Celebrate the power of Partnership as Cherri Jacobs Pruitt interviews Belvie Rooks, writer, educator, human rights and social justice advocate, on how we can plant seeds of love and change the world.
Tomorrow’s Children: A Blueprint for Education in the 21st Century, Riane Eisler
The Power of Love: A Transformed Heart Changes the World, Dr. Fran Grace
I Give You the Springtime of My Heart, audio book with Belvie Rooks and Danny Glover
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Riane Eisler
The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that will Change Your Life, Riane Eisler
Center for Partnership Systems
Center for Partnership "Join Us" email link
Resilience, Rising Appalachia
Celebrate the power of Partnership as Cherri Jacobs Pruitt interviews Belvie Rooks, writer, educator, human rights and social justice advocate, on how we can plant seeds of love and change the world.
Tomorrow’s Children: A Blueprint for Education in the 21st Century, Riane Eisler
The Power of Love: A Transformed Heart Changes the World, Dr. Fran Grace
I Give You the Springtime of My Heart, audio book with Belvie Rooks and Danny Glover
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Riane Eisler
The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that will Change Your Life, Riane Eisler
Center for Partnership Systems
Center for Partnership "Join Us" email link
Resilience, Rising Appalachia
Welcome to the Power of Partnership podcast. My name is Rianne Eisler, I'm president of the Center for Partnership Systems and I want to introduce this wonderful podcast that brings you voices from the partnership movement worldwide People using partnership practices to build a world that values caring nature and shared prosperity. The Power of Partnership podcast is hosted by Cherry Jacobs-Pruitt, a health policy and partnership scholar, and today Cherry interviews Bellaby Brooks, writer, educator, human rights and social justice advocate and co-founder with her late husband Peter Giles of Glowing A Global Heart and she's lovely. And now on to the POP podcast showing how we can plan scenes of love and change the world.
Speaker 2:Welcome, Belvi, to the Power of Partnership podcast. I am so excited and honored to be visiting with you today.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thank you, thank you. It is so mutual. I have such love and respect for Rianne and thank you so much for this opportunity. I would love for you to share a bit with our listeners about the influence that Rianne Eisler's work has had on you and maybe share a little bit about how you first became exposed to Rianne Eisler's work. Well, this is very interesting because it does require a context, because when I learned that youth violence in Los Angeles which is I had relatives who lived there it had had in one year the highest number of murders and killings of any, even more than I think that, than whatever war we were in. So I developed a curriculum coming out of my sadness around that kind of reality. And then I felt like we couldn't blame young people because they were killing each other over who's going to control a block, because they were killing each other over who's going to control a block. Adults we have wars over who's going to also control territory, but in this instance what I was really feeling the need to have them understand, was that the block was where they lived, was that the block was where they lived, the universe was the larger community that we all inhabited. Fast forward. Much of my work has been at the level of education and consciousness shifting. I had, at that point, been invited to join the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded by Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person, sixth man, to walk on the moon. And I was reading his book and he talks about having this profound insight as he was returning from space when he looked at that beautiful blue planet beautiful blue planet just in the context of the vastness of the space. And he said to me in conversation once and it was not something he could say to NASA that he in that moment had this profound kind of breakthrough of his being related to everything and oneness, and he broke into tears. Now, that's not the kind of thing. You can come back as an astronaut and be debriefed, but what it led him to do was to leave NASA and create the Institute for Noetic Sciences to explore the question that he had, because the question that he had is he came back and he saw what was probably lightning, but for him it could have been a bomb. He saw this and that was what motivated his despair and he said in that moment the question came when are we going to stop causing each other so much suffering and the Institute of Noetic Sciences was created to try and have and think about and how do we have a shift in consciousness that you know allows us to address that? So in that larger context of that work, people would.
Speaker 3:A couple of people had said to me you and Rianne Eisler should meet. I said, well, I've read some of her work. And they said, well, have you read Tomorrow's Children? I said no and they said, well, when I listened to your work and what you did in South Central, you are trying to help seed the consciousness for tomorrow's children. So, long story in short, that got me.
