CHAPTER
10
Circle as Support for Collective Healing
Circle can transform familial, community, and societal issues by receiving stories in a community of listeners. Three stories in this section illustrate the intergenerational healing of a family, the healing provided by addressing issues of race and gender in a southern city, and the ability of traumatized citizens to shift their reactions to violence in the midst of social turmoil.
When the ancestors came over the hill and into the circle of firelight, the circle socialized them into communal groups and became the container for the deepest conversations of awakening human consciousness. Staring into the flames of the cooking fire, relieved to have made it through the rigors of another hunting-and-gathering day, questions rose up in them, and they told stories that made their world. Who are we? How did we get here? Who or what made this world for us? How are we related? How do we educate our children and initiate them into the tribe?
And as they developed a sense of insider identity, they also developed a sense of outsider identity: some people belonged, and some people didn’t. Who are these others? How did they get here? What do we do about them hunting our antelope? Shall we push them out? What if they win and push us out? Do they know things we need to know? Would it be better to ally our tribes and intermarry?
Cooperation or domination, war or peace, trading or taking, kindness or cruelty have always been part of the conversation and part of human reality. What fuels our capacity for violence of any degree, from vicious language to making war, is our ability to mentally construct insider and outsider identities.
The consequences of seeing the world divided into “us” and “them” has shaped human history: it is our collective shadow. If “they” are not “us,” we don’t need to have the same regard for them that we have for our own kind. If “they” are not “us,” we can shun, rob, rape, kill, destroy them, the “other”—and it is not the same thing as doing it to ourselves. “We” are civilized people; “they” are savages; “we” are God’s chosen; “they” are heathens. On and on this thinking goes, accumulating collective shadow. Unconscious behavior, projection, and transference occur on the macro level as well as the micro level. And in circle, we can heal some of these macro issues by the kinds of conversations we are willing to have and the settings in which we are willing to call the circle. In this chapter, we will look at how circle has worked to heal family and intergenerational shadow, community and social history shadow, and shadow in war.
Talking the World We Need into Being
We have made stories and taken actions based on stories that create and sustain the world as it is, including sustaining the shadow of injustice, suffering, and violence that hangs over humanity. As Christina says in Story catcher, “When the power of story comes into the room, an alchemical reaction occurs that is unique to our kind: love or hate, identification or isolation, war or peace can be stirred in us by words alone. The power of story is understood by the powerful, yet the power of story belongs to all of us, especially the least powerful. History is what scholars and conquerors say happened; story is what it was like to live on the ground.”
We have the opportunity in circle process to heal our old stories and to make new stories that lead to different actions and create a different world. This is the essential task of our times! Understanding the power of story and the container of the circle give us life skills that have profoundly transformational potential. We can talk the world we need into being and then align our actions with our vision. This is what our ancestors did at the fire, and if we are to become ancestors to future generations, this is what we will do today.
Doing personal shadow work raises confidence in our abilities to shift social unconsciousness toward more holistic, accountable, and enlightened behavior. We begin to trust: if we can work through this shift at the personal and interpersonal levels, we can work through it at the collective level. To become peer leaders who can help transform our families, organizations, communities, and wider world, we need to practice our capacities as shadow shifters.
As circle practice takes hold in organizations, community groups, and families, it creates a social container strong enough to bring conversations out of hiding. The questions under the statements, the longing under the doing, the story under the check-in, the confusion under the confidence comes into the metaphoric firelight offering us the possibility that we may heal our collective wounds.
Healing the Family Lineage
In October 2008, Rubén Castilla Herrera, a community development consultant in Columbus, Ohio, put out a call on the Art of Hosting electronic mailing list asking if anyone was practicing this collaborative model in Portland, Oregon, and available to help host a circle of extended family members in need of significant conversation. Steve Ryman, a hospital administrator from eastern Oregon and dialogue consultant in the Art of Hosting network, responded. The two men designed the gathering by phone and e-mail.
