Friends!

People still choose love.

Over and over again, we see examples of people choosing kindness, tenderness, and generosity. Why? How is it that in the face of such beastly and violent politics, we choose love? 

From Altadena to Gaza, I see organizers and leaders choosing love even when the bomb blasts have destroyed their neighborhoods. From Ukraine to Yemen, we choose love. When drinking water is scarce, we choose love. Even when the pile of unhealed hurts has made a crater of our hearts, we choose kindness. When the fear of rejection lurks around every corner, we show up curious.

We choose love because it feels better. This is the remarkable truth. 

The reciprocity feedback loop when I choose love and kindness is immeasurable. I am bolstered by my choices to love, to forgive, to remain committed to compassion because that is what I want in return. 

And sometimes love looks like accountability and apology. Like behavior change or asking for help. Sometimes love looks like restoration and repair. Love is about realness, not the gooey cloying garbage of “it’s all for the better,” or “everything happens for a reason.” The love that inspires me to be a better person, to reach for hearts, asks me to be in reality:

• Impact over Intention
• Realness of Harms 
• Willingness to Be Uncomfortable
• Commitment to Stop and Slow Down

These are my devotions. I have good days and I have less good days. 

In the last few months, I have watched political candidates speak truth to power in trembling, tearful voices, in adamantly respectful tones. I watched Seth Todd, a young Mexican man in Portland, Oregon, change the face of ICE Protests from inside his inflatable frog suit. 

“I don't like seeing my family, my community, my neighbors being disappeared without due process. It’s ridiculous that ICE and DHS are so inhumane… we are dressing in these inflatable suits to show how the Trump administration’s narrative is ridiculous. We are not violent extremists. That’s the point, we are showing we are not violent.”

The desire to love, to be generous and kind, still manifests in so many of us so much of the time. Even when we are governed by the most hateful public policies, the lowest and most aggressive manifestations of law and order, we see love. 

A favorite element of the Portland Frog activist is the use of play, the centering of tenderness and clown in a time of guns and destruction. It’s one thing to have millennia of “turn the other cheek” preached at us (hypocritically at that), it’s quite another to watch civil disobedience happen, to see Frog face off with the police. The image is so ridiculous, so evocative, I must stop what I am doing and truly consider how this looks - a blow-up frog against a line of armed criminals doing the work of state-sanctioned violence. 

Denial does not lead to courageous action. Only in reality can my pleasure and my play serve the greater good. 

Creativity and generosity continue to manifest through cultural workers and individuals exploring love and belonging. We choose to live and commune with one another because in our bodies, love is a soft breeze, gently tickling the curtains. 

Where is your puppy pile? How do you recognize the peace that comes from sitting in the woods or walking across the bridge, or snuggling your fur baby? We chose the embodiment of belonging. 

But why must I focus on my breath? Why do you want me to pay attention to my belly, my neck, my shoulders, my throat? 

The connection between liberation work and embodiment is vague, the dotted line arduous. We hold trauma in our bodies, ours as well as the hurts of our ancestors. Bureaucracies terrify me. I know that my fear belongs to a long line of Jewish ancestors who came before me and for whom bureaucracy was used as an excuse for terror. 

Embodiment is about right now. In my body awareness, I am present in the here and now, not time-traveling to a past experience (good or bad), not time-traveling to a future experience (good or bad). When I pay attention to my senses, I can respond to what’s happening to me, around me, from my center. 

As white people, cis people, and people with rank or influence, embodiment is a core part of how I show up in my allyship. And it’s a pretty useful parenting tool as well. 

Here are three reasons that embodiment is anti-oppression work:

1. Antidote to Reactivity: When I am knocked off my center, I have a habit of reacting, taking things personally, getting defensive, and falling into shame. Breath and embodiment help me stay present to my experience of stress, support me in my discomfort and encourage me to respond from a place of intention. 

2. Portal to Compassion: My behavior centers compassion for self and others when I am in my belly, when I am feeling my experience and slowing down to notice my senses and my breath. When I make time, I can remember mutual interests, shared meaning, and move forward in generative ways. 

3. Listen with Your Feet: I recently started a practice of listening from different body parts as an effort to hear myself and others in a more embodied way. Especially in times when I am hearing something that challenges my values or beliefs, I feel my feet on the ground and listen while I rock back and forth or simply press my toes into the floor. I stay connected to earth, to my sensation of being a body hearing. This helps me stay curious and not interrupt.

Listening with your feet also looks like taking action. I have been moved by the power of being with my fellow humans in a wide range of settings. Making protest signs. Standing on the corner. Delivering soup. Going on an errand with a friend who simply cannot do it alone. 

Poem of the Month

I Am Waiting

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up 
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting   
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier   
and I am waiting   
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming 
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored   
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find   
the right channel   
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder 

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth   
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder 

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed   
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered   
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder 

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did 
to Tom Sawyer 
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting   
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder 

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again   
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn   
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting   
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

Copyright Credit: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “I Am Waiting” from A Coney Island of the Mind. Copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Provocations and Nourishment

Blue States: It Is Time For Soft Secession

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Degrowth - 

"Let’s move on from Erik Olin Wright’s modes of transformation"

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Joseph A. Labadie Collection | University of Michigan Library 

Upcoming Opportunities

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2026 Theatre of the Oppressed workshops in London

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Respite Program!

Kirkridge Retreat Center is launching Berrigan’s Folly Organizer and Activist Respite program. We are offering no-cost week-long private retreats for movement organizers and activists in Daniel Berrigan’s Folly Cottage at Kirkridge Retreat Center.  

Toward Justice,

Evangeline

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