Season 3 Wrap-Up with Aurora + Kelly

Kelly Croce Sorg
Well first of all, we’re going to start with the elephant in the room and that being COVID-19 We’re in a pandemic, still, and we need to stay socially distanced, obviously in order to slow the spread of COVID 19. And so what the heck is community in this moment when we can’t be physically together?

Aurora Archer
You know, it’s interesting because I’ve been thinking about this a lot. We didn’t have all of our family members together for Thanksgiving, in an effort to keep everyone safe and to minimize any travel and certainly airport and airplane time. And as you know, Kelly community is something that’s deeply rooted in who I am and my culture. But I think that there are some beautiful examples that we learned with regards to community from the many guests we had this season. And one of them is that even if we’re not coming together physically, as we may define community, it doesn’t really mean that it doesn’t exist.

Kelly Croce Sorg
Yeah. No, it’s true. And you know, Dr. Kelsey Leonard had had some great insight and indigenous wisdom. Yeah, around that and in case anybody needs a refresher, Dr. Kelsey is a water scientist and a water protector, and she represents the Shinnecock Indian nation on the Mid Atlantic committee on the ocean. And she seeks to establish indigenous traditions of water conservation as the foundation for International Water policymaking.

Aurora Archer
That’s a lot

Kelly Croce Sorg
It seems almost like of course, indigenous traditions should be a part of water conservation.

Aurora Archer
Yes. No, it’s not really what happens and you know, I think one of the things that we learned and I certainly learned with being with Dr. Kelsey is that a lot of times being in community, nature plays a beautiful aspect with regards to grounding us and bringing us into a communal nature. Not just with physical beings, but quite frankly, with the essence and the spirit and the energy that exists in nature.

Kelly Croce Sorg
She talked about at some point, you know, talking to the trees and just to go and talk to the water and visit with it.

Dr. Kelsey
There are some unique opportunities that COVID-19 has presented us with an ability to physically distance and connect with nature. You don’t have to socially distance because you got to be very social with the water. You get to go and visit and talk to the water talk to the trees. Yeah, you might feel like a crazy person because you’re not used to this type of socialization.

Kelly Croce Sorg
I really liked that part. I was like, Oh, I like when somebody tells me that I can just go and look at every blade of grass or like you kind of feel like a little kid again and kindergarten were in recess or something where you just kind of would play with a rock for a long time or something like that. And so, for community, at least we shouldn’t discount. We shouldn’t just think about people. We should be thinking about the we people are part of the earth and part of the ecosystem at large. So we’d have to think of all the members of community, especially the ones that we can now since we can’t be around all the other organisms like us right now. And so yeah, what does that bring up for you?

Aurora Archer
It brings up one of my favorite and a ritual that some people might find weird. I’ve always wondered, people driving by my house what they might think of this, but it’s Kelly knows our house has a lot of trees around it. And one of the things I love doing as part of my morning ritual is going out in the morning and hugging my trees and there’s something very peaceful, there’s something very grounding, and there’s something very connecting in that process for me, and you know, some of the trees on our properties God knows how, how old they are, but it certainly is decades upon decades of years and wisdom and just rooted connection into our earth that I find that only connects me to myself, but helps me to have this sense of connection with everything around me. Which in an environment in a pandemic where we have been quite isolated. It’s been a beautiful practice for me.

Kelly Croce Sorg
Ultimate tree hugger.

Aurora Archer
I am, I so am.

Kelly Croce Sorg
So yeah, Dr. Kelsey, episode number 28. If you didn’t get a chance to listen to her wisdom yet, it’s such a treat such a such a really such a treat. I love being in community with her. Let’s talk about Ali.

Aurora Archer
Yeah, so Ali and Asha. That was episode 20. I was 27 Episode 27. So we love talking to them. They are lifelong educators. They are great friends. They have unbelievable and incredible stories. They recently wrote a book called Tiny imperfections that is out available for all of you to pick

Kelly Croce Sorg
up and picked up by a major streaming platform at a show too.

Aurora Archer
hint hint, go grab the book, but it was really fun talking to them this season.

