Taking action and taking time
I want to draw you a vent diagram, two overlapping circles containing two equally true and utterly contradictory things: “the time is now” and “I’m not ready.”
Context
The truth is that I don’t know how I write this newsletter. At some point something occurs to me and I can feel that there is a kernel of an essay inside it. It’s like something sparkly arrives from somewhere outside of me, inserts itself at the semi-conscious spot where my head meets my neck, and gets filtered down through each of my vertebrae until it’s flowing out of my fingers.1
If I look at it straight on, I am in awe of this phenomenon. I am gobsmacked by its lack of formula, the way that I can’t describe My Process because it feels more like a thing that happens to me than a thing I do. I am humbled by the fact that what comes out of me is somehow both entirely mine and seems to resonate for so many people.2 I am grateful for this gift, because that’s what it feels like—a gift.
I don’t tell you this to brag, though it feels a little like bragging, and I don’t say it to suggest that it’s a thing only I can do, because I actually feel certain that the opposite is true.3 I’m explaining how it happens so you’ll understand when I say that it hasn’t been happening these last few weeks and that I feel dumbstruck by it. I have no skills for writing when the sparkly thing doesn’t do its spinal dance on me. I am just sitting here at my computer, hammering keys (the backspace more than any other) and feeling lost.
I have spent a chunk of half the days this month working on an essay about how I’m processing everything that’s been happening—the killings and beatings and kidnappings and general reign of terror—in Minneapolis, but I haven’t been able to finish it. I have gotten partway through a draft and been flattened by grief, so overwhelmed that I take to my bed and don’t get up for the rest of the day. I have finished a draft, only to realize that I have no conclusion—no neat little bow arrives to tie itself around the final paragraph in the way it usually does. The last draft, the one I’m wandering around in now, is full of fragments, three different opening thoughts that refuse to decide which should go first, jostling in line and never fully connecting with each other. There are things I want to say, but they refuse to assemble themselves into an essay, and by the end of each draft I feel wrung out, defeated.
It feels impossible not to write about our government killing people, and impossible to write about it. I have too much and also nothing to say. If I could open my mouth and wail an infinite wail that would deliver itself gently into your inbox, that might be right. But this reality won’t make itself into words for me.
Other people are doing it so beautifully. This piece, about how “action is the antidote to despair.” This one, with so many details on the ground and a steady thread of how what is making the beautiful resistance in Minneapolis possible is a foundation of neighborliness. In this one she says she finds herself wanting to make things with her hands more than ever. This one that speaks to balancing the widening perspective that screens offer with the grounding of the analog. Even this one, a rare foray into the explicitly political from an epidemiologist who I look to for info about how to weather the waves of COVID, in which she heartbreakingly describes talking to her child about Taylor Swift while also getting the news on her phone. I am grateful to these writers. Their words are handholds. They make me feel less alone. Me, though? I can’t figure it out.
I want to tell you how surreal it was when I saw a photo of Alex Pretti and for a split second I thought I recognized him. The force of the news hit me square in the chest and a dam broke inside me and suddenly I was feeling in a way I wasn’t prepared for because I have spent the last decade of my life organizing with people like Alex. I have gathered white people to show up for our neighbors who are under threat from cops. I have trained people to be on safety teams at actions, have taught folks to put our bodies between law enforcement and people who are in more danger from law enforcement. I have linked arms to make a barrier between people in riot gear and those of us resisting. Alex Pretti and Renée Good look like people I would have chatted with after an organizing meeting, people I might have gone on a date with once. They were my age, I am their age, I could have been them, they are me. It’s fucked up that I am feeling this thing more deeply because of the me-ness of these murdered people, but I am. I don’t have a neat little bow to tie around that.
I want to tell you that despite having done all of this organizing for many years I still don’t know what to do right now, because I live someplace new and I don’t have a local organizing home. I don’t know the people doing the work of resistance here, and they don’t know me. For the first time in a long time I don’t have deep and trusting political relationships, and it’s immobilizing. I want you to know that taking in this political moment as a person who doesn’t already have a local organizing home is like standing on the shore while massive waves crest and crash in front of you, but you never really learned how to swim. I want you to know that it is like this even for me, a person who has been actively organizing for a decade. I want you to know that I already feel ashamed about not doing enough, and it’s part of what’s keeping me frozen. I want to ask you to treat us gently, those of us who know in our bones that what’s happening is wrong but who are politically rootless right now. We are overwhelmed and afraid. I want to say that the best organizing ask is and always will be: “Will you come to this thing with me?” I want to ask you to please invite us to go to the next town hall or protest or whatever with you, because that invitation has inside it everything we all need: a push to act, a clear path forward, and the promise of not having to face this alone.
