Don’t be afraid of all that you are. Most important: If you are afraid of dissolving, you will spend the whole time trying to remain what you are. It is exhausting, to say the least. Here ends the period of hallucinations.

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I heard a poet say this once, while describing watching someone run for the bus, they shouted a silent prayer, “I hope you make it.” And it flipped a switch for me. It’s really nice. I hope you make it. It’s also spot on, I mean who isn’t trying to make it? To the bus, to the next destination, to the place where you finally feel good enough and worthy enough to rest and enjoy what is here. I hope you make it. I hope all that is unresolved in you one day feels resolved, I hope you make it. I hope you get the bag, I hope you make it. If the bag causes you to have stomach ulcers, I hope the load gets lighter - I hope you make it. If things are tough, I hope you make it. If things are good, I hope you make it. If things are great, I hope you make it. It just about always works. Even to the Oligarch who takes and takes and consumes and consumes - I hope you make it, because maybe then you won’t be so hungry, so greedy, so graspy, so needy, so devourous of people, place, land, body. I hope you make it.

And so now, I invite you to look at your neighbor and ask them their name and tell them, “I hope you make it.” But like, try and mean it. Really… hope that they make it. Because they are trying to get somewhere, they are, you are, we are, I am. Tell them with sincerity, “I hope you make it.” And receiver of this - receive it. Feel what it is to have made it. Wow. Finally. That thing unresolved, feel what it’s like to finally be resolved. Because that’s what we want, a feeling. We think it’s a thing, but it’s a feeling. And we think things will give us these feelings, but I invite us to imagine a world where we cultivate feelings and then let the right things manifest around those feelings.

I hope you make it.

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The tummy is often referred to as the second brain, though if you’ve ever been truly nauseous, you know it might be the first. When the tummy is sick, the head doesn’t get a say. It’s impossible to think about anything else.

This is my way of saying, I think we can get pretty far operating from the neck down. I think when the brain hurts, we can retreat to the body.

“What about imagination?” A friend asked me, “Don’t you need the mind for that?” Honestly, I don’t think I create with my mind. All my mind does is math, counting up the score after a board game. Even chess, which I always thought was the coldest thing my mind did, isn't really thinking: the good moves just come to me. I feel a position is wrong before I can say why. I don't make art with my mind. I don't imagine with it. I don’t take risks and explore my curiosities with it.

I imagine with my body, my listening vessel. The imagining is reactive, more like something arriving than something I do.

It is spotlight consciousness versus lantern consciousness. The spotlight picks one thing, the lantern lights the whole room. To live neck down is to know that there is so much more out there than we are letting in, the trick is to open to more, focus on one thing while softly receiving everything else. You’ve felt this if you’ve ever done mushrooms. You didn’t know it in your mind that you were exactly where you needed to be, you knew it in your heart, you knew it in your body and spirit. Aldous Huxley said the brain is a vehicle for receiving consciousness, not the thing that creates it. Psychedelics just open the faucet, what’s normally a measly trickle starts to flood in. But the rest of it is out there, all of it, all the time.

How much could we let in if we stopped trying to think and just listened? Neck down.

Engaged Liberation is a labor of love.

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Sara's served as a public school teacher in West Harlem, co-founded a cooperative forest preschool, trained as a doula, facilitated new parenting circles, advised political and arts & culture-based organizations, and is currently co-founding Wyla, a magical spelling app for kids—whose prototype she built in co-creation with her own 10-year-old to help her daughter's words catch up with her prolific imagination. She lives on the Ohlone land known as San Francisco with her two kiddos, her co-parent, and their incredibly cute dog.

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Engaged Liberation is a labor of love.

But it is labor. If you love it, support it for less than $5/mo. Thank you!

In therapy or a relationship, you need to be ready to do the work of opening up, art on the other hand can crack you open with no warning. You can walk into a museum and see a painting of a rock and start crying and not know why. Art finds you. It sees you. It finds the cracks in you that you didn’t know existed, and it opens them. A play can do this. A novel, a book, a poem, a painting, a dance in the street.

