still moving

I haven’t shared writing lately, but my quiet is not for lack of thought or action, but rather too much. I hear such a loud cacophony and tangle of calls, voices of powerful leaders and new themes bubbling up from conversations that every time I try to sit down and distill one idea I don’t know where to begin.  I feel at once the weight of so much rupture, grief and pain with the emergent potential for healing; intense sense of urgency and anger at injustice with also brilliant people working together on intersecting solutions. I have fallen into a river, swirling and rushing with tactics, projects, events, collaborators, conversations, and rapid learning that all swirls together. I have given over to the current and let myself become a part of the flow.  

I was recently sitting in a Quaker meeting with a friend, the bright sunlight streaming through the small panes of clean glass onto the wooden floor. Meetings are mainly quiet spaces, where people sit together and wait to hear a “small still voice.”  For the first few minutes, parents keep their children in the room. Toddlers squirm or look around, smile or play peek- a- boo with the older folks sitting next to them, who sometimes treat the kids by flashing a wink or sliding them a peppermint discreetly, but mainly smile back gently and keep their eyes closed. The elders give the gift of their example that silence and space in our brains may be worth coming together for; that we don’t always have to fill the room with the sound of our own voices and every hour with action to prove our busyness. (I’ll shout out here to the similar – feeling practice of Shabbat, in which we are called to put away all work, including phones and screens, building what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls “a palace in time” in his masterpiece ‘The Sabbath’.)

In the Meeting, when the grandma stands up to shepherd the little ones out, first the floor creaks and the kids try to tiptoe softly. But then, from the quiet, an elder starts a song (impossible to say who exactly starts it—the song always just sort of wells up, a collectively finding the note together) to send the children on their way. From quiet the meeting sings, “Go now in peace/ go now in peace/ may the love of gd surround you/ everywhere, everywhere/ you may go.” This sudden tune surprises the children and they smile, pleased to be included on whatever mischief allowed the adults to break the silence.

How do we become still enough inside that we know when to sing out? How can we get grounded enough, even and especially in the midst of rupture, chaos, and fear to know when it’s our turn to sing? How do we calibrate with each other’s pitch and tempo to make a harmony? How do we remember a song of peace through all the din and racket? (An organization of ex- IDF soldiers, speaking their truths about war and life in the occupied territories aptly calls themselves “Breaking the Silence.”)

I am trying to learn from the non- human world, which has always known how to harmonize and collaborate, when to stay quiet and when to act with force. In her book “Saving Time”, Jenny O’Dell (sadly, for me, no relation) notes how whole forests scheme together, maintaining a shared calendar for collaborating on a what is known as a mast year, a “temporal phenomenon in which trees coordinate to drop their fruit all at once. (Describing masting in pecan trees, Robin Wall Kimmerer points to studies that suggest the trees may be using underground mycorrizal networks […] in order to enact such a “unity of purpose.)” She points out that this same thing happens with cicadas, who share a clock and a rhythm and a silent conversation, emerging from their hibernation underground with incredible timing every 17 or 18 years with their whole group, somehow marking the right period of time to emerge together to have the short above-ground party of a lifetime. Out of stillness, action— when conditions are right.

O’dell stretches the idea of collaboration further as she reminds us that “the civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama said, ‘Life is not yours alone but also ‘the input of everyone who touched your life and every experience that entered it. This is true both now and after you’re gone.” This observation -- of how who we are seeps beyond, and starts before, the borders of our ‘selves’ into a wider collective body. For me, this lands particularly potently when paired with her story of cicada calendars. When my older brother, Spencer, graduated from high school he was in a treatment program for teens struggling with drug addiction. Arriving at the graduation felt so unlikely, so hard-won. That day, an outdoor ceremony in late spring in the Blue Ridge foothills happened to be momentous for other reasons: the cicadas were out en masse, having emerged from the dirt and were ready to party. Spencer making it to this moment is inextricably intertwined with the impossibility of those cicadas, the miracle of it all. In Judaism we have a prayer for moments like these, the shehecheyanu. The prayer is about gratitude for having arrived at a particular moment of beauty, gratitude for having been brought right here, right now. It is a prayer of presence, outside of time.

Spencer died of an overdose not too long after the cicadas did. But time is not linear and I am not an individual, but rather a combination of “everyone who touched [my] life and every experience that entered it” ---the people, the cicadas, the longing and the togetherness, the noise and the quiet. Whenever I hear that unique cicada crackle sound or see their discarded exoskeletons still clinging to a tree, I am transported again to the miracle and possibility always here for us. What if we are not individuals, but collaborators on this project of life doing life, emerging from underground into the light when the conditions call for it. Perhaps we, too, know innately when to shift from stillness into song, we just have to remember how to listen.

