Love Letter to the Resistance

Dear Resistance Movement,

I love you. The thought of you sometimes makes me choke up with pride. You are like a big down comforter. Just knowing you're there makes me feel warm. Before I met you, I thought I was alone. I didn't think the word "community" applied to anything in my life. Now, I feel like one small but important node in a vast spiderweb, an invisible force holding the world together, together. Thank you for manifesting yourself. You, the blessed unrest, my tribe, are the silver lining.

All loves also entail friction. I want you to be your best self. And, I can't be with you all the time.

45 isn't the hurricane you think he is; he's just the weathervane.  Melania's jacket is abhorrent, but it's not that she doesn't care. She's mad at him too.  In what universe is that jacket a feminist statement? Try to get your head there. Female anger emerges as a whack-a-mole.

Don't get me wrong. I am not apologizing for that shit. But look at her. She's pissed.

If the evidence results in revealing that the emperor has no clothes, what then? Will we be satisfied? Will our triumphant moment of justice make everything OK?

No. America has been ripped open, and with the pump of each day's news, it bleeds life out. Focusing on those with political power is like wrangling with telltales. Holding the flimsy strands of fabric in the place you want them won't change the direction of the wind.

And we will tire of the battle. Arms aching, teeth gritted, we'll burn a fuse with all that anger directed at flaccid nothingness.

The real work is tending to the culture wars. Tribalism is everywhere, dividing, dividing, dividing. Disguised as solidarity, we build ourselves up by what we're against, leeching our life-force out, day by day.





Before 2016, I thought that having more arguments, evidence, and facts in my back pocket was the way to move the dial of our culture in the directions I wanted. Likewise, as a teacher, I had thought my role was to fill students with knowledge to support positions and claims, arm them with reason and teach them how to win debates.

Has this worked in my most intimate relationships? No. Fifteen years into my marriage, I am finally learning that winning arguments and locating blame may feel temporarily good, but acts like herbicide in a garden. Only one thing can grow under the reign of repeated exposure--resentful victimhood.  Our own relationships reveal this truth to us.

Beware the us-them mindset; the other side entrenches further too. Utopia isn't around the corner of a few changed offices.  Silencing the other side by winning arguments and races can not remain the holy grail of your political energies. When my lover argues me into a speechless corner, my resentment finds other outlets. My heart and mind are not changed. Victimhood becomes fuel for other fights.

I would like the weathervanes and telltales to indicate a different wind, for sure. I love you, tribe, for figuring out multi-issue politics, intersectionality, and strategic coalition-building. I love you for all you do. I worry for your longevity, and I worry about what happens to the country when you win.

If you don't see me at the next march, it's not because I don't love you.  I'm wrestling the wind, not the weathervane.

Love,
Sarah

Teaching, Climate Change, and Eco-Grief: Recent Talks

I have been excited, nervous, and honored to give a few talks this past year on eco-grief, climate change, and teaching undergrads in the Anthropocene.  I thought I'd collect links to them in one place.

• December 2017 University of Washington. Thanks to the Interdisciplinary Anthropocene Cluster for inviting me. The talk is available on You Tube, here.

• February, 2018. "My Favorite Lecture" series, Plaza Grill, Arcata, CA.  Thanks so much to Mike Dronkers for the incredible editing and organizing work to make this sound so good. Available as podcast here.

• March 2018, Swarthmore College (my alma mater). Thanks to one of my idols, Giovanna Di Chiro, who I'm so grateful to for inviting me there. It was lovely to catch up with my religious studies professors from my time as an undergrad, Mark Wallace and Steve Hopkins. The audio and transcription are available here.

• June, 2018, University of California Santa Barbara. Thanks to John Foran for inviting me to join the Environmental Justice/Climate Justice working group for inviting me.  

A new book coming out Fall 2018, Affective Ecocriticism, edited by Jennifer Ladino and Kyle Bladow, features the only published article-length version of this work, but I'm currently developing these ideas into a book project. 

