In our debut episode, Aaron Slater challenges us to consider reverence not merely as an abstract ideal but as a tangible force for organizing and action. He explores the reverence we should hold for potentialities and possibilities for what the future could be. According to Aaron, what’s important is asking the right questions, and he emphasizes that wisdom often begins with curiosity.

Link to the Episode

Transcript

Aaron

What about the reverence one ought to hold for potentialities, for possibilities of the world to come and that we’re wishing to create, that we’re actively creating, the possibility of what it might mean to have a civic arena in which we can show up and be fully ourselves? And what are the possibilities not only that we can revere, but what are the possibilities we ought to revere as a society? How do we use that as an organizing force itself?

Ceasar

It’s another day, I wish you…

Ayushi

Another day.

Ceasar

You know, we’re in this day and age right now where everyone’s talking about AI, about the power of technology and what it’s doing. And we called me the conversation we had with Aaron Slater. Aaron works at MIT Solve, which is really about bringing technology to bear on the big issues, but not doing it from the top, but from the ground up and supporting groups to do that. And I thought it’d be good to bring that conversation back, you know, because Aaron’s a member of the Navajo Nation. You know, he manages Solve’s growing U.S. interior indigenous community work, which is amazing. Amazing, yeah. And even before that, you know, he actually did a lot of work with Aspen Institute Center for Native American Youth. But one of the things I found really interesting about him is that, you know, he’s found inspiration and guidance in the wisdom of his elders, both native and non-native, he says. And he actually points to James Baldwin as one of the elders that he really thinks about. And he calls on this particular quote from Baldwin, which says, I love America more than any other country in this world. And exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize and uplift her perpetually. No matter the day, no matter the problem, there’s a solution worth pursuing. We only need to know where to look for it and who to ask. And I think today we can look to Aaron for that.

Ayushi

I love it. I’m so looking forward to this conversation.

Ceasar

We have a new guest with us today, Aaron Slater. I had the opportunity to work with Aaron a couple of times. And you know how you’re in the presence of some people, and all it does is just kind of cover you with a sense of peace and groundedness? That’s Aaron. He works here at MIT at Solve. And he runs several programs, with most of them connected with the Indigenous Fellows Program. He runs the Anti-Racist and Indigenous Innovators Summit, which is pretty amazing. And one of the wonderful things about having him with us is he is someone who brings and has embodied what I just mentioned about how he shows up. And yet, he’s here in this Institute of Technology that sometimes just forgets those things even matter. So he’s bringing them full force, and particularly doing that with communities, colored Indigenous communities. So, Aaron, welcome.

Aaron

Thank you so much for being here. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

Aaron

Thank you so much for having me. I really, really appreciate it. And it’s lovely to be meeting you and Caesar, thank you so much for the kind introduction. I really appreciate it. I’m feeling reverent right now being in this space with y’all. Um, and I’m not just saying that, but that it’s it’s truly wonderful and beautiful to be thinking about reverence as it relates to civic engagement and to be thinking about it as, as a modern society period, it is so often pushed to the wayside as seen and seen as unimportant or less valuable than certain other, other things. And therefore we have a lack of language to communicate about it or at least in modern vernaculars we do. So I surely hold reverence for, for being in this space, but I’d say probably most recently, I was lucky enough to be back home on the Navajo Nation in Round Rock, Arizona. And I think you all can see in my zoom background, but it’s a, it’s a space of great reverence for me. It’s a space to which I am connected deeply and innately and a space to which I am beholden as well. And so when I’m there, I feel incredibly reverent of my community there, my relatives of the different beings that are there five fingered or otherwise. I’m reverent of, you know, the, the sun itself when you wake up in the morning as a Navajo, you’re supposed to exit your front door and your front door always faces east. And you’re supposed to pray to the dawn towards the dawn. And we have specific words to describe the different elements of dawn and as it changes on the, on the landscape, on the horizon. And so to be Navajo is to live a deeply reverential life and to be a deeply reverent of that, which is around you, the beings around you, the world around you, the lands and waterways around you from the smallest to the biggest, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. And so for me, when I’m back home, that’s, that’s an easy place to be reverent. Whereas, you know, in your day to day life and the hustle and bustle of things, Zoom calls, it’s a, it’s more challenging.