Kelly Croce Sorg
Yeah, itwas I remember when Asha told the story of like, she’s like I wouldn’t go in to get the mortgage from the bank or I’m gonna send the my white husband and I’m gonna say a white dude and get the mortgage. So, you know, I’m a great writer, and I have great experiences. And Ali has great experiences and the connections. So, you know, of course we can work together. You know, I knew what it was like to be the only brown face in the classroom for years. And it just was so interesting to to see sort of a reflection of another cross racial relationship and all the gifts that the separate get the different gifts that people bring.

Aurora Archer
Yeah and then the way that they had brought that community within themselves to bear and the leveraging of their respective communities and their strains. Well, I think is what you’re talking about as far as our relationship.

Kelly Croce Sorg
I have so many joys of working with you. And one, some not so good. It’s like working with 100 people. It’s like working with 10 of the smartest, wisest, most experienced people in 10 different arenas of knowledge and it’s, it hits all of my Gemini points of like, must know everything must figure this out must understand all these angles. Because working with her is like working with a dynamic multi dimensional being. And I’ve learned that she learned it all herself, which is like, wow, like my family paid so many people to do the things that were learned to do on her own. And so she’s taught me like, figure it out, you know? So, Google and YouTube are my friends.

Aurora Archer
And you’re really great and amazing, impatient with hitting the wave at hitting and see and this is a thing I don’t know how to wave, right? But Kelly knows the wave. So we balanced and we leverage each other’s strengths. But one of the things that I loved when Asha and Ali were talking about is you know how do you leverage each of the communities right in the intersection and sort of the overlap or in some cases not overlap that may exist? I mean, I always say to Kelly, I think I love leveraging Kelly’s network, right? I mean, literally, Kelly can pick up a phone, call her dad and then that phone call translates into 510 other different conversations and incredible opportunities. And quite honestly, that’s not part of my community that’s not part of my circle, and it’s something that I have come to be extremely appreciative of understand kind of the value of it and the leverage of it, quite frankly. Yeah.Yes. And I mean, we could talk about authors all day long, because I do love the slice of community that they get to show in all of their books. And so I don’t want to forget to mention episode number 33. There who read giving up whiteness by Jeff James. First of all, I loved meeting him. I mean, he is such a genuine and lovely human being. His story is amazing. Really, if you have not looked at the book picked up the book, please. We really encourage you to do so. He was a corporate executive publisher, now author that wrote giving up whiteness. He wrote this incredible book that really just articulates his personal journey of going from a place of somewhat awareness and thinking he was a good white guy to really unpacking his life, unpacking his beliefs, unpacking his religious upbringing, and unpacking the way he traversed the world as a white man and it’s an incredible book. He’s an amazing human being.

Kelly Croce Sorg
Yeah, I mean, I just loved watching and reading about his journey and how it started with himself and moved out to the spheres of influence around him and he interrogated everything. And it did start with his friend, a woman of color who said he says, like, what do we what do I do? What do I do? And she’s like, give up your whiteness. And so he went on a journey to figure out what that meant. And I was like, Oh, he’s got a friend to he went looking too. So and ultimately, now he’s married to a woman of color. So he has daughters of color, and he’s got two daughters himself. And so his motivation was to be a better father and to be a great dad and to leave behind a legacy that had meaning.

Jeff James
Well, I think about my daughters, you know, but how could I be a healthy father figure for my my two stepdaughters? If I wasn’t at least, you know, on this journey, I couldn’t I couldn’t help them.

Kelly Croce Sorg
So it just made me think of my own relationship with the world because my first motivation was to not be a shitty friend. And so I knew that I had to do something to not be a shitty friend, and then it grew to you know who am I as an ancestor, and what am I leaving behind? And you know, what, then then what does community look like and where can I find community in this way of being that I didn’t start out in at all? And what does that look like?

