We gathered under the banner of sharing songs, developing strategy, grounding deeply into our values for the movement of our times and build relationships that will strengthen our movement work across the nation and the globe. Kairos Center has helped tend the fires of change for many years, including the Poor People’s campaign (a moral fusion movement led by the poor), Free Families (to end family deportation), and Songs in the Key of Resistance (organizing songs for social change). They bring together “cultural organizers” to help us get our hearts and minds and songs aligned.

“Cultural organizers” are people who use song, visual art, and preaching or narrative to create the culture in which movements can root, thrive, and win. Culture is the water in which we swim. I was humbled to be among many song leaders whose work I admire, too many to name. (But listen to the Peace Poets! Listen to Batya Levine and Aly Halpert and Sarina Partridge and Dr. Charon Hribar and and and!)

Most of the days we spent together were entirely immersed and fully conducted in song. I have never been to a gathering quite like it. We learned new songs, practiced old songs and adapted traditional melodies with new words. We were many kinds of people and from many faith lineages, brought together out of necessity, out of love, out of hope for our shared future, crossing historic lines of division. The songs kept reminding us, like the great gospel power anthem made famous by Hezekiah Walker proclaims: we need each other to survive.

Here was the get- to- know each other part of the gathering, entirely conducted in song:

This song was adapted from a traditional folk song, Bele Mama. Likely of Cameroonian origin, it’s been passed down through oral tradition. Bele Mama translates to “Call Mother” in Oroko, calling in one’s mother to join in to a celebration.

Every piece of the gathering, from children running around (“children aren’t in the way; they are the way”) to bowls of lozenges and tea and covid tests (“we keep each other safe”) to pop up interfaith prayer spaces (“G-d in every moment and person”) helped me feel my way into the world we are building. Because we were already inhabiting it.

And the inhabiting a movement of resistance and possibility felt so FUN. At a late night participant- led sing, we learned versions of ‘Went Down to the Rich Man’s House’ mashed up with Doloy Politzei-- a Yiddish “down with police” song from Jewish bundists who were against the Russian empire that police protected, the songs themselves clarifying the intersections between capitalism and carceral systems.

The more times change…

The songs’ messages, paired with the style of collective leadership helped clarify our movement values, or what comes before strategy. Values matter more than ever as conditions change so rapidly that by the time we develop a plan it is out of date. But grounding in values can support us no matter what comes. (At the organization where I serve as executive director we run all decisions through our six values: trust and integrity and everything we do; care and reciprocity between people in the planet; justice and well-being for all.)

Different leaders seamlessly passed the ball to each other so deftly that songs would almost overlap. Each leader would tell the story of the song: where it came from/ what was the struggle story/ what language is this in/ who adapted the words? The carriers of the songs adding their own story into the songs themselves, each of us shaping and changing the meaning as we carry the tune with us.

Here we are learning “None Of Us Are Free” by Arnaé Batson inspired by the words of Fannie Lou Hamer:

The values that emanated through the whole gathering through were: a sense of the holiness in everyone; robust commitment to peace & the long time horizon that being part of a nonviolent movement requires; beauty as the way; the need to link arms across historic difference; and collective leadership.

The few times organizers did speak to us outside of song was to download some deep political education.

We heard about of moments in historic struggle where it was not clear what strategy made sense, where there was disagreement between allies, where what was going to happen next was not clear. We heard about when John Brown, the abolitionist, and Harriet Tubman discussed his plans to attempt to incite a massive uprising of enslaved people and abolitionists together across the nation. Tubman and Brown were dear friends and allies. They met often to discuss their shared longing for a liberated world. But Tubman was clear that while she admired the strategy Brown was proposing -- it was not her work to do. She needed to continue with going down into the world of enslavement in the south and bringing helping people get to freedom. Brown thought that the time was right and led a rebellion. Brown ended up being killed before he saw the end of enslavement, but Brown and Tubman loved and needed each other, respected each other, and admired each other outside, despite of and outside of and beyond strategic difference.

We also heard about meetings toward what we now know to be the end of Rev. Dr. MLK Jr’s life. He had begun to call meetings together with his closest allies to say: we need to expand our solidarity and our work to organize with all poor people and to oppose the war in Vietnam. He wanted to to oppose militarism and to call for a radical expansion of the justice movement that includes people of color, poor people and people all over the world who are crying out against American military expansionism. Some of his closest people understood where he was going, but many dissented. He was killed 10 months later.

History (especially history told by an oppressive nation up to its own project of nation building) is always political. And the histories that we are given flatten and narrow the experience of what it was to be inside of historical moments of movement.

In Texas, we were being asked to trouble those narratives and hold the complexity of change making. We’re in complex times now, times where we’re not all sure exactly how to get where we are needing to move. We were being reminded that strategic choices in the middle of movement are not simple and have never been simple. We were being pointed back to the fact that we can hold complexity, we can on strategy and still link up arms through our values and our vision. And we must, if we are truly sacred to one another.

Here is My Commitment/ Mi Compromiso written by Oona Valle and Lu Aya of the Peace Poets for the Free Families campaign, adapted and taught by Ciara Taylor:

When things are not clear, when we’re in disagreement, when we’re struggling: a key method for linking arms and remembering we are for each other has always been through song, through art, through making something beautiful together.

Finally, after days of singing together, we took our practice to the street and went to a massive ICE processing facility where people are brought in or come in voluntarily for ice check-in’s. Inside this cement and metal warehouse, people are detained and driven to concentration camps. We watched as whole families with babies and children were taken into the facility and taken out on sprinter vans driving them straight to the concentration camps of Dilley, where we know that children are abused, where children are staging their own uprising and protest. We stood in witness and would not look away.

Altars honoring our movement leaders are an important part of creating a shared space, and help contextualize the long lineage of struggle in which we stand.

The experience of watching babies and children shipped out to be taken into camps was heartbreaking in a way that I can’t articulate in words, like staring into the jaws of the machine of fascism, of hatred itself. As a mother, the holy rage that welled up in me has not resolved itself. I bring my rage with me now. I leave it with us all, unresolved, as a call to action, harm we must stop and a wound we must heal.

(A reminder that there are songs for holding rage, too— you can find more in the Songs in the Key of Resistance songbook here.)

In my rage, and in my grief— in my love— I stood with clergy, with elders and youth, with poets and drummers and song leaders and gospel singers. I stood with people whose ancestors kept planting seeds of hope and possibility in the hearts of their children in spite of grave horror. People who held in their bones that another world is possible.

We held up our hands as the buses drove away and we sang our love in the face of hatred. Our hearts broke, but our clarity, our values, and our spirits strengthened. Song can do that, love can do that, solidarity can do that. Ken Saro- Wiwa wrote from the gallows, “Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues.” We will never give up.

It was a joy to carry some of these songs back to Vermont, and I am eager to share them. Yesterday I was able to gather with organizers in the NEK organizing a “Survival Revival” to meet material needs, develop grassroots leadership, take collective action, and share songs in early June. Hit me up if you want to be involved! From there I joined friends on a back porch and learned hospice songs for an elder farmer who is in a passing process as the grackles arrived home on the maple trees. I am so grateful for how no matter the season or the event in our lives, song and community is there.

And THIS WEEK: If you are local and want to learn some of the songs that flowed out of the gathering-- and then take them to the streets: you have good opportunity to do so coming up right up:

Wednesday May 6th will be singing at SEABA (formerly Arts Riot on Pine St) 6 to 7 is masked only singing and 7 to 9 all are welcome, dessert potluck, and resistance + resilience songs.

Friday May 8th many will be doing an ICE OUT action in Saint Albans at the ICE facility at noon. Don’t miss it!

And— on a final note of song and all it can do for us— I was delighted to be interviewed recently on the Breath of Song podcast with Patricia Norton, and you can listen to the whole episode here! I teach my friend Joanna Colwell’s song called “The Turning” about Joanna Macy’s work of the great turning. Check it out!

And p.s. My friend and comrade Liza Cochran wrote a really beautiful piece, “stay busy with beauty as well as outrage”, and is lifting up our ICE OUT action on May 8th, come out! Anais and Moira and many others will be there and singing out for change. We need you— come add your voice!

ICE (aided by state and local police-- even here in VT where we are allegedly governed by a law that prohibits this kind of collaboration) sent dozens of riot-gear clad, long gun- carrying, fully masked agents to bust the door open and enter with a warrant for a person who was never even inside the home. They forcibly ripped an asylum- seeking mom of two young children out of her house. Agents threw, pepper sprayed, tear gassed, rubber bulleted, and tried to run over us “protestors” (elders, clergy, students and neighbors) as we simply tried to prevent our friends from being kidnapped in plain sight.

I have thoughts.

I recently traveled as part of a clergy action to be in solidarity with Minneapolis and took notes here. One of my organizing mentors Mark Schultz told me to always reflect, document and share what happened so we can learn and adapt as a movement.

Here are similar notes from Vermont—fresh, raw, not that polished, but hopefully helpful. Whatever is useful, take:

You can read the basics of what went down here. But I wanted, both to process for myself, and to capture for the record, a bit more fleshing out of what went down:

I arrived at around 9:30 or 10 am, after getting a text that ICE was trying to enter a home that had small children in it. I had been doing a guest teach-in about nonviolence in my second graders classroom that morning. I told the class of open faced seven-year-olds that I show up to take action because I love my own kids so so much, and I love life, and I think everyone should be safe and happy with their kids no matter their skin color or where they were born. They nodded along. It’s not that complicated. I walked out and had a text on my phone: get over to Dorset St.

I walked up to the small rental house and found it already surrounded by a large group of diverse people: college kids, elders with walkers, clergy wearing garb, and neighbors, all who were willing to put their bodies in between the guns and the young, frightened parents with their children inside. The first thought in my head was: this is what love looks like in public. (Thank you Dr. Cornell West!)

All day long we formed a circle around the house as ICE agents loomed threatening, mostly with their masks completely covering their faces, hands hovering over the triggers of their long guns. Local police showed up slowly through the day and stood near to the scene but away from it. We asked, and they told us they were here to observe and “protect the peace.” Some local police removed their name badges, a frightening warning of what was to come.

We knew that there was a small child, toddler aged in pre-k, inside with her mom. Some of us were already connected to her through friendship, and through the legal guardianship project. This project meant that the family already had legal docs in place to protect the child in the event that something terrible happened, and a temporary legal guardian held the legal authority to take care of the child.

Thank god for pro bono lawyers and organized community that takes proactive actions to protect children-- and how utterly unacceptable and horrific that such a program is needed.

We knew from watching ICE roll up in riot gear that they wanted to fight, and we were afraid for the small child. We hatched a plan and formed a tunnel of people with linked arms up to the front door, and carried the baby out under a blanket. We held silence while the guardian carrying the toddler out, handed over and kissed goodbye by her mother. We whispered, here we go little one, you are safe, we are taking you on a big adventure, we will keep you safe. You are so brave!

You could have heard a pin drop as we held calm so the child wouldn’t be frightened by the scene and guns outside of her blanket of protection. The care we took to buckle in the car seat correctly to ensure this precious toddler’s safter juxtaposed with the reality that masked men carrying long guns were currently planning, and then did, smash down her front door to rip her mother away, was beyond surreal and horrifying.

I will never, ever get over this moment. I will spend my life devoted to protecting other families from this horror.

As ICE agents sought any manner of way to get a warrant, we maintained a human chain around the house.

I saw us as a barrier reef encircling a precious island, a living buffer around the life inside. There was not one clear leader, yet we each fell into a unique role in the ecosystem, collaborating together organically and beautifully to stand in protection. The feeling of fear built, but people quietly shared their information with each other. We wrote numbers of who to call on arms as we readied ourselves for possible arrests.

I was amazed at the collective courage, calm, and presence people displayed in the face of so much escalation from agents. The love was palpable. Dr. King spoke of beloved community; this was surely it.

For hours and hours, we sang, as elders, college kids, clergy, and neighbors. We passed around old anti-war songs, taught new ‘singing resistance’ melodies flowing from Minneapolis, swapped local song leaders new tunes. Someone had brought a guitar, and a few of us trained in singing at actions took turns leading and organizing. We used song to communicate our message of peace and nonviolence quickly, and to keep breathing together.

Do we look frightening to you?

Local organizers who regularly run food distribution for our neighbors who live outside showed up. They popped up a food tent, and as the many hours passed on and we got hungry, we passed food around to keep ourselves fortified and calm.

Others who couldn’t remain brought us materials: hand warmers, gas masks, coats and hats, goggles.

As night began to fall, the ICE agents produced a piece of paper, which turned out to be a warrant for a person who was never in the house. State patrols nodded happily. (State troopers had come over to us earlier in the day to let us know “we are prepared to use force”—which also seems a clear violation of FIPP.) More ICE cars flowed into the road which had been shut down by police. Riot gear glad agents poured in. There were over thirty police and ICE vehicles surrounding us.

On this flimsy one page of “evidence,” they pushed through our crowd to the front door. Local and state police fell into line to protect ICE as they shoved us, including elders using walkers and clergy members, out of their path.

The barrier reef stood as long as we could. Agents threw people off the front porch so forcefully they broke the porch railings, and pushed college students to the ground, face down into trees and bushed. Agents used a long piece of wood to break the door open and entered with long guns drawn, fingers on triggers. They ransacked through the house, and we heard a shot go off inside (we learned later it was an accidental discharge as they forced themselves into cabinets and the attic crawl space—a bullet that could have killed someone.)

Then agents decided to take what they call “collateral” arrests (a term borrowed from the heinous war language we have come to accept as a normal idea in our lexicon). One of these people was a mother, separated from her two small children, one in the local elementary school and another too young for it. (Who had her hearing earlier this week, where the judge determined there was utterly zero legal grounds to steal her.)

We were angry, horrified, despairing. No one had a weapon, no one raised an arm. We had been speaking together on our practice of disciplined nonviolence.

Some of us did yell, did vocally express anger as state and local police protected ICE in their crimes, dragging young handcuffed mothers from their homes—mothers we knew personally, babies we loved. Some people chanted Nazis take orders.

Some of us remained silent. Some of us prayed out loud. Some of us vomited behind the house from the horror of watching the abductions. Bodies react to witnessing violence. Discipline around those reactions meant that no one even hit an officer, no one brought a weapon.

When ICE loaded our stolen neighbors into their cars, when local police protected them in doing so, loving neighbors moved into the street, blocking the vehicles from moving by putting their bodies in the path of the vehicles. The courage and the resilience of the community to keep moving, to keep forming a moving circle of care was truly amazing to watch. The word ‘murmuration’ comes to mind. Not one leader, but a collective body. People figuring out what to do together in real time.

It had gotten dark. ICE agents, and police beside them, began to throw protestors to the ground. They pulled off people’s goggles to spray pepper spray directly into their eyeballs. Agents threw flash bangs, deployed tear gas, and shot rubber bullets at people simply standing in the road. A very small woman was thrown to the ground and hit her head, causing a concussion. Another woman had a seizure, and an ambulance we called struggled to make its way to her. At one point, an agent literally drove an ICE car over a person who was lying down in peaceful protest the road, narrowly missing her with the wheel.

I had been helping a protestor who had been pepper sprayed when I watched her body go under the car, right as a tear gas canister was thrown by me and I lost her in the fog. It was a terrible, horrifying moment.

Since the action, I’ve read and received many sets of the question: “if only the protestors had been peaceful, wouldn’t this have gone down differently?”

I’ve replied by sharing my observations of what actually happened, as I have written above, but I want to add some additional questions or when you hear some form of this question:

- Who had the weapons, riot gear, and tools of war? Who used them and who were they used on?

- Is yelling violence? Or is physical harm violence?

- Is expressing anger acceptable? Are we asked to watch mothers get stolen with a smiles on our faces?

- This Thursday, Vermont’s congress is having a special hearing about what went down. Why are only members of the police invited to speak? Why have none of us who were there, or injured, or witness, invited?

- What do we do when agents are clearly breaking the law and others are protecting them? When judges later agree that in fact these actions and detentions were unlawful?

- Why didn’t local and state police protect civilians from the weapons that ICE was using? Why did they instead throw people taking nonviolent actions in the street to the ground?

- When before have “protestors” been maligned as “agitators”? When has it been presented as “impossibly complex”?

Answer: Literally during every other nonviolent resistance movement.

Here, for example, is a cartoon about a march that MLK Jr. had led called “I Plan To Lead Another Nonviolent March Tomorrow” that was published in many local Alabama newspapers. It painted him as the aggressor and questioned his tactics. Today, our nation celebrates Rev. Dr MLK Jr. as a leader of nonviolent actions. Yet in his day, he was harassed, maligned, beaten, arrested, and reported receiving a copy of this cartoon at home with the words: ‘You’re not fooling anyone but yourself in your nauseating talk about non-violence.”

Sounds familiar to anyone reading the comments section on local news coverage here.

It is hard to reckon with the fact that the tactics used now have always been used in our country—that even when we resist nonviolently, we are painted as unacceptable agitators. That police have never kept many in this nation safe, (see: all our neighbors of color living under police brutality for our entire history) and that safety has always been conditional to whiteness and power, and the second you trade whiteness for justice (like Renee Good), you can be killed.

Yet it is also clarifying. Because even when the institutions allegedly there to protect are revealed to be about control and power we find what has always been true: We have each other, and we are the ones who keep us safe. And we are good at it.

Love is a well far deeper than hatred. When they have guns, we have song. Where they have the fear of a ramming rod, we have the love of a mother protecting a child. They could never step to our force because even if they remove, arrest, beat or kill one of us, that love just wells up in the next person. We are unstoppable so long as we move with the pull of love, the courage that love offers. Life will insist upon it.

And we have stamina. Since Wednesday we rallied Friday in solidarity, we showed up Monday all day to hold vigil for a court hearing for Johana (the mama, who was freed!) and again Tuesday for a second (Cristian, not yet freed.) We showed up to city council meetings and will again at the statehouse Thursday. We will be at ICE again for a friend, Steven Tendo, who has been adbucted before, as he goes to a regularly scheduled ICE check in on Friday.

We will be singing, we will be loving, we will never give up. We are the barrier reef and we will stay protecting that which is holy, which is love. And I believe that love will win.

Ok, just a few more nuggets to take away:

We are an ecosystem.

As adrienne maree brown pointed out in ‘Emergent Strategy’ – what is going to work is when we move collectively and in a decentralized, organic way. There is not going to be one leader who tells everyone what to do, but rather an ecosystem of people who show up to resist, from a wide range of life experiences and abilities. This is a good thing. Our diversity makes us strong and our decentralization makes us hard to pick off.

We need to get very practiced at embracing each other’s tactics and ways. Don’t like shouting? Great! Don’t do it. But don’t fall into the trap that maligns shouting as somehow bad. (Great podcast conversation on this here with Dean Spade.) Don’t like praying? Great! Don’t do it. But support clergy in being present and bringing their clear sign of values and righteousness into the space. We did a great job loving up and celebrating each other last week.

Some of us are comfortable leading, speaking, organizing in these spaces. Others are comfortable holding a front line with their bodies. Others do legal prep work behind the scenes. Some bring food. Some film, and document. All roles are good, all are needed. You don’t have to be all the roles in the reef. We need eels and coral and fish all working together. Just be you. But do show up.

Materials matter.

For encounters like this, materials matter. Having food helps sustain. (We were there over 10 hours.) Having warm coats and hats allow people to stay longer. Saline is very helpful if pepper spray is deployed for flushing eyes. Trained medics are good, but anyone can squirt eye rinses. Bring lots of water. Hand warmers. Guitars. Whistles. If you have something to set the tone or sustain the mood, bring it. An elderly neighbor walked by and told us her address for us to use the bathroom. Later in the night when a friend was beaten and pepper sprayed, we took him to her house to bathe.

Singing helps!
I know I’m biased, but song really helps people ground and tap into collective love/ beauty/ courage. It binds us to harmony with each other, and reinforces the message we are singing. I later heard from the teenager inside that hearing us sing “No Estan Solos” while he hid inside was incredibly fortifying. We sing for each other, we sing for ourselves, and we sing to communicate to the world what we are for. (Follow Singing Resistance and get involved!)

We can’t control how others see us.

As above, movements for justice have always been painted as unacceptable in some way. We all need to get better at not wasting our energy on these attacks, but being disciplined in how we show up. People talk shit. Correct the narrative if you can, but also: move along and keep doing the work. Or as my teacher used to say, show don’t tell.

Documenting matters.

Take as many video/ photos as you can. As we saw when Alex Pretti was murdered, documenting is a tool for correcting the narrative and pulling the veil off state sanctioned violence. If you can have several people taking footage, that helps, because you don’t know where or what is going to happen.

What is legal and what is moral have never been the same.

Enslavement was legal. Concentration camps were legal. I won’t belabor the point. Eventually, you too will have to face a situation which forces you to choose: comply with the current law, or do what is right. It’s good to think now about what values you answer to.

People are so brave and loving.

I stood beside scholars and friends from my synagogue. I stood beside farmers who are on the board from the farming association where I work, with colleagues calling out of work to be present. I stood by a single mama whose elderly father was parked in a car around the corner with her newborn baby so she could be there too. People SHOW UP.

At one point, I was serving as medic for a young man who had pepper spray in his eyes. The person I was helping is a social worker who cares for babies and children all day. He was calm. I’m ok, he kept saying, bleeding and red all over his face, eyes swollen shut. Thank you for helping me. Thank you. Thank you.

As flash bangs went off and illuminated the night for moments, I saw constellated clusters of people helping each other. People who had been injured up and down the road, with others pouring their water into their eyes to clear the chemicals. The explosions would light us up for a moment, and you could see constellations of care which were then plunged back into darkness. (Thinking a lot about Rebecca Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell” right now.)

I felt us moving in the dark as one collective body, each a different cell responding to the call, showing up for our work to repair each harm done on the whole. I was aware of the all of us together, moving with care, and how as a group could keep going even when individuals were harmed. I was aware of us as a great force of love that could not be stopped, and how ultimately all violence could do was run away.

I have never been more heartbroken, nor more in love with humanity.

We will not try to heal from what we saw, from what we lived. We will move forward with love, cracked all the way open, all part of a body far larger than our own, far older than our lifetime.

We will keep singing.

I took (literal) notes the entire time.

One of my teachers, Mark Schultz, is a grassroots organizer. He trained us at NOFA-VT. Mark has also been building durable power in Minneapolis for decades. He taught me that good organizers take good notes and share them to be accountable, and to reflect and refine for next time. The people of Minneapolis are setting an epic example.

This isn’t polished, or tightly copy edited— nor is it a complete picture of all that is happening in the city that is making the resistance work so well. It’s just: my notes. Use what’s useful, leave what’s not, and keep going. Love is with you!

History of Place + Story of Who We Are

The infrastructure to build this scale of resistance didn’t happen overnight. But more importantly, the story and self-conception of Minneapolis as a people’s town didn’t happen over night.

Minneapolis was, and is, a union town. People take pride in themselves and their city as a place where people work together in larger bodies who work together on common goals. While the power of the union has waned in recent years, the story of the union is in families and is a formative narrative about who they are.

A chant I heard in the streets a lot was “No Trump, No troops, Minnesota’s not licking boots!” and I could hear the union influence.

George Floyd’s murder also galvanized the city, which helped lead the Black Lives Matter Uprising in 2020. These more recent experience helped get people thinking in terms of mutual aid, keeping each other safe, and clarified that law enforcement was not on the side of the people. I heard about a lot of people got woken up for the first time in 2020, who are now deep inside the mutual aid work.

People are keeping these stories alive by tending them. People march with their union. The George Floyd memorial is very present. And the Renee Good memorial is a whole block long, with a man tending a fire around the clock by it. A few days after she was killed, either the police or the city (trying to be accurate and didn’t capture that detail) cleared away the flowers and memorial, citing safety. The people WERE NOT HAVING IT and put up even more, and now stand guard. They have hung portraits of other people killed by ICE and police all along the street.

These wounds stay open to remind the city of the pain, and visibly keep in plain view what we must resist.

The power of “Minnesota Nice” and simple, human language

Related to importance of knowing ‘who we are’, Minnesotans are very proud of how nice they are. None of the people from the city I met were talking in ANY kind of jargon about why they were there. None told me their political party or their theory of change. They said things like:

• “This is plain wrong.” “I love my neighbors.” “My heart breaks for those kids.” “This is not who we are.” “We don’t really want to be out here in the cold, but we’re Minnesota tough.” “They picked the wrong city.”

• Reclaiming neighborliness and basic “niceness” (and wow does it have teeth)

• Using plain language and appealing to basic human concepts brings people in rather than making everyone be a perfect ally.

Violence is not always visible, or visible to everyone.

A lot of the violence bubbles up in an instant, and then is hidden again. In some neighborhoods, there is ICE presence and terror constantly. In others, ICE rarely moves through. It’s still possible to ignore or put heads in the sand if you really want to. Minneapolis has chosen to open their eyes, no matter what neighborhood they live in. Empire will always try to hide violence until it’s at your front door. Being willing to see is powerful and necessary. Many already do not have the choice. (Video and community witness has really changed ICE’s ability to control a narrative.)

Good preparation shapes how we show up.

