Thomas Hübl: Welcome to the Collective Trauma Summit 2022. My name is Thomas Hübl and I’m the convener of the Summit. And I have the real pleasure and honor to welcome today V. V, warm welcome here to the Collective Trauma Summit.
V (Eve Ensler): Thank you.
Thomas: It’s so lovely. Just when you came on, I felt such a lovely radiance of your being, and how you came into this space is very lovely. And I know you have a huge path that you already walked and you did so many things, and there are so many things that I’m really interested in in what you did, because it connects very much to what I’m deeply interested in.
But maybe for our listeners … You know, I look at life as there are deep, significant experiences—plus and/or our calling—that puts us on a track and forms our path to what we actually give to the world. And I’m curious, what made you you? Like how did life compose itself around you so that you got on track to do all the amazing things that you’re doing, which I really love? But where did it start? Or what were significant milestones on your way that you think formed your path?
V: Such a good question. It’s hard to know where the beginning is of anything. We have so many beginnings and so many endings actually. But I think the most obvious things that happened in my life were coming from this family and this household that appeared, had all the appearances of what the “American dream”, the kind of white picket … We literally had a picket fence. This affluence, upper middle class, entitlement, privilege on one hand. And then, the interior world to that was a world of utter darkness, violence, destruction, trauma.
And I think this split, this non-alignment of realities, really created who I am to a large degree if I look at my life. The what we’re being told is the truth versus what we know is the truth. And I think that’s something that many, many people struggle with. Being fed this American dream and living in poverty. Being told this is the greatest country in the world and knowing that white supremacy reigns here. Being fed these notions that if you have money and you have things, and if you have success, everything will be fine when in fact it usually encourages just the opposite.
So I think growing up with a father who was not only the CEO of a company, but the CEO of my family and who ruled like a corporate patriarch and had his way with my body, my mind, my heart, I just … Living in this tyranny of violence and invasion. And simultaneously early on knowing that the only way I would survive was to resist and rebel and find a form that I could save my sanity, and writing became that way. It became the way I was going to … I wrote my way into existence, essentially. Or I wrote my way into sanity, or a form of sanity that at least kept me functioning in the world. So I think that event of my father, that event of that violence was absolutely creational in who I am. And that was a big section of my … From five till when I left home at 16, you know?
But I think there’s been other really seminal events. I mean, interviewing the woman who was going through menopause and told me about her vagina and talking to her about her vagina being dried up and prune-like and dead and finished and being shocked because she was a feminist and I couldn’t believe what she was saying led me to start talking to other women about their vaginas, which led to this unbelievable phenomena/experience that is still going on many, many, many years later. So that was just an amazing journey.
I think almost dying 14 years ago of stage three/four cancer and discovering I had a tumor in me the size of a mango and going through that process of … Wow, almost dying, coming right up to it, and then literally having whatever of my past, whatever of my story melted away so that the next stage of my life literally opened up and I left the city and I moved to the woods and I lived in the … So that was a pretty amazing moment.
Thomas: Mm-hmm. Wow, it’s very intense. [laughs] It is a very intense …
V: Going to Bosnia the first time and being with women who had just been returned from rape camps and sitting and listening to their stories was also a seminal moment when I suddenly realized that violence against women and all women might be in fact the central issue of our world. And that opened up a whole new idea of what I was going to commit my life to, what was going to be in some ways the mission of my life.
Thomas: Mm-hmm. When you’ve interviewed these women and you came in contact with what I would call this massive collective trauma field, which is global, can you speak a little bit about what are the main things that you learned about it as you exposed yourself to it? And also, what was the power in you that prevented you from burning out? Because we see that many people that deal with that amount of trauma and hear so much trauma suffer themselves. And they often can’t do this work for a long time because the resourcing doesn’t work. And obviously that’s not what happened to you.
V: I think my first trip to Bosnia and spending time at the Center for Women War Victims, which was a center that had been organized by Croatian and Serbian and Bosnian women so that they were all treating each other and not separating each other out because they were women. And I spent months living on their couch and just spending time in refugee camps and listening to stories. I felt like I entered what you’re talking about, this collective realm of trauma towards women, which has been here historically, continues on today.
And I think what I realized is it’s right in front of us and nobody wants to address it. It’s the thing that’s most determining people’s existence that nobody wants to heal. It’s used this idea that we have a systematic tactic of war, which is basically the devastation and the rape and the annihilation of women’s bodies as a tool of war. And that it continues on and it’s legitimized and it’s not seen as something horrific. And actually, I think in recent years it’s gotten worse and worse and worse and worse to some degrees. The more mechanized war becomes, the more distant war becomes the more … It’s just become horrifyingly normalized.
