What Would Healing Look Like? (Part 1) with Belvie Rooks

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener

Today, I’m excited to bring in my guest, Belvie Rooks, as someone who has influenced my life greatly. We met at a gathering of social and environmental activists, about 12 years ago, and became friends.  She’s has a long life story, working as a writer and activist, and mentor to young people. She’s been working in social justice and in the environmental field for a long time.

In our conversation today, we exploring having the eyes to see things that others don’t see, and considering how we see ourselves. We explore mentoring relationships between older and younger generations, how we relate with our ancestors, and the past traumas and troubles that came before us. Having the eyes to see those and think about where healing is needed is a key part of what can heal and change. Belvie’s work aims to understand the past, to heal that in the present so that we can create a different future. So with that, I’m going to welcome Belvie Rooks today, and I’m so glad you could be here Belvie.

Belvie Rooks

It’s an honor and a pleasure and a privilege. And I’m always so excited to be in dialogue and conversation with you. We spend hours.

Beth Tener

So this is a continuation. Let’s talk first about where we met. We were both invited to be part of a gathering hosted by an organization called the Center for Whole Communities. And we were at some farm on a hillside in Vermont in a barn or a yurt.

Belvie Rooks

I saw Ginny McGinn recently, who was the executive director, and whose vision it was to bring people together who were trying to create a socially just future, but were just wearing themselves out and not prioritizing space, and downtime. They provided the invitation and the place at a very beautiful Vermont farm. I was struck by was the diversity of the group. I remember there are a couple of foundation program people, academics.

Our first session was where you and I connected. We were in a large circle went around and saying a short introduction. I was sitting to your left and you started to speak. I was coming from Oakland, California and had been doing a lot of work with several organizations that were supporting young African American men who were struggling. I was working with Dedan, my husband and beloved, to be  supportive of young people who were having these issues and trying to support the executive directors of the programs, who were also young people. There were drive by shootings and suicides, and they are just trying to deal with all of this.

When you introduced yourself to, you talked about what your life had been, and working for a corporation, being a strategic thinker, for organizations. You talked about what that meant. And as I listened to you, I started to understand how strategically focused we have to be. In these organizations, if we’re talking about longevity and being productive. As you spoke about your work, I got a sense of, oh, my gosh, this is what goes into creating sustainable organizations.

And then you brought us to the present context of why you were. You had been thinking a lot about the wealth of the corporations that you worked for, and how wealthy the program and executive director people became. You said it raised for you a question: We can be rich. But what would it mean to have a rich life?

Beth Tener

Yeah, that was a big question for me. It really changed my life, that question.

Belvie Rooks

You said that in response to that question, you had gone then in search of applying your skills to community organizations, to city governments, and an effort to understand what does a rich life mean and look like?

That question just struck me to my absolute core, because suddenly, I’m sitting with someone who actually has accomplished a lot of things that most people in the culture are aspiring to do. You had seen that landscape and then you have this question. it was such an emotionally impacting moment for me.

I couldn’t introduce myself. First, I spoke to you, I just said, “you know, I’m sitting here and I was tearful. I’m thinking about what you just said, and the kinds of resources that organizations and corporations have, and the ways in which they’re able to strategically think about allocation and sustainability. And at that point, I had gotten emotional because I work in a community, with people doing this organization work with none of those resources, with nobody to help them. I was really tearful.

And when I finished, you said, I’d be happy to come anytime to Oakland, California and offer whatever support I can. And that just touched me even more deeply. From that point on, we just have a lot going each

Beth Tener

I had been working in the corporate world, consulting and helping these companies. I had started to understand this scale of what’s happening to the earth and went to a lot of conferences with visionaries who were saying: what do we really need to be doing here? I remember I was walking in the woods. And that question just dropped in: What does it mean to have a rich life. I was not having rich life because my lifestyle in that work was so unrooted, as I’ve talked about before.

