I am arriving in deep grief today. I could make a lament of it, I could tell you all the pains in me—my loneliness, my pain at the suffering of the world, the overwhelming feeling that we are walking toward destruction—but underneath it, is my core grief, which is that I did not wake up in a village this morning.
I did not wake up to the smiling faces of my people, those who know the stories of my birth and will sing to me when I lay dying.
I do not know these lands like the face of my grandmother, each noble ridge, each weathered valley, the cedar branches reaching down to caress my face.
I need to grieve. I need to grieve with friends. I feel it as an ache in my body. And all I can tell that ache is, Sorry, not today.
In all these ashes there is an ember. The ember tells us the shape of the fire that once was. In its dim glow is the seed of a new fire.
A simple change to something I just wrote.
I wake up to the smiling faces of my people…
And we have found the ember, the vision. More about that in a moment.
Half a year of updates
My last newsletter was in March, which feels like a different era entirely.
So much has happened since then.
I conducted a research trip to the Basque region of Spain and attended a workshop intensive at the Tamera eco-village in Portugal.
I graduated from Evergreen State College with a bachelor’s in community resiliency (read my final academic statement).
I skipped the campus graduation and instead walked with my incarcerated colleagues at Stafford Creek Correctional Center, in the first ever graduation ceremony of the Evergreen Prison Education Program. This will remain one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.
The capstone of my studies was a grief ritual that was held at Stafford Creek in August. It was not facilitated by me, but by one of the incarcerated Evergreen students.
The student approached me this summer to ask me about the grief seminar and ritual I had facilitated in the spring at Stafford Creek. He told me how skeptical he’d been, until the ritual began, and he’d felt the urge to participate.
Then he told me he wanted to host a grief ritual at a yearly celebration of an Asian Pacific Islander community group he is a leader of.
At the graduation ceremony, just a couple weeks before the API event, a fellow faculty member leaned in to me and said, I feel like a proud father.
At our last class of the summer session, the student approached me, beaming. He’d run the ritual just a few hours prior. He said it went well. Some guys got emotional (high praise, indeed, for a grief event inside a prison).
I felt an upwelling of love and pride for this man. It is a rare gift to be in the presence of someone growing. To know that I seeded this for him, and that he ran with the seed and planted it, fills me with a kind of soul-pleasure. I feel gladness. I feel well-used.
More of this, please.
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What am I doing, post graduation? I’m continuing on with the Prison Education Program as program associate, to work with our new and returning students.
And, I am calling in a team of like-hearted activists to found a non-profit in service of community practices for resiliency and belonging, The Alliance for Common Ground.
We are partnering with organizations and funders in the Salish Sea bioregion to propagate community events like grief rituals. Ultimately we plan to create a number of restorative campuses (villages).
Reach out if you’d like to get involved. We particularly need non-profity people and funders. And if you’re in the region, come to one of our events. We’re hosting our next grief gathering in Olympia on October 17.
We get there together
As I watch us falling into despair, stumbling toward AI, and in our lostness pulling the entire ecosystem down with us, there is one cry I wish I could shout to the heavens:
Vision is what we need.
We cannot go to a place we have not yet imagined. We must imagine a better world.
And we are impoverished when it comes to vision. I see vision almost nowhere. Not on Netflix, not in the books at the library, not from the mouths of our political leaders, our business titans.
Instead what I find is anti-vision. Films about war, violence, super villains. Elaborate dystopian universes (in media industry parlance, franchises). I hear leaders speaking the language of fear, tired old tales of division, blame, and denial. And for the rest of us, exhausted by all of it, a world-weary despair. We’ve lost already, in our hearts.
Where are the visionary voices? Where are visionary storytellers? Where are the visionary leaders?
Where are the visionaries?
When was the last time somebody stood before a national audience and shared about a dream they had?
When was the last time we sat down to a movie and stood up two hours later dazed, having visited an impossible mountaintop together?
In my last learning contract with Evergreen (college speak for an independent study), I committed to starting a visionary art project.
So I’m starting a new writing project, We Get There Together, which will be a sandbox for my visionary writing.
I have to say, the word ‘visionary’ tastes like soap in my mouth. Part of me points and laughs, sniffing out the egoist, the fraud.
We are right to be cautious. Vision, like so many beautiful things, has been polluted by modernity. Corporations, authoritarian politicians, and false gurus all claim vision. We should call it what it is: Marketing, fear-mongering, ego.
We need to reclaim vision as our birthright.
Since time immemorial our people connected to vision. They understood the world as alive, capable of dreaming.
Perhaps what we call vision is our capacity to tap into the dreams of the earth, or of spirit.
Perhaps this is our highest purpose, to make vision manifest in the world with our bodies, hearts, and minds.
So my dears, let’s get to work. An excerpt of my first piece:
What if we wake up from this nightmare and remember that we ARE nature.
What if we look up from our solitary paths and see each other and remember, oops, that we are social animals?
What if one day the last bullet exits a rifle barrel and the guns fall silent? Because we just tire of it.
What if one day we stop doing work that we hate and that does not serve earth? What if we did that all at once?
We Get There TogetherWhat if we get there together…
an hour ago · Evan Wagoner-Lynch
Writing
I may not have been posting newsletters, but I have been writing. I have been posting some of these pieces to my Patreon. My Patreon is my only source of income for my writing; You can also join it for free. I post more frequently on Patreon. I also use it as a walled garden for writing that for various reasons should not be readily searchable on the Internet (some of my views could endanger the work I do).
Commencement in a Storm: Graduation at Stafford Creek
There’s a bigness to our little cohort, our band of scholars. They stand chin up before a storm of steel and stone, before systems that grind soft bodies to dust. To walk with them, to truly know their stories, is to accompany a friend through the Inferno.
Dreams of Village / Reflections on Tamera
… upon our birth, we all expected 40 pairs of eyes to be staring back at us. In the modern world, of course, it is rarely so.
And so tears came to my eyes when I looked at a photo of a birth at Tamera. I saw a happy couple in an inflatable pool, a newborn in their arms. Around the new family, a ring of community members smiled down at them. The whole tableaux was painted in bright Portugal light, for the birth occurred outdoors, under a white tent.
Rose Petals in the River; Men Did That
I have carried two boughs of cedar from the altar back into the village. I bless the men who held me at the altar. The cedar becomes an extension of me, caressing their arms, their heads, their faces. They smile with pleasure, their eyes closed.
I turn to an older man and bless him. He smiles broadly and then begins laughing hysterically, ecstatically, wildly. I join him, because how can I not?
There’s a cosmic joke here, and we are privy to the punchline.
That men, the most feared creature on earth, scourge of all life, can do this as well.
Split Screen; On rupture and Repair
We grasp for cages and the violence of the state for that which we cannot handle ourselves. When we call 9-11 what we want is help, what we want is to be rescued.
But the truth is the systems have not kept us safe. The only true safety is us. And indeed, it is the systems that tear us apart, that are the breeding ground of unsafety.
It’s a terrible bind we’re in. Like eagles fighting, we are in a death spiral, our claws locked, hurtling toward earth.