Rubén’s younger sister, Ruth Marie, was dying of breast cancer at age forty-eight. They were the two youngest in a large Hispanic family of eight siblings, nineteen grandchildren, and a dozen great-grandchildren. Dispersed over several states, they had not gathered as a group in decades and had never had a conversation about their histories, their identity as a family, or the impact of life events on who they had become.
Rubén later explained:
“Our mother developed breast cancer when she was pregnant with Ruth Marie and was advised not to carry the baby to term. She had a mastectomy and gave birth to Ruth Marie but died two years later, in 1962. So we don’t remember her, though the older kids do. My father remarried quickly—he had eight kids to take care of from a toddler and four year old—me—to teenagers. I don’t know all the details, but he was shunned by our community in Texas and so moved to Oregon following the migrant stream. Everyone adjusted differently in this new town and our new mom, and soon the older children broke away and scattered, and all kinds of secrets went underground.
“We became a family without a core identity or home, especially after our father died. We had not been together as a whole since 1982. Ruth Marie and I, perhaps because we didn’t remember Texas or our mother, set out on a search to discover our roots. I went back to Seguin, Texas, and interviewed people and always talked through everything with Ruth Marie. When Ruth Marie got sick, we both felt as though we were reliving the experience of our mother, that Ruth’s illness was part of the search and path, and she wanted very much to use it to reunite the family.”
The cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien relates a belief that when a baby is born, the ancestor spirits hover over the crib and ask, “Will this be the one to heal the lineage?” In their family, Ruth Marie and Rubén set out to be the ones.
Rubén became the caller of his family circle, and Ruth Marie became the holder of intention. They agreed on a date for a weekend family reunion, with a three-hour circle in the heart of their time, and sent out the invitation. Rubén wisely decided to turn over the hosting and guardian function to Steve and to sit as a participant at the rim with the rest of his family. “I am the youngest man,” he said, “and it is a Latino family. Only after my oldest brother said yes did I know it would happen.”
Incrementally, the family shadow began to shift: the acquiescence to cultural norms, the prescribed roles of the brothers and sisters, and the sense of who has authority were all shaken loose by “the babies’” calling the family together. “They let us get away with it, of course,” said Rubén, “because Ruth Marie had cancer. How could they deny her last big wish?”
Steve spoke to us of his role:
“With the exception of Rubén, no one had any previous circle experience. There were around thirty-five people coming and the potential for a lot of intensity. Rubén and Ruth Marie were being criticized because ‘it wasn’t their place’ to call for a conversation. Nevertheless, all the family members came. Some of the older brothers who were pretty resistant to the idea arrived late; one came when we were already halfway through. It was awkward to weave them in, but we handled it by staying at the deeper level of conversation we’d already reached and pulling the patriarchs along into honesty. I rang the bell several times, and we really used the center—it was a great place to focus when the conversation got awkward or emotional.
“One thing that touched my heart was watching the men struggle with their emotions. Several profound apologies were made. Another late-arriving brother no one had seen for years. I don’t know if they even knew he was coming. He talked about how far away he’d grown from the family and how much he wanted something diff erent.”
We asked Steve to comment on his experience as an Anglo outsider sitting as the holder of the container:
“I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, leaning forward, listening carefully—my whole body was involved in the process of listening. There was so much emotion in the room, and it felt like part of my role was to let their feelings wash through me, to keep my heart open, to make eye contact with the one who was speaking. At times it felt like I was even modulating my breath to theirs to help them move more deeply into open-hearted space.”
This is shadow cleansing without drama. Steve’s ability to simply hold the space allowed family members to reach the deepest potential of their interaction: compassion and grief. Volatility was present, yet through a kind of spiritual willpower, Steve helped them ground into their baseline longings for healing. It was a moment of alchemy, a collective experience of shifting unconscious material into the light of story.
