Dear Friend,
This is all very disorienting.
When I look out my bay window, I see fifty-year-old trees glowing proudly under the autumn blue sky. I feel safe.
But on my 9x13 inch screen, I can pull up hundreds of images of bodies bleeding from injustice. I do not feel safe.
Relatively, I am safe. I am grateful for this. But I know my safety was created by an empire built upon genocide, racism, dehumanization, and violence. I am protected by my racial identity, my Christian lineage, and the country I was born in. My safety comes at the cost of someone else’s, and this is not okay.
In the absolute, I am not safe. None of us are safe so long as some of us are unsafe. As long as violence lives in the collective body, we are all at risk of violence in our bodies. These words feel theoretically and spiritually true. But I do not wish for them to hide the immense inequality in our access to safety. None of us are free until we are all free, and some of us are so much less free than others. Some of us are in immediate danger. This fact matters to how we fight for collective liberation.
My mind knows these images are not my lived experience. But my body responds as if they were. My heart tries to reconcile the two, and it breaks every time. It breaks because as hard as I try, I cannot imagine what it’s like to be in a war zone, or a victim of an oppressive State. This fact further illuminates the vast cavern between my life and the life of the people of Gaza, and the occupied West Bank, and the refugee camps, and the borderlands, and the neighborhood one mile from my home. I have been sheltered. I take my life for granted. I don’t do enough to support our collective freedom.
I try to trace the thread of responsibility. I am a descendent of Christians. I live in the United States and pay taxes. I am a human being with a voice and resources. My history and present circumstances tie me to the decades-long conflict between Israel and Palestine. I have catching up to do. People have been organizing for Palestinian freedom for decades. Peace activists have been mending hearts for years. I can’t just jump on the bandwagon pretending like I’m brilliant and woke and participating. I am just beginning to understand my history and work on my internal liberation so that I can find my path in the movement for collective liberation. So that I can heal the harm in my lineage and participate in this movement, listening to the brilliant hearts and minds leading us toward freedom.
Friends send me petitions calling for cease-fire. They get lost for days amongst the open tabs numbering in the forties on my computer. I allow overwhelm to take hold of me until I regain clarity and take action. And then it doesn’t feel like enough. What is the value of a petition? I think it is to say, “I stand for justice and peace” and “I practice living my values through action.” I can choose to trust the activists telling me to act and not fall prey to the subtle ways exceptionalism and cynicism grab me.
I see the protests and I feel disappointed I am not there. I want to be the type of person whose first instinct is direct action, but I am not that, yet. I see who is there: Palestinian Americans, Jewish Americans, our Black and indigenous and Muslim and Christian neighbors and many others with intersectional identities I have not named. I notice the ones who show up first are always the most marginalized in our society. I imagine this is because they know that solidarity is a requirement because our liberation is a collective affair. I am grateful for their leadership. I am disappointed I’m putting the responsibility on them. I can shelter in my privilege and I choose to do so more often than I’m comfortable with.
I feel awkward. I don’t yet know my voice. I’m afraid to be called an imposter, speaking the language without truly understanding its meaning and implications. But I’m practicing calling it like it is: genocide, occupation, colonialism. Each of these words points to the deeper truth. I am interested in truth.
I’m practicing acceptance of where I am in my understanding and engagement in the movement for freedom and flourishing for all people. I’m early in my journey. I feel the urgency. I try to honor my sensitive system that needs lots of breaks. I try to check myself so I am not complacent. I’m building a community of support to hold me accountable. I never feel like I’m doing enough. This never-enough narrative is both true and part of the culture of destruction. This is confusing.
I wish so badly to be a good person. Someone whose life you can look back at and say, they showed up, as best as they could, as much as they could. They didn’t always get it right, but they kept trying. They were committed to staying engaged no matter what. They found purpose in the practice. I know to do this I have to be willing to surrender perfectionism and build my capacity to tolerate critical feedback and overall just embrace the messiness of making sense of such a complex and important period in human history. May it be so.
This is my mind, swirling and trying hard to orient to the world we live in as I find my place in it. I think disorientation is partly natural, and partly a symptom of my stage of growth as a white man joining the long march for collective liberation. I’m an infant. I see wise movement elders, young and old in age, thinking clearly and knowing what to do in moments like these.
When I drop into my body, I enter into a vast landscape of feelings. If I’m quiet and still, and listen deeply to sensation, my mind begins to settle. I see how big this is, and feel how small I am, and I’m amazed at our human capacity to hold so much suffering; our own and others’.
Big feelings are being felt by billions of us humans walking this hot earth. Feelings won’t fix this. But they might guide us toward our deeper longing: to lessen the suffering in our world in a meaningful way.
It is urgent work, but it cannot be hurried.
The practice seems to be this: stay with it. Meet yourself exactly where you are, and grow. Try not to shut down. Try not to flee. Try not to panic. Try not to get cynical and burn out, that only helps those inflicting harm. Stay with what you feel—the disorientation, the confusion, the awkwardness, the guilt, the heartbreak, the apathy. Talk to other people about how you feel. Stay with your lived experience. Be sensitive to the lived experience of others.
I don’t share my mental swirl to ask for pity or prove my worth or take you down with me. I don’t pretend I’m navigating this especially well. My intention is simple: to share my experience so that if it resonates, it may help you feel seen, and we may begin to see more clearly our path forward, together.
For me, disorientation feels like an important part of the path. I think insight, wisdom, and clear-seeing come with practice.
Accepting ourselves as we are allows us to move toward the person we wish to be. And so we can create the world we want by facing the world we have. Let’s keep at it.
Your neighbor,
Ryan
Honestly, I was afraid to send this. I don’t know if this is helpful or harmful or just messy and annoying. But this is my experience. Would you let me know what you’ve been feeling, thinking, reading, listening to? Can you help me see my blindspots? Is there something that resonates? Leave a comment or email me, and many thanks.
Reading:
This article: “Christians bear historic responsibility for the current catastrophe…” https://justiceunbound.org/why-im-marching-with-jews-to-the-white-house-to-call-for-a-ceasefire-in-gaza/
Listening:
Acting (better late than never):
Send a letter: https://act.uscpr.org/a/stop-funding-israels-massacres
Call: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/urgent-tell-congress-to-stop-fueling-violence/
*If like me, you procrastinate online petitions and the rush to activism, pause, notice that, and try anyways. See what it feels like.
I resonate with your words and appreciate them. These days too often I just feel tired from it all and want to close my eyes. I know that doesn’t help.