TRUST — THE CURRENCY OF CHILDHOOD
This is how John Holt, an educational reformer and social critic, described his book ‘How Children Learn’:
“All I am saying can be summed up in two words:
TRUST CHILDREN
Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” (Holt, 1983)
Trusting our children and trusting ourselves? Does this sound crazy when we consider what global threats we are facing and that humanity’s survival is in question? What if the craziness lies in putting our trust in (technological) solutions which are supposed to ‘save’ us, but leave out the basic building blocks of all our lives: trusting caring relationships?
What if the future lies in the relationship between the generations? We are living on a troubled planet in troubled times. Our public institutions of Government, Health and Education are moving towards reliance on technology more than on building trusting relationships. But all over the world people find each other and get together to weave new structures in regenerative projects, midwifing a new story for humanity and hospicing the old.
We live “between stories” as Charles Eisenstein says (Eisenstein, 2013). Joanna Macy (2012 and 2014) and Dieter Korten (2007) have talked about our time as “The Great Turning.” Much is written about the paradigm change from a mechanistic linear machine-like worldview to an interconnected living systems view of our world.
A transformation of the status quo cannot happen until we recognise that the story we have been living by has deeply misled us. It is a story of alienation from ourselves and each other and the living world around us. This blindness is the driver of the destructive path we are on. Our relationship with the world is a mirror of the relationship we have with ourselves, with our own bodies. The connection with our children reflects the connection with our bodies, and the future depends on no longer agreeing to be shaped by societal structures which violate our bodies’ intelligence. The future is not in the hand of the next generation. It is in the hands of the relationship between the generations. Parenting is where the future happens.
As Philip Shepherd says:
“What is being asked of us is not a little thing. It is not an add-on or an adjustment to our way of being; it is a different way of being; it is a revolution in consciousness. This journey into wholeness is a revolution that the entire planet is crying out for — and it can only begin with individuals like you making a personal choice.” (Shepherd 2019)
One of these personal choices was when I walked out of my obstetrician’s office, knowing I wouldn’t be back. I was in the second half of my pregnancy and I wanted to discuss the possibility of a home birth. Her prompt response was “Let’s not go there. I am here to look after you.” It felt patronising and wrong. No, it was not rebellion and I was not playing hero. I had come to explore my options. I knew that it was I who was the most important person in the room concerned with the future of my child. I was the whole world for my baby at that time. My body was his home. What I thought, felt and acted on mattered to my baby literally. I was the one looking after me and my baby with the support of my partner and friends.
Nothing was wrong with me. I felt in right relationship with my baby and I had learned to trust myself. To paraphrase the philosopher Goethe from a few hundred years ago: “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” And I think we also can say: “As soon as you trust yourself, you know how to birth and you know how to parent.”
This is however not the usual advice parents receive in our globalised capitalist economy. The products and services advertised and sold to us to overcome our ‘deficiencies’ by health and education industries with their unquestioned self-improvement ideology, are keeping our focus on ‘what is wrong?’ and ‘what could go wrong?’ with us and/or others and the world. In the experience of ‘never enough’ we become bottomless barrels, consuming products and services which will distance us from ourselves and each other further. This lack of trust in ourselves will not only clear the path to outcomes we would rather prevent but they also keep us from developing the political potential and awareness of our social environment, for which our time is calling.
The world is pregnant with a new story. I felt it when I was pregnant with my son. Pregnancy is not an illness. It is a celebration of life. The growing life inside my body was sacred and there was a mutuality between me and my baby. We grew each other. We informed each other of the right choices in our ‘mother tongue,’ in a language older than words. I trusted the new life and consciousness coming into the world through me. It was (r)evolutionary.
Towards the end of my pregnancy I had several dreams in which my baby was talking with me and reassuring me that all was well despite all the fear- mongering going on around me. I had found a wonderful down-to-earth midwife whom I trusted and I had an undisturbed and powerful birthing experience at home. I was grateful for the calming presence of my partner, a friend, and my midwife. Presence was all I needed. I did not need intervention. I was in a space in which I felt safe and cared for.
In all my decisions I was guided by my intuition and my courage to follow it. This was against my cultural conditioning and especially against my training as a psychologist. “Trust is the most revolutionary political term that exists today” . This statement from Dieter Duhm (co-founder of Tamera Healing Biotope)keeps ringing in my ears (Duhm, 2018).
When we talk of birthing a new story for humanity then it will be exactly this: to bring forth a new politics based on trust beyond the fear-based structures of societal organisation. We cannot arrive there without the re-integration of the life-giving feminine principle.