And I think I felt like I was entering some story, both ancient and contemporary, that was somehow … I felt pulled in in a way where I knew it was going to take my life. Do you know? I knew it was going to … Not literally my life, but it was going to take all my central occupation of thought, of action, of … And also because I’m a survivor. So I resonated so deeply with the stories, and I knew the implications and the impact of those stories, and I knew the long-term effects of those stories.
And so I felt like I was in a sisterhood of survivors that turned out to be one billion strong. At least a billion women. And that’s most of us. And if we haven’t, we’ve witnessed it or know about it. So it’s operating as a method of suppressing us and keeping us in our place. And I think it was a shocking experience, it was devastating, and yet it was something I was completely familiar with, right? Of course that began this journey, which led me to many war zones and many refugee centers and many homeless shelters and prisons and detention camps where I’ve spent a great deal of my life listening to the stories of women.
Burnout’s a very interesting question, because if you’re not very careful and you don’t create protective devices … My body is very, very absorbent and porous. I wasn’t able to build essential protection mechanisms because of trauma, because people got in way too early and they tore down those veils and they tore down boundaries … You know, a lot got in. A lot got in, and a lot got in and began to… It wasn’t until 14 years ago that tumor … I had an image one night where I closed my eyes and I pictured it and it was just like a bowl of yarn, and each little string was a story that someone had told me and had just wrapped and wrapped and wrapped and wrapped. And actually when they removed that tumor, I feel like they removed those stories to a large degree. They took them out of me.
And now I’m very, very careful. I don’t listen to as many stories as I used to. I have to really be very wary of this body because it’s already lost a lot of organs, a lot of nodes. And I would say for people who are working in the field that body work is critical if you are on the front lines of ingesting, hearing, absorbing stories, because if you are at all an empathetic person, which you have to be to do this work, your empathy will invite those stories into your body. And what you have to be working with is some kind of healer or some kind of person who helps you release that through sound, through movement, through body work done so that you can constantly be getting it out of your body if you’re doing this work.
Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That’s amazing. That’s why I was asking you, because I know you were so exposed. And so I was wondering how that affected you, how … And I think your message is very true. I would underline that very much, that we need to really take care of ourselves also.
V: We can reinfect people with how we’ve been infected, as it begins to change us and make us bitter or make us angry or make us resentful. And so our work is to keep ourselves clean, clean, clean, clean all the way in our spirits and our bodies.
Thomas: Mm-hmm. I find it amazing just reading your biography and getting to know how much you actually engaged, because I deeply honor this kind of work because it’s very dear to my heart. But when I saw the richness of how much you gave in your life, its … I deeply honor that part in you. It touches me very much, listening to you and feeling that in you. And also, of course, how you spoke now about the boundaries. That’s equally important. And there is something … Like the City of Joy … You went to Bosnia but you also went to Congo, which is also a very traumatizing and traumatized environment, but actually you managed to set up an amazing project. Maybe you can speak a little about that too for us.
V: Congo’s a really incredible place. It’s so many things, you know? It’s a place that’s been horrifically colonized, horrifically invaded, extracted, raped, plundered, consumed. And still, the Congolese are some of the most powerful, beautiful, extraordinary people I’ve ever met. And I think … You know, I had been to a lot of war zones by the time I got to Congo. I’d been in Bosnia. I’d been in Kosovo. I’d been in Haiti. I’d been in Afghanistan. But nothing really quite compared with what was happening to women in Congo, because it’s an economic war. And because there’s so many multinational corporations who are players in this war and using these proxy militias to secure the bounty of coltan and copper and gold, and now what’s going into electric cars, right?
This war was literally being waged on the bodies of women, hundreds of thousands of women. And it’s been going on for … In King Leopold’s time, what? 10 million people died under King Leopold. But over the last 14 years, we know that it’s probably comparable numbers of people who have died in the Congo, right? And yet, again, it’s right in front of us. It’s all happening in broad daylight and yet there’s been, in my opinion, a completely inept and unparalleled … The response to it doesn’t even come close to what the situation is.
So for me, meeting women there and spending time and … With Dr. Mukwege, who is an incredible human being who won the Nobel Peace prize a few years ago for his work with women in the Congo and the incredible work he was doing, of sewing up women’s bodies and vaginas, literally as fast as the militias were ripping them apart. He and I and Christine Schuler Deschryver, who’s an extraordinary leader and activist, we teamed up and we just spent time listening to women and asking them, “What do you need? What do you want? What can we do that comes from you?” And the thing they all said over and over is, “Build us a place where we can be safe and we can transform and we can change our existence.”
And so, we came up with this idea of City of Joy. It’s a sanctuary. It’s a revolutionary center. 90 women are there for six months at a time. Everything is paid. They have collective, amazing therapy, which they only do in a group. There’s no individual therapy because the theory … First of all, there would never be individual therapy in the Congo because that’s not how it’s structured. It’s all community based. But also, our theory is that when one woman heals, everybody heals. And when we’re healing together and we’re transforming together then we’re all rising at the same time.