Our organizing body (called MARCH) put out a call to national faith leaders and asked us to attend an orientation call before coming. They appealed to the moment saying “this is our Selma” and called us to be brave.

Then, they prepped us for the worst and allowed us to opt out. “Since Renee Good, ICE is, at times, pointing guns at people’s heads as a way to make protestors leave.”

[Updated just later this morning: horrifically, another observer was shot this morning. I do not yet know their name, but am holding them in the light and my heart. ICE must be abolished today.]

Organizers also told us VERY clearly our role “We are calling clergy here because we want to center peace, bring calm, and de-escalate violence. Even if you feel fear, you need to present calm to the people around you – no matter what. This is your role, and if you don’t feel up for it, no judgment and we love you, but don’t come; find a different way to support.”

• We were asked to journal why we were hearing the call to come to Minneapolis to get clear on our “why.”

• We were repeatedly offered off- ramps if we didn’t want to take the risk, and thanked profusely for even considering it.

• Clarifying both the risk and our role helped us have a team on the ground who had accepted the risk and was ready to be level headed, and made for a focused, calm contained. It also made risking arrests look like a tame(r) outcome.

• Similarly, we heard a lot about how cold it was going to be—which was really, really, really fucking cold. We all took that seriously and prepped, (I was wearing five, yes FIVE pairs of pants, six shirts/ sweaters, two pairs of socks, hand and feet warmers, hat and balaclava, two scarves, two coats, and even though it was -15 before windchill, I was warm all day.)

Decentralization!!! *This feels like the most major of the lessons!*

A decentralized network is very, very hard to squash. It’s like mushrooms, roots under the soil: it can pop back up anywhere. It doesn’t have one charismatic leader who can be easily taken out. It is a commitment, a set of practices, skills that are imminently replicable.

This looks like neighborhood signal groups walking neighbor’s children to school, delivering groceries so people don’t need to leave their houses right now. It looks like swarms of people surrounding each other when ICE is trying to enter a home. It looks like blobs of resistance singers, caroling to people stuck inside and also keeping watch out for ICE.

As people learn about each other’s struggles through basic mutual aid/ people- care efforts, it includes more (and the white people) of the neighborhood in the daily experience of immigrants and non- white people. This “radicalization” aka humanization aka relationship-building helps ensure that the whole neighborhood will not only deliver groceries, but will TURN OUT to big actions when they are called.

Watch some “de-arrest” videos where neighbors manage to help others get free of ICE arrest. There is not one person tugging back and forth but many people grouped together. This provides safety and cover all around.

We are many. So many. (As my taxi driver, an immigrant who has lived in Minneapolis for 25 years said, “Yes, it’s hard—I’ve never thought it could be like this—but of course we will win! No one agrees with this! Look at all the people!”

People are recognizing that togetherness, collective power, and the safety of relative anonymity means we have the superpower to flock as a group and adapt together moment by moment.

Move towards yes, build on each other’s ideas!

There was not one central leader for whom to ask for permission to do a General Strike (the nation’s first in 80 years!), but rather a snowball of an idea that got started and groups said YES, and added to it.

There were SO MANY organizations involved in or planning their own offering for the Friday walk out/ General Strike. I found one to align with that made sense for me as a clergy person and took their direction, but there was not one strategy nor one clear “head” but rather many orgs shaping different actions in harmony across the day.

Even inside of the one organization with which I attended, leadership was highly decentralized. There were many groups presenting at the first day of orientation. There was a core organizing team beyond the visible leaders coordinating all logistics. On signal, (which is where we should all be communicating if we aren’t yet) we were sorted into a cascading variety of groups.

• First ~700 clergy of us were on one signal thread for announcements only.

• Then we were in smaller affinity group by faith (mine was about 50 people deep) we could message with questions.

• Finally we were in text groups called “safety pods” with whom we were to take accountability, make sure we accompanied each other, checked in after actions and leave no one behind in the event of detainment.

  • We took that responsibility seriously! My pod would regularly check on each other throughout the days, and even if we weren’t physically together, we would know where the others were and that they were safe.

One of the major weaknesses of our opposition is they are sycophantic and rely on leaders to tell them how to fall in line. Our strength is that we are rooted in deep values and don’t have to look to one person to tell us what to do. Values can’t be killed.

And, there are real challenges of decentralization (i.e., muscles that we all need to be building now through practice with decentralized organizing in our communities.)

We as a country have been schooled to look up to authorities, to follow directions, and to wait until we are told what to do next. Even people who showed up to be part of the action seemed VERY anxious about having all the information, all the time. What time to show up, what code was the action, who should go in what group, what to do if they didn’t want to do x or y or z.

Decentralization and leaderfulness (a term for when MANY people taking on leadership roles) means that (while we do need to respect the orgs who have been building power and strategy for a long time!) we must:

1) Accept our own agency. Ultimately, and sorry, yikes, it’s all our call, and what we do is UP TO US;

2) We have to get comfortable with, or at least able to tolerate, the fact that there is a LOT of grey zone right now. Exactly how much risk you are taking on is not clear right now, no matter what action you are doing (including even simple things like writing these notes up!)

Risk is often where the impact is. If it feels risky, it might matter. AND AT THE SAME TIME— It’s the durable and relational organizing that is all in place in Minneapolis that makes it all possible, so cooking for your neighbors is A GREAT way to start if you feel low risk that is also HIGH reward down the line.

3) Shit happens. Allow for emergence and changing plans. Situations shift. Be ready to pivot. Remain calm. Forgive organizers when conditions beyond control shift. This is not a pre-scripted play whose lines we’re all following. We’re in a dance with the rest of the world and guess what else? We are MAKING IT UP AS WE GO.

Sometimes, sharing last minute plans, or not knowing the plan is actually safest.

In one example of last minute = better, we only learned the location for the Target HQ action one hour beforehand. With this notice, we were expected to get ourselves there from wherever we were in the city. This limited the chance for the action to be leaked and for it to work as a surprise. It also meant that lots of folks felt anxious waiting around for info.

There were options offered for many different actions with different roles and risks. All were important.

Organizers steadily reminded us as they presented ideas for ways to participate in the day of action that one type of action was not “better” than another.

Some of these actions included:

• Clergy going to the airport to disrupt business as usual (we were told that ICE deports people in the scale of 3 (!) chartered flights from the airport). There were both higher risk of arrest roles and witness roles. Because the airport is considered federal jurisdiction, we were advised that legal teams could only support so many of us if we got arrested, and to prioritize local folks risking that and have the rest of us in other roles.

  • · Having folks willing to risk arrest is powerful. Often high risk means high visibility and news coverage. It also is not even close to the only way. (Also, ICE is arresting people who aren’t breaking laws, so it’s a little hard to gauge arrest risk right now.)

• ICE patrol on the ground. (This looks like: regular ass people walking up and down the street in front of diverse schools, businesses, and neighborhoods.)

• One group went to do song presence and witness outside of a detention facility.

  · While they were there, a group of anarchists used metal plates to block the entrance and got into more of a direct conflict with agents. Both are strategies! Resistance is an ecosystem and we can celebrate diversity!

• Visiting churches mutual aid efforts to see their operations and connect with parishioners who are keeping each other fed.

  • A note: there was an ICE abduction that happened to take place right outside the church that a group of our people had gone to for “low risk” learning. It was scary and awful and we never know what is going to happen where.

• Song leadership training.

  

• Sing- in at Target headquarters (based in Minneapolis). We did a surprise clergy action where we held the space by singing and also raised our demands to the corporation to stop cooperation with ICE. They tried to get us to leave, we resisted. We had calm de- escalators. We need to target not just government but all the businesses that cooperate with ICE. We need to force side- taking of corporations.

• Digital storytelling as component of the action:

Whatever way you feel about it, the internet is a powerful place to spread ideas. (It’s also a place of mass surveillance). Be sure to tell compelling stories that focus on what we want to grow. Document + share (and be sure to check with anyone who you feature about posting at an action.) This is not a digital security piece, but you should read up and lock down your info as much as possible. Turn off location sharing, etc.

Key lesson: *We had to take responsibility for ourselves and figure out what made sense for us! There was not one leader to check the clip board!*

Again, there is not one perfect way – we need to, and have power to, throw grist in every gear of this machine. We can stop trying to plan THE perfect action and commit to supporting each other with doing MANY types of work. Whatever strategy you commit to, having the numbers to back you up AND CLEAR DEMANDS that you raise as part of the action felt critical.

Song!!!

There was so! Much! Singing! In! Minneapolis! There are a lot of choirs (St. Olaf’s choir, church culture, etc.) in the greater Minnesota area, and people like to sing. People kept saying “we’re good at harmony” and would break into many stacked chords quickly. ( Sarina Partridge is one of many inspiring song leaders doing a lot of resistance singing who I got to learn a bit with this weekend.)

A friend of a friend learned I was also a resistance singer back home, and added me to a signal thread for “song leaders for resistance.” There were 1000 people on my thread, called “Group 2”. I have since learned that there are so far 3 such threads of ~1,000 people each (signal groups max at 1k apparently) and that people keep signing up.

Decentralizing logistics again: these huge threads are for announcements only of where to come for a singing action or to a training.

Next, singing resistance leaders plan to help people break themselves into small, geographically based or friendship-group based pods so they can sing resistance in all their neighborhoods.

Small is resilient. We need a million pretty good song leaders, just like action planners, not one great song leader.

We heard from people who were staying in place in their houses getting sung to in solidarity, and their experiences of having song help them feel less alone.

Learning more short, easy to teach songs is helpful for keeping you warm when it’s cold out!

”We cannot let this terror campaign make us into what they are. We cannot become filled with hate. Song quickly communicates beauty, harmony, presence and love. We have to do as much good as they are doing evil. Song keeps us in the heart place from which we want to be moving.” - notes from the group during my song training

Faith + Spirit have a role in movement.

Faith based organizing is alive + powerful in Minneapolis. People of faith and conscience have a role to play in these movements because, to use Hebrew National’s slogan: “We answer to a higher authority!” (I’m jk… but I’m also deadly fr.)

Once again, faith leaders being involved helps remind us that laws are not moral — laws are reflections of power. Clergy help separate these ideas out and remind people that sometimes you have to not comply when what is deemed “legal” is horrific.

To name that the power of a loving, unstoppable and unending force (God!) is on the side of what is “illegal” more than balances the scales. It invites regular people to do civil disobedience to be in right relationship to justice. (And, FWIW, I don’t think most of what ICE is doing even complies with what this administration claims is legal, not that it’s particularly important anymore.)

• Kneeling, praying clergy with hands up get arrested is a powerful image that has helped move change historically. It’s working today too.

• When I attended the ritual of Friday night shabbat services at Shir Tivkah, the dvar was the best I have ever heard in my life. Rooted in Torah, connected to the parsha, speaking directly on ICE and police abolition, and a loving world where we all are collectively thriving. There was beautiful deep text reading about moving collectively like locusts to stand up to empire like Pharoah. There was song. I wept. There were children and elders. It was exactly needed and so connective. We all need ritual rejuvenation. I hope you can get in a space like this shul soon.

The rally at the stadium had 10K people after the massive march of 50K people, and it opened with multiple voices of Native leadership. I want to underscore this. A number of Indigenous leaders sang and spoke before anyone else, in the language of this place, waking us all in the crowd up to a longer story than that of the US empire. They helped remind us that there are many other stories available to us and when this narrative has come to its end, we can get inside of a bigger, more beautiful story.

Next, we heard from a Baptist preacher who brought fire and cadence and love, from a rabbi and an Imam who both spoke beautiful, clear words about the moment, what is possible when we come together. One asked, “when we are no longer using all this energy to fight this evil machine, imagine what we can build together! What are we growing now under the crust of empire?” a beautiful question to ponder.

Interfaith action is unstoppable. When we move together with the ultimate deep well of power (g-d, holiness, universe, life, spirit, whatever you want to call it) 1+1 is so much more than even 3— it’s infinite.

Using very “American”/ normative – coded spaces to do “radical” work is impactful.

The end of the march culminated in a rally inside a massive stadium. On the jumbotron we saw “ICE OUT”. I can’t remember the last time I was in a stadium, but it felt so deeply OF THE PEOPLE of the place to gather in this space.

• Of note: the city owns the downtown stadium. I was trying to figure out who paid for the rental, and it seems like the city allowed the gathering to happen for free. (I could be wrong! LMK if this is off, but it’s what the people around me from Minneapolis told me at the rally.) Public spaces for public purposes! If we hadn’t been allowed to be inside there, seems impossible we would have been able to remain gathered at all, given the temps.

• More on the power of having a space: the location of the song leader training was at a new urban folk school called Center for People and Craft (!), and was made possible because the city had a “vibrant storefronts” program. This program allowed people with ideas to pitch them to the city. If they won, they got $50K a year for 2 years (aka free rent for 2 years) to be able to do their project. This folk school hosted our training for free ninety nine re: song leading. (Generosity breeds generosity!!)

**If you have a space, making it available to community groups for free is a way of building power and bringing people in equitably**

All cities should have this vibrant storefronts program!!!

Non-cooperation from local leaders matters SO MUCH.

The city supported the rally to happen in a public space. The mayor and the governor are not cooperating with ICE. School boards are organizing quickly and pivoting when need be (i.e., moving classes to remote learning when they feared ICE raids this week).

Excellent music/ vibes / art create a texture of values and possibility that shape how we all feel.

Those of us at the front of the march arrived an hour or two (!) before the back of the march got done marching, there were so many people. We had to wait a long time in line to get in. First, there was a marching band playing while we waited, and people were dancing and happy.

When we got into the rally, there was an incredible DJ spinning EPIC tracks. The vibes were so on point and people were chatting with the folks around them, taking pictures together and sharing their “why are you here” with each other. Turned what could have been a drag (waiting around) into the best part (community building).

There was art all over the city depicting our asks and our vision in a million different, beautiful ways.

None of us does anything on our own. I was so supported in attending this action.

After getting the call to come, I needed help to do it. I reached out to my community and I made concrete asks for support. Sometimes I feel sheepish doing that, but it also provides a way for people who can’t be on the front lines with a way to help. They don’t have to say yes.

But people are SO GENEROUS and showed up for me. I carried a feeling of, I am doing this with the support of my community and on behalf of our whole community since we can’t all just hop on a plane:

Friends and comrades shared money for flights or hotels/ food/ etc. Any money that was extra to what the clergy delegation needed to get to and from Minneapolis will then go to mutual aid. I was bowled over by the scale and scope of gifts— just truly so generous. Old friends, old mentors supported me, and the larger mutual aid net, in ways that surprised and moved me to tears.

Kiddo support-- a neighbor watching kids so I could be at a prep meeting when my partner had to work; a teacher staying late with our preschooler because he couldn’t be in two places at once.

Ritual support: friends gave me courage tincture, lucky stones for my pockets, a mala bead necklace, a clove of garlic (because we are witchy baba yagaas over here) , prayers and chants, chocolate chocolate and more chocolate, a pair of yak traks for my boots.

My partner went out and bought be a zillion hand-warmers and the best gas mask for tear gas prep, stayed home with the kids, did a million seen and unseen acts of support. He spoke with me extensively when I felt scared, encouraged me to heed the call even though it scared him too, and checked in on me when I was out on actions. <3 you boo.

Some sentences I heard repeatedly:

- This is no ones job, and we are working 24/7, and it’s fucking beautiful what we’re doing.

- We will not become what they are.

- We have love on our side.

- We will not stop.

- We are doing what we can.

- We are showing up for our neighbors.

- I am doing my small piece.

- I am not afraid.

- I am afraid, but I am doing it anyway.

- God is with us.

- Thank you.

And finally, a song recording from a Singing Resistance training, song by Peace Poets, taught by one of the badass song leaders inside the folk school. We were all singing this together for the first time, and we quickly found our harmony.

And a prayer & reminder: we are ready. We have the tools we need for whatever will come.

The birthday of the world

By Marge Piercy

On the birthday of the world

I begin to contemplate

what I have done and left

undone, but this year

not so much rebuilding

of my perennially damaged

psyche, shoring up eroding

friendships, digging out

stumps of old resentments

that refuse to rot on their own.

No, this year I want to call

myself to task for what

I have done and not done

for peace. How much have

I dared in opposition?

How much have I put

on the line for freedom?

For mine and others?

As these freedoms are pared,

sliced and diced, where

have I spoken out? Who

have I tried to move? In

this holy season, I stand

self-convicted of sloth

in a time when lies choke

the mind and rhetoric

bends reason to slithering

choking pythons. Here

I stand before the gates

opening, the fire dazzling

my eyes, and as I approach

what judges me, I judge

myself. Give me weapons

of minute destruction. Let

my words turn into sparks.

Initiation Song from the Finders’ Lodge by Ursula K. LeGuin

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

The Layers By Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

Morning Poem By Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches–
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead–
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging–

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted–

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

Field Guide by Tony Hoagland

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious element of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That’s all.

I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

God’s Grandeur

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

How can we sum up a year like this? We have been changed. We have all of us been changed.

Is change the potter, and we the clay? We the potter, the year ahead the clay?

Like you, I am tired. Like you, I am committed. Like you, I will keep planting seeds. Like you, I don’t have the full story. Like you, I wish I did.

Standing at this threshold, I am preparing to enter a new year without my teacher James Stark, who died unexpectedly this July.

James had plane tickets to Vermont for the week after he had an aneurism and never woke up. We had a plan to celebrate his 80^th birthday here, but I instead sat by his bedside in the hospital, singing to him the Rumi line ‘Come whoever you are/ this is not a house of despair” over the incessant beeping of the heart monitor. We had schemed up a direct action for some nighttime fun, to go out and guerrilla plant fruit trees and other food crops across a golf course in the helpful cover of dark. (Feel free to steal the idea in his honor.)

The last text James sent me was one word: “Soon.”

I was recently listening to a conversation between Francis Weller (author of ‘The Wild Edge of Sorrow’, among others) with Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown on their podcast “How to Survive the End of the World.” Francis was a friend and teacher of James, a longtime collaborator, and I was unmoored by how much the cadence of Francis’s voice reminded me of James—same dry joke delivery, hearty laugh, heart pulsing with shared questions, laments, possibilities. Are we all just a collage of our beloveds?

Weller spoke about what he calls “the long dark” -- the time of loss, grief, and rupture which we inhabit now. Weller predicts this time of deconstruction will last multiple generations, and says grief is a primary skill of what we’ll need to get good at. He offers too that deconstruction can be beautiful, loving, rich, meaningful.

Weller offered up a possible mantra for 2026:

“Darkness is the territory of gestation and imagination.”

Darkness, like the rich black of the soil, in which roots entwine, network, share. The darkness within the hidden inside of a beehive, unctuous and rich with the smell of summer long into wintertime. Yes. What is gestating in that dark?

Weller offered a second line, about maturing, and embracing the role of elder, within this context of the fertile dark.

“That’s what an adult human does; they know when to show up.”

James certainly was an adult human. I met James fifteen years ago. I lived and worked at Woolman, a tiny Quaker School/ farm/ intentional community in Northern California where I managed the farm and taught a class called “Peace Studies”. John Woolman was born in 1720 and refused to participate in or accept enslavement. His lifetime of work helped create the abolitionist movement.

Working under the name Woolman was a constant reminder that “legal” has never meant “moral.” Laws are simply reflections of who was in power when they were written, and who has the power to enforce them now. I.C.E. adds another bead to the string of immoral, inhumane, and unjust laws backed by government guns over time: the internment of Japanese Americans; Jim Crow laws; ‘Manifest Destiny’ policy and the genocide and land theft it relied upon; enslavement; for-profit prisons. I’ll stop, in the interest of space.

At Woolman, we used to bring our students to the center James founded and ran with his partner Penny, the Regenerative Design Institute in Bolinas, CA. RDI was (and is) a place where people came to learn, build community, live with the land, and remember new/ old / non- conforming ways of being. There, we would work alongside true elders, people who, like John Woolman, could discern between what is culturally accepted and what is right on the long clock of the world.

I remember one day we arrived early, busting into James having tea time with Starhawk (powerful witch/ author of the seminal imaginative futures book ‘Fifth Sacred Thing’ – read it if you haven’t!), and Kalani (an indigenous elder, and good-trouble maker from Hawaii—read up for inspiration on his subversive, playful, and super effective activism against Monsanto’s “ownership” claims on seeds).

Starhawk, Kalani and James turned to our gaggle of teens, immediately shifting to swap into our scattered, rambunctious puppy energy from the sacred tea ceremony. They each treated the students seriously, engaging their concerns and sharing reflections from decades of activism. Their precious time with old friends they gave without hesitation.

We happened to be there once during the Deep-Water Horizon oil spill, as millions of barrels of oil poured into the Pacific Ocean. One of our students, a 15-year-old with spiked green hair asked James, “Honestly, we seem pretty fucked. How do you seem so… happy? Everything looks pretty terrible to me.”

James took a pause and smiled gravely at her, offering a deep nod of solidarity. “So true. I feel bleak at times too. But over these years I’ve figured out what can help, at least for me. It sounds odd, but to be hopeful: make a lot of room for grief. Every morning, I wake up and I scramble down these cliffs to sit at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. I go to the shore and sit where the water comes up on the rocks. I love it there, at the in between place. I cry a lot. I think about the oil spilling, the birds and the fish covered in it. I really stay with it. Most days it takes an hour, this crying. At some point I start to feel lighter, emptied out. That’s when I know to scramble back up these cliffs. And by the time I get back up here to the garden at RDI, and I feel… ready.”

A decade later, I found myself leading an organization when climate disaster hit our community in the form of a record flood in the middle of the growing season. People lost their homes; their farms; their livelihood; all their belongings. Someone died.

The grief in the community was intense and boulder- heavy, and I was in the thick of it, trying to resource folks, support response networks, do advocacy, raise funding, and also provide comfort to our team, who spent all day dealing with devastation. I was unmoored by the intensity of the crisis, and my own individual smallness.

After a few weeks of not sleeping, frantically (egotistically) trying to effort harder, my partner Jacob approached me gently. He said, “Look. I don’t think this is working. I really think you need a mentor.”

I was comforted by Jacob’s naming the ludicrousness of the idea that I could reverse the climate crisis alone. In the morning, I woke up with the memory of James Stark’s story about the Pacific Ocean.

It had been at least a decade since I had seen James. But I knew I needed his help.

I sent a cold email, explaining who I was, and awkwardly, nervously asked for a gift: would he offer me an hour of time to talk through my situation and give me ideas for how to make it through?

James wrote me back almost immediately. He was present, immediately available to me, a loose acquaintance from a decade back: “Of course. Happy to talk with you once-- but why only that? How about we meet every week on Friday afternoon? You can grieve, process and plan for the next week. I’ll be here for you, so you can keep showing up for your community.”

Emily Saliers and Amy Ray have a line in their song ‘Prince of Darkness’:

There was a time I asked my father for a dollar/ and he gave me a ten dollar raise/ And when I needed my mother and I called her/ she stayed with me for days.

That’s what an adult human being does; they know when to show up.

Our Friday phone calls ended up lasting for years. Through this ritual, James and I became family. He brought me into a circle of his friends, many of them older activists. Last year we all went on retreat together for the first time. They wove me into their circle with care, extending a generous offer to weave into a lineage of those who believe in possibility. This coming weekend, I will return to the group’s yearly retreat spot, our first time together without James.

James was a man who cried and grieved, yes, his grief flowing from how much he loved life. He would send me a picture of a tiny, perfect flower he had spied on a morning walk with a caption like “Hot damn, the earth outdid herself today!” Almost 80, he was often falling in love; taking an epic trip; sleeping in a treehouse; dreaming up a party; planning to get arrested.

This is the paradox of all the best activists: while their work holds a cornucopia of loss, and looks squarely at injustice, unfairness, pain—they often exude playfulness, abundance, joy, and love. James fought for the world because he loved it, he believed that another way was possible.

Darkness is the territory of gestation and imagination.

As we approach a new year, I’m working on embracing the fertile dark, the unseen life pulsing in the underground. The darkness of the inside of a beehive, sweet and rich, summer’s sun bottled. The darkness of the forest floor, networks of mushrooms sharing resources and messages beyond our imaginations, unseen by us in the light.

As Wendell Berry would say: “To go in the dark with the light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark, go without sight. And find that the dark too moves and sings. And travels by dark feet, and dark wings.“

And so, I leave you in the fertile darkness of midnight, between one year and the next, with a poem by Maria Howe. ‘To more life and less worry’ for everyone, in 2026.

My Dead Friends by Maria Howe

I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,

to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes were —
it’s green in there, a green vase,

and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy’s already gone through the frightening door,

whatever he says I’ll do.

At the same time— I appreciate the work that organizers did to turn people out, to build more of our collective muscle for coming out into the streets and helping to escalate our calls of descent. We are finding each other, we are getting more and more comfortable doing mass mobilizations, which will be necessary for next steps. Ash-Lee Woodard Hamilton, former director of the Highlander Center and badass movement leader wrote yesterday,

“How extremely out of touch and underdeveloped we must be to spend more time disconnected from No Kings, and the folks from our communities that made it possible, making fun of the very people we’d usually complain aren’t doing anything, and giving uninformed hot-takes, instead of organizing to be the next step or more radical action you swear is nonexistent.