Ceasar

I love the flow of where you’ve kind of taken us right now, Aaron, and so I want to pick up on that a little bit, which is, you know, when we started out this whole idea of doing this season, we started out really looking at this notion of this kind of disconnection that’s in our civic discourse, and, you know, it’s huge everywhere, right? And it’s being amplified lots of different ways. We see that. But one of the things that we were noticing is that oftentimes people get in these spaces, and it’s just so hard for them to find a place to actually bring up those core things that are really fundamental to who they are and have that be both heard, first finding the words to speak it, and then knowing that it will actually be heard and engaged with. And, you know, one of my early experiences came up around this. I was teaching this class, and one of my advisees came, and she was in another class, and she said to me that she was having such a hard time in this policy class, and I want to inquire why. And my assumption was, you know, just wasn’t understanding what they were doing, why they framed things a certain way. And she said, you know, I’m a devout Mormon, and if I take my faith in what I really believe in and apply it to the problem that we’re trying to solve in our policy, it would look very different than what we’re discussing in the class. But there’s no space for that. There’s no way for that to be brought into the context. And I think that student was illustrating, in some sense, what’s really happening to lots of us when we’re in — it doesn’t matter what the issue is, when we’re in these public conversations, there are parts of who we are that we kind of leave outside the kind of civics of Rome. And that’s hard. So I was just wondering, you know, even from your own life, either here on the East Coast or back home or never home land, do you have one of these spaces where you kind of, you know, remember kind of being in that kind of disconnection, you know, you either witnessed it yourself between someone else or you yourself embodied it?

Aaron

Yeah, I feel like it’s a daily experience in so many ways that we have daily reminders almost not to be reverent, or that there’s so much of our habits in the world, or the way in which we inhabit the world, reinforce a sense of not making time for reverence, or not being able to share with one another, or not being able to have the epistemic humility to be able to say, I don’t necessarily come to see and know the world the way that you do. However, I could understand how you revere things in that way, or how you gain reverence for the world, and you approach the work that you do through a very specific reverence or knowledge system that isn’t my own, but one that I could perhaps peer into human to human gain a better understanding of it. And I think that that’s why it’s so important to have daily reminders, to be reverent, because it is so challenging. I think that we can acknowledge that it’s pretty miraculous to be living on this world at all, to be the exact location that we need to be in order to have organic life take place. From that fundamental space onwards, there’s miracle after miracle after miracle each and every day, the sun rises and it surely sets. And so we lose that so frequently. I think for myself, I get lost in it with emails. I get lost in it with Euro-American work culture. I think you get lost in it so, so often in so many different ways. And I think that we see so much of what makes people themselves pushed off to the side and not discussed. And that’s something that you hold and keep it secret and keep it sacred to yourself, as opposed to being able to share it with others and to be able to have those discourses and those conversations. I wish I had a better answer for you, but I witness it constantly. And I wish that it weren’t the, or I wish it were the exception, not the rule.

Ceasar

I think you’re right. I mean, I agree with what you’re saying. That’s kind of my own experience too. Maybe you and I could talk a little more specific about like even being in the place that we’re in, the place that we share in common, work-wise. We’re in a lot of places, earth and life together, but in this workspace about what kinds of things are assumed and grounding in what, you know, the orientation of the work here, of what this Institute is about. Actually, but really, you know, we have to deal with, you know, on an often basis, you know, really about bringing kind of sense of reference into them. You know, like I brought that story about the student and how hard it is within the context of a class to do that. You’re in this really interesting place where you’re bringing, you know, both indigenous folks of color who are dealing with issues of innovation, right? Grappling with technology and what it means, you must have tons of experience and opportunities where they’re struggling with the same issues. They try to think about how do I design something or build something? And how do I attend to this issue of reference when I’m doing it? Or maybe that’s what’s driving them. Maybe that’s one of the restaurants for you in your work is that the people you’re working with are really kind of in some sense driven by that. So it’s an inquiry, I’m fishing.