And it’s amazing. I have to say, it’s the holiest place I’ve ever been in my life. And I’ve been to some pretty … I was just at Chartres for a week doing workshops on apology and I have to tell you, the City of Joy is the holiest place I’ve ever been, because what is happening there is it’s completely run by the Congolese, completely determined by them. There’s no international people who work there. I think it’s the only project that’s true of in the Congo. Everybody has learned how to do what they’re doing on the job, and they’ve learned it out of love. And they’ve learned it out of care for their sisters. And everything that is generated by love. I mean, love is the opposite of trauma. Love is the antidote to trauma. Love is the only thing that can heal trauma, in my opinion.
And so it’s a place that is love emergent, it’s … Everywhere you go there is dancing and there is singing and there is care and there is people massaging each other and people taking care of each other and people lifting each other up and people … I mean, all of the women who work there—and the men—are just completely committed with their lives to the healing, and to … We go from victim to survivor to leader, and the whole idea is that women leave City of Joy leaders and they go back to their communities and they transform their communities, and they do and it’s happening and it’s real. And we have an amazing farm, a V-World Farm, where many of our women graduate and they go there and they learn permaculture and they learn how to be really good farmers. And they bring all those tools back to their communities.
And there’s so many things to me about City of Joy that are the model of the new world. It’s a place run by principles and they’re amazing principles. Some of which are like, tell the truth, treat your sister’s life as if it were your own, stop waiting to be rescued, take initiative, know your rights, raise your voice, share what you’ve learned, give what you want the most. You were saying to me about giving like … How did I heal? We heal ourselves when we give what we want the most, right? Use it as fuel for a revolution. Practice kindness. And those are the guiding principles of our world and so they are transmitted through song, they’re transmitted through poetry, and people live by those rules.
And so once you have a community that is founded on principles of love and respect and kindness, miraculous things begin to happen, things you could never even imagine. A woman comes who’s completely broken, who has never seen a bathroom, who seems psychotic on the outside. And literally within three months, that woman is helping and serving and taking care of her sisters, and you watch this. Because love is that powerful when it is allowed to be released in its pure form, without kind of neoliberal or … Without corruption, without corruption.
And so I have to say, I learn everything, so much, from City of Joy and from what’s going on there. And how I was just there for a few weeks in June and I leave there every time feeling like, okay, here is this little lotus, this lotus in the mud, in the middle of dire poverty, war, violence, and it’s rising. And it’s now beginning to plant seeds, lotus blossom seeds everywhere around it. So the communities are changing and people are having … And you just see how one place can begin to be this radical, revolutionary, transformative hub for a new world if all the ingredients are in alignment.
Thomas: Mm-hmm. I think you said something that I want to underline. Like a deep truth that I hear from your words about the City of Joy is when you really take care of building one such an island, but with the right principles and you really manifest it, then it naturally, organically starts to spread out and then it can grow organically. But it is not being put on steroids to become, I don’t know, expanded, but it naturally does that anyway, because that’s how life works.
V: Scaling up. And I hate that expression. Scaling up feels like … What does that even mean, scaling up? That some capitalist growth term. I feel like when you’re doing something truly and you’re truly in it, the growth will occur, but it will match your ability to handle the growth. It is way past you and so you’re beginning to do something else that is no longer connected to you. We are beginning to get places around the world that are asking for City of Joys. And we are beginning to see … We said after 10 years we’d have like a model. So we’d have principles and we’d understand things. And now we can begin to share those and see if there are other places that might be able to create these very same ingredients.
But you have to be very, very, very careful, because without taking your time and without nourishing and without the right leadership … Like Christine Schuler Deschryver is an amazing leader and she is devoted. She does not have a secret agenda. She doesn’t want to be famous. She doesn’t want to be rich. She wants the women of her country to rise. And that is what is informing her work and therefore informing just about everybody who works there. And if people come who are not in that alignment, they leave because it never works.
Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s amazing. I think you also speak to one of the big capitalist toxins in our world, to blow everything and make everything big through steroids, in a way. Steroids and painkillers are kind of the currency of our world partly. And I think that what I hear from you is a very connected, organic growth that is also connected to nature, like to how nature works. And this feels very healthy to me.
V: And I would say so much of City of Joy is connected to nature. I mean, not only … It’s funny when we started … We built this in a swamp because that was the land we could get. And it’s amazing what has grown in this swamp. I mean, it’s gone from … It’s a forest now where we are. I went back to to it, I haven’t been able to go since COVID. I was like, “Oh my God.” But then we have this farm, which is … It’s 350 hectares. It’s tilapia ponds and pigs and cows and avocado trees and tons of rice and honey hives. And it’s all so beautiful.
