Dear friend,
As I’m writing this, the first snow of the season has begun in Chicago. Outside my window little tufts of white cotton are moving through the wind. The deep darkness of daylight savings is just a few days away. I’m swaddled on a couch, in my warm home, breathing deeply into my belly. I invite you to swaddle yourself. To find some corner that feels warm to you. To let your belly fill with air. To feel it stretch like a balloon. To know you are held and elastic. Even here. Even now. To know your little body is expansive and powerful - capable of alchemizing suffering into love.
This month, the escalating genocide in Palestine, the US’ funding of this violence and the discourse surrounding it triggered my body back to its state in June 2020: oversaturated with tragedy, spiritually under-resourced, frozen . . my body made the connections before my mind could. Our collective nervous system knows these parallel and intersecting terrors intimately and personally.
I’ve been using my car as an emotional portal - driving around Chicago, listening to podcasts and audiobooks and crying. Trying to make things quiet so I can hear. Praying over the names of those killed abroad and here. Looking to groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Black feminist writers I admire as models of solidarity. I’m reading the reflections of anti-Zionist Jews and members of the Palestinian diaspora. I’m holding my loved ones physically and metaphorically in their rage, sorrow, confusion and fear (and being held back). I’m letting everything break my heart and mend it back together again.
Outside of the lists of actions to take that are widely spread, I want to elevate trainings to stop antisemitic and islamophobic and xenophobic harassment. With global leaders continuing to use dehumanizing language and the blatant propaganda of many news sources and on social media, we must activate an even deeper communal care through intervention and education.
I’m sharing this month’s playlist with paid and unpaid subscribers as an offering to keep our hearts soft in this season where the personal feels particularly political. Please share this and anything above with those who might find it useful.
Below are more of the things that have soothed, enlightened and moved me this month.