languaging

Attention to the significance of language has long featured as an aspect of John Paul's work, tracing back to his dissertation that drew in theory and practice from the sociology of language and knowledge. John Paul's inquiry into language has taken many forms, including poetic exploration into the etymology of words significant to the practices and process of peacebuilding. This page features iterations of these etymological explorations, delving into the roots of words so as to illuminate new layers of their meaning in the context of peacebuilding and social change, as well as John Paul’s interpretation of key terms pertinent to these domains of practice.

  • etymologies
  • glossary

Accompaniment

(n) To understand accompaniment as a metaphor of peacebuilding and conciliation, it is useful to break it down to its Latin origins. The word is built on two principal concepts: com or ‘with’ and pani or ‘bread.’ A literal translation would be ‘with bread.’ In other words, this is a table metaphor. To accompany is highly relational and a quality of being with each other, as in ‘breaking bread with another.’ This recreates and reframes training as both space and continued relationship that goes beyond the transfer of knowledge in short intensive blocks and toward the ideas of journey and encounter.

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Accompany

(v) Hope embodied.

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Aesthetics of peace

The word aesthetic traces to Greek and is defined as “being sharp in the senses.” It connects intuition, observation, and experience. Not a feeling like emotion, intuition constitutes the sense of something. Like the experience of art and the artistic process, the aesthetics of peace interacts more holistically with how things are perceived, touch us, and permit the creative act. It sees and experiences things as a whole, not as pieces, and as such helps to constitute shared meaning. Synthetic by its nature, the aesthetics of peace invites connection with the deep intuition that creates the capacity to penetrate and transcend the challenges of violent conflict. Recognizing and nurturing this capacity is the ingredient that forges and sustains authentic constructive change. 

Aimless

(adj) The inner trail opening alongside purpose without destination.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Anthropocene

(n) The era of human evolution where we live in the stew we have cooked.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Attend/Attentiveness

(v) From Latin, ad tendere, ‘to stretch.’ To stretch the mind until one can listen with a soft heart, a tender tenacity. To attend is to stretch and hold fast, the stretching necessary to hold to the essence for the whole and the purpose of healing. To attend requires tenacious tenderness. What if we learned how to be tender in our tenacity in the midst of deep disagreement?

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Candle

(v) A soft light that refuses to give in to the dark.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Compassion

(n) com in Latin is ‘with,’ pati is ‘suffering.’ ‘With suffering.’ That pati, by the way, is the same or similar word to the one that forms the word patience, so we might suggest that compassion could add a little dose of saying, ‘it stays with suffering.’ Not physically, perhaps, but increases an ability to live with this notion that we haven’t just seen the suffering and want to quickly get past it, but that we hold a space in which we are with that person. A first impulse, and it may be a good one, is that quite often we seek some kind of a response to the suffering, we want to fix it. But this may not be thick compassion. It may in fact alleviate our need to get past the suffering that we feel in the moment. The interesting root of the notions of compassion that we find in the Greek and the Hebrew languages locate compassion in a different part of the body, it’s not about a head level. In Greek, it’s about the entrails, the guts. You feel in your guts. In Hebrew, it’s related to the womb, compassion is located in the womb. I think thick compassion has something to do with this gut level and in some instances staying with an uncomfortable sensation.

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Conversation

(n) In the Latin, particularly as employed in the French language, conversation combines the terms con and vers, basically the words ‘with’ and an aspect of turning toward, or some would say to converse is to turn together. It has an intimacy as a phrase, a familiarity that at times gets translated as actually living with one another. Curiously in the Old French and in the Middle English, the word conversation carried the primary connotation to dwell with, to live among. Conversation requires us to dwell in the turn, to inhabit, to feel at home in the turning toward and together.

