[quotes] Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) - Dean Spade 2020

  

"Mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared understanding about why people do not have what they need." 

"Getting support through a mutual aid project that has a political analysis of the conditions that produced your crisis also helps to break stigma, shame, and isolation." 

"By participating in groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being together, we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together." 

"We are encouraged to be mostly numbed-out consumers, but ones who perhaps volunteer at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, post videos about animal rights on our social media accounts, or wear a T-shirt with a feminist slogan now and again." 

"Activism and mutual aid shouldn't feel like volunteering or like a hobby - it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us." 

"They encourage reforms premised on the assumption that the systems we seek to dismantle are fundamentally fair and fixable. We have to refuse to limit our visions to the concessions they want to give - what we want is a radically different world that eliminates the systems that put our lives under their control."  

"Because of how capitalism controls the means for getting by - food, health, housing, communications, transportation - and how dependent we are on systems we do not control, it can be hard to imagine that we could survive another way. But for most of human history, we did, and mutual aid projects let us relearn that it's possible and emancipatory." 

"MADR's slogan is 'No Masters, No Flakes,' and it's a great summary of key principles for collective mutual aid work. This dual focus on rejecting hierarchies inside the organization and committing to build accountability according to shared values asks participants to keep showing up and working together not because a boss is making you, but because you want to." 

"Consensus decision-making is based on the idea that everyone should have a say in decisions that affect them." 

"For consensus to work well, people need a common purpose; some degree of trust in each other; and understanding of the consensus process; a willingness to put the best interests of the group at the center (which does not mean people let themselves be harmed 'for the good of the group,' but may mean being okay not always getting their way); a willingness to spend time preparing and discussing proposals; and skillful facilitation and agenda preparation." 

"When someone shows up to a mutual aid group for the first time, full of urgency about something they care about, and they do not understand why things are being done the way they are, or do not understand how things are being done, and do not have a way to share their opinions and influence what is happening, they are likely to leave. People come to contribute, but they stay because they feel needed, included, and a part of something." 

"In our culture, we get a lot of practice either going along with bossy people or trying to be the boss. It's time to learn something different." 

"Decision-making works better if, rather than anyone seeing it as 'my proposal,' we can see it as the group's proposal. That way we are less likely to become rigidly attached to one outcome." 

"Most of us avoid conflict either by submitting to others' wills and trying to numb out the impact on us, or by trying to dominate others to get our way and being numb to the impact on others." 

 "If we do work we care deeply about with other people, we will experience conflict because the stakes of the work feel very high to us, and that conflict is likely to bring up wounds and reactions from earlier in our lives." 

"Sometimes we are so used to feeling excluded that we tune into that familiar feeling quickly and easily, unconsciously looking for evidence that we are different or are being slighted or left out." 

"We live in a society based on disposability. When we feel bad, we often automatically decide that either we are bad or another person is bad... If we want to build a different way of being together in groups, we have to look closely at the feelings and behaviors that generate the desire to throw people away."  

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy - Becky Chambers 2022

  

"Nobody should be barred from necessities or comforts just because they don't have the right number next to their name."

"All ingredients on Panga had to first exist on Panga. Everything is natural in origin, but if you turn it into something that nature can no longer recycle, then you've removed it from that realm entirely. It no longer has a part to play. Just like me. I'm an observer, not a participant." 

"I'm here to meet humanity, and these people you've described are just as much a part of it as you are. I wouldn't be doing a very good job of pursuing my quest if I only welcomed the parts that were fun." 

"But that's exactly why I come back after going elsewhere. Me and mine believe the further you distance yourself from the realities of what it means to be an animal in this world, the more you risk severing your connection to it." 

"It was always a strange thing, coming home. Coming home meant that you had, at one point, left it and, in doing so, irreversibly changed. How odd, then, to be able to return to a place that would always be anchored in your notion of the past. How could this place still be there, if the you that once lived there no longer existed?" 

A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers 2021

 

"We don't have to fall into the same category to be of equal value." 

"Most of my kind have a focus - not as sharply focused as Two Foxes or Back Marbled Rockfrog, necessarily, but they have an area of expertise, at least. Whereas I... I like everything."

"'Everybody thinks they're the exception to the rule, and that's exactly where the trouble starts. One person can do a lot of damage.' 'Every living thing causes damage to others, Sibling Dex. You'd all starve otherwise. Have you ever watched a bull elk mow its way through a bitebulb thicket?'"

"How could we continue to be students of the world if we don't emulate its most intrinsic cycle? If the originals had simply fixed themselves, they'd be behaving in opposition to the very thing they desperately sough to understand. The thing we're still trying to understand."

"'So the paradox is that the ecosystem as a whole needs its participants to act with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior.' 'Other than fear.' 'Other than fear, which is a feeling you want to avoid or stop at all costs.' The hardware in Mosscap's head produced a steady hum. 'Yes, that's a mess, isn't it?'"

"'Find the strength to do both,' Mosscap said, quoting the phrase painted on the wagon. 'Exactly,' Dex said. 'But what's both?' Dex recited: 'Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either.'" 

"You're an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You're an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don't know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don't need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do."  

In the Absence of the Ordinary - Francis Weller 2025

  

"The skill of grieving well enables us to become current - to live in the present moment and be available to the electricity of life. We gradually turn our attention to what is here, now, and pay less attention to our need to repair history. We remember we are more verb than noun, more a jumpy rhythm, a wild song, a fluid leap than a fixed thing in space."

"In his book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, O'Donohue writes, 'What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach... When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us."

"It is not about resolving our issues or repairing the past but becoming more spacious and capable of holding all that psyche and life brings to us."

"We need to hold, contain, and cook the material before sharing it with the world. It must be allowed o go through its own process of distillation prior to being revealed to questioning eyes. The value of restraint acknowledges this truth and creates a space where something can take shape according to its nature." 