Aurora Archer
You know, the other part that I love when talking to him that you just triggered for me, Kelly was bad. He sort of brought up another angle of community that in his journey of doing this work, it really opened up this whole new dimension this whole new world of people and experiences and relationships and joy, and that’s what he calls it joy. And so that I thought was such a beautiful articulation of community of someone who had the courage to go on this personal journey, and then through that personal journey, it just opened up this whole new evolution of community for him in the experiences of all the different people. He was now having an opportunity to meet. And you know, one of the things that Kelly and I always talk about is the fact that community is something that growing up was very personal. It’s hard for me to actually even imagine a world without community. Because I have never not had community. I have never not had a sense of belonging to a community. I’ve never not had a sense of being responsible for a community or to a group of, of people and humans outside of me, myself, my family. It’s always been this sort of bigger shepherding and accountability to a broader swath. of humanity. But this season, I learned so many different things, but let’s start with what you learned.

Kelly Croce Sorg
Yeah because community for me was semi manmade and it was membership driven and money driven and you know, whether it’s a gym or a golf club or something, and I actually look back and think like, Oh, I was really yearning for true community. And instead, I felt like Goldilocks for four years. Like, maybe I’ll find it then that community, you know, maybe I’ll find community here then not that community, but I was just looking in the wrong places in the wrong way. And so I really loved gosh, I love so many of our guests that Colette Petia on battle just always brings it home for me

Aurora Archer
If you haven’t listened to that episode, episode number,

Kelly Croce Sorg
Episode 26. She was very clear that she knows where she is from, like the earth. And the soil that made the food that she eats that impacted you. It really did because she had such pride and love for where she was from.

Colette Petia
I mean, you know, Louisiana, we got such good food. You know why we have good food. We have good food because our state is made from all of the silt of the Mississippi River which pulls in the Missouri and the Ohio rivers. Everything you grow here is delicious. If delicious, we don’t just have good dishes, because we know how to cook, which we do. You don’t get that to escape. Why don’t we value that? We’ve got to have the courage to love other people the way we love ourselves.

Kelly Croce Sorg
And I can’t speak for black people in their experience of not knowing where they’re from from but I can speak from a white experience where it seems like a lot of it gets erased where we’re from, on purpose. It’s like let me distance myself from the poor Masons that brought me here or something where the abusive alcoholic that you know, that didn’t that wasn’t didn’t show up well for their family or and stuff like that. And so Colette not only brought home like the soil that that you’re from, but also like the self transformation required to really love yourself, that just how interconnected we are, and that she’s just so freakin fun on top of it, like she’s not preaching to us. She just exudes it.

Aurora Archer
Yes well, I loved the connection that she made. In relation to knowing where you’re from. She believes and knowing the ground in the earth that your ancestors and those that are part of your lineage touched and walked down is such an incredible connection not only to yourself, and to your community, your family community, but to the larger planetary and environmental community and for her, I loved how she made that connection between our environment and social justice and that the crux of that or the nucleus of that is really knowing where you’re from taking care of that and taking care of that. And so I think you’re right, Kelly, you know, I think again, as, as a black Latino woman, you know, I had parents that were very they were very focused on my sister and I having a clarity of our heritage, having a clarity of where we have come from, you know, my indigenous Mexican background, my African American reality here, but that our our, our heritage and our family members traveled through the West Indies to arrive here. Just really understanding the elements of our lineage and understanding the elements of our customs and foods and traditions, and how so much of it is actually connected to the earth. Yeah. And that we are part of this greater Earth planetary human community.

Kelly Croce Sorg
Yeah. Which brings us to your favorite. I know you don’t like to give a hierarchy of favorites,

Aurora Archer
But oh, but I Dr. Gail Christopher.

Kelly Croce Sorg
Well, we got off our call with Dr. Gail Moore says, you know, when somebody asked you if you could have dinner with anybody in the world living or dead, who would you have dinner with? And she’s like, I’d have dinner with Dr. Gayle. Yeah, like above Jesus above. The Buddha above everybody.

Aurora Archer
Yeah it was Dr. Sheet for sure. Like if you have not listened to that episode, I just highly encourage you to listen to that episode. Now share what it meant to me. First of all, she is an incredible like, am I my eyes get teary like thinking about her? She is just profoundly wise profoundly smart, profoundly loving and has just created such an impact in our world not only from a health industry perspective, but from a social justice perspective. Dr. Gail, what she gave me in that conversation that really hit home for me is that she talked about the process of healing.

