Co-creating a Brand New World
“I dwell in possibility”
There was a day, long before I hit publish on this blog, where I received a vision from God.
In the vision, I saw a tree which had once been beautiful and strong, fertile and healthy. It had grown sickened and diseased and instead of fruit, what hung from its branches were the bodies of the lynched.
I heard God say ‘Now is the time for the dead tree to be cut out at the root’, and I saw an axe falling repeatedly, raining down blows at the dead tree’s trunk where it met the earth, hacking away at a rotten and tangled root system.
‘And be burned.’
And a saw a blaze go up, a bonfire hundreds of feet high. And the voice of one of my favourite prophetic teachers echoed in my memory…
“Let the bridges you burn light the way forward”.
As I sat with this powerful image for a while, I began to see it from all sorts of angles. I probed and enquired into it, the way I sometimes do with a parable of Jesus.
One of the many things I saw that night, is the tree as a metaphor for anything that we can reasonably expect to be a structure for support in our lives.
Governments.
Schools.
Family systems.
Churches.
Sports clubs.
Relationships.
And I brought Girard’s thought around mimetic violence and scapegoating to my wondering, and thought about what happens when these systems, purporting to be ‘good’, end up scapegoating ‘the other’ so they don’t have to do business with their own shadow. Their own darkness. Their own prejudice, violence, hatred and jealousy. About how they are only ever good for some.
Usually only the white skinned. Always the rich. Probably the men.
And I saw how these systems are only capable of functioning at the level that their leaders live at. If systems have leaders who are incapable of wrestling with their own shadows, the systems will eventually lynch folks. And the leaders will either stand by passively and watch it happen, turn a blind eye, or actively participate in the lynching. Some particularly nasty leaders will do all three of these in the kind of head-spinning fuckery that is always hard to grasp in the moment.
What is toxic and dangerous and evil in our systems is a direct result of what is toxic and dangerous and evil in our own hearts and minds.
And I saw how now is the time, to watch it all burn. To realise the only people who are dismayed at the dismantling of the systems are those who have directly benefited from them.
What struck me most about it was that the urgency of this vision was powerful. It was a judgement, an apocalypse, a true unveiling image. It had a feel of imminence. I started to prepare. For what, I didn’t know. But that night I began sinking my roots deeper into mother earth and searching for groundedness. I tethered myself more strongly than ever to the energetic force of Divine which holds and steadies me moment by moment in all of the unraveling. I began to walk more lightly, to hold everything around me with a gentleness I hadn’t had before. Ready to move at any given moment. Watching. Listening. Waiting.
And then Covid 19 hit.
And now this.
I had a whole other blog post scheduled for today.
Another thing I wrote, which also felt urgent. But then, this week happened.
George Floyd’s murder became the match which lit a blaze of civil unrest, protesting and upheaval in the US.
And the rest of the world has been watching, and it has been a sobering moment to observe the reactions of the global community being so confronted with the very real evil and injustice which has long propped up every single system we have running in the world right now.
“Now is the time. Let it burn. Let it unravel.”
A number of years ago now, I had the privilege of sitting around a fire with a group of women, including my sister and our friend, and our friend’s aunties, nieces and mum. As the fire burned low, the elder women started telling stories from their lives. Accounts of watching their siblings and younger cousins being snatched from their homes and communities by Australian Federal Government agents sent to round up Indigenous kids and send them into residential care.
Hair-raising stories about hiding, running, keeping quiet. Ages, names. Places. Countries forgotten. Kin systems broken.
As they shared their stories and sanctified the night air with their truth-telling, I sat humbled and undone, suspended between my own raging grief at their systemic abuse, suffering, colonisation and their resilience through it, and my own shame at being a white woman sitting in a circle of brave Indigenous women with tears quietly streaming down my face.
My dad did a pretty good job of decolonising the curriculum at my high-school, so their stories were not shocking or news to me. I knew all about these historical events and their current-day manifestations. By that point, I had sat with countless Indigenous friends, colleagues, clients, and borne witness to their lived realities. Had rolled up my sleeves plenty of times and dug into the trenches of Australian racist systems, pulled all the levers I could reach to shift it. By that time, I’d also done a bit work around the weaponizing of white women’s tears.