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Converse

(v) To turn; to keep company with; to speak heart-to-heart.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Courage

(n) Courage has at its Latin root coeur or ‘heart.’ Courage meant to have heart, to bring your heart forward. I think that courage is essentially this: It’s the courage to be honest, to speak from the heart, which requires a certain level honesty and vulnerability. One of the things we’re often missing is that we wait until we’ve been angered to explode and then we don’t actually speak from the heart, we speak from somewhere that’s about an emotional rush. Or we’re too nervous to say anything that somebody might disagree with, so we don’t say it very honestly. We kind of back away from who we really are. And I think what people want is authenticity. I think I can live a lot more with somebody that’s authentic that I disagree with than somebody that I perceive to be inauthentic in one form or another, whether that’s by way of projection or hiding.

In the context of habituated conflict settings, there are two forms of courage that are particularly powerful. The first form of courage is the courage to reach out to be in relationship with someone you consider your enemy. That’s often a form of courage that peacebuilders talk about. The second form of courage – and I would call this the notion of social courage, second facet of social courage – is how you will respond to dehumanizing behavior when it emerges from your own in-group as they talk about those people who are perceived as enemies. It comes to the question of the inner preparation: How are we prepared to be awake?

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Cure

(v) To definitively reverse or completely heal a wound or sickness.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Curiosity

(n) Curiosity suggests attentiveness and continuous inquiry about things and their meaning, but it is more. The Latin root curiosus, formed on the term cura, literally meaning ‘to take care of,’ or having to do with both cure and care, as in spiritual and physical healing. From this we get terms like caregiver and curator; in Spanish, curar (to heal), cura (priest), and curandero (the healers). In its negative form, curiosity pushes toward exaggerated inquisitiveness best seen perhaps in the snooping detectives or overly interested neighbors who poke around too much in the affairs of others. However, in its most constructive expression, curiosity builds a quality of careful inquiry that reaches beyond the accepted meaning. It wishes to go deep and in fact is excited by those things that are not immediately understood. We could say from this perspective that sustained curiosity in peacebuilding is about a deep caring for people and the meaning of their experience. Curiosity is about passion – a passion for people, for truth, for meaning, for healing, for constructive change. If such a curiosity is at the essence of valuing peace and building the art of conflict resolution, then we must find ways to continuously incite the imagination that fuels our passion and our caring.

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Echo

(n) Echo comes from Greek and it was actually from Greek mythology, and the nymph Echo. Gods apparently didn’t like how much this dear woman was talking and so they cursed her, and the curse was that she could only repeat what other people said. She couldn’t originate an idea. I find this curse all the time in conflict. Little blocks of in-group people that all say the same things over and over again and have so little space to step out of, to say something different unless it would come under suspicion. But there’s another use of echo over the years that has emerged which is more about social echo. The ripple, the rippling effect, the wave effect that actually approximates the movement of sound.

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Encourage

(v) From the French, coeur, heart: The act of bringing hearts side-by-side so the feet can move, the hands can grip, and the mouth can speak. Antonym: Invisibilize.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Epilogue

(n) 1. From the Latin, epi and the Greek logos: In addition to; to sum up; to add last words. 2. From the Greek, epos: a song; a word. 3. From the Centuries: To offer a song of sending.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Footer

(v) 1. The craft of landing something just in its place that gifts both grounding and flight. 2. Feeling your way into the grounding.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Glisten

1. To embody a quality of presence that unleashes luminous beauty and then disappears while the beauty remains; to be present in ways that serves a person to align their deepest beauty with their sense of purpose; to gleam with aliveness. 2. To be present with others in ways that help them shine into their deepest color, purpose, and wisdom. As example: Mary and Joseph glistened to the unexpected seed they carried toward the light of day.

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Gloam

(v) Old English, Yorkshire descent, preserved by Scottish writers – to witness the sky’s capacity to glow just before dusk; less commonly, to be present with the first hint of light just before dawn.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Hearth

(n) The part of the floor where the embers are held; the cooking place; the warmth of feeling at home. (v) To offer safety; to feed and replenish; to warm the soul in such a way that an inner glow returns to the cold-numbed body.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Health

(n) If you go to the Latin, it will tell you usually one of these two phrases and sometimes together, healing, I listen carefully, is ‘sound health.’ Sound health, or and they’ll say, a ‘return to wholeness.’

