The Ground We Stand On
VOLUME 25, NUMBER 2, MARCH 2003
Ten years ago, Inter Pares assisted Guatemalan refugee women in Mexico in their arduous journey to return to their homes in the Guatemalan highlands. Today, again with our support, these women are sharing their experience with refugees from Burma living in Thailand, women who also hold close the dream of returning to their land, to their homes, to their place.
In both cases - the Guatemalan women, and the Burmese - the process of exile, their lives as refugees, and the prospect of return, have altered their identity while at the same time, paradoxically, affirming it. The opportunity to share realities is very important in clarifying visions, goals and self-determination strategies for the future. It is an experience of exchange and mutual support among people seeking to define and redefine their place in the world.
Our place - the ground we stand on - is both physical and spiritual, concrete and imagined, real and symbolic. The place we define for ourselves, and the place that is defined for us, is a constant point of reference for seeing the world, and for transforming the world and our "place" in it.
Place is not merely geographical space. Place is associated with landscape, but it is as much a mindscape and a soul-scape as a physical landscape. Place is as much who we are, and how we relate to our environment, as where we are. We can move great distances without changing places, we can stay in one spot and change our place fundamentally.
Still, over the past 150 years even the most sedentary of peoples have been transformed as immigrants in time and space. Virtually every people and community on the planet is now dispersed within concentric circles across distance and generations. At the same time, we all have a sense of place: where we are, where we came from, where we are going, and how these processes of life and transition are unified in our hearts and minds as "ground" - our ground, and our history. It is this personal sense of space, time and place, and their duration and permanence, that is the ground we stand on to face the world and to receive it.
This reality has positive and negative elements. The embrace of place liberates and constrains. Every place contains the very dangers from which it promises protection, nurtures and shelters while also restricting and oppressing. This is the nature of human society and transcends location.
For this reason, the rupture of place is always transformative as well as dangerous; it involves a disruption in established forms and relations of power and tradition, as people find themselves in new situations with different demands and constraints. It also brings with it the potential for affirmation as well as alienation. This has been the experience of the Guatemalan and Burmese women, described earlier, who first experienced the rupture, then transformation, and are now connected in solidarity across the globe.
Although perhaps less dramatically, and with journeys that entail less trauma, all of us are, in a way, pilgrims - a word that combines the Latin words for "away" and "land" and means "from away, alien, stranger, wanderer." This term carries an association of courage and quest, of adventure and personal transformation. At the same time, it recognizes that a journey starts in a place and that this place is part of the journey, not merely a point of embarkation. And that where the journey ends is also our place, permanently connected to where we began, in the heart and the imagination, and in our identity.
This Bulletin explores examples of people who are pilgrims in this sense - people who have transcended existing boundaries, often without even moving, to re-create place and tradition, and the future itself, in their own way.
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| Reviewed June 1, 2004 |  |
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