We met in Cape Town where life always finds a way improbably and impossibly amid the shards and horrors of what humans do to each other. The subject was generation. The Leading Causes of Life Fellows explored the work of grown-ups hoping our life could be about more than our own life; that we could give ourselves to the phenomenon of generation. Not abstract or innocent, we know how power is held and it protects institutions, sometimes violently and sometimes on our behalf. Such contradictions and complications. The way is found with others seeking life. That’s what we saw when we looked at our lives, some threads woven across decades.
Here’s a sort of poem I wrote as notes to myself before the African dawn thinking about that.
I thought we were talking about engaging communities of need and vulnerability. Now I am home in my home, my people torn, scarred and scared. I am reading my notes again and they seem useful in another place, here.
Question not
What first or
How,
but how with.
Living systems ask
and offer
Acknowledgement of
Contradiction
Disconnection.
And possibility.
Seek not first the things to fix.
How with?
Approach with humility
Earned by you and yours.
Be tender at the
Boundary.
Bruised,
Violated
Mind, skin and space.
Seek invitation,
Hope for membership.
First do no more harm.
You, invasive exotic
We, adaptive hybrid.
Maybe.
Your only possible
Improbable
Life.
Offer it.
Inconsequential and
Irrelevant
Perhaps.
Your stuff and power
Weighed in the savage
Economy of another.
But usually life finds life
Practical as dirt.
(Alive).
As for faith,
Have some.
Release.
As for hope,
Have some.
Wonder.
Fragilities
Less than love
Which lasts
the only way;
Offered,
consumed,
Whole.
