Soften Us Until There Are No Sides
I have been feeling edgy. There is heaviness in my chest and stiffness in my neck and my usual tools for cultivating ease and equanimity are insufficient. Yesterday I went for a long walk up dirt roads, into the hills, thick jungle pressing close, the carnival of tropical birds hooting in the dusky shadows. I felt better as long as I was sweating, but my inner peace is tenuous and as soon as I slow down the usual triggers detonate emotions that feel disproportionate. I have no doubt that this is tied to what is happening in our world.
What is happening in our world, in this body we share? Trauma. History has taught us, again and again, that in the absence of healing, horror repeats. The only way out is to forgive the unforgivable, but this feels impossible for a collective nervous system inflamed with unbearable trauma. And so the grandchildren of victims of genocide, whose bodies carry inherited PTSD, become perpetrators and bystanders to the genocide of their cousins. This trauma must be released from our collective body, just as it needs to be released from individual bodies, for peace to feel possible.
Right now the world is full of people with strong convictions about why Israel is justified to use violence, and other people with strong convictions about why Palestine is justified. As long as we are caught in this loop, no children are safe. In the Five Faces of Oppression, Iris Marion Young explains how oppression is structural, systemic, and normalized in our culture, and this is true, but what feels most important now is understanding our part in this: “for every oppressed group there is a group that is privileged in relation to that group.”
So I am thinking about my part in all this. I am thinking about trauma and genocide and justice. About how we are outraged by genocide, and we loudly blame the bad guys, and then we continue with lifestyles that feed and fund the chronic conditions of systemic inequality that cause genocide. We pick sides and enemies so we don’t have to look at ourselves. We feel rage when we see evidence—photos of limp babies lifted from the rubble of bombed neighborhoods, wailing mothers and fathers—and then drive our car to the mall and give dollars to the forces that create the conditions for wars that never end, because this capitalist lifestyle we have been indoctrinated into needs resources. This is a euphemism: there is no such thing as resources. There are only living beings connected with other beings, only living beings who all want the same things: security and justice and peace for their families.
It was just the day of the dead and we’ve been talking about ancestors in our family. My son put photos of the grandparents he never met on the ancestor altar, and on Halloween we paraded around with other families while he loaded a sack with candy, and as we navigated that garish chaos of plastic costumes and sugar mania, I thought about the kids in Gaza, how the blood on their faces isn’t fake. I didn’t say anything out loud. I’m already that person who makes other people uncomfortable too often, and I want my kids to have their fun.
When I was a kid everyone told us to “be civilized” when we acted out, but I never wanted to be civilized. I learned young that civilization’s legacy is to invade, kill native people, invent nations, use them as dumping grounds for its outcasts—those whose dark skins or pagan ways or Jewish or Arab accents threaten the fantasy of an industrious, white, straight, male-dominated Christian world—and then get the masses to fight among themselves so we don’t notice what the masters are doing. We’re still obeying the same insane script. Too busy debating on instagram to connect the bombs with the pipelines or notice the billions pocketed by weapons manufacturers and oil tycoons and all the other psychopaths profiteering off the apocalypse created by policies of domination and separation.
As I stumble along in my own search for home, I think about how every injustice can be followed to the same root: the trauma of separation from family, community and land. I feel how this question of home haunts me; it has haunted my whole life. I think about my Jewish ancestors dying in gas chambers. I think about Palestinian mothers running from bombs. I think about how there is no justice without healing and no healing without forgiveness and no forgiveness without empathy.
I am not on expert on Middle Eastern relations and I have no wish to debate politics, but I know plants. When everything hurts, I turn to their wisdom. Plants are empathy expanders. Plants empower our capacity to transform entrenched traumas and release ancient grudges. Plants open hearts of stone. Plants teach us to reach beyond ourselves, stretch to understand other perspectives, and remember how connected and interdependent we are. Even as our culture goes berserk, even as the news continues to pummel us with unbearable reports of the worst humans can do, the plants are still here, holding us. May their medicine find its mycelial way into the hardest hearts and soften them. May it soften us all. May it call us away from these glowing screens, into their flowering arms, and soften us until there are no sides. Soften us until our arguments become lovesongs so loud they reach the Holy Land and return the warmongers and soldiers to their humanity. Soften us, dearest medicines of the earth, soften us. Soften us until we become the breath of peace the world needs us to be.
