Last Saturday, Janessa and I had the privilege of hosting the Awakin Call with Susan Collin Marks.

When apartheid broke down, a new system had not yet been born, and South Africa was navigating the vacuum in between. Susan Collin Marks stepped in, working as a peacebuilder during her country's transition from apartheid to democracy. The sole woman on the executive committee of Cape Town's Regional Peace Committee, she was literally on the front lines of the transition, placing herself between armed police and angry protestors, once shot in the leg by a rubber bullet. She helped push the shift from a military-style police force—based on control and aggression—to a community-based police service based on connection and cooperation. For 25 years, as vice president and then senior ambassador of DC-based Search for Common Ground -- the world's largest peacebuilding organization nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 -- Susan has helped make peace in the most conflict-ridden places on the planet with an ethos of love.

In preparing these nuggets, I saw that Susan's ideas were already refined to their labidary core. They were all nuggets! And so worth spending time with. What a privilege it is to connect to this amazing woman and to honor this work. I can't wait until her new book comes out!

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen! Here are some nuggets....
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The roots of a peace maker
“[F]rom a very young age, I knew about [apartheid] because my mother told me, and she took me into the black townships to show me what it looked like when I was about five. She was a very unusual person in so many ways in that she was willing to stand against apartheid, but it wasn't that she was a revolutionary who was fighting. She was standing for things, not against things. She was standing for an equitable society. She was standing for human rights and dignity. She was standing for everybody belonging to this beautiful country, South Africa. And she couldn't bear the pain that apartheid created. She couldn't bear the separation of families. She couldn't bear the poverty that it consigned people to. She couldn't bear the awfulness of it, the horror of it from beginning to end. And so she stood for a different kind of world.”

“I wasn't allowed to play with some of the children, who I was at school with [all were white as education was strictly segregated], after school because the parents were afraid…Our house was raided and the telephone was tapped. And this was the reality of growing up there. But for me, it was really sort of normal, because that's all I knew…It marked me and it's indelibly imprinted in me, those years of growing up in apartheid South Africa, in a police state.”

“When you're a child, you don't have agency to change anything, but I knew it was wrong… And here I am a 70-something year old woman…and…that little girl lives, [crying gently] these are not tears of pain…They are just tears of huge emotion. Because something was lit in me, in those early years and has served that has served my entire life. I, my sense of the injustice of it, all that. People were judged by the color of their skin, and not by who they were.”

"[W]hat my mother did was extraordinary. I mean, she would invite black people to tea in our living room, and she wasn't silly about it, in the sense that she wasn't a white savior as you and David and I were discussing earlier. She was somebody who just saw people as people. And so when somebody wanted to speak to her about something, they sat down and had tea together. Of course, that's what you do. And a number of people would come to the house, for lunch on Mondays."

- - - - - - -
Janessa asked Susan if there was a moment where she felt “Oh, I do…I have agency I want to be involved.”

Susan: Yes, there was, I was at a boarding school…it was…my high school years, and a new … head of school joined. She was an English woman and she was very progressive. And she and my mother got into cahoots about all sorts of things. And one of the things that they did together was to invite to speak to the girls -- it was a girls' school -- representatives of all the political parties.

I don't remember how many speakers came. But what I -- and this was a very big deal, and there was a lot of trouble with a lot of the parents about doing something like this that was so overtly political -- what I do remember, and it was a moment that you described, was when the apartheid government member of parliament, the nationalist, a member of parliament for the nationalist party, came to speak, he told us all the good things that the party did. And I, for the first time in my life, I spoke about politics publicly. And I didn't really know what I was doing in that sense, but I stood up and I was puzzled and I said to him, "but what about job reservation?", which designated what jobs black people could do. "What about the Group Areas Act?", which designated where black people could live. And I reeled off all this legislation I had no idea I knew it. And I…stood there waiting for him to answer and tell me about it. And I have it in slow motion in my mind as what happened next, which was that he looked at me and then he looked away to all the girls and he said "she wants a coffee-colored society."

Those were his words. And the girls all went "boooooo" because they were mainly from conservative farming areas. And anyway, the way it was put, the sophistry of it all was extraordinary. And what happened in that moment has really become a standard for life in my own story, which is that I just stood there and looked at him and something in me refused to sit down. Something in me refused to break my eye connection with him. And I just stood there as there was booing, and then it quietens, and he didn't say anything. And finally, I sat down and, in that moment, I understood something, which it took me awhile to unpack, but I understood the power of speaking your truth. I understood the power of speaking what I felt it in my body, and I named it. ...