I think you and I also connected at that retreat on the big questions, like what are the good questions, We continue to play with that theme and find ways to connect. You call me up and say, Hey, I’m going to be at this amazing conference. You want to meet me there?

I’ve followed you to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and we were at the Parliament of World Religions a couple of years ago.

Belvie Rooks

One of the things that struck me when I read Angeles Arrian Living in Gratitude was her reflection about the power of a question. I will read it:

Contemplative practice of any kind. Wuestions, provoke inquiry, reflections and conscious awareness of what we are learning, or what is being revealed to us about our current inner and outer work.

That has been such a powerful presence in my efforts at understanding questions.

Beth Tener

Belvie, I know recently, you’ve been reflecting on some events of your life and your younger years. You had a chance to meet Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. How did it affect you as a young person?

Belvie Rooks

As a 16 year old, at that point, I didn’t really know who Dr. King was. I lived in San Francisco and the Quakers there introduced a new program dealing with young people. I was invited to a weekend retreat, a youth conference on civil liberties, in Sylmar, California. We were to meet this young minister from Memphis. On the bus down, one of the other people on the bus, was Joan Baez, which I didn’t know at the time, because she was 17 year old teenager. At the back of the bus we were all hanging out for a couple of hours. We sang.

We only understood who she was when they introduced Dr. King. They said before that we would like to invite Joan out to sing. She came out and sang until the The 12th of Never, and we were all jumping up and down. She’d been on our bus. We were just so excited. We realized we were watching history, because this moment was the first time that Dr. King and Joan Baez met  – at this youth conference, where nobody knew his name.

He had just gotten his PhD three years earlier. He was 29 years old. The power of it, the impact had to do with the fact that he was young, only 10 years or 12 years older than we were. I recall him talking about the struggle in the South and what was happening. He spoke so powerfully about was happening to young people, and that you we could not be in an integrated situation in the South, as we were sitting in California. For us, that was pretty shocking. He was not a well-known figure at that time, I had a little more information, as an African American, because I have relatives in the South. I knew something was happening.

What really just broke our hearts open was when he said, very passionately, how happy he was to know us and how important our voices were. The most important thing he said was that he knew that he could trust us, and that he could trust us to love a better world into existence.

And when he sat down, there 400 young people at this conference, we were on our feet. We were yelling, clapping, we were crying. We wanted him to know that, yes, we were trustworthy. That’s a very defining moment for me.

Beth Tener

In that , that eyes to invite you to see that and to see yourselves as having that role.

Belvie Rooks

So 10 years later, a mere 10 years later, most people forget that Dr. King was killed when he was 39. All that he had done to change in American history, you think he’s an elder? Ten years after we met him and cried and clapped and became more consciously focused on what was happening on in the world and what was happening in the south and what was happening in our communities, because he just talked about the relatedness of things at all those different levels.

Beth Tener

That’s such a beautiful framing. I also have a family connection with him. A defining part for me is my grandfather.was a Methodist minister who was very involved in civil rights and labor rights. I’ve always heard the story growing up, he was at the mall for the I Have a Dream speech. He was there. So in my own path has also always been this sort of way of defining, that that was part of my lineage is he was on the mall and heard that speech. It’s these luminous voices that sort of like call us forward to a higher vision of ourselves. It feels like that was like an activation for your whole life, right?

Belvie Rooks

Yes, it was. It it introduced me to other young people, because there’s nothing like young people who found each other and a purpose. The Quakers didn’t know what quite what to do. We didn’t want to get on the bus. We didn’t want to leave each other. We were crying and holding each other. We found each other and now they’re trying to take us back home. We cried on the bus.

It was so amazing that they responded. They didn’t disband us, when we got back to when we got back to our respective communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. They formed a youth group. And we met monthly. Before we sat in circle, we did some community clean-up, we did something busy with your hands and do your hands that was a contribution.