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Humility

(n) 1. The courage to hold your truth light enough that the light of another’s, even one you fear, can unexpectedly illuminate your path; also known as tender tenacity. 2. The root word of humility, which is humus, that we sometimes call hummus, which is also like the stuff that you recycle into the garden. It is earthy. My own sense is that friendship begins when we are with another person in a down-to-earth way. I think where we have real friends, we feel a sense of being able to simply be ourselves. We’re down to earth. This, of course, is not easy to do in the middle of a conflict, but how do you bring to bear the notion that you are bringing your full person, who you are.

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Intact

(v) Living whole while wounded; fully alive.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Invisiblize

(v) To unsee people; to render out the humanity of another while keeping them alive enough to work; to obscure a person in plain sight; to unnotice.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Language

(v) The power to name the not-fully-known.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Meld

(v) To combine melt and weld; to heat until new essence coalesces; to hold fire and beauty together.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Mold

(n) Tubular, branching hyphae that live on organic, decomposing matter; conditions require a bit of moisture and warmth; hyphae remain mostly invisible until they feather and form as a colony.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Muddle

(n) Being in the middle while falling off a cliff wondering if any grip on either side will hold.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Notice

(v) To become aware; to observe; the craft of seeing; the life of feeling the landscape under and around you; the depth required to link the heart with the senses.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Palliate

(v) To befriend woundedness into wholeness while continuing to live with the wound; to come alongside; to accompany; to travel together. Palliate requires a mutuality, the befriending of the path of healing as repair and wholeness. Let me bear witness. To befriend requires us to open, to acknowledge, to embrace, and to come alongside each other with the vulnerability to offer what we each carry inside. On the hidden side, palliate requires the journey to find our way to tenderness while we bind our wounds. 

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Patient

(n) 1. The one who suffers and waits. 2. The one with time-curated courage leading into wholeness; to stay the course, human spirit intact.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Paradox

(n) Paradox is a word that has long been appropriated in philosophy, theology, and the social sciences. With its origins in Greek, paradoxos, paradox combines the words para and doxa and is generally taken to mean ‘contrary to common belief.’ There is however a nuance that accompanies the root etymology that suggests that para refers to something that is outside or beyond common belief as opposed to something that is an outright contradiction of what is perceived to be true. The concept of a paradox suggests that truth lies in but also beyond what is initially perceived. The gift of paradox provides an intriguing capacity: It holds together seemingly contradictory truths in order to locate a greater truth.

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Person

(n) In Greek the word personae, ‘person,’ traces back to the ‘mask’ through which the actor spoke. Personae in this sense represented the essence behind the mask, the core, the vibration of humanity, the ‘voice’ projected out into the public square. Valencian etymologist and philosopher Vicent Martínez Guzmán suggested another interpretation. He links the modern word persona in Spanish with the Latin verb sonare which means, as he put it, ‘to resonate with intensity.’ Breaking the word persona in parts, the prefix per signifies ‘through’ or ‘for’ and connects with sonare, which traces to ‘sound.’ To be a person is to be a vessel that receives and shares vibration and sound.

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Poiesis

(n) Poiesis is a Greek word used in the New Testament, in the phrase, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” And it’s the ‘maker’ portion of that phrase where it is located. Poiesis means in Greek ‘to craft artistically,’ ‘to work,’ ‘to do.’ So a more proper translation of that text might have been, “Blessed are those who poetically craft peace.” Now this act of poiesis is always an act of creation, and I think there’s something that links between noticing and creativity, and it’s a thing that’s not always easily developed, but it has some interesting roots. For example, Saint Benedict’s first guidepost to his followers was to learn to listen with the ear of the heart.

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Preamble

(v) To walk before; to saunter, as per Thoreau’s ambulate toward the holy land while noticing the hidden but ever-present sacred; to open; to remain uncluttered, undefended, unguarded; to ponder how the path unwinds and re-braids the lived-past and the living-future.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Projectitis

(n) The repeated delivery of prescribed medicines for externally named diseases; myopic focus on a symptom without clarity of whole-body health; yo-yo charity offered by hedging funds; sometimes called deliverables.

