Belonging @ Scale 2.0: Borikén edition

What does it take to build belonging at the scale this moment requires?

Mañana en la Isla del Encanto; Playa de Humacao

Eighteen months after we first gathered in Medellín, Colombia, a small crew of us arrived in January on the island of Borikén (the indigenous name for the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico) for the second annual Belonging @ Scale convening.

It was for me a profound spiritual transformation. I’m still integrating—tenderly, slowly—much of what happened there, and what is moving through me. I want to do my best to share here from my own experience: not to speak for the collective, but instead for how I was moved. I feel protective: of the seeds we are tenderly nourishing, of the profundity of my own experience in the face of fear that it won’t be understood. That my efforts to render it via the imperfect medium that is the written word may not do justice to something that feels so important to me.

And yet: I know I’m not alone in yearning for transformation, for spaces where we can experience embodied belonging, where we can grapple deeply with kindred spirits around what it takes to transform systems and culture at the scale this moment requires. It is in that spirit of mutual grappling that I share these reflections: an effort to illuminate the path I am walking in hopes that fellow Wayfinders may find it useful, or feel inspired to share their own journeys.

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I am conscious that I am writing this in the early days of the second Trump presidency: an onslaught of executive orders, policies, and illegal executive actions designed to instill fear, sow chaos, and overwhelm. I recognize that many people on the frontlines and in targeted communities are struggling for survival. To name just one example that hits close to home for me: I spent five years at USAID, and am acutely aware of the devastation resulting from the wanton and capricious decimation of that agency and all those who rely on it (imperfect though of course it is).

It is against that backdrop that I share today’s reflections. We gathered in Borikén precisely because of this context… and our recognition that our current efforts are not enough. I choose to align myself in deep solidarity both with those suffering under authoritarian regimes and with those trying to create a more liberatory world… one where we all belong.

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From driving my vision to following my calling

If our inaugural gathering in Medellín (July 2023) was about Earth… for me Borikén was all about Spirit. It was a powerful through-line woven throughout our time on the island, and for me personally manifested in three distinct experiences that shook me to my core.

[Sidebar: I resonate with the language of Spirit; you may need to translate it into whatever concept resonates for you. Life-force, Source, religious people might say God, physicists might call it quantum… I’ve long gravitated to Emerson’s notion of “Oversoul.” Whatever you call it, I’m referring to the interconnected fabric of life that connects us to all of creation.]

First, some backstory. One piece of my wounding is a story I have held that I am all alone: that in the spaces I’ve moved through in my life I don’t find others who hold the questions I hold, who see what I see… or who see me. I have felt unsupported. In the context of my professional work it feels incredibly daunting: my vision is incredibly audacious, and I have often felt alone—and deeply uncertain—in trying to bring it into being. In MedellínI received a very clear answer that challenged my wounded story. The Earth reminded me: She’s been here all along. When I felt alone or struggled, I would always turn to nature: camping, mountain biking, hiking, backpacking, walking in the park, my semi-annual pilgrimage to the redwoods. This short paragraph can’t do justice to the sense of relief I felt in acknowledging that truth: the Earth supports me, always has, and always will.

That was my July epiphany in Medellín. Then in August I went on a plant medicine journey that deepened that insight. I was able to acknowledge two things:

1. I’ve felt a powerful calling my entire life, pushing me forward. Metaphorically that’s how I’ve experienced it: something behind me, compelling me forward, guiding me toward decisions at key inflection points in my life. Leaving my home in southern Oregon to go back East for college; going to Europe for a human rights fellowship; going to graduate school for international conflict mediation; joining USAID, trying to support the Arab Spring, and ultimately going to Myanmar; returning to the West Coast and transitioning to join the Gates Foundation; leaving Gates during the first Trump primary to eventually launch what would become Building Belonging… and Belonging @ Scale. In each of these major life decisions I felt two things at the same time: utter conviction that this was the right decision… and an inability to explain in “rational” language why.

