Reflecting on walls

An activist retreat gave me space to think...

Quick reminder: If you’re looking for good tools to stand up against injustice over the next four years, and to actually create justice, I would love for you to join me in a book group discussion of the book The Persuaders on December 1 at 7pm eastern / 6pm central / 5pm mountain / 4pm pacific. PLEASE USE THIS LINK TO REGISTER. Please note that this book is available in many libraries; I both read the digital version and listened to the audiobook through the Libby app. I’m hoping this gives you enough time to at least read a portion of the book. (My favorite section was the part on Deep Canvassing.) Would love to be in conversation with you about the book and our next steps together.

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One more pre-script: I was given a real gift in the chance to talk with my spiritual activism sister Liza Rankow recently, and the conversation was featured in her Substack

Healing Conversations from the Front Lines of Activism

. Here’s a link to the interview, plus all of her conversations might be the balm you’re seeking right now.

And now on to a reflection from my retreat last weekend.

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This past weekend I was given the gift of a weekend in the woods with amazing activists and organizers for an election debrief, thanks to the organization Windcall Institute, which seeks to help longtime changemakers find a little respite, renewal, and space to reflect so that they can show up as their best selves in the work.

I had amazing conversations with phenomenal people, and I also got to walk acres and acres of farmland in upstate New York, listening for what the land might be telling me. And what I kept seeing were walls.

The owners of the retreat center had explained to us that this had originally been Lenni Lenape territory, although it was so cold in the winter that it wasn’t permanently inhabited so much as a summer hangout spot of sorts, and that it had also been a place that diverse Indigenous people met up when fleeing the boarding schools and such.

And so as I wandered the property, I kept looking at the walls and wondering, were they built by Native people? Were they built by the farmers who took over the land after the Haudenosaunee nation had been forced off of it? Had they been forcibly removed from this land, or had it been conveniently clear by the time it was turned into a farm? Who were the walls for? What were they for?

My favorite first line of any poem is “Something there is that doesn’t like a wall,” from the poem “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost. I like the way the words feel in my mouth, the counterintuitive structure. I love that the first line is the soul-deep line, even though the line people remember is “good fences make good neighbors,” which is actually the opposite of what the poem’s about.

And so that poem surfaced once again for me as I walked. I thought about the spirit that is driving the fight over our southern border. I thought about what it means that border guards are technically allowed to cover up to 100 miles inland from any border, including the borders of the ocean, including almost the entire land mass of the west and east coasts. I thought about what is ahead of us, that the incoming administration has confirmed that they plan to deploy emergency troops. I thought about the people who have been paying attention to the conditions people have faced on the border in the past four years as well as the four years before it, and some for decades before that.

In the poem “Mending Wall,” which is definitely worth a read or re-read, Robert Frost and his neighbor are fixing the stone wall that has probably come undone because of a hard winter. And as they go, Robert asks his neighbor why they’re even doing this. His neighbor says “good fences make good neighbors,” and when Frost says that’s when we’re dealing with livestock, not apple trees and pine trees—and what’s he really afraid of, fairies?—his neighbor just doubles down. “Good fences make good neighbors,” he insists, refusing to say the subtext out loud.

I found myself wondering about these walls repeatedly during my walk, and about what it means to be trying to repurpose an inheritance borne of violence and conquest so it instead creates healing and justice. I wondered if it was enough.

What’s interesting is that the reason this question was in my head was that the owners of the retreat center had begun trying to tell more of the story—not just the story of the farm-turned-retreat center, but whose land it had been before. And that all of us are trying to repurpose an inheritance borne of violence and conquest so that it instead creates healing and justice. And telling the whole story is critical. And asking the hard questions of our neighbors (“what is it you’re afraid of?”), even when they don’t have the words yet for what’s happening in their hearts, is part of the work, too.

Simply the name “Mending wall” has a different valence right now, especially when Robert Frost is mending a wall with his neighbor that he realizes serves no purpose. This is a moment where I’m asking myself, what are the things I’ve been mending that no longer have a purpose? What are the places where I’m relying on aphorisms like “good fences make good neighbors” so I don’t have to think about WHY I’m creating the barriers I create?

I never found out the story of the walls on the property. But I was definitely reminded of the walls we are called to tear down, the walls nature itself abhors, and the ancestors and land we’re called to listen to and tend. In these days ahead, when people’s lives and dignity and safety are all political toys, it will be important to invite people to dig beneath the pithy sayings like “good fences make good neighbors” to get at why we are comfortable with suffering and uncomfortable with addressing the cause of that suffering.

I suspect there will not be too many long pauses to reflect in the months to come. Some people are worried that we haven’t snapped into action as quickly as we did in 2016. But I think we’re readying. We’re planning. We know the work ahead will be great, so those of us who can are taking a moment to go deep inside of ourselves and with each other before we have to go full tilt. And I feel incredibly lucky to have had a little time in nature to root myself in what I want not only to fight but to create in the days to come. I hope you find a taste of that also.

in solidarity,

Sandhya