Author: nancymthurston

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The Wisdom to Stay Still

Ireland doorway by Judy BorkMoving slowly and listening deeply are common practices for a Sabbath day. Lately, however, I seem to be in seven-days-a-week period of deep listening and moving at about twenty percent of my normal, double or triple-tasking speed.

The nagging voices in my head are quick to point out how ridiculous it is that I am doing so little when I have a book to market, blogs to write, friends—some in very difficult situations—to visit and a hurting world all around me.

I know that voice: the good, responsible voice that fits right in with business as usual.

I don’t want business as usual. I seek to live into the new.

I am in the middle of several amazing conversations and partnerships across huge chasms of race, class and gender. It is the hardest work I’ve ever done. And it is the most transformative and joyful work I’ve ever done. I look forward to the time when I can write about the details of this work.

For today, here is what I know: the only way I can continue to walk this path is to honor my guidance to slow down, listen, ponder, spend a few minutes each morning tending to our garden before heading out on a walk, and wait for the next steps to emerge.

Slowing down in the face of urgent needs is part of my wisdom, not my laziness.

Something is brewing on the back burner of my life. I can’t yet see it. I catch a whiff of its scent now and again. I know it will have something to do with building sustainable partnerships across the chasms that too often divide us. I want to explore how to live our huge dreams right in the middle of our too often chaotic and unjust world.

That clarity is coming. Soon? Next year? That is not for me to know.

For now, I move through my days slowly. With profound gratitude. Connection. And lots of time for solitude.

If I am to take my place of leadership in our world, I must honor my wisdom to stay still and wait until the way forward is clear.

Originally published on the Divine Feminine blog page. Photograph by Judy Bork.

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Strangers and Stories

photo-4 2I tentatively knocked on the driver’s window. The young man curled up behind the steering wheel didn’t move. The car’s motor was silent, but the radio blared. Military ID tags hung from the rearview mirror. A notebook page filled with writing was lying on the passenger seat.

I knocked again, harder this time. No response.

A few minutes before, I’d walked past the parked car on my morning walk and noticed a garden hose lying on a blackened cloth on the ground below the tailpipe and going to car’s front window. The young man inside looked asleep.

I walked a few feet further before what I’d just seen began to register. Heart racing, my thinking slowed.

Moments later another person passed on his morning walk. “Did you see that guy?” I asked with hesitation.

“Yes. Maybe he is homeless and just sleeping in his car,” he replied.

“But what about the hose?”

“That’s strange, but what can I do?” he answered before continuing on his walk.

I couldn’t walk away. Unable to rouse him, I hurried home to call the police.

Howard walked with me back to the car, arriving just as the ambulance pulled up beside the fire truck and police car. We saw emergency technicians roll an empty gurney from the truck, then put it away. There was more movement, but we couldn’t see clearly. The ambulance doors closed, but it didn’t go anywhere.

Was he in the ambulance? Was he dead?

I identified myself to the police as the one who had called. When they were finished with the empty car, one of the officers came over to talk to me.

The young man was alive and alert in the ambulance. He had told the officers that he’d been there since four that morning and had written an extensive suicide note. The policeman reassured me the young man was heading to the hospital where he would get the help he needed.

Help sounded good. Yet, I hoped that obtaining psychological help, and it’s cost, wouldn’t add to the burdens that had already made the young man feel like life was too much.

Last week was the tenth anniversary of the suicide of a friend’s daughter. And now another young adult who decided that life wasn’t worth living had touched my life.

I don’t know what brought this stranger to that brink. I do know that he was born into a world where too often the shadows of our global problems are as dark as midnight. It is easy to lose hope.

I know there are no easy answers or solutions to our global shadows for individuals or for the human family. I do believe that this is a moment in history where our most important spiritual task is to learn how to stand steady and awake with an open heart in the midst of the chaotic crumbling of so much around us. So little in most people’s experience prepares them with these skills.

I walked past the empty car on the way to church the following day. It was Pentecost. The One who was fully human and fully divine, the One who lived and died and then lived again had left a second time. It had looked as if all was lost. Again. Midnight indeed.

Two thousand years ago on a day we now call Pentecost, Jesus’ friends gathered together, hoping beyond hope that all was not lost. Suddenly a mighty wind blew, tongues of flame appeared and the Holy Spirit broke into their lives.

