Wonder In an Age of Violence: Valarie Kaur & See No Stranger

Published Oct 30, 2023, 7:00 AM

“Wonder is the root of love, the lack of wonder is the root of violence.”

Valarie Kaur is no stranger to violence. As a Sikh, as a woman, as a person of color, violence has shaped both her activism and her deep sense of community care. Her Revolutionary Love Project is the blueprint for organizers, activists, and really - anyone in love with the world and what it could be. 

 

This week, the activist, and best-selling author of See No Stranger joins me to talk about love, action, and the power of wonder in the face of impossible things. 

 

In this episode we cover: 

  • How do you continue to work on behalf of EVERYONE for a more just and beautiful world, when some of those people cause great harm? 
  • Getting outside of unbearable pain so you can survive
  • Do you have to suffer in order to be of service? Being an activist for the long haul
  • “Squad care” and what it means for activists and anyone alive in the world

 

Looking for a creative exploration of grief? Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.

 

“I spent the last 20 years organizing my life around hate and I want to spend the next 20 years organizing around love. The pain of the world is the pain of the world, regardless.” - Valarie Kaur

 

Starting this week we’re releasing some of our favorite episodes from all three seasons of the show - some you may have missed, and some you need to listen to again and again just to absorb even more of their goodness.

 

Want grief support with Megan? Apply for 1:1 sessions here, or join the monthly Q&A here



Related episodes:

The Love-Filled World

A Place Called Home: a conversation with child welfare advocate, David Ambroz

Connection is the best medicine: with Dr. Rana Awdish

 

Follow our show on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok @refugeingrief and @itsokpod on TikTok. Visit refugeingrief.com for resources & courses



About our guest: 

Valarie Kaur is a renowned civil rights leader, lawyer, award-winning filmmaker, educator, author of the #1 LA Times Bestseller See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project. A daughter of Punjabi Sikh farmers in California, her work has ignited a national movement to reclaim love as a force for justice. Find her on IG @valariekaur.

 

About Megan: 

Psychotherapist Megan Devine is one of today’s leading experts on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. Get the best-selling book on grief in over a decade, It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, wherever you get books. Find Megan @refugeingrief

 

Additional resources:

Valarie Kaur’s website

The Revolutionary Love Learning Hub

 

Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A grief clinics: your questions, answered. Want to speak to her privately? Apply for a 1:1 grief consultation here

 

Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s OK That You're Not OK and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed

 

Books and resources may contain affiliate links.

After the babies were bored, everything just hurt even more because I, you know, every loss was through their eyes. Every you know, every new atrocity was the world that they were going to inherit, and I didn't know how to keep.

Them safe in it.

This is It's Okay that You're not okay, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. This week on It's Okay, the Incredible, Valerie Corp, the activist and best selling author of Sino Stranger, joins me to talk about love, action, and the power of wonder in the face of impossible things Settle in Everybody. An incredible conversation is coming your way right after this first break. Before we get started, two quick notes. One, this episode is an encore performance. I'm on break working on a giant new project, so we're releasing a mix of our favorite episodes from the first three seasons of the show. Some of these conversations you might have missed in their original seasons, and some shows just truly deserve multiple listens so that you capture all of the goodness. Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in our time here together, this show is not a substitute for skilled support for the licensemantal health provider, or for professional supervision related to your work. Take what you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out into your world and talk about it. Hey, Fred's so you know how sometimes parents say like, I love all my children, but this one is extra special. I feel that way about this week's guest. All of the guests in this season are stunning, and some of them, some of them brought me medicine I didn't even know I needed. Valerie Corps was that medicine for me? Valeriicorp is a renowned civil rights leader. She's a lawyer, award winning filmmaker, educator, author of the best selling See No Stranger, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project. She's a daughter of Punjabi sick farmers in California. Her work has ignited a national movement to reclaim love as a force for justice. You can see why I love her right reclaiming love as a force for justice. In this week's episode, we cover activism, wonder, horror, grief, acts of violence, acts of justice, parenting in an age of rampant school violence, healing family wounds, building true community. I mean, on and on We also cover why fighting for love and pleasure is always going to be more sustainable than fighting against hate. So much of our conversation explores just how much grief we've had to metabolize as individuals, as families, as communities over these last several years. I don't want to say too much more about it. I want to get right to it. I hope this conversation restores something in you the way it restored something in me. I can't wait to hear what you think now. One brief content note. Valerie's neighborhood had some construction going on while we were talking, so there is a not insignificant amount of background noise, more background noise than as usual in an episode. So listen through that background noise for the goodness though that goodness is all around you. Okay, here's my conversation with author and activist Valerie Cower. Valerie, I am so glad you're here. I'm kind of ridiculously excited about this. So there are so many places that we could begin, And honestly, like I was telling you before we started rolling, that I've spent the last few days like reading you and listening to you and watching you giving talks, and there are so many, There are so many starting places. I was having a hard time like choosing one as an entry point. You opened your book with wonder, so I'd kind of like to start with wonder. He wrote, Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence. Can we start there?

My four year old daughter is downstairs with my mother so that we could be having this conversation.

She's on spring break.

And it's only through her did I begin to understand that wonder is our birth right, that we don't need to learn how to wonder. It's just we have to remember what we once knew. You know, we walked to the beach every Friday morning. And once I understood this, I was like, Okay, I just need to protect this capacity that she already has. As she's looking up and marveling at everything that I can't see.

Because I'm just so focused on getting to grow. We need to go.