Birthing requires a degree of trust and surrender which has been undermined by thousands of years of misogyny. The feminine life-giving wisdom has not been part of public, political or scientific life. Considering that every human being arrives on this earth through a female body, it would have served us well if we had paid a little more attention to the experience of women as they experience motherhood. Women who are pregnant have the experience of being one and two at the same time; original systems thinkers who know that to care for self is to care for the other or to harm the other is to harm the self. To host the unfolding life of another human being inside the body is a unique feminine experience.
In our polarising world it is difficult to use the language of “feminine” and “masculine” and even harder to talk about “patriarchy”, but we can no longer afford to cut out the life-giving, earth-based feminine wisdom which can lead us, men and women, away from the evolutionary dead end of the patriarchal domination system.
If we want to restore wholeness on this planet we need to re-integrate the wisdom of the feminine ‘experience,’ not ‘ideas’ about it. As Philip Shepherd writes:
“Allegiance to ideas over experience is the essence and defining trait of patriarchy everywhere, and on all levels.” (Shepherd, 2019)
Our general ‘ideas’ about pregnancy are to a large degree based on a scientific medical model which does not value women’s ‘experience.’ How the pregnancy changes women’s physical, mental and emotional processes is intelligent. Life is intelligent. Working against it is not. I felt never more intelligent and powerful than when I was pregnant. Walking out of my obstetrician’s office was one of many instances of being in touch with my feminine intelligence and power. I now look back on a parenting journey of 18 years. I can say that trusting this feminine intelligence helped me to always bring my attention back to my most important task: valuing myself in my role and worth as a mother. Following the truth of the trusting connection despite the many challenges we as conscious parents encounter in an unconscious and fear-driven environment is evolutionary activism. Now we, as parents, have to find the courage and the language to co-create the cultural conditions to trust the emerging power of our interconnectedness.
As Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee writes:
“Now is the time for this wisdom of the feminine to be combined with masculine consciousness, so that a new understanding of the wholeness of life can be used to help us to heal our world. Our present scientific solutions come from the masculine tools of analysis, the very mind set of separation that has caused the problems. We cannot afford to isolate ourself from the whole any more, and the fact that our problems are global illustrate this. Global warming is not just a scientific image but a dramatic reality. Combining masculine and feminine wisdom we can come to understand the relationships between the parts and the whole, and if we listen we can hear life telling us how to redress this imbalance.” (Vaughan-Lee, 2009)
Because we have been living in this imbalance for generation after generation, misogyny has been normalised and with it the violation and destruction of life. As soon as we understand that misogyny is not the hatred of women but the hatred of life, we can and must work together as men and women, as mothers and fathers, in bringing an end to the war against ourselves and each other and heal the past and the future at the same time.
This is our ‘Living Work’ now: to reconnect with the feminine energy, says Kingsley Dennis:
“The current manifestation of feminine energy needs new pathways in order to enter and permeate our material world. Our physical structures are responding to this call by shifting from top-down structures to distributed and decentralised networks. Yet we also need to assist this recalibration by changing the ways we think. Altering the ways we do things will not gain permanence until human consciousness changes. In order to allow the new incoming consciousness to flow into the world, we need to allow it to flow through us. That is, to manifest the qualities, attitudes and our presence in the world that will most effectively receive, hold and transmit this consciousness.” (Dennis, 2013)
In the ‘The Phoenix Generation’ (2014) Dennis describes how a new generation is bringing in a new era of connection, compassion and consciousness while he sees our generation as the “bridging” generation. As this bridging generation we are living between stories and are required to become ‘bilingual.’
The language we have been speaking is the one of our globalised economic machine’s language in which everything, including us, is viewed as commodity and as separate parts which can be bought and sold, fixed or replaced; to eventually be displaced by a ‘better’ version of humans, finally merging with the machine.
The other language which we are re-learning right now is our ‘mother tongue,’ the language of living systems which are self-directed, self-renewing and self- transcending and interconnected. A language of the living earth, of inter-being, which has been spoken by indigenous cultures all over the world.
The ‘Sixteen Indigenous Guiding Principles for Co-Creating a Sustainable, Harmonious, Prosperous World’ published by the Four Worlds International Institute are one example of this kind of language -in the sense of language as a pattern: “Starting From Within, Working in a Circle, in a Sacred Manner, We Heal and Develop Ourselves, Our Relationships, and the World”.
In his recent essay ‘The Language of the Master,’ writer and “recovering environmentalist,” Paul Kingsnorth asks:
“If (this) language … has become a tool of control, what kind of language could be a tool to undo it? … Another way of framing that question: what languages does the Machine not speak?” (Kingsnorth, 2019)
The language the machine does not speak is love and trust. To learn and practise this language with each other and our children we need to move beyond the habitual and institutional barriers which isolate us from each other and keep us trapped in harmful habits of highly individualised lives.
