#4 - restoring trust
#4 - restoring trust
to frolic in a field of dandelions
POV: I’m Hima - a South Asian, medium brown skin, cis-gender, able-bodied, straight woman living as a settler on the Indigenous lands, T’karonto. I was born in Scarborough, raised Gujarati-Jain, middle-class, with English as my first language. My parents immigrated by choice via London and East Africa and are still together. I have two sisters and no extended family living locally. I experience ADHD symptoms. Much of what I write will be informed by some of these lived experiences.
#IStandWithFarmers
genuinely wondering
how to work in capitalism, dismantle capitalism, untangle your PoV from capitalism while living in capitalism, negotiate an inner desire for fruits of capitalism, all at the same time.
dreaming about
All the reflective journal prompts, vision boarding, Kate Shela Movement Lab classes, and plant medicine journey’s I will be doing this month to process a year that will historically be known as the portal we entered to collectively awaken.
on my screen
Prepping to record the first episode of a series of audio experiences I am programming, curating, and lightly hosting with Luminato and from_later on the future of Toronto, built by artists.
contemplation
When my family went to Mont Tremblant this past summer - desperate for cottage core at cabin prices - the fridge and dishwasher conked out about four days into the trip. It was pure mayhem for a family that cherishes food sometimes more than each other. Discount negotiations began with the Airbnb host, while we hastily transferred items into our coolers, dashed out to buy ice, and contemplated whether to stay or leave.
‘She must have known,’ my dad kept mumbling, referring to the perceived sinister intentions of our Airbnb host. ‘How could they both break down at the same time?,’ he questioned while tensely pacing, seeking to solve the domestic mystery. I tried to dissuade him from spiraling into unfounded theories - ‘Things break, Dad. It happens. What would she gain by knowing this would happen?”
I’m not trying to out my parents as pathologically suspicious - but I was struck at how low their trust levels were for a relatively benign offense and how the thought of being taken ‘for a ride’ was discombobulating. In turn, I wondered what that meant for my own trust levels through lineage and osmosis. A few weeks later while walking in Forest Therapy Trail, in Markham, my mom, unprovoked, revisited the topic, ‘she really must have known they were both about to breakdown, right?’
This year has rocked our collective trust in exceptionally challenging ways and also, has weaved new fibers of trust and solidarity in radically beautiful ways. Or perhaps better said - this year we got a glimpse of how collective healing and restoration of trust will lead us to the demise of colonial, capitalist, and white supremacist power.
For communities who continue to face systemic violence and oppression - Black, Indigenous, disabled, LGBTQ2S+, and working-class folks - the distrust of power structures was reaffirmed. The state heinously failed to indict the ongoing struggle against police racism and brutality, while corporations and hospitals treated vulnerable frontline and factory workers in often depraved ways during a deadly pandemic. Friends and families were confronted with differences of belief on public health claims, science, and protocols and the middle-class began questioning government rule when livelihoods and conveniences became suddenly compromised. For the first time, there was mass dissent against billionaires (instead of blind celebration), and tone-deaf celebrities in these tender times were sacked. The word mask will never again refer to Jim Carrey.
Concurrently - 48 hours into the pandemic, communities came together in profoundly refreshing and restorative ways. Mutual aid pods were formed to offer up free meals and grocery support to elderly and immunocompromised folks, wellness instructors took to IG to give free meditation and yoga sessions, and legendary musicians battled to wash away the anxiety with art. Friends and families gathered on Zoom to connect in new, and arguably more intimate ways; fashioning trivia nights and celebrating birthdays at doorsteps and drivebys. And then, when the video of George Floyd’s breathless murder broke, people in ~4,500 cities across the world stomped the streets in unity and resolve against oppressive power. It certainly wasn’t perfect, and privilege and performance were both at play, but it was something.