"Let us come to see the value of restraint, of creating space through the practice of not doing. It may be there that we find ourselves escorted into the chamber of what it is the soul truly longs for." 

"Our senses and minds were synchronized to streams and night skies, to times around the fire, to the long, patient wait of the hunger, to the listening to stories told by elders. We moved slowly and drank in the entire spectrum of life through our bodies. We need to take up an apprenticeship with slowness and remember this ancient mode of being." 

"Slow down, uncenter and forget about yourself for a moment, let the world find you, love what is nearby, share your grief with others, say thank you, learn the stories from where you live and from where your ancestors came, be a wee bit wild in your imagination, and come home."

"In the absence of the ordinary, it falls to us to kindle bonds of kinship with all that is near to us. We are at a threshold for our world. In the days to come, everything we do will be significant. Never doubt that each of us is essential to the welfare of the commons. Everyone is a vector. Choose what you spread. It all tuns on affection." 

 

[quotes] The Emperor of Gladness - Ocean Vuong 2025

  

"You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in. And so he said it. And so he lied." 

"There was so little to hide from each other by then, their bodies finally scraped clean with each other's gazes."

"If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that's enough. Look at my girl, all that talent and for what, just to drown in Bud Light? People don't know what's enough, Labas. That's their problem. They think they suffer, but they're really just bored. They don't eat enough carrots." 

"What you see might not always be what you feel. And what you feel may no longer be real. Somewhere inside him the boy believed this law was what turned the planet on its axis."  

[quotes] Conflict Is Not Abuse - Sarah Schulman 2019

 

"At the center of my vision is the recognition that above all, it is the community surrounding a Conflict that is the source of its resolution. The community holds the crucial responsibility to resit overreaction to difference, and to offer alternatives of understanding and complexity. We have to help each other illuminate and counter the role of overstating harm instead of using it to justify cruelty."

"The values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair." 

"It is not that I was lying, bu that I was defended. I blocked access to my own real feelings. I did this to defend a story about myself that I felt safe maintaining, even if it wasn't true. But sometimes the other person saw the truth that I was unable to access or be accountable for. Part of peace-making is acknowledging that we can't know everything about ourselves, and sometimes we reveal things to others that we are not ready to accept."

"There is something in the person who hides behind email that wants these offenses to be true. They want to feel victimized. Then they don't have to look at themselves critically or think about the other person with complexity. There is no guilt or responsibility if one is an email victim."

 "While unrecovered trauma is so often a prison of inflexibility, some people do have choices about how to respond. And someone else might make that shift possible by daring to imagine what to us may feel unimaginable. Which can be love."

"At any conflicted moment that is available to interpret one's self as somehow transgressed, there is often the option of not seeing it that way. Or of asking the other person what they mean."

"Being in a negative moment with another person can be destabilizing, hurtful, and stressful, especially if a person's self-concept requires them to think of themselves as perfect. But it is not, by definition, Abuse. It could be Abuse, if one has power over another, but if not, it's a Conflict. And being in a Conflict is a position that is filled with responsibility and opportunity." 

"People who describe themselves as "Abused" when they are actually in Conflict are not lying; they usually don't know the difference." 

"A shallow relationship with a friend, relative, co-worker, or advocate means that they will not take the time to ask the meaningful questions and to help the person involved overcome shame, anger, and disappointment so they can get to a complex truth about their own participation and how to achieve repair."

"This placement of the authority to 'stop violence' into the hands of the police produces a crisis of meaning. The police are often the source of violence, especially in the lives of women, people of color, trans women, sex workers, and the poor. And the police enforce the laws of the United States of America, which is one of the greatest sources of violence in the world... The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state. So while police intervention can importantly separate violent adults from their victims or each other after violence has begun, this job of 'stopping violence' has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions of those unaddressed causes." 

"Once we stop being determined to produce a victim and are instead focused on learning the truth of what actually happened, we become willing to accept the discomfort of recognizing two people as being Conflicted and embrace a more humane and acknowledging vision of social relationships."

"People have the right to change partners, but there are many kinds of available paths to creating change. Taking responsibility, recognizing the other person's anguish, allowing for transitional indulgences, going through a process with third parties even if uncomfortable, can dissipate pain."

"Instead of encouraging more open communication between lovers, the government is imposing itself as a substitute for learning how to problem-solve." 

"This is what Supremacy Ideology does: it provides the empowered with delusions of superiority, as the ideology itself masquerades as reality. This is why some people feel righteous in calling the police instead of facing their own anxieties, and why others reinforce them in this terrible decision." 

"Silence can itself be an escalation. Little children give their parents "the silent treatment" because they don't know how to negotiate: how to listen, to respond in a way that is transformed by having listened, to change in order to meet the other."

"We all have an ideal imagined self and a real self, and there is always a gap between the two. I've never met a person who was exempt from this. The process of moving forward in life requires, I guess, constant adjustment on both sides. We each come closer to a more mature understanding of who we really are, some kind of acceptance, while at the same time working to change the things we can in order to get closer to our desired self. In this way, the gap narrows from both sides: acceptance, and change."

"Privacy, or rather invasion of, is when the government collects data on you without your consent. Shame, to me, is hiding information that reveals common human experiences, contradictions, and mistakes. Sometimes this is imposed from the outside through stigma."

"In fact, both studies found that people who come from guilt very much want to negotiate, are able to apologize and admit fault, can make concessions, and are invested in positive resolution. People coming from shame, on the other hand, direct anger, aggression, and blame towards the other party."  

 "As Sarah Ahmed says, learning from Audre Lorde: while actually dealing with the substance of Conflict may initially feel more upsetting than repressing it, the response to high levels of distress should sometimes be to create even higher levels of distress. In this way, internal and external domination systems are revealed, and this ultimately dismantled." 

