Latest / Soul Salon with Ayandastood / 47: Palestine & the words I’m reaching for — Part 1

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47: Palestine & the words I’m reaching for — Part 1 · Soul Salon with Ayandastood

• 0:00
  Hello, soul sibling. Hello, sunshine. Hello, divine and magical being. Welcome or welcome back to the soul salon.
• 0:10
  A space for the dreamers. A space for the feelers. A space for the healers. I'm so excited to be back with you today.
• 0:19
  And the words that I carry into today's soul session are let love speak through me and let me speak through love.
• 0:28
  I've been reaching for words in this time of genocide, despair and what can feel like hopelessness.
• 0:35
  And the words that I often reach for in this moment that we've been bearing witness to which is such a privilege to not be in the moment itself but to be witnessing it.
• 0:44
  And someone whose words I continue to reach for are the words of Dr Ayesha Khan who writes the substack divinely named Cosmic Anarchy.
• 0:54
  They also go by work scientist on Instagram and so I highly recommend and want to amplify their words, their work, their mission.
• 1:03
  They are such a divine presence on the internet in the sense of the clarity, the thoughtfulness, the love, the collectivism, the radical reimagining, dismantling and reconstructing work that they what they call abolitionist science really offers us.
• 1:22
  And so I really couldn't recommend their substack highly enough and just following and staying in touch with their consciousness, I feel so privileged and grateful to be able to experience their words, experience their deep thoughtfulness and the way that they conceive of this reality and this moment that we are in and have been in for decades and centuries of colonial and capitalist violence.
• 1:45
  So I just want to amplify their work and I think in a individualistic culture the question is often what do I want to say, we're in a specific moment in time, I really want to challenge my own ego and my own sense of what do I feel called to say and rather what is being said, whose voice needs to be further amplified, it doesn't always need to be and in fact it's a disservice to only bring one person's limited perspective.
• 2:09
  So I'm excited to amplify this work on this topic of Palestinian liberation.
• 2:14
  I want to highlight our three main lessons that I am sitting with from Khan's work.
• 2:20
  This is going to be based on four essays that have really been so nourishing and so profound to my consciousness recently and so I'll link to each of these essays in the show notes.
• 2:30
  I wanted to shape this in terms of three main ideas that we can take from this work and there are so many more but this is what I felt like I could bring to the flea market of life today, amplifying this work, talking about the cause of Palestinian liberation in this time of despair.
• 2:45
  Before we get into the three lessons that I want to share with you today from her work and she says that she uses any pronouns so I'm going to be just flipping and changing them as we go because that is what their bio says to do.
• 2:58
  I'll first introduce you to what Cosmic Anarchy is as a project and you can learn more about this in the link that I'll provide in the show notes and then I'll give you a little very quick overview of Dr. Yishikhan's bio.
• 3:11
  Cosmic Anarchy is a weekly newsletter that serves as an accessible toolkit for you and your loved ones to sustainably unplug from the capitalist matrix and build community in the process.
• 3:25
  Each edition of the newsletter focuses on a unique global topic that shows how we can apply our politics and social justice values into our daily life actions and relationships.
• 3:37
  Dr. Yishikhan PhD is a divergent infectious diseases scientist, germ doctor, grassroots organizer, writer, astrobiologist and educator, discovering the science of social justice, decolonization, collectivism, neurodiversity and liberation.
• 3:57
  Yishikhan's art activism breaks down complex scientific and geopolitical concepts with innovative pedagogy making them accessible to everyone.
• 4:07
  She is a CD which is Afro-Indian in parentheses, queer, divergent, non-binary, immigrant, born into a Muslim Hindu household in rural Bangalore.
• 4:18
  Her family immigrated due to the threat of religious communal violence and relocated every few years.
• 4:25
  They grew up across several countries from Russia to Saudi Arabia with most time spent in the southwest Asia and North Africa region.
• 4:34
  As a third culture child, the question of where is home is a complex and puzzling one.
• 4:40
  Home is never about nations or borders. Home is where community is and that can be built anyway.
• 4:47
  These are words from Dr. Yishikhan's website. All of this is in the show notes.
• 4:52
  So without, you know, for the preamble, sometimes it's about the preamble but not today.
• 4:57
  Today we want to get into three lessons from Khan's work that I cannot stop thinking about.
• 5:04
  The overview of the three lessons is number one, the way that in the narrative that we use to make sense of, to critique, to mourn this genocide,
• 5:16
  the way that Palestinian men and boys are dehumanized in that language, where there's a hyper focus and fixation on the suffering that is happening to children and women and children.
• 5:27
  And while their suffering is so deeply important and crucial, it also strengthens the narrative that Palestinian men and boys are inherently literally worthy of dying.
• 5:38
  So we shouldn't even speak about their deaths. It also flattens their identity into being beyond having any sort of interiority, okay?