Most importantly, there is nothing in this world that wasn’t born of creativity. We are creative beings. Everything you encounter and use on a daily basis was imagined and then creatively brought into existence, for better or for worse. These might be things that rub you the wrong way. These might be things that, in the long run, caused harm, but they are and were born of creativity.

You have this gift in you to create in this same way. Create I tell folks, create, because it is your birthright. Create, because you are a child of creativity. Create, because if you don’t, someone else will, and that creation might be in service of you or might be a harm to you. I need you to create. I invite you to create. Create from your joy. Create from your love. Create from your curiosity, and know I will keep doing the same.

Engaged Liberation is a labor of love.

But it is labor. If you love it, support it for less than $5/mo. Thank you!

Every day another dispatch: more lives in peril, more cruelty with a budget, more earth brutalized and people treated like they are disposable. More language used to launder violence into policy. More people taught to mistake punishment for leadership.

It’s exhausting. You’re exhausted. I’m exhausted.

And still - in the throes of absolute chaos, I am reminded - There is love here. There is kindness. There are still hands reaching for each other in the dark. It’s happening right here.

And if I’m being honest, this reminder can irritate me before it saves me. It can feel like a detour from the reality on the ground. Like someone asking you to admire the sunset while the house is on fire. And yes - the house is on fire.

And yet: I refuse to let despair colonize my imagination and heart. I have to cultivate joy and love as fiercely as I curate my outrage.

Outrage is easy. The world delivers it to our doorstep. Outrage is algorithm-friendly. Outrage has a hundred spokespeople. Outrage can even make you feel righteous. But outrage alone, without love, without tenderness, without beauty - eventually hollows you out. It makes the spirit brittle. It turns love into a clenched fist… I don’t want my life to become a clenched fist.

So I’m choosing, deliberately, to train my eyes toward everyday rebellions of love. My neighbors kids turning our sidewalks into cathedrals with chalk. A hummingbird out my window. Another neighbor planting milkweed for monarchs, preparing for a future they may never get to see. A fridge full of food. Two strangers holding a door for each other with the kind of gentleness you can’t legislate out of people. A friend texting, “I’m here,” and meaning it.

These are not small things. These are evidence. Resistance in a different key.

And let me say this plainly: This isn’t denial of the moment. This isn’t naïve optimism. This isn’t shoving daisies in gun barrels and pretending the guns aren’t loaded. This is acknowledging grief and terror and still insisting on seeing beauty. This is choosing to be in relationship with a loving world, not just the story of a collapsing one.

We live in a suffering world - yes. But do we also remember our barista’s name? Do we make eye contact with the unhoused? Do we ask someone how they are doing and truly listen to the answer?

This keeps me from burning out into uselessness. This returns me to my reasons. Helps me remember what I’m fighting for, not just what I’m fighting against. Reminds me what’s worth protecting.

Because despair is what they want from us - despairing people are easier to manage. Hopeless people don’t organize. Numb people don’t dream. Lonely people don’t build. They would love for our imagination to shrink until it can only picture catastrophe. They would love for our hearts to close - because closed hearts don’t connect and connected people are dangerous to any regime that depends on isolation.

So my practice - my discipline - is to keep my heart open. Walking on water is a miracle, sure. But try keeping your heart open. That is resilience, to keep opening our hearts. Keep it open when you’re scared. Keep it open when you’re furious. Keep it open when the world rewards cruelty and calls it strength. Keep it open when the machine is trying to turn us into enemies, numbers, problems, content - this is the work.

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness and love... The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to love now as we think human beings should love, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Tyrannies always fall. History is clear about that. But what takes people down in the meantime, what collapses movements before they even begin, is not only repression, it’s despair. It’s the slow corrosion of spirit.

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Liberation requires stubborn, endless love as much as it requires resistance. So: I will be a living loving sanctuary. And if you need my help, like Sade says, I will be by your side.

May we continue to act and love. In small ways. In big ways. In ways that may never be seen or acknowledged. Remembering - the miracle is not walking on water. The miracle is keeping your heart open to love while the world begs you to close it.

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Engaged Liberation is a labor of love.

