Radical Place, Radical Money, Radical Love by Wren Ribeiro

Please click on the title to read the essay

May 2025

This essay was written for a small writer’s group united in our efforts to decolonize our minds, life ways, and hearts. It speaks to obscure elements of history in Massachusetts including slavery, deception, dehumanization and genocide. And it offers numerous resources (and 49 end notes) for the reader to reflect upon roots of place in a radical way.

The premise of this essay is this:

Hurt people hurt other people. And healing people heal people. We humans, perhaps feeling the absence of deep, spiritually nourishing, loving connection in and with society broadly—including non-human species—have, under the guise of self-interest, pursued or tolerated increasingly manipulative and violent ways of hurting others in lieu of healing our own pain. Hurting others hurts ourselves. We humans also have indomitable perseverance and capacity for rising up individually and collectively—as we seek, identify, establish, and pursue purpose, wellness, and liberation. And, naturally, healing ourselves heals others.

This premise is presented through the lenses of time and money, war and the practice of peace. Life elements—such as Air, Earth, Water and tree species such as Pine and Oak—are capitalized herein to honor and show respect to their generosity. The preposition we is largely used in preference to the preposition you in order to demonstrate inclusiveness in thinking, feeling, and acting as one simple way to pursue healing of our collective pain, not to speak for or on behalf of any other person’s individual or collective experience.

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Something happened. Instead of being the caretakers, instead of being the ones recognized by all the other forms of life as caretakers, as the ones who nourish everything else and keep it in balance, now all the other forms of life are afraid of us.

They are afraid that when we come to their homes, their ocean, their forest, their mountain, their desert, that we come only to take something and to destroy their home, destroy their source of food, contaminate. How did this happen? We reversed our original talent, our original gift, into the opposite.

~ Arkan Lushwala