Steve concluded:
“After the circle, Rubén thanked me, but we didn’t do a lot of debriefing. The focus was on the family’s experience. My service was to be invisible. The family went back to socializing, getting photos taken. I slipped away—and I didn’t need anything more than that. What an honor to have been their witness, and to experience my ability to host at the level of presence.
“The lesson for me is that the family slowed down together to the point where what needed healing could now heal. In circle, when the portal opens to where healing is possible, a different kind of time takes over. It was a big group; we started late; we were sitting in a hotel conference room; Ruth Marie took a long time to tell her life story and medical history; several people came in late. When the talking piece started around, I was afraid there wasn’t enough time or enough set-up. I soon realized that none of that mattered. A spiritual readiness took over: the family saw the moment and seized the opportunity.”
Spiritual timeliness occurs when all parties to an event are ready to allow the event to happen. When readiness resides in the circle, the drive for connection overcomes the unconscious behaviors, projection, and transference that have created disconnection. This is not always true, but when it happens, everyone is aware of being in the presence of grace.
Rubén recalls:
“After our circle, driving home that night with Ruth Marie, there was such a sense of oneness and relief. Despite all the hidden stories and stuff that has happened in our family, we could come together and do this. Why didn’t we invite this sooner? It takes someone to have the courage and someone to help hold the invitation. Whoever comes are the right people. We are all living now with a sense that something profound has happened in our family, even though we don’t quite know what it is.”
Calling the circle was a culminating moment that Rubén and Ruth Marie undertook for their own healing and on behalf of their family.
“We knew we had had a mother who loved us in those early years and we couldn’t remember her. And those who could remember her never talked about her. So we did what we could to recapture that period in our family life. When I went to Texas, I asked people, ‘Tell me stories of my mother, tell me stories of my father, tell me about your relationship with them and with us.’ I took the common things from all these interviews, to Ruth Marie, and we pieced our lives together.”
Ruth Marie Castilla Herrera died on April 19, 2009, with Rubén and other family members holding her hands. During Ruth Marie’s last two weeks, family gathered in circle around her at the care center. There were always at least two and as many as twenty-five people around her. Rubén remembers:
“I was called on Wednesday, April 15, 2009, in Ohio, and family members said I needed to come as soon as possible. They were certain that she was waiting for me. I arrived on Friday, April 17, to a circle around Ruth Marie’s bed of family holding gentle vigil. This time Ruth Marie was in the center.
“In the next two days before she passed, there were many stories told about our family. My oldest brother was telling me stories about our mother that I had never heard him speak. On the morning of her passing, I saw him crying and talking softly to Ruth Marie, and it was as though he was talking to our mother. I kept hearing him say ‘Mom.’ Forty-seven years later, he was mourning the loss of our mother through our sister. Ruth Marie and I had spoken about this happening. This was the gift that she told me she would leave us. It was a true gift. It was as though my questions were answered and I had found what I had been searching for. It was at that moment that I knew the power of the circle, of conversation, of coming together with intention and purpose.”
The story continues. Rubén recalls:
“Ruth Marie had asked at our October family circle if I would eulogize her. When I had visited her again in March before she entered the care center, I asked her what she wanted me to say. She said, ‘Why don’t you just come together in circle?’
“So that is what we did at the celebration of her life. This time I hosted the circle. It was a large circle and included many new people and children. This time we knew how to hold the space. I listened to new stories about Ruth Marie that I had not heard before. Again, another brother asked to be forgiven for some words he had said earlier. There was a profound statement from an eleven-year-old nephew who spoke from the next generation about what Ruth Marie’s life meant to him. There were many moments of silence.
“No one commented about the circle that day; we just did it. For months after, I received notes and comments about how powerful it was. Connections and conversations are self-organizing among us. We are talking to each other and listening more. It’s as though something has been lifted from our hands, our minds, and our hearts. Sometimes it just takes a while. Ruth Marie and I know this.”
Her last words to Ruben, spoken over the phone before he got on the plane to stand beside her as she died, had been, “Remember the circle.” They remain dedicated to sharing the healing of their family with as large a group as possible.