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The American bodega was built by hand, mostly by Puerto Rican migrants after World War II and then by Dominican immigrants from the 1960s on, concentrated in New York and spreading out from there. It was never just a store. It was retail infrastructure for neighborhoods big chains wouldn’t touch or serve. Sometimes it was the only grocery within walking distance in what would otherwise be a food desert. The bodega was also an informal bank, credit on a nod, no application, no interest, no paper trail, just an owner deciding you’re good for it. The owners knew who were sick, who needed work, who hadn’t been seen in a few days, whose kid needed watching after school. A place where parents and their children split sixteen-hour days, living upstairs or three blocks over. The store was family. And of course, all species are welcome - the bodega cat is not a mascot, she’s an employee. She keeps mice out and everyone on the block knows her name.

In 2017, two ex-Google engineers launched an app-controlled vending machine startup and named it Bodega. They wanted the corner store, minus the corner store’s actual owner. This Silverlake coffee shop and many like it are the same thing. The aesthetic gets lifted onto a tote bag while the actual economic and cultural realities of the bodega never makes it onto the menu. Not to mention that this hipster coffee shop bodega is very possibly pricing out the people who actually need a bodega.

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This doesn’t stop at a corner store. The food cart did this, Elote sold from a cart with a a cooler of mayo was a street vendor’s livelihood. Put the same corn, the same crema, the same tajín on a slate board for fourteen dollars and call it “elevated street food.” Suddenly it’s a concept a magazine will cover. The corn and mayo are the same, just the context around them changed. It’s like what the late and brilliant Virgil Abloh said about how context shapes the way we see objects: If you place a candle in a gallery, it is viewed as art, but if you place the same candle in a garage, it may be dismissed as trash. Environment and framing influence cultural value. Every time, the object stays exactly the same. What changes is who is standing next to it when the world decides to notice.

This is the pattern, and it repeats over and over: a neighborhood, n a block of Boyle Heights, Bushwick or Pilsen holds three generations of community, and then gets rebranded as an “arts district” or an “up-and-coming” pocket of a bigger-whiter-name. The neighborhood isn’t discovered, it’s renamed, and the renaming is treated as the neighborhood’s origin story instead of its erasure.

A white writer publishes a book on consciousness and it becomes a bestseller, a movement, a frontier. The same indigenous insights have been carried for a thousand years through ritual and lineage, and are suddenly trendy because Western science publishes a paper on the living intelligence beneath the skin, while the East says, yes, we have known this for centuries.

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Done once, to one thing or one person, is an injustice. Done for centuries, to entire systems and bodies of culture, it earns a fancier word: epistemicide. The sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos used it for the killing-off of whole ways of knowledge under colonization. Empires didn’t only take land and labor. They took the authority to know, and reassigned it. A practice does not have to be banned to be erased; it only has to be reclassified.

The moment a thing is rendered into the language of institutions, credentials, and whiteness, it is permitted to be called innovation. But the knowledge is rarely new. The audience, maybe, is.

Acupuncture was not invented by the people who ran a trial on it. Meditation did not become real when the MRI scanner lit up. Breath did not become medicine when a viral white guy used it to stand in the cold. Indigenous herbal medicine did not start helping and guiding people the day Michael Pollan went to Peru. The bodega cat was not invented by whoever put her on a tote bag. The corner store did not become a concept the day someone in Silverlake put millions into it.

This is an invitation to challenge context and narratives. That to find something is sometimes only to arrive in a place where others have been living, cooking, lending, healing, and keeping the lights on for generations, and to have the grace to notice who was already there.

The bodega does not need whiteness to promote it. It needs to be appreciated, respected, and left alone.

ps. I spoke all of this instead of typing it, using WISPR FLOW - it’s pretty tight

Engaged Liberation is a labor of love.

But it is labor. If you love it, support it for less than $5/mo. Thank you!

This conversation was beautiful, mind expanding and heart opening, and cut way too short - due to a bit of a personal crisis that arose, which came up in the middle of the question, “why do you practice?” For Freedom from our own mind, and a clear relationship to what is, and to remain in presence even in chaos and the unexpected.

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Enjoy! ps. If you find medicine here, consider buying me a coffee and/or supporting me for just $2.75!

