Sustaining Justice: Maintaining Hope and Conviction for the Long Haul
Co–Keynote Address (alongside adrienne maree brown and Aurora Levins Morales for Kehilla Community Synagogue) (c) Naomi Ortiz, April 2022
I am joining you from concrete and asphalt but also from multicolored dirt that shines with flecks of mica. Here in the Sonoran Desert, ragweed is sprouting up, but the ocotillos, palo verdes and nopales, with their thorn covered skin and adaptations for an unpredictable environment, outlive the weeds.
A local elder and healer Patrisia Gonzales shares a dicho or saying in her writing, that has become really central in my thinking about self-care for people who work towards justice. This dicho is a question, ¿Y dónde está tu ombligo? Meaning, where is your belly button? Where are you centered or rooted?
This is an important question to reflect on. Especially because we often come to the work of social justice from a place of deep wounding, where we have witnessed or experienced the harm of injustice. One of the gifts of this wounding is motivation to create a change in the world we live in so that others do not have to experience this same harm.
What to do with this wounding? We may try to create a home for it in our political understandings or the values we aspire to, but does it ever really rest easy there?
For many years I ran a national youth disability justice project. As a disabled person it can be tough to find ways to learn about disability as a political and social identity. We’re not often born to disabled parents or have family that is politicized with disability justice.
Everyone in this project had different kinds of disabilities but one area where the disabled youth connected was around wounding, a shared sense of isolation and oppression. Many of the young people were segregated in their schooling, and lived in towns and cities that lacked accessibility for them to participate in festivals, nonprofit organizing, or birthday parties.
All of us are inundated with the message that to be disabled is a bad thing, something we should not want, and we are told that if we have problems participating in society then it’s our responsibility to figure it out. In this project, part of what we learned together is that this way of looking at disability actually fits into a framework called the medical model.
This was a powerful process of naming – to peel off this weight we carried that society systematically placed upon us and to give it a home in something called a framework. Learning this in disability community give us an opportunity to see oppression as systematic – as something that we are all taught to uphold – where values like efficiency create an expectation of exclusion of difference.
This was radical for me to learn, for other disabled people to learn. And, even better, there were frameworks about how disability community defined itself – that disability was a natural part of diversity, and that our differences gave us opportunities to learn amazing skills. Skills which we could share with the larger society – like how interdependence really works or navigating a lot of unpredictability and getting comfortable with a lack of resolution.
Where I’ve grown up on the US-Mexico border I am lucky to be surrounded by my Latinx cultural communities and Indigenous communities. I grew up knowing that many different realities existed at the same time, that there were really interesting places in between the binaries. But these cultural communities have to function within capitalism, and within colonialism, and fearing disability and excluding disabled people is normalized.
In my early 20s coming into my own political reality, I really wanted to root to activism as a place of safety. Many of the elders I interviewed as I was writing “Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice” had been doing social justice activism for most of their lives and almost exclusively talked about doing work within local and cultural community. Working towards collective liberation often means, working with others.
Yet, I found myself treating my body– heart –mind like a city bus. Each person who was part of these activist communities I was trying to root to had a seat on the bus. I was trying to satisfy my own needs through caring for and taking responsibility for others. However, over time I found that the people inside the bus were only happy when they got to where they wanted to go, when their expectations were met. Even though I was working hard and I felt good about meeting other’s needs, I eventually started mistaking their needs for my own because I was centering them in my core.
Entering the House of Collective Liberation
I wanted both – my political values and these social justice activist communities – to be what I could root to. By learning about the political and social frameworks which sustained my segregation, and oppression, I hoped that working with other people toward shared goals was going to give me a place to rest. To feel nourished and understood.
While understanding these frameworks or one could call them, identity politics, was a really important part of my development, it felt like sitting in a doorway but being puzzled why I didn’t feel at home.
If we think about collective liberation as a house, and the political frameworks we learn to understand our experience in the world, as a doorway to this house, then this is only part of a process. Something that we need to pass through in order to make our way to the hearth (or for those of us who don’t have fireplaces, to the kitchen) where fuel is used to support nourishment. Collective liberation is re-centering how we see ourselves in relationship to others.
How then do we work with others in a balanced way? It’s almost impossible to kick some people off the bus but keep others on. Things could only shift when I restructured what I was rooting to, what I was centering in my core. Eventually, instead of responding to community by centering them – (offering them every seat on the bus), I needed, instead, to center myself.
It’s as if I’m a palo verde tree. I am the trunk and the wandering limbs, and everyone else are the leaves. I center myself in the core. As the trunk and limbs, I am a conduit to help nourish community but I also have the capacity to shed them in order to preserve my life. There is always the option to shed the leaves.