We can yearn for more, and know more is needed, without spending our efforts critiquing each other.

The way to devote that energy of critique is: to try something.

Many of us are used to talking a lot. May we think if we discuss and read and critique enough, we will figure The Perfect Strategy out.

Now, there is certainly much to be learned by studying history and listening to the voices of those who have been in movement space for a long time. It’s wise to get informed about what has been tried. I am steeping myself in histories of resistance from around the globe, and in the voices of leaders I trust every day.

At the same time, all this reading and listening and talking keeps affirming that there is not one overarching strategy that will solve the tangled mess we’re in. Instead, it’s going to have to be all of us trying a million different ideas, strategies, experiments. We must start thinking like an ecosystem: assessing where we each can pop up depending on where we live, our role, our skills, our communities— seizing open niches and growing in them as they become apparent. Simply moving when there is possibility.

I was recently discussing an idea around conflict resolution in intimate relationships with a friend. I was getting pretty theory- heavy, when he replied: “Honestly, it seems like this is the kind of thing that we can talk a lot about— but really this is something we’re going to learn through trying it, not by talking about it.”

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about theory— let’s say, what a gift economy might look like, for example— but until we put ourselves into a position where we are actually dependent on our neighbors, alternately asking for help and bestowing them with gifts, and feel that heft of weight and responsibility, it’s really, really hard to understand it. (Side note, follow for more about that lived practice!)

The same goes for our strategies to confront fascism and keep each other safe. Don’t just keep thinking and talking about it. Pick a strategy and get inside of it! If you’ve been a person who talks about community building with your neighbors, perhaps you want to text them right now, right this minute, and say ‘I wanna have a conversation this weekend about what would make us safe in our neighborhood, can you and your crew come over on Sunday?’ (Side note: I’m working on a list of questions for sharing soon that you could bring to that dinner to help seed that conversation.)

Rob Hopkins, one of the founders of the Transition Town Movement wrote a book called “The Power of Just Doing Stuff” about how in the face of overwhelm and nihilism we find meaning and possibility by doing— and get filled up by it along the way.

Rumi wrote that “you take one step towards G-d, G-d takes ten steps towards you.” Robin Wall Kimmerer explains a similar phenomenon with healing our ecosystems: we take small steps toward repair, and the earth rushes to heal and provide abundance back to us.

We need to embrace the same ideas with our movement strategy. When we move from conversation into action, we show to our communities and ourselves: I am a person who is willing to put myself out there, to be critiqued, to possibly fail— I’m willing to try on all of our behalf, as it allows space for more people to try, and because our lives depend on us all trying.

The poet Billy Collins said that every person has two hundred bad poems in them— most people just don’t keep writing enough to get the two hundred poems out and find the good stuff. Let’s apply this to our work for change.

Certainly there are and will be crappy strategies, but we will never get through the crap and figure out what works if we’re scared to go for it and begin. No perfect method is coming. No one of us knows the way from here.

So, consider this my permission/ urging/ prayer for us all today: let’s do one experiment— right now! Let it be imperfect! Talk to your friends about it before it’s all fleshed out! Get their input! Get that bar lower! Try again after the first time!

The more we try, the more generous we will be with others as they try. And the more we all try a wide range of ideas, the more we will learn where we do get traction.

LFG!

—-

Also, I’m experimenting with whether y’all would like it if I share just a couple articles from the week I’m reading or appreciating:

• 10 Organizing Principles for Defeating Trumpism 2.0. by Arun Gupta

• It’s Time For Americans to Start Talking about ‘Soft Secession’ by Chris Armitage

There is a phrase contained in the holiday’s liturgy: hayom harat olam— which most accurately means “today the world is conceived.” Embedded in these brief, potent words is the idea that the notion that (re)creation is ongoing, and we are a part of it.

The idea of a world birthday at times feel glib, a date by which we pass on a calendar to say “Thanks for the big bang! Now we out here!” What if instead, we are transported to the origin moment: “today the world is conceived”, not “today the world was conceived.”

To be drawn back to the moment of “conception” hints at the (transgressive/ radical/ accurate?) idea that it is only via a partnership between humans and the Big Mystery that the world gets animated. On Rosh Hashanah, we are asked to accept the weight and gift of our key role as collaborators and conspirators, conceiving the world in partnership with the divine to determine what we will make of this place. We are very much responsible for all that is ongoing. We have agency, and we should make something of it.

Toni Morrison says: “I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”

I wonder if that is what Gd asks us as humans, as co-creators: “When you get these [lives] that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”

One of my teachers, Elana June, says that “endings birth beginnings.” A lot is dying, crumbling. But in its death, what might we birth?

I often quote Joanna Macy, of blessed memory, who said that we are in the time of serving as midwives, hospicing dying systems while helping with the birth of new ones.

I want to talk about her for a just a moment more, because she passed away this summer and leaves a rippling legacy that we can all be a part of carrying forward. Joanna had a way of taking horrific violence and rupture, and transforming it into beauty and wisdom through imagination.

In one potent example (of the many I could pluck out from her nearly hundred years of loving visionary struggle), she was concerned with nuclear waste management. Nuclear waste is, as you likely know, incredibly dangerous and wildly long lived. Currently, like most problems we would rather not address, it is dealt with by being hidden “away” – buried into the earth, where it regularly leaks into the ground, poisons water, soil, and the whole ecosystem and human community around it.

But Joanna dreamt of another way.

In 1991, she offered a vision of the problem, and a possible solution called the Nuclear Guardianship Project, a combination of practical and spiritual solution. From an article on the idea:

“The concept of guardianship is an extension of mindfulness. It deftly and dramatically reverses our habitual approach to a problem by making it clear that we mustn’t bury what we don’t like, out of sight and out of mind […] But we can take care of it, if we just keep it where we can see it, and continue to look at it.”

In describing its goals, the Nuclear Guardianship Project stated:

To curtail rampant radioactive contamination, the project calls for a halt to the production and transportation of nuclear wastes, and for citizen involvement in the responsible care of the wastes produced to date. It promotes the guardianship of the wastes at their points of generation in monitored, retrievable storage facilities. [My addition: which she expanded elsewhere were to be made beautiful, like shrines!] And it develops educational programs which include spiritual practice to begin the training in technical knowledge and moral vigilance required to establish and maintain these guardian sites.”

Spiritual imagination can turn destructive waste into a temple of sacred practice, the barrels a cairn, marking the way we didn’t go.

We live in a sea of toxicity, in systems that spread violence, dehumanization and ecological degradation. Here in the US, with racism, fear, nationalism, greed, and hatred so often in the drivers seat— evidenced yesterday by this recent leak of Young Republicans message thread— we must think like our beloved ancestor Joanna. What temple can we build out of all this waste?

As we look especially to the genocide in Gaza, which on Rosh Hashanah raged on— and now stands in a new moment of fragile “ceasefire”, Palestinian families are surrounded by rubble, with profound, multi- generational traumas, family devastation, horror, loss, hunger, pain. The rest of our lives must be devoted to not looking away. As Joanna said, “We [will] take care of it, if we just keep it where we can see it, and continue to look at it.”

We can root down into our own liturgical wisdom, far older than any nation state: hayom harat olam, today the world is conceived. Every day the world is re-conceived. If we look at the reality of the wreckage we have been a part of, we have the opportunity to make new choices about what we create.

Can we be bold and brave enough to commit to repair work, to dream a world in which repair work is taken seriously as holy practice? Can we dream beautiful, multi-generational solutions (led with and by the people most directly affected) to the problems we face together: the violence of nationalism, of racism, of genocide, of state violence? Of poverty, or hunger?

Can we make our lifetimes devoted to building an altar, a cairn made of barrels of waste? Will we do the slow, arduous, holy work of repair?

Watching our community gather to practice Jewish ritual outside of nationalism, deeply rooted in a commitment to justice and liberation for all, makes me hopeful. Watching our community’s campaign for Gaza Soup Kitchen exceed our $180,000 goal over the high holy days (currently at $245K— and climbing!) reminded that when we combine spiritual practice and the work of tzedakah, pursuing justice, we are unstoppable.

The future is unknown, but we get to conceive it together.

Since I’ve last written, we hosted Butterfest, a yearly gathering that a small core of beloveds throw ‘celebrating of the fat of the land and the richness of being together’. What started as a joke has grown into an important ritual that restores and connects our community to each other and to our values. (Do all the best projects escalate this way, from joke to meaning? Certainly in my life!) This year we welcomed two hundred seventy five people to sing in the river; churn locally milked cream into butter and ice cream; dance in a barn; make art together; harmonize in a song circle; be read to at a drag queen story hour; raise funds for mutual aid; and gild the lily with as much good-spirited party as we can.

Since I last wrote I leapt from high rocks into cold rivers; hosted visitors for weeks on our couches; filled my house with the holy smells of high summer-- tomatoes boiling for sauce, basil crushed into pesto. I’ve sat in our living room on hot nights with cold iced drinks sweating and old friends; learned complicated harmonies passed along from song teachers brought from afar, tapping out rhythms on knees. I’ve rolled primer across the walls of a house one of my oldest friends just bought on my street, my heart swelling knowing how her proximity will change my life. I’ve had the joy of officiating four queer, witchy, juicy & interfaith weddings and have two more before the summer ends. And on and on: the summer is certainly fat with the good shit.

And, since I last wrote, I’ve been with the horror. I have continued to witness thousands of children die under bombs for which my tax dollars paid. I’ve stood on the side of the road with my kids, banging empty pots in solidarity with kids starving in Gaza. I’ve continued to organize in person, to plan direct actions, give money, to try to shape change in a positive way by attending power building meetings. May times I just need to be in grief and loss with the gutting heart break of not being able to stop a genocide even as I can watch it unfold.

Since I last wrote, the organization where I serve as executive director has sued the administration over their illegal remaking of the federal government, serving as the voice from the agriculture community to resist the destruction of systems on which so many people rely. We just joined a second lawsuit, supporting the state of Vermont in our fight to defend a first-of-its kind Climate Superfund Law the state passed to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the cost of climate devastation they have caused.

We’ve turned down federal funding after being told to cut out the parts of our projects that were deemed somehow unallowable in their care for people or the planet. We have been making pivots, keeping our focus and values centered.

Since I last wrote, ICE has stolen my friends and neighbors and continues splitting families and terrorizing so many beloveds. We have organized, rallied, marched, and had some important wins in getting people out of detention.

Since I last wrote, the violent chaos domestically reached my mom, who lives in Atlanta, where she was on the block of the scene of last week’s attack on the CDC, in which a rampaging gunman shot up (and killed) folks at the building. She was texting me as she snuck out of the area.

And: since I last wrote, my beloved teacher and chosen father figure, James Stark, had a brain aneurysm, in the middle of an organizing meeting. His sister called me, and I made it out to California to sit by his bedside and sing as he transitioned, weaving a container of song with others who love him for his journey onward. James died at home in his tiny perfect cob house as the flowers bloomed outside as two hundred people held a sacred fire for him on the land. I want to write about James, about his radical generosity, his ebullient love of life, his raucous joy an embodiment that life can be an ecstatic dance even in struggle and grief. But I’m not quite ready. I’m still praying mourners kaddish for him, raw and heartbroken.

The Baal Shem Tov said that the heartbroken are those closest to G-d. I guess that means we all have a lot of access right now.

It’s truly too much to put a neat bow on, to sum up. It is more a time of presence, a time that calls us to be paying enough attention to be with what is real, and to show up as we are needed without fanfare.

It’s a time we do not know the full story yet, do not know how to make it tidy. What we do not know yet offers mystery, and where there is mystery there is sacred, and where there is sacred, there is healing. We can embrace our own ignorance, our own not-knowing, to navigate these times. In times when all systems are being rapidly destroyed, I want to practice being a beginner, curious, unsure, questioning, imagining. If we do not know how this story goes, we can shape it.

This week friends gathered into my messy house on a Monday night. We all brought random food and our Monday exhaustion, but after some time eating and talking, we shifted into song, offering each other this medicine, balm, reprieve, restoration. (I’ve written before about how community singing is training ground for movement organizing.)

As we washed the dishes late in the dark evening when the children were finally tucked in their beds, my friend Aylie mentioned that she had a story she thought I might need. Aylie is a trained story teller who also spent seven years studying wayfaring, sailing in the open ocean charting only by the stars. She is a person who knows how to look for the path, knows that a story is how we might remember it. I listen when she gives me a story.

The story she told me was about John Lewis. Lewis is the long time civil rights leader who marched (and was gravely beaten by police) in Selma. He’s also the elected official I grew up under, and the friendly man who owned season tickets to the Atlanta WNBA team The Dream right next to my mom’s girlfriend. He attended religiously— long before women’s sports were celebrated. He is a titan.

When Lewis was a small child, his family had been struggling for years to secure land. They finally were able to scrape together the funds and secured a parcel with good agricultural soils with a tiny cabin on it.

He was visiting his aunt along with his cousins to enjoy this hard-won home when a huge windstorm came through. There were about ten or fifteen little kids his aunt was caring for that day when wind gusted up, and the little rickety house started to peel up on one edge from the ground.

His aunt stayed calm. She led the children towards the side of the house that was lifting off. Together, they used their weight to keep the house down, tiny individual bodies adding up to a collective heft that could hold even against such a force. They would stand as long as it blew, keeping the corner rooted before another corner would begin to pull up, and then they would all move there, responding as one where the storm required.

Lewis, through Aylie, offered that some moments in organizing are just like that. Maybe not a massive, perfect strategy quite yet. Maybe just collective presence and response: noticing what is happening, acting together, doing it as long as it takes. That’s how it feels right now, watching the house peel up, hearing the wind blow. Are we willing to move together where we are all needed? Are we committed to doing it as long as it takes?

I want to offer all of us the permission to be quiet, steady, unseen. To simply be in it. To take the time we need to do what is necessary. A sprouting seed is also unseen, pushing a green shoot out into the dark soil, finding the way. As the surveillance state increases, being unseen is increasingly prudent. Just keep going. Keep offering presence and collective action. When you see a corner pulling up, move with the people around you who will not debate, will not equivocate, will simply act to keep the house down.

When I graduated high school, my mother handed me some lines from Rumi in her looping hand writing on a rolled up piece of paper:

You are a song, a wished-for song. Go through the ear to the center, where the sky is, where wind, where silent knowing. Put seeds and cover them. Blades will sprout where you do your work.

We can all hear the wind. It’s time to do our work.

It’s hard to know how to describe what it is to lose a brother, where to start. Spencer made me who I am: shaped me, protected me, dreamt with me, made me laugh harder than anyone has since. He’s now been gone a year longer than he was alive, a terrible fact. I’ve written about the ache for him before. Likely, most of us already know, or eventually will know, this most human experience of grief.

Maybe the yearning for someone long dead is like coming back to visit your childhood home, only to find that the house is gone and the field surrounding it developed. You can make out some faint contours of familiar hills, but it’s hard to get oriented. You squint to remember where the yard was, the porch, the tree you climbed so often. But it looks so different now. You know the place was here, but where? The land remembers too, surely, but how to hear the stories it holds under all this pavement?

But the memory and the love of the place, your place, is still in your bones. Your muscles are still strong, having developed a ropey sinew from climbing the tree over and over again, the blueprint for all other work to come later. You point at the air and gesticulate to your children, who came with you to visit. Over there, you point— that’s where we played. They look, they listen, they can sense how important this is and they love the stories you tell of it. But they can’t really know it.

Or maybe they can, somehow? Zusa reports that Spencer often comes to visit her at night. “He jumps on my head.” They do seem to have their own relationship going. Amos, too: one day he went through a box in my closet and took a framed picture of my own mom holding Spencer as a baby. He put it on the tree stump he keeps as a table next to his bed. Every night he flips it upright, every morning he lays it down. I have no idea what this ritual means. It’s not for me.

Zusa describes Spencer as a fairy (a description I’m truly confident he would support.) On more than one occasion a deus ex machina intervention in my own life has kept me safe: once, a force on my back that felt like a hand pushed me forward, tipping me into the driver's seat from where I had been standing at the open door, rummaging through my purse. Seconds later, an out of control driver hit the open door behind me, peeling the metal back off the car like a banana peel.

Thank you.

In any event, spirit-world intervention or no, it came to be that Zusa and Spencer shared a birthday this year, and I baked the two of them a cake.

Baking has long been a core way I show love. I kept a recipe diary when I was a child, tattered my mother’s cook books, founded a festival devoted to buttery dessert, and am now delight that my nine year old Amos has continued my commitment, running a free dessert CSA in our neighborhood, creating weird inventions out of sugar and butter and any candy he can scare up, which he then delivers on foot to our neighbors.

Instead of waxing on and trying to wring some lessons about death and life, why don’t I just describe the cake I made for these two people I love so much, one living and one dead.

The layers came together like this:

It’s late spring, and my friend and I hatched a plan to gather the abundant black locust flowers blooming right now. We hadn’t been outside much on Saturday because the wildfire smoke was heavy in the air and making my kids cough., But we were cooped up, and decided that a tiny jaunt was worth getting to be with this fleeting spring gift.

We all walked to the end of our road, where thick, droopy clusters of white, fragrant flowers hung from the branches, each cluster gravid with blossoms and buzzing with spring- drunk bees. We clipped and broke some off, leaving more than enough on the tree. The air was grey and heavy with smoke from a fire far away, but all we could smell was blossom.

We brought the clusters home, sat in a circle and ran our fingers along the blossoms to tickle them loose them from their stems. They cascaded into a giant basket, bringing a heavenly fresh smell into the room. We raked through the pile, our three year old proud of her important work identifying any leaves that had fallen in and plucking them out.

The blossoms went into a pot, and we poured warmed cream from a farmer friend over the top, the taste of the grass from the meadow, by way of the cows, mixing with the blooms. I used a big wooden spoon to press down on the blossoms, slowly juicing them for their lemon bright taste. This will become ice cream that we’ll eat next month at Butterfest.

Making ice cream requires egg yolks, but not the whites. We keep laying hens out back. They give us eggs, and in exchange we feed them and care for them, and try our best to protect them from getting taken by a hungry raccoon or fox. Mostly we succeed, but not always, and then we feel rife with grief and guilt that we were late to come home and shut the coop door. But of course, foxes need to eat, too.

Our six year old had wanted to do the egg separation, and some yolk slipped through her small fingers into the whites. She had hoped to make meringues, but that plan was now off. We experimented to see if yellow- dotted whites would whip, but even the smallest bit of fat meant the whites would thicken but never stiffen and remain in whisking purgatory forever, neither liquid nor solid.

But what is bad for meringue is still good for cake. We whipped up two layers up that night, the oven clicking and the smell of vanilla intermingling with that of the locust flowers. Even through the closed windows we could hear frogs singing. The scent and sounds of the warming seasons were heavy on us. I didn’t want the night to end, so filled with the burbling possibility of springtime, although it was already way past bedtime.

I couldn’t resist the urge to stay up regardless, to drink it all in a little more deeply. I snuggled our children onto the stained, heavily used couches my younger sibling and I dragged off the side of the road and lashed to the top of our car some years back. These couches turned out remarkably comfortable, and while i often would like a less threadbare look, I cherish getting as much use out of them as possible, delight that I scored them for free whenever i look at what a new couch would cost. And where would an old couch even go? One day I’ll learn to reupholster, I think. Wishful thinking, I’m sure.

I tuck our children under some blankets, each with its own history and maker. They ask Aylie, a master storyteller, to share more yarns of how she used to travel by canoe, as she had learned to chart by stars when she lived and studied in Micronesia with expert boat journeyers for seven years. My kids dozed on the couch as she regaled us with tales of the ocean, how bright the stars can be in the dark hours on the water.

When Jacob arrived home late at night he carried our no-longer-babies up to their beds, and I remembered a line from Sharon Olds’ poem, “True Love,”

surely this

is the most blessed time of my life,

our children asleep in their beds, each fate

like a vein of abiding mineral

not discovered yet.

The filling:

The filling was hot fudge sauce that my beloved friend Joanna made for a Shavuot ice cream party we threw a couple weeks ago. Shavuot is a holiday of revelation, a yearly remembering of the moment of Mt Sinai. It’s the time we celebrate ‘the gift of the Torah’: one of the world’s many holy guide book, aka unending scroll of questions, aka ledger of iffy ancestral decisions, from which we hope to grow wise enough to learn. To celebrate such a momentous, challenging, weighty and beautiful gift/ burden, we stay up late at night, reveling in the joy of being alive to study what it all means together.

We also eat lots of ice cream about it, since this tradition is quite mysterious and numinous and wild, and there is a magical numerical value assigned to each Hebrew letter (called gematria). The value of the number of days our collective old man Moses was up on Sinai adds up to the same number as the word ‘milk’— so: only logical conclusion is to throw an ice cream party. (I don’t make the rules.)

Shavuot completes the counting of the omer, the period of time beginning with barley harvest. It thus opens a new season, the start of ‘first fruits’ of the wheat harvest season: endings and beginnings overlapping. Together we now move into a transitional period between Shavuot and Sukkot, the final holiday in the series of High Holy Days. This time marks a powerful opportunity for transformation. We hope to find ourselves on the other side of this journey worthy of approaching the yamim noraim, days of awe, again.

This is a holiday that reminds us that we are always dying and always being born— closing as a chapter as we open a new one, composting our old ways to nourish the new.

(I highly recommend watching the Bengson’s song linked above.) Death and birth and possibility— all hidden together, in that same shadowy region we call change.

In any event , Joanna, the hot-fudge-maker in question, and I met shortly after October 7th, when we found each other through planning a vigil calling for peace and care for all human life instead of retaliation against the people of Gaza. This action got me in trouble in some communities, and I was called a bad Jew by some, worse by others.

Joanna’s mentorship and steady friendship was one of many buoys that these years has helped me to stay clear and loud in my values. A few months later she said yes to marching from Philly to DC as a peace action with Faith for Black Lives, and we walked, sang, and chanted together for days. Joanna continues to be one of the steadiest activists I know, holding a weekly protest for peace, writing regular op-ed in her local newspaper, asking people into hard and real conversations. I pray she is on the circle of matriarch- governors, if we ever build a new type of government. She is fearless.

Joanna is also a badass kitchen witch, nourishment flowing from her like manna from heaven. If the quote frequently attributed to Emma Goldman “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” was for Joanna, it might start “If I can’t feed you a delicious meal…”

So naturally Joanna was who made a giant crock pot of fudge for us to pour on our ice cream for the holiday, and when the dozens of us eating together could hardly dent the massive cauldron of fudge she brought, she quickly poured into into jars for us all to bring the sweetness home.

This thick fudge core formed the center of Zusa & Spencer’s birthday cake.

The frosting:

We had some cream cheese stuffed in the fridge from a morning of bagels and shmear with a friend and her newborn baby a few days back. We picked up some bagels and Amos, my eldest, asked to hold the baby so that we moms could eat our bagels in peace together. He was nervous, but excited gentle with little baby Rosalia. Amos is turning out to be good with babies, careful with them and commanding a knack for how they like to be held and entertained.

How, when it was just a moment ago that I was bringing him home from the hospital, all bruised and cone-headed from getting stuck in my birth canal? I remembered suddenly how we had no idea how small a newborn is, and for some inexplicable reason, only brought one giant coat with us for his clothes to the hospital. He came home looking like a tiny wet kitten poking out of a sleeping bag.

Now he is approaching ten, sturdy and gentle, but still tender, easily frustrated with his siblings and sensitive enough to cry openly at school if he loses a game of four square. Is he big? Is he small? Is he grown, or a baby? Will I hold this question forever?

Please let him grow up. Please let them all outlive me.

The toppings:

Our neighbors have a strawberry patch, and have proven over the years to be much better at growing strawberries than we. They do steady work of thinning, separating the runners from the parents, adding compost. They maintain neat rows in black plastic.

Our yard, conversely, is all wild, and while we have strawberries tucked into the tumble, they often emerge a smaller, rugged, full of flavor but hard- won from the squirrels and chipmunks. You can find them not in a patch but scattered about the perennials, rubies glinting out from below a currant’s leaves. Treasures.

It’s nice to have both yards, as because of our neighbors' good organization and generous invitation to harvest some of their patch, the girls were able to slip out of the house the morning of the birthday with a yogurt container. They passed through the hole where we had taken down the fence separating our yards many years back, the boundaries of what is theirs and ours less and less important every year. They were back in five minutes, the cup overflowing with juicy red gifts. We scattered the berries all across the cake, the sweet and tart marrying together, the season officially underway. Abundance.

In final excessive decor: sprinkles.

When I was in college, reeling from my brother’s death and the familial chaos that preceded it, a move from Atlanta, where I missed all my best friends, and studying and working abroad in a global walkabout through which I was trying to catch a scentline for how to be useful entering my adulthood, I developed a wicked eating disorder, an easily understood attempt to control some tiny piece of my life.

Sometime into this period of hunger, a friend gave me a giant jar of fancy sprinkles. I remember licking them one by one from my finger tips, dipping a wet pointer into the jar over and over again.

I decided I wanted to share them, and started rebuilding my joy for sharing food through these parties we deemed “cake nights”-- every cake scattered, smothered and covered in sprinkles. Everything Thursday I would bake a few cakes, and we would sing together in the dirty rental house we loved so much, slicing thick pieces and passing them around as someone played a guitar and we all found a harmony. Song and sprinkle somehow led me back to myself, to a full plate.

