Aloha Beloveds: Mahalo for inviting us into your Circle of Light.
I’m sending some poems and prompts for you as you prepare to do “Culture in a Bag” with each other. The purpose of this practice is to show and tell the story of your cultural Backgrounds and Values as a way of observing the cultural richness of our community as well as its complexities and Beauty.
1. Read the poem”Ceremony” by Leslie Marmon Silko; it describes the power and importance of your stories and keeping the stories alive.
2. I have also attached three other poems which I hope will open your mind and heart. Remember to read all poems out loud; this will open the doorway to the vibration of sound and meaning.
3. Weatherball and Blue Sky Moment
4. Read Hope together.
5. Look for and find a Bag in which you would carry sacred objects. Why did you choose this bag?
6. Look for and find/see an object that represents the culture you were raised in.
7. Look for and find/see an object that represents the culture you now belong to.
8. Look for and find/see an object that represents the culture you want to be a part of.
9. Tell the story of your bag and 3 objects and your discoveries.
10. Sharing Order: […the list of participants has been omitted]
11. Deep Breath.
12. Closing the circle. Giving gratitude for something received or realized. pau hana.Gassho (BeOne),
Puanani Burgess
[May 1, 2023]
Culture in a Bag is one of my favorite practices we would do in Building the Beloved Community. It always comes towards the beginning of the cohort, so we can get to know each other better through the tangible artifacts of our family legacies, our idiosyncrasies, our lives lived, our dreams for the future.
Once Aunty Pua came to the circle and told us that she had been asked to help facilitate another cohort. She was trying to figure out what activit(ies) she would do with the group. It turned out that someone else she had never met was already going to facilitate Culture in a Bag, so she had to pick something different to offer. “Wow Aunty, we said. “Your curriculum is so well-known, people are using and sharing it even if they don’t know the origins.” She was a bit baffled but nonplussed. She wanted her work to be used and shared…and I suppose it was.
**
Grief is a friend who comes visiting unasked. Grief comes to you in quiet moments when you are sitting and reflecting to yourself, or looking for a recipe but you find a message from a departed beloved. Grief is sticky and temporal; grief is as mundane as a glass of water; it can be deep as an ocean or just a drop of remembrance. It’s part of life.
I like to write this blog because it helps me remember and share things I learned from and with Aunty Pua and beloved friends. Throughout last year, and a bit before, she often pondered and brainstormed how her work could live on and be shared. This is my attempt at helping to do so.
Sometimes when I’m going through my records to find something (e.g. directions for Culture in a Bag) I’ll come across a phrase or memory that strikes a chord, and grief enters the chat. We visit for a while, share a glass of water, maybe a swim and always some stories, and then we move on until the next memory comes along. And afterwards, I go and look for my sacred objects, I remember my stories, and head to the ceremony of the circle and wait for my beloveds to join the Zoom room.
[Aunty said to read the poem Ceremony]
Ceremony
By Leslie Marmon SilkoI will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren’t just for entertainment.
Don’t be fooled
They are all we have, you see,
All we have to fight off illness and death.
You don’t have anything
If you don’t have the stories.
Their evil is mighty
But it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
Let the stories be confused or forgotten
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.
In this circle of light and possibility, what would you choose to carry your sacred objects in? What would you put in your bag?
When we do this in-person, we share the story of each object and then pass them around the circle (if appropriate) so we can feel and hold each other’s humanity, feel the mana imbued in each thing, each story. And then, we place our objects in the middle of the circle, a collective telling and showing of what is sacred to us.
The same thing with stories, our collective defense, our way of knowing who we are in relation to the world around us. There are the stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell each other and hold together that make us who we are, and there are stories that are told about us. In Building Beloved Community, the stories we tell ourselves receive light this way. We share them with others in a place of vulnerability and safety. In that telling, each voice sharing in turn, a collective picture and empathy emerges as real as objects placed in the middle of the circle as we witness our common humanity. For me, it’s helped me to reflect on my own narratives, the ones that serve me and the ones I can shift. Our confidence in our collective story grows as we give voice to it together, over time. And that becomes a balm for the stories that are told about us, it gives us perspective on the whole story, it allows us to change and shift those narratives in relationship. It helps us reach the gates of hope, together.
[Aunty asked us to read the poem Hope.]
HOPE
Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope—not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is Gonna Be All Right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, of truth-telling about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking them what they see.
By Rev. Victoria Stafford from an article published in THE NATION, September 4, 2004
If you go for a swim, don’t get lost the big and little currents. Come back to us. If you’re thirsty, let’s have a glass of water together. If you’re sad, we’re here for you. If you are resisting, or defying, don’t forget to take a rest once in a while. We are as we are and as we could be, all at once. As you go about your world, your truth-telling and living, I ask you, what do you see?
[Deep Breath.]
Mahalo nui,
Dawn
Photo taken 5/12/25 at Ka‘ohao, O‘ahu