I was with the assembly hall full of my school mates and I was alone and nobody stood with me. Nobody stood with me. And I somehow knew that I always would be called to stand alone, that I would -- you know, it wasn't that I would be without my loved ones and family and so, and it wasn't about that -- it was about this public stance. It was a knowing then that in my life I would stand alone and I would stand for what was right. And that's what it's turned out to be.

Being Peace; Transforming the "Fuel" of Anger through Presence
“I think that anger is an interesting thing. Anger fuels me. You know, the injustice, the sense of injustice, the anger about that fuels me. However, it doesn't then emerge from me. It's transmuted in that process. And that's not a struggle. …I cannot do my work in the world from a place of anger. I need the fuel of it. And then I need to bring it as compassion, as curiosity, as connectedness to do this work in the world.”

“That's one of the miracles of life: we're given what we need, and…I've known that that process that somehow happens between the anger that's underneath the injustice, the sense of injustice that's underneath, and then the ability to come into a space and hold that space with all the people, whoever's in it, has been the bedrock of doing this work, of building a peace, of helping to build peace in the world. We only help. We are all helping and being a part of this and we can't do it without the other parts.”

"I worked through an institute at the University of Cape Town and the word "activist" was not considered a good word. And I would always say, no, no, no, of course I'm not an activist. I was an activist to my toes -- and as an activist for peace building. ... [In the South African peace committees], what you're saying is you want all the voices that are concerned to come together, to talk about the problems and come up with solutions they can all live with. And the interesting thing about that is it's not that you are trying to get everybody to agree on the country. You're not. But what you're doing is everybody is listened to, deeply. And when you think about it for yourself, when I'm in a group and I have a different perspective say from where the group seems to be going, if I'm really listened to, I can really present what I see and a different decision is ultimately made. I might grumble, but I can probably accept it because I've been heard, respected, seen, and that was the big difference. And, you know, in those years of the transition, Janessa, black South Africans had never been seen mostly, except for a tiny bit by whites South Africans."

“For me, this work has always been, has always come from a place of deep spirituality, of being, of presence. And on the other hand, I am fiercely practical. I know how to make things happen and I do. And so these two things have always sat together, and I've understood the power of presence. You know, something that people say often about this kind of work, is they say, ‘you've gotta be neutral.’ And I say, ‘no, no, absolutely not. There's no such thing as a neutral human being.’…But what you can choose to be is to be impartial. You can choose to be a bridge-builder. You can choose to hold everybody in the space and make it safe for everybody to be there -- the bad guys and the good guys.”

“I've always gone towards conflict. As I started off saying, I think we all come with a different purpose, and a lot of us come with the same purpose, a similar purpose. And we band together and we become a band of sisters and brothers who do this work in the world. And that's, to me, that's the "we". That's the most wonderful thing, is that band of sisters and brothers. And then our sisters and brothers who are doing different things are there in the world. And we are all interconnected making that mosaic.”

“I understood that how I came into the space of the transition was as important, if not more important (I would say more important), than the "what", than what I did in that space. And that's been with me all my life. How we do things, how we are when we come in. Look, action is being…Doing is being in action. Who we are, who we be, is how we will act. And how we act is our doing. So we're all going to be different in this. We're all going to be who we are, we're all then going to act from that place of being.”

“And so getting to know who we are, self-reflection, I do believe is one of the most powerful tools that we have -- is to understand where we come from and how we're interacting with the world and what is being called for at any one time by sensing it, the felt sense of what's around rather than the head sense. And I do think one of the losses in our world has been this focus on the head at the expense of the heart and the gut, because those are our three intelligence centers -- the head, the heart and the gut.”

“I've never been that very good at the sitting meditation…I always sit every morning, usually with a big mug of tea. And I sit and welcome in the day. ‘This day has never been lived before. This day has never been lived before. What does it bring? What does it ask of me? What can I bring? Who am I to be in this day? What will happen in this day?’”

"There'll be a period where [things go] down, and I know it's going to come up as well. It always does. It always does. So staying with that, not worrying about it, not panicking. But staying with it and allowing it to emerge, as it should be changed in the form that it has found for itself, and in a situation where there's intense conflict right in front of you. And you're asked to help with that, to mediate it, to facilitate. On the streets of South Africa, that happened all the time for those four years. And I was out there on the streets. And so that felt sense, "what is happening here? What's needed here? What is my contribution, which may not be that much. It may be just offering space." So there's no formula for this. And while we learn techniques which are technical and they're incredibly important, this work is transformative and the technical must always be in service of the transformational. It's imperative. And often it's seen as the other way around." 