And all the people who work there are in love with it. And there’s a whole field and the whole plot of land which was given to the community so they would feel part of us. So they work with us and they feel in sync with us. And just our methods of work, I think, have brought in people, have made people feel … And I was just there where all of the workers on the farm were just standing up doing testimonies about how their lives have changed.
And so this is what we want. We want to create communities of … And if everybody were out creating these communities and not worrying about scaling up, right? If everybody were really scaling down, right? The way we love, the way we care, then we’d have all these communities all over the world that were creating this collective energy that would shift things. And figuring out how to pay heed to the details, big projects that aren’t connected to the people, aren’t connected to … I don’t think they ever work.
Thomas: I completely agree with you. And also, it shows itself the connection to nature, because I believe healing, as you say, goes through our body. Trauma can only be healed through our body. And through our body, it’s also healing nature. So it makes us naturally connected to nature and the biosphere and the whole ecosystem. We are not separate particles on the planet. We are part of the planet.
So one thing you said already that’s very strong is love is kind of the remedy for trauma. Are there other principles that you extracted? I mean, you spoke to some of, but maybe you can summarize them a little bit for us. So what are other principles you learned? Because one thing that I also heard is—and that I deeply believe in—that collective healing is amazingly powerful. And you also spoke about the group and we are healing together. So are there more principles besides collective healing and love as a remedy that you learned throughout the process?
V: It’s like really beautiful parents who bring up their children, their boys, to be feminist. And then they’re appalled when they see what happens when they go to school. Like culture, as Terence McKenna said, “The culture is not our friend.” And you can’t trust the culture. The culture is the thing that is poisoning you over and over and over again until you change the culture. And I think part of what I’ve really learned at City of Joy is that when the culture changes and when the culture’s clean and when the culture’s caring, when the culture’s loving, people get healed. You can change the culture. So it goes … It’s back and forth. You know what I mean? And I think this notion that you can somehow heal yourself outside is a very capitalist notion, very individualistic, and completely untrue, to be honest with you. It’s why people are always falling back into addiction or falling back into … We all have to do this together or this isn’t going to happen.
We’ve touched on nature. I think nature is a huge piece of healing. I know for me, it’s been probably one of the biggest pieces of it. I think art is a huge [inaudible]. I think creating art, being witness to art, dancing, dancing, dancing, being in the presence of poetry, being in the presence of theater, being in the presence of art, and creating art and making art. Because I think it takes you and it transports you out of the binaries, out of the right and wrongs, left and right. It brings you into that glorious place of ambiguity and wonder and mystery, where my bliss is. Not knowing and being okay with not knowing.
I think another big piece is telling the truth about your story. I don’t think you can really emerge out of trauma without going back and retelling, reknowing, processing your trauma and getting to the heart of it and going through that kind of wound, which is the portal to the other side. And I think the biggest, for me, of all the things that have healed me? Loving and caring for people who are suffering has been the major way that I’ve healed. Just seeing that I can be useful, seeing that I can be in service. Maybe something I do makes it a little better for somebody else. I mean, that gives me meaning. That gives me a sense of purpose. That gives me a sense that … Because so much of what trauma does is it robs you of meaning and it robs you of your sense of worth and it robs you of … It just levels you. And I think when you can see yourself in action as a person who is loving and caring and showing up for people, you begin to feel good about yourself.
Thomas: Yeah. That was a lot of concentrated wisdom within a few minutes. That’s so lovely. I mean, I resonate with everything you said. I think this is so essential principles, every one of them. This is really great. And I deeply underline also that I think that we heal together, and only when the distortions of our cultures heal. Because sometimes we see our disease as a disturbance, but actually what if it’s an expression of a system that is out of alignment? And how to come back into alignment is a collective effort.
And I think that’s also what Gabor Maté, another speaker, speaks about about the myth of the normal, or how can you be healthy in an unhealthy culture. And you spoke to this as well. So I think that’s very powerful. And also collective healing … I see this all the time in the groups, like when somebody has a healing process and hundreds of people or thousands of people witness that, that has tremendous power.
V: And I think that’s one of the great things at City of Joy, when you see women going through something in the group and then all these women are watching it and then suddenly they’re like, “Oh wow, that’s my experience. I can do that.”
Thomas: Exactly, exactly. But naturally, also V-Day, many things that you started naturally started to grow, obviously. Within these principles that you discovered, it seems like there is a fertilizer. Maybe you speak a little bit about how you through your own work … I mean, you said some things already, but the V-Day I think is also a way to deal with the current violence against women in the world. And maybe you can speak a bit to that too.
V: Well, again, I had no idea when we started V-Day … It’s going to be 25 years this year, which is, “Help, how does this happen?” I think one of the things … When we started it was really just, I had this play and so many women were coming up to me at the end of the show and at first I thought, “Oh great. They’re going to tell me about their fabulous orgasms and their great sex lives.” And in fact, they were coming up to tell me how they’d been beaten or raped or cut or incested. And it became overwhelming. I was going to stop doing the show because it was just too much.
