I vow to not burn out.
Sending you many winter blessings.
May these long nights offer you space for rest and reflection.
It has been a full and heartbreaking fall season. I hope your solidarity has been stretched and strengthened. We need to build our endurance to continue moving towards liberation, for the Palestinian people and for all of us.
At our last BIPOC meditation sit of the year, my friend Daniel offered a reading of an excerpt from I vow to not burn out by Mushim Patricia Ikeda. In this essay Ikeda shares what she calls the “Great Vow for Mindful Activists”
Aware of suffering and injustice, I, _________, am working to create a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world. I promise, for the benefit of all, to practice self-care, mindfulness, healing, and joy. I vow to not burn out.
This is a reminder that our commitment to moving towards liberation must include the way we live. Now, perhaps more than ever, we need to increase our capacity to not burn out, to be with our discomfort, to move towards what we care about. We must stay awake and aware, and be changed by what we are witnessing. And part of that practice, paradoxical as it may seem, is to center deep care and love. Yes we are striving to use our power well to shift systems, but we are also striving to care for and love ourselves, and to care for and love our kin –our human and more than human family. We have to embody, in every moment, the future we are building towards. We can do this through our dedication to compassion and our commitment to rigorously loving all life, including our own.
May we continue to find ways to embody love this winter, and into the years to come.
POLITICAL ACTION RESOURCES:
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement
Easy ways to contact your representatives:
This website helps you make quick calls and includes talking scripts and other info
5 Calls app helps connect you with your reps right from you phone and also includes scripts and prompts
FaxZero.com allows you to send up to 5 free faxes a day. It's a little clunky but a way to send more creative messages to reps
If you email your reps, try to use different subject lines to avoid filters OR use the direct contact forms on your reps websites