2. I’ve never consented to this calling. I’ve done it, yes: it has guided my actions, and I’ve followed the mandate. But I’d never fully acknowledged—much less embraced—this force in my life. On the medicine journey I finally did: feeling the support of the Earth, I decided to answer the call. I consent: I will do what is mine to do. Metaphorically this shifted the “push” to more of a “pull”: now my calling moved out in front of me, pulling me forward.

And in Borikén I finally completed the move, in a way that feels deeply liberating and utterly profound.

Supported by Earth… guided by Spirit

The flow goes something like this:

1. The Earth supports me… and all life.

2. She would never give us a task we can’t succeed at: we are all born for a purpose. It is our job to live into that purpose to the absolute best of our abilities. I would go farther: it is our obligation to share our unique gifts. The Earth has endowed each of us with our contribution to life… we must share that gift with the world.

3. Earth provides the support: Spirit provides the calling. In my redwood metaphor that I find so grounding in my own life: I root deeply into the nourishing support of the Earth and the complex web of life She makes possible. And from that rooted place… Spirit calls me to the unique task that is mine: to grow into my fullness, to become the redwood I am intended to be (in relationship to all other beings: the ferns that support the understory, the mycellia connecting my roots to other trees, etc.)

4. My job, therefore, is twofold. First, to continue the inner work required to root deeply, to accept the Earth’s support. This is about healing my trauma and working to be a better human, always in relationship. Second, to answer the call from Spirit: to attune to the unique task that is mine to do, and to follow the calling.

And here’s what feels relieving: in this understanding, it’s not me driving my vision, with all the enormous weight I feel trying to figure out the next step, often alone. Rather, it’s me listening deeply to what Spirit is telling me… and when I get stuck, to ask Spirit for guidance. This feels like a much more honest description of what I’ve always felt to be true, and what I tried to get at in my resonance with the “Source” concept. To say it’s “my” vision always felt incomplete and even somehow dishonest: yes it’s coming through me, but I never saw myself as author… more as vehicle. Prism. Acknowledging my relationship to Spirit is the first time I’ve felt in integrity with the work I feel called to do in the world. Yes: it is bigger than me. And yet I have a role to play; we all do.

In 2025 I’m looking forward to acting on this insight, to finding ways to more intentionally deepen and hone my spiritual practice, to ask for guidance when I am stuck.

It takes a big body to hold a big heart

For many years I have resonated deeply with the giraffe: obviously for my height (I’m 6’4”), but I also like the idea of being able to see far from its vantage, and its association in Nonviolent Communication with the ability to hear deeply. Only last year I learned something else about it: the giraffe has the largest heart of any land mammal (evidently this was part of Marshall Rosenberg’s inspiration for choosing it as the creature embodying the gift of NVC).

Staci led us in somatic bodywork on Wednesday: a powerful experience, facilitated by a master in the craft. I was paired with Pat: as it turned out, absolutely perfect for the work that I needed to do. At one point, once we were dropped into our bodies, Staci posed a question: what does your heart want to say? And I heard very clearly the answer: “I’m huge.” I expressed to Pat my fear that people can’t see my big heart inside of my big body, that patriarchy conditions people to see me as a threat, and she reminded me: “it takes a big body to hold a big heart.”

I laughed out loud with relief: yes! I’m giving myself more permission to lead with love. To worry less about whether people will see my heart inside of my body, and more about sharing my heart with others. Last year I got a rainbow unicorn tattoo over my heart, in part to remind myself of my connection to my inner child and to my capacity for love. After returning from Borikén I got my second tattoo: an infinity heart, the symbol of polyamory. To commemorate my commitment to my partner Leela, and to serve as a more public statement of who I am: someone who loves multiply, and deeply.

While this is a personal sentiment, it also feels key to responding to the current crisis of masculinity driving authoritarian politics, and to why so many men are struggling to find a place where they can belong. Society sees our potential for violence, but not our potential for love. I’m reminded of adrienne maree brown’s riff on Lao Tzu: “trust the people, and they become trustworthy.”