"There is narcissism to Supremacy, but there is also a narcissism to Trauma, when a person cannot see how others are being affected. Although the triggered person may be made narcissistic and self-involved by the enormity of their pain, bot parties are in fact equally important. And it is the job of the surrounding communities to insist on this." 

"Using the word 'transference,' she implied an attachment of an emotion to people who are not the source of that emotion. In this way, we externalize internal conflict."

"All of these systems recommend the same tactic: delay. And in order o delay, they all agree, one needs to be in community: a relationship, friendship circle, family, identity group, nation, or people who encourage us to be self-critical and look for alternatives to blame, punishment, and attack. We need to be in groups that are willing to be uncomfortable and take the time to fully talk through the order of events, take all parties into account, and facilitate repair." 

"His friends have to parent him as well as his actual parents, because that is where real values are established, in the conflict between what our families tell us and the reality of the world."

"Do what feels right is unfortunately considered the individual's best guide to ethical action. But this can be a capitulation to the controls of impulsivity, rooted in trauma and egged on by bad friends and negative family relationships. There is a gross distortion in this ideology as an excuse to do what you want. Pretending that what is comfortable and easiest is inherently what is right is a tragic self-deception." 

"Finally, ultimately, when groups bond over shunning or hurting or blaming another person, it is the state's power that is enhanced. Because the state doesn't want to understand causes, because the state doesn't want things to get better, it doesn't want people to understand each other. State apparatuses are there to maintain the power of those in control and punish those who contest that power; that is what bad families do, and that is what bad friends do."

[quotes] Women, Race, and Class - Angela Davis 1981

 

The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood 

"The slavery system defined Black people as chattel. Since women, no less than men, were viewed as profitable labor-units, they might as well have been genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned. In the words of one scholar, 'the slave woman was first a full-time worker for her owner, and only incidentally a wife, mother and homemaker.'"

"Expediency governed the slaveholders' posture toward female slaves: when it was profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles." 

"Within the confines of their family and community life, therefore, Black people managed to accomplish a magnificent feat. They transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive quality: the egalitarianism characterizing their social relations." 

"Black women were equal to their men in the oppression they suffered; they were their men's social equals within the slave community; and they resisted slavery with  passion equal to their men's. This was one of the greatest ironies of the slave system, for in subjecting women to the most ruthless exploitation conceivable, exploitation which knew no sex distinctions, the groundwork was created not only for Black women to assert their equality through their social relations, but also to express it through their acts of resistance." 

The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Birth of Women's Rights

"When manufacturing moved out of the home and into the factory, the ideology of womanhood began to raise the wife and mother as ideals. As workers, women had at least enjoyed economic equality, but as wives, they were destined to become appendages to their men, servants to their husbands. As mothers, they would be defined as passive vehicles for the replenishment of human life. The situation of the white housewife was full of contradictions. There was bound to be resistance." 

"The anti-slavery movement offered women of the middle class the opportunity to prove their worth according to standards that were not tied to their role as wives and mothers. In this sense, the abolitionist campaign was a home where they could be valued for their concrete works."

"They discovered that sexism, which seemed unalterable inside their marriages, could be questioned and fought in the arena of political struggle. Yes, white women would be called upon to defend fiercely their rights as women in order to fight for the emancipation of Black people." 

"But once the male supremacist attacks against them were unleashed, they realized that unless they defended themselves as women - and the rights of women in general - they would be forever barred from the campaign to free the slaves." 

Class and Race in the Early Women's Rights Campaign

"Frederick Douglass was also responsible for officially introducing the issue of women's rights to the Black Liberation movement, where it was enthusiastically welcomed."

"These women - unlike their predecessors, whose families owned land - had nothing to rely upon but their labor power. When they resisted, they were fighting for their right to survive."

"Even the most radical white abolitionists, basing their opposition to slavery on moral and humanitarian grounds, failed to understand that the rapidly developing capitalism of the North was also an oppressive system. They viewed slavery as a detestable and inhuman institution, an archaic transgression to justice. But they did not recognize that the white worker in the North, his or her status as 'free' laborer notwithstanding, was no different from the enslaved 'worker' in the South: both were victims of economic exploitation." 

Racism in the Woman Suffrage Movement

"The assumption that emancipation had rendered the former slaves equal to white women - both groups equally requiring the vote for the completion of their social equality - ignored the utter precariousness of Black people's newly won 'freedom' during the post-Civil War era. While the chains of slavery had been broken, Black people still suffered the pain of economic deprivation and they faced the terrorist violence of racist mobs in a form whose intensity was unmatched even by slavery." 

"In light of widespread violence and terror suffered by Black people in the South, Frederick Dougless' insistence that Black people's need for electoral power was more urgent than that of middle-class white women was logical and compelling. The former slave population was still locked in a struggle to defend their lives - and in Douglass' eyes, only the ballot could ensure their victory." 

"The women's rights leaders of the post-Civil War era tended to view the vote as an end in itself. Already in 1866, it seemed that whoever furthered the cause of woman suffrage, however racist their motives, was a worthwhile recruit for the women's campaign."

The Meaning of Emancipation According to Black Women 

"Men and women alike were arrested and imprisoned at the slightest pretext - in order to be leased out by the authorities as convict laborers. Whereas the slaveholders had recognized limits to the cruelty with which they exploited their 'valuable' human property, no such cautions were necessary for the postwar planters who rented Black convicts for relatively short terms." 89

"As a result, both employers and state authorities acquired a compelling economic interest in increasing the prison population." 89

"This perversion of the criminal justice system was oppressive to the ex-slave population as a whole. But the women were especially susceptible to the brutal assaults of the judicial system. The sexual abuse they had routinely suffered during the era of slavery was not arrested by the advent of emancipation." 