I now lead a monthly song circle and dessert potluck that has become the most joyful part of my month, the moment I look ahead to for joy and restoration I can count on.

Py, my youngest, has decided she doesn’t like sprinkles herself, but loves to scoop them off with her tiny, chunky finger into my mouth and say, “for YOU! Sprinkles for mama! Sprinkles all for YOU!” She pushes her finger into my mouth again and again, the baby reverse nursing the mom, demanding I take as much of her sweetness as she has to give.

Or, as Mary O would say:

Don't Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant

when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the

case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

The place offers what I think of as an ‘island of coherence’ an island, inside of our culture of illusion and extraction, to feel into our shared memory of what being a human is all about. The week there helped me remember that human intervention can be additive, rather than extractive: that the work of our human hands can collaborate with what the land offers to make all places more beautiful, more functional, more kind.

As Bill wrote, “Beauty is our birthright, and an absence of beauty is a sign of grave danger.”

Everything Bill built is curved, designed made with humans in mind. The rooms facilitate conversation; the tools fit well into the palm of your hand for comfortable use.

[an assortment of hand made tools]

Being there, with beloved friends and teachers, working hard and enjoying the place was drinking deeply from a well after a long thirst. We had some significant work projects ahead of us: planting trees and protecting them from predation, splitting wood, digging a new french drain because over the winter, the cycle of groundwater freezing and thawing had heaved the outdoor kitchen splitting its foundation. The ‘work of the world, common as mud’ (Marge Piercy.)

The work tired the body but restored spirits. Building a drain meant heavy digging, and then walking as a group down to the shore to fill five gallon buckets with as gravel and rock as we could carry (not full!) and lugging them back up the hill to the kitchen. All the while, small children running under our legs and around us, intermittently helpful (digging mussels by the beach and helping with rocks they could manage) playing (making puzzles of shells) and inserting chaos (insisting on a collection of wet kelp strands as an altar in the center of the tent).

All the materials we used were offered up by the land, the journey to fetch them filled with beauty; loons singing on the water as we traveled by skiff to the best gravel beach.

Bill made all of these buildings without the use of diesel or heavy machinery, so committed he was to building in a way that worked in what he understood as right relationship with the land. (He added floors to his yurt using a hand jack to crank the rest up!) He transported any materials he needed on canoes lashed together, paddled in. (Apparently he used to say to visitors, “ring this bell if you need anything, and I’ll come and tell you why you don’t!)

We continued his tradition of working by hand, feeling the hefted-ness of our bodies to that place. This is, of course, not a practice he invented, but for those of us growing up outside of Indigenous, land- rooted community, he offered a picture of one way back into deep relationship.

Another person cooked for the group. Others of us cared for children. Often the littles would need a nap or a snack, so I did lots of caregiving, slowing my pace from my normal work schedule to meet them, to what ended up feeling like a much more human day than my normal hustle.

[the outdoor kitchen we were working to protect from frost heave]

I was able to help with (a teeny bit of the) physical work, feed and walk my children, help them lay to rest, talk and sing and eat with friends and teachers. It was equal parts work, restoration, and creative exploration. (I couldn’t help being reminded of Helen and Scott’s Nearing’s idea of the day divided into sections of four: four hours for work; four hours for learning; and four hours for creativity/ rest. Of course Scott Nearing and Bill were good friends.)

Any time I am able to have a taste of this kind of living– with other people beyond my nuclear family, of different ages, in a way that involves some balance of hard physical labor, earth- rootedness, food, music, always feels deeply right.

Watching my children help my own mentors with real work, whether carrying rocks or planning which way the water would flow in a trench, I kept thinking: this is surely the way we humans have learned. Standing beside adults (beyond their parents!), understood implicitly as capable of meaningfully helping.

There was a young woman in our group, about twenty, badass and hard working, quietly playful. Anything she did my kids wanted to do. When we got back to the yurt, Wren didn’t want to play on her phone, but rather chose to pulled out a watercolor set, or sharpened a carving knife. My kids were watching, quietly absorbing.

[kids and mentors warming up + making art]

After a few days of being there, I came in to the main yurt during a heavy rain storm to put my youngest down for a nap. My middle child Zusa, joined me to warm up by the stove. As I lay in the bed with the baby I could hear her feeding the fire, creaking the door open and shut to keep us all warm. After about half an hour, I started hearing a new sound that I couldn’t quite place. I slowly realized that I was hearing the sound of a carving knife, peeling off bark from a log. I realized that Zusa, age six, had found her way to Bill‘s tools, curved and make smooth with the love of use. (Zusa later told me she had tested different knives to find which one fit into her small hand.) She had found a basket of sticks that Peter left out with an loose invitation for people to experiment with carving earlier in the week.

Left alone and trusted, Zusa found her way to the tools and the material, discovered the quiet pleasure of being warm in the rain, of making something real with her hands.

The land itself is a tidal cove. What looks like a lake is made of ocean water, which passes through a narrow channel twice a day with the tide. The land is formed in such a narrow way that standing on the shore, you can clearly see the patterns of the water flowing in more quickly than I’ve ever seen it anywhere else. The water rushes, a force that humbles.

The force of the water is called a “rip” and there’s a reason: the rip of the tide is so intensely powerful it could suck a swimmer or boat out to see in a blink. It’s humbling to sit beside narrow straight and watch the ocean pour in.

Seals occasionally make their way into the cove, playing when the water is high and then finding their way back out to the open ocean as the tide cycles out. Loons make their home in the cove and fishing birds fly above us. The place hums with the holy: a portal between the more human scale cove with the vast force of the sea. The metaphor of our human lives only being made possible only because of an expansive wildness that we can never tame.

[Py gathering rock by the edge of the rip]

On our third day there, Peter mentioned casually that there was a special moment every day: the moment the tide changed from going out to coming back in. This happens once a day when the water has been low, flowing out from the cove and then suddenly, it turns around.

When you watch a tide from the beach, the process of a tidal change feels slow, the beach getting bigger or smaller incrementally until the edge of your towel is wet.

But here by the rip: there is a visible moment of reversal, a wild and potent alchemy of exchange when the water stops flowing out to flow back in.

Until this moment, I had never really considered that of course, there is a moment of change. I was gobsmacked. How does it happen?

That’s when Peter told me the name of this process: restoring the force.

We were amazed just hearing about it, and ended our work period early to go and sit by the rip at low tide. The tide had been pouring out back into the ocean, giving back all that has accumulated back into the wide blue. The cove had been getting lower and lower, a mud flat expanse of mussels and clam tops. Then: magic.

Tall, ropey strands of kelp grow in the rip, and as we sat along the cliff, we watched them like a weathervane. At first, the kelp strands were prostrate, arms reaching out to the sea, bent at the majesty of the tide. As we reached to the moment our tidal charts had instructed was low tide, we started to notice small changes.

Just at the very edges of the channel, a subtle sign of rippling, almost a shaking in the water just along the edges. The water in the center was strongly flowing back out still. Then, stronger, clearer ripples spread along the edges, flowing clearly back.

The ocean water flowed in two directions at once: rushing out and rushing in. We were silent. This chaos, this push and pull, was low tide?

From the edges, the inrushing force began to spread in to the center of the channel. Over just moment, the edge rippling shifted from almost nearly undetectable to now spanning wide bands of water flowing in, while the center flowed out.

Finally, the kelp in the center of the rip did a dance, like a prayer, or a miracle. Rooted in the middle of the channel, trembling with the conflicting forces swirling around, for one poignant moment, the kelp then stood completely still. Then, the kelp threw their tops up, straight up towards the sky, poking just out the top of the water, reminding me of a saguaro cactus, arms up in perpetual praise.

And then just like that, the kelp bent and laid down, flowing now in the opposite direction. The force had been restored. The tide acted as if it had always flowed this direction and would always flow this way.

The metaphors don’t need much help.

There are times I feel so overwhelmed with grief about how distorted and upside down our dominant culture is– when I struggle with how to offer this broken world to my children. As wrote this week,

“A big part of it is just growing up in a society that’s been diseased since long before you were born, being raised and taught by people who also grew up in a society that’s been diseased since long before they were born. We show up here, we don’t know anything, and then the big people teach us about war and money and jobs and politics, and assure us that our initial horrified reaction to the things we are learning is just immature naivety to something fine and normal.”

There are many times I feel like the tide is too strong, we have gone too far in one direction and we are all going to be sucked further and further out.

But spending just a week on one of many island of coherence helped me to remember: we are always remaking our worlds. Living in right relationship with our planet, working in ways that enhance beauty, and being part of healthy human culture that contributes more than it takes: these are the deepest patterns we have. We all have these embodied ancestral memories, far older than any newer ideas like colonization, oppression, and extraction. To use our brief time here to create beauty: so deeply human a six-year-old left to her own devices innately knows how to do it.

The tide has been rushing out. It’s easy to feel like the water in which we are currently swimming is inevitable, perpetual. But nature will not allow oppression, violence, and extraction forever.

We are swimming at the edges, trying to be part of something that feels too big, trying to turn the ocean’s tide. But as we teach our children, as we gather with each other, our force expands, strengthening from the margins to the middle. As we bring each other to visit the many islands of coherence we are nourishing, not all way out in the ocean but right here in our neighborhoods and cities, in our schools and on our farms and organizations and in our homes, we gather our shared power. The earth will help us. She yearns to rebalance. Together, we can restore the force.

In the social change framework with which I work, power = people + ideas + resources. ‘Resources’ most often = money.

We need to shift how we engage with money to nourish and grow the world we want. We need to divest from a system that is killing us all, and invest in what we most long to nurture.

On the right, money is by far the dominant ingredient of the three fold power-recipe, with a handful of billionaires with exceptionally bad ideas, mixed with extreme wealth calling the shots.

On the left, we have under-explored money as a lever. We may also perhaps underestimated our own financial complicity: are our own resources working opposite our goals?

I want to make several points but this piece got fairly long, so let me make them here at the top:

TL;DR:

1. We can gently explore within ourselves the deep question of what the idea of saving/ investing/ having ever-increasingly more money actually about? What’s underneath it? Safety, security, ease, community, joy come up for me. Might it be possible (and perhaps… more realistic and attainable) to imagine getting those very real needs met in other ways?

2. The American, capitalist myth of a personal obligation to hoard money goes hand in hand with the dogma of individualism. Our collective survival relies on us adapting beyond this story and remembering that we thrive or struggle in the collective.

3. Money is just a resource, like compost. What we feed will grow. Are we perhaps inadvertently feeding the very structures we then fight in our movements? Might we shift our nourishment strategically?

4. We cannot fight on the one hand what we fund with the other. Investing in the stock market, or any consolidated, multinational corporation, no matter how “ethically” you try to do it, consolidates power into the hands of the few, and kills the planet simultaneously. With love, we need to stop.

5. In order to feel able to stop, we need alternatives. Compelling, accessible ones are out there! Let’s name them, experiment with them. I share a list of ideas below!

6. Money is a story. It is both very real, and entirely made up. We could write another story.

7. Long term, it is far safer to invest in what I think of as true wealth: care for our earth, clean water, enough food, medicine, education for everyone, the spiritual connection that returns when resource flows between people who need that resource, rather than accumulating and stagnating. Many communities who have suffered and been deeply marginalized under colonialism and capitalism have known this all along. We should learn from these practices.

8. Talking openly and without shame about money with our friends and collaborators and neighbors decreases shame, increases collaboration, and expands what is possible.

9. The earth loves us, and living in awe of her generosity helps us to remember how indebted, and supported, we already are.

   

(I love this piece, and the work Radici Studios makes— check them out!)

Now, if you are finding it hard to sleep at night or for some other reason want to take a deep dive, here goes:

Who has the money?

Since we’re talking about money, let me get this out right off the bat: the status of ‘billionaire’ should not exist. Hoarding that much resource, while others suffer and the world burns, is unethical, reckless, and will eventually be abolished. All kings fall; that kind of top-heavy consolidation makes no sense, and long term people and the earth will not abide it. For now, in the messy moment, we need to push for campaign finance reform, and commit to throwing as many pebbles into the gears of oligarchy , fascism, and the for- profit rule over all else, as possible. But: I’m not going to spill much ink parsing billionaires today. I’m assuming none of you reading this are in that category and that you likely agree. Moving on, don’t let the door hit ya, etc.

Instead, I want to focus instead on the people we likely know, if not live as a part of: the 50- 99% of our country. According to the federal reserve, this segment of people collectively control 67% of the country’s wealth. (Side note: we can’t not note the overt obscenity re: the fact that a full fifty percent reflect the “economic bottom” of our country, holding almost no money at all. Twenty-five percent of Americans don’t have $1000 in savings.

And frankly, it’s primarily those of us in the country’s middle and upper economic classes who need to re-learn how to think collectively about safety and support. People in the very most vulnerable positions, those in precarity, are statistically the people practicing a sharing economy much more so than any other class! Communities with fewer resources are statistically already much more generous (by percentage of income) than those communities with more. Lewis Hyde explores this in depth in “The Gift”-- researching how quickly resources, no matter who gets them, are distributed out to people in need in communities expert in survival– and the mutual care and collective thinking that it relies upon.

So, within the US’s offensive and oppressive economic inequality, if the mid and upper 50% of people in the US make a choice to do something different with their money, we would dramatically shift power.

In order to make different choices we have to look at our underlying beliefs to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. Here in the US, we are conditioned with a story that personal hoarding is ethical: in order to be good community members, we must do the most we can to save. Why? Whether for college or retirement funds or rainy day needs, we need to take care of ourselves, or risk being a burden to others. If you don’t look out for yourself, no one else will either.

What a sad premise! No thanks. What if we could count on our communities, families or government to take care of us if we need it? What if instead of hoarding our resources individually to fortress ourselves, we used our resources to invest in systemic changes that would ultimately ensure medical bills would be covered, elders would have quality care, all kids had college paid for, the land would not be degraded by any highest bidder? That would ROCK and I want in.

[Other side effects of American hyper-individualism are a loneliness epidemic, record rates of mental and emotional distress, overburdened marriages and nuclear family systems, and lonely young people, especially men, getting funneled into online faux-communities that radicalize them. But I digress. Hang out with your friends and neighbors, y’all, until they become friends.]

Money is made up.

A second fundamental idea is that money is a fact, rather than a belief that could be shifted. This week, the NYT wrote a line about the intense volatility in the stock market under the tariff escalations. It contained this line: “Stocks briefly rose yesterday on unsubstantiated reports that the administration might pause the tariffs for 90 days.[...] The markets tumbled again. Over just a few hours, trillions of dollars appeared and vanished.”

Money “appearing and vanishing”; tl;dr, our entire global economy is little more than a group improv game in which we all just keep saying “ok, yes!” We’re living inside of a story. That story certainly has real implications, but there is no empirical TRUTH behind what money means, or should mean. We can create new ideas around what money is, beyond pixels on a computer screen. Money is not inherently bad or good, but the story currently animating it is necrotic. We could reinvent what money looks like. (Think about people currently experimenting with local currencies, for example.) Practicing a different framework of what money means at a local and community level is much more do-able than abolishing Wall Street trading.

Does investing in something mean we hope it grows forever?

When we feed children, we’re hoping they will grow bigger and stronger. When we water or compost a plant: bigger, stronger growth is the outcome. And similarly, when we give resources to a company, we need to recognize that we are saying: grow! Get bigger and stronger! But do we want endless growth? A human cell growing forever endlessly bigger becomes cancer. Is that what we’re supplying by feeding more and more money into corporate growth? I think we want growth in all these systems – to a point. To right scale. And then to stop, and be stable, for a lifetime! If our children grew and grew and grew, that would be problematic indeed. All living systems achieve maturity and balance. We need to find a balance and right-sized economy, large enough to support the most vulnerable, and limited by ecological and social limits– what economist Kate Raworth calls “donut economics.”

Ever- bigger, multinational corporations hell bent on sucking the last drop of resource out of the earth and her people before eating their own tail and self combusting, are killing the planet, and us with it. (I’m not going to write about corporate consolidation, pollution, worker abuses, billionaires getting richer, the gutting of small local economies, the disappearance of a middle class, the rise of fascism all over the globe, and how all these factors stem from consolidation of wealth and power but… you know that all.) What is feeding that beast? People giving them money and asking them to GROW IT.

But… haven’t I heard something about “ethical” investing?

Having served as the executive director of a handful of mission- led organizations, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with fancy financial managers– way more access than I would have as a regular human living on a nonprofit paycheck. At all these organizations, which are truly values and mission forward hubs of good work, we’ve had our savings in what is called a “socially responsible investment” (SRI) account, sometimes called an “ethical social governance” (ESG) portfolio.

Some of us as individuals may in fact contribute to a retirement account that is in the same kind of ESG/SRI funds. These may be a harm-mitigation position, and I myself have contributed to one when I can put any money aside, dancing in the in between worlds. No judgment!

In an ESG/ SRI portfolio, you are offered a screening process to align with your values. You can screen out, for example, fossil fuel companies. You can screen out military profiteering, or cigarette companies. (Interestingly, there are often religiously- themed “values screens” so you could also employ a “Catholic Screen”-- eliminating any medical company that makes an abortion pill. As ever: money is a tool for power.)

Still, if you’re placing your money into an ESG, even with SRI / ESG screens, you’re putting that money into some company on the S&P. So what options are you left likely to be investing in, if not cigarettes or guns? You’ll find yourself resourcing a couple sectors. First, a category called “consumer goods”-- which could have you in something like, say, HomeGoods or Shaw’s or Staples. We have to ask ourselves: is our goal to invest in a future world in which Staples can grow and grow and grow? Is the idea of a future in which Staples gets bigger and bigger, paving over more and more land for new stores, filling every empty drawer with office supplies ideal? I’m pretty sure not.

In one stark example of the hypocrisy of “ethical stocks,” an organization that I was working for was involved in an active boycott of a major chain, a chain that was abusing its workers and consolidating market share, underpaying workers and producers to siphon profits to the very rich CEO. (Side note, the previous sentence could likely apply to the vast majority of publicly traded companies.) At the time, our endowment (formed through a generous bequest) was invested in an ethical social governance savings account.

Out of curiosity, I requested a line by line accounting of all the companies in which this meant we were currently invested. A name caught my eye: the very multinational company which owned the grocery chain we were at the time fighting.

On the one hand we were boycotting them, but we were also financing them! Make it make sense!

I am proud to say that our organization divested, and then began a process of re-investment into our community and our constituency in far more mission- aligned modes, thought it meant having less in “profit.” I think of Wendell Berry’s line from Mad Farmer Liberation Front:

Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit.

Are we funding what we’re fighting?

Let’s look into to the funding community, people who believe in change and want to use their resources to shift the course of history. Thank you! Rad! Yall the best!

But! Eek: a regular disbursement of a philanthropist’s dollars is something around 4% of the principle nest egg from which that profit grows. That means investors are putting around 4% of their money toward their values/ missions and sitting on the rest so it can keep growing for future use. The 96% is, most often, still invested in the stock market.

Until we organize that 96% rather than just the 4%, we’ll be outspent. Funders support organizations and people to do harm reduction work, while the 96% of money keeps humming forward, furthering the problems we fight with the 4% resource.

We can re-allocate those nest eggs and see real change, quickly.

But I’m not a philanthropist and I’m not uber rich! What does this have to do with me?

While it’s true that the exceedingly rich and few control an ever increasing amount of money, as I mentioned, in what remains of an upper middle class, (again, in our extremely unequal country that means the 50-99%) there is still a chunky ⅔ of wealth– and that class together has more power than we may estimate. If and when that whole group engages in boycotting, redirecting, gifting, loaning, and investing in community, it will be powerfully felt. When that whole group uses their collective wealth — invested across retirement accounts, college accounts, and investment holdings– a sea change.

And many more of us “regular” people are implicated than we may initially think.

Let’s say you consider yourself middle class and work for the state. Here in Vermont, that means you are part of a pension plan. Who doesn’t love a union pension? I’m for it! However, where is that plan invested? Unfortunately, that money is administered by the massive company, TIAA CREF. And where do the stick the hard- earned money, on the behalf of good public servants? TIAA’s is snatching up stolen land in the global south. My best is that most public servants would not like this, but likely may not know. If public workers came together and demanded divestment from these exploitative practices and re-investment elsewhere, we’d have THE ENTIRE STATE PENSION PLAN to use for local investments. In a state the size of Vermont, that’s an incredibly impactful amount of money.

But… this is the reality!

Maybe you are thinking, as I do sometimes too, ‘Well, yes, this is all well and good, but I need to exist in this system? I have children and want them to go to college some day.’ Agreed! Same! We’re mostly going to be doing a both/ and thing here. But we’re not going to let doing this perfectly get in the way of us doing anything at all. We can take baby steps to experiment and not let “ah! I don’t know enough to do anything!” get in our way.

It’s by design that it’s hard enough to just survive in these systems AND have time to fix the systems, too! That’s just the shape- shifting, two worlds moment we live in: surviving while planting. As Joanna Macy says we are midwives hospicing old systems’ death and helping doula new ones at the same time. This pattern is the same across all our ways of governance, family life, schooling, peace making. To live in this time is to accept our role as those who shape change. (Thank you Octavia Butler.) And hasn’t navigating change, and living between two worlds, actually been the story of so many of our ancestors?

Layered into this complexity of surviving and imagining at once, we all carry with us different lived experiences of money: trauma from hunger or poverty, debt, medical issues, and people depending on our early lives. We have to navigate with our pain, within the broken systems crumbling around us, and mitigate the harm our people and communities are facing. Many of us struggle to pay our bills or the debt collectors. The more precarious your position, the less this can apply. Again, for the purposes of today, I’m focusing on those people who do have more flexibility than we may naturally feel (given the stories we’re constantly fed that We Won’t Have Enough….)

And: SO much shame comes up around money, and its twin, silence. This means that it’s hard to talk with others openly about your financial choices. Many of us feel bad for the debt we carry, for how much money we spend, or lucky but guilty what we received from our parents. This keeps us not talking to one another, and “don’t ask / don’t tell” has never been a helpful policy for change.

The first step for healing that shame is turning the light on. I’ve been lucky enough to have close enough friends to share about our finances in detail. We talk about how much money we’re saving (or not) in retirement or college and credit card and student loans debt. We talk about our monthly expenses, how much it costs to feed our families. The stories I hear in these conversations is deeply calming, connecting, and humanizing. We’re all spending more money than we may want to because surviving inflation during late stage capitalism is very hard. Most of us carry some amount of debt.

In community, you find you are not alone: many of your neighbors are wrestling with the same questions that you are and having to make imperfect choices in a fucked up system.

But together, inevitably the conversation turns toward imaginative collaborations not possible when we are alone.

I like to think of alternatives as re- investing or shifting resource rather than divesting, because it allows us to center what we WANT, not just what we are reacting to or rejecting. Our neighbors started talking about how nice it would be to know that we all had that slush fund at the ready if we needed it.

So, what do we really want?

One early idea we started chewing on was: could we develop a neighborhood pool where we each contribute a small amount of money every month from which any of us could pull in the case of an emergency? (Again, a reminder that many of these practices have long been known and tended – in some Afro-Caribbean communities, these pools are called sou sou savings clubs.)

If my neighbor needs a new roof, he could dip from the fund, and a couple years later when I need to pay for my kids' braces, I too could dip from the fund. Together in small bits we’re all feeding that shared pool together.

A community savings pool is an easy, low hanging fruit experiment to start with. Find four trusted friends, and start feeling into how much becomes possible when we unite. You can pick how much you give, so it doesn’t have to feel high risk.

It gets more exciting when you shift from talking about, how could we use our money better to help each other survive to: what do we really, deeply want to GROW with our money? What seeds do we want to plant? What would true safety and joy look like in our community?

We all sawa a real- time shift in the messaging of the ‘defund the police’ campaign. While we absolutely should just point blank defund the police, we struggled with speaking only about removing the money. It took us a while as a movement to figure out we needed to be talking about investing resources in other directions: making it clear from the start that divestment is actually reinvestment.

Could we think not just about divesting from policing, ecocide, or corporate consolidation, but investing in our communities, our land, our art and thriving, all families?

As we begin to have energizing conversation about what we really hope will grow over our lifetimes, I have never, ever heard someone say that they hope there are a lot more Staples.

Instead, we start talking about the world getting greener and more beautiful again. We start talking about endangered species bouncing back and land being returned to Native tending. We talk about feeling excited for our toddler’s future. It’s a warm feeling, like coming inside and holding a cup of cocoa after being out in the cold. We don’t have to settle for crumbs and scraps. We can dare to imagine a thriving future for everyone.

We imagine our small town’s local economy humming, and beautiful art painted on the walls of renovated community third spaces. We imagine decrepit and underutilized grange halls, abandoned malls and old churches humming with life, arts programs, community gardens. We imagine what it will feel like when all our kids have excellent school access, when elders know they will retire into caring webs of intergenerational housing if they can no longer live alone. We imagine beautiful, ecological housing, built from local materials, densely so we can hang out more easily. We imagine folk skills schools where we are practicing and relearning hand craft. The list goes on and on. There is so much we begin to imagine!

