The Inward Path as Transformative Responsibility
If we turn inward in exploring ‘responsibility’ we immediately encounter a silence around which we usually build a fence. That fence is linguistic (as in conceptual-emotional) in nature. It is a de-fence of the world we live in. To be, or act, ‘responsibly’ is usually seen as a (de)fence to a threat; responsibility takes the form of ‘risk avoidance’. And in a business-as-usual world, a world of habit and certainty, that risk usually takes the form of an alternative world that we would wish (in our dreams or heart-of-hearts) to inhabit.
Here we face the limits, or perhaps shadow, of language. As Giorgio Agamben notes “The ineffable, the un-said, are in fact categories which belong exclusively to human language” not because silence, aphasia, is itself a limit but because “the unsayable [is] what language must presuppose in order to signify” (Agamben, 1993, p. 4). The ‘silence’ is what we are afraid of, it is what challenges us to anchor our world in a reality that we ‘word’ into being. Yet, the wording somehow feels always threadbare as the process of worlding, as described by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. xiii), always challenges our attempts to hold down reality. Words signify, define, enclose, capture; Worlding is generative, open, imaginative and inclusive.
Wording can leave us in the dark, but worlding is in fact an invitation to action. Always with worlding we are involved in struggles over definition of what is and therefore, in the context of responsibility, what is considered both ‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’. When we engage with the world with Heart, Body and Mind in an attempt to build something better, this is a special kind of worlding, so when we resist, we engage the transformative. An inner engagement with transformative responsibility is what we are considering when we turn inward. There is something ancient at work here along with something completely new. As adrienne maree brown notes, and we reiterate, we: “… believe that we are at the beginning of learning how to really practice transformative justice in this iteration of species and society. There is ancient practice, and there will need to be future practices we can’t yet foresee” (brown, 2019, p. 11).
We stand at a moment when we are asked by the silenced majority to go inward to re-orient our world. Responsibility requires of us a vision for a world we can fall in love with, so we turn inward to re-ignite, re-enchant, re-calibrate, re-affirm. We are involved in a real struggle to find the inward path and reclaim our right to rich futures. Responsibility for us is contextual, it can strangle possibility as easily as re-kindle it. Our ritual takes the ancient work of sacred collective action, the conscious affirmation of a commitment through a practice to transformative responsibility and combines it with an openness to the possible.
