Excerpts from Chapter Six of From Elder to Ancestor – Nature Kinship for All Seasons of Life

Honoring Our Calling to Tend Community

THE GRATITUDE-COMMUNITY CONNECTION

…However we understand community and tending it, relationship is at the fore. We recognize that we all bring something unique to the group, which when exchanged, enriches the lives of those in the community. According to Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ph.D., our gifts and responsibilities are one, and thus “asking ‘What is our responsibility?’ is the same as asking ‘What is our gift?’ It is said that only humans have the capacity for gratitude. This is among our gifts.”[1]

If human persons have the greatest agency on the planet, [as we discussed in an earlier chapter] and are the only beings in form who have the capacity for gratitude, that also means we are the only alchemy bringing those forces together. Wyrdweaving through gratitude is our greatest magick and how we form community.

THE GRATITUDE-TRAUMA CONNECTION

In the early chapters of this book, we talked about trauma as the result of pain we are left alone in. We discussed that we don’t honor kinship with Nature in settler culture, the root of which is collective and personal unexpressed trauma compounded by harmful current cultural systems. The work of Odelya Gertel Kraybill, Ph.D., produced a model indicating a relationship between trauma, isolation, and gratitude, which I feel also informs our ability to carry our agency in community.

[At the time of this printing] Kraybill’s approach to trauma therapy is called the Six Stage Trauma Integration Roadmap… What she found while developing the ETI Roadmap was that after the traumatic event stage, a trigger lingers, resulting in “the chronic sense of danger [which] often activates a withdrawal response.”[2]  Such a response is a natural reaction when the nervous system feels threatened. We seek comfort, relaxation, and the chance to regulate. However, when the withdrawal response becomes an internalized, uncontrollable cycle, folx begin to cut themselves off from social engagement as the default way of being, which reinforces the loss of hope and the feelings of isolation and not being good enough. This dynamic eventually results in a sense of not belonging and arrests the brain function that allows us to experience gratitude. It suggests a dynamic in which we can’t help but feel alone.

This effect means that trauma literally interferes with our ability to bear the human gift of gratitude and thus with our ability to situate into community. This means that trauma directly interferes with our ability to use our gifts and agency as humans. While carrying unexpressed trauma, we can’t do what we were built to do here…

Yet our challenge in this dynamic is to realize that by collectively stalling in the withdrawal stance, we perpetuate the cycle of harm, and we must choose to move differently. We must choose awareness as a route through to action and integration, to a new path to Nature relationship. Our challenge in this trauma dynamic is, as Kraybill suggests, not to change how we feel or think about it but to observe it and feel it and allow that information to come forward through us, through our embodiment.

When we can give that space to an expression of pain, we can expand our capacity to feel joy, which permits us access to gratitude.[4] As well, it allows us to respond differently to the pressure to remain broken and begin the ancestral and community healing that’s needed. The relationship between trauma, gratitude, and community is Dream Team territory. In that lifelong work we find our worth to community and bear our gifts forward as fit elders.

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 115.

[2] [4] Odelya Gertel Kraybill, “The Neuroscience of Gratitude and Trauma,” Psychology Today, January 31, 2020.

#beyourcommunity

#youareyourecosystem