Stories that Reconnect, a practice of Peace & Elise...
from EuPRA Conference "Towards Utopias of Peace"
“PEACE CULTURES thrive on and are nourished by visions of how things might be, in a world where sharing and caring are part of the accepted lifeways for everyone. The very ability to imagine something different and better than what currently exists is critical for the possibility of social change.” (Elise Boulding in Cultures of Peace 2000, 29)
This quote by Elise Boulding accompanied the launch of the EuPRA Conference "Towards Utopias of Peace (5-9 November 2024) in Pisa (Italy).
Thank you EuPRA board and EuPRA conference participants, for co-creating a space where it was possible to share our research but, more meaningfully, what inspires and gives purpose to it, to express feelings and emotions, to become more aware of some of our blind spots, and connect to a deeper level.
Here I share
- my presentation at the Conference: “Stories that Reconnect - StR, a practice of Peace”, enriched with images and the map of StR;
- the text that I wrote during a beautiful workshop dedicated to Elise Boulding.
Stories that Reconnect: a practice of peace PRESENTATION
I will present StR as a response to the context of the poly-crisis we are facing and as a practice of peace. I will sketch it through fragments from experiences born from my own need of… peace.
“Stories that Reconnect” process can be represented by a spiral-shaped map.
The spiral map is a journey where
We begin with connecting to the Earth, where we express gratitude, make space, acknowledge our gifts;
we then go to transition to Water, where we honor our pain for the world and our wounds, engaging in felt sensing and co-sensing;
with courage, we traverse Fire, symbolizing and co-creating, discovering medicine and seeing with new eyes.
Finally, we proceed to Air, going forth, welcoming and co-evolving.
StR is a map emerging from the overlapping of maps from Focusing, Work that Reconnect and Theory U, it is influenced by the work of Uri Noy Meir and Hector Aristizabal.
We live in a moment of polycrisis that shows us again and again how everything is interrelated. Otto Scharmer, co-founder of the Presencing Institute, frames today's disruptive times through three deeply intertwined systemic divides: the ecological, social, and spiritual divides; they are interconnected and mutually reinforcing.
StR starts from this framing of the current reality and invites us for a triple intertwined re-connection with others, with nature, with the Self.
StR, through this invitation for re-connection, is a practice of peace, based on deep listening. StR cultivates deep listening that opens the space for empathy, and empathy opens up the space for going out of the binary us/them, human-not humans, and eventually for acting with courage and creativity.
In this way, StR aligns with Johan Galtung’s vision of peace as “the capacity to transform conflicts with empathy, without violence, and creatively—a never-ending process”.
At its core, StR has, at the moment, the attitude of deep listening from a place of not-knowing and humility. This kind of attitude echoes Bayo Akomolafe’s philosophy about post-activism and “peace”, where there’s an emphasis on embracing complexity, including non-human perspectives, listening deeply, engaging in more nuanced, open-ended, and transformative ways with the messy and interconnected nature of the real world issues.
By preparing this presentation, I noticed that my work, my life, and the world I live in, are intertwined, and every evolutive step of this process emerges from within my own process of listening to me and my needs-dreams to connect, to honor the pain for the world, to “make” hope during escalating violence, to nurture empathy and self-empathy in the midst of increasing polarization.
Let’s tell stories, let’s tell stories, otherwise we are lost.
(paraphrasing Pina Baush’s quote “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost”)
2019
The world entered into the pandemic COVID-19, the lockdown in Italy was one of the most severe globally, because it started very early, lasted for months, it was nationwide and affected over 60 million people. I started to work entering the still unknown zoom space with doubts and suspicion. I madly needed to reconnect to the world. So I launched the invitation for “Stories that Reconnect” online, based on my previous work blending facilitation and social arts. It thrived during the pandemic time (at least three years!) with a transgenerational circle of women, a group of asylum seekers and Italians; groups of international students, practitioners and activists; we were humans, diverse for privileges, cultures, languages, paths of life, coming together to share our wounds and blessings, to meet in our brokenness and sources of joy.
As one of the women said: “through the co-created stories, I was telling my own story”. Just recently, one of the women participating wrote to me: “What a precious experience it was. I believe it saved our lives”. A sentence that synthesized the experience was: "where I can not see, please bring me there through your eyes!”. The core of reconnection with the other, the otherized other, is an art of accepting our blindness in codes that we do not know and a dance to explore possibilities of togetherness.
In the last three years, I felt more and more that my work is passing from storytelling to storylistening. There are still images, words, body sculptures and movements, but it is like they arrive in a wider and wider space of silence, groundness, awareness, and Presence.
9th March 2022
The war Russia-Ucraina started, I was pregnant, feeling a profound and dejected sadness almost in my uterus. I sent the invitation to women worldwide to join a shared space holding the intention of Peace, through simple, generative, creative acts: silent presence, movement, poetry; for 9 minutes for 9 days starting from 9th March 2022.
October, November 2023
The latest Israel-Hamas war was at the beginning, and I was back in Italy from Galilee. I was in an infinite sadness without energy. Allowing myself to listen to these uncomfortable emotions, it was possible to hear the need to nourish my hope and the need to contribute for a world beyond polarization. I holded a space online for “Deep Listening”.
