(The pic is of a hike we were led on by a friend and student of ours above the city, where we got amazing views of Dibé Nitsaa, or Hesperus Mountain,which in the Dine (Navajo) creation story is the sacred mountain of the north and associated with the color black.)
And as one of our workshop participants noted, when there are gaps in your story, you either ignore them, or you tend to fill them in with the backdrop of the larger story that your larger context (such as your country) provides for you.
We leaned into the concept and the reality of inter-being. "Interbeing" is a phrase created by Thich Nhat Hanh. He has multiple ways of explaining how being human is an experience of "inter-are". One of his explanations says this:
"We can observe emptiness and interbeing everywhere in our daily life. If we look at a child, it’s easy to see the child’s mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, in her. The way she looks, the way she acts, the things she says. Even her skills and talents are the same as her parents’. If at times we cannot understand why the child is acting a certain way, it is helpful to remember that she is not a separate self-entity. She is a continuation. Her parents and ancestors are inside her. When she walks and talks, they walk and talk as well. Looking into the child, we can be in touch with her parents and ancestors, but equally, looking into the parent, we can see the child. We do not exist independently. We inter-are. Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me."
I love this passage because it leans into familial/ancestral relationships as a form of interbeing, and makes it very clear that the notion that we can exist independently is, simply, false. Yet time and again, what Krissy refers to as "chronic individualism" rises to the surface. That's in part because this dis-ease is deeply entrenched with the cosmovision and the origin stories about America, and the modern economy, including the stories that we keep perpetuating.