Then after that, we sat in circle, and we listened to each other. And we talked I think that’s where I learned to listen deeply. The Quakers really, because so much of their spiritual orientation is silence. It was kind of hard as a teenager, but it also it turned out that it was okay to sit in silence after somebody spoke, with a broken heart. So I learned the quality of deep listening. And I learned that the safety, actually, which is amazing thing to learn as a teenager, that it was safe to be vulnerable. It was safe to speak our truth. It was safe to speak our fears. And we became like a little family.

I realized now what a profound and lasting impact. I also learn what it means to have adults have a commitment to the next generation and trying to create programs that would allow us to bridge where we were in our lives and where we would be heading with some knowledge of now.

Beth Tener

One thing I love in that story of what the Quaker hosts did for you: I think so often we create these gatherings, even the one you and I met at, and we bring people together and we can craft this profound experience. We get a great speaker in and get the kids together. And then we’re done. We don’t follow through and provide that ongoing container to take that coming together, back into your lives over time.

It is such a gift that they held that youth group together. They were responsive in offering that so that not only did you have that profound moment, but you were held in the safety of the group with the safety of the adults, as you were finding your way. That’s a really beautiful thing. I think we need to build in more of that.

Belvie Rooks

I think a part of my journey has incorporated a lot of that unconsciously. You know how you feel called, or drawn something? You’re not always clear, but in retrospect, I realized something very important was seeded in that moment in my own development, both personally and in terms of collectively finding my people.. Being given permission by adults to explore and to expand, and for them to hold the space for us to do that.

Beth Tener

I love that. There’s a lot of people that say “safe space” these days. “Let’s make a safe space.”  I was in this event that wasn’t going well. It was kind of going off the rails. And a woman of color said “I’m not feeling like this is a safe space right now.” And then this white guy said, who was a host said, “ well, I just want to tell everyone this is a safe space.”

Have you declared it so? I guess it is then. Thank you very much.

Belvie Rooks
Take my word!

Beth Tener

I’ve just declared it! What I can hear you all went through and the way it was held, you felt comfortable to open up. What you said was so special – to get that seeded early and to get to experience it in a way where it was something you could trust and come back to. So you know, in your body what that feels like.

Belvie Rooks

And going forward, as I reflect on this conversation, I knew how to identify it in the adults who I came in contact with.

Beth Tener

Was it how they saw you or how they can hold the space?

Belvie Rooks

I began with how they saw me, because they listened respectfully.

In the example that you gave, part of what it brought up to me was, in the space, there would not have been “well, you just kind of need to catch up and get with the program because this is safe space.”

Somehow the adults who had chosen this as a path managed to create the space where we knew it was safe. I was in high school then. What I later found was I had an intuitive understanding of what trust looked like and felt like.

That’s part of what Don and I tried to create. But if you’ve not seen it and experienced it, I realized that in this moment and in this conversation, if you don’t know you don’t know

Beth Tener

We’re in a society where, with all the personal, family, historic traumas, there are many people who never got safe, trusting relationship with a parent, safe trusting relationships in their school environments or other things. So we have a lot of people who just didn’t get  – what you have was special.

Belvie Rooks

So that encounter with Dr. King had a very rippling profoundly rippling impact in my life.

Beth Tener

I’m passionate the earth, and the how we turn the tide on restoring kinship with Earth, and recognize just how incredible the Earth is. In the environmental field, there’s a way of seeing the Earth as the victim and I, Beth Tener, I’m going to save the Earth! One of the things I was grateful to discover is what’s called The Universe Story. This is another area I want to ask you about.

Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry took the idea of a cosmology, of who we are, where we came from. And they said, we have so much science. If you take in what science tells us about 14 billion years of evolution of the universe, 4.5 billion years of this earth and how life self organizes and recognize that we’re a part of that. We are a small part in a much bigger story. They told that story as a myth. That  changed and re-energized me. I feel like I’m working as part of this big story, not just, “I’m here to save it.” That was one of the shifts with the Universe Story for me.

