Commitment at the heart of our conflicts

What are you committed to? Could you write it all down? And follow them?

So why do we speak out our commitments, our vows? For many, and for myself, I speak my commitments out loud to create a framework of clarity for me and the humans around me. I’ve spoken commitments to ideas for community that I haven’t adhered to. Causing confusion and, in some cases, disrepair. Yet what feels to be at the heart of this, is that commitments to an idea or a dream are never quite the essence of the vow itself.

When we commit to a project, a kind of relationship, a duration of stability, we are speaking of the future in ways that try to give us a sense of the unknown. Yet, the unknowable is exactly as it is, not knowable. And so, in many ways our spoken commitments are a little like trying something on to get a sense of whether it is our truth.

The pains of committing and seeing commitment falter into disillusion has me questioning whether I would be better off being non-committal and vaguely out the door just as I enter inside.

Yet in the relational realms I see that commitments carry weight; they give us a sense of security. They are the building blocks to village, community, safety, and trust. They are the river that always flows, the night that always comes, the promise of a new day, a home to land to, the freedom to know that there are people to raise our children.

And so, what I want to know is, what is at the essence of this secret vow? What makes them true? How do I make commitments that honor what I know I cannot break?

Sometimes I make commitments like, I’ll always listen to your perspective, or I’ll always be there for you, and these create a feeling of stability and certainty. But in truth, I don’t think they reflect my consistency of action so much as they are expressions of the seriousness of my love. That rather, my commitments are like offerings laid out to the spirit realm of what I am capable of, what I am yearning for, and what might become when these commitments are met with alignment to spirit. Or in other words, what can be held by the realm in which time and space is unboundaried.

And this is why I believe; commitment is at the heart of many of our conflicts today. In this current iteration of humanity, almost nothing feels sacred and enduring. We are hurled into an ecosystem collapsing from overuse of its gifts. The ability to move, travel, leave behind one’s culture, communities, relationships is relatively easy. Commitments to one’s life partner, hold little to no accountability within communities, as their legally binding nature is just a surface level investment that embodies the connection between two spirits through shared resources rather than their shared commitment to a source beyond what is seeable.

Yet those who gravitate towards the old ways, still look towards commitment as a vehicle to place their holy vows. A commitment to a place or a community can help us make sense of this feeling of rupture to a lack of kinship with each other and the land. We feel we can look to our ancestors, who had no other opportunity but to commit themselves to place, to kin, to their relatives as an example for how to return to our humanness.

So although it might not reflect what the spirits are holding for us as our path, we name our commitments to our beloveds, to the places we have called home. This we say with the certainty of our limited capacities to see and with the certain possibility for breaking these vows.

I often think about how life must grow from death. That what is dead inspires our living, and that the true path towards returning to indigeneity is to squarely look at what is here today.

There is no turning back towards stuffing technology back into its pandora’s box. We are in the practice of global interconnection. We are a world of 混血 hùn xuè, mixed blood. There is no purity in our waters, or skies clear of satellites even in the remote reaches of the world.

Commitment too must be born of where we are. In some ways, I see that when we make our vows, we must see them as commitments able to thrive within the rapid change of our lived environment. They are opportunities for us to practice mitakuye oyasin, Lakota for: we are all related. Rather, our commitments must make space for movement, the space for an expansion of the self as the crowded rooms of our many many ancestors.

So why is conflict born out of commitment?

Our commitments are too small for the realities of our spirits. They get stuck in the smallness of our words, our definitions that rely on securities for only one lifetime. What it means to know the secret vows, is to know the secret of what we are. And that, can never be spoken out loud.