"White women - feminists included - have revealed a historical reluctance to acknowledge the struggles of household workers." 

"The feminist activist was perpetrating the very oppression she protested. Yet her contradictory behavior and her inordinate insensitivity are not without explanation, for people who work as servants are generally viewed as less than human beings. Inherent in the dynamic of the master-servant (or mistress-maid) relationship, said the philosopher Hegel, is the constant striving to annihilate the consciousness of the servant."

Education and Liberation: Black Women's Perspective 

"'knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.'" 100

Women Suffrage at the Turn of the Century: The Rising Influence of Racism

"This conversation between Ida B. Wells and Susan B. Anthony rook place in 1894. Anthony's self-avowed capitulation to racism 'on the ground of expediency' characterized her public stance on this issue until she resigned in 1900 from the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association." 

"The same forces that sought to subjugate the peoples of these countries were responsible for the worsening plight of Black people and the entire US working class. Racism nourished those imperialist ventures and was likewise conditioned by imperialism's strategies and apologetics."

"Had Anthony seriously reflected on the findings of her friend Ida B. Wells, she might have realized that a noncommittal stand on racism implied that lynchings and mass murders by the thousands could be considered a neutral issue." 119

"For years and years, leading suffragists had justified the Association's indifference to the cause of racial equality by invoking the catch-all argument of expediency. Now woman suffrage was represented as the most expedient means to achieve racial supremacy." 

Black Women and the Club Movement 

"Not nearly as many Black women were confronted with the domestic void which plagued their white middle-class sisters." 

Working Women, Black Women and the History of the Suffrage Movement

"Anthony's staunchly feminist position was also a staunch reflection of bourgeois ideology. And it was probably because of the ideology's blinding powers that she failed to realize that working-class women and Black women alike were fundamentally linked to their men by the class exploitation and racist oppression which did not discriminate between the sexes." 142

Communist Women

"Lucy Parsons argued that racism and sexism were overshadowed by the capitalists' overall exploitation of the working class. Since they were victims of capitalist exploitation, said Parsons, Black people and women, no less than white people and men, should devote all their energies to the class struggle... Sex and race, according to Lucy Parsons' theory, were facts of existence manipulated by employers who sought to justify their greater exploitation of women and people of color." 153

Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist

"Slavery relied as much on routine sexual abuse as it relied on the whip and the lash." 175

"It was the unwritten policy of the US Military Command to systematically encourage rape, since it was an extremely effective weapon of mass terrorism." 

"The reliance on rape as an instrument of white-supremacist terror predates by several centuries the institution of lynching. During slavery, the lynching of Black people did not occur extensively - for the simple reason that slaveowners were reluctant to destroy their valuable property. Flogging yes, but lynching, no. Together with flogging, rape was a terribly efficient method of keeping Black women and men alike in check. It was a routine arm of repression." 183

"... for the rape charge turned out to be the most powerful of several attempts to justify the lynching of Black people. The institution of lynching, in turn, complemented by the continued rape of Black women, became an essential ingredient of the postwar strategy of racist terror." 

"Lynchings were represented as a necessary measure to prevent Black supremacy over white people - in other words, to reaffirm white supremacy."

"In a society where male supremacy was all-pervasive, men who were motivated by their duty to defend their women could be excused of any excess they might commit. That their motive was sublime was ample justification for the resulting barbarities." 187

"It seems, in fact, that men of the capitalist class and their middle-class partners are immune to prosecution because they commit their sexual assaults with the same unchallenged authority that legitimizes their daily assaults on the labor and dignity of working people."

Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights

"Black women have been aborting themselves since the earliest days of slavery. Many slave women refused to bring children into a world of interminable forced labor, where chains and floggings and sexual abuse for women were the everyday condition of life."204

"Their assumption reflected the tendency to blur the distinction between abortion rights and the general advocacy of abortions. The campaign often failed to provide a voice for women who wanted the right to legal abortions while deploring the social conditions that prohibited them from bearing more children." 

"More and more, it was assumed within birth control circles that poor women, Black and immigrant alike, had a 'moral obligation to restrict the size of their families.' What was demanded as a 'right' for the privilege came to be interpreted as a 'duty' for the poor." 210

"By 1932 the Eugenics Society could boast that at least twenty-six states had passed compulsory sterilization laws and that thousands of 'unfit' persons had already been surgically prevented from reproducing."

60-61, 77-83, 88-90, 96-97, 183-187, 205-210

Abolish Rent - Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis 2024

  

"The frame of 'housing crisis' trains our attention away from the fundamental power imbalance between landlords and tenants. It suggests that to solve the crisis, we should focus on the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it. It encourages us to think about abstract, fungible 'housing units' and not about power, or about people and the constraints that shape their lives." 

"'All housing is public housing,' as David Madden and Peter Marcuse put it. Public investment is a precondition for private profit. Even what we think of as privately owned housing relies on vast public infrastructure to exist. That physical infrastructure includes the pipes that deliver water, the sewers that carry out waste, the sidewalks, roads, and transportation systems that connect our housing to our neighborhoods and our neighborhoods to each other. Public infrastructure also means legal and financial systems, from the contracts that govern leases, to the regulations that dictate everything from what counts as a bedroom to the terms of financing loans. The private housing market could not exist without the support of the state."

"Theirs is a view of tenant power as a by-product of market forces: like a low unemployment rate, which gives workers more leverage, incentivizing bosses to improve conditions and raise pay, a higher vacancy rate would give tenants more choice, motivating landlords to make repairs and ease rent increases. But just as tight labor market has never eliminated deadly jobs or poverty wages, a slack housing market will not eradicate slum housing or rent gouging. Indeed, it was organized labor unions that won wage floors, weekends, and safety regulations; no basic worker protection or benefit has been handed over as a gift from 'job creators.'"