The only home for our wounding is in the dirt beneath our feet. We live in an ecosystem. We live in a house with many doorways that people who are different from us come through. Every moment spent in this house is a commitment to an expectation of difference.
Collective liberation is not only learning about and advocating for what I have a right to but also what I am responsible for. This is intense work; it can be uncomfortable. Sometimes the commitment to this kind of growth can feel really overwhelming.
That’s why we need times of withdraw, solitude, rest. We need time to grow our roots and the space to listen to the wisdom sourced from ourselves, place, ancestors, and perhaps from a higher power. To also grow in in our capacity to be gentle to ourselves in relation to our mind, body, heart, and spirit.
Gentleness as a means to Community
We don’t mention gentleness a lot when we’re talking about our own growth. Living in the house of collective liberation we can have high expectations of ourselves and others to “get it.” Yet, that level of understanding is rarely born from information alone. It is often gained through relationship, through showing up for each other – imperfectly.
For me when I have been expending all of my energy and love towards what I want to change, I don’t have much patience left to be in deep conversation around someone else’s learning. To debrief their experiences of ableism when (for example,) an administrator will only talk to them about the access needs I’m advocating for and won’t even look me in the eye.
To be clear, I am not saying that it is my responsibility to educate every friend or ally through processing their experiences when we spend time together.
I think it’s perfectly appropriate to express boundaries around my energy and capacity. But when I’m coming from a place of gentleness, having practiced this gentleness towards myself first through self-care, I ideally can encourage this person who I want to be in relationship with to read (about the issues), or reach out to other folks for support, instead of my responding with frustration. Because if we can’t learn, then we will always see ourselves as outside of community, instead of an integral part of one.
It is busy in the house of collective liberation, as it should be. We can get so excited about goals and campaigns that it can be really difficult to discern not just times needed to withdraw and rest, but what balance looks like between an extension of action and an inward focus on self-nourishment.
Choices for Abundance
Lately, I have grown interested in attempting to grow some of my own food. In the desert where water usage is an important factor, I have found growing some foodstuffs in pots works pretty well. I did a bunch of research, went to the library, checked out books on how to grow jalapenos, cilantro, and tomatillos, cause you know I want to make my own salsa, and I checked out seeds from the seed library to plant in my pots.
I was so excited the first time I saw the little shoots come up. Actually, whom I kidding, I’m still so impressed and amazed when little shoots come up. But I was shocked when I read that I needed to thin the plants. It became this big moral crisis for me, how did I know which plant would survive if given space? How did I know I wasn’t plucking out the best tomatillo producer ever?
The first year I chose not to thin the plants, and after a growing season of watering and tending, I had a bunch of little 4-inch plants that didn’t produce anything. I was very disappointed that the book was right, that plants couldn’t thrive if they didn’t have enough space in the pot.
So, the next year I plucked out all but two of the jalapeno sprouts. And I had so many jalapenos, there was an abundance, and I was able to share jalapenos with friends and family.
Elder Wisdom for the Long Haul
Visiting elders in my community I am continually confronted with how I think about time and efficiency. I show up for an interview and an elder is puttering around on their back porch potting a plant or cooking some meal that requires chopping and they tell me like three stories for every question I ask. And none of the stories quite answer my question.
But I also notice that they assert themselves in terms of experience not hesitating to disagree or provide a larger perspective. And the folks who have a lot of wisdom to share, always also ask really great questions.
Perspective. Questions. These require a different kind of pace than we often allow ourselves. A kind of spaciousness and humility.
The plants where I live in the Sonoran Desert are also elders. Several of whom can live around 500 years. They do this through graciously and radically accepting nourishment when it comes in, honoring it with quick growth and lush leaves. When the long stretches of dry come, they shed the leaves, and sometimes even go dormant.
Sometimes there seems like there’s so much pressure to stay on top of all of the information that’s coming from all over the world. Information that is important, yes. However, what elders tell me over and over is that it’s usually only in our immediate environments – our homes, the neighborhoods we live in, our local communities, where we have an opportunity to take action – to respond to what is in front of us. They remind me, That is okay.
In the past, I wanted to apply action like a salve to my wounding. If I could just do enough then I would feel better, safer – and create change for other people to also feel better and safer.
That’s why the question, ¿Y dónde está tu ombligo? Where are you centered or rooted? Has been so essential to support my activism over the long haul.
I choose to root to place and honor my needs the best I can. To constantly ask myself, how can I be gentle with myself in this moment?
Thank you.
(Talk for Kehilla Community Synagogue, April 3, 2022.)
© Naomi Ortiz 2022
Here is a link to the full recording: https://youtu.be/q6hWKSz7BBw