Speaker 3:While I was on the board at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, I did a series of conversations called Conversations that Matter. That matter, and Edgar Mitchell, brian Swim, vincent Harding, who was Dr King's, you know comrade, and who actually wrote the why I'm Opposed to Vietnam speech, for Dr King was very involved. So I invited Rian so that's when we first met was in that conversation and dialogue and that, but Tomorrow's Children, what I really love and what was an effort at projecting a future in which the consciousness that created the problem which you know we couldn't be blamed if we had no alternatives was to begin to think about alternatives and I feel like a blueprint for partnership. Education is very much part of the opening of that path. In that sense, you know, I'm really happy to be a part of a conversation and to be a part of this whole process of not domination. That's the answer.
Speaker 2:I would love for you to share a bit with our listeners about the inspiration that Dr Martin Luther King Jr has provided for you. I know that you met him while you were a teenager and that visit with him helped ignite your commitment to human and civil rights and justice, and this commitment has taken you down many deep and meaningful roads across the world.
Speaker 3:Thank you. So so so much. I'd be happy to and, in the interest of brevity, I just had written a paragraph about that in an essay, which I'll just read because that'll just get us right to. I was, by way of context, as you've indicated, I was a 16-year-old living in San Francisco. Turns out, the Quakers had invited this young minister, and then they invited 400 young people from all over California to come and spend the weekend. We arrived in Asilomar, where we were going to spend four days, and then the moment that we'd all been waiting for arrived A very young Dr King walked to the podium.
Speaker 3:Very young Dr King walked to the podium Because he was so young. His message seemed very accessible and we listened intently as he talked about the incredible courage of young people, our age in the South, and the risks that they were taking and the dangers that they were willingly facing to make the world a better place. He talked about Gandhi and the creative power of nonviolence. He talked about the redemptive power of love and how truth, goodness, righteousness and love would always win out in the end. He talked about personal responsibility and the power that we each had to make a difference. I remember vividly how, at the end of his speech, not only did he get a standing ovation, but we were on our feet and we were clapping and we were yelling and we were screaming and we were holding each other and we were crying. He spoke to our hearts. He spoke to our unformed visions of hope and possibility for the world, of loving a better world and to existence. I will always remember that he said hate only intensifies hate in the world. Someone has to break the chain. Hate ends in destruction and, as I said, it was a powerfully emotional moment for him and for us, because he was out of the South. He explained to us if we had been listening to him in Alabama or Mississippi actually we couldn't have, we would have had to have been in separate rooms as young black students and young white students and I think that was very eye-opening for us, was very eye-opening for us, but it had a profound impact because I think his faith A and B, his declaration that somebody has to break the cycle, and I feel so many of us left with that vision and hope and possibility.
Speaker 3:And I must say, in terms of mentoring and adult mentoring and intergenerational you know this intergenerational journey that is such an important part of Rudon's work. Of course, the Quakers heard us. We didn't want to leave each other. We cried. We were crying on the bus. We had met people we'd never see again and, to their credit and my endearing and undying gratitude, they saw the tears, heard that we had found something together and now we were going back to our high school. So they managed to keep us together as a group for a year.
Speaker 3:But just the fact that they were willing to just understand what a profound and transformative impact this had been and then to reorganize what they had planned to do. To keep us together for a year, we met every other month and the first thing we did was we went out and cleaned the beach together. We did something together that was helpful for somebody else, and then the afternoon after lunch, we sat in circle and we talked about you know what was going on with us, and I learned very much, because it was the first time I had felt really heard by adults. I think all of us did. The adults just simply held the space for us to talk about who we were and how we were, and I've been thinking a lot about intergenerational wisdom sharing, and I realized that what I've written about in that encounter, of course, is Dr King. But what I also realized recently, or blatantly, that that was not an isolation.
Speaker 3:I had my grandmother eighth grade education from the South in Alabama, mississippi, and had lived in the South. But I remember, oh I think it's when the four young girls were killed in that church in Birmingham and I was, you know, as a teenager it could have been me in Sunday school and I was very rattled and I was just talking about how I hate, was crying and saying how I hated those people that did that. And I realized she one of the few times I've seen her angry was. She stopped and came to the table where I was sitting and crying and took my hand and she insisted that I look at her. And I looked at her and as her only grandchild, I was just her angel.