Aaron

You’re absolutely right. When I’m working with the fellows or I’m working with other folks in this indigenous innovation space, I get to have those experiences much more often, where we’re discussing issues of reference, but perhaps not using the word reference itself, or one need not even discuss one’s approach to the world, in that we both understand where the other is coming from in many respects, and that need not to describe or explain what is a whole cosmology, you know. So, in order to understand my reference to the world would need to explain the cosmology under which I was raised and taught to understand and relate to the world. And when you have people who you don’t need to describe that to, but you have that sort of shared language or that shared understanding, it can it can take place so much, so much faster. And so, one of our fellows, he is a data scientist works in artificial intelligence does really phenomenal amazing work and outstanding scientist. And he he talks about this particular teaching from his father who’s an IT professional. When he was growing up, he would always share with him, you know, if I have a problem where I need to be fixing a computer or something like that, or there’s something electrical that’s gone wrong. My first thing isn’t to just jump in there and to be able to dig into the matter and fiddle with the matter and figure out what’s going on. I first sit down and I think about it, and I pray about it. And I pray to the electricity that’s in it because the electricity itself is something that’s involved in our cosmologies and our understanding of the world. And that very beginning that first step as a step of reverence in and of itself, that there is this miracle of electricity that we’re working in tandem with not that we have control over, or that we have authority over, but that we’re working in tandem with. How do I work in tandem with the electricity in order to ensure that my laptop is running okay that I have the internet connection that I need. And although it’s not necessarily spoken as a moment of reverence, it surely is. And I think with the other fellows, it’s being able to be in one another’s presence and to be able to share with one another without necessarily having to do that explanation where, you know, the need to explain things dissolves and that one can just be discussing things with one another. And that came up in discussions with the anti racist technology in the US Solver teams, thinking about what might it mean if I get to show up into a space and just be myself, and not necessarily have all the societal baggage that is placed upon me because of certain identifiers and the way I am perceived, or the way in which I am received, which is something that I think you raised earlier, it’s not just how do I speak, but how is it that I am heard. How is it that I am ensuring that I am being well received. And I think that there’s a lot of reverence in the room, trying to think about what that world might look like and that perhaps is the world to come that we’re actively trying to be able to create.

Aaron

And I think it’s an element of reverence that isn’t oftentimes discussed but, you know, I was discussing revering the world around me the natural phenomena. But then, what about the reverence one ought to hold for potentialities for possibilities of the world to come and that we’re wishing to create that we’re actively creating the possibility of what it might mean to have a civic arena in which we can show up and be fully ourselves. And what are the possibilities not only that we can revere, but what are the possibilities we ought to revere as a society? How do we use that as an organizing force itself?

Ayushi

So, I also work in a sort of technology adjacent space sort of by day. And one of the things that, you know, pretty consistently has occurred to me for years now is that the very methods that are used in building technology, they can be so extractive, right? And like a very simple example is even just conducting like usability tests or usability interviews or user research, right? A user is a human, right? This is a human that has some kind of a need. And here I am as a product person with my team of designers, going to humans in need many, many of them and asking them about their challenge with X tool. And in some ways requiring them to answer me without any kind of compensation, without any kind of reciprocity basically, right? They don’t get credit for the product that we develop using their words, using their experience and their research. And that experience could also be sometimes really difficult to recount, right? Depending on the kind of stuff you’re building. And I don’t know, I think about that and I say all that just to say like, you know, the dual question here is like, how does that connect show up for you in specific ways? And do you find ways to bridge it, right? Like, how do you find your own experience of what drives you to get up every day and do this work? Does that help bridge that kind of disconnect that you see? And are there specific disconnects that you do note?

