Decompiling Oppression #117
Sam McVeety
There's a hummingbird who has started visiting our garden regularly, inspecting each of the flowers in turn, from scarlet runners to multi-hued nasturtiums. (I'm not sure if it's the same one every day; they are very small.) The nasturtiums, for their part, guide aphids away from the squash, perhaps with the help of some of the local ants, protecting the plants as they mature into bright yellow fruits.
When today's bird tires of hovering, they perch on an archway that we've constructed to guide the beans, peas, and cucumbers skyward. This arch is new, constructed with the inspiration and help of friends. Their labor and friendship is a gift; so too is the presence of the bird. When the flowers turn into beans, we will share them and cook them, accepting this gift with gratitude, too.
With so much heaviness in the world, the garden is a reminder of what is, what was, and what can be. In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of a return to a gift economy of abundance. Just as the abundant gifts of sunlight and rain have allowed our garden to thrive, so too may we turn these into gifts of our own, from the fruits of the soil to the shared company of watching a hummingbird alight from branch to branch. She writes from a place of compassion, humility, and deep wisdom, offering us a way out of our scarcity driven spirals, if only we have the will to take it. Hers is not the idealism of naivete, but the idealism of experience, of seeing many different ways of being and offering one to make us whole.
adrienne maree brown writes of a similarly expansive vision in We Will Not Cancel Us. Reflecting on the ways in which compounded trauma can undermine the very relationships and communities we hold dear, she invites us to do the hard work of embracing conflict and managing it productively:
What moved me to publish these pieces in this way is that, more than anything, I want to invite us to get excellent at being in conflict, which is a healthy, natural part of being human and biodiverse.
One of the many things I appreciate about her writing is that she models this embrace of conflict as a necessary part of learning, holding her mistakes and insights with equal compassion, acknowledging that learning is messy, and we all have so much still to learn. The booklet itself is a work in progress, revised from an earlier draft based on feedback from around the world. She praises this feedback as the gift that it is, holding it with care.
Both writers imagine a changed world, where change is not some far-off island, but something that we can step into every day. For me, it is so easy to feel powerless, to feel the world slipping away, and yet, through their words, I see that wondering and practicing how we can be in right relationship with each other is work that we can do right now.
Close to my heart, in Hadestown, the Fates ask Orpheus, "who are you to think that you could walk a road that no one ever walked before?" Before, I always heard that lyric as underscoring the singular nature of Orpheus's task, that if only someone were strong enough, they could make it turn out differently. This week, I heard it a different way: we are all walking down a road that no one ever walked before, individually and collectively. We can let that isolate us, or we can see the beautiful possibility in the truth that each of us, every day, is doing something that no one else has ever done.
By itself, our garden is not going to solve the urgent issues of our time. By itself, it is not going to address climate change or food justice. And, it is a practice. Of learning to see possibility: what if we added an archway, for the beans to climb up, for a hummingbird to rest on? Of learning to adapt, and change: some years, we over-water the garden, or choke the soil with too much organic matter. As we see the garden grow, it teaches us how to see each other more fully: with humility, curiosity, and compassion, so that we may share each other's gifts.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Where is there abundance in your life, and what is a gift you can give?
Communal: Where can we realize collective abundance?
Solidarity: Support the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment and their work to create programs that draw on the wisdom of both Indigenous and scientific knowledge in support of our shared goals of environmental sustainability.
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