Everything is In-Between

Anything like true social justice, mutual aid, or “team human” as I’ve come to call it, happens in that mycelial, connected, doula space where compassion resides and domination has no place: there are no subjects and objects, just relationships.

I’ve spent most of life and career thinking of myself as an agent of change. I grew up at the end of the Vietnam War protests, and mixed one part Brechtian activist theater to another part prophetic Judaism and ended up at the TWO protests and Occupy Wall Street. I really believed we could use those deliberate mechanisms to create policy, fight the... See more

As for making sense of the world and what’s happening, I don’t think it’s a matter of focusing on those things , but trying to get a sense of what is in between those things. Less attention to the individual pictures on the TV set, and more attention to what is happening on the ground. It has less to do with the news stories we may not be able to c... See more

The boat navigating across the ocean may need those coordinates, but the surfer or even the tiny fishing vessel may care more about the waves. Mapmakers can’t see those movements; the waves do not exist. But that’s where the action is.

We can’t adjust course much less make sense of the last new thing before the next new thing comes along.

Maybe we shouldn’t try to.

Yes, we continue to care about things. I am not saying to move into a state of denial — but I am choosing an alternative to watching the news all day in a state of paralysis when I could be attending to real people, so... See more

Connective tissue wasn’t even acknowledged, much less treated as an organ, by Western medicine until the last few years. They didn’t even acknowledge its existence, or the meridians, gut biome, or any of the other liminal, in-between things that actually compose the community of organisms our bodies represent and share.

The organs are just the figu... See more

As I’ve been suggesting through my last few pieces, these subjects and news stories are more like the figures on the TV than the ground on which we actually live. Yes, they are real events and have real repercussions. But to most of us, most of these phenomena are not directly related to our lived, moment-to-moment experience. Even if our house is ... See more

How do I even write in a way that is appropriate to the moment, when the moment keeps changing? Trump wins (help people breathe), Carter dies (highlight an era where climate change was an accepted fact and a president told us to turn down the heat and wear a sweater), Musk takes power (techno-feudalism, getting off social media, reversion to the me... See more

I find myself slowing changing from an agent of change to an agent of care. I’m less confident in the impact my activism might have on policy than I am about the impact my care may have on other human beings, as well as how they might trickle up to the systems that need changing.

What I've seen work in real life are activities such as mutual aid, c... See more