And I said, “Either I’m going to stop doing the show or we’re going to use this play to end violence against women. Like how can we do that?” And I got a group of women together in my living room, which I think is where all revolutions begin, and [inaudible] like, “What can we do?” and we came up with this idea of V-Day. And we were going to do one day where we put on the show and got all these great actors to perform it and raise money for local groups that were working to stop rape and battery. And we did one amazing performance and it was just mind-blowing, you know, 2,500 people showed up and all these great actors performed it and we raised a lot of money. It opened up this door that was begging to be opened.
And one woman said, “I’m going to bring it to colleges.” And another woman said, “I’m going to make vagina pajamas.” And another woman said, “I’m going to make vagina puppets.” And another … And it was like, “I’m going to bring this to Pakistan, and I’m going to bring this here.” And again, it happened very organically. It wasn’t trying to do anything. It was like everybody got a hold of this … I always feel like there’s this big, amazing vagina [inaudible] in the sky and everybody was just pulling it down, going, “I’m going to do this and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do this.” And I’m all for take it and run, take it and run, go. I have a very anarchic sense of the world in me. I love it that people want to just take something and go with it.
So here we are, 25 years later and it’s pretty amazing what’s happened in this 25 years. Have we ended violence against women and girls and non-binary people and trans women? No, we have not yet. But when we started this 25 years ago, you could not say the word vagina anywhere, and you can say the word vagina everywhere now. You could not talk about violence against women. It’s a front page issue now. We’ve made huge legislative slides. We’ve birthed gorgeous projects like the City of Joy or the Safe House in Kenya. We’ve grown a movement, a global movement, in a hundred countries. And we’re still here, which is an achievement in itself.
I think the negative side is, if Dobbs and the reversal of abortion rights have shown us anything, we haven’t dismantled the system, the mindset, the culture of patriarchy, right? And until we do, we’re going to be really fighting these individual battles forever. And until we understand that all of these issues that oppress us have to be faced together, that … Patriarchy, to me, has birthed racism and it’s birthed capitalism and it’s birthed imperialism and it’s birthed all these things. And until we begin to see that the inequality of wealth keeps women in unequal positions, which is connected to racism because that inequality is more oppressive with people of color, that it just goes… Everything goes into everything else. You know what I mean?
And I think, I don’t know how we dismantle patriarchy. I have to tell you, I have pondered this probably every day of my life since I had a conscious mind and I don’t know the answer. But what I do know, and I think what’s changing for me, I’m not going to react against it anymore. I feel there is something about … Writing The Apology, the book I wrote where I wrote my father’s apology to me and I climbed inside him for a year and I really tried to understand—not justify, and I want to make that very clear, the difference—tried to understand what went into making my father. Who was my father that he could have done what he did to me. What were the ingredients that created his ability to harm me in such a profound way?
And I think one of the reasons I did it is that I felt, even at this time in my life, I was still in my father’s narrative. I was still in my father’s story. I was still reacting to my father. Like, “A successful thing. You see? Proof you were wrong. You see? I’m always battling you. I’m always angry at you. I’m always proving … ” And I realize I don’t want to be in that story anymore. I want to be in this story I create, which is one of the reasons I changed my name. I want this next period to be V’s story. I was in my father’s story with his last name and his name and that story’s over.
And I think part of what I don’t want to be in anymore … It’s time to create a vision and a place and a way of being that is new, inviting, exciting, inclusive, loving, inspiring, envisioning. A world without patriarchy, of cooperation and not dominance, of listening, of caring, inspiring, including people, seeing people, cherishing people, having time for people, right? Where people are fed and housed and live in healthy neighborhoods and get healthcare and educated. And where we turn our attention to caring for people and the earth and each other, and doing everything we can to transform trauma into love.
And that means I can’t spend all my time hating that, pushing against that, reacting against that. We have to build a new world over here. Whatever you say, the Mother, she keeps doing her thing. No matter what happens in the world, spring comes, and no matter what happens in the world, the leaves fall at this time of year, she just goes on. And I’m learning from her. You need to create the world that’s going to be so beautiful and so sexy and so alive and so enchanting that people want to come there and they don’t want this world of the patriarch, which is so painful, so oppressive, so mean, so cruel. And once you get a taste of what something else can be and a feel for it, then you’re going to want, “Oh, I want that.” It’s like sleeping on a scratchy blanket your whole life and then someone hands you cashmere and you’re like, “Wait, there’s cashmere?”
Thomas: I love it. I love it so much. And I love it also that you said … Because for many people, it might be that we stay in the story and againstness to the story that we are a prisoner of. And also, and a lot in the ancestral healing work, we say only when you find a relation to the past of your parents, you can make a different choice. You’re not against that, but you’re for something that you choose. And that’s so beautiful. Everything you said is exactly that. It’s like how you got this insight to choose something new. And I think that’s also the answer to how to dismantle the patriarchal structures is not to fight it, but to actually create another world. And that’s amazing.
