Hosting the Edges: Kinship, Retreat, and Lineage
By M. Rako Fabionar
Gratitude for the beloved unseen, including my grandmothers and grandfathers, especially the old, gnarled ones whose names we no longer know. Appreciation for my family, who continues to walk this earth, and for the generations yet to come who will walk here too.
The Mountain Story
There is a story about the mountain range that holds my home and community:
A child wanders after losing their family and suffers at the hands of others who also suffer. They come to hear of a mountain that holds great power. After many trials, the child arrives at the mountain but is turned away by its dragon guardian upon seeing the anger and vengeance the child carries in their heart. Undeterred, the child makes their way to another mountain of the range, the mountain of wisdom, where they seek insight to trick the dragon.
The Mountain of Power
Alas, the brilliant light from the crystalline heart of the mountain of wisdom blinds the child, their pain body so thick that they cannot receive such a gift. Defeated, the child wanders again, stumbling into a cave, exhausted and broken. Feeling momentarily safe, they begin to cry and then wail. The tears and grief are so strong that an elderly couple hears and promptly brings the child to their home on the mountain of love, where they raise the child as their own and give them the name “Beloved.” With time and the couple’s love, Beloved’s sight returns.
A few years go by, and Beloved’s parents pass away together peacefully in their sleep. Beloved retreats to the cave to bury them and offers grief and tears to the Earth. They ask that Earth and the mountain of love receive and tend to their parents well. Upon receiving this grief offering, the mountain gives Beloved the gift of an open heart and the calm, loving compassion that accompanies it. The open heart allows Beloved to see their ancestors for the first time.
Guided by their heart and ancestors, Beloved returns to connect with the dragon and receives the gift of power and vitality from the mountain. Soon afterward, Beloved is called back to the mountain of wisdom, where the gift they receive from the crystalline heart is how to cultivate, in concert with love, the insight and discernment necessary to wield power appropriately. The story concludes with Beloved coming to know deeply that the mountains and their gifts exist both within and outside of Beloved, as Beloved is guided next to visit and embody the spirit of the mountain of healing.
The Cousins
“May we know and cultivate love, may we know and cultivate wisdom, may we know and cultivate power, vitality, and abundance, in service of healing, awakening, and beauty.”
My extended family will be coming to our new home for Easter this year. Our place is close to Beloved’s mountain, the one known for its healing capacity and beauty. After nearly a decade of living in an apartment and months of travel, we are happy here and for the ability to host now.
Before the pandemic, at least 40-50 of us showed up whenever we gathered as a family.
The collective loss and grief from the pandemic and civil unrest make coming together more precious. We've had limited contact with folks in person these past two years because of a family member who is immunocompromised. Gratefully, we've found ways to mitigate risks and work through some tensions to reach a point where we feel resourced and comfortable gathering our people to celebrate. Of course, this too might soon change; such is the nature of our times. For all of these reasons, it is a privilege to be able to host.
Hosting is one of the things that my family knows how to do.
I grew up in a Filipino American family and culture that valued hospitality, especially hosting guests who were kin or part of our extended community. As children, my brothers and I were excited about the opportunities to spend a week or so away during the summer at our cousins’ homes (sometimes just ten minutes away), where our aunts and uncles took good care of us.
The Cousins at Daguhoy Lodge
Having the opportunity to move outside of our home environments and the day-to-day routines of our lives was special. We played, deepened our connection with our cousins and their neighborhoods, went through growing pains, and explored different aspects of our identity.
We learned the differences between our relatives and ourselves. We also started to understand some of the underlying tensions and traumas that, intertwined with such beautiful gifts, existed within our respective families and permeated our extended tribe. Ultimately, we were fed during these stays with our cousins in so many ways.
As we came into adulthood, this intimate kinship continued. We created an annual Cousins Weekend (which lasts several days) where we gather to feed each other, play, and celebrate. To pray and affirm. Some cousins lead yoga classes, and others find quiet spots to meditate.
And there are some small precious spots where we grieve.
Here, we support each other in our life's work and challenges, recall fond memories, and toast "future memories" - a ritualized way to imagine the future potentials that we intend to manifest.
These special extended periods with family shaped my understanding of retreats.
