A Beautiful, Artistic Defiance

If something hurts, it means you care, and that is not weakness; it’s strength.

True healing comes from embracing that pain. But it requires risk; it requires courage, and it requires people to be willing to be uncomfortable and eschew the status quo, which is what got us into the situation we are in. Dilafruz Kohnikboyeva affirmed this to me.

“Pain has a transformational aspect, but you have to lean into it,” she says.

Khonikboyeva grew up in Tajikistan under the Soviet Union, saw its collapse, and then her nation fall into civil war. Her home community's resilience under extraordinarily difficult circumstances informs her work today.

Her organization, Home Planet Fund, provides direct funding to conservation initiatives led by Indigenous people and women’s collectives in some of the most resource-stressed and ecologically significant regions. Funding these communities, she says, requires trust. It means funders may have to be okay with putting their money behind something that may not operate in the way they dictate. In other words, it’s uncomfortable.

“ I think sometimes people wanna hear, "Yes, we'll take your money. Yes, we'll do what you want in the timeline that you want. Yes, everything is possible." And it's just not true, right? That is actually not how life works,” she says.

 “If you're donating to the big giant organizations that everybody knows, that's fine, but your work could have a lot more impact if you were a little bit more uncomfortable and took a little bit more time and tried to invest in the community level.”

I have decided not to take the safe road in life. The safe road is familiar, but it does not actually help you grow. I wrote about this in relation to facing fear. What’s on the other side of that fear—that discomfort—is often exactly where your heart needs and wants to go.

The philanthropy space often avoids uncertainty by imposing funding restrictions. Yes, due diligence is important, but if you don’t permit the use of funding in the way the people who know how to tend the land best do, how can you expect to heal that land? Or those communities?

The Western world often holds much of the funding, but the knowledge of these ecosystems resides in the culture and lives of the people who live in them. Khonkiboyeva tells me why empowering this local knowledge isn’t just necessary from an ecological perspective, but from a human one.

 “In healing that land, there is something in people that we can also heal. So can we invest in the healing of ourselves?” she told me. “If we have populations that are traumatized, that are so fear-based, and that the only reason they save this planet is just for fear of dying or fear of the collapse, that's not good enough.”

I have said before that we don't need a monetary incentive to do what’s right. We work on things because we care; we work on them because we want better for ourselves. We create art because we need it. Khonkiboyeva agrees.

“We do things for each other because we believe in the future.” Her mother and father worked to keep a power station functioning in her home community—without pay—simply because it needed to be done.

 “I'm always deeply overwhelmed when I sit in communities who, when I read about them, when I engage with them, I hold so much of their pain as I hear about it, and yet I see just a lot of joy. I see a lot of laughter. I see a lot of hope for the future. I see a lot of defiance in that, and it's a beautiful artistic defiance. It's a defiance in healing.”

I believe Khonikboyeva is telling us true healing takes courage, and a willingness to be uncomfortable, whether it's in philanthropy or in your life, but it’s clear a lot could change for the better if the people who hold resources are more willing to take a chance.

 “There are pathways to healing through the trauma and building a beautiful world, not because we fear a collapse, but because we want something better for ourselves and this planet,” she concludes.

Being willing to step out of the familiar is one of the bravest things you can do. It is how you, as Khonikboyeva says, develop a ‘beautiful, artistic defiance in healing.’

Mike

Image caption: 'Blue Cave' in Jodogahama bay. Miyako, Japan. Photo by Mike DiGirolamo.