When it's Time to Listen and Take Action

Recently, I’ve been asked to listen. First in Virginia, during our quarantine, I was listening to the Earth and to the still small voice within me. Now more than ever, I’m actively listening to the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who have less privilege and power.

I’m trying to better understand those who have been experiencing systematic oppression for as long as they (and their grandparents, and their grandparent's parents) can remember. I am facing all the ways that I am complicit and am learning how to engage wholeheartedly in anti-racist activism.

This process won't be pretty or easy. We have to face and feel grief, shame, guilt, anger, confusion. It's uncomfortable and disorienting. And it's nothing in comparison to what people of color have had to endure over the past centuries. And yet, I'm grateful this is unfolding now and is being brought to light all across the globe.

This is a significant undertaking. I see it as a long-term action oriented process, like the ongoing tending to a garden. There are seeds to be planted and weeds to be pulled. Once I’ve donated to an organization, or re-posted a post, or watched a video, I can’t let myself off the hook. I want to avoid a false sense of taking an action and then “being done”.

As a white upper-middle class Jewish cis-gendered heterosexual man I wield a lot of privilege and power. I therefore have responsibilities to take action. Sometimes that will mean stepping back to make more room for others, other times that will mean standing up and stepping forward to leverage my privilege. I’m new at this and still learning.
 

I see my work as cultivating more wholeness and health. Healthy and whole people have the freedom to respond to life in authentic and creative ways. A society like ours, that not only denies people their agency and freedom, but actively persecutes and oppresses based on skin color is broken and unhealthy.

Working with individuals in a vacuum, without acknowledging and working with the systems within which they live, is a betrayal. It denies reality and fails everyone.

But systems are complex and powerful. Changing systems can seem out of reach. It can feel impossible. But it’s not. It doesn’t (usually) happen overnight, and it can’t happen without the collective effort of many individuals. And yet, changes do happen when we work towards it.

Evidently, our society is not living up to its stated values and certainly not up to its potential. Things need to change. The time for sitting around and waiting for someone else to make those changes happen is over. Conversations are a good place to start. Curiosity is a good orienting attitude. But we can’t stop there.

When the idea of a Heartseed came into being for us, we related to it on the individual level. What is your heartseed and how can we help it sprout and grow? What’s that thing within your heart that needs to come to life, that is asking to be tended to and cared for and nurtured. 

Our collective heart has seeds within it too. New possibilities asking to sprout and grow into new realities. Realities that are more respectful, equitable, and whole. It’s not fully clear what role Heartseed Health will play in tending to this collective seed, but it is clear that we will play a role. 

We want you to know that we’re here and with you. We’re all coming from different backgrounds and experiences, and we’re all part of the (sometimes messy) cultural healing process that’s underway in our country. We don’t always have answers, but we know how to sit in the questions, pain, and discomfort with you and support the emergence of answers and healing.

In the meantime, if you’re on the same journey as I am, here is a useful compilation of resources to help.

With humble and reverent love,

Noah