About how white women repeatedly take the focus off their brown and black sisters by having hysterical reactions to systemic racism. About how exhausting that is for women of colour to attend to, comforting their white friends. How much they don’t have time and energy for it. I didn’t want to break the sacred space with my sniffling, or draw attention to myself at all, horrified as I was at my own reaction. I shifted my face deeper into the shadows and controlled my breathing so that no one would hear me. The tears flooded down my face in hot rivers and I could not stop them, try as I might. For a long time, I think I hid it. Then my mate who was sitting next to me shot a look over at me and broke out into a smile, and I knew I’d been busted. She sat there, rubbing my knee quietly, while the matriarchs in her family lineage carried on with their story telling.
This moment we are living in, is a bit like this moment. If we have been paying attention, even a little bit, this should not shock us. We should not be at all surprised by what is happening in the US. We should be shocked that it is NOT happening in Australia. Now is not the moment to go about and use public forums, or your brown, black or people of colour friends to educate you about the systemic injustice, racism and how it is lethal and all-pervasive. Now is the moment for those of us who benefit from white privilege, to hide our tears, when we are having them, (and we should be having them, if we are listening deeply and paying attention) and force ourselves to stand, and look and bear witness.
“Every single one of us has work to do, if we are white. All of us. None of us get a free pass on this.”
The thing is, no one can tell you what that work IS. That is your own task. That is called ‘taking responsibility for my own de-colonisation.’ All week I’ve been sharing voices from Australian and global perspectives who’s work we can read, digest, listen to, watch and learn from. Now is the moment for those of us who realise we’ve been putting off our own work to de-colonise our minds, our homes, our schools, churches, sport clubs or whatever spaces we call our own – to take action. Here are the steps for white folks who sincerely want to be allies in the fight against systemic racism, laid out in a way which I hope makes this seem achievable for all of us:
1. Resist the urge to freeze, hide or zone out. Realise that inaction always strengthens systemic racism.
2. Repent (privately if appropriate, but also publicly if we have a platform, lead a community or have influence and have remained silent about racism) for our inaction.
3. Commit to making change.
4. Realise change must start from within us. Commit to the dark and difficult shadow work, asking ourselves the hard questions about how we continue to benefit from systemic injustice, and how we may have been complicit in it historically. Have these conversations around our dinner tables, with our friends. Talk about race. Listen when others speak.
5. Commit to learning from voices which we have not heard before. Listen silently. Do not ask your black and brown friends to spoon feed you. Do the wrestle. Figure it out. This is called ‘emotional labour’.
6. Do NOT expect gratitude, affirmation or extra respect for doing this work. Realise it’s a bare minimum for being a decent human being who shares the earth with billions of people who are more melanin enriched than you are, are smarter and more educated than you, and who have suffered more than you have.
7. Keep going and never quit and take your children with you.
To be clear, now is not the moment to try and ‘get woke’ in a public way. Do that work privately now. All your black, brown and people of colour friends are not okay right now. They are in crisis. Do not make this crisis about you. In any way. I cannot stress that enough. Do not use this as a moment to showcase how woke you are. Look for where you can pull levers in your own sphere. Pull them. As hard as you can. At your own cost. Do not mine these moments for photo ops. Do them privately, quietly, and out of sight. Show up at rallies. Make signs. Teach your children. Recognise where you make mistakes, acknowledge your error. Rinse and repeat.
I’m convinced if we all seriously commit to this work, our exterior reality will start to reflect, in time, a genuinely transformed inner reality.
This is our moment, our time. We will be held accountable for what we did with our lives. For how we responded to Aboriginal deaths in custody. To how we voted once we learned that Australia is the only Commonwealth nation who doesn’t recognise its First Peoples in its constitution, or in any kind of treaty. We will be held accountable for what we let slide by us because we felt overwhelmed, too tired, or worried we would get it wrong. We WILL get it wrong, at times. We will need to say sorry, we will need to learn from our friends who are people of colour and humbly commit to doing better next time. This, too, is part of the process. We cannot enter into this work if we want to get A’s or brownie points, or get spotted virtue signalling to make sure the right people know we are doing the right things.
We can only participate in this process if we are truly willing to let change come, and let it come in and through us first.