Or as I’m feeling it: love the people, and they become loveable. So many men (well, all people) are desperate for love… and when they give up on the possibility of receiving it they often turn to violence. I resonated with this vulnerably-written and self-revelatory article where one wounded man—in therapy working hard to decondition from patriarchy—comes to recognize himself as what Terry Real calls “love-addicted.” Can we men find ways to share our longing for love with more vulnerability? Can we take responsibility for feeling and expressing our feelings? Can society see in us our longing for love… and not only our potential for violence? Can others see that my big body is to hold my big heart?

I don’t want to lead alone

This was a clear theme that resonated with many of us there: the exhaustion of leadership. And I felt Spirit gently laughing at me, as it finally became clear why I (we) had been called to the Kineo Center in particular. Founders Dan and Tonya established it as a retreat for wounded leaders… to heal from the burnout and sense of isolation that often accompanies those of us called to work in pursuit of collective care. Oh. Right. That resonates. (Of course I had seen that in the billing when I booked the retreat center, I just hadn’t personally connected it to me/our collective and what we were needing at this particular moment in our lives and in history. Sometimes I can be a little slow… not yet fully attuned to what Spirit is asking of me).

I’m tired of being lonely. I’m tired of holding onto trauma stories that keep me trapped in isolation, and I’m tired of leadership archetypes that thrust me onto a pedestal I never asked for. I feel ready—at long last—to let go of my pain and take full responsibility for my healing. It feels really good to trust my own capacity and strength, and to hear that reflected back to me by others.

I received a clear call in Borikén —from Spirit and the group—to step more fully into my leadership. Rajkumari generously shared with the group a Systems Constellation offering facilitated remotely by his friend in Poland… and it blew my mind. One clear transmission for me personally: my ambivalent relationship to my own power is a blockage in the system. And it is my responsibility to get in right relationship with the power that is uniquely mine to wield; to do otherwise is to continue to fall short in answering my calling, and to get in my own way—and cause impact to my partners—in collaborative efforts.

It felt both challenging and relieving to hear this. Relieving because it feels true, and resonates with my own sense of what’s needed. Challenging because I’m not sure everyone is ready for me to step more fully into my power (or perhaps I’m not sure I’m fully ready?). I experienced it as powerful and new to hear a very clear request from the group for me to step up: it landed as consent to me playing my role, and I felt deep relief. It hearkens back to my first Strozzi commitment: I want to lead from a place of invitation and noncoercion. I can only do that if my teammates consent to my leadership (in the role that is mine to play, just as I invite/welcome/consent to their leadership in service of their respective callings).

This is what I mean when I talk about yearning to experience other people’s power. I want other people to want to experience mine too… and to help me channel it effectively. It’s too much to hold on my own: my calling is too big. I’m ready to step into my power… but don’t make me do it alone.

From bridge to beacon: Embodied Exemplar

One of my contributions to the group during our time there was to lead a session exploring theories of scale. I invited each person to name their boldest experiments/visions, and then asked the group to see if we could identify the underlying theory of change/hypothesis animating the vision. My sense is this: when it comes to scale, we are very clear about what we do NOT want. But we don’t yet know what we do want… or how to practice it (indeed, this was the animating premise that launched the Belonging @ Scale initiative).

It was a fun and generative exercise… if you’re a theory of change/framework nerd like me :-) With apologies for my truly bad handwriting:

I ended up finding language for one theory that I’ve observed out in the world but hadn’t yet named as a path to scale: I call this “embodied exemplar.” It’s born of my own longing for examples and models to follow on my often-lonely path: what I lamented/longed for in this post exploring what it means to be a “good white man.” It’s this insight: for many people, we can’t be what we can’t see. We can’t strive to become something we don’t know is possible.

So the very existence of that thing we long for—what the good folks at Wolf Willow Institute call a “positive deviant”—can be a massive catalyst for transformation. A beacon in the darkness. This is the power of representation: seeing a Black man as U.S. president forever transforms our collective imagination about what is possible. I see it as a major and under-utilized path to scale in social justice movements… in part because of our understandable allergy to figureheads and top-down models of leadership. We fear the dominant culture model and refuse to elevate people… and in my view miss an opportunity to give more visibility to different ways of embodying power.

