Sparkle & truth

A Letter from a Trauma Worker on the Anniversary

"I’m sorry for every time you’ve needed help, consolation, relief, or empathy and did not receive it. For the injuries, injustices, and sorrow that may have compounded over time. For the ways that what you’ve been experiencing has resurfaced earlier traumas, put pressure on existing fissures, and even tapped into something intergenerational that you know to be achingly real, though hard to fully understand. For each time your brain was drawn to think the unthinkable, again and again, I am sorry.

I am sorry for all the feelings coursing through you so quickly you don’t know where to put them. You may feel like you are overflowing with sadness or disconnected with numbness. You may feel haunted by a sense that you can never do enough; a sense that runs so deep it’s as if you feel that you’ll never, again, be enough. You may feel paralyzed by helplessness or deeply disconnected with hopelessness. You may find your anger and rage unrecognizable. The persistence of your guilt may stun you and the cognitive quicksand you wade through may confound you. You may long for the creativity you used to be able to access. Perhaps you worry that you’ve forgotten how to laugh. Your inability to assume well about others may confuse you. You may feel exhausted in your body, spirit, and soul. The depths of how disheartened you feel may alarm you. The extent of your resentment and envy may feel like it knows no bounds. And you may have come to realize it is possible to feel depleted and yearning and avoidant and lonely all at the same time.

And you may feel afraid. Afraid of everything you’re going to try to forget and all that may continue to torment you. Afraid of what the future may bring. Of losses you can’t bear to conceive of."

traumastewardship.com

"I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding market economy that reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: relationship and purpose and beauty and meaning, which can never be commoditized. I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use.

You might rightly observe that we no longer live in small, insular societies, where generosity and mutual esteem structure our relations. But we could. It is within our power to create such webs of interdependence, quite outside the market economy. Intentional communities of mutual self-reliance and reciprocity are the wave of the future, and their currency is sharing. The move toward a local food economy is not just about freshness and food miles and carbon footprints and soil organic matter. It is all of those things, but it’s also about the deeply human desire for connection, to be in reciprocity with the gifts that are given you.

The real human needs that such arrangements address are exactly what we long for yet cannot ever purchase: being valued for your own unique gifts, earning the regard of your neighbors for the quality of your character, not the quantity of your possessions; what you give, not what you have."

The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy.

"Today, many of us live in the most atomized societies in human history, which makes our lives less secure and undermines our ability to organize together to change unjust conditions on a large scale. We are put in competition with each other for survival, and we are forced to rely on hostile systems — like health care systems designed around profit, not keeping people healthy, or food and transportation systems that pollute the Earth and poison people — for the things we need. More and more people report that they have no one they can confide in. This means many of us do not get help with mental health, drug use, family violence or abuse until the police or courts are involved, which tends to escalate rather than resolve harm.

In this context of social isolation and forced dependency on hostile systems, mutual aid — where we choose to help each other out, share things, and put time and resources into caring for the most vulnerable — is a radical act."

Mutual Aid Is Essential to Our Survival Regardless of Who Is in the White House Mutual aid is inherently anti-authoritarian, demonstrating how we can organize human activity without coercion.