And so I started to make up the song for her, It's become our song now, and saw on a leaf birds in the sky, sweet little bee, trees so high. Wonder baby says, wow, WHOA, You're a part of me.

I don't yet know. Oh, I love it.

And then we do this for everything. We do this for the people walking by. You're a part of me I don't yet know. We do this for the people we see who might be in pain or on the street. And then we start to do this with herself, you know, with ourselves. When she's feeling angry or sad, it's like, oh, these emotions, this is a part of you you do not yet know, so you can wonder about it and let it expand you.

And so this.

Practice of wonder that my daughter has taught me has been the way I have learned how to care for her. She's changes so fast that I have to wonder about her every day to figure out how to care for her, how to meet where she needs. And as I'm looking at the world, this aching, noisy, complicated, bleeding world, I'm realizing how much love comes from that willis to wonder when it's hard, and that if we want to expand our capacity to love beyond our inner circles, to others who may not look like us, even to our opponents, to ourselves, who we too often neglect, that that means to be brave with our wonder Because when we shut down our capacity to wonder, that's where neglect or indifference or violence is allowed to thrive. So so much of my work now around building this movement, around revolutionary love is really returning people to their inner capacity to wonder, like my daughter does.

And so much of life is sort of designed to grind that wonder out of us.

It is.

It's like this flame that just the hot winds of the world want to extinguish it, want to put it out. And so how do I teach her that, No, this capacity to wonder is not your weakness or it's not naive. It's not something that you have to let fall away in order to be strong or serious or make it in those way world or be powerful. No, this capacity to wonder, to be vulnerable, to let yourself orient to the world through the eyes of wonder, to be to let humility be the way that you move it is actually her greatest superpower, and it could each of ours.

Yeah, I was just gonna as you're describing that, I'm like, this is really the root and the foundation. And had you mentioned something in there the hot winds won't touch you, which, of course we know from your book is a prayer from your grandfather. Yes, what is the prayer there? The hot winds cannot touch you.

It's from the sick faith, my faith tradition. And my grandfather would sing it to me every night before I went to sleep, or made me make me recite it when I went to school, as he drove us to school. And I'm so glad he did, because only now do I look back and realize that it was the secret to his courage. He would recite this, you know, when he was in the face of death many times in his life. And it's the shovid I recited when I was on the birthing table when it felt like dying and I had to push my daughter into the world.

And it goes like.

This, that divan a Lagi bad Dramshanai djogud Madam God, the club gay not by and it goes on and on, and it's the hot winds cannot touch you.

You are shielded by love.

I'm wondering what would happen if each of us could place our hands on our hearts and identify that space inside of us where wonder lives, the root of love. If we could feel that space inside of us and imagine it as a sovereign space that nothing could touch, not the noise of the world, not the chaos, not the atrocities, not the despair, not the attacks. Nothing can touch the sovereign space inside of you. If we can let ourselves touch that space and live in that space and grow in that space, then perhaps that's the secret to becoming more courageous than we could have ever known ourselves to be.

You know, so often in certainly in Western culture, we talk about things like wonder, We talk about things like bravery that as though they're the absence of pain, right, that you have to overcome all of these difficult things in order to access like that. You know, be a big girl, be strong, like access your strength and overcome this pain or this suffering. And one of my absolute favorite things about you is you don't do that. You don't sugarcoat things. So when you're talking about can we rest in that place of wonder as a sovereign place of strength, that's not necessarily a place without pain.

No, you know, it's not transcending pain or bypassing pain. It's inhabiting your body so fully that you're both able to touch the pain and be aware of the space around it. You know what really taught me this was it was being on that birthing table with my daughter. I'm getting I'm talking about her a lot right now because I'm weaning her also, and I'm feeling very emotional as I'm grieving this intimacy that we had. And so I'm going back and thinking a lot about her coming into the world and what she taught me, and how her labor was very very The pregnancy was very difficult.

I had hyperemesis.

I threw up every hour on the hour for four months and was in a wheelchair for the rest of the time. And so when her labor came itself was like the culmination of a lot of pain.

And it was rapid.

It was a four hour labor from zero to ten and four hours. And when it's that rapid, the pain is so intense, and I don't even think there was time to consider medication.

It was just it was that.

And the only thing, you know, that got me through it was there was a moment, you know, when it was just the contractions are thunderous. It's like bone crushing pain and I needed to gulp air, and so I, you know, I thought maybe it would go to my ancestors like I did when my son's labor.

I thought maybe I would go.

To the sea, because this is my place of rest. But no, I went to a meadow. I was in this gorgeous meadow with flowers blooming, and she was there next to me, giggling and cooing as we were looking up at that blue sky. And then the next moment the contraction hit and I was back pulled down into the bone crushing pain, bearing it. But this time I was sort of hovering above it, looking down, so I was both feeling it and also being aware of it. And then when the contraction subsided enough, I could return to the meadow.

And this time she was six.

Years old, you know, crawling around me and pulling on my hair, and then boom, the contraction hits. And then the next moment, I'm back in the meadow, and this time she's fourteen and she's telling me stories. And the next moment it's raining. There's an umbrella and we're walking through it, and so back and forth that labor.

I was in the.

Meadow and then back of my body, and then in the meadow and back in that body, and that meadow became my sovereign space until there was a moment of transition where there was no space between the contractions at all, and I just it felt like a tunnel of fire opened up from under me. And the only way that I could get back to the meadow as if I went through the tunnel, through the fire, through the pain, through the wound. I eat through the womb to push her through. And then the next moment it was the most unbearable kind of consuming pain, but it was allowing myself to feel it and habit it and push, breathe and pushed through it. And here's the thing about pushing, it's not something that you do. You have to wait until the urge.