Speaker 3:But it was for the first time that I saw her upset with me. She looked, she said I need you to look at me and I said she said in this house we don't hate anybody. And I was angry because I said well, I hope they're telling their children the same. She said no, no, no, no, you need to listen to me. In this house we don't hate anybody. And I learned later I came to understand later that she didn't say we don't hate anybody. She was establishing the parameters that she controlled In her house. This is not conversation we can have and I realized that you know, dr King's talking about hate only intensifies hate and somebody has to break the chain. It was in that moment for me. I realized she was struggling for my very soul.
Speaker 2:You are listening to the Power of Partnership podcast. If you would like us to share your partnership story or if you would like to become a proud sponsor of the POP podcast, please contact us at center at partnershipwayorg.
Speaker 3:And now back to today's episode. My own personal transformation was having the opportunity. In 2007, d-don and I went to Ghana to be married. We both, you know, we had grandchildren and all that. We decided we needed to elope and we went to a slave dungeon. And my friends all said you're going on your honeymoon and you're going to a slave dungeon. And I said yes, we are, because anybody that looks like me in the so-called new world has some ancestor that came through one of those slave dungeons and we were just going to go to pay homage to the fact that we had returned, we were safe, and so that informed our visit to the slave dungeon. But what I had not felt was the impact that that would just make to be in a women's dungeon where people for 200 years had been bought and sold. I just fell apart. The stories of young virgins being taken up to the governor's bedroom at night and the women had. I just fell apart. I forgot everything I thought I knew about goodness and oneness, and you know I just was. I just fell apart.
Speaker 3:After the two days of crying did on, came to me and he said what is so hurt, what hurts so bad. And I explained to him that what hurts so was the erasure, that we know the name of the ship, we knew the investors in the slave ship, we knew when it left Rhode Island and when it arrived in Jamaica, and we knew how many enslaved people it had when it went back the people, the names of the mothers and the fathers and the children. They were enslaved, they weren't slaves, and it's that that hurts so bad that they have just been erased. And he looked at me and he said what would healing look like? And you know, sherry, when you're in the wound it was an annoying. What healing, you know? Just like I'm going to cry, falling apart. And you're.
Speaker 3:Morning, when I woke up, I went down to the ocean, with the slave dungeon in the background. Because then I remembered what the elder said to us before we went into the dungeon the women elders had had a ceremony for us and they said when you leave the dungeons, you should go to the nearest body of water and watch your feet. Well, I, because you do not want to walk with all of that sorrow. They said. Well, I went and went to bed and became embraced by the sorrow. But the next morning I remembered and I went down, got up early and went down and I did the ritual washing of my feet and I kept hearing plant a tree, plant a tree, just plant a tree.
Speaker 3:And at some point I realized that it was a phrase from one of my friend, alice Walker's, poems plant a tree. When they torture your mother, plant a tree. When they torture your father, plant a tree. I had always thought that that was a poem about hopelessness trees in commemoration, ceremonially, at this particular time of climate crisis. In their name and in their honor, we would be calling their energy into this critical moment. I felt like I couldn't come back with all that anger. I was on the board of the Institute of Noetic Science. I had been on the board of Bioneers. I said I believed in love. I said I believed, and then here I am, this other kind of energetic feel that I'm creating and that I'm in. But fortunately, I was honest to be in it and honest and blown away by having the midst and depths of that sorrow and the ritual washing this planted tree. And so I realized that, wow, the universe gets us to where we need to be, even when we are not conscious of what it is.
Speaker 2:In your case, which was this amazing program that you and D-Don started called Growing a Global Heart. So can you share more about the amazing work that you're doing in that organization?