Here we, the writers of this book, ring the bell, pause, breathe, and observe a moment of silence to honor this story.
Healing Community History
In 1999, we were invited by Dr. Mary K. Sandford, at the time associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro (UNCG), to bring PeerSpirit Circle Process to a yearlong conversation and experience she was organizing called the Race and Gender Institute. Mary K. called us to say, “This institute has been functioning as a kind of remedial summer school for faculty who have failed to change old southern mores in their language and behavior around race and gender. If you’ve been ‘bad,’ your dean refers you to detention. When it came my turn to host the institute, I refused to apply a punishment model; it just doesn’t work.”
Mary K. picked a small group of forward-thinking faculty from several departments and started reconceptualizing what the Race and Gender Institute could be and how it could serve the university and community. “Two things were coming into alignment,” she remembers. “Redesigning the institute and the college program committee were both my responsibilities that year. So we offered race and gender as the programming theme throughout the academic cycle.”
Mary K. and her committee invited a diverse group of twenty faculty whom they expected would be willing to explore these issues. They hired PeerSpirit to start and finish the year, facilitating two, two-day retreats. We were privileged to see them take their first risks as a group and then to witness the creative and bold ways they had extended shadow healing to the university and community at large.
People who had been accepted for inclusion in the institute were supported by their departments, assuring additional responsibility beyond their teaching load and were generally excited to be in the conversation. They were also highly guarded as they entered the conference room and took a seat in a circle of chairs. In those first forty-eight hours, they had to forge a new way of being together in an environment famous for ruthless judgmentalism. They had to break free of personal preconceptions of one another and face their internalized notions of race and gender. This circle would set out intentionally to heal the participants’ individual and collective shadows through the experiences of honesty and to explore ways to extend their learning forward.
After introductions and the mention that they would be developing their own version of PeerSpirit Circle Process, they were given a small note card and asked to write down something from their own life experience that at this moment they could not imagine sharing with the other people in the room. They sealed these statements in envelopes and held them close. The first shadow shift: people carry stories into circle that they do not intend to share. What we share and how we share, what we withhold and how we withhold, are choices that build or diminish shadow in a group. People continually assess their levels of comfort and risk and whether they are willing to commit themselves to authentic interaction.
Working Agreements for the Race and Gender Institute |
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We share a commitment to the process and to being “here.”The group then listed attributes of social container they felt would foster enough trust that they could imagine making freer choices than simply withholding stories from one another. With a host, guardian, and scribe in place, we crafted a set of working agreements and intention that would allow people to grow in truth-telling and imagine themselves in leadership roles around these issues (see Exhibit 10.1).
After dinner we reconvened for the opening check-in. The intention and agreements were posted on the wall. The conference room had been transformed into a quieter space: a candle on a low table, a circle of floor chairs and pillows. The halls of academia were far away. And though it was an unusual arrangement for many present, they sat down willingly in the experiment. Each person had been asked to bring an object to place in the center that represented a moment in time when the consequences of the person’s race or gender became clear. Someone read the agreements, pausing and letting the importance of the commitment sink in. Someone else rang the guardian bell. The group took a spontaneous long breath and dived into honesty with tears and laughter.
The next afternoon, one of the African American participants said to Christina, “Just so you know, I didn’t come here with a nine-month commitment in mind—it was more like ninety minutes. I told myself I would not participate in another session of ‘educating white folks’ to the realities of color. When the agreements got in place, I was willing to extend another ninety minutes to see how the check-in went. I was the last to speak—and by then, I knew I could be here for the year. It wouldn’t have happened for me without this circle stuff.”