Comes and you push with the current.

So it's almost like you're listening deeply to what is wanting to emerge through you, and then you push with it. You let the pain come, you let it sear you, and the next moment, of course, she's on my chest and she's landed there and we're together again like we were just in the meadow and now we're here.

It was birthing my daughter.

That taught me about that sovereign space inside of me that we can access that even in the thick of the most terrible grief, the most horrendous kind of pain, no matter what's happening around us, there's a place we can go inside of us that is eternal and internal, and we can make it how we wish to make it. It can be our own sovereign place of respite. And from that place we can allow ourselves to notice body, to notice pain, to be with it, to accompany it, to push with it, so that we too can be rebirthed and emerged into what is wanting to be. You know, Meg and I've often thought about grief and transition because I was describing transition on that birthing table, how grief is a kind of transition, that we are becoming something new, and the grieving, you know, to lose, especially when we lose someone who we deeply love and fiercely love, it just shatters us. It's bone crushing in its own way, like will never be the same, and it's true, will never be the same. And so to allow ourselves to go through, not to bypass or numb or stuff, but to go through the wound is in a way, to go through the womb, to allow ourselves to become something new on the other side, And in doing so, I feel like we discovered that the person we love who we've lost, that their love outlast life, that their love just changes formed of You know, when I lost my grandfather, I thought it was the end of the world.

He was my pillar.

You taught me the prayers, He taught me how to love.

He was my warrior. And I was so angry when he died.

And it was only until I realized, like I was searching for him and searching for him, searching for him until I sat on that bench by that lake, and I imagine, like what if he was already here, and I could feel his hand close over mine, and I realized that this grieving process was just one long way of making him internal to me. And now I can close my eyes and I can say his prayer, and I can hear his voice, and I can feel the chocolate brown sweater on my cheek when I used to hug him. I can feel that in an instant, even though it's been fifteen years since he's died, because he's part of me now. But I had to go through the pain, I had to be rebirthed, and losing him on this earth in order to find him inside of my heart. Perhaps with this moment went and history calls for us, for all of us to be that brave, to allow ourselves to be rebirthed and remade again and again in the grief, knowing that if we inhabit it fully, if we do it from that sovereign place inside of us, that we become strong or more resilient, more courageous, more imaginative, more loving than we've ever imagined that we could be.

Yeah, and not that that allowing that other side, that birthing process is about making anything better or making yourself better. I think sometimes we like we framed resilience as like you didn't need that, you needed to like understand how strong you are. And again coming back to like my fangirl moments with you here is like you never sugarcoat this stuff. You talk about resilience, and you talk about strength, and you talk about birthing the world that we want, bringing that into reality and existence, and you never let go of how hard it is to be here.

Sometimes it's so hard to be here and to be awake. You know, I often, especially after my baby's award, I just you know, I felt like I turned into a raw nerve, like I've been fighting for Rachel's social justice for twenty one years now, But somehow after the babies were born, everything just hurt even more because I, you know, every loss was through their eyes. Every you know, every neu atrocity was the world that they were going to inherit, and I didn't know how to.

Keep them safe in it.

I didn't, and so I realized, like, I can't keep them safe. I can only make them resilient enough to face the world. And that means that my breathlessness.

Was never a sign of my weakness.

My breathlessness was a sign of my bravery, you know, to let yourself feel, to let yourself be awake. It's okay, my love, if it's hard. Sometimes it's okay if you feel hopeless sometimes. I mean, I came to understand that my hopelessness was more like, you know, a feeling that ebbs and flows, that comes and goes.

It's like the moon.

Sometimes it's wide and luminous that I can so so hopeful we're going to change the world. At other times it's like a new mood or a slivert I can't even see.

Hope at all.

And yet What matters is now, not how hopeful or hopeless you feel. What matters my love is like the work that your hands do. How do your hands keep moving in the world? How do you keep laboring? How do you keep returning to wonder? How do you keep loving? And I took me a long time, and this really making it sense that I wrote this since I wrote, you know, stranger, did I discover this? Because I feel like the book is like this one long story of birthing the wise woman in me, you know, like until the very end, and I finally, just like joy is the last chapter when my daughter's born.

It's like I.

Finally understood that joy was, and now I'm understanding, like, oh, joy and pleasure.

Like I used to feel so guilty.

About my pleasure and about my joy that I would deny it to myself again and again. I used to grind my bones into the earth. I used to compare my own suffering with the people I was serving, and I was never worthy enough to care for. I used to think that I had to make myself suffer in order to serve right, to be breathless all the time, because that meant I was awake all the time, not to let myself feel rest, you know, feel pleasure. And it's taken me really turning forty and understanding that, oh, if I'm going to allow myself to feel all the pain and the grief that my body can hold, then the only way I can make my body a container strong enough to continue to endure this for the next decades is if I allow that much pleasure in my body to Like.

Now, it's like a new frontier.

I'm like, oh, the deeper I experienced pleasure in my body, like sensual pleasure, like holding the tea with the we were talking about the fire before we gain, like the cozy fire and the warm tea. And I'm always my children to laugh at me because I carry around a chocolate purse wherever.

I go and has at least four bars of dark chocolate inside, because it fringes me so much pleasure.

