What Does It Say About Us That We Can Survive Oppression, but not Conflict?
Trans Migrations & Monday Meditations
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There have been many of you show up over the last 9 months. I still think writing to over 18k people seems like a large crowd. I’m reminded that Jesus worked in family systems and 1:1 and the things that were crowds were miracles and profound teachings that are called miracles. Some traditions arts h sacred meaning to miracles, namely that it made Jesus special. I’m not here to debate the particularities of miracles. I’m here to point out the obvious, again. So, I keep leaving the stage for the shared table. Today is no different.
The bright lights and big stages did nothing for me; it only accelerated my anxiety. Being a teacher means that I am under an authority that is governed by community. I am accountable to this with whom I am in relationship. This Substack is illustrative of that.
Relationships will Save us
My relationships are where I work out my salvation. It is a place where I practice. The Monastic Order that I am joining with a vowed path is another primary place where I practice another possible world. My intellectual partners are a place where I tend to my ideas and learn to distill my ideas. Relationships will save us. I’m learning this by reading about love and relationships.
The relationship I have here on Substack with my readers is something that I value. Several people reached out to me after I published this Substack essay around surviving oppression but not conflict. I want to respond to some of what I have been told, some of what people have disclosed, and show care in my writing.
I believe we need to put care into everything we do right now. So, in the spirit of social repair and healing, I want to try, again, to dig into whether we can survive conflict.
I have cited sources here that have been accused of harm against women. I have caught up on other details related to Francis Weller. I have spent my weekend praying and discerning how to navigate not only this particular harm that is floating in the ether, but the harm that is the water in which we swim.
Last Monday, I published the following article on Substack and one of my readers responded to me from Wales. I am so grateful for Sian and her reading of me. She didn’t quite follow everything I was saying and attempting to get out in written format, So, I am showing my work and revising last week’s essay into something a bit more coherent trying to explain how to I use varying theories and philosophies and methods.
One is I am trained in the Imperial West where Continental Philosophy is the queen of the sciences, but I also hold dear to me the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and the long tradition of liberation.
The work of liberation is my goal. That’s why I never join progressive liberal movements or show up for Democrat organizing. I am a part of a network of thinkers and activists who are liberationists. We are trained scholars, artists, writers, cooks, knitters, zine makers, lovers, family, and comrades.
My work is iterative and requires repetition to understand it and further metabolize ideas into praxis and learning to live buen vivir in everything.
I have been sitting with a lot of information this year. The acceleration of war both domestically and abroad has been hard to stomach, especially when I remember when I decided to become more non-violent.
I decided not to kill an ant.
I removed the ant and sent him on his way.
Nonviolence takes that kind of attention. Setting an intention to not harm and being attentive to the various ways harm circulates in our ecosystem is the work of becoming aware and awake.
Violence begets violence. How can we have generative conflict when we are unable to bear witness to our own woundings?
I’ve been doing that work of looking at my own trauma filled life and ancestral patterns that have caused my own woundings. As I’ve been doing this internal work that has required a fair amount of solitude and closing out the noise that sounds like urgency and privilege and power and abuse, I have become clearer on how compromised I am and how compromised we all are.
We don’t know how to tell the truth to each other, so we betray our loved ones and those closest to us.
It’s been strange to tap into it all of what is happening, while I’ve been on the road eating with strangers. And, just recently, a dear friend reached out to me to see if I had heard of the allegations against Francis Weller.
I had not, but soon was caught up with the story of harm, yet again.
We cannot outrun harm.
When will we reckon with power that is alive and accelerating today?
How do we reckon with abuses of power that become part of our cultural landscape in very small and large ways?
How do we nurture truth, beauty, and goodness in a garden of love as the governing principle?
I reflect on this question with you today, because this is the question I’ve been sitting with all week after reading through some of the online materials related to Francis Weller.
A Call for Anti-Foundationalism and Anti-Normativity?
How do we reckon with the foundation of this country? Logics of white settler colonialism is violent and fascist and focusses on hoarding power and wealth. One way this is done is by consuming women. I have watching this over and over and over again by not only systems like the church or government or hospitals or churches, but I have seen this in 1:1 relationships, and it’s one of the reasons why I identify, first, as a feminist before identifying as a Transguy.
We are socialized to consume.
Let me repeat that: We are each socialized to consume.
That is what racialized capitalism does.
So, the very harms that we are navigating are because of our supremacist economic system that teaches us all how to accumulate wealth through violence like consumption, even and especially of the more vulnerable bodies.
How do we reckon with current structures of power? That is a serious question, not a utopian vision.
We must recognize that the reign of power that exists currently is violent toward anyone who is not a cis white male. I can no longer support the world as it is; I must cultivate undercommons as gardens that grow truth, beauty, and goodness.
Who wants to plant a garden with me to grow the slow food of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
One day, I was reading on Substack for research and came across the Erotics of Liberation . I was struck by their proposition that we can survive oppression, but not conflict, and I’ve been sitting with this since I read it. I even mentioned it to my therapist who asked me to hold this as a question and not a solid / certain framework.
I appreciated this nudging me to hold it as a question instead of a declarative statement, but I am curious about whether this is true: we can survive oppression but not conflict.