V: I think patriarchy is absolutely into itself. But I see this with One Billion Rising where people dance, right? And I’ll tell you this great story, which is such an emblem of… So in Philippines, they have a very revolutionary group called Gabriela, which is part of our movement and there’s workers involved and the workers, for years, they were like, “We march. We don’t dance.” And then one day they were like, “Maybe we do dance.” And they started dancing. And they were like, “Okay, we love to dance.”
And anyway, they were dancing, protesting this corporation. And they were just dancing and dancing and the police came and they were so moved by the dancing, they just started dancing. To me, it’s just the best story because it’s like, what are we offering that is going to make people want to be part of this? Does it feel good? Do you feel seen? Do you feel loved? Do you feel nurtured? Do you feel lifted up? Or do you feel judged? Do you feel put down? Do you feel like you’re not good enough? Do you feel like you’re doing something wrong, that you’re stepping out of line? You know what I mean? That’s where people leave. That’s been their traumatic experience. So how do we make people feel loved? How do we make people … As we’re being fiercely committed to our political values?
Thomas: Very much so. And even more so, because then you tap into your creative spark and you get the support of entire life is lining up behind you because you’re choosing something new. And that sounds to me really like the remedy. That’s very powerful what you said.
V: We were just in Croatia with all our One Billion Rising council who determine what the theme it is going to be for the year. And we decided this year the theme was going to be “Rising for Freedom. Create the New Culture.” What does the new culture look like to you? What is it? What is the world we want to live in? We spend so much of our time resisting this culture as opposed to going, “What is the culture we want to live in?”
And I think when we can begin to see that culture, we feel that culture, embody that culture, people get very drawn to us and they want that. And that’s what I’m going to spend the rest of my life doing. I’m done fighting them. I’m done even … It’s like, “Okay, we know what you do. We got it. We got it. Your endgame is suicide. Your endgame is to end this whole thing. That’s where you’re headed. You’re going to kill our air, kill our food, kill our ground, kill our seas, kill us so you have the power.”
And I used to have this ongoing dream that there was a landscape of bombs and people just holding onto the bombs starving. Because that’s what got created, like power, power, power, power, and now there’s nothing. It’s over. So if you want power, if you want to dominate, if you want to … We know that. We live in your world. But I’m going to spend my time … I’m an artist. I’m going to build another world over here.
Thomas: That’s really lovely. I mean, you said it already but maybe you want to speak more about … Given all your experience and everything that you learned so far, what’s the most exciting? Maybe that’s already it, but is there more to your leading edge? Or does this sum up your current leading edge where you feel your own calling at the moment that updates itself all the time?
V: I think living here in the woods, I’m really connected to the Mother. I’m really connected to her. And I feel my edge is to serve her, to cherish her, to respect her, to praise her, to be her daughter, to be her servant, to be her … In any way I can. So my leading edge is to listen. What am I to do? And if I’m really attentive, I’m really still, I can hear what I’m meant to do. And right now I’m creating a really exciting musical, or this play, fairy tale about climate change with music. And I’m having the best time in my life. I’ve never written … I’m writing with these two great composers and we’re writing music and we’re writing … And, you know, I’ve written this fairy tale and it’s going to be theatricalized. And you know what? It’s got tons of teenagers in it. It’s wild. It’s called Wild. I feel like …
I’ll tell you a really funny story. We shifted what the play, the musical was going to be about from … It was going to be looking at extraction and fracking and then we shifted it to deforestation. And we spent a week here working on it, working on it, working on it, and it was an amazing experience. And half the week we were thinking, “What does it sound like when a tree falls down?” And just trying to get the theatrics of saws and, anyway. They left. Next day, I hear this cracking, cracking, cracking, cracking, cracking sound, and I run out and the catalpa tree has split in half and fallen in the pool. Just fallen in the pool. And I feel like we are all getting those signs all the time. I happen to get really huge like you can’t ignore them signs. But I think we all are getting signs all the time if we want to tune in and pay attention to what’s coming towards us, right?
And so I think what I’m trying to do now in my life is how do I in every way that I live serve her? Serve her, serve that which is life, serve that which is alive, serve that which feeds us, serve that which is so generously taking care of us at every moment, and be a good daughter? And be a good daughter. And that feels like a lot. It feels like a lot. And it manifests itself in our political work, in my artistic work, in my personal work, and in my life. Is this what she would want me to be? Is this making … Is this furthering her life?