And I don't choose outlet I put it on my tongue and I let it melt, you know, and I experience the whole bouquet of all the flavors, like whether it's sexual pleasure or sensual pleasure, or the pleasure of music or poetry or beauty, just letting and let letting yourself feel your body as you're feeling pleasure. Oh, that is not an escape. It's actually priming your body to be able to hold the grief too. They're like they're like two wells that carve each other out. You know, the deeper the pleasure, the deeper your ability to hold grief, and vice versa. So I've come to understand that, like you know, the labor for making a more just world, the labor for rebirthing this world. We may not see the fruits of our labor in our lifetime. We may not get to the point where the baby lands on.

The chest and all is well and done right.

But how do we stay in the labor when sometimes it's so painful? It's you go to the sovereign space. You let in rest, you let enjoy, you let in pleasure. And in doing so, I've discovered that for myself, laboring for or more just and more beautiful world with joy and with pleasure has become the meaning of my life.

I love this like both the personal and the communal parts of it. Right, So the personal part being there's so much pain that I'm looking at right now in my own life with this person's death, or this illness or whatever it is we're carrying, and is their space for me to feel that and also let chocolate dissolve on my tongue and know that I don't have to let go of my grief right in order to also notice the beauty of the world, right, because we're so often pitted. We're pitting those things against each other, one or the other binaries against human life all the time. You can be sitting there in your grief, or you can be experiencing the joy and sensual pleasure of the embo world, but you can't do both at the same time, which is just such a reductive way of looking at things. But this is also like, this is how we can think about this personally, but this is also collectively. And I love that you brought in the bigger social justice work here that I think so many of us as activists, we keep our eyes on the terrible things so much, and so often it feels too important, not too it feels disrespectful in some ways to close our eyes to the pain of the world. And there's a line of yours that I really love. We were talking about the conversation you had with Jonathan Field's on the Good Life Project where you said, you know, I I'm going to misquote it here, but I spent the last twenty years organizing my life around hate, and I want to spend the rest of or the next twenty years organizing around love. And that's what I think of when you make this description, is that the pain of the world is the pain of the world regardless. And what is our rest point that allows us to show up for it?

Yes, on my desk here I have posted and on it is breathe and push.

The wisdom of the midwife.

You know, she doesn't say all right, push all the way now. She says, breathe, my love, and then push and then breathe again. You know, there's a kind of cadence, a kind of rhythm to sustain one stamina through any long labor, the labor of raising a family, the labor of you know, building a movement for justice or rebirthing a nation. That you got to be breathing enough in order to make the push.

And then once you do.

That enough, you realize that there's a breathe in the push, and there's a push and the breathe like there's it's a way of being that is coming from a place of love.

And I have to say, I mean for most of my life again.

As a traditional activist with the bullhorn in the street, I would roll my eyes anytime someone said love was the answer on a stage, and yeah it was. It was really like, you know, laboring with these communities and realizing what was making them last in the face of unspeakable grief, and then you know, becoming a mother myself and realizing that caring for my children, like empathy wasn't actually that useful to me that often, because I could sit and my daughter would be crying, and like I could sit and imagine what it would be like to be crying, or I could wonder about why she was crying and then care for her, and that empathy is a tool that comes and goes when I need it. It's between the activism and the mothering. That's where I came to a whole new definition of love. It was, you know, it was my mother, you know, opening her bag and feeding me doll and Joel on the birthing table like feeding her baby while I was feeding mine and looking at my mother and realizing, oh, she has had the definition of love that I didn't realize all this time, like love is more than a Russia feeling. Love is sweet labor, fierce, bloody, imperfect life giving a choice we make again and again. And if love is labor, then we have to harness all of our range of human emotions in that labor. So grief is the price of love. Joy is the gift of love. Anger is the force we harness to protect that which we love. Wonder is the act that returns us to love when we think we've reached our liamit. And so if love is sweet labor for redefining what love is, then when we love beyond what evolution requires, that's when love takes on this revolutionary force. That's what I call revolutionary love. So revolutionary love is a choice to enter into labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us. And once I came to that definition, Megan, I said, Okay, we're going to need people who continue to do the crisis response work. And let me be in this space now where I'm giving people a framework, a moral compass to know how to last. What if we could build our movements out of revolutionary love, What if we could show up to our lives each day from a place of revolutionary love.

What if we could change this country.

With the practice of revolutionary love as our culture, as our consciousness. And so that is the mission now that I have devoted the rest of my life to.

Yeah, I love a good midrash, right, like reclaiming the world the word love from like the pink pastel, a little bit of grease on the lens, to make everything all soft focused, Like that is such a diss to what love is, right, Like, it is so rude to make it this like fluffy pastel thing that can't do anything for you except do it help you bypass things. But like, I love the ferocity in this because like love is a ferocious force. It is much bigger and much more sustaining and much more important and necessary to all of life than the little tiny container that we put it in.

And we've heard this called I'm saying, like revolutionary love is the call of our times. And we've heard this call for a thousand so many ye right, you know us to Abraham, to Mohammad, to put that tova gudunanik, you know, see no stranger knackle. Betty Nahibagana I see no enemy, I see no stranger. We've heard this invitation again and again, you know, and most recently with Doctor King's Revolution of Values and The Strength to Love with Belle Hooks, a black feminist imagining that the love ethic could be the foundation of every arena of our shared life. So we've heard this call, we know. When did you first hear it? I heard it from my grandfather, Like when did you first hear it? And now, like our very future as a nation, you know, will we birth a multi racial democracy that sees everyone as a dignified being, Like our very future as a species, Like will we will we teach humanity how to live sustainably with the earth for the first time ever, Like our very future as a nation and as a species, depends on what we can put the love ethic into practice on a scale we never had before.