How do we be in right relationship with ourselves and all living beings?
“Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking to be deepened.” Maledome
Another person who is charged with harm is the above author who speaks of conflict as the spirit of the relationship asking to be deepened. What do we do?
One of the things I am coming into deeper awareness of is how compromised we all are. Have you been following what is happening at Cornell? The heteropatraichal violence has been just as bad for a long time, and yet we still have cases where women are sexually violated and then disposed of.
I don’t know what to do with the fact that we are all compromised. In very large and small ways. I don’t know what to do with the fact that most all of my sources are compromised and I am building another possible world in the shell of its own. And, doing that work while also being deeply compromised.
I am compromised. I have done harm and have been harmed. How do we heal the woundedness and how do men live an ethical masculinity? More on that, another time, but stay tuned!
I tend to be a Stranger in the Village when I travel. I observe my context and learn the rules of engagement then engage. Connection seems to be the thing missing from every context I encounter.
We are out of practice with one another, and relationships will save us. Every day.
How do we connect in the face of conflict and oppression?
The whispering trees tell me something along with the symphony of birds that appear each morning. The tall pine trees of Little Rock remind me of East Texas, as do the valleys of upstate New York. Place matters so much.
The question I have been asking myself is how do we connect right now with so much collapse and devastation? Even I have caused harm and haven’t known what to do about that. I remember being called out on social media and not realizing that the very systems I had invested in were the very systems that I was using to cause harm. I am devastated to know that my conditioning by the church, the academy, and the movement is also gennocidal.
I am gutted to know how compromised I am, and still I choose to imagine another possible world.
Each one of us will awaken or not to the level of compromise that we each inhabit.
Nothing we don’t face cannot be changed, and things cannot be changed, unless they are faced, as Baldwin said. That is still true today! So, how do we face how compromised we are by logics of identity, logics of white settler colonialismls, logics of cisness, logics of heteropatriachy, and logics of violence? That is really the question here if we can survive ourselves and the conflicts we create.
Oppression is not going away.
It is the hegemonic norm that we are to turn away from.
A cultural metanoia is in order right now.
When will we be serious about the world of liberation?
It’s why I feel betrayed by the white liberal progressives in my life. They say they want change, but they aren’t willing to divest from their platforms, their positions, their power, their wealth, or their privacy.
I keep trying to leave public life and I keep wanting to show up to the 1:1 situation and build micro economies. So, that is what I am doing. I have left the bright lights of big stages and the grand invitations for the work of liberation and to get my hands dirty with the wounds of the world.
The long hard path toward liberation can only happen one day at a time, unless revolution comes. And, maybe revolution should come; it’s going to get worse before it gets any better, I tell people.
Place matters, and we need to tend to our places that we call home. Are you in a Blue State or a Red State? Nowadays, things are looking ever more black and white and binary and sad and devastating than a proper Red, White, and Blue.
We do to the earth what we say we would never do to our mothers, yet we violate both the earth and our mothers every time we fail to acknowledge our ancestral patterns of how we treat a place.
The places that I call home are many. One place that I call home is Alfred, NY, a place riddled with histories of white settler colonialism that founded an academy in the village that has become the very mirror of the oppressions we are all surviving.
Alfred University is just as fascist as every other academic institution that has hired me, including Duke. There are full-time employees who are on medicaid because people in Alfred cannot afford medical care, and even I cannot afford medical care, so I, too, remain on Medicaid.
The economic disparities here and the precarity here boggles my mind.
Again, conflict and extractive labor practices and empire.
Violence begets violence.
This place I call home are complete with various conflicts. I even hear there is chrome in the soil in Alfred, but no one will test it to learn how compromised the soil is.
When will we endeavor to be in right relationship with pacha mama?
Conflict will outpace us, if we do not earn how to be in right relationship with each other.
It’s one of the things I ask people when I talk with them. I don’t pussyfoot around the need for a cultural metanoia. I start every relationship with an orientation to(ward) right relationship. Now is the time to begin to practice with one another. So, as I am out in the world building networks of trust and practicing with strangers, I am doing that with readers, with friends, with colleagues, comrades, and my vast network of people who are waking up.
One of the things I have learned is that relationships take a lot of practice, every day maintenance. And, one of the things we need right now are rituals.
I believe in soul activism and soul hygiene. The soul activism I look for in life is meaning making on the every day. A slower sloth like pace where everything is done with intention. Breaking ancestral patterns that cause harm and composting the rage at the fire. In fact, this last week, I was at the fire every night from 2pm til 1am. I tended fire this week and kept adding logs to burn the rage and the unending lament for the abuses of power that have been perpetuated and the ways that people violate others without even knowing their actions are violent. Thinking that people have consented when the power structures have clearly dictated otherwise.
No, we don’t need the dogma or the nostalgia of the church; we need rituals to bring us back together in right relationship. We need grief rituals; we need celebrations; we need ceremony. Conflict today is asking us to go deeper and to listen to the wisdom of our bodies. Our bodies are craving for a re-mem-bering with land, people, food, animals, and all living things. We are being invited to become one together, whole, again, in the face of devastating fractures.