Over the years, The Cousins have also spent time together one-on-one and in smaller groups. Some of us travel or have lived together. As we get older, we look to each other for support when significant life transitions arise, and more profound healing is needed. This includes challenges around relationships, money, depression, addiction, suicide, and other family patterns influenced by multigenerational conditioning needing, and sometimes ready, to be engaged.
I’ve received some of the most honest feedback within this kinship context, including a loving-yet-direct reflection from my cousin over twenty-five years ago that was integral to my development. After a minor conflict between us, my cousin spoke about a part of myself that I was unaware of and how this unconscious expression of passive-aggressive behavior impacted him and our relationship. He contextualized this feedback within a broader story of cultural conditioning and complex family expectations (Including what Filipinos call utang na loob). My cousin's words and story painfully touched me and opened my eyes to how this pattern played out in other relationships. He provided the loving support I needed to begin integrating some deep shadow material and opened me to receiving more feedback.
Soon after this exchange, he shared a quote by Trinh Minh-ha at our grandmother's funeral that deepened my understanding of the gift he offered me and sparked my desire to learn how to facilitate that kind of medicine. Minh-ha wrote about storytelling as she experienced it from indigenous and traditional cultures:
The story as cure and a protection is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical, and religious...The principle of healing rests on reconciliation, hence the necessity for the family and/or community to cooperate, partake in, and witness the recovery, de-possession, regeneration of the sick.
Rako at Daguhoy Lodge
As with all cultures and communities, my family has dysfunction and shadow expressions that still need healing. Yet, I've been fortunate to have folks on both sides of the family and "chosen family" members model behavior that encourages self-disclosure and intimacy. The Cousins provide a cultural space, a trustworthy container that has helped me learn to feel comfortable being vulnerable and open to the kinds of support that facilitate healing and growth.
My current work is rooted in this deep kinship and storytelling tradition, and I offer it through the Retreat Center Collaboration and the Innovative Learning and Living Institute. Before connecting professionally with Christian, Catholic, Buddhist, and human potential retreat centers, my family and cultural community shaped my understanding of radical hospitality and the experience of transformative communities of practice. We were inspired time and time again to keep our hearts open at the mountain of love, received revelatory insight while in a ceremony at the mountain of wisdom, and have experienced the blooming of vital energy surge through our bodies at the mountain of power.
From this Root
“If there is to be any hope whatsoever of living well on this earth, we have to take the ancient root and put new sap in it.”
Rako's Grandparents at Daguhoy Lodge
One of the reasons I am pleased to host Easter this year is that the holiday falls on my grandfather's birthday. Shortly after he passed away when I was a child, almost forty years ago, one of my aunts gave all of The Cousins a booklet she made called From this Root: Memories of Grandpa. It was a compilation of stories she collected from the grandchildren orally and through a writing prompt. Like my grandmother and mother and many women in the family and extended community, my aunt is an intentional culture bearer who uses stories, gifts, songs, and food to offer a “way of being” rooted in a rich tradition.
My family's intimate, healing, and celebratory ways of being did not begin with The Cousins fifty years ago. These traditions that we’ve embodied, evolved, and now offer to our children are the continuity of a cultural lineage that goes back to our "edge communities" in Stockton, CA, and on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines.
My friends and colleagues at Salmon Nation focus on "rural, Indigenous and urban 'edge' communities; on lesser-served places and markets; and remarkable people doing remarkable work." Some live on the margins of society because they are forced to do so. Others choose to inhabit these spaces. Either way, edge communities are "places and people—near enough to resource centers, yet far enough away to preserve alternate viewpoints—[who] are well positioned for the development and demonstration of new approaches to living that makes more regenerative use of natural, social and financial capital."
My grandfather was a steward of an edge community in Stockton, CA. He was among the leadership of a Filipino organization whose headquarters was a community center and boarding house called the Daguhoy Lodge. Founded in 1926 and located in one of the most impoverished and violent cities in the USA, the Daguhoy provided an urban sanctuary for Filipino migrant farmworkers, laborers, and the extended Filipino community. For decades, most Filipinos in Stockton were legally, economically, and culturally limited in what they could own and what civic and social institutions they could access safely.
