Dialogue Description:

• Fighting despair, not really jiving with hope, personally think we are past the point of hope; know that the end is coming, how do we love and care for one another through these crises
• Graduate student instructor: have students who are looking to instructor for sense of hope, security, some way to plug in; feels disingenuous to give a pep talk or be a cheerleader
• How to show up for young people in a way that feels authentic without being pessimistic
• Those in power want us to give up
• Fighting pessimism without being overly optimistic about things we can’t even predict
• Going to go down fighting, but what is that fight?
• What is a way to keep strong for that fight without destroying myself in the process, and care for my loved ones in the process?
• Spent the year after 2016 absolutely in despair and anger; considering my age I really wondered if I wanted to stay here, didn’t feel like there was much I could do
• Turned a corner in the last year after reading Rebecca Solnit; in despair there is hope
• The hope for me is taking action, doing something
• I saw someone and they saw me, there was a humanity between us, I gave a little bit of my time and a little bit of my heart
• Clouds and insects are going instinct!
• Have been marching with the teachers, who are up against such difficulty; are out there every day fighting and picketing and marching, laughing and singing, it has been really uplifting
• I need to recommit to my happiness
• Really connecting with the movements that are bigger than myself
• Found a sanctuary in building lines of accountability that I didn’t have before
• Have been blown away by what is happening outside of our country
• Part of my despair was seeing dynamics on the left that are not just toxic and unhelpful but existentially problematic
• I want to hold on to my values but I don’t want to be here
• If we have humility and can really listen and get out of the way, there is hope
• A year or so ago I was feeling like I must find the political home; have come to a place of piecing it together
• I’ve noticed that because of my identities I don’t deserve a political home, this is a story I need to disrupt; what I’ve turned to is needing to split up the pie and find a home in each little segment, which makes me feel kind of segmented but is a reflection of where we are both geographically and politically; has fed me because I can bring different parts of myself to different places
• Have a lot of places where I’m doing political work, but as far as whether or not they feel like home is different
• Spaces that take the majority of my political energy feel really challenging
• Labor movement and climate movement: can’t even get trade unions to adopt climate oriented values; all about short term jobs
• The things that I’m doing – I’m doing because I’ve been doing them, I’m seeing through what I’ve started, but it isn’t really an antidote to the grief and despair; so I never feel like I’m doing enough
• Everything feels so imperfect, so that’s hard
• Find something that’s actually helpful, but it isn’t perfect so we find ourselves tearing it apart
• I’m not that attached to “saving us” but I am attached to doing as much as I can, but that feels narcissistic
• Felt the gift of nourishing time after coming out of a period of such severe time claustrophobia
• Time as the foundational conditions of everything we want to create; sense of time-enough-ness, since so many people are suffering from constant urgency
• What is that chronic time condition that is preventing the deep time it takes, revolutionary time, time like this, time to think out loud, time to ask how are you really?, time to create things
• Three month ritual performance workshop – ancestral legacies, relationship to land, us as ancestors of the future
• The world has made me think I have to settle; when I was radicalized or politicized it was about fighting that; there is a voice inside of me that says “this is all this is”
• Have never felt like I’ve had a political home, in some ways I’ve been my own barrier to feeling like home
• Live in a house that is trying to live collectively, to live in the world we want to create, to live in a visionary way; and it is not working, it is falling apart, I am not who I want to be in the world, it is really hard; if that is not nourishing and it’s my home then where else is it?
• Feel like I’m settling at home, settling at work
• Having milestones, having a way of telling stories so that you can remember how things were, how the thread of the past connects what is possible in the future
• My hero died three years ago on April 21^st; when Prince died a lot died in me; when he passed it fucked me up, and millions of people around the world
• Being responsible for disabled elders will really re-frame everything
• This is the solution to everything you just talked about, women in circles, that’s what’s up – it is where the healing, the creativity, the light; it is where it happens
• I’m not so attached to everything, I’m starting to learn to step back and be reflective and not be so angry, and over-thinking everything and not being so intense and self critical
• How are you doing? “Oh, I’m busy.”  That’s the new “fine”
• Idea of political is in this state of awareness of self, really finding my home in my self
• The only thing that I can’t lose is myself, that’s the thing I’m really coming around to, being with pain, learning from pain, being with loss
• Sy Montgomery,
• Beautiful angst
• I don’t want to just talk, I want to act
• A lot that we thought we embodied in the left back then felt so disconnected from reality
• If we decide in this dominant culture to not have something; it is also hard to ask people who have way less not to want more, if we are talking about resources
• I have no fantasy how we can ever address climate change in a real way of leaving the oil in the ground
• How can I raise a family in the countryside to use the least resources possible? I totally failed with that
• How strong all these contradictions are; how challenging they are to resolve
• I feel like I’ve always had a political home by being an environmentalist, but I feel like I betray my values so often and so deeply that how can I call that a political home?