Then, there are the abundant emotional wounds. Jobs I prayed and prayed for and still didn’t get, loss of family members and friends, broken heart after broken heart.

For a long time I didn’t know what to do with all of it. And then I found a word for what a tree does: Gnarling.

Gnarling is an action a tree takes as it grows into itself, the action of twisting and contorting something into a knot or deformed shape. A gnarl in a tree is part deformation, part adaptation. It is formed when a tree experiences some calamity, when it loses a branch or gets an infection or develops a mutation, and then it grows around the old wound, which deforms the otherwise smooth flow. In some way, it can be read as a tree refusing to let go of its past. The oldest trees on earth, the bristlecone pines, are among the world’s most contorted and gnarled.

I love this. From what I knew of the world gnarly, was all the California kids saying it in skate culture. “Gnarly” comes straight from “gnarled.” It started as surf slang for a wave so big and twisted it could hurt you, and it kept both meanings at once: the danger and the achievement, the wound and the feat, fused in one word. A gnarly wave is a world of twists and turns you choose to ride anyway.

I choose to ride.

I think to live in a gnarled gnarly way is the art of dealing with bodily injury, but also mental and emotional and spiritual injury and loss and change. It is going with the curve of life, it’s a way to twist with life and not go against it. Contortion as thriving. Gnarling as adaptation and strength.

Yes, this is my physical body experience of not letting all my injuries stop me from moving and being active, but also my internal one - one day I think I am worthless, and then one day I think I am the Dominican Brad Pitt, and then one day I want to live in the cabins and be a monk, and one day I want to run around and sleep with as many people as possible, and then one day I want to do as many psychedelics as possible, and this - who and what am I conundrum goes on and on… and instead of having to choose, I ask myself, what if I twist these parts of me into my being? We think we need to let certain parts of us go, or we need to stay one way forever, that it’s part of getting old, but what if, like a tree, we grew older, which means we grew more gnarled into ourselves. We didn’t get rid of things or always had to pick and choose, we let them grow into us.

To think in a gnarled way, to think like a tree, to experience life like a tree, is to see the world as an ongoing pattern of persistence. Not defeat. A tree is a way of persisting in a world of wounds. That is how they outlive us and expand our sense of time. Each new layer of wood wraps around the old, around what we learned to live with, until we grow with our imperfections.

And this is the pattern of our life. We branch out, we take risks, we build community, we reach and we try. A tree keeps its wounds, the scar becomes part of the trunk. All the while we weather hardships like a tree. All the while we set down roots like a tree. This keeps us grounded for all the gnarling that is to come.

Stay gnarly.

Engaged Liberation is a labor of love.

But it is labor. If you love it, support it for less than $5/mo. Thank you!

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Time. Time takes time. Time is relentless in its productivity. Time clears everything up. The rattle of the radiator. The fog out the window. The fog in the mind.

“I celebrate myself”

This is what Whitman said in his song to himself. At 37 years old he publicly celebrated this self. I am 36, an ancestor and a child of his song of his celebration… Wondering if too can celebrate myself.

I am writing this in pen. In a cabin with poor light, no internet and no service of any kind. Pen vs computer vs keyboard. Pen and paper feels closer to my self. A hand feeling the exhaustion of gently guiding words across paper, across sun, soil, farmer, logger, mother, child, father. This tired hand is their tired hand, we are all exhausted. Exhaustion is a part of this song.

I believe the great opus of my song is that of Relationship.

To all things. To the ocean in front of me. To the cloud cover. Or the fog cover. To the edits. To people. To women. To man. To myself. To love. To lust. To Zen. To liberation. To the costumes I praise and tear down. To the boulders I climb. To the problems I try to solve.

None of this is metaphor. I’m not clever enough to be anything but honest.

The tree in front of me looks like a giant peacock. The feathers, the show it performs to be both seen and feared. To say, “I am beautiful,” to warn predators, I am large (larger than I am). Science tells me the tree came first. Zen tells me they need each other. The Peacock, becoming itself, “I, too, can be as beautiful as this tree, I too, am as grand, as long lasting, watch me.”

Do you have to know yourself to celebrate yourself?

