One of the ways that Marie Vea shares her gifts with WholeHeart is by serving on its board of directors for the past five years. One of her recent contributions was helping to realign the organization’s mission statement with fellow board member Jeanie Phillips and executive director Holly Wilkinson as part of a strategic planning process.
Marie is well-suited to conversations about mission, vision, and values, as she has mentored and guided students, staff, and faculty in their own development and leadership abilities for nearly 25 years at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. She currently works there as the assistant dean of Student Services and Staff Development. In 2020, she earned a doctorate in education, authoring a thesis dissertation entitled, “Sense Of Place And Ways Of Knowing: The Landscape Of Experience For BIPOC In Natural Resources, Environmental Education, And Place Based Learning.”
WH Interim Co-Director Marybeth Redmond asked Marie to take us on a journey through the recently updated WholeHeart mission statement and to share her insights behind verbiage realignment:
“WholeHeart cultivates our capacity for deep listening and solidarity in service of collective well-being, dignity, and relational justice in kinship with all beings.”
MARYBETH: What do you see in the updated mission statement that’s important for us to emphasize so that people understand the work of WholeHeart?
MARIE: There's a lot packed into each of those words, and I'm remembering what it was like to sit down with Jeanie and Holly and feel the resonance of the words that emerged through the lovely and prescriptive process that Jeanie designed for us. Somehow, we landed on the word “cultivate” because words like this have a particular zing. I think that’s the word we used. There's a process and tending to the word. You cultivate flowers, you cultivate relationships, and cultivate your own emerging into something new. So that felt intentional.
For me, capacity speaks to, do I have the space for this? Do I have the muscles needed, and if not, how can I build the muscles for that? I also think the word capacity allows permission to say, I do not have the capacity for this, and space to ask the question, might we want to cultivate that capacity?
Deep listening is a compelling invitation to go beyond first-level listening, to practice and learn about what deep listening might feel like where it's not just with your head, but it's everywhere, listening with your full body.
Solidarity is being in partnership - not power over or power to, but power with and power beside. That conjures up for me the image of elbows interlocked. I went to a Brazilian dance lesson several months ago. There were 40 of us, and the instructor showed us this dance movement where when you've locked arms, you are to imagine all your ancestors standing beside you on the left side, and then all of us (in the room that evening) are interlocked together on your right side, walking toward whatever vision we share; that’s a powerful image of solidarity.
Collective well-being, I think, is pretty self-explanatory.
Relational justice. Sometimes I struggle with the word justice because it means different things to different people, and it plays out in varied ways. But when you put relational next to justice, there's an importance placed on what does justice mean for you? It's not an equal thing (person to person). Relational justice is an invitation to talk through what that might mean from my context, from my experience, from my perspective.
“We have such a hard time remembering that we are in deep relationship with all that is beyond human, with the natural world, the land, all of it.”
MARYBETH: What does it mean to be kin and to be kin with all beings?
MARIE: A lot of my work and research displaces humans at the center of things. The ecological catastrophes that we're in right now have a lot to do with missteps and injustices that humans have brought. In my work of environmental education, we have such a hard time remembering that we are in deep relationship with all that is beyond human, with the natural world, the land, all of it.
Kin is a term that Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, uses. Kin is about relationships and acting as if everything is family. And if we hold that perspective, then what does it mean to extract from our family, to extract resources from the land? What does it mean to take power and exploit not just human kin, but the kin that are all around us? That's why I appreciate with all beings. I hope people are wondering what does kinship mean because the word human does not show up in this mission statement – and I actually hope that’s what they notice.
MARYBETH: Where do you suggest we start in learning to live as if everything is family, is kin, how do we begin?
MARIE: It's really simple. You say hello and introduce yourself. So, there's a pothos plant just behind you; there's three of them hanging, and you say, good morning to them as you water them, I'm Marie.
It was raining this morning, and recognizing, okay it's raining, thank you, rain. Acknowledging that rain is not good or bad. Say hello to the oak tree, say hello to the animals that are around you. Say hello to the wind and the trees. It's a deep, deep noticing. I have a friend who describes this as paying exquisite attention.
And beyond my own observations of them, they observe me too – and thus the importance of introducing myself. So, when we make relationship, I am going to think twice before pulling up a mushroom, for example.
“It was the vision of an operating system based on love that was intriguing to me. I was like, ‘whoa, I’ll sign on to that!’ And how can that vision become part of everything we do from the organization and its systems to sitting across the table breaking bread together.”
MARYBETH: How can all of us living in the dominant white culture learn to become more open and receptive to other ways of knowing that have long been practiced and suppressed for generations?
MARIE: I think there's a multi-layered, circular, cyclical process of unlearning that we each have to do. I do too (as a Filipino woman). Unlearning capitalism, unlearning colonialism, unlearning our sense of time. Like, when I got stressed out that I wasn't getting here on time, and then noticing, what good does that do anybody?
So, there's a lot of unlearning about the processes and systems that we have taken for granted because we’re immersed in them, and how does that affect us? I think all of us would say that we share the values of family and relationship, but some of us are closer to that deeper remembering than others.
Folks indigenous to the land have practiced long-term observation over millennia so it’s not a new skill, but we tend to preference a Western scientific model of study that tends to give more credibility to formal learning and credentials.
Unlearning Western science can mean sitting at your sit spot, observing, and tapping multiple ways of knowing. And some of these ways of knowing we hide or downplay because capitalism, academia, public school, the health care system don't value them. But they are still present in us.
And I bet if you ask anybody regardless of their race, they have these other ways of knowing that they kinda hide away because they're considered crazy, or they don't make them money, or it’s just not favorable in society.
I also don't want to absolve white people of the work because everything, all of our institutions, are white-centric. We use the model of the white male able-bodied person when we're setting health care policy, when we're setting education policy, and on and on. So, how do we displace that in favor of thinking of all the other ways that people might make decisions?
“How do we illuminate for folks, that the touchstones of deep listening and cultivating various ways of knowing are actually a means of changing the system?”
MARYBETH: Are there hopes and dreams that you hold for WholeHeart in looking toward its future work?
MARIE: As a collective, if we're talking about collective well-being in our mission, how does the community become responsible for itself? I wonder about that especially in regards to the long term viability and sustainability of the organization; it can't be focused on one person or position. What agency do the members of Whole Heart have to help the organization be viable beyond the money part, energetically, and in other ways?
MARYBETH: What drew you to the work of WholeHeart? What's appealing to you about what WholeHeart does?
MARIE: It was really the vision of an operating system based on love that was intriguing to me. I was like, whoa, I’ll sign on to that! And how does that happen? How do we actually do that? How can that vision become part of everything that we do from the organization and its systems to sitting across the table breaking bread together (like we are now)?
How do we illuminate for folks, that these touchstones of deep listening and cultivating various ways of knowing are actually a means of changing the system? Yes, you can gain energy, replenish yourself, and find solace in doing WholeHeart-ed work, but the very act of participating together is an invitation to subvert the system that is draining us. So, how do we operationalize that in the midst of our busyness? And I'm preaching to myself, how do we cultivate that in the midst of all the demands that are upon us?