It’s been a good summer for me. The days were full of productive work - writing, and working with the ILI board to strengthen the Institute. On warm evenings, I took a canoe to a local pond. The gardens at our house this summer came alive with hummingbirds. I often stopped working just to take it all in. When I did, I could feel myself settling down.

Still, despite my own personal calm, I fought dismay about the news.   Even today, as I write, wildfires burn thousands of acres in California. One rages just miles from my sister’s home. She sent me a photo this morning of the things she’ll take with her if she has to evacuate.

It was a small collection: one suitcase, a tote, a box of papers, a basket of special things.  I recognized the basket; have one just like it. Years ago, my parents gave each of us a basket my father had spray-painted blue, replicas of the original “blue basket” in our childhood home. One of us would be assigned the chore of gathering misplaced things into the basket, then we’d carry it around the house, returning each item to where it belonged.  In that way, my mother restored the house to tidiness.

My sister, carefully setting aside the small pile of things she’d save from a fire, imagined a different kind of restoration – not returning to life as it was before a fire, but having enough to make a new life whole.

A deepening understanding of restoration like this -- facing forward, rather than retuning things to the way they had been, helped me stay steady this summer.

To restore is generally understood as bringing something back to the way it was, returning to something known. In terms of social change, for some, restoration means going back to a better time. But as facilitator, teacher and writer Prentiss Hemphill has said, “There is no magical return,” no “unblemished time in history” to return to.  Instead, Hemphill asks, “We're here now, what do we have to do?”

For me, the answer to that question lies in part in an understanding of restoration rooted in ancient, indigenous practices of peacemaking.  Indigenous leaders have chosen to share those practices, and they have evolved into movements for restorative justice. Iterations of restorative justice have been renamed restorative practice, transforming schools and communities, and to some extent organizations. 

I’ve learned to see restoration differently from this history, these movements, and from restorative practitioners. I’ve come to understand that if I want to contribute to more people thriving, and to an increasingly peaceful world, then I need to develop a personal restorative practice.

But what does that look like in everyday life?

Robert Yazzie, Chief Justice emeritus of the Navajo Nation Supreme Court, suggests that restorative practice begins with compassion.  That means, he says, hearing the stories and perspectives of others.  Yazzie emphasizes restoring stable relationship, which is not necessarily predicated on agreement. Instead, peacemaking relies on accountability.

In restorative justice and practice, accountability is about seeing and responding to harm.  In a personal practice, that means responding to the harms I cause and those from which I’ve benefitted with what activist Mia Mingus has described as the four parts of accountability: self-reflection, apology, repair, and changed behavior.

You’ll notice, admitting or assigning guilt is not on that list. Guilt is a part of a punitive paradigm. Punishment requires retribution and disconnection. But in centuries of peacemaking, says Robert Yazzie, relationship has mattered more than all else. That’s profoundly challenging for me. I don’t necessarily want relationships with people whose beliefs and actions frighten, anger, even harm me. But Yazzie speaks of relationship in a broader sense - staying open to the other’s full humanity, understand their story, their point of view.

For me, that leads to another piece of a personal restorative practice, tolerating fear and sadness instead of batting it away with the punitive impulses of guilt and self-righteousness.  When I can do that, I have a much better chance of hearing others’ stories and understanding their perspective. At best, then, my compassion grows, and they respond in kind. We find a way to make peace. Or at least that possibility stays open.

It would be naïve, of course, to expect that to happen all the time. There are certainly people determined against restoration, determined against my thriving, determined against peace. Even then, if I stay in relationship enough to understand their story, I am much more able to craft a liberatory strategy in response. 

Restorative personal practice begins with compassion, requires accountability, tolerating sorrow and fear, and maintaining connection. It also requires imagination.

Imagination isn’t the same as optimism. It doesn’t assume bad things won’t happen. It doesn’t deny the past, and it doesn’t deny the present or immediate threats. When my sister prepared to evacuate, she knew the fire was burning and uncontained, and she knew it could well take her home. When she gathered that small pile of things, she was imagining her life whole after a fire.  Whole, not the same.

Imagination offers a vision of peaceful connection, and the possibility that people can change. Restorative practices have for millennia rested on that possibility.  

One more thing:  Ask any committed athlete or musician, and they’ll tell you: practice never, ever makes perfect.  Practice makes change. Change never stops and neither does practice.  Long-time activists and restorative practitioners say it’s hard work and failing is guaranteed. When Robert Yazzie says, “It takes a lifetime to learn peacemaking,” he means no one lives long enough to get it right.

This summer, that’s been a comfort to me. My work is to stay in the practice, no more and no less. I can do that.

Links to references in this piece can be found in the September 9, 2022 issue of Intersections, the ILI Newsletter