I remember you took that into your work with young people in Los Angeles. How did you bring that part of that Universe Story into that?

Belvie Rooks

To be honest, it was a dark night of the soul for me. I found Thomas Berry in the midst of my own despair about what was happening in the country with young people. In Los Angeles, every time I would hear about a drive by shooting or murder, it just broke my heart. This was in the early 80s. I went into a deep state of depression about each death.

So I went to the bookstore to try and find something to read, so I could get out of bed.  Whichever bookstore I went to, I reached out for one book, and another book fell on my head. I was so annoyed.

I looked at the book I had reached for. That wasn’t the book for me. I picked up the book that had fallen on my head, and was getting ready to put it back. It was Natural Grace, by Matthew Fox and Sheldrake. So I ended up taking the book that fell on my head.

I said the universe really introduced me to the a cosmological journey, when the book I didn’t want fell on my head!

With the Universe Story, I started to get a bigger vision of wholeness, and oneness, and who we were. And then came in I encountered Edgar Mitchell and his work. He was the six man to walk on the moon. He had such a profoundly life-altering experience coming back to Earth from space. He thought he had had a nervous breakdown, because suddenly, he broke into tears, looking at the small blue planet, in the depth of dark space. And that was home – that was all that he knew. And in that moment, he was not the NASA scientist, he didn’t know what had happened to him. He broke into tears because he looked beneath, that small blue planet with which was mostly water, and the white, and it was just so beautiful. He understood, for the first time, that the consciousness of what he operated, which was separation, that there is only one, there’s one Earth, there’s one.

I was deeply moved by that as well. And then I decided, well, these young men killing each other, in Los Angeles and drive-by shootings are really fighting over who’s going to control the block. But if they didn’t know, and nobody had ever told them, and made a point of exposing them and introducing the fact, the block is where our house is, the universe is our home. Reading that, I started to see a connection between that and my own despair.

For a period there, I just stayed up at night writing. And when I looked at what I had written, it was a curriculum for introducing young inner city people, particularly in a place like Los Angeles, what home was, and who they were really in the context of that whole. That got me the attention of the Earth Island Institute president that I talk to you and they said, We will underwrite to go to Los Angeles for the summer. I did it for two summers, because I wanted the second generation to be taught by the first generation. I wanted the people who had gone through it the first time to be teachers and co-facilitators with us again. It was really quite lovely.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters was so excited about it, that for the graduation, she wanted for them to celebrate I said, “the celebration for these young people would be to have a limousine drive up to their house, pick them up like they were superstars and celebrities, and take them somewhere and then bring them back home so that everybody in the community could see that. Since they were only accustomed to seeing people in limousines who, were – however, they got their money… Here, being conscious, could get you a ride from a Congresswoman.

Beth Tener

I feel like all of us can use this reframe of who we really are. I’m curious, how did the young people change who went through it? What did you see?

Belvie Rooks

They did their own project at the end. Some were about water and what was happening to the bay. They looked at bioregion, because I had to tell them in the terms of wholeness: Everybody in this community looks like you predominantly African American. But when we think about bio region, the

the principal river here, connects people that don’t happen to look like each other. They got a larger view.

One of the projects was to figure out what was happening to the bay and how that was being polluted and was impacting everyone. I was just really struck by their enthusiasm, and their enthusiasm to teach the following year. It launched several of them, not so much into careers, as much as a consciousness, that they tried to pass on.

Beth Tener

The work of Joanna Macy is another place we connect. She’s an ecological writer and activist. And there’s a lot in my journey around redefining yourself from the small self to the, I think she called it, the ecological self, right. She would teach these workshops called Despair and Empowerment for social activists. She has a lot of books out, such as Active Hope.