"To protect their right to profit from housing, the industry consistently framed their attacks as a defense against communism. Robert Gerholz, president of the National Home Builders, threatened that public housing would allow the US to 'be precipitated into a socialist state.'"

"As Hoyt once put it, 'Communism can never win in a nation of homeowners.' By blocking a federal guarantee to a dignified home, the real estate industry forced most tenants to turn to the private market." 

"By the eighties, shaped in turns by inflation, tax revolt, racism, and the red scare, Republicans had invented the housing programs that make up the overwhelming bulk of the government response to the housing question today, in which support for tenants ends up benefiting landlords and real estate developers... Rather than challenge the power of landlords and developers to extract rents, these programs hand over our tax dollars to shore up private profits."

"The decline of public housing was timed with the expansion of another institution of publicly funded housing for the poor: prisons - public housing as public warehousing." 

"Like the horticultural metaphor of 'urban blight' that figures dilapidation as disease, the theory smears the quality of tenants' neighborhoods into the character of tenants themselves. It suggests that buildings in poor condition are not evidence of historical segregation and disinvestment - the decisions of landowners and governments - but evidence of residents' criminality." 

"The role of municipal governance continued to shift from providing services to existing residents to growing their economies and expanding their tax bases. Municipalities perform that role by courting new, richer residents as well as real estate speculators." 

"Who should we look to for help to dismantle the real estate regime? What levers do we have? What threat do we pose? 'What can we do today so that we can do tomorrow what we cannot do today?'"

"Putting a face and a name on the landlord turned the struggle against an impersonal process of gentrification into a struggle against a would-be evictor, who could no longer hide from personal responsibility for - and personal benefit from - the tenants' removal." 

"They learned about the warranty of habitability, implied in most every state and enshrined in California, which ties a tenants' obligation to pay rent to a property's livability: an apartment free of pests and structural issues, heat that heats, lights that light, drains that drain. Withholding rent is often legally protected if basic living standards are not met." 

"This is clear from the Mariachi's collective action: Those who couldn't pay and those who could decided to join together, organizing to withhold a majority of the rent roll for the building. The association turned withholding rent into a ritual, turning over their rent checks or money orders to be stored by the union each month." 

"Landlord stakeholders claim their property taxes are their contributions to the public good, but it is we who pay our landlords' property taxes." 

"A tenants union treats tenants as experts in their own experience and as agents of the changes we need. Who builds a tenants union? We do. Who is it for? Us. A union allows tenants to claim collective control of our housing and our lives." 

"By reclaiming the common space of our buildings and our blocks, we assert ourselves as the stewards of the places where we live. We educate ourselves, acting our way into thinking and archiving past tactics to build an arsenal for the future." 

"Enacting the principle of small-d democracy - people's self-governance - the tenants union is an instrument to produce small-c communism - collective control over our housing, our land, and our lives." 

"The union builds community to overcome this sense of disempowerment, to testify to our ongoing presence in our neighborhoods, to bolster our sense of control over our lives. When we act together in solidarity, we solidify the bonds gentrification breaks." 

"So many systems protect landlords from having to encounter the consequences of their actions, from the LLCs that anonymize their identities to the physical distance that separates their homes from ours." 

"And, as we know from living in broken-down apartments in cities with habitability laws on the books, what laws we win are only as good as their enforcement." 

"Similarly, when we reclaim shared spaces - hold association meetings in our lobbies, grow plants in our backyards, repair our sidewalks, clean our alleys, block traffic to host a union party on our street - we occupy our buildings, our neighborhoods, and the city." 

"How do you resolve the tension between the emergency we are living through and the fact that the only tools we have to work with - organizing and collective action - take so much time?... The union is what makes it possible to continue in the face of all the conditions that made it seem like the rational thing to do would be to give up." 

"Aligned with property values rather than human rights, city agencies conspired against residents of Echo Park Lake by denying or removing services. As public-records requests revealed, Chief Park Ranger Joe Losorelli had helped deny the park access to a hygiene trailer with showers, lest it become 'another Occupy LA.'"

"Housing without autonomy is internment."

"During an attempt at mediation, the landlord told the city attorney's office that he'd drop his tenants' evictions provided they stop their events. He said the tenants association's movie nights, chapter meetings, and food distribution were as threatening to him as eviction notices. Those communal gatherings are not outwardly aggressive actions, but, in a way, he is right: taking away his ability to turn their neighbors against them, building support for emergency response, those actions grow the power of tenants." 

  

[quotes] Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paulo Freire 1968

 

"The term conscientização refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality." 

"The rightist sectarian differs from his or her leftist counterpart in that the former attempts to domesticate the present so that (he or she hopes) the future will reproduce this domesticated present, while the latter considers the future pre-established - a kind of inevitable fate, fortune, or destiny." 

"The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a 'circle of certainty within which reality is also imprisoned.' On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it."

"From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love."

"The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed." 

"This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well." 

"True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the 'rejects of life,' to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands - whether of individuals or entire peoples - need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world." 

"They will not gain this liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it. And this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors' violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity." 

"It is a rare peasant who, once 'promoted' to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself. This is because the context of the peasant's situation, that is, oppression, remains unchanged." 

"One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another ,transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber's consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor. The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility." 

"... the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle." 

"However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires. Moreover, their struggle for freedom threatens not only the oppressor, but also their own oppressed comrades who are fearful of still greater repression." 

"They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produced by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom." 

"The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. they are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account." 

"In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform." 

"Hence, the radical requirement - both for the individual who discovers himself or herself to be an oppressor and for the oppressed - that the concrete situation which begets oppression must be transformed." 

"One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings' consciousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: refection and action upon the world in order to transform it." 

"The pedagogy of the oppressed, which is the pedagogy of people engaged in the fight for their own liberation, has its roots here... The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption. The pedagogy of the oppressed, animated by authentic, humanist (not humanitarian) generosity, presents itself as a pedagogy of humankind. Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression."

