|
WEEK AFTER WEEK . . .
we hear from readers. You share how this newsletter is one of the few you open, how you save it in your inbox for a time when it can be savored, and how it helps you feel connected at times when it's increasingly hard to ground ourselves. On this end, the experience of writing it is no less grounding and impactful for us, and it has me wondering about how communication leads to connection, or not.
For the month of April, I followed a series of prompts for National Poetry Month, one each day, to write 30 poems in 30 days. (You can download the calendar from Dr. Taylor Byas and Séamus Isaac Fey here.) There were many days in that process where my sense of language - its meaning and purpose - broke down. At times, the result was an overwhelming sense of boredom with my own thoughts. But there was an upside: a looseness and liberation, an experience that many writing prompts and rituals I've encountered in the past have tried to engender, by 'tricking' the mind out of its influences of ego and dogma.
In the aftermath, I feel a stronger connection to the daily habit of listening to messages from the creative spirit - the curiosities, flights of fancy, tiny whispers of ideas, and threads to past writing work - that has strengthened my relationship to creativity. I also feel a hint of grief - a distinct sense of disharmony between the amount of communicating and expressing that I encounter each day, and the true connection that touches the soul and makes me feel as if all those words matter.
In other words, I feel acutely the gap between communication and connection, and I wonder: with so many ways to communicate, to express ourselves, through various forms of language, art, across time and even through intentional silence, is there a recipe to shape our communication so that it leads to connection?
A post from Toi Smith caught my eye this week, as she so often does. Smith was writing about parenting, and the myth that instinct and intuition are all that is needed to raise human beings. Yet, much as we wrote last week that we are all mothers, I found the language resonating across all human interactions. She writes, "Parenting in a society shaped by capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and trauma requires more than instincts and intuition...It demands self-awareness, emotional regulation, critical thinking, healing work, and support networks."
I think Smith's list (italics my own) is one worth examining, piece by piece, because of how often I ask myself, how is it that we are operating so irresponsibly with our communication - within community systems, within family systems, and as citizens of a common species? At the height of my frustration with communication that fails to connect - that is fraught with ignorance, anger, manipulation, unexamined urgency, or unprocessed trauma - I find myself returning to the idea of responsibility in the context of communicating. As Gary Zukav writes in The Seat of the Soul, "Responsibility is a sacred word. It means the ability to respond from love rather than automatically reacting from fear. This is creating authentic power."
Communication does have power. Surrounded as we are by systems that seek to diminish any power that isn't aligned with their agenda, or to wield the power of their own communication to silence and suppress others, taking responsibility for our communication is a radical act.
We send out dozens of emails each week to job posters, asking them to look more closely at the language of their job descriptions - about how they are communicating to the human beings they might one day work closely with, whose families they might be providing for, whose growth and development may become an intimate aspect of their own daily lives. There are times when individual emails seem meaningless, and our sense of direction becomes one of disorientation. Yet the overall takeaway, from years of doing this work, is that the more we build care and responsibility into our communication, in ways that become the fabric of our own systems and processes, the more sacred our connection to one another - to each of you reading - becomes.
If you are posting jobs this week, you may notice that we have updated the workflow of our Post a Job form, so that hourly and annual compensation rates that differ in some states are automatically applied. We will soon be adding automatic messaging around coded language in job descriptions, as well. We hope this will mean we can save some time communicating about those details, and spend it instead on ways to continue growing and developing our connections to you all.
Bridging the gap,
Dor + Tay
photo by Estefania Trujillo Preciado
|