ALL OF THESE ARE FUTURES WE CAN INVEST IN TODAY. Hallelujah!

Instead of relying on the most massive banks who fund drilling in the arctic or private prison profiteering (yes, like the companies who will build out ICE’s new detention facilities unless we stop them, we could do a most simple thing. We can simply move our savings accounts to community credit unions, where money circulates locally in initiatives like solar projects or low interest loans to local businesses. (You can look up your local one to see where they invest, or request a meeting to ask.)

We could consider investing funds in revolving loan funds, where the money can be used over and over for community projects.

We can support small, worker- owned cooperatives in our area. We can spend money building dense, ecological housing in our own backyards so more people have a place to live. (This was a choice that our family recently made, combining our savings, a loan and an affordable-housing grant to sink our resources into a tiny house in our backyard built by New Frameworks, a values- aligned company if there ever was one!) Now we are “renting’ the tiny house to a community member who lost her housing in exchange for help picking our kids up from school, which supports our life enormously. The economics of our relationship take place mostly outside the zone of money transactions.

We can pool money with neighbors and establish a land trust, removing land from the public market, ensuring it remains a public good forever.

We could move toward experimenting solutions, like a gift economy model, in which you gift freely and trust the gift will return (here is one friend living it.). The more radical, the more local the scale of practice is needed. I have some other friends, Mark and Kristi Kimball, whose farm does 1 million dollars in sales a year, and around 1 million dollars in gifts and barter. They told me a yearly question of themselves and their community is “how generous can we be?”

It’s not surprising to me that the folks I know currently practicing the most radical economic schemes I’ve heard of in the USA are also farmers. If you spend all day relying on the earth (directly: all of us rely on the earth), you begin to feel overwhelming, radical generosity constantly flowing in our direction. You start to emulate it.

In the Serviceberry, Kimmerer writes, “In the Anishinaabe worldview, it’s not just fruits that are understood as gifts, rather all of the sustenance that the land provides, from fish to firewood. Everything that makes our lives possible—the splints for baskets, roots for medicines, the trees whose bodies make our homes, and the pages of our books—is provided by the lives of more-than-human beings. This is always true whether it’s harvested directly from the forest or whether it’s mediated by commerce and harvested from the shelves of a store—it all comes from the Earth. When we speak of these not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes.”

We start to feel how indebted we all are, how much is freely offered all day, how gift flows out of us and into the next person, and from them the next, opening and expanding a web of reciprocity that can keep flowing if not dammed up, hoarded. (We’re really on a mission to un-dam our generosity.) The resource doesn’t keep a ledger, but trusts that there will be enough.

Lewis Hyde explores the idea at length in his seminal work, ‘The Gift’ – a dense miracle of a book about gift economy, creativity, and community that I cannot possibly satisfy in an excerpt. I found this summary by Jonathon Rogers, a theologian: “In Lewis Hyde’s explanation of the gift economy, that idea of goods being passed along rather than being exchanged is exceedingly important. In a market economy, you give money and goods to those who can give you goods and money that you deem to be of at least equal value. The books stay balanced that way. In a gift economy, the gift-recipient does not balance the books with the gift-giver. Their books are balanced otherwise. Unlike money and tangible goods, when it comes to intangible goods (love, joy, peace, security, hope for the future, faith, beauty, the ability to knit or change brake pads), you don’t have less when you give them away. Indeed, you have more. To the extent that you can say they are yours, they are more yours when you pass them along. Also—and this is exceedingly important—as your gifts are passed along, the world looks a little more like the world you want to live in.”

The world I want to live in has more berries, more birds, more friends, more joyful learning for all kids. The world I want to live in has clean water and fresh air everywhere, abundant food. The world I want to live in experiences a durable peace: for prisons and border checkpoints to have been dismantled, and the earth underneath to have been spread with cover crop. The world I want to live in has a lot of art and song.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that “The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature. It will call forth the gifts of each of us; it will emphasize cooperation over competition; it will encourage circulation over hoarding; and it will be cyclical, not linear. Money may not disappear anytime soon, but it will serve a diminished role even as it takes on more of the properties of the gift. The economy will shrink, and our lives will grow.”

Amen.

Some of us have already been involved with change making/ movement/ activism explicitly, and, while we are definitely struggling to stay afloat given the strength of the waves and intensity of the storm, we don’t necessarily feel surprised that we’re swimming in an ocean.

For others, realizing suddenly that we all seem to be way too far out to see any shoreline is not only surprising, it’s terrifying. (Are there sharks here? I can’t swim that well! How far until a life boat comes along? Lots of people are blowing whistles! Whose whistle means what? Are we just treading water or is there an island somewhere nearby?) These are all valid, unanswerable questions. We just can’t stop by expressing our worry, or we end up like those in official leadership positions who have revealed themselves to be far too in shock of how fast this has gone, too afraid to speak out, or too committed to maintaining the status quo to take action.

So, whether you’ve identified as an activist before, or are new to holding the question ack! what now?, we’re all needed. And the good news is: the stars are with us, twinkling overhead, calling us on our way. And it’s always been us who are the ones we’re waiting for, anyway.

We’re out to sea, that is for sure. You might even say we’ve been shipwrecked, even though we could have seen the iceberg looming. So we’re out here, and it’s quite deep and dark, and damn are these waters cold. But still: we seem to have some life preservers floating around. And some elders who remember how to chart a way by the stars; their ancestors traveled this way before. Some others know these waters well enough to coach the rest of us: they tell us to go limp when the rip tide comes, to find our way back when it spits us out. Some people are strong enough even to pull the broken pieces together and lash them with rope, making us a life raft as we get our bearings. Someone, god bless them, held on to binoculars and can call out to remind us where we’re going.

In the spirit of wow-we-are-currently-very-lost, but-look-there-is-Orion, I wanted to offer a basic ideas as a framework that I hope may be helpful. Making explicit what our language means helps me to ground in where we are together. Language provides the floorboards, allowing us to sit and paddle towards where we are needed.

What is a movement?

Most basically, a movement is made up of many different but values-aligned actions and strategies that people take across sectors, organizations, and individuals towards a common goal. The people who make up the movement are pretty loosely organized, but we are rooted together in that we share a common value set. Together movements win change by sustaining a steady drumbeat towards their common goal of shifting society’s structure or values.

Right now I think a few clear ideas that we are coalescing around are:

1. We value the promise of participatory democracy (even if this country has never been a real democracy) and we believe in moving towards it as opposed to sliding into pure authoritarianism;

2. We stand for people and the planet, rather than profit;

3. We commit to defending human rights for all and decency towards each other.

In one encyclopedic definition, Britannica explains that social movements “result from the more or less spontaneous coming together of people whose relationships are not defined by rules and procedures but who merely share a common outlook on society.”

This is an important element of how movements work: this work is conducted through our personal relationships, and will not be defined by rules or procedures.

Making change is inevitably going to personal, and it’s going to be messy. At times it will be unclear who is in the lead or follow position, especially as we get our strategies going. It will at times be very planned, and at others, will bubble up spontaneously (read AMB’s Emergent Strategy if you haven’t yet!)

Accepting this means that we’re going to need to show up to actions we don’t think are perfectly planned. It’s going to require us to sometimes stick our necks out when we don’t feel ready. It’s necessary to just do it scared.

It’s going to require us to pick up phone calls, even when we’d rather space out because we are tired and just wanted to cook dinner. It’s going to require writing that op-ed when we would rather remain in hiding. It’s going to take us showing up, and showing up again. It’s going to stretch us. We’re going to change. We’re going to get tougher as we work these muscles, and we’re also going to find people we can rely on.

My good friend Adam, a brilliant farmer, visionary and writer, pointed out that “to long” for something means “to be made long.” As we move into our longing for a different world, we are going to be stretched in ways we can’t anticipate yet. The yearning is the guide. The stretch and struggle means you’re in it.

Being part of a movement also requires humility, first by leaving space for other people to lead, but also the humility to hold the truth that we just really don’t ever know what’s coming. There is a piece of all of us that feels defeatist right now: Things are bad. We know what’s coming next. It’s doomsday. (I feel you, I too go there. It’s a lot right now. These feelings make sense!)

But these feelings are not facts. It’s much harder to hold ambiguity, because it requires accepting the power and responsibility that comes with realizing that what happens next still depends on us. What we do next matters. We are shaping what we allow or disallow. We are in a chaotic time which means that power is being contested, new norms are being shaped. We are the people of this place, no matter who is in the White House: we are not passive lemmings: we determine how we show up, and as we change our response we change the conditions on which we’re operating.

I was recently on a (fifty- thousand person strong!) call with Maurice Mitchell, the head of the Working Families Party, who reminded us,

“Public courage has always been the nucleus of social change movements. If you start to feel an ounce of public courage, don’t hesitate. Don’t wait to ask permission. Act.”

We all are presented with opportunities every day now to be brave. As these moments of public courage present themselves and we take them, we create the scaffolding for movement forces to gather behind us and grow. We become the first barnacle clinging on to the rock of our values, and then others can latch on and grow from there. If we believe in protest, we have to protest, even if it feels scary. Use it or lose it.

We have gotten dangerously used to specialization, individualization and professionalization, wherein we believe the weird capitalist idea that one person alone holds the key to perfect and precise strategy which will work for us all. That’s not how a living system works. And we’re an ecosystem, filled with niches and strategies that will work in one place won’t thrive in another.

In reality, movements have always required a partnership between organizations that durably build and protect power and bring people together, coupled with regular, non “movement professional” people who decide that they are the ones they’ve been waiting for, and stand up for something when the moment presents itself.

Unfortunately for those who like me long deeply for one clear plan to emerge: that’s not happening. There will not be one badass strategy that we all can just hop on the bandwagon of. There will not be one leader who we all adore.

There will instead just be us: showing up for each other’s actions, creating our own, gathering in rooms big and small. Trying some things, failing, trying other things again. As some strategies gain public traction, they will be more possible to replicate and gather force. Leaders will emerge in the doing. Trusted voices call out, and we will call back. A variety of strategies all are needed. If you haven’t yet spent time with this small book published during WW2 in small tactics for simple sabotage, I highly recommend it!

I recommend spending time with this gorgeous graphic — which my friend Christine (Tender Warrior!) fleshed out even more recently in a zine that you can download. She illustrates Leah Penniman’s idea that change is a butterfly held up by four wings, all made up of different forms of change making. Where do you feel called to work? All roles are needed.

And, in order to understand movements, we need to understand power: what it is, why we need it, and how to grow it.

So, what is power?

Power has a bad rap. You ask people what they think about when they think of the word power, and they’re likely to say something like I did when I first did this exercise: Rich white people in suits who don’t care about anything other than money. Capitalism. Guns.

But another way to think about power is this: power is the ability to get things done. Think about horse power, or a PTO hookup for a tractor. A plug. Power is just the engine that enables us to achieve our goals. It’s neither inherently good nor bad, it’s just fuel.

As the Rev. Dr. MLK Jr says:

Christine made the above and below graphics that explains our shared working framework of power, (I know y’all she’s on a roll!!) Read the whole “where are we going and how do we get there” zine here. Art gets right to it!

Power is generated by organizing three key ingredients: ideas, people, and resources. Weave together the narrative space, build people power, and flow resources there, and you have a potent combo.

But, what is organizing?

I would be happy to write for a long time about organizing because it’s what I like best: working with people and helping them to do things together. Talking to people one on one and in groups. Asking people what they care about. Texting people back. Showing up at each other’s houses with dinner when friends are sick. Sending relevant articles to those people fired up on that topic. Asking what is keeping your neighbors up at night and listening to their response. Proposing an idea and seeing if people will help you. (I wrote about how organizing is like making music here.)

But the best explanation of what is organizing and why it matters comes from the poet Marge Piercy wrote “The Low Road.” (Again, always: art has always played a central role in change making, precisely because it can cut through a drone of lengthy words and get straight to the heart of the matter.

I woke up this morning craving it with my early morning coffee, the fortification needed to start the day with focus and purpose. I read it aloud this morning. (A friend wrote me back that this poem is sharp and comforting, like holding a jagged rock in your pocket.)

In case you’re a text rather than a read- aloud person, here it is:

The Low Road

By Marge Piercy

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can't walk, can't remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can't stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.

(A quick aside is that I can certainly always finish a pie no matter the number of dinner guests.)

And so, finally, what can we do right now?

First, we can follow trusted organizations that bring people together. Some of the organizations I am a member of or follow closely include Choose Democracy, Working Families Party, Faith in Action, Rabbis for Ceasefire, National Family Farm Coalition, and locally NOFA-VT, L’Chaim Collective, Migrant Justice. There are others, many others, who need people and resources. Find ones that resonate with you and start watching what they’re up to. These are the swimming coaches, the ship captains, who have at least some training in navigating storms. Pick wisely and trust them.

When they ask for volunteers or put out a call for an action, respond. Say you’ll help. Move chairs, sign in volunteers. Get to know people.

Last night I met with a friend and a movement leader who is the director of a local democracy and rights organization here who I trust and know well. I asked her just that: what do you think the core movement activity should be this week?

She suggested that we are at the stage of most needing more sustained public protest, for two reasons:

1) Public protest makes visible our dissent and helps others come out of their fear of being targeted and take action– already people are scared of persecution and DJT saying that protest is going to be made illegal is a clear threat. Again, use it or lose it, and strength in numbers. Get out and make visible your discontent as a first step. This is not an end goal, but it readies the way for more specific asks.

2) Non violent protest has the best track record of success against authoritarianism, which by all analysis we are now living in (or at least a very strong attempt towards which we want to contest).

Public protest also gives us space to practice working together and showing up together, as a way to build our readiness for bigger resistance actions like general strike and mass boycott. (We are definitely going to need those too, but we need more practice if they are going to work.) The 50501 actions (which are being planned in a completely decentralized, no- staff at all manner) are happening- perhaps can you join one?

Some of us also tested out the strategy of boycott last week. We love to see it. I read a lot of think pieces criticizing the boycott, and I frankly feel tired out by that. Yes, let’s critique and be discerning, but let’s also just TRY TOGETHER which means accepting imperfections— and moving forward with our work despite them. We all agree that a one day boycott, without clear asks wasn’t enough. It’s also not failing if something doesn’t work the first time. And failing is also ok, failing is an important element of trying. We can and should refine and continue the boycott.

We can also do resource-spreading, or what I think of as the inverse of a boycott: putting resources towards something you do want to grow. Can you identify a way to invest those funds into your local community? Make a list of the organizations and businesses and people you want to survive in your community, and shift your resources there. What we feed will grow. Remember, we build power through people, ideas, and MONEY. Wherever we put our money grows in power. Choose wisely. For example: It makes no sense to fight Bezos on limiting freedom of the press, and then turn around and fund him with our spending money.

Study movements that have come before. I was up early this morning on the phone with my good friend, a dairy farmer who had just finished up milking. He called me to talk through the tariff impacts on his business and what his plans are, what he thinks we should be doing to agitate. He mentioned that he was reading more history lately and had been thinking a lot about Gandhi’s tactics. Gandhi didn’t protest by marching alone— he marched to the sea to make his own salt as a way of standing up to far more armed powers of colonization. What are the non-violent, earth- rooted, deeply potent symbolic (and material) actions in each of our communities that stand up to dehumanization, pillaging of the earth, and authoritarianism? Let’s be dreaming on that (and again, if we think of one, go ahead and move on it!)

Find ways to sustain your spirit. It is no surprise that most sustained nonviolent movements have been led, or at least buoyed, by people of faith. As my friend Reverend Stephen A. Green, who founded Faith for Black Lives Matter says, “plugging into spirit is the ultimate power source. With this connection, we will never run out of fuel.”

Whatever you want to call it– spirit, source, G-d, the universe, mystery, earth, the small still voice– tending to our sacred selves as a part of movement work that is often overlooked. Finding ways to tend to your relationship with the more-than-material is critical. Without mystery and possibility, folks get bitter, burnt out, nihilistic.

Prayer, ritual, singing, silence, time planting seeds or walking in the woods make a space inside of us, open us up, crack us open, help us to heal.

All these practices remind us of our size (very, very small) and the arc of deep time (very, very long) and the amount of people who have lived in similarly challenging times (most all of the ancestors). Chart by the stars and you start to notice their beauty. Notice beauty and the journey itself becomes tolerable, maybe even joyful.

Surround yourself with a community who can help you remember the stories that matter. The narratives we tell ourselves become real. Take good care of which you allow around your dinner table. Those we repeat become the paths we will trod. Focus on stories of bravery, stories of hope, of persistence.

Practice your swimming, practice your constellations, practice resting when the waves are low. Soon you’ll be strong enough to be the at the helm, steering the raft we’re all roping together with the scraps of old survival stories our people managed to salvage. We’ll all need to take our turn captaining the ship, so that others can rest.

The waves are rising, but so are we.

Will we be complicit and repeat the worst of what humans can do, the devastating pattern of descent into dehumanization, violence, authoritarianism?

Or will we wake up, stand up, and together move towards the future we long for and know is possible? A future that values life, justice, thriving for the earth and all her people?

It is in times of change and liminality, in the small moments between the eras, that determine what unfolds. Everything depends on what we do now.

Whenever there is a big transition and it’s not clear which way things will turn out, what is possible is up for grabs. Who has power. What the story is. What values are allowed, codified, repeated, resisted or replaced.

So, let’s be bold in this liminal moment, standing at a shared threshold. We are being offered a window of opportunity in all this chaos. Let’s push it all the way open.

A friend reminded me yesterday that “our ancestors did more, with less. Look to them for guidance now.”

And so, I turn to my tradition, and the lineages of people who developed durable practices that have lasted for thousands and thousands of years– practices that allow for surviving and thriving, despite what all of history could throw at them. No matter where you came from, you descend from hopeful survivors, too, or you wouldn’t be here.

In Judaism– the tradition I’m situated in and in which I’m raising my children– we have a very clear practice. When we’re at a threshold, we have a crystal clear instruction: Kiss the mezuzah.

The Torah itself tells us to place mezuzot on all of our doorways, that most quotidian thresholds.

A mezuzah is a tiny talisman, flashing an ancient message at us: “You seem to be at a threshold! Make sure you remember what really matters in all your comings and your goings! Don’t act a fool out there! We’ve been through this before!”

Mezuzah literally means doorpost, signaling its placement at the lintel, the liminal place between outside and inside. When we are passing through an in between, we have a unique moment to reaffirm what matters, to remember to carry truth with us from inside, out.

The origin of the word itself has two possible roots, and which is “correct” is disputed. Some scholars pointing to root zwz (ז-ו-ז) meaning 'motion' or 'shift'. Another etymology points back to an Akkadian word mazzāzu': stand.

Like in all good lore, both things are true. (Thank you, Tyson Yunkaporta!)

Held together, the two meanings reveal the complex work the mezuzah itself does. First, they teach us how “to shift”: given changing conditions, on what can we bend? How can we navigate swiftly flowing waters? How can we remain nimble and flexible? As we move from home into world, how can we stay adaptable to changing conditions?

Yet mezuzot also teach us how “to stand” and on what to be rooted. How do we build strength and stillness of an oak tree, even in times of strong winds?

As we cross thresholds from the safety of our home, where we root and experience slices of the world we long for, out into the wider world, where we are exposed to the elements and must contend with the world as it currently is, the mezuzah challenges us to hold both: flexibility and change, and rooted strength.

But still: rooted into what?

We must look inside the mezuzah to the prayer itself.

Inside each is a tiny scroll with a handwritten prayer called the Shema. You have to be a special kind of scribe with training to be allowed to write these prayers, so these prayers are physical objects imbued with years of training, hand craft, and love.

The words of the Shema itself call out: “Shema Israel/ Adonai Eloheinu/ Adonai Echad.”

Translated we read:” Listen, all of you people who wrestle with G-d! The lord our Gd, the Lord is one!”

Or, for our modern readers: “Listen up! Y’all who are struggling! Yall who seek answers and find only questions! There is the One Big Truth! The one big truth – of holiness– applies to all of us! Do not forget!”

Are you living in a time of dehumanization? Do not forget. Kiss the mezuzah. All is holy. All is one.

Living in a time of chaos? Do not forget. Kiss the mezuzah. All is holy. All is one.

Living in a time of wealth worship and false idols? Do not forget. Kiss the mezuzah. All is holy. All is one.

We are all right now moving from one place to another, unclear of the way to go. Do not forget. Kiss the mezuzah. All is holy. All is one.

I have mezuzot all around my house. And lately, I’ve taken to putting other reminders in my doorposts and thresholds as well. First, I put a tiny painting of a strawberry that a dear friend made. It was part of her study of abundance, juice, and joy– of remembering that summer comes back even when all we see is snow. Then I put a bread and puppet print of ‘thanks’ in the doorpost, reminding me of gratitude for it all, and the joy of resistance through art and expression. I kiss them both, along with the shema. These are my guides. From here to there.

As we continue to navigate these challenging, chaotic, hard moments of change, I hope we can all remember: we are at a threshold. The safety of my warm home is at my back, but the big wide world is an open question mark ahead.

What will I allow? What story will I be a part of? In what ways can I bend and flow, like water around rock, and in what ways must I be firm, a tree deeply rooted? When facing anger, fear, dehumanization, will I comply, be silent, retreat? I pass through the doorway. I will not forget. I will kiss the mezuzah. All is holy. All is one. Here we go.

Or, instead I could draft a short reflection on the last couple of months of local organizing work I’ve been involved with, tacking stories like push pins onto a cork board, trying to map a fractal pattern? Should I share my prayer that small acts of community building, local organizing, solidarity peppered with potlucks just might add up to a meaningful culture shift over time?

Well, unfortunately, I just watched one of the world’s richest men perform an unmistakeable N-zi salute at the new president’s inaugural celebration and these ideas went out the window. I felt unmoored, nauseated, terrified, and silent.

I take a breath. Such egregious performances, like this salute, or worse: real acts of violence like the soon-to be-attempted deportation blitz, are meant a shock and awe campaign designed as a test. Will we stay silent? Those testing certainly hope so; they desperately need to prove their power. The plan is to take our collective breath away, to scare us into policing ourselves in anticipatory fear. Some may want to believe the illusion that silence will protect us; if we don’t say anything about those other people they have chosen to dehumanize first, we might somehow squeak by. Not so, folks. It’s all of us for all of us, always has been. The people/ united/ can never be defeated. We know this.

The silencing, the fear are the point of such shenanigans: those in extreme, consolidated power want us unmoored; they benefit when our brains are scrambled and anxious, distracted from our goals. If we stay in stunned silence we don’t move, talk, or get organized. If us many regular people stay scared, we also stay divided and angry, unclear about where to direct our hurt we may turn on each other, or perhaps we just fall in line and simply comply.

Most importantly, those putting on the show hope we will swallow the story they are peddling that: there is nothing we can do.

The brazen attempts to demonstrate that we regulars have no power in fact reveals the opposite: a Wizard of Oz booming voice only has might if we don’t pull back the curtain. This kind of mirage always ultimately crumbles, a house of cards too fragile, too rickety to stand for long. Or, to quote the honorable Rev. MLK Jr (z”l) on the day after his memorial holiday: “unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality [...] right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”

Everyday people are the ones who ultimately decide what kind of future we are all walking towards, because it is through our labor, conversations, neighborhoods, schools, and organizations that we move towards the future. As Annie Dillard says that “how we spend our days is, ultimately, how we spend our lives.” We make whatever path we continue walking today.

We decide what future we will allow, create, participate in. We are the many who will keep each other safe, who will call on each other when we need help, who will show up when needed. We are the ones who will quit our jobs if we are required to behave immorally. (Time to get brave and clear, y’all.) We are the ones who will start needed projects if they don’t exist yet, often quietly and not in the public eye. (Time to get humble and clear, yall.) We are the ones who decide what we will normalize, or resist, in our workplaces and schools, what language we allow or do not, who we refuse to leave behind or cast out. We are the ones who will tend to our networks of care, share resources, and make wherever we are a safer place for all.

I am able to tap into this clarity, perhaps, as I am significantly more resourced than normal. I just returned home from a weeklong retreat with a gathering of movement elders. This group, largely in their sixties, seventies, and eighties have been at the helm of change work for their whole lives. I feel unspeakably, incredibly fortunate to spend a whole week in conversation with them, harmonizing in song circles, and on slow walks in the woods while getting advice from these leaders who have spent decades more than I’ve been alive asking how to best use their lives to be of service to people and the planet. Soon, I hope to share more here reflecting on the magic, profound gift, and restoration of this week soon. (So much to say about radical hospitality! About unexpected invitations! About the leaders who cleared paths! How rare and beautiful, to have a full week with a whole team of seasoned change-making mentors!)

But for now, for this day, what I want to offer is the profound calm that comes with of being with a group of people who understand, in an embodied way, that they have spent their lifetime on purpose, of service. (And they continue to look around and ask, how can I continue to take what I've learned and be of service?)

One of my teachers calls this sense of purpose “the long work”-- that is, a sense of how the struggle extends far past the parameters of one’s job, through all of your life and across generations, far beyond one’s lifetime.