During the Sunday sermon, we were invited to share our experiences of being touched by the Holy Spirit. In this Episcopal congregation, people spoke up and shared story after story.

Young man. Share your stories—the ones of your grief and the ones of your dreams. Listen to others share theirs.

I have my own story about the morning I met you. Since I planned to walk to a class a few hours later, I had debated whether or not to go on my early morning walk. In the midst of my mental debate, I felt the Spirit nudge me to walk out the door, and I did.

I saw you and have been carrying you in my heart ever since.

I am eternally grateful that strangers are called to be present to one other, even in our darkest hour. It gives me hope.

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Economic Justice: Beyond Just Words

It is easy to talk about economic justice. Living it within a diverse world is another matter altogether.

The rules of the culture’s game are rigged where some have easy access to resources (jobs or foundation support), training (education at school or trainings) and publicity (ease of getting published or noticed by people of influence). This access is often along the lines of race, class and gender.

Individuals or organizations aren’t personally culpable because doors open easily for them but, for all of us concerned with social justice, we are responsible to open our eyes and begin to notice the way money and access flowing in our world. Once we’ve woken up, we need to find ways to align our values with our behavior.

Many speak words of justice. Fewer take steps to make that happen.

Be Present, Inc. is committed to having a diversity of people in their trainings. To shift from this being a value held in only words to one that is manifested within the organizational structure and programs has required an integration of fundraising by everyone in the organization—from children to elders, staff to volunteers—as well as people who attend the trainings.

This video is an excerpt from the second session of Be Present, Inc.’s 18-month West Coast National Training Institute on Race, Gender, Power and Class. Eugene Allen and I are co-chairs of the Institute’s fundraising committee. We will be working with participants to collectively fundraise to ensure access to the training by a diverse group of folks.

In this video clip, I explore why our unusual practice of holding fundraising as a perfect place of practice and is critical to our exploration of race, gender, power and class. Raising money moves from the sidelines to the center of the work of “building sustainable leadership for social justice.” *

Collectively we raise the funds “while simultaneously examining the dynamics of race, class, gender and power that influence their fundraising and giving practices … [in such a way that] success is measured not only by where money is given, but also the process by which it is given.” ** In this way, social transformation moves in the direction of justice for each of us individually as well as throughout the culture.

 

*  Be Present, Inc. Mission statement http://bepresent.org/history,

** http://bepresent.org/BOARD-&-STAFF

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Money and Transformation: Diversity

Fundraising. Money. Economics.

Strange topics for me. I hovered near the bottom of the sales list every year when my Girl Scout Troop sold cookies. I hated my economics class in college. Today, I struggle to keep putting myself out there to market my book, Big Topics at Midnight.

Nevertheless, most of my life has circled around economics, especially fundraising. I am passionate about spiritual transformation, global justice and partnership across our differences, and that journey has lead me directly into money.

Money that I invest, spend or give to organizations working in these areas close to my heart. And money that I invite other to give in support of those organizations.

Last week I signed up for yet another fundraising committee.

Did I mention that I don’t really like fundraising?

This past January, I began my third Be Present, Inc. national 18-month training institute. For my first training, which started in 2003, I was a participant soaking up everything I could learn. Though initially I had a difficult time understanding all that was going on in the room, I knew that something was happening that I’d never seen before. I wanted to learn how to know who I was outside of the distress of anything that stopped me from fully participating in relationships/partnerships with everyone from my husband, Howard, to my grown kids, to friends, and to my work in organizations dear to my heart. I wanted to know how to really listen with my full self. And I deeply desired to be in partnerships that sustained and grew even in the midst of conflict across our many historical divides.*

That training was one of the most important of my life, and was part of the nudge to dive into the writing of Big Topics at Midnight.

In my second training, Be Present at the Table: Effecting Sustainable Change in Philanthropy, and this third one, The National Training Institute on Race, Gender, Power and Class, I have been on the leadership team.

Leron and AndrewMany organizations talk about the importance of diversity in their programs, but Be Present makes sure this actually happens. Too often, money stops diversity in its tracks: In order to attend, you must either pay the fee or apply for one of a few scholarships.

At Be Present trainings, no one is turned away due to lack of funds. Registration fees are on a sliding scale and support is offered for individuals to creatively raise money to cover these costs.