Or is the celebration the key, the door, and the whole thing itself. So that we celebrate ourselves before it’s too late.

Pause.

I’ve set a timer to go off every 15 minutes. Reminds me to take in the moment. To arrive. To stop running. To rest.

Relationship is the biggest battle of my life.

A battle. The whole world is battling - again, not metaphor - battling something and someone, and here I am celebrating myself. Is that selfish? Powerful? Foolish?

Peace creates peace? Song inspires song? Force begets force? Power is inherent? When people know they are enough do they then have enough? Do they then decide to stop taking? If we stop and pause will the delusions of greed, anger, and more-more-more begin to settle?

Eyelashes keep falling from me or falling for me… so many wishes to be made:

I wish for songs. Songs of peace. Songs of freedom. Songs of no fear. Songs of liberation. Songs of space. An expansive space. A Cathedral of possibility. Spaciousness that is free from a self-cherishing me me me.

The clouds are back, maybe it’s fog, I’m not really sure. The ocean is hidden, but I know it’s there. I can’t see it. Not even a little bit. I’m sure it’s there.

A song of movement. Be moved. Move me. I try to move myself. Over and over. But I don’t know what’s best for me. I don’t know the right thing to do or choose. I don’t know where to go I don’t know with who to go or stay. I don’t know when to stay.

Pause.

15 min. Pause. The pause is Here. Reminds me Here. The song begins & ends Here. The celebration begins & ends Here. Here is my cathedral. Here is as wide and expensive as I’ll ever be.

This is my celebration. My party. My song. Sing loud or don’t sing it at all. It’s still Here. Always Here. Regardless of volume. Here I celebrate myself. The self. An empty self. A still becoming self. Here I accept myself. A shifting self. Meeting and re-meeting. No self. Learning and unlearning. Here a liberated self. Here human life matters. Here I bear witness - to sorrow, to suffering. Here there is alchemy. Here there is transformation Here there is compassion and action. Love and trust. Here all the doors are open Here there are tools at our disposal. Here I am the candles, the palo santo, and the sage. Here death treats everyone equally. Here lies the many losses and obstacles from which we build a palace of peace. Here my life is an altar Here we pray. Here we run Here we try again. Here we run again. Here we stop running. Here we run again. Here we empty ourselves. Here we love ourselves. Here we relax. Here we arrive… For long enough to stop searching. Here we breathe. Here we care for ourselves. Here we keep arriving. All things Here. No thing separate from Here.

And again the clouds have passed. There she sits.

Still there.

Still Here.

(still unsure whether it is fog or clouds obstructing my view)

Engaged Liberation is a labor of love.

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In the face of climate collapse, destruction, change, a refugia is a safe haven in a sometimes unsafe and unpredictable world.

Beavers make refugia. They build and build and build, instinctively, creating space where water slows and where other species can survive. A whole…

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I got to spend a few weeks in Kyoto recently, and seeing all the temples and Buddhas — especially at Otagi Nenbutsu-ji — which holds thousands of individual and unique hand-carved stone Buddhas, most of them smiling.

This did something to me. First, it made me think: carving Buddhas into stone for …

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On Baldwin / Extreme Action & The Lotus Sutra

I have always been struck by self-immolation, not as spectacle, but as intention. What kind of clarity does it take to offer your body as a message? And is it enough for them to listen?

…

Self-immolation, often described as an extreme act. Fire leaves very little room for ambiguity. It’s immediate. Irreversible. It demands to be seen. But that language - extreme - may reveal more about our distance from such clarity than about the act itself.

There is actually a chapter in the Lotus Sutra in which a Bodhisattva burns his own body as an offering. The story has troubled and fascinated readers for centuries. I think the passage was meant to be taken metaphorically, an image of total devotion, the surrender of ego, the relinquishing of attachment; not to be interpreted with tragic literalness. But history has shown us that metaphor and literalism often live dangerously close together.

Still, the story remains. Fire remains. The image remains.

And maybe what unsettles us is not simply the act itself, but the degree of conviction it reveals. And recently in America, and beyond, we have seen more and more extreme acts of conviction. Such as Luigi Mangione with the United health Care CEO, and Cole Tomas Allen, at the White House Press dinner. A sort of self-immolation maybe? An act to get a message across?