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  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Reflect

(v) To bend backwards until you see and feel yourself.

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Remember

(v) From the Latin memor: To stay mindful; to bring the wondrous range of experience into intention; to mapmake; to create the pathways questing around our questions.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Respect

(v) Respect builds around the Latin word specere, which is ‘to look at’ or ‘to observe’ or ‘to watch.’ In English, the reason we would say spectators at a theater or at a football match is that those are people who are watching that particular event. When the prefix re is added to specere, the meaning deepens inasmuch as we must look again, a second time – we gaze with care, regard, and appreciation. More than a spectator, to respect requires a mutuality of depth, a caring for something past the surface that reaches toward the heart and soul of another. It is the nurturing of human dignity by way of slowing down sufficiently to notice, turn, and look carefully back again, beyond the face, to the story.

If you are meeting with somebody that you don’t trust, the first words out of their mouths reaffirm that you don’t trust them, you stop looking. Respect means that you look again, you listen again, you listen from other angles. Your purpose of conversation with people with whom you do not agree is not to reach agreement. It is to be in a meaningful conversation of honesty where you commit with each other to turn and look again and again. That is that there is a process in which you may be able to understand in a new way the concerns that have come, but you may also understand in a new way what it is that you yourself were trying to say.

Committing to look and look again is something that may happen better in the vow of friendship. I think we honor God when we seek and hold relationships that are both honest and marked by unconditional love, even and most importantly when we are different and disagree.

Respect, or re specere, unfolds only when we look and then have the courage to pause, turn, and look again at what we thought we knew. It can only rise with an earthly dose of humility, the holding of a holy ground that probes the not yet known, the not so visible in the systemic patterns, and the mystery of the other, even the ones we fear and do not understand.

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Saunter

(v) Sauntering has a curious root. Often described by authors, but most notably by the American author Henry David Thoreau, who in his very classic essay on ‘Walking’ traced the origin to a phrase in French that came from the time period when people began to take pilgrimages from France toward the holy land. The word derives beautifully “from idle people who roved about the country in the middle ages and asked charity under pretense of going à la sainte terre” – to the holy land. ‘Til the children exclaimed, “There goes a sainte-terrer,” a saunterer – a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. One who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.

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School

(n) In Greek, schole in various forms had a curious set of meanings. Essentially, it seemed to be connected to travel, even leisure, as a time apart for a dedicated vacation. Or like a place, the hostel, where people stayed who were on a search and took time off. Schole had a kind of a parallel to the commands of old that people recently returned from battle or recently married would have a time apart, a time and place set aside for true reflection, for finding oneself and a deeper sense of life, even the enjoyment of life.

We have long lost this sense of school, though some have made a point that the early years of college, first years away from home, are in fact too much like leisure and a vacation. No, I think what we have perhaps lost is the sense that school, the time apart, is not just a vacuum to be filled with someone else’s gained knowledge. It is a gift. It is the gift of the space and the time to nurture the search for understanding, for truth and for meaning. School, a time apart to nurture the life discipline necessary to sustain the search to find that of God in all we are and all we do.

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Serendipity

(n) I found it extremely useful to go back to the origin of the word serendipity, which was first coined by Horace Walpole in the 1700s. And he had received a gift and he was writing a letter when he wrote a sentence that still appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, which is essentially that “Serendipity is the discovery by accident and sagacity of things you were not in search of.” And there’s so much richness in that across the three levels.

Discovery, that is that you keep an open mind, which basically says that you have to approach this work we’re doing with an enormous amount of humility because none of us actually knows it fully what’s coming or how we’re going to figure it out. Humility I think keeps you open to evolving understanding of Truth, but also keeps your eyes and ears open to wisdom that emerges from the least likely of sources. Because we tend to too often listen only to those that we think have a certain level of formal expertise and actually many of the answers that we may need may lie far outside of that. So serendipity as discovery is that you create an ongoing commitment to openness and not a dogmatic narrowness to a particular thing.

