Hi Friend,

Two weeks ago, I had about 5 people registered for the ReMembering Course. That's enough for me to run the course, but it is a smaller number than is ideal.

When we started this past Friday, we had 14. Four of those participants joined us the day before the Course started. We are full.

I was delightfully surprised.

Thank you to everyone who kept sharing about the Course! And for joining us! 

I opened the class with the question: ‘What does the term 'ReMembering' evoke for you?"

It's a question I often ask people. I keep hearing different answers, and I keep coming into a deeper understanding of what is dwelling in this word/notion.

In the small group that I joined, participants talked about ReMembering as a sense that links the past and the future. The sense of connecting ancestors and future generations. I loved that dimension of ReMembering: both a bridge between and across multiple generations... and as something that dwells in a multidimensional rhythm of time.

I woke up the morning after our Course began thinking about that sense, and connecting it to something I recently noticed.

Krissy and I have been making a point of visiting Krissy's 4-month-old grandchild (she has two grandchildren) on a regular basis. I myself have not spent a lot of time with babies. Turns out that I really like babies. They are totally amazing. Really, I might be in awe of babies.

This little one, like most human babies, tends to make fists with his tiny chubby hands and likes to hold things. Especially the fingers of adults. There is something so cool about a baby grasping my finger: I sense a deep evolutionary bond, a deep spiritual bond, a deep primate/human thing: hold on. Connect.

I don't know what is the experience of this tiny person, but I feel a great curiosity, and an extension of my heart. Connection is a form of empathy.

I was reminded of other times that people have held my finger - particularly at the bedside of someone who is actively dying. Sometimes, all that a person can do is squeeze a finger. Or maybe wiggle an eyebrow. Or manage just the fraction of a smile. Once, when I was with someone who was close to that liminal space between this world and the next, she looked at me, and twitched her index finger. She didn’t have the strength to raise her arm, so I put my own finger into her hand, and she squeezed it. Connect. I see you. I know you. I'm holding on to you. Right now, for this moment, with what I have. Connect.

Something wordless passed between us. That moment of connection stays with me, tho she is no longer here. Those moments connect me with the miracle of life. 

In the last few months, a dangerous lie has been spread by, amongst other people, the richest man in the world. Musk did not invent this lie - it is deep in the writings and thought of thinkers much older than he. (Indeed, Adrian Daub does a beautiful critique of how authors such as Ayn Rand and some of Heidegger influence modern tech bros in his book, What Tech Calls Thinking). It's been around for centuries, this lie. In recent decades, Scientists (including quite a few technologists) have worked hard to disprove it - from neuroscience to social sciences to evolutionary biology. These days, science and economics are coming to agree with common-sense wisdom: connection is core to human survival and thriving.

The lie is that empathy is a "problem". That humans are only and fundamentally individualistic and self-centered. That we have ever survived outside of communities. eco-communities, to be precise.

It's just not true.

Empathy, compassion, kindness and generosity, and the cycles of reciprocity that engender are key to our survival.

Our ability to literally, emotionally, and figuratively/symbolically connect with other people, with other animals and plants, enables... everything. Especially surviving till we are old enough to take care of ourselves …and dying surrounded by care. You know, the basics of living.

I thought this was so obvious it doesn't need to be said.

But apparently, we are in a moment when we need to keep finding ways to say it, to showcase it, to acknowledge it in our words and our storytelling and our actions.

Because the lie that empathy is a 'problem' instead of part of the key to our success/longevity/survival/thriving as a species... that can, has and does lead to a lot of other problems. A lot of violence. A lot of war. A lot of downwards spirals of hatred and animosity, and fear. We know what that pathway looks like.

Let's not go down that route any more than we already have.

Other pathways are still available to us. They always have been.

There have always been and still are pathways towards peace and harmony that are built into and based on our capacity to connect to one another and to the wisdom of land and waters. Including but not only across the vast distance of generations.... which, sometimes, is not so vast at all.

These next few days, Krissy and I will be in Niagara, not far from the great Niagara Falls. And the Love Canal - the infamous site of the toxic environmental dump. And the Tuscarora Nation. Krissy will be doing more things on behalf of her family members who died, as well as those who are living. I will be going to the annual gathering of the Spiritual Directors International - a professional conference for people like me who offer spiritual direction (amongst other things). I don’t know this community, and I’m going with a lot of curiosity.

While I'm sure the conference organizers will do a land acknowledgement, I am curious if the conference organizers will know how close they are to the Tuscarora Reservation. Or the Love Canal - a site of the infamous toxic waste dump. Indeed- just outside the dense ring of tourists who flock to the Falls for wonder and awe and romance, there are quite a number of spaces of what we might easily call ecological injustice.

Which is to say, land and water that is suffering from those times when society/industry/the US government/a small group of people decided that their immediate profit was far more important than the well-being of (fill in the blank) people and land/waters.

The violence that arises from the lack of empathy/compassion/connection is all around us. It's in the high rates of cancer and asthma in communities that have been denied access to clean water and healthy soil around the world. It's in the way land is divided, and who gets to live where, and how one group views the other group, based on a line that is sometimes literally invisible, but everyone knows is there. It's in layers and layers of cultural superiority, part of the legacy of the doctrine of discovery, that keep being accompanied by many forms of social and ecological disease.

Oh yes, we know where the lie that "empathy is a problem" gets us.

All sorts of ugly.

And disconnection/alienation.

And yet even with all sorts of dis-eases, there keep being people like us. People who cross some of those boundaries. People who choose to look and to see … and to be changed by looking and seeing.

I don't think we are all that special. We arise from communities and from lineages that encourage connection. That encourages clear-sightedness. I keep meeting people like us all the time. People like you.

I'd like to say that those of us who know the power of empathy and compassion (which can of course also include boundaries and differentiation and all that) are in the majority around the world, regardless of what social media algorithms might try to show us.

So... wherever your own ReMembering journey might be taking you, I hope you keep finding ways of sharing the stories of empathy, compassion, and people choosing justice and healing and attentiveness… that are always right there.

There is a bigger story that we are all a part of, a story that comes from a song whose rhythm is the beat at the heart of the universe and the heart of all beings. One way of talking about that unnameable heart is aa the heart of connection.

Some even call it Love.

Blessings on your inward-outward travels --

Sara Jolena