The heart of it was: when you realize you are a part of a living web of life, that is also where we draw strength. And you start to say: How does life work and I’m part of life and that life is flowing through me. It’s a different frame that can get us out of the very narrow, “us vs. them”. I feel like we get so caught up in the frames of problems and divisions.  Like the Edgar Mitchell story, if we take that view of the whole, could we come together around the land, as opposed to my identity versus your identity, or all the history? Could restoring the health of the rivers or the waters be the common thing we could all focus on, and we’re all human beings within the web of life, that’s a very different, inspirational way to be orienting our lives, than fighting over this block.

Belvie Rooks

Because the block is like, orientating life around race. In the larger picture, that’s not the most important thing and trying to defend your block in South Central Los Angeles, is a very narrow understanding of who you are and what the possibilities are. But I also feel as clear as that kind of misunderstanding was and is for young people, There’s a larger parallel to that, as we understand ourselves, as women only as men only, that’s the block. That’s the same consciousness of the block.

That’s Edgar Mitchell’s breakthrough and Thomas Berry in the Universe Story, breaks out of…it’sthe same counterpart that I was trying to deal with the block, with the young people.

Beth Tener

I agree. I was also thinking, it’s identity, but it’s also: me and my job and my family’s well-being, and all these very narrow causes or needs that we focus on. What I love in taking this story of how the universe evolved, is the sense of perspective and time that shifts. There’s this amazing graphic, I’ll put a link to in the show notes called the Tree of Life, and like humans are very late to the indigenous people know this, what, like, 300,000 years. I did this exercise where I just looked around the landscape around my house. I saw white pine trees and looked up how old that species is. It’s 165 million years old. And this rock in front of my house. It’s like 500 million years old, this very rock. And I’ve been here 50 some years – like who am I to think the whole world needs to revolve around me? Get some perspective!

Belvie Rooks

It means that we have to broaden the dialogue. The indigenous native people have been in North and South America for 10,000 years, at least. Our materialist kind of evolution and tools – the idea that “we have the answer, because we have so much technology. We created it because we were so smart, and we don’t really need to listen to these people.” The feeling of superiority… but the opportunity in all this, and that’s what I feel like Dr. King seeded for me, is “I know that I can trust you” And when I remember that room, that room held people who look like me, and they help people like you, and people that didn’t look like either one of us.

Beth Tener

In the remaining time in our podcast, I invite Belvie to tell a story that was one of the ones that really moved me when we first met. It became a central story in her life and one that she’s told many places and inspired many people. We only had time to get to the core of it in this episode. In Part 2 of this podcast, she’ll tell another section of the story. And we’ll also have a guest or two, who will share were the seeds of the question in this really profound experience she and her partner, beloved Dedan had, and all the seeds that emerged from this story.

By way of background, later in life, she was living in Northern California, and she was on a radio program with some colleagues, sharing the story you heard about the Universe Story and work with young people in LA. Dedan Gills was living in LA in an eco-village. He had grown up in the neighborhoods, in the kind of life with the young people, she was talking about. He was totally inspired by her work, and eventually the two met at a conference. They fell in love. They decided to get married and chose to get married in Ghana in West Africa. Here is Belvie picking up the story from that point.

Belvie Rooks

We decided to get married in 2007. I had traveled extensively in Africa and I felt like because we had children, grandchildren, we didn’t want to get married here, we were going to elope. So we decided to elope to Ghana, because Ghana was the first African nation to gain its independence from British colonial rule. We went to Ghana and got married. We wanted to go on our honeymoon. We also decided that two or three days after our marriage, we wanted to visit the slave dungeon. And all of our friends said, you’re going to slave dungeon for your honeymoon?

Both of us said, actually, what we’re doing is going to honor the fact that everybody that looks like us, in the part of the world we call the new world, had some relative who had passed through one of these slave dungeons, hundreds of years ago. We are in the new world because we had a long ago ancestor go through that Door of No Return. This ws not to celebrate our honeymoon, but to really honor them and say thank you.

What we discovered was that being there was just emotionally overwhelming. We learned that at this very spot on the Cape Coast in Ghana, the dead and dying African people who were tossed overboard, there were so many that it changed the shark migration pattern.