A few months later, the circle supported one of its members, theater professor Marsha Paludan, and her students in mounting a production of Emily Mann’s play Greensboro: A Requiem. Mary K. said, “The play is about the Ku Klux Klan opening fire into a group of marching demonstrators on the streets of the city of Greensboro on November 3, 1979. Just as Marsha sat in the honesty of the Race and Gender Institute circle, the student actors prepared for their roles by sitting in circle with Marsha. They did powerful work around racism in order to be able to portray both people of color and white supremacists on the stage. There was a lot of edginess in the town because it was the twentieth anniversary of the actual shootings. There was some question about whether or not the Klan might show up on opening night and repeat the violence.”
When using circle to shift consciousness at a community level, many elements are activated. Those who call the circle cannot predict or control these reactions. They can, however, hold their own intention clearly and their energetics strongly. They must also practice asking for the help they need and inviting others into intentional speaking, attentive listening, and supporting the well-being of the whole. A well-timed conversation can diffuse a lot of tension.
In October, a few weeks before the premier, the Beloved Community Center sponsored a coordinated event called the Night of a Thousand Conversations. It had prepared a video that combined fifteen minutes of television coverage from 1979 with survivor and witness statements, gospel music, and social commentary. It made one hundred copies and asked for one hundred volunteers to invite at least ten people into their homes to watch the video and have a conversation on its impact then and now. They were also asked how their lives as citizens had been affected.
Mary K. explained:
“In 1979, there had been much criticism of the police for not being present at the march and slow to respond after the shootings. So of course, they made quite a show of presence at opening night of the play—squad cars out front, officers standing in the aisles—a bit of a siege mentality. Putting on my anthropologist hat, I stood on the stage before the performance and spoke about our hopes to contribute to cultural healing. And because all the institute people were there and Marsha had worked in circle with the cast, we were able to create a kind of circle atmosphere during the ‘talk back’ at the end of the play between the actors, playwright, drama professor, and audience—including a number of survivors.
“The daughter of Reverend Nelson Johnson, a leader who had been stabbed during the demonstration, stood up and said, ‘I’ve never had the opportunity to publicly tell my parents how proud I am of them for standing up for what they believed in.’ A student from California said, ‘I didn’t understand before what people here in the South really went through, what it took for you to “overcome someday.” Now I know.’ And for months after that, people would stop me in the grocery store and tell me stories about their memories of the shooting, the impact on their lives, the things they were thinking about now. I felt like a walking circle space.”
There are long-term outcomes to the work the Race and Gender Institute did that year. The members of the institute began using circle in their classrooms and in their faculty and staff meetings. In traditional meetings, they adopted the host-guardian configuration, sitting across from each other holding the energetics. The programs they sponsored were instrumental in establishing an African American studies major at the university. At the end of that year, the provost spoke in awe of what had been accomplished and acknowledged the central role of circle in all that had occurred. And in 2005, an independent “truth and reconciliation project” and “truth and reconciliation commission” were established to further the community healing. Rev. Nelson Johnson told Mary K., “None of this would have happened if it weren’t for what you did through the Race and Gender Institute.” So it was a seed.
The institute provided experiential evidence that deep issues of shadow could be intentionally brought to PeerSpirit circles for discussion, action, and ultimate healing. The topics had the potential to be explosive, and yet the institute members’ experience was that everything could be said within the rules of engagement the group had outlined for itself. Nothing was stifled, and within the structure of circle, there was no need for violence or drama.
Some of the members of the institute still teach at UNCG, while others have moved to different universities and organizations, changed careers, or retired. And yet that circle isn’t over. Everyone who experienced something during that year is still influenced by it—the circle members themselves and also the students, the folks in each other’s living rooms, the police who stood guard that night at the play, the survivors from both sides of the conflict, the attendees at lectures, the college administrators who weren’t sure what they’d unleashed, and the strangers in the grocery store who just had to share their stories. This is the great leap of faith in the world of circle: our speaking and listening contributes to one another, and beyond the small rim of personal feedback, as among those twenty faculty, we can never gauge the full impact we have put into the world.