That's why I call the era that we live in an era of transition.

Yeah, bloody, it's convulsive, and yet it is pregnant with possibility. I believe we are the ones who are tasked to rebirth that world, and that each and every one of us has a role in the labor.

This is true personally and collectively I think one of the things that we also sometimes do is like is we jump to the movement. Yes, right. One of the things that I really appreciate in your book is you start in the personal intimate sphere, you start with personal grief. There's a training that I teach in. One of the lessons is on grief and social justice and how every single social justice movement has grief at its core. And that's the intimate personal life dissolving. And I think that sometimes we forget that because it's so big and so painful, and you that that ferocity and that braveness, like you walk into that personal intimate life dissolving grief and stay there with yourself and with the people that you encounter, and that is that is something so unusual and so rare right now. And I think this is also a place where both of our works intersect. I'll quote you, right, You said, you see, our solidarity is only as deep as our ability to love one another, and our ability to love one another is only as deep as our ability to weep with one another. Yes, and that shared grieving creates that deep solidarity.

Yes, anytime in US history when people who had no obvious reason to love one another, came together to grieve, to weep, to lament, to cry together. They gave rise to new relationships, even great movements. We all lived through one such moment after the murder of George Floyd. It was a moment of collective grieving with black people that I had never thought I would see in my lifetime, because many people felt like, Okay, this was just like the nineteen sixties or nineteen ninety two. It was, and yet there was something we never seen before. We saw white people forming a wall in front of black people kneeling in the street, in front of an army of police officers. This was a multi racial uprising for black lives, the largest that human.

History has ever seen.

And it came from this deep and profound, intimate life dissolving, as you describe it, moment of grieving with of collective grieving. And what I've discovered is that you don't need to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them. And there's a long way we still must go. There are many mistakes made since that summer of twenty twenty, but one thing that I have seen as I travel the country and go from city to city. Is how many people who did show up with their full hearts and grieve are still staying awake and paying attention and creating spaces and conversations and projects to stay in relationship, to build deep sot solidarity with black people, indigenous people, and other people of color. And that all came from that courageous choice, to individual choice, right to show up and to.

Let something that was so painful into your heart.

I think that we're living in a time where we have to metabolize grief on a scale that no other generation before us has had to, and that.

Will soon be entering an era where.

We all already are right where billions watch millions die, and how many people have we lost from COVID already, let alone the racial reckonings and the wars and the climate catastrophes. And so our choice is an individual choice for each of us. Do we turn away? Do we say I'm not strong enough to look at it, to bear it?

Do we go numb? Do we escape?

Do we retreat into whatever privilege we have? Or do we turn and face it and know it's okay. If we don't have any right words, there are no right words in the face of this much grief, grief on this skill, it feels like it opens up this massive black hole that sucks in any language or sense or meaning. There's no making sense of it, no right words.

There's no fixing grief.

There's only bearing it, and we can only bear it if we do so together, like it's the only way we survive it. And anytime we survive it, choose to survive it collectively.

Then Remember I.

Said, grief and transition are linked, right, We are made in new We birth new solidarities, new possibilities.

New movements that might expand the.

Circle who counts as one of us, so that your child is mine and you look at my child and say, my child is yours. I mean, that is what it looks like to have a culture, a society that sees no stranger. And I believe that being awake to this much grief and allowing ourselves to love each other through it is how we work that future.

Before we get back to my conversation with Valerie, I want to talk with you about getting help inside grief, no matter what that grief is. You know how people say, like maybe you should talk to somebody, well, finding skilled grief support is hard, no matter what kind of grief it is. We get a lot of messages from people wanting to speak to me directly, and we used to say no because I did not have time. But now we are saying yes, yes for a limited time and for a limited number of people, like not yes to everybody, but yes with limits. So to apply for one of the grief consultation spots on my calendar, send us an email at support at Refuginggrief dot com, or use the contact form at megandifine dot co. If individual work with me is out of reach, or that waiting list gets too long and you don't want to wait that long, you can join me each and every month for a live Q and A at Patreon dot com, backslash, megandivine now both options working with me individually and working with me in that larger communal Q and A. Details for both of those options are in the show notes. All right, back to my conversation with best selling author Valerie Corp. What is it do you think that makes us look at our own pain or somebody else's pain, somebody else's grief and consciously or unconsciously say like, not today, not feeling this, don't want to see you, don't want to like what.

It's too much, too much, And I want to say you remember I said, like the beginning of love. You know, the first act of love is not necessarily empathy or compassion, because if you read the news and look at all the controcities every day and force yourself to imagine and feel in your body what that person is feeling all the time, you will have what's called empathy fatigue and you will shut down. Right, So, empathy will come and go, and it's okay because the founding act of orienting to life through love is wonder. Can I wonder about that person and their experience that community.

Can I wonder.

About my relationship to them and what that looks like in my own hometown. Can I wonder about myself, you know, and what I might do in response to them? And then maybe empathy comes later. But it's wondering, you know. It's keeping yourself open to wonder, and it's giving yourself.

Time to breathe, to rest, to let in pleasure and then returning to the labor. There's that.

That's the cadence again, right.

I think so many people.