The second is that phrase ‘accident and sagacity.’ Most people hear the word serendipity and only think of accidental – it happened accidentally, it was unexpected, which is true. The word sagacity means wisdom. So when you combine the unexpected with wisdom you suddenly are in a place where it returns that notion of openness, but it also is attending to the legitimacy that experiential wisdom offers things that often those of us who are distant or not proximate to the particular concerns that are that are being daled on. Which is why in peacebuilding I think the whole of the movement has to shift much more to locally led, how to lead from the experience of people who are proximate to that. But often their knowledge is less valued than those who are, for one form or another, seen as carrying that expertise. So there’s a difference again that I was saying earlier between knowledge and wisdom. And I think serendipity actually is about attentiveness to wisdom, not just to what is known.

The final one is that ‘you were not in search of.’ This is a mystery. I don’t know how you all feel about it, but for me the longer I work with peacebuilding the more mysterious it becomes. Because in your early years maybe your viewpoint is, “If I just do this right technique, I’ll control things.” And the one of the greatest challenges that you’ll ever face in life is the challenge of risk, of letting go of control. That is that you don’t fully know and you don’t know to control what’s about to come completely. And that places you in a location, I don’t have any other words to call except that it’s a form of spirituality. We’re born naked and we’re going to leave the world naked. Just face it people, that’s what’s going to happen. So we don’t start from a place – any of us no matter who we are – that’s anything other than that. And to retain that capacity that says ultimately, we’re going to have to find ways to do the best that we can with what we know, but we’re going to have to also be open to those things that we don’t yet know. And we have to recognize in many instances for many of us that unlearning the sacred things that we thought we knew have to be let go of. And unlearning takes courage because you take the thing that you may hold most precious and you’re actually going to say, “I have to look at it again. I have to look more carefully.”

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Sincere/Sincerity

(n/adj) When working on conflicts in Central America in the 1980s, people used to always talk about the key to conflict was more increased sincerity. I could never figure out why they were so concerned about sincerity, why they kept saying, in sort of an everyday street language, that what was needed was that somebody be sincero, una persona sincera. And I would think, why is sincerity such an interest. To me, it’s the last word that my teachers would have taught me in the skills of mediation, be sincere. And then I heard Mark Nepo, great friend and poet, tell a little story about the origin of the word sincere. When you know Spanish, it jumps out at you, but I had never heard the story of where it came from.

Hailing from the Roman Empire, the Latin root of sincerity combines two terms, sin and cera, or literally in English, ‘without wax.’ In this time period, builders and sculptors sought high-quality marble for their projects, and a robust business emerged. Vendors wanting to present their wares in the best possible light at times used mixes of wax to cover blemishes and fissures in the stones so it looked absolutely perfect. At a later stage those working with the quarried marble would sooner or later come across the cover-up. Over time the vendors who sold their stones without wax, that is, who showed the stone as it was, blemishes and all, came to be known as people without wax, sin cera, or sincere in their life and livelihood – transparent, showing themselves forwardly with no things hidden. The story perhaps illustrates the quality of honesty that underscores this tributary we must understand.

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Stygmergy

(n) It literally has a root that is shared with the word stigma, which means to be marked by or to have a mark. We often use that word negatively. Somebody carries a stigma, it may be for something that marked them, it may be for a variety of reasons from accent to color of skin to whatever else that gets stigmatized in a given society or location. Stygmergy is a mark, a scent, a place noted in the landscape. As insects travel, they leave something in the landscape that other insects sense, smell, or sense in whatever form they could, and then respond to and build on. Pick up a trace leave a trace.

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Thrive

(v) To braid hardship and flourishing together.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Unknowing

(n) Beginner’s mind; a destination not found on the map; a town we have no desire to visit; sometimes called a pass-through or a fly-over; antonym: arrogance.