Thomas: That’s very powerful, very powerful. Beautiful. And I have maybe two more questions for you. I know I don’t want to stretch your time too much. One is, my wife and I, we set up an NGO some like, 16, 2016, and it’s collective trauma work around the world, but what I … Like one part of the vision is what is … Because I believe when we heal trauma enough, a natural urge to apologize, like an ethical correction is basically always … When the ice melts there is like a realignment, an ethical learning. And I think we need … In a lot of ice, there’s a lot of ethical learning that’s frozen. That’s why we didn’t get it. So we need to deice it in order to grow as human beings, to meet AI and nanotechnology and many other things that are tech-related or science-related.
And since you wrote this book on apology, I’m curious … Because I see in the moment we heal enough … For example, states apologizing to each other, to groups of people, to suppressed ethnicities, to end slavery and racism. There’s a natural apology that’s arising from deep healing. And I’m wondering, when you envision states where a lot of trauma happened or genocides happened or other crucial things happened, how do we approach that kind of collective apology? That it will be a natural consequence of us touching the deep humanity of who we are in order to come to that voice. Because you spoke about the voice of the Mother and I believe the Mother once that these wounds can heal. And yeah, maybe you can speak to what comes up in you when I say that.
V: Wonderful question. I’m so happy you asked it. I think writing The Apology was such a profound thing because if you had ever told me that I was going to climb into my father and feel his pain and … You know, he was just a monster to me and that was done. And to go back and to feel my father’s pain and to understand what happened to my father was excruciating, but it was the most liberatory thing I’ve ever done. It allowed me to understand. First of all, understanding is freedom. It’s freedom. Because by seeing who my father was, I came to understand that what he did had nothing to do with me. It had to do with him. I was a child. Once the book came out into the world, people started to write me like, “I want to know how to apologize,” or “I feel like I want to do this,” or “I want to do this.”
And what I feel about collective apology, look. The non-apology is one of the central columns that keeps patriarchy in its place. Men have been told from the beginning of time, never apologize, never be weak, never show your vulnerability, never show you’re wrong, that’s how you’ll lose your way. It is the hardest thing for men to overcome. I really believe that. Because it’s been so indoctrinated into them. So what are states but patriarchal constructs, right? They’re just the larger amplification of a patriarchal mandate. So why would states ever apologize?
I think when we get to the place where states and systems that are responsible for enslaving people or genocides or robbing people of their lands … Like if we just look what happened to the Indigenous in this country, like the stealing of lands, the killing of thousands and thousands of Indigenous people, the robbing and eviscerating of their traditions, torturing them in schools, beating out their wisdom, beating out … There is a massive apology and reparations and reconciliation that must occur in this country if it is to ever truly go forward. There is no way to go forward without that.
Same with what happened to African Americans who were brought here as slaves, who died, and the millions who were tortured for years, who were enslaved, who were whipped, who were … And then all the things that followed from Jim Crow, whether mass incarceration, Black people beginning to rise and being wiped out again during Jim Crow. All of that has got to be dealt with in a way where collectively we acknowledge it. We speak it. We own it. We see as white people, for example, that everything we have is predicated on it, and our privileges and our whole story is linked to that. Because without that enslavement, without that oppression, we would never have achieved the material goods and the advancements that white people have. And until that’s fully acknowledged and apologized for and reckoned with, there is no way this country …
And so you see now in America this incredible beginning of reckoning and then this incredible pushback against it, of not wanting to teach anti-racism, eviscerating critical race theory. Like all the ways in which we are pushing back against telling the real story and owning the real history of this country. And I think it’s very dangerous. I mean, I have a line in my new … I have a new book called Reckoning that’s coming out in January and there’s just one little line which is, “Reckoning is the antidote to fascism.” It’s like, if you reckon with things and if you remember things, and if you tell the truth about things and you won’t … Fascism is impossible. Pretend it hasn’t happened, you’re almost inviting it to happen again.
Do I think it’s possible? Of course, it’s possible with the right leadership, with a person … Look, I mean, it was an incomplete apology, but certainly in New Zealand, the beginnings of an attempt to apologize to the Aboriginal was there on the book. And that was something. And that needs to be a much deeper apology and that needs to be going into much … And also there need to be ramifications to that apology. There need to be reparations and reconciliations that go along with it. It’s not just something, “I’m sorry,” but, “Here is what you are entitled to.” I think when that mechanism collectively begins to start to happen, we will see the possibility of real change in the world. But it will not happen until that happens. It’s impossible. Until people own what they’ve done to you and say in some way, there is no way people can release those harms, you know? It’s very …
On the other hand, I think we have to find modes that don’t keep us caught in our grievances and caught forever. I mean, I sometimes think as a Jewish person sometimes that we’re caught so much in our grievance, in this determination to be that grievance, that we allow ourselves to perpetuate terrible crimes against other people—i.e., the Palestinians in the name of that—rather than finding forms that release us from those grievances. And what are those forms? So that we don’t have to be only that, right? We can be more than our grievances.
