Candy-Colored Islands and Complicated Truths
This week, I have been in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It is rare for me to take this kind of time away a full week simply to rest, observe, and be.
The beauty here is extraordinary. At moments, the landscape reminded me of Monte Carlo or the south of France: boats resting on brilliant blue water, mountains rising dramatically from the sea, and homes nestled high into the hills. The colors reminded me of the Candy Land game I played as a child pink, green, orange, and yellow. Bright colors, almost like candy to the eyes. Yet beauty can tell more than one story.
Amid what one might describe as the European charm of the British West Indies, I could also see the remnants of colonialism. Questions began to emerge for me: Who owns? Who has access to wealth? Who provides the labor? Who gets to live high in the hills, and who serves those who do? The colonial past is not simply past. As I traveled through the islands, local people told stories of Europeans who came and claimed land and power. They also told stories of the Indigenous Carib/Kalinago people and Africans whose lives became intertwined with these islands through colonization, enslavement, labor, resistance, and survival. The mountains, magnificent as they are, seem to hold all of these stories.
And yet, amid these historical and economic inequities, what I noticed most was community.
I watched children and teenagers walking in their school uniforms. There seemed to be an innocence about them not innocence in the sense of being naïve or unaware, but a certain freedom from some of the distractions that seem to consume so many young people in the United States. It made me think about our children at home.
American young people are growing up within a culture saturated with messages competing for their attention: social media, consumerism, celebrity culture, preserving their own culture, technology, algorithms, politics, and the relentless pressure to perform, possess, compare, and be seen. So much of what surrounds them says, “Pay attention to me. Look at yourself. Compare yourself. Build your brand. Protect what is yours.”
But community asks something very different: Look around you. Who is beside you? Who needs you? To whom do you belong?
Watching young people here caused me to wonder what happens when a culture still provides spaces in which children can experience themselves as members of a community before they are taught primarily to experience themselves as individual consumers.
Of course, I am a visitor. A week does not give me the right to romanticize island life or pretend that young people here are untouched by technology, social media, economic pressures, or the challenges facing teenagers everywhere. What I saw was only a glimpse. But that glimpse raised an important question for me: What are we placing before our children that strengthens community, and what are we placing before them that slowly dismantles it?
And there is another side to the question.
What happens to these young people when they finish school? What opportunities will be available to them? Will they inherit the economic roles held by their parents and grandparents, or will they have access to higher education, entrepreneurship, ownership, and the freedom to determine the direction of their own lives?
This creates a tension I cannot easily resolve. I can admire the apparent strength of community while also questioning the economic structures surrounding it. Community should not require limited opportunity, and opportunity should not require the destruction of community.Perhaps that is one of the lessons I am taking home.
Progress should not cost us our Belonging.
As a Motherist, I often ask: What does care require of us in this moment? What should one do?
But perhaps every encounter does not immediately require us to do something. Perhaps there are moments when our first responsibility is to resist arriving with answers and instead to listen, observe, receive, and honor the people whose home we have entered. Perhaps sometimes the work of Motherism is simply to BE-long.
To BE fully present to help others BECOME!
To recognize that I am not separate from the people whose lives I encounter.
To understand that belonging is not possession, rescue, or control. It is relationship. It is recognizing the dignity, history, beauty, struggle, and possibility already present in a community.
This week, surrounded by mountains, water, brilliant colors, complicated histories, and beautiful people, I was reminded that perhaps the question is not whether one culture is better than another.
The question is: What are we willing to sacrifice in the name of progress, and what must we refuse to lose?
Sometimes we do not enter a place to change it.
Sometimes we enter a place so that it might change us.
And perhaps that, too, is what it means to BE-long.
#StVincent #Motherism #rest resistance #Belonging #DRLEW
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