At that time, I was in conversation, through email, with Chen Alon, one of the co-founders of Combatants for Peace CfP, and it emerged the opportunity to ran an interview with him and Sulaiman Khatib, another co-funder, and later on with the two co-directors of CfP Rana Salman and Eszter Korany. CfP challenge and treasure is to have “one leg in reality and one leg in the dream”, on one hand fighting against occupation and apartheid and on the other already working for reconciliation. I can surely say that also this special connection influenced my work and StR roots and potential branches. I cherish some of the key passages in the interviews that I can frame in Theory U passages: open mind, open heart, open will:
- Making room (in the Theory U language, opening mind, activating curiosity) for the narrative of the other and embracing different narratives, acknowledging the enormous role of the polarizing narratives in the two sides, in dehumanizing the “other” or the “enemy”;
- Holding a space where it is possible to empathize with the pain of the other, the “enemy” (in the Theory U language, opening heart, inviting compassion), through the practice of sharing personal stories as a crucial part for a re-humanizing process, even in the midst of bloodshed and injustice, passing from the “single monolithic narration” to the “plurality of complex stories”;
- Recalling the power of imagination to open the door to “unthinkable” actions and possibilities (in the Theory U language, opening will, acting with courage), for example convening Jews and Palestinians every year for mourning together during the Joint Memorial Ceremony and recently in the event “Every Life, a Universe”.
In that autumn, I was invited along with Hector Aristizabal and Uri Noy Meir to hold a space for Honoring the pain during the Gaian Gathering organized by the Work that Reconnects Network, starting from a collective creative video inspired by the poem “Bestiary”. This is the testimony of Elena Boukouvala, Drama and Movement therapist (MA), Psychologist and Performance Activist: “Having watched the video “Bestiary” with people around the world through the event and witnessing the responses through poetry, I was part of something bigger, connecting with deep grief and a glimmer of hope that somehow needed this bigger group to be felt. The grief was overwhelming and also with it the sense of being present together with others, uncensored, raw. When Ilaria acknowledged our pain without trying to change it or make it better, when she gave space to it without doing something about it, it was healing. I felt seen or more precisely without the need to hide.”
October 2024
As I saw the image published by the Italian newspaper “Il Manifesto” of the crater in Beirut, Lebanon, on 1st October, I wrote this text:
“We are sinking in the hole of violence, Yes, we are sinking in the hole of violence, A deep and dark hole, Endless as it seems. And still, And still, We can make room for the vast and overwhelming sadness in the valley of our hearts, Abused by bulldozers and drones, and bombs, and missiles, And set a time to mourn and cry. We can allow ourselves to feel the wild anger in our choked throats and crushed stomachs, And give voice to this, for so long, muted scream, throwing up frustration and blood, disgust and bile. We can feel our hearts so broken that they could almost be flattened as the quarters in Gaza and Beirut. We can feel our chest like under 80 tons of explosives, 80 tons on our Mother Earth. And still, And still, We can find our hope, shy and tired, marginalized and disappointed, That with a whisper, so humble and so strong, so faint and so assertive, Is urging us to Navigate through all these tears And step into the world that wants to be born anew.”
At this moment, I knew that I was not the only one to feel that way. I felt to hold a space for honoring the pain of the world and eventually making hope together.
I want to give credit to these two expressions. “Honoring the pain of the world” comes from Joanna Macy and the other “making Hope” comes from a quote of Maoz Inon, Israeli, in conversation with Aziz Abu Sarah, Palestinian, both are entrepreneurs and peace activists. “Hope is not something that you find or lose but something you must actively make… Like love, you can’t make it by yourself, you’re doing it with others…”.
And this is the testimony of Amie Slate, a participant in the sessions I offered: “From listening with attention together with others — even for just a few minutes — can come such tiny, potent shifts. … So small and yet so big. Perhaps we have to feel this immense process of BECOMING in such tiny sips so we don’t die altogether, so we can hold onto a thread, a shred of Self-ness — which is after all, the Point.”
I think that all the work about deep listening and storylistening that I am crafting, leads to a feeling of being more constantly in touch with oneself and others from a place that is very similar to the field that Rumi described like this “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there”.
That, after all, is the ground and the premise for … Peace
During the wonderful workshop "What about Elise?" (Elise Boulding of the quote!) facilitated by Draga Gajic, I wrote this text that I share as my prayer.
There is nothing.
I mean nothing around us
that anyone of us,
of today from this place,
can recognize.
It's silence around,
not the silence of fear
and dust settling
after bombs and distruction,
There is silence
with chirping of birds
and sounds from nature around.
We became wild again.
We became black.
We became human
beyond humanitarism.
We live in Peace
beyond peacebuilding.
We live constantly in
conflict, and mess,
and
we do not know violence.
I am 73 years old.
My daughters
that I was strongly afraid
might have been living
in more and more violent times,
they live in connection with the forests,
in compassion with the others,
and with meaning and purpose.
This is my prayer,
Amen.
Mitakuye Oyasin,
Ilaria