Showing Up
By Liz Jansen, Executive Director
This week has been yet another week that has felt like many, many decades. I was reviewing some notes for a meeting that I thought happened two weeks ago. It wasn’t until I looked at the date that I recalled it happened on Monday … of this week … not even a full four days ago.
I’ve been reading a book called Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day by Kaitlin B. Curtice. In it, Curtice breaks resistance down into four realms: the personal, the communal, the ancestral, and the integral. I started the book earlier this week (aka 25 years ago), so I am still reading about the first realm, the personal, which includes art as resistance. Curtice writes, “Even though the world is heavy and we are in so much pain, we still create with and for each other, because we belong to each other.”
Now, this certainly has not been enough to get me fully out of the funk I’m in, but it serves as a helpful reminder that’s guiding me through. As I reflect on this week and where I really started to feel the heaviest, I’m realizing it came out of a conversation I had with a nonprofit leader on Wednesday (aka 15 years ago). During the conversation she described her work, which is advocating for unaccompanied minors who have to go to court and detention alone. I was aware of this very disgusting and hyper-American phenomenon, but had been able to compartmentalize it and file it away. Facing that depraved reality directly in a face-to-face conversation absolutely zapped my energy. It made everything I’ve done since—answering emails, tidying my house, moving throughout my day-to-day feel SO FUCKING DUMB.
Tack on the military marching on our capital, a genocide funded by our tax dollars, climate catastrophes and mass shootings so common they don’t even make headlines, and it begs the question—how do we claw ourselves back from the brink of nihilism (or, let’s be honest, the depths of it, depending on the day)?
The closest thing to an answer I’m cobbling together for myself and for my work, is that we show up. We take the breaks we need, we find joy where we can, and then we show up with as much compassion and zeal as we can muster. I’ve shared this on LinkedIn, because it’s where a lot of the folks who are out there showing up, hang out. All of the nonprofit folks, the foundation folks, the university folks, the corporate folks who are trying their fucking best despite being entrenched in these inhumane systems that are designed to grind our will, our energy, our hope, our bodies to dust. Despite it all, we’re creating, building, repairing for and with each other because we know that we belong to each other.