In Buddhism, intention matters. The Buddha says in the Anguttara Nikaya, “It is intention, monks, that I call karma.” Not merely action, but the state of heart behind the action. Again, this does not sanctify destruction or violence. But it does ask us to look more deeply at the conditions that give rise to such acts. Buddhism has never asked us to turn away from suffering. It asks us to look directly at it. To investigate it and engage with it. To understand the roots beneath the visible flames.

The Buddha’s First Noble Truth is not pessimism. It is honesty. There is suffering. There is dissatisfaction and unfairness. There is anguish woven into ordinary life. But perhaps what feels newly dangerous in our current moment is not simply suffering itself, but our inability to remain present with it long enough to understand it. We are constantly turning away. Numbing. Refreshing. Scrolling.

And then we have these chances to stop, to feel an extreme action and take it in.

They even leave us manifestos in case the act isn’t enough for us to see. They arrive after the act, sometimes before it. Typed, posted, recorded, left behind like a final attempt to impose order on chaos. A logic. A justification. A plea. The author insists that what has been done is not senseless, but necessary. That the violence, or the sacrifice, or the rupture, is meant to awaken something dormant in the rest of us (or so they hope). Their ideologies diverge, their grievances are not the same, but beneath both is a shared faith: that an act, dramatic enough, could break through the collective trance. That we would see it and finally ask better questions.

But we do not seem to be waking up or asking such questions. We are watching. We are scrolling. We are maybe even liking and sharing, maybe even agreeing, but are we waking up? Are we seeing?

Somehow these events are quickly turning into content, not a call to transformation, just another thing in the stream of many things. We live in a time when nothing remains singular for long. Tragedy dissolves into a timeline. Outrage becomes aesthetic. Even the most desperate acts meant to shock us into moral clarity are flattened into discourse, clipped into segments, argued into abstraction, and then buried beneath the next wave. Social media did not invent this restlessness of the mind, but it has certainly industrialized it and capitalized off of it.

The extreme act used to function as a kind of moral interruption. It demanded engagement. It asked the viewer to sit inside an uncomfortable logic long enough to either reject it or be changed by it. Now it competes with everything else. It appears in the same feed as an ASMR recipe, a dance, a war, an advertisement, a thirst trap, another advertisement, another thirst trap, another AI rabbit dance video. The terms of attention have changed, and with them, the possibility of being moved seems far, far away.

Thích Nhất Hạnh once wrote, “The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.” Presence now feels increasingly endangered. We are adjacent to one another, but rarely with one another. Constantly connected, rarely deeply encountered. We know what everyone ate, wore, believed, condemned, purchased, reposted, but not necessarily what they fear. Not necessarily what hurts. Not necessarily what they love enough to protect.

There is a deeper erosion beneath this, one that cannot be reduced to distraction alone. It is not just that we are overwhelmed, it is that we may no longer be imagining. Once, acts of protest, whether nonviolent or extreme, were tethered to visions of a different world. A more just one. A more humane one. Even if those visions were imperfect, they required belief in an alternative. They required the capacity to see beyond what is immediately given. Now it often feels as though we are not building toward anything so much as reacting to everything. Surviving. Managing collapse in real time. We consume so much information and opinions that the muscle required to question the structure itself has weakened. Without that questioning, there is no liberation, only adaptation.

If we don’t know how to take the time to hear and identify the genuine within, we will forever be at the end of strings that someone else pulls. We will never be free. Even when we think we are free, we aren’t. If we are always responding to other people‘s actions and desires and choices, we will never be free.

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That night they interview…

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Afew months back, I was returning from a dharma retreat in Mexico City—three days in the city to walk in silence and be in community. One of the retreatants I had the good fortune and blessing to spend those days with was a beautiful and powerful birth doula named Erica Pinilla. As it turned out, it happened to be Mother…

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The man was older and so his text were magnified, big ol’ bubble text. He was texting his wife, “God, why do I have to sit next to a trans person.”

She saw it. And you could …

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There is a failure of love in this country. Both personal and public. We have forgotten how to love. We have forgotten that love does not free us …

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