"There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation... This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate." 

"But even when the contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation established by the liberated laborers, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression."  

"For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more - always more - even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be the class of the 'have.' The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own 'effort,' with their 'courage to take risks.'"

"... trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust."

"The insistence that the oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation is not a call to armchair revolution. On the contrary, reflection - true reflection - leads to action. On the other hand, when the situation calls for action, that action will constitute an authentic praxis only if its consequences become the object of critical reflection. In this sense, the praxis is the new raison d'etre of the oppressed; and the revolution, which inaugurates the historical moment of this raison d'etre, it not viable apart from their concomitant conscious involvement. Otherwise, action is pure activism." 

"The correct method for a revolutionary leadership to employ in the task of liberation is, therefore, not 'libertarian propaganda.' Nor can the leadership merely 'implant' in the oppressed a belief in freedom, thus thinking to win their trust. The correct method lies in dialogue. The conviction of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation is not a gift bestowed by the revolutionary leadership, but the result of their own conscientização."

chapter 2

"This is the 'banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits."

"Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them'; for more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated."  

"Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly, fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality. But, sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation." 

"It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educators' role is to regulate the way the world 'enters into' the students. The teacher's task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to 'fill' students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge... The educated individual is the adapted person, because he or she is better 'fit' for the world." 

"Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it. Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, not the use of banking methods of domination (propaganda, slogans - deposits) in the name of liberation." 

"The role of the problem-posing educator is to create; together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos."

"Education as the practice of freedom - as opposed to education as the practice of domination - denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people."

"In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation... it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world." 

"Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming - as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality... The banking method emphasizes permanence and becomes reactionary; problem-posing education - which accepts neither a 'well-behaved' present not a predetermined future - roots itself in the dynamic present and becomes revolutionary."  

"Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects."

chapter 3

"Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people." 

"As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love. Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not love the world - if I do not love life - if I do not love people - I cannot enter into dialogue."

"At the point of encounter there are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only people who are attempting together, to learn more than they now know." 

"Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all). Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue; the 'dialogical man' believes in others even before he meets them face to face."

"For the dialogical, problem-posing teaher-student, the program content of education is neither a gift nor an imposition - bits of information to be deposited in the students - but rather the organized, systematized, and developed 're-presentation' to individuals of the things about which they want to know more."

"The oppressors are the ones who act upon the people to indoctrinate them and adjust them to a reality which must remain untouched."

"It is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours. We must realize that their view of the world, manifested variously in their action, reflects their situation of the world. Educational and political action which is not critically aware of this situation runs the risk either of 'banking' or of preaching in the desert."

"Often, educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the people they address... In order to communicate effectively, educator and politician must understand the structural conditions in which the thought and language of the people are dialectically framed."

"... as they locate the seat of their decisions in themselves and in their relations with the world and others, people overcome the situations which limit them: the 'limit situations.'"

"Confronted by this 'universe of themes' in dialectical contradiction, persons take equally contradictory positions: some work to maintain the structures, others to change them. As antagonism deepens between the themes which are the expression of reality, there is a tendency for the themes and for reality itself to be mythicized, establishing a climate or irrationality and sectarianism."

"In sum, limit-situations imply the existence of persons who are directly or indirectly served by these situations, and of those who are negated and curbed by them. Once the latter come to perceive these situations as the frontier between being and being more human, rather than the frontier between being and nothingness, they begin to direct their increasingly critical actions towards achieving the untested feasibility implicit in that perception. On the other hand, those who are served by the present limit-situation regard the untested feasibility as a threatening limit-situation which must not be allowed to materialize, and act to maintain the status quo." 

"Human beings are because they are in a situation. And they will be more the more they not only critically reflect upon their existence but critically act upon it."

"The task of the dialogical teacher in an interdisciplinary team working on the thematic universe revealed by their investigation is to 're-present' that universe to the people from whom she or he first received it - and 're-present' it not as a lecture, but as a problem." 

"The important thing, from the point of view of libertarian education, is for the people to come to feel like masters of their thinking by discussing the thinking and views of the world explicitly or implicitly manifest in their own suggestions and those of their comrades."

chapter 4

"The revolution is made neither by the leaders for the people, nor by the people for the leaders, but by both acting together in unshakable solidarity."

"Authentic revolution attempts to transform the reality which begets this dehumanizing state of affairs."

"We can legitimately say that in the process of oppression someone oppresses someone else; we cannot say that in the process of revolution someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that human beings in communion liberate each other."

"Although they may legitimately recognize themselves as having, due to their revolutionary consciousness, a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of empirical knowledge held by the people, the cannot impose themselves and their knowledge on the people. They cannot sloganize the people, but must enter into dialogue with them, so that the people's empirical knowledge of reality, nourished by the leader's critical knowledge, gradually becomes transformed into knowledge of the causes of reality."

"It is necessary for the oppressors to approach the people in order, via subjugation, to keep them passive. This approximation, however, does not involve being with the people, or require true communication. It is accomplished by the oppressors' depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo: for example, the myth that the oppressive order is a 'free society.'"

"All these myths (and others the readers could list), the internalization of which is essential to the subjugation of the oppressed, are presented to them by well-organized propaganda and slogans, via the mass 'communications' media - as if such alienation constituted real communication."

"One of the characteristics of oppressive cultural action which is almost never perceived by the dedicated but naive professionals who are involved is the emphasis on a focalized view of problems rather than on seeing them as dimensions of a totality."

"By means of manipulation, the dominant elites try to conform the masses to their objectives. And the greater the political immaturity of these people (rural or urban) the more easily the latter can be manipulated by those who do not wish to lose their power."

"Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think."

"One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success." 