• The paycheck and the health insurance is for the little kid me that didn’t know they could have a safe life, and I’m going to give myself that; and then the political work is pushing that space to be more radical
• Really wanting home in a lot of ways and not feeling enough of it
• Seeing a lot of folks get displaced, which is not new, but wondering if I am going to have community to hold me when I need it
• Shit is so fucked right now I’m wondering if I should be getting arrested every day until I’m arrested forever
• Awakening on a personal level and numbing on a political level because it does feel so overwhelming; there is a lot of privilege in that and also we do need to stay alive and love what we are doing as part of this
• Language left uses of us & them, win/lose – we perform the contradictions of what they left critiques, how we replicate dynamics
• Scary to feel wrong in what I’m doing, needing to let go and reintegrate, and yet my beliefs of accountability say I can’t step back as a white woman, immediate whiplash
• Contradiction of working for inclusion and deepening alienation and opposition
• Dismantling master’s house
• Another Audre Lorde quote, “only by living in harmony with all our contradictions will we keep everything afloat”
• What I love about Black feminism is how fierce and generous it is
• Being ok with the unknown
• What will anthropologists of the future say of our time when people saw the world ending and didn’t do shit
• Hospitality for alienated parts of our own humanity
• Left’s intolerance for contradiction: we see this when a concept is named (like white fragility or cultural appropriation) at first it becomes expansive and creates all sorts of space for critical exploration, but then it contracts and becomes reductive, closes us in, makes us just want to check a box and name something as what it is, forces us to lose touch with our ability to question and explore
• Fear of becoming complacent
• If we trusted we wouldn’t be complacent, what would happen to our vigilance?
• This has been a thread for ten years: Challenges to white anti-racist organizing among white folks, Joanie Mayer
• Okay I can’t tolerate this in you, I need to show everyone that I don’t have that in me
• Wanting to repel from white women who want to literally sit around and intellectualize this shit and look really smart and feel important; what is the trigger, why am I wanting to disassociate?
• Competition to be the good white person, but I have so much love for us and myself who are doing this work
• How am I supposed to find a political home if I can’t even find a home? I don’t know how to find a home, even my home of origin, I don’t have a modeled experience to be in a healthy container where we all love each other, have a passion, have a purpose? How am I supposed to do that in these political, complicated spaces? I don’t even know how to do this at any level
• We seek out relationships that will heal all of our childhood traumas and then get really resentful when our partner doesn’t heal those things; are we bringing this to our political work as well?
• I wonder how much of our disappointment comes from our expectations – why would we expect it to be any easier?
• Appreciate quotes from women and genderqueer folks in Europe – well adults were always telling us we couldn’t be; my very existence defies your tired awful categories so I’m less inclined to believe that this is how its always been so this is how it will always be because I’m embodying other ways
• Paolo Freire – Do one thing today so that we can do tomorrow what we could not do today
• Cults draw on deep longing and need for political, spiritual and social home; if we don’t expect power to recreate itself then when it does it becomes a shadow thing that you deny rather than expecting it to arise
• Acknowledging what it is, but not giving up on it, not that it’s all that it can be ever
• Practice of humility becomes such a battle
• Forgiveness and empathy
• Being resourced enough, if ever single space is always taxing
• Bravery of turning toward something that I want to turn away from, bravery of questioning a world view that I’ve held for a long time
• Can feel really good to say “I don’t know”, can be a great relief, can be so threatening
• Rebecca Solnit, hope is not about optimism or an expectation that things will work out, but simply an understanding that the future is unknowable
• Everything we do now is political; every act, every word, every gesture, everything matters as the world is ending, talk about contradiction
• Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
• Heretical cults were trying to overthrow feudalism by sodomy and homosexuality, the inherent politicality of everything we’ve ever done
• Each era has had a group of people who were super tuned in to the breaking heart of the world
• Were suffragettes, abolitionists, etc. sitting in a circle thinking that the world was going to end?