Stopping there would allow a few more people to attend, but the trainings would remain minimally diverse.

However, in addition to personal fundraising, all of the participants fundraise. That means that everyone, including people like me who have enough funds to easily pay our own way, works together to make sure that all of the registration fees are covered at a level that covers the site/training and organizational leadership costs.

Normally, folks like me are exempt from this fundraising process, leaving the responsibility for ensuring a diverse Trainingtraining on the laps of people with limited economic resources.

Be Present understands that every one of us benefits with the full diversity of people in our trainings. Therefore, we work together to make sure that happens.

This is what is required for trainings and conferences to embody a new paradigm of justice and inclusivity.

No mattTraining 2er how often I try to turn away from working the money, my commitment to waking up to the big topics and experimenting with keeping my values in line with behavior keeps bringing me back to the money. And fundraising.

 

*Be Present Empowerment Model

 

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Who Knows the Way? Women Do.

Lillie Allen, Nancy, Margherita Vacchiano
Lillie Allen, Nancy, Margherita Vacchiano

The message flows from all corners of the world: This is the moment in history when women need to lead the way.

This clarion call isn’t for women-only leadership. Or the well-worn way of ruling from the top.

“Social justice activists and diverse communities are re-imagining and redefining what leadership means and which faces are at the forefront. Late in the 20th century, scholarship emerged describing new leadership as a collective, shared process that evolves with participants and prioritizes relationship-building.”*a

Relationships are at the heart of leadership. Many women have long understood the importance of living within a complex web of family and friends, colleagues and strangers, ancestors and generations yet unborn.

Be Present Inc.’s Black & Female Leadership Initiative,* highlights the “leadership of Black women in partnering with diverse people to create sustainable change that serves everyone in our communities,” where all voices are welcomed.

Twenty years before I first stepped into Be Present trainings, Lillie Allen offered the groundbreaking Black & Female: What is the Reality?® Workshop at the First National Conference on Black Women’s Health Issues. Starting with black women and girls, Be Present’s work now includes everyone.

Be Present says, “Collective leadership occurs when people come together and mobilize resources in ways that improve their communities. It is an intrinsically inclusive approach to leadership because it requires individuals to cross boundaries of all types –such as race, gender, class, age, religion and culture – as they commit to cooperative learning, joint action, shared responsibility and mutual accountability. Competencies include the capacity to develop oneself and to cross many boundaries: those between individuals and groups, those among organizations and those fostered by issues that divide. It also involves challenging assumptions; expanding perspectives from an emphasis on the “I” to accentuating both “I” and “We”; and bringing people together to address conflicts.” *b

Today’s leadership needs to bridge the big topics that have separated the world into “us” and “them.” Instead, it needs to be collective, grounded in the intersection of “I” and “We.”

Now is the moment for humans to honor all of our wisdom—feminine and masculine—and for leaders to serve in a way that benefits us all.

In my latest YouTube exploration (located on my website’s Gender page), I explore how writing Big Topics at Midnight helped me access parts of myself I understand as feminine wisdom—intuition, body knowing and playful creativity. The more I listened inwardly, the more profoundly I woke up to myself and to the world around me. Only then was I ready to step into the fullness of my own leadership within the collective, Nancy Ann Mathys Thurston style.
*Be Present, Inc., Black & Female Leadership Initiative, Overview and Design, January 2013-December 2017.
All quotes are from this Leadership Initiative. The other citations’ reference information are noted in this Initiative:

*a. A Framework for 21st Century Leadership, http://www.joe.org/joe/1995december/a1.php
A Review of Leadership Theory and Competency Frameworks, http://www2.fcsh.unl.pt/docentes/luisrodrigues/textos/Lideran%C3%A7a.pdf
The Holistic Leader: A Developmental Systemic Approach to Leadership, http://www.julieorlovconsulting.com/docs/holistic_leader_article.pdf

*b. The Collective Leadership Framework: A Workbook for Cultivating and Sustaining Community Change, a publication of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (2007), www.iel.org/pubs/collective_leadership_framework_workbook.pdf

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Grief on the Way to Transformation: My Cell Phone and Violence #2

TeardropWhy concern myself with human rights abuses in far away places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Why make connections between myself and the behavior of a long-ago king, the Belgium’s colonial policies or missionaries’ behavior when, although I personally am outraged by their behaviors, none of these people were my family members?