In this moment on the world clock, my hope is that we all are brave enough to find our unique purpose, and embrace our role in the long, shared work. That we also may all be humble enough to know there are a lot of other people out there pulling for change, too. That we can somehow find a space to trust ourselves to do what is needed, and to trust others to cover what we cannot do alone. May we find the communities that cheer us on to keep going, to push outside of what was once our comfort zone to imagine a new path, and then take steps down it.

And finally, perhaps most importantly: may we all hold some space for the unexpected, for the miraculous, for dare I say: the joyful. A major take away from my week with these luminaries was that, despite how serious their work, how arduous their struggles and losses, one thing rang out of every person in the group: the delight, the willingness, the possibility of catching someone else’s eye across a circle and starting to chuckle. Perhaps allowing that giggle to build to a laugh until you might have to throw back your head and let out a belly roar of hilarity, tears streaming down your face.

Do you remember the last time you laughed so hard you cried? Do you remember the feeling of release, of calm that followed?

Often, I get violently serious about what we’re all facing. I, like the many people who long for a more just, verdant and thriving world, feel an intensity of grief for what is broken in a way that can feel extremely hard to carry. The week alone that I was in retreat, LA burned, leaving many dear friends without homes. I watched bombs continue to fall on Gaza even after a plan for a ceasefire was announced, I learned of neighbors who are today at extreme risk of deportation. Tonight I watch a N*zi salute at the inauguration celebration. I struggle to find any of it funny.

Which is clearly true; none of it is funny. And yet, as living patron saint Wendell Berry wrote so presciently in his Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front (read the whole thing here):

“Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”

If these movement elders, these teachers who have been deeply in the struggle, themselves grieving spouses and children in the personal and big movement losses in the collective, could find space and humility to laugh, I should be open to it, too.

Laughter darts out from the daily struggle, golden stitches of embroidery thread poking through the tapestry of our lives. Laughter serves like the stars, useful for navigating in a small boat across a wide dark sea: the constellations twinkling, reminding us of the direction we set out to follow when we steered the dingy of our life away from the harbor. Laughter invokes wonder, as suddenly a shooting star flies by, out of nowhere, sending out a rippling trail of light in its wake. A laugh can leave you with that feeling, too: gratitude for the chance just to be alive for this moment, despite it all.

Laughter pierces our individual struggles like holes nailed through a tin can, allowing our light to spill out into the darkness around us, helping us to find each other as we bushwhack our way through the forest. Drawn into a shared experience of joy, we suddenly notice we’re not alone. There are many of us out here, walking, finding a way. I’ll follow your light, you can follow mine.

Laughter punctures the narrative those in power force, that all is already won, conquered. Nothing we can do? Yet we are laughing even now. The emperor has no clothes.

On the first night of this retreat, I sat at dinner with a new friend, Milenko, a badass artist and community builder in his seventies. I didn’t know it yet only on night one, but Milenko was soon to reveal himself as the person I spent the week following around: brilliance, insight, songs and incisive, connective jokes spinning off him like whey from butter in the churn. An artist originally from Slovenia, Milenko has devoted his life helping communities heal across a lot of difference, conflict and rupture by collaborating on massive art projects. He focuses on deep listening for transformation, and watching him hold conversation in a group is magical. He can draw out even the most reticent conversationalist with perceptive, gentle, generous questions– and better: he really listens to the answers.

Milenko is a person with a gentle steadiness that I long for. As I do, about five minutes into our relationship I posed the following to him: “Ok, so… to be honest it all feels pretty bleak and heavy to me right now. What do YOU think we need to do right now to actually help create the world we really long for?” Milenko took a beat, smiled, looked at me with kindness and also a bit of mischief. “Grace, I wonder if we just need to dream up much funnier stories!”

Thus commenced my week experimenting with the medicine of laughing, largely doled out by Milenko and James (another dear mentor/ friend/ gentle father figure/ teacher / rabble rouser who invited me into this space and who I have written about before.)

Laughter serves as a needle to pop illusions. First, critical for our purposes here today: to rupture the constructed balloon of power. Ursula LeGuin wrote searingly that “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” If a N*zi salute is intended to freeze and terrify us, then sharing our most daring, joyful, funny futures is the counterpose. These stories of our dreaming endear us to each other. The move us out of fight or flight, into the realm of possibility.

Oh, you say there is nothing we can do? Please. We are laughing even now dreaming about the future we are building.

Laughter also helpfully pops our own sense of ego. In one of our retreat circles, I shared that I had been struggling with the feeling of so desperately wanting, and failing, to do anything meaningful to stop climate change. I shared how I felt panicked thinking about my children growing up in a world ravaged. Everyone listened deeply, nodding and sending me empathy. Later, I was sitting again with Milenko at dinner. We were talking about how to cultivate irreverence, and why laughing at ourselves and our situations mattered. I was reflecting about how seriously I often felt about the climate catastrophes around me, how they unmoored me, caused me to wake in the night. Was it possible to hold this more lightly? If so, how?

Milenko (very gently, kindly, in his dear accent and his already demonstrated true care for me) quietly wondered, “You mean, like how you think you alone can stop climate change? How that’s somehow on your plate, and the rest of us are just here to watch? It’s….. It’s honestly…. a tiny bit funny of an idea.” I started smiling, then laughing, releasing, a catharsis washing over me like waves on the shore of this useless ego trap. The alchemy of laughing made the space for me to actually hear what he was saying, the gift he was extending. Of course the notion that I’m going to somehow stop climate change– especially do it alone– is patently ridiculous, some bizarre white ego-y savior superhero movie bullshit, and I need to let that shit go, asap, if I’m going to be of much use.

As David Whyte writes, “Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.”

Laughter is the all- too-often missing secret ingredient in this much needed recipe for change, the salt in the soup that allows the rest of the flavors to sing. What is the boldest, most wildly joyful future we could dream up is a question I’ve heard before, but far better: can we even make the road there FUNNY? I know from parenting tiny children that if you try to win them over with serious commands to do anything, you are doomed. But make it a game? Make it a joke? Make it joyful? Watch them fly to put on their boots and coats. All humans are motivated towards joy much more than threat or doom.

So, a question before me after watching the salute, preparing to help my community resist any immigration raid attempts today. How can we turn toward irreverence, laughing, out of commitment to the possibility for something different?

The best way to be sure that flowers will come in spring is to plant the bulbs in fall, so last night I pulled out some cream from my friend Pete, a dairy farmer who gifts me gallons every year. I mixed up a batch of ice cream, anticipating my favorite yearly event: Butterfest. A few friends dreamt it up in the days of peak loneliness during the early pandemic, back when we were on house arrest. Jacob and I were terrified that our oldest child, a kiddo with an at the time extremely unmanaged lung disease, would somehow catch this new illness that his pediatrician already told us tender, struggling lungs “couldn’t handle.” It was a moment we were anything but laughing. That year especially, we needed an anchor to future joy, a plan– something to believe there would be a time that we could see friends again, could be together, could laugh. We planned the event as a joke, and weren’t able to throw it for years. Then we did it, and now we (and a few of our closest couple hundreds of friends + random people who pull over on the side of the windy Vermont highway to see what’s going on by the giant shipping container painted like a butter stick, yes, literally) do it yearly.

Even when we’re suffering, we can hold on to the idea that joy is in our collective future, and work accordingly.

Butterfest offers us a chance for rejuvenation, a moment devoted to celebrating the fat of the land and the richness of being together, and is held on a beautiful farm along a cold, clean river with more joyful elements than I’ll enumerate here. This year I have decided to get rigorous about my ice cream prep and make a gallon of ice cream every week because then, come July, I won’t have to stress or sprint. I will already have enough ice cream on hand for the hundreds of people to eat as much as they want, to scoop seconds and thirds, as I know already they will be dripping with sweat in the hot July afternoon, dancing to fiddle and drums. I prepare for our future celebration.

[double chocolate luscious ice cream/ promise of future joy]

As the night settles around me, I carry the churned cream– extremely generous gift of pastures and cows who chew cud and the people who get up at 2:00 am to milk them daily– down into the basement to the deep freezer to drop the quart to harden, where I find the whole freezer still more than half filled, abundant with berries we picked and froze in the summer to nourish us in the winter. Here are the chickens we grew and shechted in the summer, thanking them for their nourishment. Here is a bag of bush cherries, there two of elderberry, gallons of blueberries from a friends place. Always preparing, and along the way, finding moments of joy in the work, licking the bowl. Mary Oliver says that “joy is not meant to be a crumb.” The seeds we tend today bring the fruit we harvest tomorrow.

In this moment of remembering again the earth’s abundance, waiting for me even in the dark winter, I recommit with a feeling of calm for the work that I’ve found, chosen, committed to. All I have to do is be present to my life, to accept the work I have chosen, to bring my best self to it.

Today, I will drive down to a small town in Vermont where we’re supporting a group of community members in a collaborative process to buy, conserve, and collectively steward a farm that had gone out of business, rejuvenating it with care, intention, time. It’s hard, slow work, requiring these tenacious folks grit and strength to figure out where the funds will come from, how to structure the project, and how to collaboratively govern. It’s hard, but such needed, beautiful work, that will protect land and keep the community fed, all while deconstructing the idea of the nuclear family farm as the only model. I hope to bring some concrete ideas around structure and funding, and maybe even some jokes.

Then, tonight (Jan 21st) I’ll be hosting a member meeting for NOFA-VT members about immigration crackdown and how to show up for all our neighbors, especially those friends worried about deportation and being separated from their families right now. We’re offering know your rights training, and helping folks strategize about how they can each be of service in this moment. We always end with the question: “What can we do together that we can’t do alone?”

If you’re local and a NOFA member, I hope you can make time to join us and find a way to plug in to the work that’s needed right now. (Sign up here.)

While I won’t be able to serve everyone an ice cream cone (one of the very sad realities of zoom) – I will have music playing, dozens and dozens of other good people for you to connect with who want to help. Finally, even amidst the fear, the division, the fracture and the threat– we might find a moment to breathe, and maybe, will find the strength and humility to let go, and laugh together, not as an end goal, but as sustenance, nourishment, and reminder that the world doesn’t have to be like this.

We could make it joyful.

In a moment when many of us are struggling to find sea legs on turbulent waters-- or perhaps are still just retching overboard-- this generous author, Daniel Hunter was at the ready to share some steady, calm navigation. Who was this voice from the future, helping us find each other, find our way? I looked Daniel up, curious which Aikido studio they’ve been practicing at to be this ready, in this stance even in this moment. Daniel has been working from the intersection of strategy and soul for years (he has a book by the same name). He teaches and refines collective strategy, makes space to do soul-care, and puts his body on the line with direct actions. This  mix: strategy, soul, stance offers a balanced three-legged stool. 

I do not intend to carve a pedestal for one uniquely exceptional superhero (though I appreciate your generous way- lighting,  Daniel!) But we need no more individual exceptionalism, not one more opportunity to think: ‘well, maybe they will save us!’ Or: ‘I’m nowhere near that amazing, so what could I do?!’

 In fact, Daniel’s self-description itself points away from the idea of their work as that of individual hero. Instead of the list of accolades, awards, and tiresome “40 under 40” lists prominent thinkers so often have as their bio, Daniel’s offers more a map of relationships. His bio shares an inventory of many, many people trying, praying, organizing, insisting, joining, moving together: “Quakers on building campaigns to stop mountaintop removal, those fighting for public sector employees with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, pastors in Sierra Leone, independence activists in Northeast India, environmentalists in Australia and Indonesian religious leaders.”

The morning after the election I needed to write the team I lead at my work. These are people who work on the front lines of the climate crisis, and a membership, many of whom have lost their homes and farms two times in the last two years due to flooding. We all know well what a political ordering that denies climate change will mean for the policies and programs that have very real impacts on our work and our people.  Many of our crew (in fact, many in every group of people) feel personal safety concerns.  Whether Queer folks, folks of color,  people who immigrated, people living with disability, people taking care of kiddos and elders. The dehumanization language and vitriol we’ve heard these months put people on notice: be afraid.

What could I say to be brave and honest, actively hopeful and fierce. But. As the song leaders Abigail and Shawn Bengsons sing: “Hope is not a feeling/ hope is an action.”

[Watch for sustenance! Thank you, thank you Abigail and Shawn for your spells of endurance these years.]

Sometimes the only hope-action is remembering I am not alone, I do not have to know all the moves alone. I reached out to a mentor of mine, Niaz. Niaz has been pushing towards justice longer than I’ve been alive. We got connected through work, and I quickly saw that I wanted to learn from her. Niaz has a certain gravity about her; when she weighs in on a course of action, others fall silent, nodding, digesting. Niaz is able to see through the distractions of noise from real content, distinguish the froth churn of waves from the tip of a shark fin in the sea, and steer the ship accordingly. Niaz is banned from a lot of places due to her direct action work. (One of my favorite of her stories is an arrest at a long John Silvers protesting their plunder of the sea– she may have been dressed as a pirate? Perhaps that part is apocryphal— but very possible.)

The very best thing about Niaz is that she laughs often, loudly, heartily, head back and throat full. She embodies joy in hard work. Niaz makes me feel not only that change is possible, change is inevitable. It is already in her captain’s spyglass sight. 

Years ago a friend and mentor told me: if you want someone to mentor you, ask them formally. (Movement lesson here: articulate a plan; embrace rigor around it.) So, some years back, after a few meetings in big groups with her I wrote to her. I want to learn how you to move more like you do. Could you help teach me? 

 Not everyone I have asked this question says yes. Some laugh it off. Some ignore it. Some say, I am too busy. Niaz said something humble but generous: I’m happy to share what little I know. Then, this ridiculously busy, head of a national organization badass said, I’ll send you questions every morning about what it means to be a leader. And then she did. 

adrienne maree brown says: trust the people and they become trustworthy. I add: ask the people to help you and they will. 

Early on Wednesday morning, Niaz responded to me quickly. (With the rigor, with the precision, with the care.)  ‘Grace, it is OK to be speechless in any one moment. You can be without words today. Our work is not a moment.” I remembered over the summer when we were in Kentucky working together on a project. I was agitated about a new issue that I wanted to add to our shared work plan. Niaz kept calming my urgency down.  I need to have the discipline of accepting this is going to take many generations. We know the work won’t be done in our lifetime: this is just our leg of the marathon.

I reached out to another mentor, James. He’s turning eighty this year and has been helping communities take care of each other through climate devastation for decades. There’s a similar story of how we connected. The asking. I sent James a text. The phone rang immediately. James greeted me: “I’m here. It’s good to hear your voice. Let’s breathe together for a second.”

There was a time I asked my father for a dollar, and he gave me a ten dollar raise/ and when I needed my mother and I called her/ and she stayed with me for days. - Emily Saliers

So much has emerged from being willing to pose the question to the universe: what is possible? how much we can count on each other? Very often I am surprised at how much is possible if only we ask. 

And so, my elders got calm and clear to do my work. Today, grieve and pause and support and encourage. Allow yourself the time to digest and breathe. And move tomorrow.

A dear friend in Georgia who is one of a couple people who has been with me through it all: deaths, births, the stuff in between. She’s currently trying with her partner to get pregnant. They’re worried about what may happen if one of them needs an abortion at some point during pregnancy, what medical care would they have. Risks are real. Lives are at stake. My phone dings with love from her: Wellness check. She asks to see a picture of what I’m eating and drinking.

On election night, another friend invited us to eat pies together to quell the anxiety as polls came in, to not be alone. Another neighbor dropped by with baked goods the morning after the election and asked if she could just lay on the couch for the morning. I stay nourished because of my friends, because I am not alone.

My nine year old ran up the stairs. He busted through the door, all muddy and wet. He’s obsessed with pond mud lately, digging through the damp edges of a wetland, pressing his hands through the muck and dead plants to pull out malleable clay underneath. This layer of sub-soil clay is where the turtles burrow for the winter, sometimes emerging with a whole world taking root on top of them while they rest. Amos likes to dig his hands in a making tiny, detailed creations. He lays two clay creations on the floor: a braided bread and a small bird. I made these mama! Look! Do you love them?

Like Daniel, I assess the worth of my life by the list of my relations, the people I can show up for and who show up for me when I need them.

I have been so happy to hear a call to relationship with a lot of folks repeating the line, don’t despair, organize! But I’ve also wondered if we know what organize really means? 

Organize is taking our sets of relationships and getting ever more skilled at doing hard things together.

 If you have played sports, you probably have a helpful metaphor to employ here, but I’ve never been super great at following arbitrary rules to win points. I have, however, been one voice of many in choirs and singing groups.

Singing groups are communities in which we show up for practice regularly whether there is a concert coming up or not. In a choir, you must learn to find the same note and hold it together. Whether this learning happens by ear or eye or listening, there are many paths to how that learning happens—in a church pew, with a teacher, in friend groups on front stoops. However you learn, singing together requires discipline and precision, to be able to move together in tempo, words, pitch, volume—to move at the same time with others. It also requires differentiation and knowing your niche: the ability to hold one steady beat while another part moves off that first note to make a harmony, and then another and another. This is the same as the strength of an ecosystem, the wisdom of the earth.  The skill of a choir is reflected by the amount of diversity of notes and beats it can hold and still move together. The more diversity, the richer the sound. 

On the flip: if you try to make more than one note (do all the things as just one person) it just makes a strange noise, not music. Pick your note, pick your work, celebrate your niche. Stop wondering if you should be covering the bass line while singing soprano. Embrace your role and trust in others to do their part. That’s the only way the music really sings. 

Group singing also means trusting the leaders -- section heads, musical accompaniment, conductors-- to be in sync together with subtle eye and body motions to shift the whole when needed. Join trusted organizations and people who have been in the work for longer than you. 

Good singing requires practice, practice, practice, with rigor, accepting correction when you get it wrong and learning a different way. Training allows you to be ready to soar no matter whatever the piece of music you are handed. Keep showing up. 

 Group singing, when produced with attention to each other, without abandoning your self, with trust in leadership, can create transcendence, illumination. Sometimes, spirit shows up and the sound wraps you in a swath that is bigger than a lifetime, bigger than words or notes or people. Possibility. Wholeness. Make space for spirit. This is when a movement thrives. This is when we become more than just us, and the whole universe conspires. 

   Before the election I knew that whatever happened, I knew I needed to sing on Wednesday night. I didn’t know what to expect but I assumed we would be anxious and scared whatever was happening. I texted a friend to ask if we could use her community’s house of worship for it. Yes. (Trust the people.)  I put out a quick post: No matter the outcome of the election,  we need each other.

“In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing about the dark times.” - Bertolt Brecht.

There will be dessert too.

Yes, folks responded. What can I bring. How can I help. What do we need. (And they become trustworthy.) 

               There is a Sufi phrase: you take one step towards Gd, Gd takes ten steps towards you. People are the same. The best part about taking one action is ten people around you joining in. A friend sent me some money for the rental. Another picked up name tags for the welcome table. A third came to my house and baked all day to prep food for our sing. A fourth sent song suggestions and a fifth brought his steel guitar to accompany.  I could go on to ten small acts of helping. Not me, us. This is practice.

There will be bigger tests, much, much harder tests of community. We will have to face, (perhaps we are already facing, have been facing for years): what are you willing to do for each other? Some questions to consider at this moment: Are you willing to stand up when your neighbors are threatened with deportation? When your trans patient needs medical care or a pregnant person needs an abortion? Are you ready to share resources when climate catastrophe hits and there isn’t a plan? Many people in our country have long been at this level of being tested. Many have already shown their bravery, their endurance. Look around: people who can teach you, who you can learn from. 

Black people, women, queer people, immigrants, poor people must be our core teachers, our leaders— those who have been charting these waters for generations already. These are the people in our country who have the knowledge, experience, and resilience of moving through deep, personal challenge. It comes as no surprise that most excellence in protest/ grief/ hope singing traditions have also been protected by Black women.

[Growing up in Atlanta, taking in Sweet Honey concerts at Spelman or marching in an MLK JR Parade while Bernice Johnson Reagon (z”l) rang out the call was part of the shared culture.]

Some of us still have more privileges and safety; we haven’t yet felt we had to choose what we will do to keep each other safe. I suggest it’s time we test our muscles. Lift the smaller weights, do what we can. Sing the songs you can learn with the skill you have today. Shift resources. Get involved. Next, learn a song with quicker notes, dissonant harmonies. Feel the stretch. Take a personal risk to speak truth.  As you learn to hold your part against what at first sounds impossible,  you must also learn to trust in the composer, to embrace the tension in notes right up close to one another. Be braver. Keep practicing. We all need the practice. Take it gently when we can. Breathe. Know that more tests, harder ones, will come. Sing This Little Light. Keep showing up. Start to feel the melodies working inside you, even when you are “alone.” Begin to feel yourself as the music, let it flow through you as a vessel. Way will open. Speak truth. 

  On Wednesday night, around seventy five people packed into a house of worship, lit up bright in the dark of northern night. Some folks knew each other, most didn’t. There were babies and elders. We didn’t really talk much- we just got into it. First we learned simple chants, then harmonies, then riffs and parts. When we got off a rhythm,  I asked people to stop, and re-orient, re-learn the line. Discipline is joyful. The music then soared, we clapped when we sang a line and it worked. Even in newness, we can do hard things, accomplish tricky harmonies.  

We made amazingly rich, inventive sounds; some elders and young people wept on a bench together. A few babies slept right through it all, snug beneath our blanket of warm sound. 

The best part of a community song circle is the songs you don’t expect, didn’t know at the start of the evening. Other people’s songs that catch you off guard and stay with you as you walk home. A movement chaplain taught a chant where the beat was spoken “there will be better days.”

[Simple to learn and harmonize- a mantra for these days that feel so hard to move through.]

Another person requested a collective scream; the collective catharsis was profound. Someone plucked union songs on a steel guitar.

At the end of the night people hugged, took warm baked goods home in pockets, wrote down their names on a sign up sheet. The weaving continues, deepens, as more of us are woven together. And the next morning I received several versions of this text from friends:  “I need that to happen again. I will pay the rental or will bring the materials to make it happen. I, we need that.” This is what happens in good collective work: people find what part they love,  a way to help. Embrace their niche, hold their note, move towards each other.

We come alive with care and brilliance when we can let go of the pressure of being a soloist and find richness in the harmony. 

We have song circles scheduled for the next many months now. If you’re local come join us— will be listed on the events page here. And wherever you are: I made a list here of simple songs to teach in groups that keep spirits up— feel free to use it. If you know one I should add, let me know.

Who we are is our relations, what we do together is our practice.  The way through is harmony. I do not pretend it will be simple or easy. I believe we will be singing through real danger and real harm. We cannot sing the danger away. But I do know singing has sustained people in struggle for generations, buoys whales and birds while migrating. Singing allows us to go on, to remember what matters. Singing weaves relations, heals loneliness, makes meaning. Together we will sing a song, a song that makes life worth living.

p.s. I’d love to hear from y’all, whether you write me or comment here, what songs are you singing lately to buoy her heart? And with whom are you singing?

[Earth made by Morgan and Sarah, which we used on Rosh Hashanah during our re-enactment of the creation story, mainly acted by children with puppets we made from cardboard and paper mache. We re-used the earth on Yom Kippur to hold our our grief in the form of yarzheit, memorial candles, for all the lives lost this past year. One day, the earth will take our weapons and compost them back into nutrients for life again. May we spend our lives hastening the day.]

[Please look again at how unimpressed the earth is with us.]

Over the last two weeks we have been in the period of the year called the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe. These days span from Rosh Hashanah (the birthday of the world) to Yom Kippur (the day of atonement). We start in celebration and amazement that we get to be alive, that creation came to be at all, and that we are her on this planet where apples grow on trees and honey drips out from their hollows.

[Scraping honeycomb for everyone to taste the sweetness of creation from bees tended by one of our core team, Lindsey. She also made this local shofar, buying a goat’s horn from a farmer, and then boiling, scraping, and drilling into them using her neighbors metal working shop, shared for free. As we sing: Every land is a holy land. Many thanks for these beautiful pictures taken by another member, Danielle.]

We end with atonement and grappling at Yom Kippur, expressing collective worry: have we done enough? Have we oriented to the right values? Have we dedicated ourselves to truth, justice, love? Will we be inscribed in ‘the book of life’, or does the divine smell a whiff of bullshit about us? We fear, we pray: we take stock, we repent— and we hope we make it back to celebration again. 

[Gigantic birthday cake for the world made by core member Jory, who got the tradition from her mom. She tried to dye the frosting blue but it turned purple. We decided this was likely the color of the primordial sea.]

 While “Yamim Noraim” is most often translated as days of ‘awe’, it can also be translated as days of ‘fear.’ We recite the Unetaneh Tokef, a prayer that lists out what scary fate might befall us before we are ready. We sing aloud our collective sins of the last year, we beat our chests. Are these days of awe and wonder at the beauty of the world, or are these days of fearing our fate?  Fear and awe have always two ropes in the same challah for me. How can you be alive and not see so much beauty in this world? So much unspeakable horror?

What will we make of this place? What will we make of ourselves?

During these intense days, I have been thinking of some lines from Maggie Smith’s poem, What I Carried:

“I carried my fear of the world

and for my children modeled marveling

at its beauty but keeping my hands still—

keeping my eyes on its mouth, its teeth.

[....]

