“The wound is the land of healing”

I woke up this morning at 5 in my hotel room in Bristol, crying warm salty tears, thinking back to 13 hours earlier being in this dense, deep, difficult, liquid, liminal space of ‘Uncomfortable Conversations’ at the Blue Earth ; together with Kara de los Reyes Kainyu (Kai) Njeri Alexandra Pimor ???? and ??John Brown sharing those stories which do shake us up, transport us to discomfort on the brokenness of this world, the despair, shattered glass, destruction, chasms we encounter in our work to heal, restore, love, guide, seed, tend to our wounds, of the other, of this world, the visible and the invisible. Now this early morning I'm still being here in this void, this ecotone, this interregnum, this inbetween space, the not-yet-but-coming soon…

I started as the first sharing my provocation how our ‘own wounds are the land of healing’ (Tabita Rezaire) overcoming boxed, binary, polarised, paradoxical thinking towards care, love, repair and healing, where our words, language, being becomes and sweeps us forward in fluidity.

The Swiss gender-fluid and non-binary ‘Kim de l’Horizon’ wrote in their debut novel ‘Blutbuch’ about the inimitable act of liberation of those things we take on unquestioned: Sexes, bodies, traumas, class affiliations. Choosing between paternal and maternal, the protagonist identifies more with their family’s female history – a story of neglect, repression, stubbornness and resistance.

These “inherited wounds” of the past underpin the protagonist’s non-binary existence. But they are also plagued by a gnawing sense of self-doubt. They ask “What narratives are there for a body that defies conventional ideas of gender?”. Yet Kim prefaces the first chapter of his novel with the quote from Tabita Rezaire “The wound is the land of healing”, setting their focus less on radical self-exposure than on care, repair and healing, where language becomes as fluid as bodies, identities and nature: It sweeps you along in fluidity.

So let’s take a few minutes looking at our own wounds, inherited or not, of binary thinking, polarisation or paradox.

Those exquisitely big questions.

The existential ones.

The ones where we tend to bury our heads in the sand about it….

To not be so easily boxed and categorised is a quality that seems to be hard to accept for some people.

People have a hard time dealing with fluidity and things that don't fit in their boxes.

We live in societies ridden with the fear of the unclear, the non-normative, the fear of change, the inability to keep up with change, and the fear of not knowing that lures us into boxed and binary thinking.

Ironically, it's exactly the non-binary, the unclarity, the glitch, the instability, the change, the not-knowing, radically embracing strangeness, curiosity, liminality, complexity, flexibility, to be with yourself, to constantly evolve - that teaches you to hold, live, stay and not run from paradox, contradictions, mystery and your own wounds.

To seek the flow between polarity and depolarisation, the ability to integrate paradox.

Where when everything is open we seek boundaries.

Where when everything is bound we see things open.

Where we might see too many or not enough boundaries.

Where through dancing with polarity we become our integral self.

Not anymore determined by oppositional juxtapositions. But integrating…

The Leader AND the Follower

The Learner AND the Teacher

Male AND Female AND Queer

Humans AND Metaverse AND Ecoverse

Polycrisis AND Polyrealities

Leading AND Seeding AND Healing

And then we just…. sit there.

With the discomfort. Together.

Whining about how uncomfortable it is? Allowed.

Deranged laughter? Allowed.

Compassion? Agenda-free witnessing? Allowed AND encouraged!

And where we need more spaces to be uncomfortable and ask those questions that don’t have binary, ready-made, simple answers.

Spaces where we can witness each other as we tremble — together — before the maddening reality of this climate emergency.

The speed of change will increase and the behaviour of the natural world and our own response, will be increasingly erratic.

Where non-binary mutability and adaptation are the crucial survival skills for the instability ahead.

Where you have to be adaptable.

Where by being, thinking and leading non-binary, we prepare ourselves and our wounds to transform.

Where we learn to accept ourselves fully, becoming aware of our impermanent, fluid identity and advocating others to also do so.

I know we need those spaces. Where we will be healed by those spaces.

Yet where those who fail to flow, shift, change, adapt and evolve; will freeze, fail and fall away….

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Deep gratitude to Matt Hocking Charlotte Sewell ????? Verel Rodrigues for lightly hosting these 90 minutes, an experimental space for the lone dancers, instigators, unusual suspects and first followers, who won’t and can’t ignore anymore seeking and doing the change we’re still ignoring and continueing to discount. I hope this time was just the beginning of more Uncomfortable Conversations - online and in physical reality…

The Bio-Leadership Project #besummit23 #nonbinarythinking #nonlinearthinking #polarisations #hope #fluidity #fluidleadership