Inherently, we know we can not co-exist without trust - it is the graham cracker crust of all relationships, the bones of interdependence, and the hair elixir that smoothes human life. And yet, the current status of trust in society feels like a shattered chandelier that no one has swept for centuries. ‘We move at the speed of trust,’ Adrienne Marie Brown, author, and mistress of pleasure and magic includes as part of the principles of Emergent Strategy. We do, and it shows. Despite 150 years since Juneteenth in the US and the abolishment of the slave trade (though we know this is far from the full truth for Black communities) and 500 years since the European colonization of Turtle Island and the meditated genocide of Indigenous communities - we are only scratching the surface of bare minimum acknowledgment. We have fashioned an entire culture of collaboration where the assumption is skepticism until proven trustworthy - bridging the gap with contracts, resumes, identification cards, testing, reporting metrics, and 5-point reviews. The only folks who get our unwavering trust are the deified and dead - which is a bit of a cop-out if you ask me.
I’m not suggesting a utopian view of implicit trust for all, because that can be hugely dangerous when wounding and power dynamics mix with biases, vulnerabilities, and expectations. And well, fake and manipulated news and media does not help. But, there is a great, grand, injustice in living with mistrust and the resulting mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual tax of constantly calculating if a person, system, or organization is willing to show up for your survival, humanity, needs, desires, and dreams. Over time, this way of being corrodes your nervous system, keeping you in a constant loop of fight or flight; always awaiting a fire to turn wild. Mistrust is merciless in comparison to trust, which can feel like a great emptying - of the wrestling thoughts, questions, concerns, and worst-case scenarios; a graceful fall onto a scented, silk pillow; a true frolic in a field of dandelions. When spiritual teachings counsel seekers to surrender - often what they are saying is ‘trust that it will all be okay.’ Not okay in the way you imagine or desire it, but okay in the way you need it for your natural, already in-motion, evolution. When you can start to see people as conscious beings having and figuring out the human experience, while equally flawed, weak, and scared, it can accelerate the process of surrender.
However, this equation changes when you are in survival mode, which mournfully is a regular state for so many people. Arguably, most people. This mode is typically the result of ongoing exposure to stressful environments and unprocessed trauma that keeps you stuck in a challenging past experience. In survival, you simply don’t have full capacity to make a sound trust calculation, which can unlock a tremendous amount of ongoing fear, hurt, anger, and inability to engage. For some, survival can trigger hyper-independence, and for others, leaning deep into community or dependency. When I think back to my parent’s reaction at the cottage, I wonder if they went into survival mode - even if that was not their material reality. I have spent the better part of my life in survival mode - even if that is not my material reality. The cost of mistrust has been extraordinarily high. If I had to sum up my healing odyssey in a single word - it would be to learn to trust. Slowly, I have been reforming my parasympathetic nervous system, growing an unwavering internal tree - who is a pillar of trust, being, and acceptance.
In a slack group that I am part of, people were sharing potential theories of how COVID-19 came to be early in the pandemic. When I dismissed these theories as fear-mongering, I was gently reminded by a friend who grew up in Iran that following the revolution in 1979, which led to the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and a largely authoritarian regime, many conspiracy theories were found to be true as part of a strategy to destabilize the region. As trust unraveled this year from inconsistencies in leadership and messaging, combined with a deluge of opinions and studies, and the stakes of health, wellness and survival heightened - we made trust calculations based on corroboration of scientific data, lived experiences, needs and feelings. We likely did the best we could. We all wanted to survive. In moments of disagreement or a difference of opinion, what we rightfully heard was ‘I can’t trust you to show up for my safety and survival,’ creating tears in relationships. Agreement, on the other hand, brought people closer, and cities, communities, and digital commons morphed into new geometries of connection.
