A Year of Living Resistance

a moment to celebrate with me

Dear friends,

Forgive me for popping into your inbox twice this week, but today is such a special day for me and I wanted to bring you into it—I’m celebrating the one year anniversary of Living Resistance being out in the world!

Before I started writing Living Resistance and it was just an idea, I met with someone in publishing just to get an opinion on it. They said they were worried it wouldn’t be evergreen enough, meaning it would only be relevant to this current time we live in and wouldn’t be a book to last throughout the years.

It’s hard to just ignore the current issues of our time when writing a book, for sure.

But at the same time, I knew this person was wrong, because resistance is evergreen.

Resistance based on Indigenous wisdom is meant to last throughout the years, something that we practice again and again as long as there is a toxic status quo to move and breathe against.

So my job in writing this book was to help us ask: How can we practice care for ourselves, one another, and Mother Earth? How can we use our everyday lives to exert energy against the dangerous status quo of our time and the time to come?

One year ago, I was in Florida at the Aspen: Climate conference, speaking at an interfaith panel. It was an emotional week. I got to meet Tommy Caldwell, a climber who inspires me with not just his climbing but his activism. I appeared on the podcast We Can Do Hard Things (listen to it here!). I released a piece I wrote for Oprah Daily on a powerful breathwork session that changed the way I view childhood trauma.

Every morning at 7am of the few days I was in Florida, I walked to the beach to steady myself, to remind myself of who I am in this moment, to hold my heart close and beg the world to take my words tenderly to the readers who needed them.

So, a year later, what do I feel and believe about this book?

I wish it wasn’t so relevant. I wish we weren’t asking in big ways what it means to resist the status quo. I wish we didn’t have to write about violence and war, colonialism and white supremacy.

I wish I didn’t have to write a series about how publishing isn’t sustainable, and I wish I didn’t have to check in with author friends to see how they’re really doing.

But this is the world we live in. In the United States, we’re coming up on a really important and terrifying election, and I feel a whole lot of ways about it. The world is hurting all over, and I just picture Mother Earth feeling terribly bruised, all while she’s incredibly strong.

So, I don’t want to take up too much of your time today. I just want to hold this, celebrate it, and sit with the reality that we are always, always resisting, whether it’s in our personal realm, our communal realm, our ancestral realm, or in the integral realm.

Here is one of my favorite parts of Living Resistance, from the Communal Realm on protecting the land as resistance:

Given that these patriarchal power structures have brought so many of the problems we have today, we have to be careful about the movement we continue to build. Ojibwe activist and climate lawyer Tara Houska has concerns about the way we build these movements, which can easily become mirror images of the very institutions and designs we are fighting against. If our climate movements are about money and not about the land herself, we have missed it. She writes, “Corporations spend millions on campaigns to sow distrust and hatred toward anyone who disrupts the status quo. . . . I wonder what would happen if the environmental movement truly stood with the land it speaks of, side by side with impacted communities who bear the brunt of the climate crisis.”

She later writes,“I do not believe we will solar panel or vote our way out of this crisis without also radically reframing our connection with our Mother.” This is why I tell people to write letters to Segmekwe. This is why we cannot approach the climate conversation from a static, data-driven reality only—we have to invest our bodies and souls in this.

Resistance against the status quo of conquest, of hate, of pillage, means reconnecting our souls to the land that holds us. I want to share with you one of my favorite poems from Mirabai Starr’s lovely book Wild Mercy. The poem is below, and as you read about the Great Mama, I want you to think of her as Mother Earth, Segmekwe. Imagine Mother Earth gathering you to her lap. After reflecting on Mirabai’s poem for months, I wrote a response to it—a response from the Great Mother, in this case, from our Great Mother, Earth. I hope you can sit with the poem and my response as you lean into your Resistance Commitment, as you ask what it might mean for you, for all of us, to reconnect with the lands and waters around us.

Here. Come here. Take a moment to set aside that list you’ve been writing in fluorescent ink. The list that converts tasks into emergencies. Items like “feed the orchids” become “If I don’t accomplish this by 11:00 a.m. tomorrow morning the rain forests are going to dry up and it will be all my fault.” Or “If I fail to renew my automobile insurance I will probably crash my car and everyonewilldie.”Or“Thisfriendjusthadherbreastbiopsiedand that friend’s brother-in-law beat up her sister and my aunt just lost her job with the symphony and my nephew is contemplating divorce and I must call them all, and listen to them for an hour each, and dispense redemptive advice.”

Gather your burdens in a basket in your heart. Set them at the feet of the Mother. Say, “Take this, Great Mama, because I cannot carry all this shit for another minute.” And then crawl into her broad lap and nestle against her ample bosom and take a nap.When you wake, the basket will still be there, but half its contents will be gone, and the other half will have resumed their ordinary shapes and sizes, no longer masquerading as catastrophic, epic, chronic, and toxic. The Mother will clear things out and tidy up. She will take your compulsions and transmute them. But only if you freely offer them to her.

The Great Mother Responds

I gathered you up yesterday. You were tired, worried, your mind full of everything and nothing. You were living an apocalypse, anx- ieties rising with the second, so I handed you a basket. I handed you an oxygen mask too, and we took deep breaths together until eventually your heartbeat slowed. You were sleepy, finally, like a child who has thrown a tantrum long enough, who has let it all out and suddenly aches for closed eyelids and comforting dreams. So I picked you up and held you, sang to you while you fell asleep.

When you woke, everything was still everything, but you— you were different. You calmed, and carried on with the tools to continue the calm, even when things began to unravel. You took your inner world and proclaimed it to be good, sacred even. You trusted the deep breaths, and as you slowly emptied your basket of worries, you looked back at me, questioning. You looked back at me, holding the to-dos in your right hand and the oxygen mask in your left, and as you’d learned, you took a deep breath and journeyed back to your life. I’ll see you tomorrow, though, and the days after, every day that you need me. I’ll be here to hold you, to remind you of the oxygen mask and the basket, to remind you that my waiting lap is ready and that my arms are warm. I am always here when the inner world gets shaky. I am always here to unburden you.

I had this drawing on the wall of my office the entire time I wrote the book, a visual reminder of what I was trying to build and bring to you.

So, thank you—thank you for celebrating my work, for reading my words, not just here, but in all of my books, on social media, everywhere. Thank you for believing in me, for telling your friends and family, for challenging the status quo wherever it shows up in your life.

I hope you take time to heal, to cherish, to honor, to fight.

And as we celebrate Living Resistance together, could you do me a favor?

1. If you haven’t bought it yet, please grab a copy for yourself or a friend (and remember it’s on Audible too, and yes, I read the book!)

2. Share about it on social media using #livingresistance

3. Invite a friend to subscribe to the Liminality Journal

4. start a book club and read Living Resistance with a friend or two

5. keep loving yourself, others, and Mother Earth well

Onward, friends, remembering that we are always, always arriving.