• Science is saying something different than it ever has
• Thinking about how other oppressed people viewed the world and what their elders understood about the environment; understanding that science is definitely informed by white supremacy and patriarchy
• There are worlds that have already ended, indigenous worlds, the apocalypse happened, we are living past that in some other form
• Did it end or did it transition?
• Pace of change, from my own perspective, there are things I thought were in place for my future
• Find stability from folks who’ve never had the material conditions to have hope but did anyways
• Don’t think of it as ending but as rapid change; we could still be here and we could still be good to each other, we have that capacity
• As generation X I inherited this feeling of insecurity, everything is torn apart; want to direct everything toward finding safety, but having the privilege to ask myself I want to see how much safety I really need for myself; questioning the idea of if there even is any safety
• What is connected to safety is also dependency, to see that we are interconnected and dependent on each other and that it is not necessarily something bad; admitting that could also give me a feeling of safety in the relying on each other
• Be okay with uncertainty, I don’t know how tomorrow is going to be but I’m still going in this direction
• Definitely think the world as we know it is going to end, but there is something really nice about it, we can get out of the human-centeredness of this time
• Vulnerability as a place of power, co-creation, interdependence, feeling our bodily vulnerability, all of the ways that we are very porous as one of the pathways out of this hyper-individualistic state that we are in
• Donna Haraway, multi-species feminist; apocalypse is impending, veils being pulled aside, need to be making kin across species
• I feel the ways that love in the face of death or dying comes up, really appreciating something or someone when they are transitioning, how often people have regret
• Try to practice active love
• Cloud appreciation society, challenging blue sky thinking
• Apocalyptic narratives in popular culture, millions of people are imagining these and rehearsing these futures, many of them are incredibly repetitive; the psychological horror of these is always about other humans
• Indigenous futurist narratives – yeah we did go through an apocalypse, the gold rush in California was nothing short of a Zombie apocalypse
• Extinction Rebellion – we have no other choice anymore, we have to go through the grief but we have to pull all of the possibilities together, politics and lawmaking is one of the possibilities, it won’t work without it; like war, which forces us to leave everything else behind and narrow our focus,
• My thoughts around what a political home should look like shifted – forgiveness, the imperfection of it
• How do you take the home you are in and make it the thing it needs to be?
• Deeper sense of what is most important about a political home for me, which is around people that are going to be real about where we are politically and are going to radically hold each other in that; what are the other components of political homes that people are looking for?
• Feel a little more landed in the conversation around expectations; messy humanity and joy of getting to create this and make up something new, no political home is static
• Feel very uncomfortable, which I’ll try to live with for a while; I come for that
• We are actually all doing it right now, we are living in harmony with our contradictions, we are being uncomfortable, we are holding sadness and joy at the same time; break out of binary thinking, either/or that one thing precludes the other, that these things can be simultaneous and intertwined
• Gratitude to hear from everyone where the struggle, feel unresolved, angry, in grief – so honest, I experience it too, I appreciate the generosity of your shares
• Humbling nature of acknowledging where we are, sometimes the smallness of what we are capable of doing, and still the importance of that
• It feels home to be vulnerable, it feels home to be open and honest with each other; in that sense, home and political home can be in a lot of spaces, it is about the conditions and to take that wherever I go
• I am rejecting the idea that the world is ending, I do not accept it; I think it is because I have a beautiful 15 year old boy at home; I think the world is changing and transforming, I feel very fed here, inspired thinking; being super at home in myself
• Cornell West: it is not about being multi-cultural, it is about being multi-contextual
• How in despair I am in this moment, it all feels so hard; and it is probably not all that hard actually; just acknowledging that it is really hard and acknowledging that I want it to be different will make space for it to shift; tenuous connection between joy and despair
• Inspired by Green Hairstreak Butterfly, all sorts of people coordinated together to create a corridor for their survival and brought them back from extinction
• One of biggest component of political home is constant questioning; the Zapatista slogan: caminando preguntamos
• Antidote to despair: creativity
• Creative writing – writing love letters to political homes that we’ve known, acknowledging that those are relationships, all the love and the heartbreak, as a way to bring closure, say things that haven’t been heard otherwise