Part of my motivation in identifying and bringing together the people who are part of Belonging @ Scale is because I see each of them in different ways as embodied exemplars of something the world needs. And to speak more personally: something I need. Staci embodies a form of leadership in a White body that I aspire to; Marielena a fierce humility I aspire to; Kai Cheng a bold public generosity that I aspire to… and so on for everyone involved. And I trust—no, I know—that I am not alone in needing what these specific people are offering.

In Borikén I began to lean tentatively into something I have thus far rejected: the idea that perhaps I too could be an embodied exemplar… a beacon. In the past I’ve resisted invitations in that direction for several reasons:

1. It sometimes feels like the tyranny of low expectations for White men. I tell myself the story that part of why I get invited to speak is because there are so few White men embodying the quality of leadership I aspire to… and that what makes me unique is not actually any specific thing I’m doing but rather the contrast between what I’m doing and what people expect from someone who looks like me. (Like when I get complimented by strangers for being a good father when I’m doing the kind of routine everyday parenting for which a mother would never be complimented).

2. I’m hyper-aware of my own imperfections, and the gap between the person I am and the person I want to be. Maybe a blend of imposter syndrome on the one hand, and a fear of being put on a pedestal on the other… being seen for the things I’m doing well without holding the full complexity of the many ways I continue to struggle.

3. I don’t want to lead alone. My authentic truth in leadership is that to embody it well… I actually don’t want to be alone. That is part of the archetype of leadership (as embodied by dominant culture/White men) that I explicitly reject.

Those three things are still true. And: I’m allowing myself to relax my resistance… a bit. To explore the possibility that if I can hold all that complexity with other people (I don’t ask for perfection)... perhaps others can hold that with me? And that maybe my story about low expectations isn’t always true; perhaps I can trust my discernment around when an invitation feels grounded in being seen for my gifts, rather than in contrast to how others with my identities show up in the world? And finally: I don’t have to go it alone. I can accept an invitation to speak… alongside a fellow Wayfinder. It is this last possibility that feels most exciting to me, and one I’m in the early days of exploring with Kai Cheng.

Toward “fractal integrity”

Kai Cheng gets credit for this particular coinage: when she said it, it resonated deeply with me, and I sensed within the collective as well. It’s a beautiful way of capturing what I mean when I talk in Building Belonging about I/We/World, and what I understand Grace Lee Boggs to mean when she says that we must change ourselves in order to change the world. We must embody in our individual and relational lives the kind of world we want to create.

In our movements: we must treat each other well. If we believe in building a world where everyone belongs… then we must act and communicate in a way that lets everyone know that they too belong. This is what I think Toni Cade Bambara had in mind when she said we must make our movements irresistible: we must embody the invitation to the world we long for.

Anyway, more to say here, but wanted to capture that poetic framing as an invitation to others who may resonate.

Can we hear the dissenting voice? Positionality inside of a polarity

On the first day Kai Cheng led us in a polarity workshop, where she invited us to hear the wisdom of the “dissenting voice.” Can we hear the kernel of wisdom on the other side of a polarity… when that person is standing alone?

We continued to play with polarities throughout our week together, and I found myself resonating with and returning to the idea of the dissenting voice… until finally something clicked. It happened on our last day together, and only later did it crystallize into the concept I’m now trying to articulate. It goes something like this:

1. I tend to see most complex/stuck issues as polarities; the famous idea that the opposite of one great truth could be another great truth. A polarity has two sides, each of which has an upside and a downside. The “infinity loop” image popularized by Barry Johnson’s work in what he calls “polarity management” captures this:

   

2. As a lifelong bridger/mediator, I often find myself in the middle, trying to help the system see itself: to help polarized people recognize that what they are seeing as a “problem” to be solved (by their side “winning”) is actually a polarity to be managed… with multiple truths. Each side is “right” about something… and usually missing something else.

