The children are always ours
The children are always ours
Slouching towards peace with Yeats, Didion, Baldwin, and Kabat-Zinn
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
―James Baldwin
For the last several months, I have been writing in one way or another about mothering. Mothering as defined broadly, as
puts it here:[B]y mothering, I’m not referring to a gendered act, to an act performed exclusively by females, or performed exclusively for children we physically birth.
By mothering, I mean the care we all give to all living beings across generations, the innate love that transcends our best attempts to label and divide.
Since I began this project, Initiation Writes, I have realized I have been doing this. Tending a small grove in which we talk about what it means to tend. To tend our bodies. To tend grief. To tend hope. To tend children. To tend fellow tenders. To tend villages. To tend the earth itself.
I think I will never tire of talking about tending. It is who I am and what I love, in my deepest heart.
And, writing about tending — often writ small, on the scale of a single seed — is how I feel most connected to the larger initiation that we are moving through as a global community.
What is this initiation all about? I feel it is about the crisis of care in which we find ourselves, one of many such crises in history, and the collective tension we’re feeling around how this one might be resolved.
There is one part of me, one part of many of us, that anticipates a sinister end to the world as we know it. This is the “rough beast” that stalks through Yeats’ poetry, written at the end of World War I, and Didion’s essays, written as she contemplated the possible outcomes of America’s mid-century culture wars and misadventures abroad. And perhaps they are right.
There is another part of me, however, that sides with James Baldwin, and the vision he lays out in ”Notes on the House of Bondage,” an essay he wrote in 1980 that is being widely circulated this week, thanks to the relevance of the quotation above. In this essay, Baldwin — ever elegant, ever weary — puts forth the case that the moments that call up in us the deepest cynicism (like, say, the prospect of electing Reagan) can also contain the potential to dismantle the “house of bondage.” Meaning, the world in which racism, colonialism and modern state-sponsored greed run rampant.
As Baldwin writes:
One can speak, then, of the fall of an empire at that moment when, though all of the paraphernalia of power remain intact and visible and seem to function, neither the citizen-subject within the gates nor the indescribable hordes outside it believe in the morality or the reality of the kingdom anymore-when no one, any longer, anywhere, aspires to the empire’s standards.
This is the charged, the dangerous, moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new; when nothing at all can be taken for granted.
This charged and dangerous moment — it is still unfolding. Certainly, nothing right now can be taken for granted. Not our reproductive rights. Not so-called safe zones. Not our government’s accountability to its citizens. Because of course, the old world won’t go quietly. The bodies of those of us still held in the house of bondage remain, for now, contested territory.
But I think Baldwin is right in another way, too: that the opportunity remains, even in the ashes of this no-longer-aspirational Empire, to realize a better world. To return to tending what is sacred and composting what is not. To bring healing to what Jon Kabat-Zinn calls the current necrosis of the human body politic.
In the coming weeks, I will be dropping back to my summer schedule, posting bi-weekly rather than weekly, as I consider how my own work in this space might be composted and re-planted, made to better serve the work of liberation and peace. (There may even be a new name in the works for this newsletter.)
I will also be focusing this summer on sharing the voices of those who are already tending communities, online and offline, that are guided by this kind of mother-love: that is, the innate love that transcends our best attempts to label and divide.
I welcome any suggestions for future interviewees or guest posting along these lines in the comments below. You can also respond to this email directly if you’re a subscriber, or reach out to me at InitiationWrites (at) gmail (dot) com.
For now, I’m continuing to support the unfolding work of World Central Kitchen, which provided 100,000 meals last week despite impossible conditions, and to amplify the calls to action of Operation Olive Branch (OOB). The latter org, “steered by a diverse core council of global advocates including Palestinian and Jewish voices,” is supporting birthing mothers and babies in Gaza with this GoFundMe, and is also issuing a call for volunteers to amplify and support upcoming campaigns in Sudan and the Congo here.
New paid subscriptions this month will go towards these two organizations. (If you cannot afford a paid subscription or do not want to give Substack your money, you can also make a donation in any amount to either org and forward the receipt to the email address above, and I’ll be happy to give you one, no questions asked.)
I am also once again grappling with the graphic violence and grief of this week by reading and writing poems, including the one below. And look, I’ll be the first to tell you: the ones I write may not be great poems. But they are my way, as I have said before, of claiming what little additional power I have here. The power to witness and be witnessed, during another difficult chapter in the history of the house of bondage. To create a space big enough to hold the both/and of this time — this feeling of increasingly unbearable constriction, as well a wild and improbable faith in future growth.
May this imperfect offering be of benefit for those of us who are trying to stay grounded this week, to dig for hope in impossible places, and to grow something good out of the ashes.
The Mothers
1. Did you know that olive trees have been around since the Ice Age, When humans moved out of their birthplace and into the rest of the world Leaving a ream of dead mammoths and mastodons And blooming olives behind them? Did you know that Scientists call This time “The Great Break”? Did you know the word for “oil” Comes from the word “olive” Because olive trees offered fuel to the lamps That lit the first homes of humanity? Did you know that the ancient architect Vituvius discovered that if you char olive wood It only becomes stronger A material so resilient That neither decay, nor harsh weather, nor even seemingly time itself can pierce it? Did you know that the oldest living olive tree Has been growing for three thousand years From before the time of Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammed? Did you know the first olives in America Arrived inside the pockets of Spanish colonizers, Blazing their way to California In the 18th century And that it is from there that they grew through the talons Of the eagle in the U.S. Seal -- Enshrining, even in a nation That would soon be At civil war with itself, The enduring power of peace? 2. Did you know that an olive tree Can be re-grown from a barren trunk, A buried branch, a tiny twig The deepest of roots? Did you know that olive trees must Be planted in pairs Because one olive tree cannot Fertilize itself? Did you know that Palestinian tradition holds That during the harvest, those who lack Land may still eat the fruit from Their neighbor’s trees? Did you know that olive is still the oil Jewish mothers use to light the shabbat candles, Because, they say, Eve extinguished the first man Under the tree in the Garden of Eden And so she is is duty-bound to re-enlighten the world? 3. It is remarkable when biology texts and biblical ones Converge upon a single truth: Olive trees are the mothers of humanity Of all that makes us human. Olive trees are the teachers of humanity, too Speaking of lighting the way, Of becoming stronger through fire Of springing back from the cut-up stump. Last week, they pushed a teacher To the ground. But you cannot bury An olive branch without planting A new line of trees. Can’t you see, now, how fruitless it is This endless attempt to extinguish The source from which your own light springs?