Why think too much about the fact that materials for my cell phone and wedding ring may have involved injustice and ill treatment of others half way around the globe? For me, my cell keeps me connected to people I care about and my wedding ring is a symbol of a life-long love.

I have no interest in collapsing in shame and despair. That is a dead-end street that feels lousy and helps no one.

Yet, I am no longer willing to keep global horrors at arms length, grateful that since I don’t approve I can wash my hands of any connection to things done by other humans, national and transnational corporations who produce the goods I buy, or “my people” (which includes people who share my Euro-American roots, white skin, Christianity or wealth).

Distancing myself from other’s behavior makes it too easy for me to forget the deep historical roots of today’s world events and the fact that I enjoy the benefits of things grown and produced under horrifying conditions.

Maintaining that distance requires that I go back to sleep. That isn’t an option for me anymore.

However I can’t, nor should I, shoulder the responsibility for all of these actions. Nevertheless, I can stop and grieve. Weep for violence and injustice—for both victims and perpetrators. Let my heart break open for those who suffered and continue to suffer far outside my neighborhood.

My personal grief and the world’s grief meet in my heart. That is where I experience the truth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”1

No defensiveness is needed. Only seeing. Grieving. Not getting stuck there, but also not bypassing my need to wail about tragic aspects of human behavior.

Fear is fanned on every street corner and news show. Despair for the enormity of the environmental destruction and human inequity feels like it could easily undermine our capacity to cope with daily life.

The only path I know of that moves toward transformation, runs right through the middle of grief. “To let ourselves feel anguish and disorientation as we open our awareness to global suffering is part of our spiritual ripening. … Out of darkness, the new is born.”2

Against all logic, this path leads me to joy and gratitude. Standing solidly in the center of both grief and joy, I find clarity about my place in the global world. I am prompted to continue to ask myself, “What’s next? What is my next step to further align my behavior with my values?” Not from a place of despair, shame or over-responsibility but from a solid knowing of the interconnectedness of us all.

Paradox again. I always return here. The more I can learn to hold grief and joy, the greater my capacity to live life fully in ways that serve us all.

 

1. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
2. Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown. Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 1998) Pg 45

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My Cell Phone and Violence: #1

My cell phone.

My Belgian roots.

My membership in a Christian church.

My wedding band.

The genocide and massive use of rape and sexual torture in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi are connected to these four things. The violence in that land is not a far off horror that has nothing to do with me, nor is it an innate character flaw within the Africans themselves.

The foundation for these atrocities has its roots in “my people” and me.

“In 1885 Belgian King Leopold ‘founded’ the land he called the Congo Free State (later Rwanda and Burundi) as his own private colony. Booker T. Washington wrote an article, “Cruelty in the Congo Country,” where he reported, ‘There was never anything in American slavery that could be compared to the barbarous conditions existing today [1904] in the Congo Free State.’1 In 1908 King Leopold turned the colony over to Belgium. During the years of Leopold’s rule, the population of the Congo declined from an estimated twenty-five million to less than nine million.”2

Belgium assigned the responsibility for education of the Congolese to the missionaries, staunch supporters of colonialism who were interested in educating men who wanted to go into the priesthood. The first Congolese citizen admitted to a university without heading to the priesthood happened in 1954—the year I was born.  “By the eve of Congolese independence in June 1960, the aspiring nation had only sixteen African university graduates out of a population of more than thirteen million.  There were no Congolese engineers or physicians.

“Perhaps most crucially, the lack of centralized education left the new nation in a stunted state of growth. Across the African continent, educated Africans had often played a key role in the independence movements, and these leaders had then stepped in to govern the new nations which emerged in the 1960s.”3 Due to Belgian colonial education practices, however, this critical foundation was never built.

Limits to education weren’t the only blows dealt the Congolese by the Belgian missionaries. “The most important legacy of colonialism in Rwanda and Burundi involved the Belgians’ obsession with racial, ethnic classification. The Belgians believed that the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda was racially superior to the Hutu ethnic group because the Tutsis had more ‘European’ features.”4 They turned ethnic differences, which had long been present, into gasoline-soaked kindling for a bonfire of war.

