integrity

/inˈteɡrədē/ noun: the state of being whole and undivided

Intricate tree trunk carvings left by bark beetles; caressed by my friends’ hands

Dear friend,

A few weeks ago I took a long walk through a forrest preserve on the edge of Chicago with some friends. We came across multiple trees with a missing outer layer of bark whose exposed trunks were tattooed with intricately carved swirls, lines, and patterns. The markings are made by bark beetles and their larvae who use the tree as a nesting place in the winter before re-emerging in the Spring. In their wake, the tree retains a physical record of their presence.

These carvings have stayed with me for the last few weeks. They are a beautiful web capturing our cross-species contradictions: the tree, sick and weak, left sicker and weaker; the beetle, singularly focused on the protection of its offspring; me, enjoying what looks unmistakably like art.

Our survival and suffering and awe are all wound up in the other.

Back in September my friend invited me to view a Black Panther archive in a Chicago church-turned-art center where Black Panther Party members famously met and organized. Our eyes toggled between the stunning 19th-century stained glass windows all around us, and the displayed black-and-white photos of iconic leaders like Fred Hampton standing in the same stained glass rooms, only a few decades earlier. Afterward, inspired by what we’d witnessed, we shared falafel and hummus at a nearby restaurant and created our own ephemeral piece of art: a heartfelt conversation about integrity and friendship.

We started discussing the complex relationships between the writer-activists June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich over their political views about Zionism and Palestinian liberation. In the essay “Moving Toward Life,” scholar Marina Magloire studies archival letters as a way to understand the tension Jordan faced holding tight her pro-Palestinian ethic and the fierce love she had for both of her friends.

In an unpublished letter addressing the Zionist politics of her peers, Jordan writes:

“I claim responsibility for the Israeli crimes against humanity because I am an American and American monies made these atrocities possible. I claim responsibility for Sabra and Shatilah [sic] because, clearly, I have not done enough to halt heinous episodes of holocaust and genocide around the globe. I accept this responsibility and I work for the day when I may help to save any one other life, in fact.”

Every time I read those words I feel emotion well up in me. Magloire describes this proclamation of responsibility as a way Jordan models for her friends and peers what it looks like to be accountability—“that being part of an ethnonationalist state, whether born or chosen, carries the obligation to critique its violence.”

What I love about this moment is Jordan allowing her pain and fury to provoke a response that comes from a deeply rooted desire for personal integrity and genuine relationship. She's not trying to prove she’s right, she knows she’s right and wants to move together with those she loves and works alongside, toward justice. The friendships between Lorde, Jordan and Rich don’t come together in some kind of perfect harmony. They provoke crushing feelings of betrayal and distrust, disappointment and discouragement. Still, the current of love, although dormant for long stretches of time, moves with quiet strength.

How do we approach moments when the actions of others feel so impossibly “other,” as a threshold to step into deeper relationship? To really challenge our understanding of the word “collective” in collective liberation? To feel as equally accountable to the suffering of people oceans away from us as we do to the political maturation and spiritual healing of our neighbors?

Sitting in that restaurant, my friend and I reveled in the miracle of friendship and the imperative of cultivating our own integrity. In that moment it felt as though we were—learning from these tenuous moments of the past. Our reflections on the power of devoted love, were also prayers over our own friendship(s). Prayers that in the moments when conflict and fear seek to break us apart, we me might have the courage and conviction to not abandon each other or our values.

Integrity has many definitions. It is both a state of being and an action. It is a pledge we make not to a nationstate or an institution, but to ourselves and others. On a global scale and in all facets of our lives, we’re relentlessly asked commanded to warp our definition of integrity until we no longer know what the concept means. We only know the sensation in our body when we ally ourselves with propaganda that makes us feel slightly less afraid—that offers a facade of safety or freedom.

I often think of a Q&A with one of my favorite thinkers and writers, Mia Birdsong where she challenges our modern, western understandings of freedom:

“My understanding of freedom continues to evolve, but it fundamentally rests on our interdependence and intrinsic need for connection and community. . . Freedom and friendship have the same etymological root, which means ‘beloved.’ Back in the day, freedom was understood as being with and in connection to your kin. When someone was enslaved, part of why they were not free was because they were being kept from their people . . . The disregard for human attachment and relationship, the practice of terrorizing people with the threat of separation, was part of what made enslaved people not free.

During harvest season in my community garden, produce is gathered and offered to the associated church’s food pantry. Around this time of year, the food pantry encourages gleaning: the process of gathering left over produce that’s already fallen to the ground or that’s growing abundantly on untended plots.

There are multiple biblical references to this practice including in the Book of Ruth where Ruth, an immigrant and widow, does this tedious labor to provide for herself and her mother-in-law, Naomi. I was so moved by the concept and my own experience of gleaning, that I reached for the one travel-sized bible I still have and re-read the story for the first time in years. I was touched again by the famous verse: “I will go where you go, I will live where you live; your people will be my people, your God will be my God.”

I imagine Ruth looking to her mother-in-law, a fellow widow who recently buried her two sons, and committing to struggle alongside her. Both women were considered socially insignificant and burdensome in their society, devalued by their nation states, and yet they find redemption by choosing to radically love each other. Together they kindle a kind of power that doesn’t exist if they’re apart.

Despite the many patriarchal, violent, exclusionary narratives religion exposed me to over the years, it’s these stories and that I still hold onto. Stories of the earth’s abundance, or love’s transformative power. The wayfinding. The making a way out of no way. The ability we have, every second of every day, to create or uncover in our words and actions something life-giving, even in the most dire of circumstances.

The arc of the universe still pulls everything lovely, frightening, and destructive together; undivided. Reminding us that we—and I mean we in the biggest sense of the word—are integral.

me trying to be upright and undivided

With love,

Jas