let's escape the tribal

from many, one

we have our differences,

and part of us loves commonality,

a grouping together with those

most like the part of ourselves

that strikes us as determinant:

maybe our gender, our age,

the way we see the world,

personality traits like ours,

the geography of our birth,

the color of our skin,

we find each other,

and we are a group,

those not in the group are “other”

and it’s easy to deny the other can be part of us,

in our politics and in our associations

we can easily slip into the tribal,

we fragment and deny the whole that we can be,

tonight I attended the world premier of a play

I commissioned to be written

as a way to express and celebrate

the best of who we can be as a Quaker school,

the playwright, director, and middle school actors

got it, expressed it, celebrated it,

as they presented a world with 7 tribes,

each committed to the totem of a different animal:

the fierceness of the tiger,

the preening of the peacock,

the caution of the mouse,

the playfulness of the monkey,

the steadfast dependability of the dog,

the power of the snake, the goat,

the children explore, reach out to the other,

and find companions, friends they didn’t expect,

another group impinges on their world

and they have to deal with it,

so they find how to work together

and, in that work, discover parts of themselves

to develop in synchronicity with what works for the other,

once they’ve come together,

their hearts enlarge enough to welcome

even the ones most distinct from them,

if the other meets the outstretched hand

 with their own outstretched hand,

“me” dissolves into “we” 

and the opposition of the tribal 

morphs into the dynamic cooperative tension

that can hold family and community together.

by Henry H. Walker

May 1, ‘15