Viewing entries tagged
diversity

Haben Girma

This week, Rach was speaking at a two-day online conference run by the incredible Mary Freer, called Compassion Revolution. Seth Godin was speaking too, but the really intriguing human that was sharing the stage with Rach was a woman named Haben Girma.

Haben is a deafblind woman of colour, the first deafblind person in history to graduate from Harvard Law School. She chats with presidents, advocates for greater human and disability rights, and is beautiful and funny and gracious. She delivered a keynote over zoom that got us all thinking deeply about our biases and identities and potential.

Incidentally, for those who, like Haben, are reading this post (yep, it’s possible) I am a tallish white male in my forties, currently folded into the back corner of a coffeeshop with a notebook and a laptop. I’m wearing a dark blue t-shirt that is splashed with white flowers that have pink edges. There are so many humans around me, but I can’t hear them, because I have headphones on, listening to “Games” by Bakermat. The music is joyful and melancholic, and feels like someone is shaking both your hands, but in time to your heartbeat, so that your whole body bounces in rhythm to your pulse.

Anyway, the morning after the conference, Rach and I are sitting in bed drinking coffee and she says simply, “my Instagram is ableist.”

I ask her what that even means, and she explains that without choosing to, without even thinking about it, she has built a collection of imagery and art that only those with sight can enjoy. There are videos whose auto-captions would barely make sense to someone without hearing who rely completely on captions.

“That’s hardly ableist, though.” I say, trying to defend her honour or something, “It’s not like you’re deliberately marginalising anyone.”

She stares into her cup, the steam backlit by the early sunlight. “But that’s the thing. It’s not deliberate, but it is ignorant. I’m being lazy, Nath, because I’m comfortable doing things the way I’ve always done them.”

“So it’s ignorant ableism, then?”

“Yeah, I think it is. By not even thinking about inclusion, we are by default EX-cluding people."

This is how we talk sometimes. Big concepts (at least big to me), just casually introduced at 5am before the caffeine has even kicked in. I try to keep up. “How can your Instagram be more inclusive then?”

And she comes alive. Descriptions for each of her artworks, captions that are accurate, commentary on the visuals of our white papers, multi-sensory experiences. And then I get excited too, and together we come up with all these ideas around experiential art exhibitions, better websites and identity descriptors, and other stuff that just feels powerful to talk about.

We talk about community, how it has always shined the brightest through service. Helping, lifting, sharing, encouraging, contributing, they’re all elemental traits that build humanity. Though all of us prefer comfort, as soon as we react to someone else’s need, we feel a sense of forward motion for humanity. Like we actually contributed to a meaningful story.

I know right now this is talk not action, but the talking helps remove the ignorance. It shines a torchlight in a corner that I forget to look at. Ignorant ableism is absolutely a thing I do. Along with ignorant racism, climatism, sexism, and every other big conversation. I just don’t know what I don’t know, and that’s a whole lot.

And, I don’t know what to do, all the time. What the right things are, the best way to act, etc. But I do know that I’m built for this: for learning, growing, serving, assisting. We’re all built for it. My challenge is to stay aware, and to not be fearful of the discomfort as I learn and grow. Because finding ways to lift each other up and value everyone equally is soul-edifying, it is life-giving, and it is absolutely human.

Learn more about Haben, and buy her memoir, at www.habengirma.com

More about Compassion Revolution: www.compassionrevolution.care

Giving voice to the radio waves

Hemmingway once said "write drunk edit sober," which I love. Not that I often do exactly that, but the idea of freewriting is a strong one - that open-minded, hold-it-lightly, stream-of-consciousness that just plucks words out of the ether and tosses them to the page.

So, this post is a freewrite. I'd normally refine it, simplify it, whatever, but after reading it I thought it would be most authentic to just leave it as is.

Enjoy.
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What if everything is just flowing through us like radio waves all the time?
Energy and creation, messages from God, voices from the past.
And what if most of us, most of the time, were just oblivious to it?

The few who are sensitive to certain frequencies would “see” something that others don’t. They would “feel” something. An intuition, a 6th sense, a premonition, a prophecy.

In the pentecostal church I grew up in, we were encouraged to reach our senses out, stretch our sensitivity to “discern” spiritual movements in the world. And we did, and we felt stuff. We saw things, and heard things, we dreamt dreams and saw visions.

I have a friend who sees feathers. Not “I see dead people.. and feathers” kind of thing, but she just notices them. A feather in the wind, a feather on the ground, a feather in a doorway. She is very aware of feathers, and she assigns meaning to them. It's never just a happenstance, when a feather appears. The moment is elevated, and my friend feels seen and known by forces greater than herself. I see way more feathers now too.

I have another friend who feels the darkness someone else is holding. He says it's like a black wave, like ink, and when he gets that feeling be becomes more interested in the person, more attuned to their words, their fears and masks. And when the time is right, he calls it out. He asks them about their darkness, and they respond with surprise and relief, and they leave with a lot less ink in their waters.