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Unyoke

(v) To hold the chaliced circle for a slow listen wherein people can hear themselves and together carry their wounds gracefully as they open into the brilliance of their flourishing; to nurture aliveness; to unleash.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Vignette

(n) 1. Vine-like borders of a page; the edging lines that hold a blank space or frames the canvass in order to host an image of the yet-to-come; the preparation needed to receive; the threads that open and hold a story. 2. To witness and wait. Or, as some Abbas seem to suggest: Witness. And. Wait.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Vocation

(n) The word vocation in Latin traces to the word ‘voice.’ That I am touching something that is deep within who I am that I need to understand and nurture, and that I need to see who I am as reflected in those that I’m with. The deeper listening to an inner voice that relates the purpose and unique place of people and their life callings.

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Vulnerable/Vulnerability

(adj/n) Vulnerability suggests a level of defenselessness. One is exposed. Naked. The etymology of vulnerable, vulneris in Latin, traces to the word ‘wound.’ The root suggests that vulnerability is how we carry our wounds with each other, how we are present for and with the wounds that we have, and as we are present with our wounds, how healing may emerge. The poet Mark Nepo has suggested that to live vulnerably requires carrying one’s wounds gracefully, to be careful with how we carry the wounds of others because we are in essence helping to touch and hold up our own humanity. To live vulnerably also suggests the need to be attentive enough to notice that of myself in another and that of the divine in the other.

When vulnerable, wounds are exposed and open. Vulnerability, a quality of living exposed, requires the honest sharing of how one views the world, the tenets of faith and belief held as truth, even when those may shock or offend. The alternative, refraining from full honesty about deeply held conviction, may have a place in finding diplomatic wording or politically correct engagement, but will fall short of authenticity if it hides, compromises, or refrains from openly sharing belief which at the deepest level is held to be central. At essence, this tributary of vulnerability suggests that the practice of honesty, the sincere sharing of truth as best understood, carries greater worth for the relationship than diplomatic expression, tolerant compromise, or ensuring a shared environment of political and religious correctness.

To a large degree, this is a commitment to walk the path of the rehumanization of our conflicts. The first thing to go in the midst of conflict is usually the dehumanization. We lose track that we have before us a human being. This is what radical integrity and compassion point to – a quality of character or a quality of presence that when you feel it and sense it, you feel a sense of yourself being in touch with a deeper place of who you are and what you can rise to, but you also have a greater capacity to notice who is with you even when you are in disagreement.

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Yo-con-yo

(v) To spin while traveling up and down a string, always arriving back at the same place you began.

Evoked in:

  • The Centuries Wrap Round Us [forthcoming publication]

Circulation

Circulating is very powerful in the evolution of raising up a collective consciousness and, in turn, collective power to engage change differently. Inspired by entomology, circulation describes the ways collective goals are achieved without centralized control, known as stigmergy. Circulating requires actual travel to the familiar and home locations where people live, or what some anthropologists reference as probing meaning by way of emplacement. Differentiated from convening, it is not about asking them to come to you, it is about you going out and moving around the varied spaces inhabited within social conflict. A friend in Colombia used to say “si no vas no ves,” meaning “if you don’t go, you don’t see.” Circulating has this characteristic. When you go, you’re not seeing just from someone else’s eyes, you’re seeing from their location in society, in the world, in the community. This helps develop an embodied sense of place and collective empathy.

Constructive change

The pursuit of shifting relationships from those defined by fear, mutual recrimination, and violence toward those characterized by love, mutual respect, and proactive engagement. Constructive social change seeks to move the flow of interaction in human conflict from cycles of destructive relational patterns toward cycles of relational dignity and respectful engagement.

Collective empathy

Collective empathy requires sitting with and perceiving the world from whole communities’ lived experience. Differentiated from individual empathy, which is often found in the phrase “walk a mile in another’s shoes,” collective empathy is cultivated through listening to the stories of whole communities’ lives and histories from the very places in which these stories are rooted. It is to see, hear, and sense the world as it is collectively experienced on the street corners, in the villages, and along the footpaths that communities daily inhabit and traverse. 

