Embeddedness, Part Two — An Example
Gaza, Limits, and Showing Up.
The last piece that I wrote explored the term “embeddedness.” Specifically, I landed with an understanding of the term as:
- A commitment to place over time
- that also involves deeply relational aspects (“relationships good enough to trust”)
- and an accounting of interactions, human and beyond, akin to ecological understanding.
If you breeze through the writing, an obvious question rears its head: where does this leave the places and people and all things that lie outside of whatever boundary I seemingly think necessary to maintain for embeddedness?
Here’s a rough answer in progress:
Embeddedness, or meaningful relationship to place, doesn’t impose borders on care. But care, when flung far and haphazardly, isn’t always sufficient. Good intentions can lose their bearings, particularly when geographic, cultural, and experiential disconnect is involved. Grounded care and grounded intentions are needed. These seeds grow best when rooted in the depth and complexity of other places, nourished by knowledge and humility.
That’s wordy. The question deserves a real-world example.
I met him at a gathering at Wagbo Farm and Education Center. He was thoughtful and well-spoken, and we had a place in common — he worked for a coffee company in the same small city where I had learned to love coffee a decade ago; the same city we had moved to from rural Ohio a little over a decade before that. I didn’t dare ask where he was from. My inability to identify his accent would give away my ignorance. I had no idea what he was planning at that time, and I had no idea he’d still be at it now as I write this.
Pat’s workplace, one of Muskegon’s third places, carries with it conversation, perhaps more earnest than most, fueled with caffeine. From time to time, Pat would hear impassioned discussions. The idea that those talks only happen in large cities, hubs of progressive energy, is a myth. One of those shop conversations was sticking with Pat. People were asking hard questions about Palestine. And, as far as I know, unlike most of them, Pat had been there.
As people in the coffee shop discussed practical actions geared towards stopping the atrocities and bloodshed in Gaza, Pat felt grief.
Here in the U.S., we’re deeply embedded in systems, to an extent by choice, that have the power to transform labor and resources into profits. These same systems wield the ability to do the same with our care and good intentions. Expressions of just about anything shared on social media become fair game for advertising. Pat noticed an ad that began to appear on his feed — a plea to support the people of Palestine by purchasing a keffiyeh, a traditional Middle-Eastern head scarf that’s become a symbol of Palestinian solidarity. The details of distributing the profits to relevant organizations were muddled. Not long after seeing the ad, someone entered the coffee shop with one, and Pat could see just what he suspected — they were cheap, thin knockoffs, printed fabric rather than woven. You know where the conversation didn’t veer? There is only one original keffiyeh manufacturer left in Palestine, struggling to stay afloat, threatened by the flood of cheaper, mass-produced, Chinese imitations for more than a decade. Earnest efforts, coming from Muskegon, were being rerouted and reshaped into profits with unknown destinations.
Pat knew about the struggles of the keffiyeh factories because of his background, but the knowledge didn’t stave off any sense of powerlessness. The knowledge pulled him back in.
In 2013, after being detained and interrogated at the Jordanian border, Pat had been banned from entering Israel until 2018. He was off the heels of just under two years in Iraqi Kurdistan, engaging in international advocacy work, like non-violent direct action training, and using white privilege to question those in power and bring victims of violence to the table as part of a peacemaking team. He kept up with documentary photography on the side. He had made an additional commitment to stay in Palestine for two years. His time in the West Bank lasted four months. After a one-month hiatus from Al-Khalil/Hebron, Israel denied his return. I don’t know the details of the rejection of entry, but I do know the experience broke Pat, and he’s been looking for ways to make up for it since then.
Pat stepped across the ice at downtown Muskegon’s Hackley Park, walking beneath leafless maples, and found his place beneath the eighty-foot monument. All that preparation, and he hadn’t remembered gloves. Pat wasn’t eager to be there. When he had moved from Wales, this wasn’t what he had signed up for. He had applied for a green card, yes, but not to shoulder this kind of weight. Due to his immigration status, he has no right to vote. But regardless of his immigration status, he still feels responsible for challenging what is wrong. Fingers cold, he began to read aloud.
He started with context, offering approximate numbers of Gazans killed and injured since October 7th and making note of the additional deaths and injuries of Palestinians in the West Bank. He stated the purpose of the gathering — to repent for our complicity. He outlined the amount of tax dollars involved, the votes of our elected officials, and our government’s vetoes of international motions to condemn the genocide.
He then shared a hand-written liturgy asking for forgiveness, with a heavy lean on our responsibility.
After finishing, he began to read names. Respectfully and with care, Pat began to read the names and ages of 6,747 Gazans killed between October 7th and October 26th.
In that first hour, he read 611 of them. His voice broke multiple times. After each name, those present with him joined in: “Have mercy on us.” At that rate, Pat will be showing up and reading names every Sunday afternoon until sometime in April or until a lasting cease-fire is announced.
I had heard about Pat’s plan on Facebook. His post asked those moved not to “like” or share it but to join, support, stand with, and protect him. It asked for presence.
I considered it but couldn’t make it to Muskegon. I reached out to Pat for the words of the liturgy and the list of names. And as I slowly read the first few, something inside me shifted.
Reading the list is voluntary. And painful. It connects me, in a small but not trivial manner, with those suffering far away. More than any tally of numbers, considering the names, lives, and stories represented on the list clarifies the difficult connection between myself and those outside of where I live.
Pat sees connections between the present conflict and America’s lock-step relationship with capitalism and the wealth and comfort that we don’t want to give up. He doesn’t see any way out of this. He does not expect that his commitment to show up weekly will shift things meaningfully. He expects the situation to get worse more likely, and that’s part of why he’s doing this — as penance for his lack of hope. It’s a practice rooted in unknowing, but still showing up.
I don’t see Pat’s example as an indication of the absence of hope. I see internal work shaping the outer life, informing small, local actions that shape the wider world. I see Pat answering the easy questions from the last essay: do we care for those outside of our places, and do they matter? Yes. And I see Pat offering an answer to the more difficult one, too: what does that care look like?
It looks vulnerable and informed, consistent and accountable, lamenting and voluntary. It’s bound by place, time, and our limits as humans, and it looks like the rended human heart acknowledging its role and complicity in a broken world. It’s the medicine of humility and honest assessment. It looks like questioning more deeply how we move in this world with whatever tools, skills, circumstances, and limitations are at hand. Embeddedness is not an either/or, yes/no, stayed in a single place/didn’t stay sort of thing. There’s no membership, no badge, no confirmation card.
It’s the woven answer to a short question: what does it look like to live here in a way that requires less destruction elsewhere?
In the tumult of all things, I don’t see clear, simple, universal answers that amount to solutions. I see plenty of improvements and positive steps and forms of good work. What those amount to, I really don’t know. I don’t see the way out, but I do see ways we can show up.