Filipino farmworker mural by Eliseo Art Silva
My grandfather used to work in the fields, as did his cousin, a small, endearing, and spirited elder that The Cousins called “Tata” growing up. Like we would come to be, these two cousins were inseparable and fiercely committed to the well-being of their family and community.
Folks of the Daguhoy Lodge pooled and shared financial resources. They shared food. In addition to cultivating their own vegetable garden, the Daguhoy residents who labored in the fields brought seasonal harvests back to the lodge and dropped off fruits and vegetables on the doorsteps of community members' homes. My grandmother and other women organized social and cultural activities and holiday gatherings. They hosted wedding celebrations and funeral receptions and explored esoteric practices and ceremonial rites of passage.
As the organization focused on the dignity of working-class folks and housed migrant farmworkers and laborers, the Dahuhoy was also a hub for political activity. My grandfather and other kin were active in the conversations and organization for farmworker resistance and solidarity. This activity included talks and work with Larry Itliong, who, unbeknownst to many, provided the leadership that would spark the farmworkers movement of the 1960s and compel Cesar Chavez to join the strike.
The Daguhoy was a rich social environment that influenced the cultural formation of The Cousins. The multigenerational community fed and affirmed us, encouraged, and bore witness to our songs, dances, and words. I experienced the value of hospitality from the resilient edges and learned how it emerged from less than hospitable social conditions.
Still, this lineage has deeper roots.
Like my grandfather, Francisco Dagohoy, the inspiration behind the Daguhoy Lodge in Stockton, CA, was from Bohol. Dagohoy was a resistance leader who initiated the longest revolt against Spanish colonial rule in Philippine history. Supported by collective farming practices, Dogohoy and his followers created a new edge community and established the First Bohol Republic, an independent government in the mountains. Spanish forces met successive defeats during the Dogohoy Rebellion from 1744 to 1829.
Dagohoy Cave and Mountain
The recorded history of Dagohoy, the revolutionary hero and edge community leader, continues to inspire Filipinos. The oral histories about the extraordinary powers Dagohoy developed through his intimate connection with nature and devotion to the community also continue to inspire. He is part of the mythology of Eskaya indigenous people and connected to Bohol's contemporary sukdan shamans. They later claim that Dogohoy was also a sukdan shaman and underwent transformative initiations in his mountain and cave retreats.
Hosting the Edges
As children living in Stockton, my parents would look beyond the islands of the California Delta and gaze upon the mountain that the Ohlone people called Tuyshtak, which means “at the dawn of time” or where it begins. Now in their seventies, my folks recently visited the mountain at the edge of their experience as children. They sought the mountain’s beauty and inspiration as they asked what was next. What new story was to begin? What was to become?
Many retreat centers are asking similar questions.
What transformative initiations are we individually and collectively undergoing already? Which ones are calling us to move more intently? Retreats always involve movement: Physical, cultural, psychospiritual, and political. Some of the most potent retreat experiences are the ones that bring us to the edge of our comfort zones. From the edges, the margins, we reflect upon who we are and begin to imagine who we might become. The liminal space, the in-between-ness of center and margin, of "being" and "becoming" is what is held, nourished, and catalyzed through the multidimensional support of retreat.
I appreciate how the RCC continues to inquire into the future of retreat centers. The pandemic and civil unrest have catalyzed an even deeper exploration into what is needed to cultivate the transformative changes retreat center professionals want to enact from within and across their communities. I hope that as we continue to listen more deeply and learn to live in new ways, we also continue to host our edges and pay close attention to creativity and innovation coming from edge communities.
M. Rako Fabionar cultivates innovative learning environments for folks to experience deeper connection, insight, and well-being. Rako comes from a family of educators, counselors, organizers, and healers and is connected to the Philippines' Boholano and Eskaya indigenous people. Identified as “one who carries medicine” by elders and spirits of three different lineage traditions, Rako has participated in many healings, apprenticeships, trainings, and formal initiation ceremonies over the last two decades. Often sought out as a land listener, he also supports people during transition, with more than 20 years of experience designing a wide range of transformative initiatives for universities, community-based organizations, businesses, and change networks. He is part of the RCC steering committee.