Critical yeast

Rather than critical mass, commonly believed to be the moment of shift when large enough numbers of people get behind an idea or movement, critical yeast does not focus on measuring large numbers of people. Critical yeast asks the question in reference to social change: Who within a given setting, if brought together, would have the capacity to make things grow toward the desired end? The focus is not on the number but on the quality of relationships of improbable people brought together, who represent unique linkages across a wide variety of sectors and locations within the conflicted setting.

Haiku attitude

The discipline of preparation, a predisposition for touching and being touched by the aesthetic, in other words, to perceive and be touched by beauty. Haiku poets talk of humility and sincerity as the two guiding values that underpin their work as they face life and seek to see the true nature of things. 

Haiku moment

Penetrating insight; the appearance of deep resonance, which connects deeper truth with the immediacy of experience. Haiku poets call this the ah-ness, which some may consider as the ah-hah moment, the moment when people say, “I see exactly what you mean.” In the midst of complexity, the haiku moment penetrates and unfolds into insight that is held in a simple, elegant, and organic whole.

Horizontal capacity

The ability to build and sustain relational spaces of constructive interaction across the lines of identity division in systems and societies divided by historic patterns of toxic conflicts.

Improbable dialogue

Dialogue that requires us to move beyond only talking to those who are like us and who think like us. Improbable points toward intentionality. It simply asks people to move across and beyond what’s comfortable and have the courage to reach out toward those who have been perceived not just as different but as enemies and to then often discover they may well also be reaching toward you. Having these “improbable dialogues” is more about circulating, going out to where others live, rather than exclusively convening in a formal process. 

Justpeace

An orientation toward conflict transformation characterized by approaches that reduce violence and destructive cycles of social interaction and at the same time increase justice in any human relationship.

Mediative capacity

As a lens, mediative capacity requires us to think about social spaces for constructive change processes that have intermediary impact rather than about mediation narrowly defined as a role conducted by a person or team at the level of political negotiation. This perspective focuses attention on introducing a quality of interaction into a strategic set of social spaces and institutions within the web of systemic relationships in order to promote constructive change processes in the conflict-affected settings as a whole.  

Moral imagination

To imagine responses and initiatives that, while rooted in the challenges of the real world, are by their nature capable of rising above destructive patterns and giving birth to that which does not yet exist. In reference to peacebuilding, this is the capacity to imagine and generate constructive responses and initiatives that face the day-to-day challenges of violent settings while transcending and ultimately breaking the grips of those destructive cycles.

Platforms

Ongoing social and relational spaces, in other words, people in relationship who generate creative processes, initiatives, and solutions to the deeper ingrained destructive patterns and the day-to-day ebb and flow of social conflict. As such, a platform has a continuous generative capacity that is responsive to longer-term relational patterns and is adaptive to changing environments. The focus of a platform is to create and sustain a foundation capable of generating responsive change processes that address both the immediate expression of the conflict and the deeper epicenter of the conflictive relational context. A platform is like a moving sidewalk in an airport combined with a trampoline. The sidewalk continuously moves across time and the trampoline has the capacity to spring forward new ideas in response to unexpected and emerging problems while sustaining the long-term vision of constructive change.

Process structures

In the physical world, these are phenomena that are simultaneously dynamic processes and take shape and form in identifiable structures. Some examples are skin, rivers, and glaciers. They are changing and adapting, yet have a form and shape that from a distance appear static. Applied to social change, building justpeace is a process that must be both responsively adaptive to the context and the evolution of events, yet must have a vision, direction, purpose, infrastructure of support, and a shape that helps sustain its movement toward the desired changes.

Serendipity

The discovery, by accident and sagacity, of things for which you were not in quest which creates an emphasis on learning about process, substance, and purpose along the way, as initiatives for change develop. To nurture serendipity, one must pay special attention to the development of peripheral vision, the capacity to be observant and learn along the way while sustaining a clear sense of direction and purpose.