Aaron

you. It’s a profound question. I think I experience the disconnects constantly on a daily basis. And I think it’s so deeply challenging to remind yourself on a daily basis that you should position yourself for the potential of reverence, that there will be something worthy of reverence in my day, which is I think so typical that we forget it, but that it’s there right underneath the surface if only we are looking out for it. And so how do we structure and organize our lives in a way in which we may experience those moments, which I don’t think could be described anything short of a miracle. I think that those moments to experience reverence and to do so in your day-to-day life and not when you’re seeing a rainbow or something that’s really powerful to you, it’s nothing short of a miracle to experience that. And so how do you structure and organize your life in a way that allows you to do that, but then also how are you structuring your life such that you are revering the right things and revering in the right way? And so earlier I shared, you know, to be Navajo is to live a reverent life constantly, but it’s not just I’m revering everything or I’m revering very specific things, but rather starting at the sort of base level of your hogan facing the east and your cornfield that’s helping the earth itself and connecting you to it and the rest of the world. You also need to be thinking in terms of what is something that I revere and respect so much that I actually leave it alone, which I think is something that technology and technologists have a hard time grappling with and have a deeply challenging time with that serious question. And what then does it mean if I am out of balance with that which is around me? What if my reverence for things is out of balance? What if I am revering the wrong things? So to be Navajo is to live a deeply reverent life, but the life itself is meant to be how can one be in balance and harmony with that reverence, with those beings around you, with the world around me. It’s that element of balance that we oftentimes forget. To be reverent of discussing civic engagement, I mean to be reverent of the commons could be a beautiful thing, but to be reverent of the commons has also justified genocide. To be reverent of things in the wrong way, in an unbalanced way, leads to tremendous violence and we need those mechanisms to be able to pull us back, to be able to right size. And so in Navajo society, there are things that you revere in such a way and the mode of reverence is by letting them be and only under specific circumstances when you’re out of balance with that particular thing that you then pull it into the fray and start dealing with it in very specific ways. And so I think what we might be seeing right now in American society in so many different ways is that we’ve held reverence for institutions and not necessarily what the institutions represent. And we’re seeing a dissolution of trust in those institutions for myriad reasons.

Aaron

And we are seeing a lack or a dissolving and dissolution of our reverence for those institutions. And we are no longer grounded to or reminded by what is it that we ought to be reverent of within those institutions themselves. I think you could see that in so many different ways. Perhaps the Supreme Court is a timely example. Now, unfortunately, I imagine it’ll be just as timely as we’re discussing it now as it will be when this is released. But it’s that question of not just to be reverent, but to be balanced in your reverence. And then again, I think tying it back into technology, are there things that we ought to be reverent of to such an extent that we leave it be? And how do you have those conversations?

Ayushi

Mm, I love that so much. I love the reverence, the point of just letting it be. Like that is how you dignify it. That’s how you express it to be sacred, yeah.

Ceasar

Wow, a number of things come up for me. One is this whole notion of letting something be and the wisdom to know what that is. And how do we cultivate that wisdom? How does a collection of people cultivate that wisdom? A collection of people who come from so many different ways of knowing the world and understanding the world? How do they actually find that essence? And I think the other part, which I think is really profound, is the fact that we’ve really focused on these institutions, but we really is the essence of what they were supposed to be doing that we forgot about. That’s what we forgot about. And now they’re crumbling. We have to think about how do we, I don’t even want to say rebuild them, but how do we reimagine what their essence was about and bring a new form for that? That’s kind of where we are, I think, in society right now, maybe even in the world. I opened up with a poem by James Baldwin because, as I said, I remember reading something you had said about honoring your elders and that those elders can be from different places. And Baldwin was one of them in your readings. Is that where our wisdom comes from, from our elders? And then how do we cultivate that? So I have to say, okay, I’m going to be just kind of cut to the chase. Elders has to be about more than age, right? It’s not about how long you lived, but maybe more about how you have lived and how you have sought balance and kept balance and struggled with balance and persevered through that. And so many things, like I think about being an institute of higher education, our default is that the longer you’ve been, right, and the more you are expected to be, and so the more you can be put into positions and give an authority, regardless if you have wisdom or not. And how do we start to think about that differently, get people to separate that notion of knowledge versus wisdom? I guess might be the thing. And because I don’t know how we move and bring more reference and actually deal with those things that we need. We’re so reverent if we leave them alone, if we actually don’t have wisdom, right, as a place to go, a well to drink from, to actually get that nourishment, how will we know? Not that I expect you to have the answer. I just, no, it’s fine. I just, we compete.

