In search of a missing word

Its starts with a dream

I wake from a dream. It’s not a story just a single image,  an image of words which looks something like this:

(n)  an action or decision a person makes knowing it is a part of a larger collective movement.

What is missing from the definition, is the word itself. Perhaps it’s not yet known, a naming that’s still in the making. Waking up, I can’t think what this word might be even though the definition makes perfect sense to me. Isn’t this what so many of us have been doing for some time now? Isn’t this what our times call for, individual choices attuned to collective wellbeing, cultural and ecological healing?  

For the last 50 years, neoliberalism has reigned supreme, singing the praises of individualism ( you’re a winner, not a loser!”) while sweeping collective life under the carpet. “There is no such thing as society” Maggie Thatcher famously thundered, denying millions of years of human evolution largely shaped by social interactions and community life. Yet here we are now in this brief moment of human history with a dominant global culture devoted to isolating people and denying the basic commons of life – land, water, air – as well as human communal life.  So much so that in the Western English-speaking world, we have no word for taking personal action holding in mind the larger connections, realities and needs of life. Nevertheless this is what we are increasingly being called to do as the climate and nature emergency bites deeper while government action weakens and stalls.

Dreams are generous and generative.  They offer us all manner of  insights, warnings, guidance and inspirations, personally and for our communities. The night before my dream I had gone to bed asking myself what I might write about for my next post. Waking in the middle of the night with this vivid dream image, I knew this is what I would write about, without really knowing why or where this would take me.

Being in my sixties, it’s a shock for me to realise that most of readers here will have no or little memory of living in societies not shaped by neoliberal beliefs in the virtues of competitiveness, free markets and Governments that bow down to the dictates of corporations. What this means in practice is that social good has rundown while financial inequity is increasing exponentially, creating a culture of neglect and unkindness. Within this culture each of us is treated as an insecure consumer instead of receiving education and support to be an active citizen. As a consequence, social capital and ecological resilience has eroded while the personal costs of living in high stress environments are taking a huge toll on wellbeing as Kirsten Powers writes about so powerfully here.

But there is only so long you can deny or suppress human instincts. And one of the strongest instincts we have as human beings is for social connection. Food, water and air give us biological life but it is social identity and action that makes life meaningful. True human agency is found in the nexus between individual and collective being. Dismiss collective life and you can end up alienated from others, often in a state of overwhelm by larger forces at work - climate change, pandemics, food shortages, poor working conditions, an erosion of democracy and so much more. Neglect your personal life and you risk burn out and loss of self. A healthy culture empowers and enables people to live meaningfully and authentically in personal and collective life, seeing these as a continuum not a polarity. Individual supports community, and vice versa. Take a moment to imagine this; not having to struggle alone in isolation for a fulfilling and purposeful life within a culture bent on self-destruction. 

A sum more than the parts

Systems theory teaches us that the sum is more than the parts. What this means is that each one of us becomes more of ourselves through consciously participating in community,  human and more-than-human. In Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit reports back from disaster-affected communities including New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. What she finds is that there is a leap in people’s altruism, inventiveness and sense of purpose when ordinary divides break down and people focus on acting in community, something we witness over and over again here in Australia through floods and fires.

“Disasters are extraordinarily regenerative”, writes Solnit. Like revolutions, they spur “disruption and improvisation, and an exhilarating sense that anything is possible.” They also reveal “how much people want to be members of a stronger society, to be better connected, to have meaningful work [and] how much everyday life prevents that.” Our dominant global culture keeps us apart in ways that are bone wearingly familiar – media distraction and biases, insecure jobs and housing, scarcity of social supports. One of the most vital ways we can meaningfully act as individuals is to be a co-creator of  a counter culture of care and connectedness which aims to hold all through life’s passages and challenges.

Just as I write this piece, Krista Tippett posts about her time in Plum Village, a Buddhist retreat centre. She tells of an exercise given by a monk in a Dharma talk and invites us to try this. First clench one fist, then:

move to force that fist open with your other hand. The fist only clenches tighter — as if by its own will, a natural reaction to force. And I invite you to try, then, a counterintuitive approach: cradle the fist with your other hand. With the same naturalness, but a wholly other quality of feeling and response, the fist releases. It softens. 

A sea of clenched fists is a metaphor for our world right now. This exercise brings me back to a conviction I’ve long held, but can find hard to sustain in the tormented adolescence of this century: one of the most powerful ways we can be present to our world’s pain is with a countercultural tenderness. 

I love this term countercultural tenderness. It feels very close to the missing word from my dream.

How might we tend to a kind and regenerative culture, loosening the barbed wires that have wrapped around our hearts, minds and souls as the result of living in a harsh and unhinged culture? My answer to this has been to shift from working alone in private practice to working in  community through climate psychology organisations, as well as volunteering in my local community garden and permaculture food forest. It’s been a surprisingly happy shift considering what a wild introvert I am by nature. A more recent joy has been discovering Substack and realising what a great vessel this can be for creating a caring culture with its stories about people tending to human and other-than-human friends and neighbours, communities, workplaces and ecosystems.

Kinning

Writing this post, still pondering the missing word, I clicked on a Substack note from Maia Duerr a few days ago which led me to an Orion article called ‘Kinship is a Verb’. This article is a conversation between Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Hausdoerffer about Maggie Nelson’s observation that “Using kin as a verb reminds us that kin is always alive… and it requires [of us] some action or intention.” When kin becomes kinning, this word invites us into a living world of connections, eliciting our interactions and care. Could this be the missing word, I wonder? Not a noun but a verb, inviting us to be attentive, share gifts and tend to the human and more-than-human world as family.

So often the community actions we do in today’s world go unrecognised, unnamed and unvalued. Yet they sit at the heart of the wellbeing of human psyche and culture. How might naming, practicing and celebrating these actions as kinning, or some other word, change us and our world ? I invite you to jump into the comments here to share your own stories, questions and reflections on cultivating countercultural tenderness.