3. As a consequence, I often feel like the dissenting voice. In dominant culture I’m way too radical, and seen as weird, out there, alone. In social justice culture I’m seen as normative, representative of dominant culture, too privileged and proximate to power. In each sphere I often find myself articulating a perspective that is not shared by the group… and often feeling alone in doing so (even where I sense others may share my perspective… few are bold enough to go against the crowd).

4. Yet there’s something particular that happens in social justice spaces, where my positionality discredits my voice. It’s this phenomenon: when I try to articulate the upside of a polarity that is more often privileged in dominant culture (e.g. urgency, inside the polarity of urgency vs slowness, e.g.), by virtue of my identities only the downside of the polarity is heard. So I might be trying to make a case for the “fierce urgency of now,” but because of my visible identities my interlocutors might only hear the false urgency of white supremacy culture.

This felt like a profound aha for me, as an experience I’ve encountered repeatedly and hadn’t yet found a good way out of: where my (presumed) positionality drowns out what I am trying to say. And it feels much bigger than me. This dynamic feels to me at the core of our current polarization, where each side can’t hear the other in part because we can’t hear the upside of the other’s pole inside of their identities… which we associate with the downside that seems so obvious to us.

A time for Radical Bridgers… and Wayfinders

This is the work we are called to do… and it’s incredibly difficult. But it doesn’t have to be lonely! I consider everyone in our gathering in Borikén to be what Pat calls “radical bridgers.” People deeply committed to seeing and holding the whole, to playing a bridging role between the polarities… turning binaries into spectrums. In this global moment of intense polarization, we need more radical bridgers to reconnect across differences and paradigms… and together point the way forward.

The crew in Borikén… mugging for the camera :-) L to R: Myrna (our local host/partner on the island), Christina (my Building Belonging teammate), Marielena, Rajkumari (behind), Farzana, Kai Cheng, Pat, Mila (in front), Staci (behind) and me :-)

In her introduction Mila invoked her ancestral connection to people who are Wayfinders… and I resonated deeply. It was this thread that I connected to most strongly in Moana, and where I found myself tearing up watching Moana 2: she is a Wayfinder. Like Elsa in Frozen 2, she MUST go (and yes, longtime readers will know that I identify profoundly with the young female protagonists of contemporary Disney movies). Updated after publishing to add this little gem; thanks to my sister Trina for the share:

source unknown… I came across it here

Yes! This resonates so hard… and explains my connection to Moana, Elsa, and others called to this role. This is Moana’s calling; it is her role. More than that: the collective depends on it; the future of her people depend on her answering the call, on voyaging.

And yet there’s a unique pain there, because in order to go… we Wayfinders have to leave. That means leaving people behind: people I love. And people who usually don’t understand why I’m leaving… because they are called to stay. Just as some of us are Wayfinders… others are Stewards. Caregivers. While I am amphibious and polyamorous and called to multiplicity… others are not.

How can we find ways to honor and support everyone’s callings? And the question on the table for those of us in Borikén: how can we support ourselves and each other in the lonely and uncertain work of wayfinding?

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Anyway, this process of integration (ongoing!) has been enormously helpful and feels profound to me. I fear it won’t feel that way to readers… but I trust you will take what serves and leave the rest.

I want to express deep gratitude for the generous stewardship of David Hsu at Omidyar for the grant funding that made Belonging @ Scale possible: I am humbled by his faith and trust in what we are trying to seed here.

I’m also humbled and grateful to the land and people of Borikén for so graciously hosting us; to Dan and Tonya for their vision with the Kineo Center; to Myrna and Lourdes in particular for generously sharing their relationships and wisdom; and to Bibi Balanani, Guaribo, Pluma, and Adela for welcoming us to their native land… and sharing their healing gifts.

Finally, I’m so grateful to the Belonging @ Scale team: some truly beautiful humans and souls doing inspiring work to build belonging in the world; I feel honored to count them as friends and collaborators.