Beloveds,

How are you? How is your body? How is your breath? I will not ask how your heart is because you are paying attention, and that means you are sad. Possibly you are scared. Potentially, you are overwhelmed.

Venezuela… threats to Greenland… and now, and now… the murder of Renee Good. A poet. A mother of three whose wife was in the car with her. Whose child’s stuffed animals were in the back seat. I would be lying if I didn’t say that looking at my own wife and children this morning, these children who are five and seven years old, my breath stopped and my adrenaline started pumping as I thought about the flurry of text messages from a few weeks ago, when my wife told me her plans to put her body between ICE and children if agents showed up at our school. I felt tears sting my eyes as I walked behind my skipping five-year-old, who was literally singing her joy about going to school today.

When you ask my children what my job is, they will tell you what I have said and sung to them since their first weeks on this earth.

Me: “What’s my job?”
My children: “To keep us safe!”

How do I keep them safe? How do I keep us safe? I don’t know if I can keep us safe, and it is breaking my heart.

We are living under fascism. I do not think we can sugarcoat this. And it is my belief that it is our duty to resist this by whatever means possible. And still, all I can ask of myself and anyone listening in this moment is: please, please, PLEASE do not numb yourself to this. Do not look away when ICE is murdering people and when government officials are lying to our faces about the circumstances. We owe it to ourselves to confront this and to feel it. And those feelings most likely will bubble up into rage or devastation. Then you need to let them out. Go scream in your car if you have to. Scream into a pillow. Write 10 pages in your journal. Find a friend who is ready to rage. We have to face this fear and this anger. We have to process it. And we have to let it fuel us.

My prayers are with Renee Good. With her wife and her child. With her community. My prayers are for all of us, that we can maintain our bodily safety. My prayer is that those in power will wake up and remember that they are connected to everyone else and that there is nothing they can do to change that, no matter how hard they try to deny it.

I love you. I am grateful to know that you are all awake to the world, no matter how much it hurts. The world is always trying to heal. It is our responsibility to join in that work. It starts with us. There’s no other way.

Sending love.

With care,
Rachel