Feel like I'm either all in or not in at all, And so they'll just shut themselves down. They won't read the news at all, they won't show up to the local vigils or the protests or the marches because it's just all too much. But it's the breathe and push and then breathe again. It's it's if we're breathing enough, if we're letting enough breath in our bodies, can we show up and continue to wonder and continue to labor and continue to be in relationship with other others. And so I mean, I mean, I'm talking to you at you know, spring break, and we just I took my children to the Grand Canyon for the first time family road trip, and I had to leave my phone behad my my mother had to physically hide my phone in a place where I would not find it, because she knew that if I was just reading the news every day, I would just I'd be continuing the push, like I wouldn't know how to just drop in and breathe. And sitting on the edge of that the south rim and looking out at the canyon, all those layers of rock, it was.

Like looking into deep time.

And when you think about time, in terms of like cosmological time, like billions of years it took to form that canyon, and then it puts a kind of breath in your body.

It allows you to return.

To that sovereign space inside of you that always is right, that resources you then so that I can come back on a Monday morning and have this conversation about grieving with you and show up to the community who needs me this afternoon, you know, like it's I often think of it of as like liberating the wisdom of the midwife, Like we say soldier on, even though like a subset of human beings have had the experience of gold going to war.

But we say soldier on, like fight on.

We know what it's like to be that warrior, and I come from a warrior people, so I often use those metaphors. But the wisdom of the midwife, she says, breathe and push, like you know, if we liberated that and imagine what it might be for all of us to be vessels for love like that, then that I think, between the warrioring and the birthing, we.

Have of course we need to we.

Have all the metaphors we need. There's something that you said in there about, you know, as you're describing what it takes to feel with other people to allow that. One of my old teachers used to say poignancy as kinship, right, that when we look at somebody else's grief, somebody else's lost, somebody else's story, we start to feel things. And in a culture that is afraid of emotion, that is grief phobic or grief illiterate, where it's not safe to have those feelings, right, I think that there's some part of us that says, like this is too big and I don't know what to do with it, and it is all or nothing. Yeah, And what I love and what you just described is like the it's not that you need to be fully prepared for the pain of the world and know what to do with it before you can engage with it, but that we come back to that wonder as our orientation, and that includes wonder for yourself what happens for me when I open to this pain in front of me, whether that's when I'm sitting with my friend whose sister just died, or I am sitting in a group of people who just experienced a school shooting in their community, Like wondering where do I feel that I can't hold my gaze on this anymore? And can I respect that for myself? Because we just have that like all or nothing thing, and so many people are going to choose nothing because we don't have the tools to deal with all.

That's so good. It's so good. I mean, the school shootings are you know.

I talked about becoming a Rodner after the children were born, and then the school shootings have been very difficult for me, Like after we just went through another one. The one in Uvalde, Texas was particularly hard for me because my children are the ages of these children, and it was so graphic and so monstrous and so massive, and it felt like a primal scream in me that just wouldn't go off, you know. And I had to notice that my body was at debated, like my throat was closing, my chest was constricted. How was I supposed to go downstairs and give my children dinner if I couldn't even you know?

And I and I was like, oh, this is not.

The time to open my phone and read about every single one of those children, Like I have to breathe first, I have.

To notice what's happening in my body. I have to go down with my babies. I have to feed them. I have to.

We have a practice called dance time every night where we play a song, and even when I do not feel like dancing, there's no reason to dance, my children will play the song. We don't talk about brou no no no.

Enough time, which I can'tnot dance too.

Thank you right, thank God it's a good song because then we start dancing and pretty soon they're laughing, and then I'm laughing, and I'm like, on nights of such horror, I can still remember what I feel hopeless.

You can't even see it in the sky.

I can feel joy into my body when I dance with my children, and it's like it's like a kind of sparkling energy that goes from the earth up into my heart, you know. So in the sick faith, we call it Jardivi gla, Jardivi gala ever rising joy, even in darkness, ever rising spirits, even in the thick of the labor, Like can you The world doesn't give it to you, and you can't force joy, but only create the conditions to let.

Joy come and seize you.

And if I'm not creating those conditions, if I'm not breathing, you know, if I'm not finding myself on that yoga mat or turning up that song with my children, I'm not creating any any condition for joy to find me. Sometimes it doesn't come, but more often than not it will find me, and it's like that sparkly energy, and then that's my breathe. Right, then I can Okay, the kids are asleep, all right, I can open, I can read, I can look into the faces of these children who are no more. I can wonder about them, and I can wonder about what my particular role is in response to this tragedy at this moment.

Not all the roles. You don't play all the roles.

You play your role, and you'll know your role by your sphere of influence, your particular talents, and what your body is ready to do in that moment.

That's the showing.

That's the showing up. There really is like it's parastaltic motion, right, contract expand, contract, expand, and in order to be able to show up to our own pain, the pain of the people closest to us, the pain of the world, we have to find those places where there is an expansive in breath yes, I.

Find that beginning and ending my.

Day with breath helps me show up to whatever the day might present in the mornings. We started to do this during the pandemic because we didn't know, especially the beginning, we didn't know what the future would bring, and so I would hold my children as we woke up in the morning and say, I get to be alive.

I get to be alive today. I get to be alive today with you.

That's how we still begin our days just this morning, I get to be alive today.

I get to be alive today with you.

Oh. Each day a surprise, a gratitude, gift, and then we end our day with this.

You know.

I talked about my grandfather dying. He died this saintly death. It was a sage death. It was like he looked at everyone around his death bed and smiled at them and sighed and died.

It was a masterful death.

And I realized that if I wanted to be that courageous in the face of death, then I had to practice being that courageous in my life. And so every night I practice dying the way that my grandfather died. I'll say, what was the hardest part of this day? How did you get through it? Notice what that feels like in your body? What was the most joyful part of this day? Notice what that feels like in your body.

