My name is meaningless without a story but I am not meaningless without my name.
My name Van Thi traces a history of colonialism, diaspora, and marginalisation through its translation from Chinese to Vietnamese to English. But its origin story, its Chinese meaning as “rhyming poem,” is the one I resonate with and the one I share with collective humanity.
A story is useful when we know we can change it
I advocate for an eco-spiritual approach to social change. Since “eco” means home, eco-spiritual means finding our way home towards our spiritual belonging, purpose, and oneness with the world. Our spiritual home already lives internally in each of us, but as a collective civilization, we depend on stories to understand life. These stories are the narratives of our personal and collective histories, the norms of societies and cultures, and the parameters we apply to create judgments. These stories are the basis of our identities as well as the programming for repetitive patterns of pain.
Most of us believe we are our stories. But our stories are only useful because they are malleable versions of reality. I realised this during a “spiritual initiation” (i.e., an existential crisis) that started in the 2nd year of my PhD studies. It was the first time I became aware of how much I had deprived myself of happiness because of the stories I believed in about what I deserved in life.
Externally, I looked like I was living out a story of a fairly “successful” person. I had been a top student all my life. I was regularly praised for my intelligence, talents, and work ethics. I worked as a landscape architect, a role I once envisioned as my dream career. But internally, I was consistently struggling to feel comfortable in my own skin. I yearned to be recognized for my sensitivity and my vulnerability but the fear of being seen was greater than my desire to be truly appreciated.
I didn’t know the difference between who I was and who others thought I should be. Neither did I fully appreciate the parts of myself that I wanted others to value. I didn’t know that I was highly empathic, intuitively attuned to the energies and emotions of people around me, but like many other wounded empaths, I believed that the source of all that emotional baggage was my defectiveness. Through years of healing involving many things, from psychotherapy to energy work to mysticism and career certifications, did I understand that my identity was entrenched in generational and collective subconscious beliefs of oppression, shame, and not-belonging.
The only way I could move through this chaos was to summon a power greater than the destructive forces of the collective social structure that created the stories in the first place. So, I came to realise that the ultimate power to personal and collective healing is faith.
Surrendering to the authority of my own purpose
Our stories are valuable because we can re-construct them to change meanings in our lives. We make meaning to the lives behind our names (our identities) through our stories and not because of them. Or else we become victims of our own stories.
As a researcher, philosopher, and light-worker, I feel drawn to make sense of other people’s stories. But I have to continually remind myself that we are all responsible in co-creating our own stories with whatever sources of faith we individually connect with. I cannot re-write other people’s personal stories for them. But I can re-write my own.
For much of my life, I had learned to seek safety in being invisible within the norms of social obedience and social value. But knowing and flourishing cannot be achieved through proxy. I am the piece of the puzzle that grounds my awareness of the world and I am the authority of my life’s flourishing.
To live purposefully, I strive to be free from other people’s versions of reality. I strive to value my own perspective of the world as an embodied testament to my own self-integrity.
My place in the world
My life’s greatest spiritual teacher, landscape, teaches me how to recognize my place in the world. In a landscape, I am the one who perceives and the one who receives. The world mirrors my choice to move, look around, or stay in place. But I do not control the world. Moreover, to receive the gifts of a landscape—the beauty, inspiration, healing, and awe of being connected to something greater than myself—I need to stay humble.
I sometimes envision life as a long hiking trip on a diverse landscape. This sojourn is our temporary stay on Earth as human beings, but also our timeless engagement with the truth of our divinity. Each piece of landscape we encounter teaches us a lesson about duality and the liminal space in-between. The entirety of life can be seen as a liminal experience between birth and death. Simultaneously, every moment in life can be seen as a liminal experience between the past and the future.
Liminality can feel either uncomfortable or relieving for the very same reason: we are existing in the present without a story. To find our way home, we need to simultaneously value our stories and be willing to let them go. So while my name holds many stories from the past and the future, some lived, some imagined, and some destined to become reality, the process of living an indeterminate story and making value from it is how I nurture my life’s flourishing.
The Story of A Flourishing Commons
If my name carries the story of my individual identity in this world, then A Flourishing Commons is the story of my shared existence in the collective consciousness. This story involves our tragic separation from nature and our commitment to find our way back to oneness through a continuous learning process of self-love.
Just like the Greek classics, our Tragedy starts with a self-fulfilling prophecy, in this case about our unworthiness to exist on Earth. Like the Hero’s Journey, we learn to navigate the temptations and storms of our oppressive psychological and institutional structures. While A Flourishing Commons is our destination, the story has yet to reach an ending.
I invite you to claim your participation in the building of our Flourishing Commons.