In the past few days, I’ve seen countless posts detailing “the horrors of this administration,” the latest of which include separating families and imprisoning immigrants. I’ve seen friends describing their embodied physical and emotional pain, including pain from complicity and always too-small actions. I’ve seen friends accounting their own family stories of separation, as the history of state-sponsored violence against Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) is ... Read more ...
resilience
A Love Letter to Students Surviving Sexual Violence
As we near the end of spring semester, students in both my “Contemplative Writing” and “Writing for Social Justice” courses are pulling together projects to make interventions in some way. Several students are addressing rape culture, and one student is compiling a book of letters by and for survivors of sexual violence. She hopes that others at our university will read the letters, write additional ones, and add threaded response—facilitating healing through ... Read more ...
5 TED Talks for Developing Emotional Literacies for Racial Justice
Today marks the final day of the 40-day practice I’ve been leading for a local, predominantly-white church on developing emotional literacies. We’ve been focused on building and strengthening emotional awarenesses, knowledges, intelligences, and response-abilities for racial justice. As part of this practice, I’ve been sharing resources, including TED talks that provide language for understanding emotional literacies. In this post, I share five of these talks that are ... Read more ...
Snapshots of Support
This week I’ve felt stretched thin—waking up earlier and heading to bed later than I’d like. One moment, I’m reviewing students’ midterm portfolios. The next, I’m scripting a hard conversation. While attending to microaggressions and facilitating tricky online and in-person conversations, I’m also sharing hopeful-yet-emotional announcements with family, friends, colleagues, and students. In the midst of such frenzied and frenetic activity, I’ve been finding support ... Read more ...
What Is Justice?
What does it mean to strive for justice in everyday life? This question is front and center for me most days, but especially now, as I'm teaching two undergraduate courses focused on justice and as I’m offering a 40-day practice for a local church on “Building Resilience for Racial Justice.” These teaching spaces—the university and the church—are predominantly white and marked by whiteness that obscures understandings of race, racism, white supremacy, and systemic ... Read more ...
Warm Quinoa Cranberry Breakfast Cereal
Recently, I’ve felt the heat associated with anger flushing through my body, asking to be recognized. As I tend to this anger, I’m seeking nourishment that provides fuel for committed action—fuel that is sweet, but not sugary. One of the meals I’ve been making for myself is quinoa cranberry breakfast cereal. I simply combine the following ingredients, press the “porridge” setting in my “fuzzy logic” rice maker, and wake up to warm cereal and sweet ... Read more ...
Writing with Heartache
In this week of Valentine’s Day—a week when I’ve been teaching bell hooks’s Feminism Is for Everybody; sharing love notes that amplify hooks's words; and meditating with students about love as action, commitment, and a call to authenticity—I’m sitting with heartache. Heartache that gun violence continues unchecked and that proclamations of love are flooded by the pain and fear of regular, normalized, and numbing violence. Heartache that a series of online and phone ... Read more ...
My Journey with Back Pain
Back pain. It’s a friend who’s accompanied me through most of my life, beginning in my early teens and really intensifying during graduate school when I had an “emergency surgery” after losing muscular control of my right foot. In 2006, when I had this surgery, I experienced intense pain: burning sensations that radiated from my low back down my right leg and into the toes that I couldn’t lift. It was a scary experience. The last decade has taken me on an unexpected ... Read more ...
Spell-Casting and Other Contemplative Practices for Reflection and Recovery
In the past two weeks, I’ve been listening to a LOT of guided meditations, as a concussion has me grounded. I’m grounded in the sense of a child who’s misbehaved: sent to my room, with limited activities, and in reflection on what’s gotten me here. And I’m grounded in the sense of rooting down and deep, strengthening the base/foundation from which I can grow. Truly, I’m grateful for “the grounding,” and I’m grateful for the contemplative practices that are helping me ... Read more ...
A Few of My Favorite Things
December. It’s a hard time for folks walking on wires to please others. It’s a hard time for folks finishing semesters when running on fumes. It’s a hard time for folks grieving family hurts or losses. It’s a hard time for processing what comes up in contemplative moments and social interactions alike. This December is especially hard because it punctuates a year of great injustice, dehumanization, and the increasing visibility of wrongdoings. Now, as so many of us ... Read more ...