Beth Tener

The blood in the water and the bodies?

Belvie Rooks

I glanced at the ocean a few feet below. It was hard to process the fact that for over 300 years without interruption, millions of African men, women and children had begun a long journey into slavery from this very spot. And something just broke inside. Something just fell apart. I cried and I went back to where we were staying and I couldn’t stop crying. I was in bed for a couple of days.

And Dedan came to me the next day and he was very gentle. He said, “What is it that is so hard? You’re suffering, What is causing such suffering?” And I basically said to him,

“Well, the suffering is the names of the people passing through the Door of No Return have all been erased from our historical memory. The names of the mothers and fathers and the sisters and the brothers and the elders and the weavers and pottery have all been erased.

And here we stand in this dungeon and we can read when the slave ship arrived, when it left, when it departed, when it arrived in the Caribbean, when it arrived in Rhode Island. We know everything except the names of the people and that’s what hurts so. The erasure.

He knelt down by the bed and he took my hand. He said, “I need you to look at me if you can, if you will.”

In order to see him, I had to dry my eyes. He looked at me and said, “What would healing look like?” 

You know, Beth, how when you’re in the wound, I was like, healing? I mean, I was annoyed. I was falling apart, crying, and he’s asking me about what would healing look like? But the important thing about that, was that he planted a seed. I remembered that the African elders had said to us, “when you go into those slave dungeons, one of the first things you should do when you come out, is ritually wash your feet in the nearest body of water. Because you do not want to walk with all of that sorrow.”

Early the next morning, I woke up told Dedan what I was going to walk down by the ocean to do that. And he said, I’ll stay up here. So he stayed up I went down and I was crying and ritually trying to get all of this sorrow for my feet. As I was rubbing, I kept hearing, plant a tree, plant a tree.

I realized, that plant a tree was the refrain from one of my friend Alice Walker’s poems, called Torture. “when they torture your mother,  plant a tree, when they torture your father, plant a tree, when they torture …” Now, I always thought that that was a poem about hopelessness. But in that moment, on the beach, I realized it was a poem about hope, In the midst of disaster and heartbreak plant a tree, because a tree is about the future. It lives a long life and it lives well beyond.

I realized that thing that had been hurting, so was what do I do with all of this death and murder and mayhem? Do ceremonial planting of trees in their name.

Beth Tener

That was the answer to that question of What would healing look like?

Belvie Rooks

It was quite extraordinary because, here he had asked the question, I hadn’t connected the dots. Performing the ritual emerged, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and lost and maimed and murdered. Plant a tree ceremonially for all those people and it will honor them and help heal our collective home.

Beth Tener

So the question, what would the healing look like? As you’re honoring my question of what might a rich life look like? It’s like that question about healing, for me, and for many others who’ve heard this story, I think, has really been that seed question right? To so much. The gentleness and care he had in that moment for you in such despair, to be able to bring that in, I think that is a gentle, loving part of that story. Then to see how it found its own answer. I hope it’s one those listening to this podcast can also take as we all enter moments of despair about different events unfolding in our times: What might healing look like here?

Belvie Rooks

It’s so true. I feel for me, the universe kind of blessed me/us, in trying to help find an answer to that question. We were invited in 2011 to plant trees at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Dr. King’s march from Selma and Montgomery is such a historic one. Your audience can look it up. It was where John Lewis was badly beaten, and it was a turning point in the civil rights movement, because the violence on that bridge of keeping people from marching was so violent and vicious that people came from around the world. People came to join the second effort to cross. It was really an international gathering. And so it was an honor to be invited to plant trees there. And so we did.

I woke up the next morning, in my mind was a question “What about the Confederate soldier?” And I said, “I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear that.”

That question popped into my head and I decided I needed to push back. I literally opened my mouth. And I said to nobody “I am going to pretend that I did not hear that.”