We need to come together in self-organised small circles which break our isolation and allow us to meet in our real experience and not fight over outdated ideas of how life should be. Co-creating compassionate spaces for ourselves and each other as parents is evolutionary activism. Our children will need our calming presence as much as they need to see us stand up for them and all life. They will be required to be healers and warriors at the same time; activists who fall in love with the earth and all life and passionately defend the sacred.
How do we do it?
Keep seeing the ‘miracle’ in them and every day celebrate being alive together by honouring the whole wild spectrum of human experience.
Since the corona crisis has hit the world humanity has a new chance to fall out of the story of separation and wake up in awe of the miracle of life and our interconnectedness.
Charles Eisenstein gives a description of a miracle as an invitation for all of us to step into a larger world in which new things are possible:
“What is a miracle? It is not the intercession of a supernatural being into material affairs, not an event that violates the laws of the universe. A miracle is something that is impossible from one’s current understanding of reality and truth but that becomes possible from a new understanding.” (Eisenstein, 2009)
In her brilliant poem ‘Human Emergency,’ Liv Torc (2019) faces the pain of bringing up her daughter in this time of global upheaval and responds to the paradox of the simultaneous breakup and breakthrough with believing and seeing the ‘miracle’ in her child.
It ends with the words:
“Isn’t it better to say ‘Its incredibly scary.
It’s as bad as they say.
But you are alive and you are a miracle, and that has to mean something.
And it’s you who might be standing at the moment where everything ends.
But your generation has the power to save the whole world.
And I’m gonna help you because I’ve got your back.
And I am a miracle too.
And guess what? .
There is something out there more courageous and potent than science and I believe it will help us because
I’ve touched it
and felt it and
I’ve seen it.
In you.“
My son wrote a song when he was 13, turning 14, about our break-up/wake-up moment . My favourite line is
“…. ’Cause you’re not some lonely accident,
not a victim of your age
but a miracle the world is waiting for
to take the stage…”
We are the ‘miraculous’ inter-generation and we need to take the stage together now.
THIS IS IT !
******************************************************************
This is an edited version of an essay from the anthology ‘FUTURE KIND — essays on raising the generation our world needs . Practical guidance, personal reflections, and cultural critique.’ (2019) https://radiatepublishing.com/product/future-kind-anthology/
*) THE GREAT TEARNING explained: “We have chosen to alert to the insanity of the life-alienating toxic operation system we have inherited and which we now have to TEARN around into saner and safer inner and outer spaces. The time we’re in was described as “The Great Turning” initially by David Korten and Joanna Macy. We call it The Great TEARNING”, combining TEACHING and LEARNING into one word and pointing towards the need to re-define learning, to create spaces for nurturing creativity as if our life depended on it (because it does). We need to move beyond the habitual and institutional barriers which make us repeat harmful habits and interactional patterns.
In order to re-learn regenerative interactions with each other and the places we inhabit we need to make learning lifelike, not machinelike. https://www.facebook.com/pg/LivingLearningTogetherNow/about/?ref=page_internal
REFERENCES:
Barson, L 2015, This Is It, song <https://www.youtube.com/watch?=rFQQXxM6Q0>
Dennis, K 2013, ‘The Living Work: Reconnecting with the Feminine Energy,’ HuffPost, 23 January.
Dennis, K 2014, The Phoenix Generation, Watkins Publishing, London.
Duhm, D 2014, TRUST is the most REVOLUTIONARY political term that exists today! — Dieter Duhm / Interview <https://www.youtube.com/watchv=dTSDqHBpBAs>
Holt, J 1983, How Children Learn, 2nd edn, Delacorte Press, New York. (Reprinted by Perseus Press 1995)
Kingsnorth, P 2019, The Language of the Master,’ emergence magazine, <https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-language-of-the-master/>.
Korten, D 2007, ‘The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community’, davidkorten.org, <https://davidkorten.org/great-turning-book/>
Lane, P 2019, Sixteen Indigenous Guiding Principles for Co-Creating a Sustainable, Harmonious, Prosperous World, Four Worlds International Institute,<https://www.fwii.net/profiles/blogs/sixteen-guiding-principles-for>.
Macy, J 2012 & 2014, The Great Turning, <https://www.activehope.info/great-turning.html (2012)>; <http//www.joannamacyfilm.org/ (2014)>.
Shepherd, P 2019, Radical Wholeness, Omega, <https://philipshepherd.com/omega/>.
Torc, L 2019, ‘The Human Emergency,’ Liv Torc, Performance Poet, Teacher and Producer, <https://www.livtorc.co.uk/>.
Vaughan-Lee, L 2009, The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul, Golden Sufi Center, Point Reyes Station, California .
