At WholeHeart, we stay curious about what our participants absorb and metabolize through experience with our varied programs. We begin a new series in our E-newsletter this month, where we’ll profile a member of the WholeHeart community, discovering how they bring wholehearted insights from this work into their lives.
We begin with Eben Bein, age 36, who lives on Pawtucket Land (Cambridge, Mass.), who has participated in the year-long Courage Cohort, a WholeHeart Gathering, and a Circle of Trust retreat for three years. Eben is a former biology teacher and science journalist, whose first chapbook of poems entitled, Character Flaws was recently published.
Currently, he serves as Massachusetts field and education manager for Our Climate, a nonprofit organization that empowers young people to advocate for science-based, equitable, and intersectional climate justice policies. Eben coaches young people on how to engage with state legislators and build meaningful, resilient coalitions. You can imagine that his conversation with Marybeth, a former state representative in Vermont, resulted in a lively exchange! Eben participated in this interview while walking through leafy Cambridge, taking some self-care time outside to get away from his computer screen.
Marybeth: In your online bio, you describe your life as occurring at “the miraculous interface of climate justice education, communication, and the arts.” I’m curious why you use the word “miraculous?”
Eben: As a queer person raised in a secular science-minded household and family culture, my relationship with spirituality is interesting. I was raised with a sense of life as miracle and that many of the intellectual and scientific pursuits (of our time) have been, in a way, a celebration of that miracle. My dad and I both share this model of God as, you keep asking scientific questions, “okay, so how does a plant turn sunlight into sugar energy,” and you keep answering and say, “okay the leaves have this, and the chlorophyll has this, and the atoms, do this.” Then you always get to a step where you have to throw up your hands and say, “and then a miracle happens.” So, this is how the words “miraculous” and “miracle” became important to me.
It’s also related to this wonderful quote that I’ve been chewing on for a while: “Wonder is the absence of interpretation” by Neil Evernden (author and environmentalist). That quote is a good piece of medicine for me because I'm an interpreter; that is my default state, both interpreting for myself and interpreting for other people around me. Sometimes returning to wonder is an important challenge for me -- and that’s a Courage touchstone, “when the going gets rough, turn to wonder!” So already, I think we're touching on what WholeHeart helps to heal and strengthen in me.
“I think there's something about the structure of WholeHeart that understands that self work is outer work.”
- Eben Bein
Marybeth: I thought of that touchstone as you began speaking! You continue to participate in the year-long Courage cohort and other gatherings. What attracted you to the work of WholeHeart?
I read the Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer early in my teaching career and felt very compelled. Among many things in that book, I have thought often about his invitation to use metaphor to describe one’s own approach to teaching, and how powerful that was for understanding one’s own strengths and liabilities (as a science teacher). The image that has stuck with me is that I teach like a dragonfly: very agile, darting, a little bit predatory, territorial sometimes, and yet also as flexible as they come, able to see the interconnections, and perch here, and see in 360 degrees.
Even in the moment of this interview, I realize dragonflies spend a lot of their time underwater growing and nourishing themselves before they can do all those feats. Parker Palmer’s exercise in metaphor keeps giving. Since then, I’ve continued the exploration of his work, and it led me to WholeHeart. I know and understand him as a beautiful person, not an exception, but rather, one beautiful branch on the tree of Quaker traditions and other contemplative traditions and wanting to find my way to that.
Marybeth: I have a similar journey into WholeHeart work through the inspiration of Parker Palmer. And I love what you said about Parker not being an exception, but rather a kind of beacon, helping us to activate our own inner lights. The second part of my question was what have you integrated or metabolized from your experiences with WholeHeart? And what do you offer to the whole that’s important?
Eben: I'm very aware of my age, my queerness, the whiteness, and the Boomerness of the space at times. I was raised by Boomers and have been nurtured intergenerationally, not just by my own parents, but also by the co-housing neighborhood that I grew up in. In these times, there are lots of intergenerational tensions that all of us are learning how to hold. In many instances, things that I might describe as adult fragility, parental fragility, and white fragility - I get this more often from older people than younger people – who reflexively describe the whole of young people's work as solipsistic or self-focused in a way that’s unhealthy and out of balance.