Though this region is among the poorest in the world, it is resource rich. “It contains 2/3rds of the world’s remaining rainforests, and vast mineral wealth including cobalt, coltan (used in cell phones and other high tech equipment, Congo is home to 80% of the world’s coltan reserves) copper, cadmium, petroleum, diamonds, gold, silver, zinc, manganese, tin, germanium, uranium, radium, bauxite, iron ore, and coal.” 5 Greed for these natural resources was also a major influence in the Belgian, and later global, treatment of this country.

Millions have been killed. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women, have been brutally raped and tortured. The land has also been raped through extraction of minerals such as coltran.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not taking personal responsibility for actions done generations ago by one of my homeland’s cultural ancestors. I am not refusing to own a cell phone or wear my wedding ring. However, I don’t want to pretend that I don’t see the connections between my life and these horrors.

For decades, my heart has ached for the women who have been brutally raped, their bodies and lives ripped apart. I am grateful that in 2011, many, including Eve Ensler, stepped in to open the “City of Joy” in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, to serve these women.

Only recently have my thoughts turned to the perpetrators of this violence. How does a human being’s behavior become so twisted that he is capable of torturing, raping, brutalizing and killing? What can be done for the men who have perpetrated this heinous violence? How can there be a turning of the tide within these countries with extreme violence still active in so many men?

What can be done about the foreign and transnational corporations, and the people who run them, who have allowed their lust for riches to lead to violence and economic devastation of people native to this resource-rich land?

I don’t know how to stop these horrors, but I won’t pretend that I don’t see the ways that my cell phone, ancestral homeland, faith tradition and wedding ring have connections to unimaginable horrors.

I woke up to the paradoxes in our world today and won’t go back to sleep. In very concrete ways, I am not disconnected from anyone or anyplace on earth. I pray that my life, and my small and large everyday choices, will support the Great Turning so needed in our world today.

1. “The Booker T. Washington Papers,” University of Illinois Press (1904): 8, 85, http://www.historycooperative.org/btw/Vol.8/html/85.html.

2. Thurston, Nancy, Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Gender, Power and Class (Portland: Rosegate Press, 2012), 325

3. http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/belgian-congo.html

4. http://geography.about.com/od/belgiummaps/a/Belgian-Colonialism.htm

5. http://www.healafrica.org/learn/history-of-the-congo/

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Small Topics at Midnight: Behind and Under

Tomato plant grows in compost bin
Tomato plant grows from compost bin

Compost worked deep within the field.

A young girl standing tall on top of a 1954 Chevy.

Little videos have their own stories to tell. Next year’s harvest depends on rich compost today. A book cover in 2012 requires a snapshot taken over fifty years earlier.

Past and future, light and dark—paradoxes meet in the middle.

Big Topics as Compost and Cover Stories: Behind the Scenes are out in the light of day on my website and You Tube Channel.

nancy-and-sky
Nancy and West Texas sky

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What do you do? Take 1

Nancy Ann Mathys Thurston
Nancy Ann Mathys Thurston

I used to hate that question. I’ve rarely had a simple answer. Physical Therapist worked for a decade. Mother. Retreat Leader. Board Member. None of those sounded normal and solid enough to be a “real” answer.

I could have said I was a novice spiritual revolutionary, but that never occurred to me in my younger years. Or activist-from-the-heart in training. Or spiritual seeker. Or visionary.

But I was milder then, trying hard to navigate being a nice, normal girl when I was so much more. Trying to understand the connections I saw all around me while navigating the explosive steam of compassion and justice that hissed around inside of me.

Since I turned 50, I’ve been trying to walk right into the middle of Marianne Williamson’s challenge,

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”*

Courage is not conquering fear. I am still afraid. But I walk forward anyway. Boldness today is needed to serve our world for today and tomorrow.

“What do I do?” you might ask.

I am a stretcher of the boundaries. A catalyst. An awakener. A fire starter. A revolutionary. Warrior from the heart. Pioneer. Leader. Minister. Priestess. A root healer. A social activist seeking to change consciousness. A connector.

And I am only one of many.

What do you do?

Remember, playing it small doesn’t serve any of us. Be bold, even when your knees shake or part of you cowers at your audacity.

Future generations are waiting to see how bold we are willing to be.

*Marianne Williamson, A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles, pages 190-191.