How does one wrap up a column that never really found its rhythm? When beginning this year, I imagined my relationship to this container so much differently than unfolded - so many unfinished drafts, so few actual pieces published. It’s not been for lack of wrestling or writing! There is so much about solidarity that is simple. At its best, it is a natural extension of our love for each other. A natural outgrowth of recognizing that what happens to one (being or person or community) is inextricably linked to all of us. A most foundational grounding for what it means to be in relationship. In...

There are a great number of important takes on feeling helpless circulating these days. They are so important. Despair that leads us to compliance, exhaustion, cynicism, or handing over our agency is dangerous. To give up on our neighbors or our own power at this stage of fascism while living in the belly of the beast is an abdication of responsibility toward life and lives across the planet. If the collective strategy were simply to become, “there’s nothing we can do,” then we would all be destined for the worst form of whatever gruesome futures the powerful may dream up as planetary...

Over the last six months, I’ve been finding my way through a need to make a shift from my original intentions with this column. Every month, I inevitably find myself at not just a fork in the road but forks in the road of my writing. “Who am I talking to/with?” Each way of answering would lead down different paths - and so I get stuck. In this particular column, in these particular days, I am needing the stated specificity going forward: I will be writing explicitly to/with/for fellow white people (and look forward to complicating the tidiness of that category). I am of the common belief...

I've been lingering in some questions lately about anger and its role in solidarities - what it indicates or doesn't.  I've been thinking about who we, I, others, all of us, any of us are willing to get angry with, whose anger is pathologized or criminalized, whose anger becomes a weapon or a tool or an archive. Whose anger hides under pleasantries, whose explodes in public, and whose must be practiced with such care and precision. And when it's not about 'who' the anger belongs to - but on whose behalf the anger is expressed. Suddenly, even the anger of the most privileged becomes a crime,...

One of the things that excited me about this column was knowing that every month, I’d get the opportunity to linger with a different angle, form, shape, or incarnation of solidarity.  Universalizing a thing - making it singular, static, stuck in one rote form or definition - is a task of white supremacy’s doing. Learning to love a thing, or at least respect a thing, in its multiple forms…that’s a very exciting part of growing in freer directions. Getting to perceive and interact and play and learn from what happens when a thing gets the room to be, become, evolve, flow and even contradict...

Ashes. Dirt. Soil. Stars. As the season of lent begins today, many will remember it is from these elements we have been created. And to these elements we return. An invitation to remember mortality, but also, so much more.  Much of what I believe about spirituality these days is identifiable in the earth’s wisdom. Sacred truths decomposing, frosting, seeding, blowing, raining, slithering all around us. Consider fungus: one of the oldest living organisms on the planet and not a single electoral representative. Fungus has adapted across millennia of changes and found ways to thrive. Lessons on...