Eating with strangers has taught me many things. Norms and dysfunction exist for everyone!
When I am invited to come eat with folks, I am at the mercy of people and their dysfunction, and I remember that God’s mercy extends to us all, so I practice and work to be in right relationship. We need small doses of dopamine, so that we survive the collapsing devastation of the Imperial West. We are in a kairos moment in so many ways.
What we need is a deep political practice of listening to and with one another with deep care and the utopic vision of another possible world. My friend, Clifton L. Granby has just written on the racial politics of listening that might help us right now!
Granby’s The Racial Politics of Listening aligns with work that seeks to make institutions, conversations, research, or creative practice more just and accountable: it argues that listening is never neutral, because power determines whose knowledge is trusted, dismissed, or made invisible. Its central invitation is to move beyond surface-level inclusion toward “deference”: deliberately redistributing attention, credibility, and authority to people and traditions historically marginalized. If your work involves equity, community engagement, education, culture, storytelling, or organizational change, the book offers a strong framework for treating lived experience not as supplemental input but as essential expertise. I urge you to go get this book, which was just released this past week!
If I’ve learned anything these past 9 months of eating with strangers for auto-ethnographic research on belonging and freedom, it is that we need a social practice that can shape us into a better body. A better flock. A more generative herd of people working interdependently to achieve another possible world. We must come to understand the conflict that exists. There are many.
As we endeavor to get clear on the conflicts that plague us, let us learn to work collaboratively. The antidote to fascism is connection, I iterated all week this week to someone who trusted me with their story.
We need each other. More now than ever in many of our lifetimes. I have borne witness to the devastation with my own eyes in different places of this country and abroad. I have seen the devastation in Belfast and the ways it will be generations before social healing has materialized and the trauma has been composted. We are not okay.
A book I recommend right now in addition to Clifton’s book is https://www.plutobooks.com/product/from-the-clinic-to-the-streets/.
May we develop a better practice of listening to ourselves, so that we can better hear each other into speech and learn to practice with one another another possible world. This requires pace and place to be right, too. When we recognize that we are each compromised, we will be better able to endeavor to be in right relationship with all manner of things.
This essay might be revised, again, next week, as I hear from readers. I am trying to get clearer on how we might survive oppression and also conflict by calling for accountability, social repair, and a cultural metanoia, a cultural turning away from harm and toward the utopic vision of community.
I am trying to say more than If you like Michael Jackson and you like his music, even though he has been named a predator, you can still enjoy his music. Do we banish all the men? Is that the solution? NO! How can banishment be the solution?
I also don’t think matriarchy is the solution to patriarchy, though there is evidence of matriarchal societies that flourish, and I’ve never looked away from a strong woman! Strong woman remind me of my mother and so I pay attention.
I’m going to leave this here and listen to what people share about this piece, and maybe The Erotics of Liberation will help us continue to ask important questions questions!
Paz, —RCE+
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm going to write back to you in your comments section because you have a community and I am bold enough to want to be part of it - yippee here I plunge!
I venture to say 'I hear you louder this week'
1. Your writing is to be mused upon and considered as you say and you are of course right. Its for meditation and musing.
It dares to ask many questions that have possibly as many answers as people who hear you - yet the questions are universal - we can agree on how conflict is hard to deal with. We can agree that we often prefer a 'flight' response rather than a 'fight' one.
Perhaps conflict itself is a very broad term, sometimes felt by some internally when none is evident to others (lets not start on surviving internal conflicts as it would be a long, long topic I feel).
Yet surviving conflict is perhaps at best rebirth - new confidence, new points of view, new self respect, new perspective. You are open to building a world where differences and different points of view, are prized as jewels to be discussed together, marvelling at the light twinkling from that idea versus another one . There is an energy within difference(conflict?) that is surely essential.
2. Being brought up in a world structure that is causing harm is so so hard to deal with as you allude to. I don't have your academic breadth of reading - I'm a gut feeling and a wing and a prayer kinda gal but this I do know. I do not want to become paralised by guilt from a system I am part of due to no fault of my own. I am here - I did not ask to be here - now I am here I can use this friction to power my learning towards fairer ways of being with others. Action is taken. This is why I love your writing so much. You are boldly going where so many rarely bother to go i.e. out of the ivory tower and into the kitchens of others to share.
3. Harm - yes I see that we are all guilty of committing it. I did kill that ant the other day and while I don't use pesticides in my patch of earth I do 'feed the fish' with slugs! We can not be perfect, we must all review our own roles in doing harm to levels we can live with but you are right to worry that within the existing and prevailing system there are those who are willfully oblivious to harms they commit.
Our societal structures are violent and mysoginistic but less so I believe and we are pushing that dial. I sound like I am making statements across you - actually I am reacting - but I am also conscious of wishing you peace. You are brave to venture to these places and I feel like ,in my need to reassure you and soothe you, it is all in an attempt to soothe and reassure myself. Of this tendency I am at least aware and so I will go on listening to you in developing a rounder understanding of what can be and how we are all working with these positions.
I will end with the salutation 'High regards and misdemeanors' because I like the sound of it.
S