My next weeks look full of opportunities to listen, to collaborate, to be in community. I serve as the director of an organization working to heal land and people through food and farming— and we are hosting a giant convergence, our yearly fabringen that has us eating, singing, learning, sharing. (This gathering always feels to me like the family photograph if you could zoom in and snap candid pictures in those mycelial networks among the tree roots that RWK mentions.) Immediately afterwards I leave to march in the Pilgrimage for Peace, a march from Philly to DC, led by Faith for Black Lives, in partnership with Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist and Jewish people of faith and action. I’ll be there with with Rabbis for Ceasefire, a group I am a part of as a rabbinical student working to separate Judaism from nationalism, centering pikuach nefesh, the holiness of all life, striving for peace. These gatherings are not siloed or separate— content spilling from one into the other and back. I’m delighted that a few farmer friends asked me if they could stay over late after the first conference to drive down with me to march the following day. At the conference, we’re showing Foragers, a film about wild harvesting in Israel-Palestine. The work gets richer as the selves we inhabit seeps beyond rigid boundaries toward one shared goal: work that is in support of life, in service to each other.

Rabbi Heschel, the brilliant keeper of Sabbath as a “palace in time,” marched in Selma with Civil Rights leaders. He carried a Torah as part of his action, and as his prayer. (If you drop a Torah on the ground, the whole community has to fast for 40 days. Torahs are heavy; his was no joke!) Heschel later wrote of the march: “It felt as if my legs were praying.” Stillness and action, strength and care. We are so often presented a false dichotomy of movement or contemplation: an activist in the street or a monk in the monastery. Yet it is often in quiet I can find the clarity that in turn leads me to deeper calm about taking action, and likewise in action I find a sense of relationship to truth that motivates me to continue on the journey of spiritual discernment. Sometimes, your legs can pray while marching. Sometimes the prayer is bigger even than one body and spills out right onto the road you’re walking on, into the people you’re walking with. Then all of you say together “v’ani tefilati” – and I am my prayer. And the “I” is something more like the “I” of the forests dropping their masts of acorns all at once.

This summer, I was dealing with overwhelm headed dangerously towards nihilism, or at the least burnout, brought on by supporting on the front lines of climate crisis. Luckily, my partner reminded me that I was not an individual but ‘all the people and events’ that have conspired to get me here now. And that I should call in some support and wisdom, because…. clearly I didn’t have it myself.

Suddenly I remembered this moment when I was working as a high school teacher in California. I recalled sitting with a group of students on the Pacific coast, talking with a movement elder about how to do climate work without burning out or getting too overwhelmed. He told us a story from when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest spill in history was happening, dumping millions of barrels of oil directly into the sea for days. He told us, “I went down and wept by the ocean every morning. I gave myself an hour. Then the ocean and I would talk, and then I would be ready to come back up the hill and do my work.” I realized I needed to find this man and have him by my side. I needed him to teach me how to grieve, how to be still, how to talk to the ocean. I was not just me, Grace Oedel, alone— I was him-and-me. In fact: I was him-and-the-Pacific-ocean-and-me. All of us collaborating. I tracked him down, he said he would coach me. I said I could pay him for his time, he said absolutely not.

At his instruction, I have cultivated a practice of going outside every day and trying to find just a few moments to be still. Not walk or tromp through the woods, letting it whizz by while I listen to a podcast, but go outside and sit on a stump and look around. This stillness quiets me just as a place away from my screen where my brain can unspool. But there is more—a taste of what Wendell Berry might call “the grace of the world.” It is that somehow, even when I am still, even when I am grieving and overwhelmed and impossibly small:  there is life moving, life doing its thing. Over time and many visits, an intelligent whole slowly becomes more (though still not entirely!) legible— a massive life energy that is popping up here as the oak, now as the cardinal, now as the dripping water slipping down to form a long icicle. There is a pulse of the world that goes on before I come out to do my sit spot and continues after I go back inside. I am only here at all because this larger corpus made “me”, and continues to feed me, exhale air that I can breath in, transforms soil and sun to something sustaining that fills my belly. (This is all very basic reciprocity stuff that in tact cultures recognize and steward, but wow do I need to re-learn through practice!) There are occasionally fleeting moments in which I can feel that I’m not outside of the ‘grace of the world’ but am somehow a part of the whole. This is a quiet, but not subdued feeling, somehow shrinking and expanding at once.

Dorothy Day, of radical hospitality and Catholic worker movement lineage, wrote, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” Francis Weller, author and teacher about grief writes “the psyche knows we are not capable of handling grief in isolation. Only through the compassion and loneliness and love inherent in grief can we forge a world out of the fire that will not replicate ancient hierarchies.” Community, togetherness allows us to act differently, to transform our individual grief into collective wisdom.

I am allowing myself this time to be a water drop in a rushing river. Mia Birdsong wrote that “We need a vision of community that is relevant and future-facing. A vision that brings us closer to one another, allows us to be vulnerable and imperfect, to grieve and stumble, to be held accountable and loved deeply. We need models of success and leadership that fundamentally value love, care, and generosity of resources and spirit.” The models of success I tend now are the cicadas, the oak trees, and the elders bursting forth in song for peace from their silence.

In “The Gift”, a work on creativity and an economy based on gift and reciprocity rather than scarcity and hoarding, Lewis Hyde wrote “we are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.” I am at once moving towards stillness, and letting stillness move me to act. I am trying to get quiet enough to hear the whole above the din of my own racket. And then to sing for peace.