I carried my fear of the world

and my love for the world.

I carried my terrible awe.” 

[Some of our smaller collaborators getting wild for the world’s birthday and reminding us to not keep our joy to ourselves.]

The news this morning– T.W, if you don’t can’t stomach this now, skip – of more hospital bombings, of people burned alive in their hospital beds. Of children starving. Of children being deliberately starved and killed. So much fear, so much anguish: this is the world we have allowed. I will not look away.

Compounding this immediate, shocking violence, there is so much fallout from our slow violence to the earth: the flooding in North Carolina, the storms in Florida. I am connected through friends to a whole family who died, and know others who lost homes and farms. Still here in Vermont we have roads washed out from July. The continued struggle in my own community, with farmers not making ends meet, with record numbers of children and their parents getting kicked out of housing just as it gets cold.

The intensity and speed of all these crises is bound together by a shared root cause: an economic and political order that insists that devalues life and breaks our relationships with one another and the earth.

In practice with L’Chaim Collective, we are trying to remember ( re/member: to make embodied) the teaching that : we are who we are through relationship. We are because of each other. We don’t say confession for our sin as individuals, we do so as the collective. And we don’t heal as individuals, we heal as a collective. 

We model our collective practice by what we are doing– explicitly rooting our faith as an earth- rooted practice, fundamentally outside of nationalism, as both a way to create spiritual homes for folks rejecting the dominant violence and racism that separates us from our siblings on the other side of the border. We are actively raising funds for the Palestine Emergency Fund as part of our collective practice of teshuvah (returning) and tzedakah (justice) — please join us! We are carving out a space that can provide relief, and oxygen mask, a holy vessel to meet the divine as we also move to change material conditions.

But we are also modeling another way also by how we do our work. We do our work not as one rabbi or director making all the decisions and a bunch of members who have no voice, but rather as a collective, a network of people who are smarter together than alone.  We are insisting on relationship. While we do have different forms of training and practice (some in rabbinics, yes, but also some in somatics (embodied healing), others in organizing, art- making, policy, education, farming, therapy– the list goes on.) We take turns at the helm, in a support role, off to the side moving chairs. All are needed.

Deep collaboration and relationship is possibly because we are committed to the rigorous, joyful work of meeting in groups often and making choices through consultative and consent- oriented discussions. We grapple and we talk, often. We have a text thread that is pretty much steadily buzzing all day, a hive mind outside of any one of us. 

We always eat when we get together.  And when we get together, we try to meet outside to stay grounded, literally, on the earth. On days like today, when the reality of violence is too much, we get on a call together, or we gather for song, mourning. We find our way out of isolation.

[Gathering in ways that help us to remember our place in the larger order of things. We do tashlich, the casting away of our sins, with the help of running water. The water can move what needs to be moved. The water is also a place that our youngest members have space to play and explore and laugh— even while we grieve. These poles— grief and praise— are always happening at once.]

On Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, we say a prayer called the viddui. In it, there is a practice of beating our hearts as we feel all our collective sins from the last year. The verbs of the sins are not in the singular but in the anachnu form— we have sinned.

This prayer is compounded with its pairing with the hafarah– which on YK is a reading from Isaiah:

 “​​You fast, yet the very day you fast, you continue oppressing. Is that the kind of fast I desire? No. This is the fast day that I desire: unlock the handcuffs put on by wicked power. Let the oppressed go free, break off every yoke. Share your bread with the hungry. Bring the poor, the outcasts, into your house. They are your flesh and blood. Don't hide yourself from me." 

[My child Amos, who acted in our play both as ‘the creatures of the land’, divinely shaped— and also Cain, the first murderer. I was thinking watching him be both joyful animal and murderer about my friend and collaborator Moira Smiley’s song ‘My Son David’ that this same kiddo and I got to be a part of in her Rhizome Project, exploring violence and innocence.]

My colleagues at Rabbis For Ceasefire put together a little explainer on the viddui, the confessional prayer: 

Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari says: Confession is an essential step in transformation. To know our wrongdoing so clearly in our hearts that we can name it, that we are willing to say it, and in so doing, to let it go. Telling the truth with as much clarity and compassion as possible is a necessary part of all teshuvah, all healing and repair. For this reason, the practice of Vidui is one of the core spiritual practices of Yom Kippur.

In his teachings about teshuvah, Maimonides explains that when a person strays from their path -- whether intentionally or unknowingly -- and does teshuvah and realigns after having missed the mark, they are obligated to articulate with words the ways they missed the mark with spacious presence because, "Any time a person misses any mark, it impacts their core self and it unsettles their spirit. [To restore alignment] they must articulate with awareness the ways they missed the mark..." 

As the L’Chaim Collective, we wrote the following alternative to the traditional viddui. It has some lines from our collective member Ilyse Morgenstein- Fuerst (buy her new book, Religion is Not Done With You!) mixed with inspiration and words from longtime peace movement leader Rabbi Lynn Gottleib (buy her book ‘Shomeret Shalom: Replanting the Seeds of Jewish Revolutionary Nonviolence!). We took the liberty (with permission) of combining their words with some of our own.

I did not denote who wrote what, did not bracket one person’s brilliance, did not keep it apart from the next person’s mourning. Our thoughts and words flowed in and out of one another. Our services, too,  are led by a series of voices.  (I always think of my teacher Lisa Fernandes who always says: ‘only my mistakes are mine, the rest is open source- take anything helpful.’)

Together we beat our chests and prayed: 

For the chet (sin/ literally ‘missing the mark’) of dehumanization. 

For the chet of denying the divine in others. 

For the chet of pain caused to children, to parents, to elders. 

For the chet of looking away, of remaining silent. 

For the chet of all of the last year’s atrocities and violations of human rights carried out in our names, in the name of Jewish safety. 

For the chet of a never ending assault resulting in intergenerational trauma. 

For the chet of violence done to the land and to the people. 

On Yom Kippur we ask forgiveness collectively. 

May we be forgiven for the ways we cause harm, knowingly and unknowingly. 

May we acknowledge the ways in which we are complicit. 

May we face the ways we fell short in doing all we could. 

May we allow our prayer to inspire us to speak truth to power. Today we recommit to fighting and raging and crying and mourning and acting. 

May we be moved by the images of this last year. 

May we acknowledge the consequences of our action, and our inaction.

May we acknowledge that it is not whether we ask for forgiveness, but whether we change how we are in the world, which will decide whether we are inscribed in the book of life. 

May we earn this precious, wild life we have been given. 

We expanded on themes of re-alignment: 

Acknowledging our harm, we also acknowledge our power to heal. 

We pledge to remain sumud - steadfast, until a durable peace is found. 

We pledge to lift up the dignity of every human being and remain faithful to the value that all people are sacred across all forms of incarceration, walls and borders. 

We pledge to remember, and help to grow, a world where all people are free. 

Tonight we plant again in our hearts the knowledge that another way is possible. 

We pledge allegiance to all lands and all peoples, to all life.

Tonight, as we light the havdalah candle, the wicks of the world we have and the world we long for will braid together. They will light us on our way for the work ahead, reminding us that it is our lives that can be a bridge. 

As we sing together, we call in all our ancestors to join us. There is a rabbinic idea that at weddings, all the ancestors whose names we cannot remember, and all the descendants who will follow, are here with us, celebrating our holy joy in this moment. 

May tonight be a marriage between us and our deepest values. May our ancestors and our descendents stand with us and offer us support and guiding light for our work of cultivating peace. 

The work of repair is longer than our lifetimes. We take our place in the collective effort towards wholeness. We release any need to be the savior, to have all the answers.  We celebrate our part in the collective whole, our soul in the soul of the world. Here, may we find ourselves. Here, may we find each other. Here, may we find Gd.  

****

After services, a number of people asked if I could share the prayer, and who wrote it, where it came from. I found myself wanting to explain and clarify more easily who wrote what. I mentioned that the prayer was a bit of a Frankenstein, co-written and not clearly attributable. My own notions of individualism, of recognition all were swirling when a friend said back to me, “I love that. You all made a patchwork prayer!” 

 How fitting when we had in fact sewed a literal patchwork for the service.  A big quilt with the sky on it and the burning bush and Gd’s first question to us in Torah: WHERE ARE YOU?

 The quilt was sewn by repurposing scraps from one of the first quilts I made almost 20 years ago with my mom when I was moving out west after college. I was headed out into the Sierra Nevadas, where I would sleep in a tiny cabin in the woods, tend a farm, and eventually teach a class called Peace Studies, meet lifelong collaborators, manage the kitchen and eventually get married in a cow field after doing a mikveh in the Yuba River. The quilt kept me warm on cold nights in my tiny cabin. The quilt, in this form, had been helped by the help of my friend Christine, an artist who has a great eye. She knew how to layer the fabric flames on top of each other so they would lick up around the words. We used fabric that my own mom had saved from a dress that was her mothers, my grandmother. I cut the old silk, patched it, used it again. I worked on a sewing machine that my elder friend, Sandy, had picked up for me off of Craigslist for $50 when I didn’t have the money. She had left it on my cabin stoop with simply a heart on a sticky note. All of these people made the quilt for Rosh Hashanah.

Nothing I do is alone.

WHERE ARE YOU? The quilt asks.

Quilts, even when they are sewed by one lead person, have always been traditionally quilted in community. Like a barn raising, finishing a quilt takes all hands on deck as the fabric and batting are stretched tight across a room. Quilters (historically with a majority of them women and femmes) sink needle and thread into one side, pushing against the resistance into the fluff,  and then popping the needle out the other side to hold it all in place. 

Here we are: stitching together, we can transform even old tatters of cloth into something whole again, something that can keep us warm. (If you get interested in the history of quilting within resistance movements, read Hidden in Plain Sight, a book about people during slaver using quilts as maps for escaping enslavement and moving towards freedom.)

My friend, farmer and writer , wrote recently thinking about “How will we act on the day the industrial supply chains inevitably fail to deliver on their fantastical promise of an unlimited life?  Will we build taller fences and gather our munitions?  Or set the table with everything we’ve got left and invite the whole neighborhood over for supper? On that day we are likely to do whatever we practice now.”

I am grateful to Adam for reminding me that we are always practicing.  What are we practicing now?

[When in doubt, lay a longer table. Use a quilt as your tablecloth.]

Personally, I’ve been holding the question of what shift to make: what will help me to keep showing up to the horrors of our time with as much hope as possible? ‘Hope’ with the meaning the poet Seamus Heaney gave it: 

“Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.” 

I used to want to solve everything myself. Years ago I read Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” documenting her family’s yearlong journey to eat only food they could grow themselves. Inspired, for several months I ate only what I could grow, or could source from an arbitrary boundary of fifty miles around me. While the practice of trying to produce what I could for myself taught me enormously about the land, and about myself, I felt somehow less in community trying to do it all myself. 

 I’m less interested today in the idea of my own rugged individualism than I am in my community’s strength and relationships. I am old enough to know for sure I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to do much of anything on my own.

Instead, I’m taking on as many experiments in community strength and resilience as possible. On the local scale: my family has committed in 5785 to try to eat food grown only by people we know. Through this practice we are asking: what is safety? What is resilience? What can we do together that we can’t do alone? How can we move resources now into a strong community today, and in the future? How delicious can healing be? (Side note: can you imagine on the macro if we could shift our government’s spending on the military to instead support our local communities thriving, keeping our land tended and people fed?!)

On the collective and global scales, asking ourselves daily: how can we do more today to protect life right now? How can we materially, daily, change our lives to enable peace and justice, near and far? As we engage these questions in values- aligned, deep community, we will have stronger, braver, more beautiful answers than we can imagine — or act on— alone.

We are fed, we are buoyed, we survive, we find bravery enough to take meaningful action— like these activists blocking the stock exchange just today-- through our relationships.

Together, we can quilt a patchwork strategy, more beautiful than we could each make alone. As we stitch our lives together, we shift out of the days of isolated fear into the days of collective awe.

 “Religion, the end of isolation, begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us. Wonder is the state of our being asked. The ineffable is a question addressed to us.”

Abraham Heschel

The first question posed in the Bible-- the book that birthed the great tradition of asking questions-- is: “Ayeka? Where are you?”   (G-d  calls this out to Adam and Eve after they eat the forbidden fruit.)

The second question is again: “Ayeka? Where are you?” (Gd calls this to Cain after he kills his brother Abel in a jealous fit.)

The third time we get the question is when Gd calls out to Moses, who is being asking to lead the people to liberation. Moses doesn’t want the job and tries to run away, hiding in the desert. So, Gd sends a burning bush to ask again, “Ayeka, where are you?”

“WHERE ARE YOU, humans?!”

Only when despite his fear, Moses gets his sh*t together and takes a deep breath to answer: “Hineni: here I am” can the whole story of the possibility of liberation and redemption flow.   

Grace Lee Boggs (z”l) famously asked the question to every student who came to learn justice organizing with her: “What time is it on the clock of the world?” Perhaps another way of getting at: where are you?

I wonder today: do we know where we are? Do we know what time it is?

Every year as the seasons heave themselves forward with the heaviness of bounty, just as the berries ripen and the last petals unfurl, a showy finale from the garden as the plants get ready to give it all up and rest for the winter, I grieve my beloved brother, Spencer, who died 19 years ago this year, when he was 19. He died of a drug overdose, tender heart so open to this world. I wonder: Spencer, ayeka?

On his yarzheit (anniversary of death) I got up before my kids woke, recalling the Sharon Olds line: “my children asleep in their beds, each fate like a vein of abiding mineral not discovered yet.” What will their lives become? What times on the clock of the world will they inhabit?

 I walked out into the yard, ground cold and wet with dew. The dahlias were hanging their heavy heads, so thick with the bloom and full of beauty they couldn’t sustain themselves upright anymore. Overhead, geese honked their mournful pre-migration calls, practicing their formation patterns, always preparing, in the growing pink light. Beyond the highway there is a beaver pond behind our house, where deer and fox and egrets make their homes, cozy and wild, right up next to our suburb and pavement. Life finds a way. I like to think about all our wildness and theirs wildness bound together by our place.

Sumac’s bright orange and pulsing red leaves flamed out against the morning fog: a burning bush right here for me.

The world calls out to me: Where are you, you who are still alive?

I walked around the yard pulling dew- wet berries into the cup for my children’s lunches, the ripeness of the earth so generous and abundant. When I was a small child I often talked to Gd and I would hear an answer, feel a sense of closeness easily. I don’t anymore. I try to get quiet or pray and most days don’t feel much in return. But this morning, I felt a calm holiness around me, each berry I picked an offering back from the divine: here I am/ here you are/ here we are together.

 There are so many more berries than we need right now, but in a week, they’ll all be done, and then the plants will look just like sticks, and then the snow will come and cover them entirely. Yet, here we are, now, in this moment of lush fullness. Or, as Mary Oliver puts it: “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”

There is a deep ache in the beauty of late summer giving way into fall, the season so transient and momentary. As the wheel of the year clicks forward I find myself in a spiral time: again returning to the same anniversaries, the same holidays and harvests. What have I learned since last year? How has the clock of the world shifted?

“Oh this world falls on me, with hopes of immortality/ everywhere I go/ all the beauty just keeps shaking me. […]All with hope, all with hope, that emptiness brings wholeness, and loss of love bring fullness to us all.” – Emily Saliers  

And then after Spencer’s death day, the world nudges me again as I hurtle into the preparation for the Yamim Noraim/ the Days of Awe/ the High Holy Days. This time marks the the birthday of the world and the beginning of the next year--  the season for atonement and repentance and the hope that can come through rigorous repair.  Every year at this time we are instructed to do three things: teshuvah (return), tefillah (prayer/ repentance) and tzedakah (justice) to be ready to move through the year again.

We are required to work through these three processes to prevent simply cycling forward through another year, unchanged. We have to pray, make amends, and do justice— or we risk just get old, but never getting wise.

What time is it on the clock of the world? This last year has been one of unrelenting rupture, so much pain, so much loss. The lives of many thousands claimed needlessly, the thrum of nationalist violence grows ever hungrier. Where have I been this year? Have I answered often enough: here I am, ready to do what is needed?

If all goes to plan, I will  finish my rabbinical program in December. In these years of study, I’ve been working with the idea that making meaning by learning Torah can serve as a metaphor for making meaning in our lives broadly.  Barry Holtz writes that “beginning students of the Bible experience some initial difficulties being comfortable with fragmentary insights.” He goes further and says that in seeking meaning through reading Torah “one must accustom oneself to an almost cubistic art.”

I literally laughed out loud reading this. How much of our lives offer only a fragmentary insight! How accurate a description how meaning reveals itself: in flashes, in moments, in berries, in non sequiturs that somehow, together, constellate and point a way. Somehow the universe hints to us at some underlying directionality and meaning to *all this*.  

I have been thinking about these small quotidian moments as cubistic art, like picking berries or hearing geese, that make meaning shimmer out all the sudden like a magic eye picture. Today, my brilliant friend Christine mentioned to me that I might like Sister Corita Kent — a “pop art nun.” Sister Corita made art with her community and refined an eye that captured the sacred everywhere. I was reading about her and learned that, along with many other things, she made a collection of photographs called, “Ordinary Things Will Be Signs For Us.” (Yes, sometimes life be like that.)

(work by Corita Kent)

Today on our porch we ate bagels and played music with friends and neighbors as we cut and paper mached and painted big mask puppets for Rosh Hashanah, when we’ll again tell the creation story with the L’Chaim Collective, our new community of people tending earth- rooted, justice- seeking, post-nationalist Jewish practice. (If you’re local, come hang with us at an upcoming event!) Together we will tell the story of how we came to be here, now. Or at least, one possible version of it. Your tradition might have a different version. Maybe together we know five. They all have the truth in them. The question is: How will we tell it? Will we be ready to hear?

 Every year though the words are the same in the book of Genesis, the meaning shifts. Where are you? Is a new question for all of us after whatever we have journeyed the last twelve months. As we tell our story of creation again, we are reminded that each day we are making anew our world, every day we are offered a chance to respond in a fresh way.

In Talmud Pesahim 6b the rabbis write, ‘There is no ‘before’ or ‘after’ in Torah.’

There is only what Moki Cherry, (one of the artists who our collaborator Rebecca suggested should inspire our Rosh Hashanah puppet creation), calls “the Eternal Now.”

[Side note: Rebecca showed up this morning at our puppet session and immediately knew what we needed to do and make and how we could make it happen, even with a gaggle of children underfoot. I always think I need to solve everything on my own, and then a friend appears and casually hands me the puzzle piece that has been missing. As David Whyte writes, "Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.”]

(work by Moki Cherry)

That is: everything is happening all at once, all the time. Holiness and meaning are always calling out to us. We can open the Bible and read Cain killing Abel; or we can open our news sources and watch Cain killing Abel. We can be Cain or Abel, or we can be Moses and answer when we are called. We learn, or we repeat.

As we cycle again through the loops of the year and the seasons of the earth, will we notice the burning bushes all around us? As the sumac flames out along every highway median, as the berries offer themselves up plump and soft, as the geese begin their long flight south again, as we long for our brothers now gone and we wonder and worry for our children, will we notice when the world asks: ayeka? where are you?

And what will we say?

On a recent, shimmering and expansive interview, two of my favorite interlocutors explore what I have come to understand as both my theological and political perspective: essentially, ‘yes to life!’ Krista Tippet asked our collective bestie, adrienne maree brown, to share her current “unthinkable thoughts.” ‘Unthinkable thoughts’ is a term a.m.b. uses to name the internal fears that feel almost impossible to say out loud. The term allows her to metabolize and perhaps hold these fears in a new way that can be illuminating and generative.

adrienne posed her current unthinkable question, a gut punch immediately: ‘will I be OK with it if humans don’t survive?’ She explains how for so long human survival has been her life’s goal, and wrestles with her grief about what it would mean if that doesn’t come to pass.

Hearing her articulate this deep fear touched me to my core. In my more fearful moments, I’m terrified—scared shitless—of this precisely. I lead a farming association that works to foster community resilience and food security in the face of climate change. Survival is not a theoretical idea. Just this summer our little state has gotten pummeled over and over with flooding that sweeps away homes, roads, fields, and has tragically taken lives. Meanwhile, political leadership hasn’t done much, to say the least. It’s plain that the time line of climate change and the timeline of our structural readiness are, to say the very least, not lining up. Not nearly.

Yet-- naming our unthinkable thoughts, in fact in naming whatever is true--  is in and of itself the magic spell. The naming becomes our medicine, the way we can find through. Speaking the fear makes it tactile, real—and naming it also makes it somehow bounded, limited, reckon-with-able.

Now that the unthinkable thought hath been thunk, and is out on the table, it sits chunky before us. Here in the light it reminds me a bit of Friday night’s challah dough. Now we can take special care with this thought; we can touch it, braid it, make it holy. 

On Friday evenings when we bless the challah, the way the prayer ritual works is as follows: The first person physically touches the bread: body connecting to braid. Then another touches that person, and so on, the next person in the circle to the next, making a chain of connection rippling out from the loaf, the primary source of the gift of nourishment.  Standing in this chain of touch, we sing a prayer together that thanks Gd for pulling the bread straight out of the earth, here for us. We basically say: WOW and THANKS! Insodoing, we which change the bread from just any bread into holy bread: the bread of peace, of community. And in turn, the bread transforms us to holy people, people who make blessings; people who notice the resources require of the world and offer gratitude in return. (Or, ‘all we touch we change. All we change changes us.”- Octavia Butler.)

What happens when we imagine our unthinkable thought as the challah on the shabbat table, waiting for our blessing, waiting to change us? Can we make direct contact with our fear, while holding each other? Can we make contact with our fear and simultaneously with our gratitude? If we can, can our fear turn us in to people who are also holy? Can we let the passing of truth through our community bound us together? Can we let it move us to action?

  Fear and awe root into a shared word in Hebrew.   

Hearing adrienne say “What if humans don’t survive?” first made my eyes well up, and then… made me laugh. Her blessing (if not by physically touch, into my ear buds) transformed this terrifying thought into holy bread. Because, spoiler: humans absolutely won’t survive! I already know this! Whether we make it through climate chaos, whoever our next president is, a nuclear war or the next ice age, big picture, the writing is on the wall! On the personal level, we’re hurtling towards our individual deaths, and collectively: the sun will burn out eventually and all life on earth will be doneso. Deep time- wise, we can peek ahead to the last chapter and yall- it’s game over.

Somehow, though, this clarity makes me feel much, much better, not worse. Rob Brezsny writes that “we are seeking answers so that we can destroy them and dream up better questions.” Embracing the truth that life is terminal affords me a chance to destroy the answer and seek the better question. What is my real yearning inside that unthinkable thought? I admit that I can’t prevent the end coming. It all becomes clear at once:  It’s that I really, really want us all to thrive while we’re here.

We live in a world that offers us juicy, red berries more abundant than we could eat. We live in a world rushing with cold rivers for us to leap into. We live in a world with complicated harmonies we can sing using just our throats and some old gas that a tree breathed out, plus a circle of friends. We live in a world filled with shimmering iridescent hummingbirds, with mushrooms that chat and share food at their own subterranean dinner parties. We live in a world of whale pods led by grandmothers that have their own languages and even jokes, whales who sing unique songs for each baby. We live in a world where you stick your hand in the dirt and pull out an orange carrot, sweetened by frost. We live in a world with butter! To which you can add salt, which is itself is offered up as a gift??? From the sea??? (Which itself is ALSO the same spot that holds those amazing whales!!) We get to eat that salty butter on warm bread on cold days, sometimes even in front of a wood stove while wearing warm socks!  We live in a world where babies learn to smile just by watching your face smile! And then they learn to laugh! What a gd miracle!

When I tell you I love life: I mean it. And that’s just it: I want life, the good stuff, for all of us. I want us to live life while we’re here. Joy is what illuminates that which is divine and holy; joy provides the guide for what we’re organizing FOR, not just against.

Ross Gay says that justice is something like ‘the willingness to stand up for what we love.’ Yes. That is a worthwhile way to spend a lifetime: a constant standing up for what I love. Now I feel less grief around the question of “what if humans don’t survive.” I have that energy freed up, and can turn my focus is on: “how can I stand up for what I love today?”

 The things we need are not complicated: safety, care, community. The end of war and the end of the idea that humans are somehow a scourge on the earth. My work, then is not about preventing the big ultimate end of humanity, so I can stop spending my time trying to avoid thinking that thought. My work is simple: reduce suffering. Increase joy.  

When we run from our fear or our “unthinkables” they gain power and potency. When we open them like a gift, we unlock new meaning and possibility. In ‘The Uses of Sorrow’ Mary Oliver writes, “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”

I’ve been sitting with this idea of opening up those grief boxes and looking straight at it lately. On this amazing podcast with Malkia Devich Cyril and Prentis Hemphill, they clarify how grief is not something we need to avoid, but rather to dive headlong into, in community. How the step of collective grieving—is critical for the community to process and move together. How grieving is a required, if often omitted, step in organizing work. Cyril points out that student encampments protesting the atrocities in Gaza were, essentially, public spaces to express grief. And that was too dangerous to allow to continue. (Is grief not an expression of the unthinkable thought: “what if this loss cannot be fixed?”)