‘This is the time to heal in America,’ Biden said in his victory speech a few weeks ago. Since American imperialism has ravaged us all, surely he was speaking to all of us. To heal, we have to rebuild, restory, and restore trust. ‘Trust the people, and they become trustworthy’ - another gem in Brown’s theory of social change, which is rooted in changing our relationships to shape the futures we want to live in. When I lived in India almost a decade ago, a country with no social service nets, ruthless disparity, political indignity, sometimes fragile infrastructure and where fighting for basic survival is the most common way of life - at the end of three years of program and policy development, my enduring question was, ‘how do you build trust at a societal level?’ Because, while things work in the absence of trust, driven by transactional survival, few things can thrive and flourish without a pantry of medications and distractions to tranquilize the fear and anxiety. Growing trust within a nation, community, and within oneself takes consistency, grace, revealing, listening, apologizing, and ultimately, letting go of the ways in which you individually and systemically reproduce oppressive control and power. It feels impossible to conceptualize restored trust in a time when the gap between people in power who benefit from mistrust and anxiety and people who suffer from the density of mistrust is practically a crater. All the media forces today - at the user-generated, bot farm, meme factory, and conglomerate level, are stretching our seams of trust. Yet, I firmly believe there is a type of moral and spiritual leadership that has yet to fully know and realize itself quietly rising in the margins. In one of my favorite podcasts, Call Your Girlfriend, Ann Friedman chats with Mariame Kaba, an activist and organizer focused on the abolition of the prison industrial complex, and the first person who introduced me to the practice at Allied Media Conference in 2018. When Kaba was asked what a post-police, post-prison community looks like, she flatly said, ‘that’s a great question, but my answer is, I have no idea.’ The reason she has no idea, she explains, is because it is a collective project, and she trusts that it will be built with many visions coming together in a world that has been completely restructured and the need for punishing institutions will cease to be needed.
The only way we can collectively restore trust is by centering all relationships, spaces, and projects with this purpose; holding the line of change and restoration. It will require us to recognize the cutting impact that mistrust is having on our capacity for personal and collective harmony. It will require us to come into awareness of the ways in which we all stumble into tribal ways of being - trusting those like us culturally, politically, and economically, and almost immediately distrusting difference. It will require us to set boundaries if our survival is being compromised and still trust in another’s truth and humanity. It will require us to grieve the ways our trust was severed without warning, and still accept that our trust will again be breached and rocked, but know that we can restore it if we so choose through hard conversations where accountability will be necessary. It will require us to acknowledge all the actions and potential harm that have led to others mistrusting us, and how that may feel shameful or regretful. It will require us to adopt a daily practice that works for and on you to slowly untangle and unlearn distrustful ways of being to become aware of the resolute trust already within you.
This is what we have signed up for in this moment and era of human history. Buckle in. Trust, and its peace, is what we get to have.
liberation now
By watching this interactive documentary*, ‘The Deeper They Bury Me,’ which shares audio clips from a conversation with Herman Wallace, who spent 40 years in a prison cell. He was the longest-serving solitary confinement prisoner on earth. In 1967, Herman was sentenced to 25 years in prison for an armed robbery, which he confessed and where no one was harmed - though, case severity never justifies brutality.
In 2003, artist, Jackie Sumell initiated a project with Herman to imagine his dream house. ‘What kind of house does a man who has lived in a 4-foot-9 cell his whole life dream of?’ she asked. Over a few years, she would render the house in his imagination. ‘I can only dream,’ he said.
Hearing his experience firsthand is haunting, and yet, his account of keeping a balanced mind despite solitary imprisonment - which for most lasts 22-24 hours - 24/7 surveillance, wicked intent, and the knowledge of your calculated, slow, demise is profound in its incomprehensibility. But it is real, very fucking real, and the only way we can dismantle carceral logic is if we sit in and with the discomfort of human cruelty.
In 2013, three days after the judge overturned Herman’s sentence, he passed away from liver cancer, surrounded by his family.
obsessed with
Finale: Bouquet, by artist Nike Savvas and installed at the Te Papa’s Toi Art gallery. While the piece has a Yayoi Kusama aesthetic to it - there is something about precision and scale that slows my heartbeat. Savvas wanted to create a celebration that never ended. See the timelapse here.
210,000 pieces of recycled plastic, 6000 strands, 816 hours to install, 6 people.
This newsletter is inspired by this TikTok by @rea.earth, which like this newsletter, is always best enjoyed when shared. Want to chat more about anything I have written? Respond to this email and let’s jam.