Mary K. stared out the window, seeing something in her mind, and said, “I remember watching the news coverage of those shootings while I was in graduate school in Boulder, Colorado. And I thought to myself, How could anyone live there? with no idea that I was on my way to exactly that place to do exactly this piece of social justice work. Having grown up in segregated Arkansas, it horrified me to see this nasty piece of the Old South still happening in 1979. I have learned in my adult decades that after any milestone—voting rights, desegregation, the election of President Obama—we need to stay awake and active. We need to have continuing conversations about race and gender that keep society moving toward healing our ancient wounds. It’s not over—and that’s the human journey.”
Whenever we need encouragement, we remember the observation that Mary K.’s predecessor in the field of anthropology, Margaret Mead, spoke from her experience: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does.”
Here we, the writers of this book, ring the bell, pause, breathe, and observe a moment of silence to honor this story.
Healing Lives amid War and Violence
Bev Reeler is a white citizen of Zimbabwe, a country where unemployment has run as high as 90 percent (the government being the only entity left in the country with money to pay employees), where systems of production have broken down, and the social infrastructure of the country is in shambles. In 2002, the governmental policy of internal land invasion, evicted all white farmers, causing the collapse of commercial farming and the displacement of tens of thousands of people from rural communities. Burdened by an untreated HIV/AIDS epidemic, near-universal poverty, and inconsistent food-growing capacity, the life expectancy of the country’s eleven million people has plunged to thirty-three years. Once known as the “breadbasket of Africa,” the nation has been devastated by years of intense political strife (amounting to an internalized state of warfare), with arrests, torture, and assassinations used to control access to power and even voting. The lion of shadow has swallowed Zimbabwe, and yet the spirits of individual people seek to endure.
Under these conditions, Bev has dedicated her life to calling circles of healing. Since 2004, these Tree of Life Circles have been taking place in the hidden corners of the countryside, in the face of continued violence and fear. Bev calls them “small sparks of hope and love shining in the darkness.”
We met Bev and heard about her circle work when we visited Kufunda village in Zimbabwe in May 2007 and have included her in the list of Zimbabwean friends and colleagues we watch and pray for from afar. Most of this story is told in her words as she writes to let the outside world know what is happening in her beloved and tormented country.
Rays of late afternoon sunlight filter through the open sides of the thatched rondeval,2 painting gold across the shining earth-brown faces in the circle. These are the Shona people, the primary tribal group of Zimbabwe. They have spent the last three days together sheltered in a Miombo woodland,3 leaning against house-sized granite boulders, sharing their stories. This group has traveled from Epworth, a high-density suburb of makeshift huts and tiny plots of dirt yards and home gardens at the edge of the capital city of Harare. Political violence has left their lives shattered, their homes burned, and their community in tatters. Over three days, they have shared stories they have never told before.
All their stories are told in a circle with a talking piece. In the first circle, when the participants introduce themselves, they make agreements about how they choose to live and work together (Exhibit 10.2). “The agreements they choose are always the same,” says Bev:
Working Agreements for the Tree of Life Circle |
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Here in the sunlight, the quality of their time together depends on maintaining these agreements. After they return to the shadow of sociopolitical violence they come from, their lives depend on maintaining these agreements.
“Sitting in circle is a simple behavior,” Bev notes, “but it is in total contradiction to our present world experience. To spend time with one another in this way is a revolution in itself. Circle is a way of breaking the stranglehold of fear, distrust, and isolation so that a more wonderful part of ourselves can come into being.
“We start by speaking of our grandparents and great-grandparents, tracing the paths they traveled to Zimbabwe. Among the Shona, many find that others in the circle share the same totem (traditionally an animal or bird) or that their ancestors followed a similar path to Zimbabwe (from Mozambique, Malawi, or Tanzania) or that they come from the same rural areas or that their traditional belief systems are still held in the family or that their families have become divided over new belief systems.”
About her own family’s journey, Bev says, “My great-grandfather arrived as the first city architect, and my family has now lived for five generations in this country as architects and engineers. But most important of all, we have deep roots in this African soil and have become part of these amazing people.”