"In [cultural invasion], the invaders penetrate the cultural context of another group, in disrespect of the latter's potentialities; they impose their own view of the world upon those they invade and inhibit the creativity of the invaded by curbing their expression."

"The more the invasion is accentuated and those invaded are alienated from the spirit of their own culture and from themselves, the more the latter want to be like the invaders: to walk like them, dress like them, talk like them."

"Homes and schools exist not in the abstract, but in time and space. Within the structures of domination they function largely as agencies which prepare the invaders of the future."

"Internalizing paternal authority through the rigid relationship structure emphasized by the school, these young people tend when they become professionals to repeat the rigid patterns in which they were miseducated. This phenomenon, in additional to their class position, perhaps explains why so many professionals adhere to anti-dialogical action. Whatever the specialty that beings them into contact with the people, they are almost unshakable convinced that it is their mission to 'give' the latter their knowledge and techniques."

"In order to determine whether or not a society is developing, one must go beyond criteria based on indices of 'per capita' income as well as those which concentrate on the study of gross income. The basic, elementary criterion is whether or not the society is a 'being for itself.' If it is not, the other criteria indicate modernization rather than development."

"If at a certain historical moment the oppressed, for the reasons previously described, are unable to fulfill their vocation as Subjects, the posing of their very oppression as a problem will help them achieve this vocation."

"... just as the oppressor, in order to oppress, needs a theory of oppressive action, so the oppressed, in order to become free, also need a theory of action."

 

 

[quotes] What It Takes to Heal - Prentis Hemphill 2024

 

"We neglect ourselves or our growth in our rush to change what is external. When we do, we fracture, and succumb to what we are unwilling to face." 

"It seemed as if everyone had come to the edge of the precipice, held hands, but failed to jump. The change that was needed required more than many were willing to give." 

"I don't think healing begins where we think it does, in our doing something. I believe it begins in another realm altogether, the realm of dreams and imagination. A realm that I might also call spirit. A place of potential, where possibilities reside, where we retrieve, through prayer or in dreams, visions for ourselves and for the world that make us more whole." 

"Some say that in our time of overwhelm and chaos we are at the end of futures, out of resources and hope, that were is nothing left to dream in this reality, that we are trapped on a timeline where we keep remaking disaster movies until we meet our final catastrophe." 

"Visioning is an uncovering of potential. It's revealing what is already there and trying to become, if only we believe in it."

"I think of the risk it is to stretch beyond the containers that have been created for us. I think about longing. It's a visceral word for me. It's vulnerable and hard to let ourselves desire beyond what we can trust will be fulfilled. Longing is not evidence-based in that way; it's a yearning that comes from our bodies."  

"When we can't perceive too far ahead, it's impossible to imagine that we can shape what comes and create a future we've never seen." 

"There is a difference between the visions that come out of our most individualistic tendencies and those that arise when we are able to admit that we need other people. I've often found that the visions people articulate for themselves, those that they are most afraid to admit, are their yearnings for connection and their longing to lead and coordinate something that will have a big impact on the world." 

"Our ability to dream of something different, to name longing, to articulate a vision and commit to it, directly correlates to the likelihood that we will experience it, that it will be realized... In prayer or meditation, in what we ritualize, our visions become more real the more space we give to them." 

"Healing and social change are not, in fact, unrelated. To pry them apart is to exacerbate the issue. They are inextricably linked, braided together, interdependent processes of transformation... How could our personal development ever truly be at odds with social transformation? How could it happen without it?"

"As we attempt to reconfigure the world where it has been unjust and where our systems and beliefs have hurt us, so must we transform ourselves, our values, our cultures, our actions, and our spirits." 

"Pain is transmitted across a power grid. It's sent to the places where we don't fear the consequences of it spilling over onto the people less powerful than us, onto seemingly less deserving bodies. It shows up as abuse toward a partner who has fewer means to leave or in the scapegoating of whole communities for our suffering." 

"I've been working for years now with this: Healing is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma." 

"Healing, I often say, helps us fight in the places we need to, but love in the places we long to."

"It's in everything that right rightsizes you, brings you into reverence and presence, where you leave your control or hiding place, and suddenly you can create within the world, and be taken aback in awe of it, too."

"We commit to our own healing in part because the realization of what we are dreaming of rests on it. It is our responsibility to one another to do our internal work, not so that we feel good alone but to stay in active part of the whole and to refuse to pass down to the next generation what pain we've accrued." 

"For healing to take place, for it to be felt, for it to root, remake, and rearrange us, it has to happen not only in the realm of our thinking, but in the soil of our bodies. Healing has to be embodied." 

"(1) What we practice, what we do over time, can eventually become automatic; that is, it no longer requires our thinking to execute. We just do it. Something is truly learned when it is embodied (whether it's riding a bicycle or having the capacity to trust someone). What we embody may be aligned or misaligned with our values or may be helpful or harmful to us as we learn and embody practices both consciously and unconsciously over time. (2) We can build our awareness of what it is we do automatically, how we do it, and how it came to be - which gives us the possibility to change. (3) We can increase our ability to feel our emotions rather than deny them and allow ourselves to feel what we deeply long for in ourselves and the world. (4) To transform and become who we intend to be more often, we have to practice being who we are becoming."

"Such a view of our own bodies and the natural world converts us all easily into objects when we relate to one another. If we treat our bodies like machines, as if they are only containers for our thinking, then our emotions, in their unpredictability, become the wild in need of conquering, too. And it would follow that if we do not feel or if our society views feeling as a failure, our culture might lose its grasp on what is truly humane." 

when did you first know you have a body?

"Our best thinking happens as a full-bodied experience, because no matter how much we try to separate the brain from the body, it is irritatingly located there, inside of it, a part of the ecosystem that is us. There is a reality that our bodies connects us to." 

