JHC 2023: On Waging Piece
Dear Collective,
As I metabolize the global events since 10/7 and, frankly, the last seven and a half years, I am almost without words. Or, for the first time in a long while, I fear whether I will use the right ones.
Personally, I have spent this season journaling — on my phone, in Canva, and in print (no rules!). I have been trying to process all the pain, the confusion, the hate, and the fear in the larger collective. I have been listening to what shows up in my psyche and what shows up in my body — and I confess — it’s not always clear what “feelings” belong to me.
Call me an empath or label me hypersensitive, but the ways of the world can often be “too much with me” (ala Wordsworth), and no matter how much I know this — like a glutton, I step into it.
Into the muck.
Into the sludge.
I feel it all.
I get muddy.
I ache for all who ache.
I rage for all who rage.
Because,
No mud, no lotus right?
The light side of this same coin, this very same disposition, I have learned, is that I also love for all who love. And ultimately, I always find my way back there. To love.
For love is my activism.
I spent the last few weeks sorting through how we digest what I call “the global story.” I had my brilliant co-writer edit a long piece I intended to mail you all. I spent countless hours finessing it — reaching for the words to encourage us (to encourage the world) to be IN the global story without feeling the need to grip for righteousness (or to be right!) or without bypassing the discomfort in it all in service of arriving at some perceptual happy ending. I felt called to teach.
But the message wasn’t sitting right. While setting up the note for deployment yesterday, I realized it’s not my duty to teach without speaking to my own learning journey. So I changed course. And this is what came up for me to share:
Today, I woke up with the heaviest heart. And yet, as I made some mushroom coffee (my new favorite), I realized how proud I am of my ability to hold complexity, to be in multitudes. I am proud of my capacity to see my own story and to see outside my own story. This may be the gift of a humanities education. It may also be ancestral. Jews are no stranger to complexity, or what we call both/and.
From the time I learned to read and emote, I found myself drawn to journals and poetry. John Fox calls poetry a sacred place, a companion, and natural medicine. I felt this before I knew this. In times of complexity and crisis especially, poems brought me peace. They continue to bring me peace. I can hear myself in poetry. Verses reach my soul and my cells. Poetry gives me permission to feel.
So it goes,
Last night I googled “poems of peace” and so many came up.
From Muriel Rukeyser: I lived in the first century of world wars
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
From Wendell Berry: The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
…I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I love protest poetry too. Poems “wear no mask,” I learned in my studies, and are in many ways acts of resistance. This book became my bible in the summer of 2020: Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin.
Again, poetry is peace for me. And when everything else feels out of my control, I go there.
Word to word.
Page to page.
A quest for transcendence.
Judyth Hill wrote around 9/11:
So, my friends, I ask you, how do you wage peace? What has worked? What is working?
In the spirit of transparency, the year ahead makes me anxious. As a feeler, election years often rattle my nervous system. But for the first time in my adult life I am prioritizing my health, so I can prioritize the work I want to do in this world as well as the PEOPLE I want to be present to. For the first time, I am practicing discernment – what is mine to hold and what is mine to witness. Poetry will surely join me on this ride.
As my business enters its teenage years in 2024, I will continue to focus on serving higher ed, medicine, and the social sector, especially in bridging fundraising communications, organizational health, and strategy — while remaining rooted in research on the power of story. I am also excited to share that I 1) finished my certificate in Narrative Healthcare at Lenoir Rhyne, and 2) was nominated to step in as chair of the board at Health Story Collaborative — both endeavors which sharpened my devotion to narrative practice and poetry as a peace-making endeavor. What’s more, in 2024, I have committed to:
Expanding JHC’s Organizational Storytelling & Communication Business: There is more to JH Collective! And some of you have already met the gifted communicators and writing strategists in the group. We are here to support storytelling, story-training, and more!
Moving Milestones on Two Major Projects: I am enlisting an editor in my essay collection that features “Awakening the Authentic Ask” and the “Complexity of Story,” and still developing a retreat concept for social sector leaders titled “Leading Narrative Change in Fundraising.”
Facilitating Monthly Writing for Health Sessions: I will be facilitating MONTHLY meetings, free of charge, for story-minded folks at all levels (sign up coming soon!) via Health Story Collaborative.
Guest Presenting in Inspired Spaces: I will be back at Rancho La Puerta during the week of November 30, 2024 with “Flexing Your Creative Muscles: Using Storytelling to Stretch & Release.” (If there is interest from more than 8 people, I may be able to get a group rate) And I have already committed to client facilitation on topics pertaining to purpose and board wellness in early 2024.
So that’s all I have got this season. Poems for peace. Waging peace. Knowing peace is alive and available in me, in us, even if the world prefers to keep us at war.
Sending love to all this season. I hope to hear from you.
Warmly,
Jennifer Harris
P.S. If this letter compels you to invest in the power of poetry or story-work this season and how applied storytelling can change hearts and minds, I invite you to make a gift to Health Story Collaborative or consider sponsoring our 2nd Annual Signature Event featuring author Rachel Aviv: “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us.”
