Hi all,
I wanted to send a note to acknowledge that it has been a heavy, scary and painful couple of weeks: the mass shooting during the July 4th Highland Park parade, another unarmed black man, Jayland Walker killed by police, the slew of anti-LGBTQ laws that are going into effect and the ramifications of the overturning of Roe vs Wade already impacting families across the country and allowing various state legislators to signal their desire to take away basic rights for LGBTQ+ people.
I know I am not alone in feeling overwhelmed, exhausted and at times even numb to these unending tragedies. I just want to acknowledge that all of this can be hard to hold and that whether your heart is hardening, breaking or feeling numb, please take care of yourselves and each other.
I leave with this quote, "That we parse healing and politics apart is some of what plagues us. To understand uprisings or to understand protest, you have to understand emotional repression. You have to understand that there are feelings that we have out allowed. Rage forms when grief has not been allowed or honored. What I have experienced in the streets is the convergence and expression of grief that spans generations, grief that has been silenced and unacknowledged but lives on in us. This is also for so many of us the practice of healing shame, of moving beyond the frame of respectability that we have been told keeps us safe but doesn't" - Healing and Somatics teacher BLM: Prentis Hemphill
