Dear Friends,
Welcome to the second installment in our summer series! Each month, we will email you a toolkit for one of the three parts on the Revolutionary Love Compass — love for others, opponents, and ourselves.
Our focus this month is LOVING OPPONENTS: TEND THE WOUND.
- Rage: A Guided Inquiry
- Listen: What is your role?
- Reimagine: Ways to Practice
- Music for the Movement
- Sneak Preview for Educators
All the tools here come straight from our new Revolutionary Love Learning Hub. It’s our free online platform with curricula, teaching videos, meditations, music, and more. You can deepen your exploration by visiting the portal page for each compass practice, which is linked in each section.
May this summer series inspire ways to bring these practices into your life and community!
Yours,
Valarie
“Divine rage is fierce, disciplined, and visionary….The aim of divine rage is not vengeance but to reorder the world. It is precise and purposeful, like the focused fury projected into the world from the forehead of the Goddess. It points us to the humanity of even those who we were fighting….Perhaps our task as human beings is to find safe containers for our raw reactionary rage–and then choose to harness that energy in a way that creates a new world for all of us.”
Where is rage inside your body right now? If it is difficult for you to access, remember all the things that you are grieving about and fighting for. Don’t be afraid of your rage. Don’t be ashamed. Just notice it.
Stay with the sensations of your rage. You might notice tension, clenching, springing, heat. Notice the shape of your rage in your body, wherever it’s living — in your heart, your belly, your throat, your legs.
What does your rage want to do? How does it want to move your body? Invite simple movement. Maybe you are springing to your feet. Maybe you start to cry, or scream, or yell. Maybe you are starting to shake or spin or stomp. Let the energy move through you.
What safe containers do you need to process this rage? Writing, dancing, running, therapies, rituals of all kinds. Safe containers are ways to process this rage in a way that does not harm others or yourself. Do you need a friend or professional to help you?
What information does your rage carry? What is your rage telling you about what is important to you?
How do you want to harness this energy in the world? What creative nonviolent action are you ready to take? Who can take this action with you?
For more on the role of rage in revolutionary love check out the RAGE portal.
“To listen to our opponents is to seek to understand them–not to change them, or persuade them, not to compromise with them, or legitimize them. Listening to our opponents preserves their humanity—and our own.
Listening is not just a moral act; it is strategic. Listening enables us to fight in smarter ways for justice—not only to remove bad actors from power but to change the cultures that radicalize them. This is how listening to our opponents becomes a powerful act of revolutionary love.
Ask yourself: When is it my role to listen? When am I emotionally and physically safe? When can I take on the labor of listening when others are not safe to do so? We can all be one another’s accomplices.”
“To reimagine is to explore a vision of a relationship, community, and world where we all flourish. Reimagining means that we’re doing more than resisting our opponents. We are looking at the cultures that radicalize them and institutions that authorize them. This is the moment to declare what is obsolete, what can be reformed, and what must be reimagined. Reimagining focuses us not just on what we are fighting against, but the future that we are fighting for.”
Protect spaces to imagine. Find people around you to create a pocket of revolutionary love. Gather together in spaces where you intentionally reimagine the world you are fighting for. This may mean creating art or ceremonies, designing rituals, or journal writing. Remember your values and the world you are fighting for, not only what you are fighting against. Let these visions guide your actions.
Imagine the world you want to see. Be as specific as possible. What does this world look like, and feel like? What do systems of care, governance, justice, education, and healing look like?
Work backwards from your vision of the world as it ought-to-be. Who is already doing the work and how can we work with or alongside them? How will we care for each other while we labor, so that we all will last?
Explore your role in institutional change. Choose an institution in your life that needs to be reimagined. It could be a school, a house of worship, an industry, a system, or your own home. What is your role in that labor? What might it look like to start a pocket of revolutionary love where you are? Who can be an accomplice with you. What is the first step?
Loving our opponents is a rhythm: step away to rage, return to listen, and reimagine the solutions together. Our friend and singer Maggie Wheeler read these words in SEE NO STRANGER and turned them into a song for us!
This September marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and we wanted you to be the first to know: we’ll be releasing brand new lesson plans to support you in teaching about the decades-long impact of 9/11. Through student activities, film clips, and book excerpts, these lessons will center the stories of communities most impacted, such as the Sikh community, and lift up how to practice revolutionary love and solidarity. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, you can find lesson plans to bring revolutionary love to your classroom or community in our educator’s guide. We draw from wisdom past and present, from the Black Lives Matter movement to disability justice, Grace Lee Boggs to bell hooks. Download the guide right now for a suggested donation or for free.
We want to hear from you! Have you been working with SEE NO STRANGER or the Revolutionary Love Learning Hub in your home, community, or congregation? You can submit your experiences and feedback here.