And while speaking in these generalizations is so problematic and the situation is nuanced, it has been remarkably healing for me to be in a Boomer-dominated space where there are very specific containers for a person to do, what in other situations, I have heard older people call “selfish” work. I think that there's something about the structure of WholeHeart that understands that self work is outer work. That has been a huge gift because amongst the younger people in my life, I feel like there’s a currency of understanding, and I can learn a lot from them, but I miss out on the wisdom of the older generations when elders shut down similar conversations for being too “self-centered.” So I’m glad to make the WholeHeart space more intergenerational.
"To all of the adults who have uttered, “for future generations” or “for the children” or “for my children,” I would suggest that we please cut ourselves off mid-sentence and hand the mic to the young people."
- Eben Bein
Marybeth: Do you see a connection between the WholeHeart learnings you are living into and what you're bringing into your day-to-day climate work?
Eben: I feel tender in my heart just letting that question in at this moment because the going is so rough. Just the other day with a group of young people, we were meeting with a champion (legislator) to present an interdisciplinary climate justice education bill we have written and submitted for the second session. He had encouraged us to learn from the Department of Elementary and Secondary education and from the teachers’ unions to inform our process and make the bill more effective and realistic. It led to an amazing morphing of what we thought the bill content should be.
Anyway, the legislator’s reaction to us bringing a new draft of the bill from which we had integrated input from multiple coalition meetings was, “Oh well, this is the middle of the session, we can't change the bill; we need to go back to this other bill.” I think his heart was in the right place; he was trying to help us have realistic expectations, and yet I found the way he was sharing his own perspective unskilled in a WholeHeart kind of way.
I want to acknowledge that it's rough in the sense that he is overworked as hell, and you, Marybeth, know this from your previous position. But I want to use this example as a microcosm of a moment that is so difficult, where I would hope we could all turn to wonder…about what's going on for him, and for the students.
One youth leader who did more work on the bill, who at the end of the meeting was like, “Oh thank God, I'm not going to be working with the legislature next year because this sucks.” This is one of the most intelligent, reflective, hardworking young people I have encountered, and it is really rough to see her give up on this aspect of our work.
Marybeth: I know exactly the dynamic you are referencing. It's like the old paradigm of how the legislative process has always worked (speed, efficiency, top-down) crashes into an emerging paradigm of slowing down, collaboration, and consensus. Continuing our conversation, your work with the youth climate coalition centers the voices of Bay State youth in the movement. What does the youth voice bring to the table that's missing?
Eben: I'm having a tough-love impulse at this moment. I’ll answer that question indirectly and say to all of the adults who might read this interview, that every single time you have uttered, “for future generations” or “for the children” or “for my children”…Let’s think about the number of times we have said that phrase. Each time we do, I would suggest that we please cut ourselves off mid-sentence and hand the mic to the young people. It's funny for me to say this as a 36-year-old, knowing I now identify as an adult in our spaces.
I won’t answer regarding what young people have to offer because I think they need to answer that question for themselves. I will speak to where I identify myself now. I think that for us older people, I notice this in myself too, it's so embedded to reach for control when I feel fear. That is deeply programmed into me and part of human nature. I think it's highly reinforced in American culture, in white supremacy culture under capitalism. I’ve been trained to reach for control when I feel fear.
One of my youth leaders is joining the WholeHeart Courage cohort next year, which is amazing. I do think that us older folks need their participation more than younger folx do. So much of how we inflict and reenact old broken systems comes from this clinging energy that we can unclench when we do WholeHeart-ed work. I need the courage to come back to healing myself, to tease out the parts of me that are about ego and control, and to come back to my center so I can respond, not be in charge of, but respond with the best that my generation has to offer.