What are you most grateful for in this day? Notice what that feels like in your body.

And imagine that this day is an entire lifetime with a beginning, a middle, and end.

Every lifetime.

Something that's hard every lifetime, something that's joyful every lifetime, something to be grateful for.

And now, my love, are.

You ready to let go of this lifetime? Are you ready to die? At kind of death?

And sometimes I still have to think five more thoughts, But.

Then I get to the point where, okay, I practice sying and I practice dying.

As my grandfather did you know megan doing that.

It's been fifteen years now doing that, waking you know, and dying, dying every night and then waking up like this lifetime is a complete surprise.

You know, it's a new lifetime, it's a new day.

It has really helped me live into that idea that the labor might go you know, past our lives, that you know, if we show up each day with love for others, love for myself, with breath with pleasure, with joy, then showing up with the grief, and showing up to the anger, and showing up to the hard places. It's sustainable because I'm using all parts of my heart.

I have a note in my notes here, the end of it, after this quote says, this is probably my favorite line of hers so far. And it's what you just said, right, You must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. Yeah, And that's really what you just describe there is like how do we keep ourselves porous and open to all of it?

Yeah?

I mean all of this work can feel so heavy, and I feel like so much of what you've shared with us today is like the heavy lifting of this, like the heavy lifting of how hard this can be, whether you're keeping your eyes open to your own pain or you're keeping your eyes and your heart open to the pain the world. Like it is so heavy. And in the book you introduce the concept of squad care. Can you tell us what that means? Squad care?

This is Melissa Harris Perry's term, you know, Black Thinker, who has been a big sister in my life for many years, and she was really you know, furthering this tradition among Black feminists of teaching people how to care for themselves, Like the movement cannot happen on our backs or over our dead bodies. We need to be caring for ourselves as we care for the world. And self care is a term that doesn't necessarily capture what we need.

You know, when we're.

Sitting at the edge of that black hole, you know, giving myself extra yoga sessions and lattes are not going to say it's not going to save me. Like, and I can't do it by myself. I need someone holding my hand. I need a home that is allowing that grief to be held. I need to be part of a workplace, in a community, in a city, country, and a culture that is supporting the kind of care that I need. You know, just like we don't go to battle alone and we don't give birth alone. We need midwives by our side saying breathe and push, and then we need to be someone else's midwife. So Melissa's idea of squad care was that there's allays a handful of people, usually for me, sisters, who we have each other's back for life. You know, I was born on Valentine's Day.

That's how I got my very non Indian name.

And for a long time I railed against Valentine's A precisely.

For the reasons you named earlier, the pink and.

The hearts and the roses, and that's all love is.

And now I'm.

Reclaiming just like I'm reclaiming love is revolutionary love, I'm reclaiming Valentine's Day as a day to reclaim love right.

And so for this year, I.

Brought my sisters together in a sisterhood's soare and we sat around at table and had this gorgeous brunch together. We hadn't gathered together, it wasn't safe enough together for so many years. And as I looked around the table, I realized that I knew everyone at that table for twenty years or more, and that if there was anyone that was defined as my squad, you know, to be by my side, not just through the joyful and easy moments.

But through the grief, the griefing, the grief and.

The grieving, it was the women at this table. I know not everyone has that, but I do believe that cultivating that kind of circle of care around you is available to all of us. That there's always love available to all of us if we just have the courage to open, to lift our gaze, open our eyes and say what it is that we need and offer our hearts to others. So that kind of squad care, community care, sisterhood. You know, that sovereign place inside of me, that wise woman inside of me that lives in that sovereign place, she only gets stronger when she's in the presence.

Of other wise women.

So maybe imagine that there were networks all across the country of those of that kind of caring. In a way, that's the movement that we're building with Revolutionary Love, to invite people into creating their own pockets of revolutionary love as part of.

The larger movement.

Those communities, those friendships, those connections happen when you are allowed to tell the truth about your own experience and have that witnessed and heard and supported. Yes, earlier in the season, I had actual it was last season, had a conversation with Sarai Shimale, the author of Rage Becomes Her and I adore her, and we were having this same conversation about like the people you can be angry with, yes, right, And she said something like, you know, the the closest, most powerful, most supportive relationships and friendships in my life. I got those because we were angry together. And the echoes that I hear in your work here are you know, we don't get these pockets, we don't get these squads, We don't get the communities that we need around us. And we want to offer to the world by pretending that we feel other than what we feel, by pretending that we can keep pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing like that. There is a communal visibility and witnessing that is at the core of our personal revolutions to create this love filled, wonder filled, wonder founded world and also the world that we want a birth into being right, that all of it has to be at this party and acceptable.

Yes, oh, sud So beautifully said.

I've been on the road the last few months, you know, after coming out of several years of locked down.

I know travel.

I've been on the road, and every city I go to, I think like, Okay, this is an event where I'll be giving the keynote and then having the Q at eight, and then it transforms into this contain where people are standing up at the mic and telling their stories with their tears and their struggles and their open hearts, and we're crying with each other, we're hugging each other were and I'm realizing that they are these containers for collective grieving, and these containers like these safe containers for rage, And in that space at the end of the night, people like, it's a joyful space because there is a relief of catharsis and knowing that you're not alone. And our culture doesn't, you know. We we live in a culture that tends to look at grief, despair, rage as individual maladies instead of collective experiences that we're all surviving together. And so to find to be able to create those spaces in our movement where people are safe enough to be vulnerable, to be courageous, and then to feel with each other and to deepen bonds with each other, that's the fabric for any kind of action, any kind of self I say that shallow solidarity is rooted in the logic of exchange. I show up for you, so you show up for me. But deep solidarity is rooted in love. I show up for you because you are my sister, you are my brother, you are my sibling. You're my beloved, and we can only get there. We can only be able to look upon the faces of people we don't know and say, sister, brother, sibling, you are a part of me.