Speaker 3:As we talked about it, I said it felt like that what was so needed was a global heart, right, and if we're all interconnected, then it's global. And our task was part of maybe. What we were being asked to do was to help seed the vision of growing a global heart and to speak from that place, because that really meant that there was no them or us or other. There's only we, there's only us. And the trees I would really is. That's a particular lesson, because trees breathe for the whole. So by planting ceremonially trees, trees, the trees didn't say you can't breathe my oxygen because you're African. You can't breathe because you're an enslaver, you can't believe because you lynched somebody. You know what I mean. The symbol that had emerged in that moment of despair was a symbol that breathed for the whole, and so we then thought that what the journey that we were on was trying to grow a global heart, and that's what healing looks like, and that's what healing looks like. That's what healing looks like.
Speaker 2:Can you share a bit about what's happening with growing a global heart in your work today?
Speaker 3:Yes, and thank you so much for that question. Growing a global heart is involved in trying to seed the vision that we got in Africa. That came through through family, not looking always the way we were raised to believe it was supposed to look, and so we have been the collaboration that Growing a Global Heart is having with the SEEDS Institute and it's seeding the future. But it's P-S-E-A-D-S seeds and the work that they are doing in California schools, using poetry and dialogue and storytelling.
Speaker 3:That's what I'd really like to most focus on, and very excited as I know D-Don would be with A Transformed Heart Changes the World, the Power of Love book. With so many people. He would be blown away, just as I am, by the names of the other contributors, people who I have great respect for. So I really, really want to provide a shout out for the power of love because it is so expansive in terms of contributors. So I feel that, too, is a reflection of and a continuation of trying to build a kind of global heart and global community. So I would and then you know Danny Glover has, and I have an audio version of I Give you the Springtime of my Blushing Heart, which we would certainly love if that could be highlighted. We publish a newsletter every other month that people might want to be on that list. We would love it if they were.
Speaker 2:Well for our listeners. I will definitely include links to all of those resources and the Power of Love book and the Seed Foundation, as well, of course, to the Global Growing, a Global Heart Institute, all in the show notes so you'll be able to easily click on those links and get more information, get more involved. And also in the show notes, of course, will be a link to Rianne Eisler's Center for Partnership Systems so that you can sign up for the Changing Our Stories, changing Our Lives course or any of the other resources that are on the website. And I also would like to invite all of our listeners to sign up for the Center for Partnership Systems email list. You can sign up for that email list by just clicking on the link that will be in the show notes or go to the center's main page on the website and click on the join us link. I wonder, belvi, if you have any final words you'd like to share with our audience today.
Speaker 3:So I feel in this moment the emergence of a divine design, the reconnection to Rian.
Speaker 3:You're taking this on to have a global conversation and I feel is that the divine design part of the journey is seeing what's possible and what's hopeful, and finding and rediscovering family does not always look the way we were raised to believe, it was supposed to look, to believe it was supposed to look.
Speaker 3:We had been raised to believe that family only was the white people, or family only was the black people that looked like me, or the family only that spoke the language that I spoke to. I feel what the power and one of the messages of Rihanna's work is that global, larger than global, context for who we are and how we can be. In order to honor and express that, and I feel like it's, you know, in the context of that community that is trying to emerge and that is, in fact, emerging, and that I agreed to do this because I felt this conversation with you, because most of the news, quote unquote, is negative, because most of the news quote unquote is negative. So I feel that this is part of what the young people that we're working with now in the context of growing Global Heart and using poetry, because Dedan was a poet and using poetry to deeply reflect on some of these questions. When I read what they write, you know, I realize that I've lived long enough to be able to fortunately, to see tomorrow's children.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to the Power of Partnership podcast. We're grateful to Rising Appalachia for the use of resilience as our Power of Partnership theme music. If you would like us to feature your partnership story or if you would like to be a proud sponsor of the Power of Partnership podcast, please contact us at center at partnershipwayorg. We hope you enjoyed this episode and will leave us a review on your favorite podcast channel. And don't forget to subscribe to be notified when new episodes are released. I'm Cherry Jacobs-Pruitt.
Speaker 4:See you next time. On the Power of Partnership podcast up at the table again and again and again. I'll close my mouth and learn to listen.