In these Tree of Life Circles, Bev and others have carefully crafted a healing process, where the presence and metaphor of nature is part of what allows participants to handle the pain in their own and others’ stories. Bev sees the connection with nature as a way for people to reconnect with their history:
“Our shared humanity becomes clearer and clearer to each of us as we observe how nature is interconnected.
“People spend time outside the rondeval looking at the trunks of the forest trees. They notice the bends and twists, signs of fire and drought, and compare the scars that mark the trees’ growth into maturity with stories of their own childhoods. People speak of trials and difficulties, of sorrows and joys and of those who have loved them. They hear how their stories carry the same themes and realize they are all connected. The Tree of Life becomes a powerful symbol in these circles. The trees are living participants who hold our backs, provide shade and fruit, offer twigs to start the cooking fires, and connect us to our lineage stories.
“All Zimbabweans know that trees carry ancient healing medicine. The wisdom of old spirits is whispered when the wind stirs the leaves, singing long-forgotten stories. In the peace of sitting under the Msasa trees, breathing the natural pulse of the earth, the terrors of war begin to drain from our bodies, and we can feel our hearts beating with a rhythm we have always known.
“We speak of the forest that is Zimbabwe and of how it has been damaged, chopped, burned in these last years of violence. I hold the rim of witness while the others share stories of how this has been for them. An elderly carpenter speaks with great dignity of being beaten and burned; grandmothers and granddaughters speak of rape and humiliation; young men who are laborers, counselors, teachers, and preachers speak of being tortured and of the pain and abandonment, fear and guilt they have felt and of the deaths they have seen. The talking piece goes round and round, and the listening circle bears witness to horrific experiences they have never spoken before.”
In the quiet sunlight of the forest in this place of temporary respite, the people around the circle shed their tears of mourning. These circles are addressing the deepest layers of collective shadow: humanity’s capacity for systemic violence, for warring against itself. For all humanity’s brilliance and creativity, for all the graces of art and craft and ingenuity, for our ability to make consciousness and religion and science and technology, we are the only species on the planet capable of premeditated and carefully designed cruelty. In this disastrous breakdown of life in Zimbabwe, Bev offers in response: the circle.
Tree of Life Circles began in August 2004 when eight activists selected by their communities were bused to Lake Chivero, near Harare, to spend five days together with Bev and her colleague Sonia and a wonderful team in the National Park cottages. The eight had all been recent victims of organized violence and torture and were understandably anxious to find themselves in the bush with people they hardly knew. In the following days, these traumatized people lived and ate together and shared the stories of their experiences, taking their first steps of transformation from victim to survivor. This was the first Tree of Life workshop in Zimbabwe, and the members of this chosen group have become the core facilitators of the process as it has begun to spread throughout the country.
Bev explains:
“Of that original circle of eight, Abby, Namu, and Rodgers are still active members and facilitators of the Tree of Life family. The others have had to leave to earn their living or move to South Africa to survive but are still in contact. In the intervening years, these three have led lives of inspiring dedication to healing. It has been a difficult process. All of the participants have been targeted by the government, so moving them around the country and finding places to meet has provided its own dangers. There have been times we have had some funding and longer periods without. There have been periods of ducking and diving and living on the edge. But throughout all this, these facilitators have stayed connected to the newly created Tree of Life circles. Each circle they have sat with has had eight participants—by now over three hundred people have sat in these circles. They have kept in cell phone contact, mourned the deaths of circle members, tracked them through arrests and torture, and celebrated their survival and success. A small and growing network of survivors has been formed across parts of the country. From this network of circles, two other survivors, Jane and Gift, joined the team in 2008 and have lent themselves unstintingly to the work of healing.
