Thread by @MeghanWise_

My #Resilience Community of Practice group started up again today—a year of engagements & community building determined collectively.

Two things I flagged as wanting to work through was the framing & language of resilience & FEAR.

Warning—loquacious climate ramble.

Framing & Language

A collective priority was addressing how to support people in shifting the language and framing of “resilience” away from individual targeting to addressing the systemic level #resilience and origins of harm and violence.

As we know, “#resilience” framing is often weaponized & used to gaslight the toil of survival (specifically racialized & oppressed communities) amid systems designed / built to systematically undermine wellbeing, life & thriving.

Lauding individuals or an under resourced community as able to “survive” or be “resilient” amid endless, intentionally curated systemic violence deflects blame & shifts attention away from the SYSTEMS causing harm.

Let’s ensure SYSTEMS reliably & justly feed & foster resilience.

Fear

On Monday we had a moving & rich event around issues of migration & climate change.

Post event offered time for deeper chatting & discussion.

Something we waded into was the need to mindfully confront death & fear as part of fully navigating our #climategrief & trauma.

Further, we need to support people in how to process their fears about the need for #systemschange.

Asking people to change the ways they fundamentally see the world is TERRIFYING

Asking people to imagine no capitalism, when many assume it’s an innate way of the world is scary.

If we are asking people to let go of a system—to let it die so another system can take root and live—where does that leave people amid the world they have ideologically situated themselves in?

System change also means an ideological identity change.

That’s fear inducing work.

Additionally, death and fear (from my inside cultural perspective) are also intimately interwoven in western culture.

We are taught to fear death by way of not talking about it. That overt death discourse is taboo. Tacitly we learn grieving is private and mostly inward.

But as per this conversation we were having post event, we all acknowledge we’re bearing witness to watching the world die via #fossilfuels.

So what do we talk about & do as a world dies?

How can we talk about death without normalizing the unnatural death we are witness to?

How do we support each other in embracing hope as well as the reality of both fear and death—to allow us to meaningfully embrace the unknown of new, needed & different systems to navigate us beyond climate doom toward spaces of #messyhope and dignity preserving futures.

Something I’ll be digging into in my own thoughts and work this year.

To the folks in that little post event convo—you know who you are—THANK YOU.

It was a moment of clarity and richness. ♥️