickly stop. But just because he didn’t know me doesn’t mean that I couldn’t better know him, even in his absence.
In the midst of seeking more reliable and instructive histories, I can’t seem to reconcile how easy it is for people who have died, even parents, to become strangers to those still living, even their own children. Despite coming from a family of considerable resource, with a significant interest in history and family genealogy, having thousands of devoted friends, as well as close family members, and on top of having hoarding tendencies…my father’s record is very thin. I can’t access his first-person thinking, his memories, opinions or ideas. I have memories of memories and other people’s perspectives on his experiences and truths. They are a heavily filtered set of stories, and maybe not even any of the ones that he would choose to tell. Yes, our national backdrop is one of persistent amnesia, but many of our familial foregrounds are plagued by forgetfulness and an absence of record keeping or storytelling as well.
In contrast to my father, my father’s father lived to be 93 years old. While we were not close, he was a unique character. And I at least trust my impressions and perspective of him. They are easily corroborated by others. And still, despite 24 years of relationship, one of the most powerful experiences I have had was being able to read a journal he kept in the year 1941 as the tensions of WW2 were mounting. He was chronicling not just his daily life but his reaction to geo-political events. It was the most relatable I’d ever known him to be. Reading his real first-person account, as short as each entry was (often just 5 sentences) was so much more illuminating than hearing recounted stories decades later…with all the uncertainty of the future resolved.
Consider with me the contrast between the public legend and the man:
My grandfather had many accolades. He was a commanding man, nicknamed Toro for his likeness to a bull. He graduated first in his class and delivered his commencement speech in ancient Greek. He was a Rhoades scholar. He was a war hero. He wrote a rebuttal (yes, a rebuttal) to Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. It’s studied in law schools across the nation. He was a prolific storyteller who only spoke in one volume and it was very, very loud. When I google him I find stories about him being the last person to see Lawrence of Arabia alive and dinners with royals and leaders of nations. These stories are funny and wildly intriguing, but completely unrelatable and intimidating. They highlight to me everything I am not.
But this legend is absent from his 1941 journal. Reading it humanized him more than my 24 year relationship with him. It also validated many experiences and feelings I’ve had in the last two years. He commented on how disorienting the seeming normalness that people clung to was in the face of increasing tense and devastating news. He worried about the best way for him to lend help and show up in the nation and world’s time of need. He recounted his efforts to seek help, counsel, and advice from many around him to better assess the choices he faced. He talked about his garden and when the melons were ripe. He remarked on the sunshine and fun times with friends, in the midst of alarming news headlines. He gave his son swimming lessons at the lake. Even in his own journal he is part of the larger story…not the subject of a myth. This was the man I would long to know. This is a record that helps me not only ground him in context but ground me in the arc of human experience, and more specifically our national experiment. It helps me better meet the challenges of my own times.
As a granddaughter I am so grateful for this brief but wondrous record captured in 1941. As a daughter I mourn the absence of the opportunity for any direct glimpses into my fathers experience and personhood. As a child of our shared history I cherish any opportunity to more clearly understand what it *was like* “back then.” As a mother and citizen worried for her children and nation I find our trajectory, experiences, futures and fates impossible to ignore. I am compelled to bear witness…and find it entirely possible to record that process.
Where Do I Go From Here?
We witness. We record. We preserve.
I am committed as a citizen and as a parent to both chronicle (a new practice) and continue curating stories that illuminate what has been and what could be (an existing practice). This crescendo of change has called me deeper into work with both a longer horizon and a narrower immediate scope: deepening my practice of curating, collecting and creating stories that inform, connect, align, and tether more closely the here and then.
My chronicling/writing will not be about eloquence or exceptionalism. It’s about creating a personalized and reliable record of what it is like for me. In this moment. About what I can see from where I sit. Based on what I know and believe. At the intersection of the private and public.
It’s about illuminating my context and naming my choices, reactions, and decisions, and situating my experience in relation to the way way past and the way way future.
Because what’s happening now is and continues to be highly dynamic and incredibly important.
Because we always think we will remember.
Because public and even family narratives are far from complete.
Because the maintenance of first-person narratives have been horribly inequitable in the past…and we now have the tools for everyone to capture their story. We know how limited history is when our accounts aren’t reflective of the full population.
Because we can’t rely on the media to capture, nor schools to distill and synthesize.
Because it’s powerful to offer your children and community a front row seat to present-based narrative when no one is sure of the story arc just yet.
This site seeks to capture my travel along that horizon. It won’t be a complete record as some of my processing is personal, and likely too tedious for other readers :) But this is a space where I will pull on long threads and highlight resources, authors, and artists who help us tap into the time-bending wellspring of the human experiment.
*Thanks to colleagues Nicole Hudson, Eric Ratinoff, and De Nichols for keeping these questions top of mind for me.