I’ve been wondering whether this might actually be the masterplan for us humans: That we each see different things, interpreting the same event in an entirely unique and personal way, so that together we can be a full-spectrum community. I see X in that event, and you see Y, and instead of arguing that only one is correct, we consider that both frequencies are valid. An attitude like this would allow us to paint all the dimensions of something that would otherwise be limited to our single-perspective shape.

Like, if a giant cylindrical pyramid landed on its side in the desert, and there were two groups of people, one at the south end, and one at the west end. Those in the south would declare that what they see in the distance is absolutely a circle. Those in the West would say it’s definitely without a doubt a triangle. If neither group moves, then no amount of conversation between them would result in a change of opinion. They both have the absolute truth, and therefore the other options must be false.

It’s a dimension thing, and a perspective thing.

The solution of course is simple. Somebody leaves their fixed viewpoint and takes a journey of discovery. They do a lap of the cylindrical pyramid and realise that there are other dimensions in play. And when they return, they can share with the others the new, broader, wider truth:

That both sides were true, and neither had the whole truth.

But in our lives, we often can't move. We're stuck in our spots, and when we hear of new perspectives it's very hard for us to shift our understanding to believe it. Even when someone who has taken that journey of discovery explains it to us. But I think it's our unique privilege to try.

Perhaps what makes us human is our ability to intuit, to NOT take a “fact” at face value. To ask of everything, not “what is happening?” but “what do I make this mean?”

To incline our hearts towards the radio waves, and allow everything flowing through us to have a voice.

In story, we know that truth is NOT the facts. Nobody really cares about the facts. The audience is not here for the facts. That is just information. What the audience is most interested, in, and what we all actually need the most from each other, is an understanding of what we made the facts mean.

Meaning is not found in a list of facts, but in every unique and differing perspective of humanity. None of us alone can build a complete picture of our world.

We need each other.

On uniqueness and identity

I discovered this in a notebook from a few years ago, and after all the conversations Rach and I have had this week I think it must relevant somehow… If you’re not feeling very unique this week, then read on..

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Yesterday evening I found my ten-year-old, Jeremy, flopped on his bed, tears rolling down his face, eyebrows all furrowed and eyes kind of furious.

Two minutes before that, he was happily working through his Harry Potter Lego castle, generally joyful and chatty.

This huge crash in emotions was triggered by one little experience: Shasta, his younger brother, asked him for help with a new drawing app on his iPad. It was an app that Jeremy himself found just a few days earlier. He loves to draw, and wanted to create some new styles and comics, so researched the right tools, and eventually found this one.

Jeremy was so excited about this new tool, and had been studiously learning how to draw things. He had just started his first comic panel.

And then, disaster hit.

His brother got excited and inspired by what he was doing, and asked if he, too, could have the app. I saw no problem in it, and said yes, and all of a sudden Jeremy’s energy dropped a little.

Twenty minutes later, Shasta is asking for help, holding up a screen already filled with drawings and colour and comics that look as good, if not better, that Jeremy’s own work.

I can imagine what happened next in Jem’s mind, because we still do this as adults:

First, a sharp feeling of injustice, that someone just stole the “thing” that makes us, us. Then, jealousy - this other human is producing really good work. And they seem to be doing it with more ease than we ever did. And lastly, resignation - that compounding sense of “what’s the point, now?”

And, what is the point? Someone else can do what I’m trying to do, and it seems better, and they make it look easier. So, why bother anymore?

It’s pretty disappointing. All of a sudden, the desire to create dries up, the feeling of uniqueness and individuality crumbles to dust, and we are left with frustration, jealousy and often anger at that other “better” person.

So, I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, watching this little face leak angry tears down hot cheeks, and I ask “is this because of Shasta and that app?”

Jeremy’s gaze is locked on a spot on the wall, but fresh tears appear on his lashes. He nods, and says, “Shasta didn’t even care about drawing until I got the app. He just did it because I’m doing it!”

“Does it matter?” I reply. “That he has the same app as you? You guys produce very different work, so no one would compare and say one is better than the other?”

“But it was MY thing. And now he’s doing it too!”

And there it was: “It’s my thing.”

—

Comparison breaks us, and I hate it. I’m sure it wasn’t meant to, but over thousands of years of us humans relating to each other, we have managed to turn comparison into something dark. Now when we see a difference in another, instead of applauding the diversity, we make a judgement of better and worse.

And ownership diminishes us. It tells us that we are what we own. It makes us believe that our uniqueness comes from the tools or titles or toys we hold, instead of the vast galaxy of resource that exists in our physical, emotional and spiritual being.

Who you are is found in the totality of your being. Everywhere you’ve been, everything you love. Everything you believe. All that you allow to waterfall through your heart and onwards into others. As far as unique and beautiful humans go, you’re freaking untouchable.

And you know what the great irony is? I KNOW this about Jeremy, but he’s going to spend the next decade slowly believing it for himself. So every time he turns to me with defeat in his eyes, I’ll tell him again, “you are beautiful and unique, little one. Do your thing, stay open, relax, it’s ok. Keep the channel open."

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“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

- Martha Graham