My Meditation Class Got Hijacked by Politics

I have been attending a “mindfulness meditation” class on Mondays recently. Last Monday, the teacher brought up the horror weighing heavily on our minds, of the separation of families along the southern border. Our teacher raised the question, what does the practice of meditation have to do with injustice in the world? 

Although I feel like I've been thinking about this question forever, in my midlife, I find my thoughts about this are changing. I used to agree with the conclusions of my teacher--that the whole point of spirituality is to open us to non-harming loving kindness, which leads us to action in the world. She quoted Gandhi a few times, who said, in essence, "those who think spirituality has nothing to do with politics don't know shit about spirituality." 

I remember my Religious Studies major in college, for which I took classes like "Religious Belief and Moral Action," and "The Problem of Religion."  These classes were nearly entirely all about how different religions have theorized the relationship between political action and spirituality. I used to think that any spiritual life one could lead would be narcissistic if not connected to politics. Chalk this all up to my own Quaker background; the Quakers are nuts for using religion to rationalize progressive social justice agendas.

But over time, my thoughts have changed on this. For one, I've become much more cynical about using religion or "morals" or "spirituality" to justify any political agenda--on the political right and the political left.

But what I really want to write about here is something else that bugged me about meditation class last week. 

One of the reasons I stopped attending Quaker meeting is because I don't want my spiritual spaces coopted by political proselytizing. Which isn't to say that spirituality has nothing to do with politics. It just rubs me as fundamentally devious to sneak in political agendas while people are contemplating the meaning of life. It's manipulative. 

Also, are Buddhism and Quakerism only available to liberals? That can't be right.

The small-mindedness of thinking that these spiritual approaches must inherently lead to a certain political bent is troubling to me. It can't be that if you're X religion, then your politics must therefore be Y. Doesn't this just add to the problem of tribalism we're all being crushed by right now?  Isn't this at the very core of what led to what's happening on the border?

In addition to not liking to have my spiritual life hijacked in favor of anybody else's politics, even if they're in line with my own, I bristled at being told, once again, that if I really believed in loving kindness, or God, or whatever, I would do more things. 

My teacher's lecture seemed to assume that everybody in the room was so privileged that they must not actually do political or social justice work in their lives. If they were in that room, then they must not be already engaged enough. This assumption just reinforced my own anti-meditation bias. I am sure I have avoided pursuing a spiritual life not just because I have no time, but because I have thought of it as privileged, as a luxury only people who are not paying enough attention to the apocalypse we're experiencing would care to seek. 

However, the whole reason I ended up in that mindfulness meditation class is because I am suffering from burnout of doing too many things, and I've come around to thinking that a spiritual life may in fact not just be necessary for recovering, but also for keeping myself resourced for a lifetime of this work.  

After the 2016 election, I turned up the volume of doing more things even more, thinking I wasn't already doing enough. I have turned to mindfulness and meditation precisely to recover, to find rest, to re-source myself so that I can figure out how to keep working for social justice without depleting myself. 

My teacher's conclusion that we should all support organizations more, call our congresspeople more, reach out to our neighbors more, is all fine and well, but what I want to hear about is the value of meditation to keeping up one's reserves for the long haul of this work. 

I agree with her that spirituality should not be an escape from politics. Meditation is not only a navel-gazing exercise. But I crave a much more sophisticated, complex lecture on how one's own spiritual vitality is necessary for sustained engagement in the world--no matter what that engagement looks like. It may be calling politicians, but it may be what we do every day for our jobs, then come home and do with our families. 

Adding more for us to do on top of our first and second shifts is precisely what is not needed. And fueling the divisions between "us and them"-- what Tara Brach in her most recent podcast calls "unreal othering"--is not what I want from my spiritual life or teachers. 

It's not that I want an escape from politics; I want an alternative path of action not driven by anger, fear, and negativity about people and actions I feel powerless to do anything about, and a practice of right action and right intention that helps me focus on the realms I do have control over.  

I'm feeling more like Audre Lorde than Gandhi right now.