In the last six days, I've gotten a lot of text messages from folks wondering "what now?" If you received my last message a few days ago with post-election thoughts on privilege, you may remember the first thing I cautioned folks to watch out for is Urgency.

That energy that comes from our discomfort, from the unpredictability of what is to come, from the powerlessness that we feel when the people in power don't have our best interests in mind (and may even be prioritizing things that will harm us in one way or a million) prompts us to look for something to DO.

Our brains are tasked with keeping us safe, and they don't like to be slowed down in that pursuit, but unless your hair is literally on fire or you are bleeding from an important blood vessel, slowing down is in our best interest. We don't make our best decisions - especially collective ones - from a place of fear.

Several years ago, I was in a multi-week workshop with a group of BIPOC teachers learning about post-capitalist organizing. What comes after these systems crumble? One of the elders was Tiokasin Ghosthorse (go look up his work - you won't be sorry, I promise), and he talked about how some indigenous folks arrange to walk the Trail of Tears every single year together. They do this not only to make sure that they don't forget as a collective, but to "look for the medicine." It is a way to commemorate the fact that they survived, and to understand how. They embark on this journey not armed with notes from last year's trek, not already feeling like they have the answers and they're teaching them, but as a group whose ancestors lived this reality, who have the experience of being subjugated, disconnected from their land and culture and language, and treated as less than human. The goal is to walk those same steps and begin to imagine what came from that, what could still come from that.

I often say, when I am leading Grief and Rage workshops that your greatest gift is adjacent to your greatest wound. Where is the medicine? Where can you use your lived experience to create wisdom for how and when to move forward to be part of creating something that heals both you and others? This requires two things: you have to have done some healing work around that particular trauma, and you have to be in a place of creative problem-solving (not fight/flight/freeze). Thus, not in urgency.

· When we experience or witness communal horror/terror/trauma, we are socialized to try and hold it individually, but as bell hooks famously said, "rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion." We are harmed in relationship. We don't heal outside of it.

If you are feeling the whole, full spectrum of human emotions right now and it feels really uncomfortable, that's great. Moving between freeze, fight/flight, and connection is the way we're designed. The trouble comes when we get stuck in one or the other and stay there for so long that we forget how to be in the others, or we burn out. The best way to move into connection is with other humans, so I encourage you to find folks who know how to bring their nervous systems back into harmony and spend time with them. And once you're in a group that feels safe and connected, then we start brainstorming. We listen to folks who have been doing this work for decades - indigenous people, BIPOC folks, disability justice organizers, LGBTQIA+ groups, mutual aid organizations. We center those who are most marginalized, listen deeply to what people are saying they need to feel grounded and cared for, and move slowly. We expect to fuck up and try again, we prioritize hard conversations and learning over 'knowing.'

I have some experience in helping folks get back to nervous system regulation, and I'm happy to offer that for anyone who is interested in being together with other people who want to do that work. Feel free to reply to this email if you'd like to explore that.

Holding us all in love and care.