When most people see my brother, they will often first notice his disability. They might find a label like intellectually disabled. Often, their primary curiosity is about what makes him other and then him as a person. I wonder often about if we first asked what unique abilities someone like my brother has instead of first tracking his disabilities.
Hey, check out my new catalog! Yah, look what color dock lines do you like here?
When I see my brother, I am relieved. On one hand, because I’m about to receive a big nervous-system-regulating bear hug and on the other hand, because I am seen and loved.
What is your cousin’s girlfriend’s name? Oh, Emily!
From when I was little, I knew that my brother knew things that others around me didn’t know. On so many occasions, he knew how to transmute our family’s conflict and chaos to levity, laughter and joy. Growing up, some hell might’ve been going down around us but he’d whisk me off for some adventure. Once it was playing in the mud outside. I loved playing in the mud with him just as much as making sure we were all cleaned up afterwards. My brother’s instinct to protect, care for and love his little sister was not impaired.
What’d you have for dinner? Ravioli? Ooooooooo yum!
When part of who we are is marginalized from the societal center, we can be more easily tapped into the collective emergent edge. We can see and exude what those more in the center have a harder time accessing. We can be aware of what’s missing as it’s part of what we know and have to give that’s missing.
In a way what we call intellectual disability now, to me, contains in it an emergent ability for what we need to grow collectively to our edge. Including and integrating who and what part is excluded and marginalized is part of being fully with where we are so that we can move forward emergently.
Please tell me how you make that sausage bread again!
In my brother’s disability, he is emergently-abled in his shameless big-hearted embodiment that centers the warm intelligence of the heart over the cold intelligence of the brain. Our over-reliance on cold intelligence hasn’t brought our collective consciousness to a place that can adequately address climate change, gruesome systemic oppression, dehumanizing technology, isolation and other pandemics.
Will you come home more often when I have a boat? Will you be there at my wedding?
Is there a part of you that is divergent from the mainstream or a system that you’re a part of that has medicine or a message to lead us towards our evolutive collective edge?
How can you make space for that part to be more fully seen and acknowledged? Perhaps first just for yourself.