And I think that’s something we all need to be thinking about. How do we honor the history, the horrible things that have been done to us, and yet say, “That is done and we are made anew through people owning it and through people acknowledging it and through people apologizing for it and that we don’t have to keep seeing that as the only thing that we are.” Now, that’s true across the board with everyone. How do we do that? And it’s hard when often the people who are most aggrieved are the most ignored. They continue to be the most depressed. As there is horrible racism, there’s horrible antisemitism, it all continues. And yet on some level, if we just keep continuing that, we keep continuing perpetuating the patterns of oppressed, oppressor, oppressed, oppressor. And we do to other people what was done to us, you know?
Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Very much so. Touches me deeply when you speak about it, because I completely agree with what you said. Impulse to speak about. It’s not like a question, but it’s more like I want to hear how you respond to this, given everything that you’ve seen. Because I believe that when somebody is missing in a community, the responsibility, the ability to respond to that of the community is to go to look for that person and rescue or bring that person back if they can’t come back by themselves.
And I believe on the level of trauma or pain, there is a level of pain where we still have a voice to call for help. But actually the deepest pain in our culture is the one that is mute. And you spoke a little bit about it now at the end, there is so horrible racism, antisemitism, violence against women. The muteness is actually the deepest pain, but when we don’t have a word, we don’t have a creation, so we can’t call for help. So a lot of the pain, like the deepest pain, is actually mute. And it needs all of us. Like your service. Like you are serving the world is a way to go to look for that missing mute pain that often can’t call for help.
And when you hear me speak about that, I would love to hear your thoughts on that. How we as people who are also privileged to have enough awareness of the world, that it’s actually our job to go to look for that pain that is missing in the muteness. And maybe you can speak to that a bit.
V: It’s interesting you’re saying that because I think I’ve spent my life … I think because I felt so muted as a child and because there was no place to go with my pain, except to write in my journals and whatever, I was so lonely. I was so lonely. And I think one of the most prevailing things in the world right now is this utter capitalist loneliness. It just feels … Capitalism has just birthed this horrible loneliness where people cannot speak their pain. They don’t trust anyone to believe their pain. They don’t believe people have time for their pain. Everyone just rushing, rushing, rushing.
And one of the things I feel my life has been is like I’ve gone to places where people are invisible, where people don’t exist. I spent my life in homeless shelters and I spent my life in prison, in refugee camps. I’ve spent my life where the discarded live, where people who stop mattering to people live. And I’ve done that because I feel like, until they’re all included and part of us, we don’t get to be whole. We’re all this mandala. We’re all this collective, what Jung talks about, collective unconscious. We’re all this. And every part of us has to be part of this alignment and this circle before any one of us gets to be whole.
So I have to say, I have been so privileged to spend eight years in a maximum security prison with a group of women who were all there for violent crimes. Watching them every week wrestle with their crimes but also with their histories, with their hearts, with their stories to find … To give voice to who they were and why they did … Because none of those women had time in their life or a way in their life to even voice who they were, what they felt, because life just happened to them. It just happened to them. It was just like it threw them against the wall and then they woke up one day in prison.
And I spent time in homeless shelters where the same thing happened to people. And I spent time in refugee camps. And I think, honestly, what we all need to do is look around at the people sitting next to us on the bus, at the people walking by us, at the person serving us coffee, at the person … Who are those people? What pain are they in? What suffering are they in? What’s their story? Who cares about them?
And even if it’s just making an effort once a day to listen to somebody, to feel somebody, to be in relationship with somebody that you would normally not pay attention to, it changes people’s lives overnight to feel like someone cares about your story and wants to hear what’s going on with you and is interested in you.
And I think we have become so atomized. Particularly since COVID, we’re all cut off, locked up, shut off, and we’re not seeing each other and so people have gotten more and more lonely and more and more isolated. And I think for me, it’s like how do we break out of this isolation? I did a piece during COVID where I interviewed all these nurses and I just spent hours listening to their stories and then I put it together into this piece that we did and we performed. But the nurses were so grateful just to have an hour where somebody was listening to their story.
Go invite a person who’s cleaning your school and ask them to sit down and tell you their story. Go invite somebody you’ve looked at every day and you have no idea who they are because you’ve never opened the door to being curious about who they are, and make that person real. We need to make each other real in our lives. So we’re not these cut off, estranged … Camus really talks about it, that state of estrangement that we’re in so much with each other lately. And I think you’re so right about the missing. And there are a lot of people missing right now.
Thomas: This was amazing. I deeply resonate with your mission and your beauty that you bring through every word that you say. I deeply resonate with what you do, so thank you so much. I feel very enriched. I feel full and glowing after our conversation, so thank you so much. It’s beautiful.
V: Your energy is so beautiful. It’s been such a pleasure.
Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thank you so much. And yes, thank you. It’s a great contribution to the Summit. I think you spoke to so many important topics. Thank you very much.
V: Thank you.