“In June 2008, we hit an all-time low when Tonderai Ndira4 was murdered with seven of his activist friends. We had to find a safe house for Nhamo, who had been Ndira’s friend. Then Gift, a Movement for Democratic Change government official, lost his seat in the elections, had his house burned, and was jailed. The other facilitators had to stay in hiding. When Gift was released, we moved him to a safe house and began to meet in circles again to keep up our morale, moving around police blocks and taking our chances to ensure we were connected. Our resolve began to grow again.
“We needed to get our own funding and ensure we could carry on with this process, as it was something we all believed in, so we dreamed our dream and it began to unfold. AusAID gave us funding to keep going for six months, and the Research and Advisory Unit,5 our partner and support, began to deal with the money.
By the end of 2008, Tree of Life Circles had become a cohesive organization that offered twenty-five workshops for communities and grassroots and human rights organizations in the first four months of 2009.
“In a time when the political status of our country is so ambiguous, the monolithic darkness begins to show its cracks. Shafts of light move through the shadows. And suddenly we can move in different ways. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, the International Organization for Migration, the Uhuru boys (student activists), the City of Harare Resident Association, the Alternative Businesses Association, the UMA (a group of pastors), to name a few, are all now ready to begin the process of healing, and we are ready to guide new facilitators to take the process to their communities and organizations—and so the circles will multiply.” The Tree of Life Circles have demonstrated that there is a process and a set of tools that can be used and built upon. Thanks to the generic nature of the organization, it multiplies and requires only the temporary support of trained facilitators to foster the leadership that emerges from the group experience.
Out in the woodlands, after a day of mourning, something different often happens. People bring out drums and mbiras and sing and dance and laugh, as if a huge weight has been lifted. It is as if the isolation they have felt has dissipated. Life is connected again, to this circle of people, to these trees and rocks, and to the spirit inside them that had been lost in their terrible journeys.
By their last day in circle together, people have changed. They look at themselves as a forest, as trees that stand together, and they see how they have taken their scars, survived, and grown again. They have discovered what incredible resources they have had at moments when all seemed the darkest. They have spoken the names of those who have been there for them in times of need and acknowledged their strength at times they traveled alone. This forest is full of fruit, of strength and courage and endurance. They begin to understand their survival and the great learning it has brought them and the incredible people they have become.
Says Bev in her witness role:
“A strong young man spoke in the circle: ‘I heard my four-year-old daughter tell her friends as she sat in my yard, “Matemba from next door burned down our house”—and I wanted the sentence to end “and my father sorted him out [taught him a lesson].’ For I spoke of revenge to my friends, and we were collecting knives. But today I know that I want my daughter’s sentence to end another way. I want to hear her say, “and my father was part of the healing.” My heart has changed.’
“This afternoon, they have been speaking of power: of the effect of abuse of power in their lives, in their homes and their schools and churches, in their country and their history. And now they begin to speak of another sort of power, that of a circle, carrying a common intention. A new way of working together begins to emerge. They look at how they can bring this into their lives and their communities, and they feel the strength of these connections. They walked in a silent procession up to the rocks, where, in a small fire, they burned what they wished to leave behind and shared their dreams for the future. And the granite boulders echoed with their songs and prayers, their dreams and their laughter.”
Something Mahatma Gandhi said speaks to this work: “We must let the Law of Love either rule us through and through or not at all.”6 This is what the Tree of Life Circles are doing in Zimbabwe: choosing to let the Law of Love rule by bringing people’s broken hearts to one another and claiming peace over retaliation.
The seeds of Tree of Life are being taken into the hands of other Zimbabweans, and a quiet forest is being planted across the country. These extraordinary people, who have experienced the most challenging onslaught to their lives, have agreed to carry forward a process of healing and empowerment rather than one of vengeance. Through the dedicated work of all those who have carried the vision of reconciliation in the face of all sorts of hardships and difficulties, who have prepared themselves to learn and take risks, the web of circles begins to hold them.
Here we, the writers of this book, ring the bell, pause, breathe, and observe a moment of silence to honor this story.