Communication Breakdown
:::Lessons From The Hui:::
Once, while leading a group of American college students through Aotearoa, our Maori hosts were rightfully offended by many of our actions. “Americans”, and privileged university students in particular, have a way of walking through the world with both arrogance and naivety. Conscious of it or not, we too often tend to believe that everyone loves what we love, wants what we want, eats what we eat, thinks what we think, loves how we love, listens to the same music we do, etc. As we wrongfully navigate with this erroneous assumption at our core, we are generally loud, oriented primarily by a desire to remain comfortable, get what we want and be entertained. More often than not we speak only English, have few genuine spiritual beliefs and fewer still in an animate, sacred world. To us, the world, albeit beautiful, is but a massive orb of resources merely existing for the benefit of human enjoyment and consumption. Some“thing” to take nice pictures of. To put it mildly, this view offended our hosts, whose view was based instead on kinship and reciprocity and oriented within a framework that includes far more than merely the human realm. Conflicts eventually grew to such an extent that one of our hosts refused to engage with us further until the village elders brought us all together for a collective mediation to work out our differences.
I won’t here unpack the cultural baggage of that which pissed off our hosts, which, to be fair, tends to piss off people of most in-tact cultures I have had the great opportunity to live and work with the world over the last couple of decades. I will save that for another letter. What I wish to offer to our dialogue here is a reflection over how the Maori people of that village communicated in a time of conflict. It was masterful and effective, and it required a great deal of patience, respect, raw emotion and collective effort.
Recently, my wife and I have traveled back to the States in an attempt to help birth an alternative school of sorts in Colorado that focuses on the vague, broad topic of ethnobotany. Unsurprisingly, the majority of those who orchestrate the school, myself included, reside within “white”, male-identifying bodies. We have all had the privilege of living many lives, in places where cultures are in-tact and places where culture seems to be non-existent, places where money flows freely and places where poverty reigns supreme, places where ecological diversity allows for great wealth to bubble up from the land and places where excessive extraction has resulted in forcing nearly all life to migrate elsewhere. To say we have been touched by these experiences is an understatement. We all now dedicate our lives to doing what we can to regenerate forgotten educations and ideally plant seeds of hope in students willing to think and live differently.
Yet beyond our grand visions of community being at the core of our idealistic dreams of setting into motion some Great Leap Forward is the harsh reality that seems to plague most of us in the modern world; we don’t actually know how to come together. I have written much of this, about the varying ways in which different peoples of the world define “community”. Yet no matter who and where one comes from the need to be able to communicate well remains a core necessity globally, and here in the west, as we continue to glorify the pursuits of the individual over all else (as seen in such wonderfully empowering movies as Barbie), we, even in idealistic communities like the ones I generally interact with, struggle disastrously in our efforts to genuinely communicate well.
So what does it mean to communicate well? Does it mean to speak “mindfully”? Does it mean to only speak when anger has passed? Does it mean to follow the protocols offered by the lords of Non Violent Communication? Or does it mean to genuinely make space for listening to others, as they are?
What touched me most about the experience had in what is now referred to as New Zealand, was that the elders of that community made certain that all were heard. In addition to the two people in particular who had grievances with one another, it was understood, being as it were that we were all co-creating our experiences together, that we were actively engaging in community dynamics that were both personal and professional, and as such, any grievances held seemingly individually by particular members of the community, the professional team, etc. ultimately involved everyone. Thus, the mediation was not orchestrated there in a comfortable, convenient setting set aside to accommodate some pre-scripted vision of peace. Rather, in a timely way, as the grievances began to surface, all members of the community were brought together to sit in a circle and speak. No judgments were made when some spoke wildly, with tears of bubbling rage. No harsh critique was offered to those who had little to share, but everyone was encouraged to share something.
The gathering started early and went on long into the night. Tea was served. And food. The elders spoke when it was necessary, but not too much. The space offered a place to be seen, heard, and held, collectively. And when the night finally ended, we felt as if we were a part of something bigger than ourselves and although some of us still hurt, we felt acknowledged, connected, and cared for, which seems to be the purpose of communication to begin with.
Living as we do now in a world of compartmentalized subjects, houses, schedules, etc. I often wonder if it is even possible to experience the depth of being seen and able to see others in return that I experienced in that village. Back here in the so-called “civilized” world, attempting to ironically build community by utilizing the same societal tools of empire that separated us from each other to begin with, the irony of it all runs thick. When conflict arises, we fear it, we hide from it, we call on certified experts to NVC us back into hivemind and shun those whose raw emotions result in group discomfort. We schedule convenient and timely one-on-one check in’s that are easier to deal with, all the while conveniently skirting around matters we know deep in our hearts cannot be solved without the messy, challenging work of all parties being involved directly. Here, control and efficiency reign supreme. Here, time is money and the time required for the slow weaving of strong, intergenerational community development takes far too much time for most. We all got shit to do!
Being a human is messy. Being a human in community with other humans is arguably the messiest mess of all messes. Yet none the less, conscious of it or not, we inter-are regardless of whether we live in direct relation with our neighbors and co-workers or if we live in a castle on the hill surrounded by a moat. And until we build the capacity for showing up in circle with each other regularly, not merely when the holidays come or when it’s convenient and fits snuggly into the schedule but so too as the inevitable conflicts arise, in real time, with a real desire to hear our fellow relatives, than on we go, delving further into the cult of “me”.
I’m not sure how, in this post-modern world of hyper-individuality, busy schedules and overstressed, technologically-obsessed circuitry I personally can reorganize my own life in such a way that would allow me to experience anything like I did in the Marae in Aotearoa again. Well, of course “I” can’t! That’s the whole point!! Everything that means anything requires regular comings together, collectively, where our grievances, hopes, visions of healings, etc. can cross-pollinate with those held by others. None of us can do anything alone, much less the big work of healing and building community again. We need each other. We all inter-are.
*Please, if any of this speaks to you, share your messy feelings with us all, and with your own hopeful communities as well. We need each other. We all inter-are.