How would I describe my relationship to grief, right now, whatever that means?

Ponder the Notion: “we are all one”

With your someone(s), interrogate your gut feelings about the notion that “we are all one.” And then investigate what has been present, what has happened, in times and places where you’ve experienced something like “oneness” or wholeness to be realized, robust, and as complicated as life itself.

Am I, somewhere, openly metabolizing how the last few years have shaped me?

Voice Questions as Maps and Guides

“Our communal repository of questions may be the closest thing we have to maps and guides right now in a world that is without maps and guides.” – Krista Tippett

With your conversation partner(s) for this retreat, give voice to the questions that are maps and guides for you — and work on them, hone them, question the questions themselves, set them intentionally to carry communally and return to for discernment and sharpening in the time ahead.

Do I have a working definition of compassion? What associations come readily to mind?

Critically Investigate Compassion

We’re going to treat compassion (alongside some kindred virtues and capacities) as something serious — that is to say, something that can withstand tension and conflict and critical interrogation. Settle in by opening a journal and/or starting a conversation with someone in your life, asking them to be a conversation partner and sounding board as you walk through this retreat.

Can I stretch towards the love for the world on the other side of my grief?

Carry Rilke’s words with you like a friend: “Move back and forth into the change.”

That dance with despair, as Joanna describes. The way pain turns if we actually look at it, take it in our hands, be with it, and keep breathing. This analysis of grief is reminiscent of an idea in Christian theology that is about the move from grieving to mourning to lamenting.

The invitation here is to cultivate that move inside ourselves and, for the sake of the world, to stand reverently with our grief, to let it turn to mourning and lament and something that brings us more deeply into our love. A muscular hope may not be possible without the capacity to make that move. And it is something we can and must practice.

Can we build a beloved community? Interrogate what stands in the way of throwing your life at a wholehearted yes.

At the worst of times, Vincent Harding reminds us, there are these pockets of hope operating all over the place, but somewhat separately from each other. That is an important and instructive analysis of this generative narrative of our time, which is real but not connected up, and so doesn’t always experience itself and isn’t always visible from the outside as a coherent landscape.

And there is Vincent’s insistence that the only question big enough to live into is, can we build a beloved community, a beloved nation? Why don’t we try, as he says?

The invitation here is to say yes.

If Vincent Harding says this America is possible, we must say yes and throw our lives behind that yes. It’s so critical, too, to take in this observation or this underlying assumption that runs through Vincent’s vision, that stitching the generative narrative together — making it cohere as a visible, viable reality — includes stitching the generations together.

Because the work ahead must be generational in scope, we must accompany each other across the span of our life experiences, our wisdoms, and our energies.

I’m so aware, listening to this now again, of how prescient Vincent was when he resists the question of whether we are seeing places of hope versus places of no hope. He says, no, we have places that are operating out of uncertainty. And uncertainty can steal the ground from hope. It can send people into their fearful impulses, the fear places in our brains and bodies. He was prescient when he talked about the crisis of whiteness, which is now so much more vividly upon us.

Who am I, and why am I here?

Practice curiosity, starting with the simplest of things. Feel the expansion in your imagination and your body.

From her earliest life, Jane Goodall likes to tell this story about how she was driven by curiosity. And in fact, one of her earliest memories, and one of the earliest memories of all the adults around her, is when she disappeared because she had hidden in the hen coop to understand how chickens lay eggs, because nobody had been able to explain it to her.

It’s also interesting, in other parts of her story, how she retained her core value of curiosity even in the face of what she abhorred and felt she needed to fight, even in herself, as much as in others.

Jane Goodall brings home so much that we’re actually learning — again, on our scientific frontiers — about the power of the muscle of curiosity. Where experiences and responses like fear and anxiety tighten us up and close us off and shut us down, curiosity literally expands us, physically and emotionally, and it expands what becomes possible.

How do I experience, even personify, time in my body and in my imagination?

A thought (and spirit) experiment: receive and settle in Joy Harjo’s trust that time and space are on the side of deep justice and human flourishing.

Consider, as Joy does, our children as the “rudder of hope” — and that insistence that all children are our children.

There are many invitations here. One of them is to get less literal, less Newtonian; which is to say, to more completely enter the reality of time and space, to claim a hope muscular enough to meet them as they are and to, as Joy said, fly a little in our perspective — to believe and to insist and to live as if time and space are on the side of deep justice and human flourishing, in which we all become more whole.

What am I grateful for in this moment?

Stop. Behold. Go.

The invitation here is to be grateful — not for everything, but in every moment. What does that take, and what does it change?

Brother David also has such interesting ways to talk about what “spirituality” really means. He points out that spirituality comes from “spiritus,” and that means “life, breath, aliveness.” Spirituality is aliveness on all levels. It starts with our bodily aliveness; also means aliveness to interrelationships, aliveness to mystery. Science, Brother David says, has discovered that when people are grateful, they come alive, and you can actually talk about that in terms of measurable outcomes of well-being. What a time to be alive.

In what granular way could I more vividly live as I would like to see a life?

As you move through your days, try on calling yourself a social creative, a social artist, even if only to yourself.

Few others teach about hope — and radiate it — like Jericho Brown, our final voice in this course. And there are so many invitations here. One of them is to deploy your imagination — to live as one would want to see a life.

Walk around with that. That is a thrilling idea, challenging in practice — like hope, worth throwing one’s life at.

And try on that language of being a culture worker — that we are each of us culture workers; that we are steeped in culture, touching it, and it is touching us at all times.

Take in the language that flows from that and from Jericho Brown — of thinking of yourself as a social creative, a social artist — even if only to yourself, quietly. See what that shifts as you walk through the world. These are such wonderful charges. They are a sending forth from Jericho, as we also step out of this course.