Aaron

I found it out, we’re good. No, it’s a beautiful question. And I think an element or a key element to wisdom itself in so many different facets is asking the right questions and formulating the right questions. Because through that formulation of questions and rearticulating, reiterating, or iterating upon the questions that you’re asking in a way in which you are beginning to get closer and closer to the right question is not just something at the individual level that leads to wisdom, but on a societal level. And I’m not just Navajo, but I’m also Jewish. And so part of that lineage, there’s a teaching by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who says, you know, when asked, you know, why is it that you pray? Is it because you believe in a God that will grant with the wave of a hand, whatever it is that you’re praying for? Is it because you think that, you know, that’s the source of how you’ll, that positive thinking that things will come about? He said that I pray and I pray fervently and I pray regularly so that I may better understand what in life is worthy of prayer. So that I may understand what in life is worthy of prayer. And so if we think about that applied to reverence or to wisdom, what is it in our lives that are worthy of reverence in our institutions, that essence beyond the institution, what it ought to stand for? How do we do it, not necessarily in a prayerful approach, but with that regularity and with that both personal and societal fervor and intention? How is it that we not only say that the contemplative life is the life worth living, but how is it that the contemplative life has parameters, that has values that we’re able to discuss with one another, all the way from our young onwards? How is it that we as a society cultivate that wisdom? What is worthy of our contemplation? What is worthy of our time? And how is it that we can begin to discuss that with one another and iterate upon that core question continuously, together, communally? And that’s where I think we might see more coming to the fray, more coming and bubbling up to the surface. But I’m very curious what your thoughts are.

Ayushi

I have a lot of thought, I mean, the word worthy, it’s a very loaded word, right? I mean, there’s something about the word worthy that makes me think of like sentinels, like keeping guard, right? Like who makes it in, who’s worthy? It reminds me of judgment, right? There’s judgment in that word, right? There’s a judging of worthiness versus unworthiness of like deservingness versus not. And I don’t know that there’s enough prayer even happening to be able to discriminate or decipher worthiness versus not, right? From my perspective, it would be a huge start if the people around me even had reverence or brought even just generosity. I don’t even use word reference, brought generosity into conversations with neighbors, with each other. That, that alone is missing. How can I begin to talk about the worthiness of generosity, right? Of my generosity or my reverence when it feels like more fundamental pieces are actually not present. You know, I think like as someone who’s worked as a public servant in the government, the state, local and federal level now for many years, I find it really, really interesting, really sad, you know, I have different adjectives on different days, how when I walk into the DMV, how other people in line are treating the person who is managing their paperwork, right? Like there’s a complete lack of respect and it goes both ways sometimes too, right? But what’s interesting there is the state is a thing that has been forced upon us. And there’s like, there’s many layers to this and you know, there’s a certain kind of duty that comes with being in certain spaces and that sort of sense of civic duty that I think comes with civic engagement is when it’s missing, when that sense of civic duty is missing, when the sense of respect is missing, generosity of approach is missing, worthiness or reverence or worthiness of my reverence feels even more distant. I don’t know, it feels, I feel sad saying that out loud, but that’s my initial thought as you were sharing.

Ceasar

I’m going to mix two things, reference and faith.

Ayushi

Dun, dun, dun.

Ceasar

I was realizing to sit here listening about, wow, what I have reverence for and what I have faith in. And the struggle for me in terms of thinking about how do we build new civic spaces is that I have real reverence for kind of all living beings. I don’t necessarily practice it as well as I should and show it as much as I should, but I do. But I don’t know if I have full faith in human beings. And I was thinking back again back to the Baldwin quote. There’s this line where he says, it’s our duty to do this. And then he says, the handful that we are, meaning it’s not going to be everyone. It’s going to be some of us who take this on, do this work, and that’s what’s important. And I hear that as almost a warning. Don’t let the desire to bring everyone alone keep you from doing the work that you can do with those that are with you. There’s that peace. And so, yeah, so I guess that combination of having reverence, but having certain faith or lack of faith in certain things, and then really, I guess this is the wisdom part, to know with whom and where and how one can act, the discernment of those three things.

Aaron

Absolutely. Now it brings to mind my maternal grandfather. He had a lot of different amazing lessons for all of us, but one of the things he loved to always sort of instill in us was this little credo of, if it is to be, it is up to me, which I got from him. And then in the Jewish book of ethics, there’s this phrase that’s more or less translated to, you are not responsible for healing all the wounds of the world, nor are you free to desist from supporting their end or to healing those wounds. And it’s sort of just that balance of, you’re not going to solve it all, but just because you can’t solve it all does not mean you are free to desist towards making the world a better place in the ways that you can, and always trying to inch further and do the more that you can. And similarly with, if it is to be, it is up to me. It is not necessarily to say, if I want to see good in the world, I’m the only one who can do it, but rather saying that, you know, if I wish the world to be seen in the beautiful way that I see it, it is up to me to participate in my society and in the world in such a way that that may be true, and that it can feel deeply lonely at times, but when it’s not, you know, what could you be more reverent of? There’s surely that balance of individual responsibility, individual motivation, but then what does it mean to be let down? You know, what does it mean to be let down by your government, by your civic society, by discourse more broadly? What does it mean to be let down on a near daily basis, looking at the news app or, you know, scrolling through social media and seeing a mixture or ad mixture of, you know, influencers with the most horrific things you’ll hear all day, coupled with all of these different things and that. What does it mean to be sort of let down in such a constant basis such that it’s, as you say Caesar, it’s far easier not to live or act in reverence or with reverence for the world when you digest it on such a daily basis in such morbid tones. It’s a great question.

Ceasar

I wonder if you’ve ever experienced this or have thought about it, but can reference fall away? Surely, shortly. Have you experienced that yourself?

Aaron

Absolutely. I would consider myself a deeply reverential person. Somebody who sees tremendous and profound beauty in the world around me and tries to participate in that, but those moments of disappointment by society, the act of coming into contact with the sheer force and destructive forces that the universe holds, whether it’s in your personal life or in a societal level, it really eats away at that type of reverence. And I think that that’s why in both Navajo society and perhaps in Judaism as well, there is such a premium placed on being reverential so that, again, you may know what is worthy of being reverential of and to position yourself so that you may experience miracles as they are. But to fall out of reverence, I think, is a near daily experience. I think it is more common to not be reverential than it is to be, but I think there are days when it’s… Can’t be right about this in his own way, where the sun is beating down on you. You’re a little bit irritated. You’re not feeling that good. Maybe you haven’t eaten. Maybe you haven’t taken care of your body that day the way that you needed to. Maybe you got some bad news. Maybe things are just… You’re a little bit off. And in those moments, if you see a rainbow, as you invoked the covenant earlier in the favorite song and not have that feeling of, if not reverence, then duty, it’s deeply challenging in those moments. And I think one need not beat up on oneself, but provide oneself a bit of grace there. But also, I think it illustrates the challenges and the necessities of creating those moments through your day. So whether that’s you wake up and you have your morning gratitudes that you share with yourself, morning affirmations, whatever it may be, or throughout the day, being deeply grateful to others who are around you. Or if it is to respond to somebody who is not being nice to you, respond with kindness, because the sun might be beaten down on them a little bit harder that day. I think that there are ways in which we can integrate it, but it shouldn’t be the individual. It should never be Sisyphus all on his lonesome pushing that boulder, but rather it is all of us breaking the boulder apart, perhaps, tilling the ground, turning that hill into perhaps, let’s say, tears, or you can have some agriculture in one area. Rice fields. Exactly rice fields, exactly tear farming. You live in this portion, broken apart that boulder so we can construct things, but it ought be done in community with one another. And the more we try not to, or the more we think we are self-sustainable all on our own without community, the further astray we go. And I think the less reverential we get.

Ayushi

Clearly, when you read all these Greek mythologies, we can think of race deals as the answer really, but that’s what was missing here. I don’t know where in Europe they were, but they weren’t getting it right. No, I love that. I think there’s a lot in what you said around participation as an output, maybe. I don’t know if output’s what you would say there, but participation as an output of reverence, regardless of, even if it’s just the one starfish you throw back. I didn’t grow up in a home that came with a faith background and so I’m just thinking of what I can relate to what you were saying with starfish. Throwing one back in that metaphoric story, it still saves that one. We can all pick up a couple starfish and throw them back in our own way. Then there’s another piece you said about a community and reverence really being present in not the individual, but in a collection of individuals, doing what they can in their way to ease healing or ease suffering. I think that to me is in some ways perhaps the other side of that worthiness we were talking about earlier. I don’t know that I’m someone who prays, but I’m someone who has really worked on finding delight in the ordinary. That’s my version of reverence, is finding delight in the day-to-day, in the way the light shines, in the way that all kinds of, there’s so many things. There’s just only little, little moments, whether they’re natural or human made that are awe-inspiring. I think of reverence as a practice and the point, praying for the sake of being able to pray better or praying for the sake of being able to just be a more proficient prayer no matter what we’re faced with so that even in moments where reverence might fall away, we can actually maintain that practice, maintain our participation, and maintain our presence in that community. I really appreciate what you’ve said. It’s making me. It’s making my brain do good things.