Siphon strategy

 A siphon seeks to move liquid from one container to another using only the natural energy available. A tube is inserted in one container. At the other end of the tube, a person inhales, creating a vacuum that lifts an initial portion of the liquid against gravity until it begins its descent into the other container, pulling with it the remainder of the liquid in the original container. The physics of a siphon does not concern itself with moving all of the liquid. It is only concerned with getting the initial portion to move against gravity, knowing that momentum will pull the rest. Applied to social processes, the siphon strategy raises this question: Who, if they are linked together and make the journey against social gravity, would have the capacity to pull the rest of the system/society along toward a desired change?

Social spaces

The locations and places where relationships are built and interaction takes place. In reference to constructive social change, these spaces refer to the locations of interaction among improbable people, those who are not like-minded about the conflict and not like-situated across the social divisions and levels of leadership within the setting.

Stigmergy

A term used by entomologists, stigmergy refers to a mark, a scent, a place noted in the landscape. It’s leaving something in the landscape that other insects smell or sense in whatever form they can and then respond to and build on, which permits whole collectives to make decisions without relying on hierarchy. In essence, if entomologists were to suggest how to build peace, they might offer this answer: Circulate and circulate again. Begin the arc of a thousand conversations. In every conversation you will pick something up and in every conversation you will leave a scent. It is in the circulating that ideas begin to emerge, cohere, have a sense of purpose and direction. Though our capacity to constantly move within our communities and then beyond them, we evolve better ways to develop both the power of the local as well as the power of the capacity to connect and really mobilize around interdependence.

Strategic peacebuilding

Strategic peacebuilding denotes an approach to reducing violence, increasing justice, transforming conflict, and building peace that is marked by a heightened awareness of and skillful adaptation to the complex and shifting material, geopolitical, economic, and cultural realities of our increasingly globalized and interdependent world. It is comprehensive, interdependent, architectonic, sustainable, and integrative. Peacebuilding that is strategic draws intentionally and shrewdly on the overlapping and imperfectly coordinated presences, activities, and resources of various international, transnational, national, regional, and local institutions, agencies, and movements that influence the causes, expressions, and outcomes of conflict. What makes it strategic is precisely this flowing together of people and processes who would not normally come together or head in the same direction, who now collaborate to realize a horizon of possible measures to reduce violence and advance justice. 

Strategic what

Analysis of the wide range of issues and problems that focuses the challenge of which options hold the greatest potential for creating a wider impact on the setting. Primary in this regard is the choice of investment in a particular issue because it has an inherent magnetic quality that permits people to engage together who are not like-minded and not like-situated in the conflictive setting. The strategic what avoids, at all costs, crisis-hopping and fire-fighting approaches to conflict resolution.

Strategic where

Provides lenses that focus on the place and geography that have strategic significance in addressing social processes and conflicts. Rather than looking at conflict exclusively in terms of issue content or process, the strategic where inquires into the interdependence of people and the locus of their conflict. It looks for geographies of unique social interaction and intersection, then explores the design in reference to those locations. Examples are riverways, markets, schools, hospitals, or highways as strategic places, geographies for the emergence of potentially constructive transformations of conflict by virtue of the unique relational interdependencies and intersections created in the confluence of those places.

Strategic who

Analysis of conflicted social systems aimed at identifying key agents of change, particularly those with the capacity for building vertical and horizontal integration. 

Vertical capacity

Relationship building across levels of leadership, authority, and responsibility within a society or system, from grassroots to the highest, most visible leaders. This approach requires awareness that each level has different needs and unique contributions to make, but ultimately are interdependent, requiring the explicit fostering of constructive interactions across the levels.

Vertical and horizontal integration

Strategy for seeking change within a divided system or society that engenders and supports processes linking individuals, networks, organizations, and social spaces that demonstrate a capacity for both vertical and horizontal relationship building.

Vocation

The deeper listening into life purpose and the unique place of people and the unique gift of their relationships.

Web approach

The pursuit of social change initiated through relational spatial strategies and networking. This strategy identifies, reinforces, and builds social spaces and intersections that link individuals, groups, networks, and organizations, formal and informal, across the social divides, sectors, levels, and geographies that make up the settings of protracted conflict.