I want to tell you about how a few months ago, my housemate Kristin sent a question in to her favorite gardening podcast. She told the hosts about how we’re in this new house, suddenly surrounded by so much land, desperately eager to grow food and medicine and plants that will tend to the ecosystem. She told them that in the face of so much space and so many dreams, she doesn’t know where to start. The advice they gave was simple but maddening: spend the first year just sitting on the land and noticing. Notice where the sun moves, which spots it drenches over many hours. Dig holes around the place and see if and how they fill with water. Pay attention to which plants the birds like, where the squirrels nest. You’ll only know what to grow and where and when if you spend some time getting acquainted with the place and the beings in it.
I want to draw you a vent diagram, two overlapping circles containing two equally true and utterly contradictory things: “the time is now” and “I’m not ready.” Or maybe “I have to understand the ecosystem I’m entering in order to show up responsibly” and “people are dying there is no time to waste.” Or “I can’t watch the news it will crush my spirit” and “we can’t look away from this horror.” “I am exhausted” and “we have to act now.” “There’s so much I want to grow” and “growing things takes so, so long.”
Here I am, at the end of the essay and still unsure exactly what I’m trying to say. Except maybe that being able to let something be imperfect and hit send anyway, not knowing what to do and doing something anyway, knowing two contradictory things are both just as true and acting in the face of that contradiction—is all part of the medicine for this moment.
I have made you a newsletter. It took three weeks to marinate and looks nothing like I thought it would, but look, here it is. I have no organizing home and yet I have been to two events in the last few weeks raising money for Ulster Immigrant Defense Network. When the ground thaws, sooner than we think, we won’t plant everything we want to. Maybe just corn and beans and squash.4 Somehow I am both taking action and taking time. I hope you are too.
Did something in here resonate with you? Please do me the solid of forwarding this email to a friend who might need to hear it too.
Want to have this kind of conversation about something you’re grappling with? Book a coaching call with me.
The next round of my very easeful 7-week course, Bricolage: Tools for a Non-religious Spiritual Practice, hasn’t been scheduled yet. If you’re interested, respond to this email and tell me what timing would work for you!
Stuff
On Wednesday we’re hosting an info session for Hearthfire: Beo na Tinibh, our new program for people with Irish ancestry living on Turtle Island to learn ancestral practices, return to the land, and recommit to collective liberation. IT’S SO EXCITING and all the details are here.
To send money to Minnesota and support the people resisting military occupation, pick one of these relief funds. Or pick one of these. If you feel overwhelmed by how many there are, pick one at random. Pick this one. Pick whatever one you happen to click. Remember that doing something is better than doing the perfect thing.
This is a sweet sweet offering of a zine: 50 Ways to Meet Your Neighbor.
When people say, “we have made it through worse before” by Clint Smith
To close with sweetness, you should know that my friend Karly is working on starting a children’s choir where they sing protest music and every time she sends me a video I immediately start crying. “Kids are an underutilized resource,” she said, “they’re loud and they love saying the same things over and over and over.” I can’t wait to be at an action where these beautiful babies are singing. In the meantime, check out this song and chant sheet she made.
“It’s difficult to describe exactly what happens in visionary moments. I put a lot of sophisticated ideas into my head that come to me from books, from schooling, and from other people. However, when I sit down to write, often it’s as though I’m transported to a magical space. I don’t always remember what happens. I have a magical encounter with words where all of a sudden something appears on my page that is totally not in line with anything that I consciously thought. Artists like yourself, and other folks who’ve gone to school and been trained, also have those moments where all that training falls away and you’re at that visionary moment where you see it and can make it happen.”
– bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
After the last newsletter so many people reached out to tell me that they’d missed these regular dispatches, and I can’t tell you how moved I have been to hear it. It is an honor to be of use to y’all.
I believe that we as human beings are miraculous makers, that inside of all of us there are the embers of imagination waiting to be stirred, and that if we can cultivate them with enough space and encouragement and care and joy, they will blossom. I believe that there is something magical in you, too. I really do.
The Three Sisters is an Indigenous method of companion planting, where each plant helps the others to thrive.