"And our bodies are somehow a collection of living stories, too, of where we've been and where we come from, a profound record of our ancestors' survival." 

"The more we are jolted into reactivity, the more we lose our grounding in the present moment as we respond to the vestiges of the past. This loss of presence is a loss of agency. If we are always caught up in responding to the conditions of another time, we are not able to respond as thoughtfully to the conditions of this one." 

"Numbing is one way that we protect ourselves from feeling something we are afraid to or are under-resourced to feel." 

"Somatics, in a way, is born from the original fracture that separates us all into feeling and non-feeling, wild and civilized. It's a solution to a problem created when the mind was given supremacy." 

"Somewhere along the way we were taught to stop feeling instead of being taught to stop what harms us, as though the feeling were our enemy, as though the feeling were hurting us. To move forward and address the harm, we have to feel. As Audre Lorde said in her essay, 'Poetry Is Not a Luxury,' 'The white fathers told us: I think, there I am. The Black mother within each of us - the poet- whispers in our dreams: I feel, there I can be free.'" 

"Empathy, mutuality, and connection are dangerous to injustice. They can unravel what is otherwise a fragile, imposed order. For safety reasons, then, we are all taught to push our emotions down and away rather than feel them. If we felt, imagine what we might change." 

"Across this earth are our kin. What we do shapes the lives of others. We exist in an impossibly complex web of relationship." 

"Inauthenticity is sometimes rewarded. It's a set of defenses learned over time. They can develop out of striving to achieve the visions that were imposed on us. Or we can become someone we're not to protect ourselves from being vulnerable and impacted by other people, a self that is assembled through trauma." 

"When we allow ourselves to be authentic, it's from there that we can be known. Authenticity is the root of vulnerability, of intimacy, of relationship. When we can take off our mask, we invite others to do the same." 

"I choose what to share, I choose what I respond to, I choose when to leave. I see people all the time who bring others back into their lives after distance and assume that the relationship and their proximity to each other should revert to what it once was. Instead, ruptures should inform the shape of relationships going forward. We should relate differently based on what's happened, now that we've learned something about who the other actually is and who we are. If not, we risk falling into the same patterns that didn't work before." 

"These are boundaries. When we decide the shape and nature of our relationships. When we are not forced into closeness because of expectations or history, but we choose according to our comfort. We get to move forward with the knowledge of our history, following a path of our own making." 

"trust as the choosing to make something you value vulnerable to another person's actions. Trust is a risk we take with one another to do something bigger than we could have done alone." 

"Of course, unplugging gives us the space we sometimes desperately need to reassess and listen, to hear ourselves, our own heartbeats in the silence. But if we believe that our wholeness requires long-term disconnection from the world, we run the risk of mistaking what is comfortable for what is healing, a sense of control with safety, and reinforcing separation and isolation." 

"We can't change the world if we can't heal what has become embodied in us, and we cannot truly heal if the conditions that break and isolate us don't change, too." 

"While these systems are sometimes the sites of both individual and collective trauma, each of these sites, these systems, is also a potential place of action and transformation. Just as they shape us, they are places that can be shaped and reshaped, rebuilt and reworked, abolished and replaced." 

"To initiate change, we can only begin where we are and as whoever we are right now." 

"We decide together what is sacred and we hold it as such."

"Engaging the world is about making our contribution, about exiting the safety of the sidelines and feeling the texture of deep practice and collective action." 

"When we choose to deny that interconnection by othering, by seeing some of us as less worthy, we refuse to submit to a clear and urgent lesson from our universe: When we don't care for all of us, what is allowed to happen to me will eventually be done to you." 

"No one teaches us how to build a family, how to decide that people with whom we share no blood are relatives."

"... we must first be able to feel grief, our own, before we can truly become an ally to anyone else. We have to know what it is to have lost. For all of us striving to achieve, climbing the ladders of success or acceptance in our society, that might well mean we have to stop and admit that there's something that we've given up to play the game." 

"There's no saviors in a circle, no heroes, just people taking risks for a vision of another way." 

"There's is almost nothing more profound or more terrifying than the simple act of reaching for each other. There is no real intimacy that does not begin with listening. And there is no chance that we can show up for each other if one or both of us is still somehow an object." 

conflict is the nature of a relationship asking to deepen

"Sometimes we wrap our tender fears in judgment and in blame, punishing someone for making us bare our chests, holding tight the apologies that are ours to say until the other person shows they are worthy by apologizing first."  

"Conflict can makes us very unsure, and a body threatened craves certainty. This can affect the way we respond... when we are able to hold and explore nuance in a situation, it leads to more precise actions. We see that contradictions can exist alongside one another, and we can hear and take in other perspectives. We can hold multiple motivations and truths in our core and live with that stewing of complexity until the next right action shows itself to us." 

"What if we could do something different from having innocence and guilt at the core of our conflicts? To give up on this binary is not to erase the fact that we often hurt one another in conflict - very must the opposite in fact... What if, in resolving conflicts, we could move out of binaries and into a culture of accountability? Where we are proactively responsible for our actions and relationships."

"I'm left with a question I haven't yet been able to answer: What will it really take to believe in our and others' ability to change? Maybe the most direct question is: How do we begin to create this culture when there have already been so many betrayals?" 

"It is hard to describe to someone who has not experienced it, what it is for a body to open, but it is just as holy as falling before the pulpit and as righteous as a riot. It is the breaking of what binds. It is undoing so that we can become." 

"We are always practicing something, somatics teaches us... We have practiced, whether we realize it or not, who we are right now." 

"Practice isn't only helpful because repetition brings us closer to some kind of perfection, but because in each repetition we are met by our internal barriers, sometimes small and lurking, sometimes quite profound, that threaten the skill we are trying to learn. Practice is the recurring encounter with ourselves and the space to learn from it. The mundane is miraculous with the right attention."