Dear Indigenous Neighbours: a letter from a European-Descent (via South Africa) Canadian.

Dear Indigenous Neighbours,

I wanted to say, “Brothers and Sisters” where I said, “Neighbours,” but I was scared to be presumptive.

I am also scared not to presume that we share the same mother, the Earth and the same father, the Sun, the Sky.

I won’t presume to know how it is for you, how you see your relations. I won’t take up more of your time and attention with how it is for me, except to add that I would like to know how it is for you.

How it is, and how it’s been.

I am writing to tell you a bit about how it’s been for me, to grow up as a daughter also of capitalism, patriarchism, colonialism as also a daughter of Earth and Sun and Sky.

It crushed my heart, and I almost killed myself to try to get away from the pain of it all.

I was reflecting today (among ohter things) about how the people of my ancestry forbade your ancestors to have your traditional ceremonies. I can only begin to imagine how this went and what the consequences have been.

I also had scant ceremonies. What is a birthday party when you need Initiation? What is a driver’s licence or a wedding when you need Initiation?

Indeed, what is survival, when you need Initiation.

I feel glad that I noticed that, having survived, I needed Initiation.

I learned from some of the elders of your people for a while. It was beautiful and it worked in the ways it worked. For a while I longed to be adopted. I couldn’t ask for that. I figured out that there was more missing for me than I had first seen, and I set out to learn.

I learned from contrast: from what wasn’t working, what was broken, what caused pain, in order to come to notice what might and did work, what might and did heal, what might and did bring ecstasy.

It was a lonely time, because for a lot of it I was in contact with others who mostly had ways that didn’t work, didn’t heal, and brought as much pain as ecstasy.

Finally I found others who had been, like me, experimenting. They shared their findings with me and I have been sharing my findings with them and now with others, empowered by what their findings added for me.

I am writing this letter to invite you to look at our findings, and to bring your own, whether traditional or personal to you, as you have been working with that which has not been working, that which has been broken and that which has been painful.

I will speak for myself, and I think many of those with whom I relate and do this work would speak similarly: I want to continue to work and experiment side by side with whomever of your ancestry is interested.

We call the body of gathered work “Possibility Management.” The originator is Clinton Callahan, he started 45 years ago. He is not “in charge of it”, because this work has it’s point of origin in Radical Responsibility. The Initiations we each choose to undertake build our capacity and skill about Radical Responsibility. A massive multiplayer on and offline multiplayer game called StartOverxyz had been created, powered by Possibility Management.

I invite you to take a look.

I would love to get to hear from you about what you feel and think if you do.

With love, pain and all my best wishes,

Nicole