But the question came again, what about the Confederate soldier? You’re planting trees along the Underground Railroad for the black people that escaped from slavery. Then what about the Confederate soldier? So then I went into thinking about the Confederate soldier. If the Confederacy had won, I’d still be enslaved, we’d still be lynched and hung. And the response was, this is not about them. This is about you. This question is for you. What about the Confederate soldier?

And the second part of it that came to mind was:  “ If you are who you say you are trying to become,  then what about the Confederate soldier?” It was soft and easy, because you’re just trying. You not be there yet. If you’re not, it’s okay. There’s no judgment from the place of this question.

Well, I woke up and I sat with it. I decided I needed to go to visit. I knew there was a confederate cemetery in Selma. Selma was one of the last battle sites for the Civil War. So when Dedan woke up, I told him I was going to the Confederate cemetery. And he looked at me like I had lost my mind. And told him, this question is haunting me. He says, “ that’s your journey. It’s not mine.”

I took a taxi. The African American taxi driver when he got there said, I’ll just wait for you.”  I said, that’s okay. He left. And I was just kind of quivering because here I am, African American woman early in the morning in a Confederate cemetery I could be seen as being up to no good. I walked through and I looked, they have a big banner that says, “There’s glory in the grave. “

So people who died trying to keep me enslaved, just remember there is glory. We planted the longleaf pine tree at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and we had a couple leftover. I took one of them with me when I went to the cemetery. I walked and I walked. I was reading when people were born and when people died. At one point, I realized, when I calculated the birth and the death, I was standing at the gravesite of a 17 year old, a 17 year old child. Whatever I thought of Confederate soldiers they were not this.

I stood there thinking about this child, who had given his life to keep me enslaved. My heart just broke open in empathy, for him. It was the first time anything related to the Confederacy related to me, as an adult, as a parent.

That is where I chose to place longleaf pine. People could come and plant it. I had cousins and relatives who were 17 or 18. I had relatives who were officers in Vietnam. I had young relatives who had lied about their age to go to Vietnam to kill, maim, and injure Vietnamese people.

My relatives who went didn’t see the Vietnamese as humans. And this was dropped bomb. Yeah. So I realized in that moment, in both these stories, that they were both equally innocent and both equally guilty. My heart broke open.

Beth Tener

That story of what will healing look like? The question is bigger than you. That’s what we find with these really powerful questions. When we sit with them, we don’t know where they will take us. Clearly, in that part of your story, you didn’t, you never imagined it would take you there. Yet, it’s almost like healing itself had its own answer it needed you to be part of.

The vision that came out of your story in Ghana with Dedan that you worked on through the last few  years of his life. He died of cancer several years ago. You created an organization called Growing a Global Heart. It’s such a beautiful way to weave together a lot of what we’ve talked about today. What does it mean to actually grow a global heart, not just your heart, your identity and your story? from your identity and your people, but a global heart, that we’re all a part of, that has to include all the stories somehow in their guilt and innocence?

Belvie Rooks

That was an unexpected revelation in a Confederate cemetery. And then it got to be funny, because we had selected the tree, the breathes for everybody, but I was saying, just breathe for the black people who escaped, the hell with the Confederate soldier. Dedan has a poem about that. The tree doesn’t say, you can’t breathe my oxygen because you’re a Republican. He points out the ridiculousness of the consciousness that we had selected based on Alice’s poem, we had selected the tree, which breathes for the whole.

I put it into my little narrow box, my drive by shooting box, of separation. But this is not for the Confederate soldier. So we do have to laugh.

Beth Tener

We all have to join Edgar up there to see the whole. It’s a continual invitation to pull back.

Belvie, we’re coming to the end of our time. Thank you so much for sharing your hearts and your history and your stories. It’s been a pleasure.

Belvie Rooks

I can never thank you enough. It has been a mutual journey, always with you as a sister, a friend. Thank you, teacher.

 Beth Tener

If you’d like to learn more today, please go to kinshiphub.net, the podcast pag, and you’ll find lots of resources.