"We always need to listen to the body, and to bodies. ... I'm very observant. I watch. I'm a watcher. And it's part of doing my work is to watch, and I see what's happening in people's bodies and I feel it, I feel what's happening in other people's bodies. I believe that we need to heal at all levels, and that everything can be a part of healing. And that the body mind is of course at the core of that. So, absolutely right. Yes, the somatic work of release, for one thing, of releasing the pain, can be very, very powerful."

Interregnum: This messy time of possibility - the pandemic and beyond
“We all bring different gifts. My own feeling about our world is that every single being matters, every single being matters, and that we human beings all bring gifts and that we are all needed. Every single one of us is needed, particularly at this time of transformational crisis and the crisis world that we're in…There's no one thing that is needed. It's all needed.”

“A long time ago, I was told about a Tibetan legend…that the Shambala warriors would return at a time of crisis on our planet, in our world, and that their weapons would be insight and compassion. And that time is now. And look at the number of people who are emerging through all sorts of ways of life, all sorts of avenues, to right the wrongs -- from institutionalized racism, to institutionalized sexism, to criminal justice reform, the practical things that must be changed. And here the people are emerging, coming up, and the spiritual warriors are just standing there and doing their work. And the more that we recognize that in each other and in ourselves, the stronger we will be in this quest at this time.”

“So let me talk about the transition that we're in now, and the pandemic and the way the world is right now…in March of last year, the German President Steinmeier, talking about the pandemic…said, "This is not a war. This is a test of our compassion." And I got it. I just understood that this is what this was about. It was being treated as a war, a war against this, but there was something much deeper.

And then in May, you may remember seeing that amazing photograph of Mount Everest taken from Kathmandu. And there was this beautiful mountain in the Himalayas against the blue sky. It was the first time that the Himalayas had been visible from Katmandu in 50 years because of pollution. And so when I saw that photograph, I understood also that our earth could heal, and that more than so that, the earth itself could heal, nature could heal, but so could we. Because we are part of nature. We forget that. We're a part of nature, we humans. We're just another animal.

And so here I had these two things. On the one hand, the grief and loss and longing, but the tremendous grief of this pandemic. People began to die very quickly. Loss of livelihood, loss of a way of life, loss of certainty -- you know, fear coming up. And here was this possibility in transformation. And for me, it's been an act of absolute ... it's been sacred act to hold those two together. Because the one without the other is not whole. If we just get lost in the grief and if I had lost somebody close to me, that's where I would be right now. And I would want to hold...them and not ask them to look at the possibility.”

The ongoing work in South Africa
It's only 25 going up to 30 years since the end of apartheid. And I have this feeling that the healing of things, as deep as that, take almost as long as it took to get to that place. Now there were 42 years of apartheid. But before that, there was a long history of repression and oppression of black people and indigenous people in South Africa.

So I see us in a long healing process. I don't think we understand this properly. I think we think that when we fix the political system and we do a bit of development, that actually now, everything's going to be fine. Well, no, actually it isn't. And that's why, for instance, I think that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict seems so intractable, because what we've got is deeply wounded, deeply hurt, deeply injured people, and an injury that's been passed down through generations. And if you do injury to one generation with the purpose of trying to repress or eliminate future generations, that lives on in them. This is what I've come to see -- that the poison of trying to, of what was attempted in South Africa and succeeded, but has moved on, it worked. You know, what happened is embedded there. So it's going to take time, in a way we're learning what the phases of that are. And we're seeing the backlash to whites' oppression in black oppression.”

"we're in a process, and I know that nothing is ever lost. Everything is recorded in the book of life. Everything is recorded in the book of life. And the gains that there have been since the nineties, since the end of apartheid, are enormous. They are also not anything like where they've got to get to."

- - - - - - -
“…we can declare peace just as we declare war. Peace is a decision. Peace is a decision. And the thing is that peace isn't just a word. It's been so misused. Peace means that things open up. In war, things close down. In violence, things close down. In peace, anything is possible. War and violent conflict destroy everything. They destroy infrastructure. They destroy lives. They destroy the environment, destroy hopes and dreams. It destroys everything. Peace builds that.”

Gratitude
It is so wonderful to know these amazing women -- Susan and Janessa, and Preeta (the behind-the-scenes wizard of Awakin Calls). Thanks for letting me hang around…. To quote Susan,

"I think we all come with a different purpose, and a lot of us come with the same purpose, a similar purpose. And we band together and we become a band of sisters and brothers who do this work in the world. And that's, to me, that's the "we". That's the most wonderful thing, is that band of sisters and brothers. And then our sisters and brothers who are doing different things are there in the world. And we are all interconnected making that mosaic."

--David Bonbright