PANDA

On Facebook someone created a poster with a Panda Bear holding two pistols in his hand. The caption read: "Destroy racism. Be like a panda; he's black, he's white, he's Asian." To which I responded thus:

Destroy racism? The absurdity of the proposal is in the word. Be like a panda he's black, he's white, he's Asian? What lives within a panda that can be used in the spiritual work of change and shifting? The panda was hopeless before the onslaught of its greatest enemy: the thinking and non-relationship with Life embodied by the European tribes, and their fundamental paradigms that fueled conquest around the globe and continues to justify every act of desecration upon the Earth, our Mother. The very people that orchestrated his demise prance about squealing about how cute he is, and he can only live safely in a zoo!

Panda was not the Medicine I used to overcome my problems with whites. Panda has to play games to survive in the zoo, and make white people feel good about themselves. That is one of the survival tools Blacks use to survive in the world. It isn't spoken aloud. It just is a part of our makeup. Panda Medicine did not know how to deal with my pain. Panda deals with his loss of freedom and habitat suitable to him. But to learn how to do ceremony with whites, to see them without hate, to know how to listen with an open heart in sacred circles to their heart songs, and from the heart call them my relatives was hard work for me, and the first to show me how to do the work were two white women, and one white man many years ago!

It is work; deep dark probing work that removes racism from the center of one's being. If we want panda to be panda and if we want to learn from the panda restore his land and all the animals and the green, and sky he needs to live without us. Learning how to become a Bear is done humbly through relationship with more than one living thing. Learning how to love one's oppressor is to learn how to love in the deepest sense of the word, and the word; the operative word is Power. Power brings in Clarity and Clarity ushers in Power. These relationships mirror what we need between people and the monumental divide created by worldviews, and the different relationships people hold within the spot of land of their Ancestors.

The frustration of reconciliation work for facilitators is in the fears, the deep crippling fears living within whites, for the most part, terrified by their history and its multiple implications. These things keep them from participation in the spiritual work at every level. Dorothy Height said at Coretta Scott King's funeral, "The Black man needs the White man to help him with his fears and the White man needs the Black man to help him with his guilt!" The how to make this happen I have learned, but in this setting, online, it is impossible to translate, to teach, to feel. This is my gift to you. AHO! - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories