Chris at Parking Lot is a great mentor for me on holding space. Today he uses the story of the re-discovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker to teach about holding space and never giving up on anyone.
Joy Harjo’s cousin wrote about the meaning of the birds to the Muskogee people:
The honorable ivory-billed woodpecker has returned from the dead and is living in a wildlife refuge in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas. It seemed to disappear in 1944 and was long presumed extinct.
This spirit bird’s reappearance 60 years later reinforces a wise instruction by Native elders: ”Never give up on anyone.”That admonition to never give up is an essential practice of holding space. In fact holding space, and the faith and dedication it demands, may be the most trusting thing one can do: imagining that the one who you are holding will eventually flourish, or return. If that wildlife refuge had never existed, a space held for the unconditional use of these animals, it’s likely the woodpecker would be gone from North America for good and the Muskogee songs and healing processes that go with it would have slowly disappeared too.
This is a lovely story about what it means to be connected to the world and what that connection demands of us.