Be a wetland

Right on time Side with Love got to be with the good people of Minnesota celebrating the justice ministry of the Minnesota Unitarian Universalist Social Justice Alliance at their annual fundraiser and co-hosting Grow Racial Justice, a healing retreat with MUUSJA and the People’s Movement Center. 

We retaught each other what we already know: 
Grow things and eat them
Cook for each other
Sit by the fire together
Disagree and tell the truth at the kitchen table
The systems of our bodies and the wider body of our earth have the wisdom we need

One of the practitioners from the People’s Movement Center said to us “We heal so we can struggle better, not feel better. We feel better when we all feel better.”

UUA Youth and Young Adult Ministry Associate Sara Green who led the gathering taught us a song taught to her by Deirdre Smith. We sang call and response: Do you heal? Yes I heal. We’ve got all our medicine right here. 

The morning that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified to her truth and thousands more testified our truths to each other, to our families, to our own hearts, I heard the artists and organizer Ricardo Levins Morales say “Liberation struggles are about restoring power to people whose power has been taken away. Which is also a definition of trauma healing. Be a wetland. Detoxify what is upstream. Pass on liberation.”

Be a wetland. 

Let whatever touches you or your communities, come out with less harm, less harm, less harm. 

Adrienne Maree Brown says “We are not passive observers. We are survivors who have learned and are learning to alchemize our pain into futures that don’t hurt our children’s children. Our stories are our slingshots, and we are moving forward. And none of us move alone.”

There are a million things to do. Phonebank for our family with felonies who need the vote. Knock on doors for a ballot initiative that would get our people out of jail in Ohio. Open your home and heart to sponsor asylum seekers. Rage and disrupt today and next Friday and the next.

And it is enough of a struggle to love your own self. Do that. Eat food. Feed someone else. Sing. Scream. Sob. Do what is where you are. 

Pass on liberation. Alchemize new futures. 

Restore power that has been taken away. Be a wetland.