Power to the Personal

(Image of my Great Great Grandmother Leona of the Passamaquoddy)

I don’t feel we can ever be truly objective. We all come with our own ever-fluxing understandings of the world. Objectivity is the shadow of varying "schools of knowing" like anthropology where other peoples stories are narrated for them, rather than those very peoples telling their own stories.

Objectivity stems from omniscience. The idea that we can somehow know and understand everything by being distant from it. As if we aren’t impacted by what we see, hear, feel, love, fear... Objectivity is an attempt at evading one’s porosity.

What’s implied is that our personal experiences aren’t “trustworthy” and are tainted by irrational underpinnings.

The personal reminds us that life isn’t neat and tidy. It breaks apart cultural dualisms, and in the cracking open sprouts towering multiplicities whose root systems entangle.

The personal asks of us more presence and attention. It requires a rigorous kind of listening from our hearts, and a fierce kind of in-dwelling where ones truth is capable of meeting another’s truth fully without the governing agenda of approval. Of rightness or wrongness.

Intersectional crossroads of contradiction invite us into paradox-ing terrain where certainties and over-simplifications start to collapse under the weight of refusing to settle for well-worn pathways of approach and understanding.

It is a radical act to let oneself sit in the not-knowing, and be shaped by its permeating presence. It is a rebellion whose livelihood has little to do with resistance, and more to do with turning away from empirical demands and spiraling out toward other horizons of enlivening possibilities. It’s an invitation to let our differences weave us together into a tapestry of yet-to-be-known wonder where we walk the edges of honesty and responsibility as a collective in service to our shared emergent becomings.