I do not yet know.

We can only get there if we open our hearts and lead with that kind of wonder and let it take us to that space where all the rest flows.

And we have so many opportunities to do that, right on the everyday little things and on the bigger things, and then on the global things, like there's so many opportunities to practice that kind of love that you describe.

It's true, Lenna.

I started, we started the conversation with me telling you about the song. It's now called Wonder Baby. It's going to be a book that comes out and oh fun. It's like, yes, the movement involves. It has to begin even with our children. And ever since that song for my daughter, you're a part of me, I don't yet know.

It has become my mantra.

When I move through the world, when I look at people's faces on the street or on the screen, when I go to the Grand Canyon and look at the rock, You're a part of me. I don't yet Yeah, when I sit at the foot of the great Sequoias. You're a part of me I don't yet know. Like if you're taking anything away from this conversation, know that we can transform the world from the inside out. We can transform the world from the inside out, and it can begin with a simple refrain in your mind. You are a part of me, I do not yet know. Allow yourself to say that. Hear that, whether you're in a difficult conversation or just moving through the grocery store, or your child is in your arms. And notice what happens next, Notice what you see, notice what you want to do. And that starting point placed inside of you is one of love.

There's lots of love in this subset. Now, you've brought up hope a few times in our conversations. So the question that I ask everybody at the end of our time together, knowing what you know and living what you've lived, both personally, ancestrally and collectively, what does hope look.

Like for you? That my daughter's daughter's daughter will be able to take her children to the Grand Canyon, sit at the edge of that rim and look out and feel the awe that I felt, and know that she will think of me as her ancestor, and that what she will inherit from this time of violence and transition is not my trauma, but my bravery and my joy.

Thank you for that.

Oh, I love you. Thank you for feeling that with me.

Yeah, I felt that one. Yeah, thank you. So we're going to link to your website and your book and your work and all of that includes ways to take this conversation, take this work out into the world. But is there anything else that you want people to know or things places you want them to find you? Any last parting words?

Basically, there's one more thing that gives me hope, and it's a very practical thing.

M I love Practically.

There's a researcher, Chena within her team out of Harvard University who have researched past social movements, and what they discovered was that when three point five percent of a population engages in a shared non violent action, it creates change throughout an entire society. No movement has failed once it has reached that threshold of three point five percent. That's eleven million people in the United States, eleven million people to create a revolution. Revolutions happen not just in the big grand public moments, but in the spaces where people are coming together to inhabit a new way of being, a new way of seeing. That's the kind of revolution that we are after. That's a kind of revolution we are building. And so if you count yourself among the eleven million welcome to the revolution.

Each week, I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. Now you will notice that I did not do my usual closing, in which I ask our guest where you can find them. But Valerie ended on such a powerful note. I didn't want to add anything. I just wanted it to end there. This conversation. I know I've said it a few times now, but it was everything I needed and didn't know I needed. At the end of our official official podcast conversation, Valerie said, hey, do you want to be friends? And let me tell you, I've never said yes so fast in my entire life. And there's one thing that Valerie said in our time together that brought me to tears when she said it. In fact, I needed a break when she said it, and it's brought me to tears every single time I've copied those words down and pasted them somewhere else, like on post it notes or tucked them into projects that I'm working on. When I asked Valerie about hope, she talked about her daughter. She said, I hope that she will inherit from this time of violence and transition not my trauma, but my bravery and my joy.

I just.

I hope what she will inherit from this time of violence and transition is not my trauma, but my bravery and my joy. It is safe to say that I've carried those words around with me ever since the day we met. Valerie. If you are listening, thank you for that and for everything. How about you, friends, what's stuck with you from this conversation? What do you want the people you love to inherit from this time? Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but I do hope you've found something to hold on too. If you want to let me know how today's show felt for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered, let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation affected you. You can follow the show at It's Okay pod, on TikTok and Refuge and grief everywhere. Else. To see videos from the show, use the hashtag It's okay pod on all the platforms, so not only can I find you, but other people can too. None of us are entirely okay, and it's time we start talking about that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay. You're in good company. That's it for this week. Remember to subscribe to the show and leave a review. Your reviews help make the show easier to find for people who would find it beautiful and useful.

Yeah.

Coming up next week, everybody, Maggie Smith. Yes, that Maggie Smith, the author of Good Bones, and you could make this place beautiful. You know her, even if you're not sure of her, because I bet that you've read her words. Follow the show on your favorite platform so that you do not miss an episode. You want more on these topics. Grief is everywhere. As my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief that we don't call grief, And all of this season's guests are talking about grief in some way. Learning how to have these conversations without platitudes or dismissive statements, that's an important skill for everybody. Get help to have those conversations with trainings, professional resources, some cute videos, and my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay. At Megandivine dot Com, It's Okay that You're Not Okay. The podcast is written and produced by me Megan Devine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fausio. Logistical and social media support from Micah, Post production and editing by Houston Tilly, Music provided by Wave Crush, and background noise as stated from the Jackhammers Going Off where Valerie lives