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How many emails, newsletters, and pleas for year-end donations have you received that refer to perilous, tumultuous, or challenging times? We all experience varying degrees of uncertainty, and instability daily—environmentally, politically, culturally, spiritually, racially, emotionally, and financially.
How can we navigate through unsettling times of personal and collective upheaval?
An important way for me is to let myself have my feelings and feel whatever it is I am feeling. Emotions are a way we show up, engage, and interact with the world. They are a resource to use to influence the world we each create. Having our feelings is a radical act when so much asks that we be robotic, apathetic, or numb.
These times aren't allowing me to be in automatic (or business as usual) mode. They insist I dive deeply into whatever I'm feeling, including my grief for the climate crisis and the climate of hatred in the world, rage at decisions based only on greed with no concern for the well-being of life, anger at racial and economic injustice, pain for those without home or food security, gratitude for being alive, joy, frustration, love, confusion, despair, hope. My heart is breaking wide open—and I imagine yours may be as well.
Listening to my heart has led me to begin to explore my whiteness and racial injustice. I am taking a break from writing about money these days as I'm no longer comfortable talking much about money until I have a fuller understanding of the intersection of race and money. I feel shame about having written about money with so little consciousness about the economic roots of racism and the continuing and economic injustice and terrorism towards people of color. I'm not allowing my feelings of shame to overwhelm me but rather having them inform my actions and educating myself about economic and civil rights inequity.