Dr. Gail
I talked about racial healing, and I’m really talking about not just anti racism, which is a phase of the work that I’m talking about, not what we’re against, but what are we for. We need to be for asserting our and I’ll use the term sacred interconnectedness as a human family.

Aurora Archer
And for me, myself, journey has very much involved healing the wounds healing a lot of the ancestral pain, wellness overall spiritually, emotionally, physically, and her ability to recognize that was profound but number two, transcending that as it relates to not only people that looked like me, which I cou ld also say Yes, true, and I am connected to that reality and that I know that my healing creates a ripple effect back into my generation of ancestors as well as to those that will come after me and my lineage. But I think connecting the healing to the overall collective that includes white people. And for me, just being in her presence and having that conversation, really brought that aspect much closer and deeper to me, in the recognition of how our collective healing as white and non whites is really, really connected in a community of healing.

Kelly Croce Sorg
Yeah, the racial truth. I mean, just really you know, the necessity to us embodying and understanding the truth of our races. Yeah. How they are not real and yet everything is based on them. Yes. And the healing and the transformation and transformation. We did not tell people to say transformation, everybody, they it was all organically coming out. Yes, yeah. It was quite the message.

Aurora Archer
So were you left with any questions as it relates to community or how is it continuing to evolve? The definition of community for you Kelly

Kelly Croce Sorg
I think a little bit that comes up for me is, is understanding more how the systems work in our communities. So understanding how especially how race plays out in the systems that kind of are the are the organizing factors of our community? Like, for instance, when Ali and Asha, bring up public schools, you know, and it’s like, well, you know, public’s, you know, public school education is very, very different in different areas, depending on how much people pay in taxes. Yes. So it’s like to me is, is understanding how all of those systems play into our communities and we’re often we’re very still segregated in a lot of our communities. How about you any question marks or things that you would have liked to talk about more?

Aurora Archer
You know, I think for me, the the continuing question is, how do we broaden and how do we bring a greater sense of community into the into the embodiment and awareness of white people? Right? Yeah. Because I think you know, when we talked to Sister Norma right, so one of our one of our interviews this season was with Sister Norma who is a sister, who is at the border of Texas and Mexico, and she is extremely engaged and involved in immigration. And so I have always struggled with how people can see what’s happening at the border and not be outraged. But somehow, those those children those those families are, we can separate ourselves from them and not think of them as part of our human community, our human sisters and brothers. But we can sort of shut it off and you know, it’s not playing out in the news and we don’t think about their struggle, their suffering. And so for me, it’s how how do we evolve or how do we integrate the notion of community into cultures and parts of our humanity where it’s not so ingrained, it’s not so part of the cultural experience?

Kelly Croce Sorg
Yeah, in fact, that what comes up for me is what I notice in some white communities that I’m a part of is I see white folks sometimes hunker down more and be more separate themselves more and take care of them in their own more out of fear and, and the story that we we kind of make up in our heads so that we can cope with the the extreme heaviness and tragedy and trauma that’s happening. And instead, we just go like ostriches and stick our head in our own little sand pile and say, like, Well, I’m just gonna take care of mine on my own. That’s all I can do. You know, and it’s like, actually, we can do both like we can do you know, is that binary thinking comes in the Kaleen taught me that that’s a coping strategy. binary thinking is a coping strategy. I was like, wow, yes. Is we either do this or that. And it’s like, no, we can do both things.

Aurora Archer
We, can do both things. Wow. Wow.

Kelly Croce Sorg
And that’s a wrap season three is over, but you can stay connected with us online at the OPT Hyphen In.com.

Aurora Archer
And you can also find us on all the socials on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at the optin music for this episode is by Jordan McCree and the opt in is produced by Rachel Ishikawa. Bye for now.

Kelly Croce Sorg
Bye, everyone.

Aurora Archer
We love you stay safe. We need to change and that’s why you’re here. That’s why you stick through these conversations as hard as they may be, and continue to challenge your communities to think bigger. We’re here for liberation.

Kelly Croce Sorg
We know you know how important this work is, and we want to keep doing it. However, we need your support. You can pledge your contribution to our Patreon Venmo PayPal, all the links on our website, the OPT Hyphen in.com