Dismantling The House

In the wake of the election, I’m often hearing Audre Lorde’s famous words echoing in my mind. She said “For the master's tool will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

This quote is rich, poetic, powerful and deep. It is also very elusive to enact simply because it is so difficult for us to see possibilities beyond the “master’s tools”because they are all we have known.

Much like the indigenous Caribbean people who literally did not see the European ships on the horizon because they had no concept for sails and instead mistook the forms for clouds, our minds struggle to see beyond what we have known to be the tactics of power, control, oppression and division for thousands of years in the Western world because we have no known template for what that looks and feels like.

So how do we even begin to identify NOT the “master’s tools” in order to bring about change?

For starters, we can follow the opposites of what we identify to be the master’s tools at work currently. There are countless examples I could share, but at the core I believe fear is the most pervasive tool presently wielded to maintain the status quo. So the opposite would be developing trust in any pocket of life we possibly can.

Growing our ability to trust may be in a relationship, deepening our connection to our own body, or finding sources of solidity in the world around us.

At the very least we can build trust by considering the unwavering presence of gravity holding us solidly on the ground. Soften into that idea…notice what happens in your body.

Trust is a wildly powerful tool for eroding this culture of domination like ivy crumbling a brick wall. When we build a personal temple fortified by trust, we are now wielding a tool capable of dismantling the master’s house. Whoa!