Ceasar

Actually, I’m going to let you go out with the last question, but before we go, there are four things I wanted to… words that for me have popped up out of this. One is reverence. The other is grace, wisdom, worthiness. I just think it’s pretty… an interesting constellation of words to consider in their relationship to each other. And faith, which is the one that I threw in there. I just think those five words are always in kind of motion with each other in some ways.

Aaron

Well, if I could just interject, please, if we think of those all as amulets or little gems to be put on a string and where as a necklace or the constellation, you’re discussing the, the piece that I would see is the through line in so many ways is balance. And what does that mean and all the different connotations, you know, how is it balanced in all of these different elements and how challenging that is. Love that.

Ayushi

Well, our closing question here, thinking about our audience, how do you bring others along as you do this work? How do you, in your efforts to help people build faith, build reverence, build respect, build participation as we approach these various institutions? In this case, I’m thinking particularly of civic ones, but it could be others as well. How do you maybe create the space for people to step into spaces of reverence or balance using the word that you just shared?

Aaron

I think in many ways it begins with reverence for community itself, reverence for the lands and waterways that you’re walking, that you inhabit, while remembering that there are equally beautiful and equally deserving of reverence, lands and waterways and people and communities that are not in your eyesight. You can’t hear around you, you don’t feel in the same way. I’m thinking about how one can apply that reverence of that which is around you towards that which is not, that is one place to begin. But I think also, you know, earlier I was just discussing how there’s a mode of reverence that means to let something be, that you revere it so much that you respect it and leave it be. But there are other modes to bring into the fold now, which would be to revere a comet passing through the sky and somewhat passively and somewhat actively making a wish upon that comet or revering it from afar and it sort of dissolves away and perhaps with your wish as well. Or another mode of reverence in which one perhaps sees a baby. Maybe it’s your niece, maybe it’s your child and there is this moment of reverence perhaps that you experience which you say, I’m gonna not just revere this individual but I’m gonna do all my power to support that individual and as you say, take them along and involve them and rear them in the right ways. I don’t think that it is unique only to babies or to other things like that but when you see something and you revere it or you recognize a core element of that reverence is a desire to support that very thing, its well-being and of that of which is yet to come and of the potentialities that there is a reverence of potentialities and your participation in it. And if you take the mode of reverence of the comet, you in all likelihood will not be bringing very many people along with you in your civic engagement, in the work that you’re doing, in your reverence overall. But if you sit in that framework of reverence that is of the baby or the reverence of possibilities and potentialities, it necessitates bringing others along and to be engaging in that community. And so for me, starting there, starting with that sort of operation or that framework of reverence deeply rooted in my Navajo and Jewish beliefs, I always turn back and think of things with a certain sense of reverence towards the community that therefore necessitates my participation in its betterment but it’s my participation in the civic society I wish to live in and not doing so alone, as lonely as it perhaps feels.

Ceasar

I’m going to say thank you so much, you know.

Ayushi

Thank you so much.

Ceasar

When we started out, we asked you about Experience Reverence. You said, oh, I am right now. I certainly feel that for the last hour, we’ve been in a very special space. And you’ve created that space for us. I want to thank you. I know our listeners are going to enjoy and be in that space also when they hear this.

Aaron

Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be in community with you both and with the listeners now as well.

Ayushi

Thank you all so much for listening to that episode of season three of We Who Engage. This conversation would not have been possible without sound production and editing by Dave Leschansky and Jeff DeWine. A huge thank you also to our team who supported us throughout COVID, Eli Epperson, Ana Perez, Nick Sprague, Mo Bradford, and Patricia Iregas.

Ceasar

Yes, and we also have to send a big thank you to the Silverberg family for their support for our launch event, which we’ve never done before. A belief in disbelief that was held at the MIT Museum who really stood out for us to give us that space under short notice. And we also have to give a really big shout out to the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning who’s been a supporter of this work from the very beginning and will continue to do so.

Ayushi

Thank you all for listening.

Ceasar

Thank you.