You Can’t Build on Broken
When a biologist encounters an ecosystem in trouble, she/he will pay close attention to what has broken in the pattern of relationships among diverse species. Health will be restored by creating new connections and strengthening existing ones. This solution is found in the etymology of the word health. It comes from an old English word for wholeness. That word comes from an earlier word for holiness. Whenever two or more are gathered. . . .
For many years, the Berkana Institute (I’m co-founder and serve again as president) proclaimed, “Whatever the problem, community is the answer.” I learned this working in southern Africa, among indigenous communities in many places and, time after time, from my now dear friend, Angela Blanchard. We met in New Orleans sixteen months after Katrina. Angela’s organization had been intimately involved in immediately settling the more than 120,000 people who had to flee New Orleans after the storm and find refuge in Houston.
Angela has led Neighborhood Centers Inc. (NCI) in Houston for more than thirty years. Houston is the second-fastest-growing city in America and one of the most diverse. It has the same issues as other urban centers—exciting growth coupled with increasing economic disparity, poverty in the midst of plenty. What began as a settlement house in 1907 has grown into one of the largest nonprofits in the United States, serving “new neighbors” of immigrants coming into Houston, as well as those long-marginalized. The range of services covers all ages and most needs, from health and education to job training and placement. I love how they describe their work because they actually do this: “We believe that our neighborhoods are bridges to opportunity, that people can transform communities and that everyone everywhere has something to contribute. For Good.”
They serve in more than seventy community locations. There are six main centers, two built as village squares that house a broad range of services in brightly painted, human-scale buildings. Angela has stewarded this extraordinary growth and contribution by relying on community. She summarizes her experience in a simple phrase: Every person has the desire to “Earn, Learn, and Belong.” (In 2016, she brought this learning to refugee settlements in Europe, working with on-the-ground leaders to create places first of welcome and then long-term communities.)
I encourage you to read about the work of NCI on their beautiful website, filled with the faces and stories of the more than 500,000 people they serve so well.22 You will learn and see how healthy vibrant communities are being built among diverse people, relying on the aspirations we all share as human human beings.
“You can’t build on broken” is one of Angela’s best slogans. It’s the recipe for building healthy community.
Like the biologists, but unlike the common approaches in aid and development efforts worldwide, health is found in working with the strengths already present and creating new connections. If you’re building a new community center, ask people to design it by bringing in photos of what they love about their community. If you’re developing job training programs, get jobs guaranteed from corporate partners before training starts. If you want immigrants to become legal, bring in federal immigration authorities to advise them directly. Tragically, this cooperation is no longer possible with new anti-immigration policies.
When you strengthen connections, even among those who have been indifferent or hostile, you create possibilities. We may be strangers or estranged, but we can become neighbors if we decide to work together on building something good. For good.
We may have known this truth but now forgotten it in our devastatingly polarized society. Too often our energies have been diverted into strategies of protection from the opposition and winning the endless battles. We couldn’t avoid this, but now it’s time to remember the value of community. In so many situations, I’ve witnessed Angela’s unshakable faith in people materialize as gifts and contributions that create community. I’ve learned again that community is the answer.
Angela always speaks of grace and joy—gifts abundant when we are working together. As we gather together to create islands of sanity, we, too, will have many moments of grace and joy. Guaranteed.
We are not broken people. It’s our relationships that need repair. It’s relationships that bring us back to health, wholeness, holiness.
Intelligence
we are told how wrong it is to impute
our intelligence to animals
building them up raising their ranking
attributing behaviors meant only for us
but what if we were as intelligent as animals?
if we had their intelligence
we would not push away
what we don’t want to know
we’d know denial is a form of suicide
if we had their intelligence
we would notice who’s around us
no longer duped into thinking
we can make it on our own
if we had their intelligence
we would engage with everything
mindfulness not a fad knowing
staying awake means staying alive
we are a young species
we would be wiser if we
recognized our immaturity
and used our intelligence
to take our right place on the planet
Margaret Wheatley, How Does Raven Know?
INTERCONNECTEDNESS: NOTES
1 The Genome Project led to the discovery of epigenetics, that DNA can be changed by the behaviors and experiences of individuals. The ensemble metaphor is from Richard Frances, Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance (New York: Norton, 2011).
2 See Symbiotic Planet, Lynn Margulis. Her revolutionary theory about the microcosmos of bacteria was at first ridiculed and now is foundational among biologists; a new Tree of Life published in 2016 has bacteria in most of life’s branches. Carl Zimmer, “Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life,’” nytimes.com, April 17, 2016.
3 A remarkable video, “How Wolves Change Rivers,” provides a dramatic example of what are termed “trophic cascades.”
4 The Greeks believed in sacred geometry, that harmony and beauty are properties of the world independent of our observations, but that we all respond to. God was the grand geometer, creating geometric forms that give the experience of harmony. Sacred geometry is found in the patterns used in many cultures for sacred buildings, paintings, and symbolic art.
5 Tim Maudlin, a leading philosopher of physics, in George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance (New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), p. 11.
6 Proposed in 1935, by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen.
7 This happens often in theoretical physics: an experiment set up to prove the impossibility of a quantum phenomenon instead establishes further proof of its existence. It happened to Schrodinger, Einstein, and Wheeler, among the most prominent quantum theorists, and also to others intent on proving that the world wasn’t as weird as it appeared to be. It was and it is. See Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance.
8 Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance, p. 10. As you’ll note from the number of quotes, I find Musser’s book invaluable and up-to-date (2015). He offered a brilliant presentation on nonlocality at Google in February 2016, “Spooky Action at a Distance.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8nqgyBsM9U.
9 Roger Penrose, one of the leading physicists, published Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe in 2016. The title speaks for itself.
10 Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance, p. 115.
11 Leadership and the New Science (3rd ed.), p. 6.
12 See Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006).
13 See the Mind and Life Institute, founded in 1990. Dialogues occur annually; these began in the mid-1980s by Adam Engle and Francisco Varela working in close partnership with the Dalai Lama.
14 See Recommended Readings.
15 James Kakalios in Scientific American, 2010, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/everyday-quantum-physics/.
16 A Snapchat streak, indicated by a fire emoji, is when you have exchanged snaps three days in a row. The goal is to keep the streak alive for as long as possible. At the end of 2016, Snapchat rebranded itself as Snap, now selling spectacles from vending booths that, at the press of a button on the glasses, will videotape where you are and immediately download the video onto your phone to send to all your friends. One commentator noted that young people now communicate through pictures rather than words. OMG.
17 See http://www.curbed.com/2016/6/20/11978178/ikea-life-at-home-report-2016.
18 See, for example: “The Town Where 100 Young People Have Tried to Kill Themselves,” www.bbc.com, August 21, 2016.
19 My book So Far from Home details that the things we activists have been focused on changing are emergent phenomena. What emerges can’t be changed by working backward to change the parts.
20 The great Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn founded the Order of Interbeing. The word itself means many things but conveys immediately our interconnectedness. It also can be used as a verb: “We interare.”
21 In Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (New York: Fawcett Books, 1999). I have found deep comfort in Hogan’s book, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (New York: Norton, 2007).
22 This is a state-of-the-art website, visually delightful and as welcoming as the centers themselves: www.neighborhood-centers.org.