I’ve been also learning that tending grief, and tending grief in community is something that the ancestors were up to, we’ve just forgotten and need to help each other remember. (So much forgetting – so much remembering to do!) Thanks to Rabbi Jericho Vincent and Dori Midnight, I’ve been reading up on Mikonenet--  are the people who, in Biblical times, held the community in lament and led the community through times of grief. Mikonenet were typically women and femme people, leaders of grief, who understood how to cry out, how to break down together and that experiencing grief is a key ingredient to spiritual growth.  They could be hired to wail, cry, rip clothes, sing songs of lament. They were, essentially, grief facilitators, the people who knew the healing power of speaking the unthinkable, the pain. Who understood that speaking it was required to see a way forward.   Women weren’t allowed into other leadership roles, but this was tended in their domain. What can we learn from them today?

We aren’t exactly great at grieving in our culture. We’re often advised it’s much better to numb or shop or drink or avoid—anything, anything to avoid just holding the grief. But, what if we turn towards it? What possibility might open up? What does standing up for what we love in a time of grief mean?

I’m part of a team organizing with the L’Chaim Collective who will be serving as mikonenet this month. As we begin to approach the terrible one- year mark from October 7th, as we approach the High Holy Days, we need space to grieve and process all that has transpired in the last year. So many human lives have been taken. So much horror at the pain of the violation of Jewish values in the name of Judaism. So much rupture in our communities and families. We’re coming together with somatic processing, Jewish liturgy and ritual, some EMDR (therapist- led!) tapping, and some herbalism to try to start exploring what this can look like. We’re getting curious about how to move towards the grief, the unthinkable, rather than away.

What are the unthinkable thoughts, the unspeakable questions we can then ask of our grief, of each other? Can we find some answers in order to destroy them, and dream up better ones?

To life.

And. I’ve increasingly held the question (and now seen others discussing it online, thankfully!): well, what is OUR plan? 

What is the core goal that we [who believe in freedom] can all articulate with ease? What is our clear and simple vision, paired with a winnable roadmap to achieve?

The goals of the left are often described as more intersectional, more complex, less reductive, somehow tricky to express. But… is that true? Perhaps seeing our goals as too complex to be summarized is more about the fact that our educational system and culture have taught us more often how to critique than build, more to problematize than imagine or inspire. 

Tech bro and AI enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg asks his team to “move fast and break things” while Indigenous systems thinker and life enthusiast Tyson Yunkaporta points out how “it’s way easier to break shit than make shit.” 

 So, we need to put on some Beyonce, squad up, and start getting highly organized and Get. In. formation. What might that look like? Find a power building organization and get involved. Find trustworthy leaders, ask what they need help with, and join their plans. Build a mailing list of everyone you know and set up mutual aid systems. Gather up your neighbors, as what is keeping them up in the night. Write those answers down, break them down into action steps. Take the first step. 

Project 2025 is a thirty year strategy that has gotten slowly enacted step by step. We need to get much, much more disciplined– and also more practiced at articulating what we are FOR. 

I want to suggest our efforts, perhaps, could be just as simple as the far rights’ message. Big picture, we are reclaiming what pro- life means. We are working for life. Beyond borders. For people, and the planet. Life beyond capitalism. Outside of prisons. Where people and planet have rights, not corporations. L’chaim— to life.

My brilliant friend Christine (@tenderwarriorco– artist/ organizer/ visual genius– you should follow her immediately!) recently made this awesome graph that shows how the range of change work, from transformative and radical overhaul of systems on one side and harm mitigation in the systems we have on the other. My takeaway is: IT IS ALL NEEDED. There is no “right” kind of helping to do. We all need to find our place and take it up. 

Right now in the short term we must reduce the worst harms while we continue planting seeds for the world we need. We all have a unique position we can work from, and we are called to do so now. 

Here in Vermont, we just had a second year of epic flooding, on the literal anniversary of last years “centennial flood.” Harm reduction work in this case, looked like literally hundreds of people pouring onto farms to help farmers pull crops out of fields as the river gauges revealed that the banks would soon be breached. Short term response work looked like calling out of work to be there, like making donuts and tea to feed the crews hauling the new potatoes out, and up, away from the encroaching water. It looks this week like clean up, or hosting someone in your house whose apartment washed away. 

I remembered being at a La Via Campesina encuentro gathering and hearing from farmers in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. They described big crews walking farm to farm to check on each other, helping each other make it through the season, making sure elders had food and water. I wondered: could we pull that off here? It was hard to imagine. But last week— we did. The grassroots flood response here was so profound to witness. Yes, in times of crisis people can crack or splinter apart. But more often: they rise up together. They get resilient. In fact, this is what marginalized people surviving within a system designed to oppress them have had to know how to do forever. As Mia Birdsong wrote, “People do not survive racism, xenophobia, gender discrimination, and poverty without developing extraordinary skills, systems, and practices of support. And in doing so, they carve a path for everyone else.”

We all have resilience and possibility in us when we learn and listen deeply to those who have more experience with survival. Even now, even feeling tired: we have what it takes to do what is needed.

In the long term, change work looks like building power with small farmers and community members who lost their livelihoods through organizations to raise our shared voices. It looks like taking over under-tended or poorly utilized lands, and growing there. It looks like planting tree crops that take seventy years or three hundred years to harvest. It looks like reclaiming religious spaces from nationalism. It looks like a lot of work whose fruits we likely won’t see in our lifetime. It’s hard, long term work— but it’s also work that will give our lives purpose, meaning, hope.

And if you’re afraid of what that will take? You still just do it, scared. 

One of the best things I have learned from birthing multiple children— and other supporting people through birthing many times— is that fear is often a player in a transformative, emergent process. Sometimes, we can find tools to overcome that fear. But more often, we have to work with our fear.

Right now, we just have to have the fear right there with us (what if Trump does get reelected, and then won’t leave? What if the ice caps melt too fast? What if we’re too late to make anything better? What if we don’t have what it takes to stop the war? What if we look like an idiot? What if we fail? What if our religious community disowns us? What if our art goes nowhere? What if none of this matters?) These fears are real and valid and not wrong, but also: not necessarily right, or helpful. They are the worst scenario appearing, trying to keep you safe.

You can acknowledge those fears and then: you move ahead anyway.

Seth Godin says it plain: “It’s always your turn.” So, you take your turn. 

And. 

At the same time we must take ourselves seriously as people with power and agency who can affect change– which we are, and we must– we have to simultaneously hold the opposite truth, too: actually, we control very little. We practice and engage spiritual discipline to do the inner work to both work rigorously and also to let it go. Or as somebody's grandma used to say when I lived as a small child in Macon, GA: give it to God, honey. Give that all up to God. 

Recently, my eight year old was reading a book about evolution and extinction eras, (why do kids books just really tell it like it is sometimes?!)  and asked me how come humans had made all the passenger pigeons die. He looked troubled and sad. I felt something close to clarity flow through when I said plainly: 'oof, Amos, I know. There is really so much that’s been done that has caused all kinds of harm. It’s hard, and it’s so, so sad to know about all that has happened sometimes. 

And also– (and I looked at him in the eyes and meant it when I said) – ‘The good thing about being alive now is we get to be one of many generations who are going to help. We get to work to figure out what repair is needed now, and we get to make it right. That is a really special and important job we have. That other people before us did too.’ For now, at eight, he accepted this idea.

In other words: “it is not ours to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.” (Pirke Avot.) Or perhaps Heschel, “Few are guilty, all are responsible.” Or from adrienne maree brown, “I am living a life I won’t regret.” 

I trust us all to be able to hold this complexity. We can build beautiful networks of care right now–  even as we face devastating grief– so much loss, so much horror, so much fear. And it’s our turn, and it’s been others turns before. So we take our turn and step up to whatever point on Christine’s graph you can. All are needed. 

But, since we’re talking about grief– I’m going to pivot to something a little more Jewish- text- y now in that vein. Please do feel free to stop reading if you are not into it! You get a Hall pass on Talmud Torah! For those of you feel like an old warning story about unprocessed grief might be called for right now, proceed on. 

Last week we read Parshah Chukat, a Torah portion that truly has a lot packed in: instructions for how to become clean after touching a dead body (spoiler: it involves a perfect red cow and is quite wild!); the death of Miriam, Moses’s sister who led people out of through the desert and was able to locate water miraculously; the lack of water that follows her death; the people’s thirst and struggle with their journey; Moses getting angry and hitting a rock that Gd tells him to speak to; Aaron, another key leader’s death; battles; still more travel–  and a lot, lot of struggle between the people and the leadership. 

If you haven’t read Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s recent piece about Christian Zionism and the Red Heifer, you should absolutely do that before you read anything else about this parsha. In it Rabbi Ruttenberg connects how this funky, old chukkim - style law (that is, a law that while it’s required by G-d, really doesn’t make sense on its own two feet; a category in counterpose to the laws that make more sense just as common sense ideas, like the prohibition on killing or stealing) with Christian Zionists. She explains, through the lens of the Red Heifers, Christian Zionists are using the nation state of Israel for their own religious purposes. (As my friend Dr. Ilyse Morgenstein- Fuerst would say: Religion: definitely not done with us!) 

But the element I mainly want to focus on from this week’s story is the moment when Moses yells at the people. I’m curious about why now he gets to this place of uncontrolled rage. The wandering people are in the desert and have (again) been complaining. But this time, their complaints seems legitimate. Having recently lost Miriam ( the person who could bring water to the desert and also songs and uplift) they have no water now in the desert, and the soil is “no place to plant a seed.” In some ways, their lamentations have often felt like a “boy who cries wolf” situation. The people have been so whiny, missing their food from Egypt, but now their concerns are real.  Water…is a survival issue. Moses is so worn thin, so frustrated and tired and unable to hear one more whine, and he basically throws a massive tantrum.

 Moses shouts in an outburst: "Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?" (Numbers 20:10) With the term "rebels" he reveals his contempt and anger for his own people, a sure sign of a leader at the brink. Moses, who had devotedly led the people and interceded to Gd on their behalf numerous times, is ragged, and is OVER IT.

So, why is this the moment he breaks? Well, perhaps what is unsaid in the text is what is most important. Moses has just suffered the grief of losing his sister, which has largely gone unprocessed. The text skims over her death, weirdly quiet for such a front and center figure. The line reads only, “and the people abode in Kadesh; and Miriam died there, and was buried there.” 

Virtually no time at all is given to holding space for Miriam, the person who led the people through the parted sea with song? The person who brought water through the desert, anywhere she went, ensuring safety? The person who offered supervision and wisdom and counsel when needed?

When we don’t make space to grieve, we rage. And when we rage, we do stupid, harmful things. We strike the earth, we harm it. We yell at the people we’re supposed to be supporting, we harm each other. We transgress our most holy duties, we harm the divine. We profane the earth, and ultimately we (well, Moses in this case) lose entry to the land of freedom he was seeking. 

I read this text like a warning for our time: make space to grieve, or risk it all. 

How can we make space to grieve so that we are able to move into the work (both short and long term) that is needed? How can we allow grief to be a generative and healing force? How can we design supportive communities to contain that grief? Climate crisis is here. Violence and starvation are being done in our name and with our tax dollars. These things require grief. They are hard, they are awful. To grieve them is to remain human.

And. To grieve them allows us to move into a different place. Instead of a place of lashing out anger, we can access another path. A path that is discerning. A path wide enough to hold also the beauty in the world, here still. The possibility of our agency when we come together. The permission to be small and tiny and insignificant, laying under a massive blanket of stars. To be accountable to all that means, and to let our responsibility end where it actually does. That is: to be human.

My friend Adam, a farmer, (who gives away all the food he grows, living in a deep experiment around gift economy) who also writes a substack newsletter weekly sent one out this week called “So much noise, so little song.” In it Adam wrote,

I have a hunch that how we raise our voices matters much more than we’d like to believe.  In every moment the road forks three ways: grief, grievance and gratitude.  To say, “I am in pain” weaves a different cloth than “Those people hurt me.”  To say, “Even in this much pain, I can hear the world singing,” allows for the possibility of healing.  To say, “I am alive today alongside millions of miraculous others” might let the pain to slip into the background for a few precious moments. 

In the wake of the flooding, I find that the only place big enough to hold my grief is the earth itself. I’ve been going outside more, submerging in the rivers that aren’t too high as often as I can. I’ve been running my hands along the raspberries in my garden, so plump and soft and red, saying out loud to them, “thank you, thank you berries for tasting so so good” before I put them into my daughters mouth for breakfast. The earth can hold my grief, can take it down and transform it in the soil layer back out into something useful.

We always have enough time, when we’re collaborating with the earth, when we’re still living, still here.

We only have to get into formation, and then give it all over, give it all up.

Since the seventies, the environmental movement has spoken a story of doom and gloom, something like: ‘If fossil fuel burning goes unchecked, then the temperatures will keep rising, and we are all … pretty much fucked.” As the fossil fuel profit party has continued, and climate chaos intensifies, we feel ever more overwhelmed and desperate. 

Some part of me must admit to feeling motivated by a fear tactic.  Due to whatever particular mix of early childhood experiences and my predilection towards hypervigilance that flows from them, I can go pretty far powered on the fuel of fear. But ultimately, fear alone scatters our focus and doesn’t clarify where we’re going. Fear puts us into a place of overwhelm coupled with urgency, a bad cocktail if you’re angling for endurance. When outrunning a bear, you can do it for short sprints. But if you’re training for a marathon (and quick spoiler: we are in a marathon that will last longer than our lifetimes), you need pacing, you need food along the way, you need the right shoes, you need a very loud cheer squad carrying signs of love and support when you flag. 

And even more importantly, what’s wrong with this story is simple: doom and gloom has not worked. Last week I read another article predicting extreme societal breakdown within five years due to climate chaos. The time horizon is shortening. The future has never been closer.  It’s awful and everyone is going to suffer. I understand, appreciate, and empathize with scientists doing their best to raise an alarm of peak emergency about what is unfolding, in a sea of “leaders” who seem to answer increasingly dire situations and data with a shrug.

From my experience last summer supporting farmers who were navigating how to survive and keep their communities fed amidst record breaking flooding, I understand that the predictions the article makes are already here. Government agencies were already so overwhelmed, not only with our flooding here in Vermont, but with the devastating fires in Hawaii and out West, erratic late freezes, power loss from storms, that the typical federal relief programs were maxxed out and under resourced. Farmers called federal offices and didn’t get calls back; some have yet to receive support for the events last year. The federal policies are (currently) designed for the large corporate agribusiness and chemical companies.

 The scientists see this writing on the wall. And they care! So they raise the alarm, again. And yet they turn to the same strategy: a story of fear, backed up by the right data, on the hope that this will suddenly move us all. 

This is the same problem with the “debate” about the land now known as Israel and Palestine: it just doesn’t work. When we’re locked into the same arguments,  we aren’t working towards healing or peace. It doesn’t matter how right we are, if logic and facts are not compelling change. We need a new tactic.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last several months being challenged by people who want to prove me “wrong”, or really, prove their own narrative “right” about the current atrocities unfolding in Gaza. I’ve heard the same people decry the student protestors, choosing to spend more time arguing about why the student protestors tactics are flawed, problematic, or dismissible than they do addressing the reality of the suffering, starvation and horrible deaths those students are seeking to stop. (I’ve been struck recently with the polls from the ‘60s in which white Americans were asked whether sit-ins as a tactic were positive or negative and would ultimately “help the cause” of Civil Rights. It’s worth holding the question why we love to celebrate historical protests and decry them in our own times.) 

I am humbled by the service of the many brilliant professors, writers, and thinkers who are willing to spend time teaching people a rigorously engaged history, and more: helping people remember and learn how to research, listen, and think deeply themselves. Learning how to engage deeply for a nuanced, authentic understanding of history, rather than parroting quick or convenient sound bites, requires a diligence and engagement that this country massively needs. If we refuse to study what really came before,  we will unfortunately learn it again ourselves through painful experience.

 But have we ever learned a truthful history in this nation? I invite you to walk into your neighborhood school during Thanksgiving and consider how the narrative of White settlers’ relations with Indigenous peoples on these lands is presented. Perhaps this is the crux of the issue: most of us have not had much experience with ‘right story’. We’ve not experienced a real story, which much like a real meal, cooked from what is growing around us, tastes like. So we’ve developed a taste for Twinkies, saccharine sameness that tastes like nothing at all, wrapped in plastic.

So, we need a story that makes repair possible. We need help remembering recipes for the healing stories: what are the ingredients?  Who, if anyone, remembers how to simmer a story? Who has time to cook anyway? What has been tucked into the root cellars of our collective memory, lying in wait, calm and cool, for us to remember and dig up for nourishment? 

We need  stories  that will help us to remember the best of ourselves.  We need  stories that grapple with our violent tendencies, and our ability to rise above our worst impulses. We need  stories that remind us how repair can happen, and how satisfying it is to start that slow and awfully hard work. We need  stories that warn us against what happens when we won’t. We need  stories that move us, center us, and give us courage to take action. “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms” per poet Muriel Rukeyser. We are the stories we carry, just as we are the food we eat. 

Tyson Yunkaporta’s book “Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the world” remains one of the most rollicking, hopeful,  and mind- expanding texts I’ve ever sat with. If you haven’t had the joy and journey of reading it yet, I am so excited for you! He recently published a second book, ‘Right Story, Wrong Story’, exploring the way we make, hold,  and pass on stories about ourselves, the land, and each other. He writes about how the technology of making the right story takes multiple generations;  Indigenous myth production is not a fast process. To be sure to pass on a core cultural idea, relationship, or teaching, a story is developed, through dialogue, across long spans of time and with the participation of many. Yunkaporta juxtaposes the patience of Right Story creation with the worst qualities of Wrong Story: fast, greedy, immediate, generated out of,  and in service to, our lowest impulses. 

This language of ‘Right Story, ’ and of the work of creating it across many generations,  helped me to understand why I went  to rabbinical school. Facing the climate crisis in a very direct way through my work, I encounter incredible amounts of overwhelm. Being of childbearing age, I hear friends wrestle with nihilism as they  consider whether to bring kids into this world. I have been yearning for old wisdom, stories that had taken generations of debate, wrestling, refining, and commentary to work through. Stories that people had prayed about, sealed into clay pots for hundreds of years,  and then taken out to season, argue, polish, refine a bit more. Stories that came through a relationship with land, rituals in conversation with the cycles of the year that make our lives holy. Stories that have enough heft to them to hold us, bridge us, lead us through this narrow time of fear. (The recent burning of olive trees by the Israeli army in Palestine is such a devastating illumination of how perversely a story can go dark, especially when the old story’s mandate is so clear: "When you besiege a city for many days to wage war against it to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them, for you may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down" (Deuteronomy 20:19).

Many of us are not standing in the rivers of old faith traditions, and we are still in search of a story strong enough to be a bridge. Where are the old stories we can find together? What qualities do they share—how do we know if they will lead to safety and healing?  

The clues are around us. Last week, an army general resigned in protest of what's happening in Gaza. Harrison and I grew up together. When he quit, as a high ranking official with a prominent post abroad, he wrote publicly, "As the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing." He shared that he decided to come forward publicly to make the way easier for others to dissent. Something about him citing his ancestors struck me. Harrison went on: “I am haunted by the knowledge that I have failed those principles [‘of not to just follow orders’]. But I also hope that my grandfather would afford me some grace; that he would still be proud of me for stepping away from this war, however belatedly.” Remembering what the ancestors taught. Finding the grace to try and repair. Taking a bold step at great personal risk. The possibility of change. Right story. Right story. Right story. 

And just a couple of weeks ago we celebrated Mothers’ Day. Now wrapped in cellophane, a day of Hallmark cards that paper over the structural hostility of the nation toward mothers, Mother’s Day was once a revolutionary idea. Antiwar activist and co-founder of the day Julia Ward Howe offered us a clue in her Mother’s Day Proclamation, written in 1870 on the heels of a bloody civil war that devastated the nation, “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” 

This word—tender—calls me in: a whispered spell to put my ear toward, to listen.  Mothers (and other people caring for small ones) are tender, yes—fierce in their tenderness. They split their own bodies open to make way for new life. The love strong enough to vow  “our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn.” A love that clear and instructive will follow through. 

(Let me note here that in “capitalism has no shame” news, Howe was later arrested protesting the commercialization of the day she herself had helped to create.) 

I was listening to an excellent podcast recently about building power and union organizing. While the podcast is slightly old (recorded after Super Tuesday in 2020), the themes around mobilizing (getting people who largely agree already to take an action) as distinct from organizing (working to actually move people together across difference of initial opinion towards a common shared goal) felt more relevant than ever.

 In the conversation, Jane McAlevey (author of A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy) talks about what you need to be a good organizer. Jane is a straightforward, f-bomb- dropping union organizer with massive wins under her belt. I was moved listening when she articulated the three qualities she sees as  core for good organizers: 

1. You have to believe ordinary people are smart. 2) You have to believe people can change their minds. 3) Most basically, you have to love regular people. 

Love. Her word choice struck me. Love as a primary tool for change. Love as the story, the practice, the principle. Like Howe’s tenderness—not meek love, but a love with follow through. MLK Jr wrote, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” 

We need a story powerful enough to remind us of what is possible: we can create a world without war. We can design educational systems in which no child is trained to fight another human, ever again. We can collaborate with nature to heal our planet. We can say thank you and place trust in a good, generous earth that will rise  up to meet us. 

We do have some old recipe books still lying around, and we do have some food left in the larder. Last night I was on my back porch with my a gaggle of neighborhood children of all a range of ages from toddler to newly driving teenager. A friend had gifted me with some extra cream from his farm and I decided to make it into butter. The kids were taking turns paddling the butter with big wooden spoons, pressing out the buttermilk. Suddenly I remembered a section of a fantastic article on building power for change making by Alexis Frasz that I read and loved recently: 

 “Participatory culture—the process of people making and doing themselves—is critical for power building. Creating culture with others builds social bonds, shared identity, a sense of agency, an attachment to place, and other critical capacities that serve as a foundation for community power. For people who have been structurally disempowered, this can be transformative. El Puente, an environmental justice organization in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, uses community art-making activities as “an antidote to disempowerment.” According to cofounder Frances Lucerna, “The arts are transformative because they help people see themselves and tap into their own potential for creation. The arts help people realize ‘I can.’” Transforming people from “consumers of democracy to agents within it” is a primary goal of power-building work. Participating in shared cultural activities builds relationships and a sense of agency that can be carried into other settings. “

I want a world where children know that butter is bright yellow in late spring because the cows are finally back on pasture after a long winter, eating that good good grass, because they’ll always be aware of the seasons— and that waiting for the good shit is worth it. These children will always move to protect the earth because they know the earth feeds them; that they are, in fact, made of the earth. These children will never have to unlearn an idea of separation. I want a world in which children have a relationship with the earth not primarily about fear, but rather deep love and reciprocity. Once you truly love the earth, dropping a bomb on the land will be unthinkable. I want a world where kids know how to work with people of other ages and abilities, because they’ll learn to take care of each other and work as a team across difference. I want a world where it’s OK to stick your finger right in to the cream, because the process should always be delicious. I want a world where kids know that food is a right and people share it freely, because the earth and our feasts are abundant when we are in right relationship. Butter is just a small part of the story, but it’s one part I can help to churn. 

Remembering the whole story is of course held in a time frame much longer than ourselves. But we can handle that. We, mothers and other parenting people, think beyond our lives all the time. We teach skills we hope will stay with our children after we are gone. We sing songs so our little ones can hum them when they’re scared and we’re far away. We recite the prayers over and over, this one for bread, that one for the morning, this one for grief, this one for thanks, nourishment and instruction for the long journey of life that will follow after we are gone.

I was recently sitting with friends in a local Quaker meeting. One person stood up and started talking about George Fox, the abolitionist credited with founding Quakerism, (a religious framework founded on pacifism and abolition.) The speaker reminded us that Fox said to “walk cheerfully over the world”—but the speaker wondered aloud: how are we to do this when the world is so horrifying, so broken? 

We sat in silence for a while, holding the question, breathing in and out slowly together, waiting. The light poured in to the meeting house. I, frankly, found it hard to settle. I tried to breathe but found myself looking around the room at elders who had been trying for a much longer time. I saw one who I know had been arrested recently, laying her body across the train tracks that led to a coal mine. She was still and had a small smile playing on her face.

A few minutes later another meeting elder stood up. She has calloused hands. She reminded us that Fox’s “Walk Cheerfully on the earth” idea came as the latter part of a sentence: “And this is the word of G-d to you all, and a charge to you all in the presence of the living G-d: be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of G-d in every one.” Cheerfulness comes once you’re in the right story. Discipline makes way for grace. Get arrested at the coal plant in the morning, make butter with the neighbors at night. 

This sitting/ waiting/ sharing/ reflecting process that unfolded during Meeting reminded me again of Yunkaporta: knowledge produced by being together in real time, in conversation, making space for the sacred to move through us. Knowledge created in conversation with elders across generations. And finally, wisdom shared out of a heart-broken openness, refined through life experience, struggles, loss, practice. Wisdom born out of a lifetime of trying and not giving up.

The stories we need to remember are still here, flowing from grandfathers calling us back to what we know, and children looking wonderingly at us about how to learn. We’re all churning.