• 5:48
  Compassion, grief, all of these deep complexities of what it means to be a Palestinian person in general are then removed from the subject of the Palestinian man and boy.
• 5:59
  Although they are subject marked as always already worthy of dying and about to die, which is honestly what colonial and capitalist violence against Palestinians amounts to.
• 6:09
  And this is the idea of necropolitics and death and who dies and there's a book by Achille and Bimbe about this, which I haven't read but I really do want to read, which is all about the study of death and who is marked by death.
• 6:22
  And let me actually make sure I get you the actual, the actual meaning of this.
• 6:26
  Okay, so necropolitics is a sociopolitical theory of the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die.
• 6:37
  Okay, so that's the politics of understanding who must live and who must die for all of these systems of power of capital of control to continue.
• 6:47
  The deployment of necropolitics creates what Achille and Bimbe calls death worlds or new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.
• 7:03
  And what an apt idea to bring into this conversation because that is what we are talking about.
• 7:08
  We're talking about people who from even before the moment they were born were marked as already dying because already the state of Israel was conceiving of more and more ways and the state of the US was conceiving of more and more weapons and support to further the death of Palestinian people and the ecocide and genocide of Palestine in general.
• 7:33
  So I want to go back to Dr. Yusha Khan's work. So then the first point I'm going to share with you is this dehumanization of Palestinian men, which really stuck with me. Like when I read that essay, it said so much that felt like bubbling under the surface when we speak about the Congo and what is happening.
• 7:49
  It's often there's so many children who live in this kivir region of the Congo or where the rebels are fighting like the women and the children.
• 7:56
  And although I want to be very clear, gender-based violence is critical to talk about and to really oppose.
• 8:03
  There are moments where it is very important to speak about the gendered nation of violence.
• 8:08
  But Israeli state violence is against all Palestinians. It's against Palestinians themselves. It's not a form of gendered violence.
• 8:17
  I mean, it affects women in specific ways and affects children in specific ways. But I think the logic embedded in Israeli violence against Palestinians is not a logic that I think can be best understood through the paradigm of gender.
• 8:29
  And in fact, it does a deep disservice and dehumanization when we raise the violence that is inflicted on Palestinian men and boys and dehumanize them as though they don't feel pain, as though they don't feel grief, as though they are not caring and loving and compassionate, as though they are somehow subhuman.
• 8:47
  So that's point number one. The second point that I want to share with you today is this idea of the myth of peaceful protest.
• 8:54
  And this idea is so interesting the way that Khan lays it out for us. It's so powerful how they conceive of the fact that we live in a society that is so deeply violent and we're similar to the necropolitics idea.
• 9:09
  If you feel safe like my safety right now, it's predicated on the deep fragility and precarity and violence and genocide against the people that then are made to feel unsafe in the system or unsafe in the system. It's actually beyond feeling are precarious in the system and only through their precarity can others feel security.
• 9:33
  Okay, so when you have such a violent system and then you say go protest peacefully, how can that even be possible? What does peaceful even mean in such a system? We're going to be getting into this, but I think this is a beautiful paradox that she's offering us and I think that it's going to teach us a lot on how we can respond to people in our lives who are angry at things like the destruction of property and so on and asking, but what is the actual violence that is being responded to?
• 10:00
  What is the core root violence that we are so embedded in that protecting the status quo, not disrupting it, not doing anything that is against the flow of capital and against the flow of everyday events, that is the true violence.
• 10:17
  Especially with climate catastrophe and ecocide and genocide, there's a way that by doing nothing, you're condemning more and more people to just die and say, well, that was protecting the status quo.
• 10:28
  And then the third idea that we want to bring is this idea of keeping hope alive and how even though it may feel naive or it may feel overly optimistic or even like a form of toxic positivity that hope is a critical energy.
• 10:44
  If you think of how any species needs energy needs nourishment needs food needs calories to keep surviving the trees feed on the nutrients from the soil and the sunlight and we feed on food and nutrients and community and similarly movements cannot survive without the sustenance of hope.
• 11:07
  And it doesn't have to be a kind of, I was going to say blind, it doesn't have to be a naive hope, but it can be a kind of hope nonetheless.
• 11:15
  And there's a quote by the author of in pursuit of revolutionary love, her name is Joy James.
• 11:21
  I haven't read the book, but I know that one quote that I learned from Deshore Harrison who wrote Bailey of the Beast is trying to free ourselves from these systems.
• 11:30
  The quote from Joy James is, it's an impossible task and yet one entirely worthy of us.
• 11:40
  And I think that really captures the tension that we're being asked to sit with, that though it feels like these systems are massive and we are small as Adrian Marie Brown says, she says something like the problems are massive and we are small, small, small.
• 11:55
  But then she also says that the small mirrors the large so to change the society just like the pattern of one single little stem of a broccoli mirrors the full bushel of broccoli mirrors the big bush of broccoli.
• 12:10
  That's what a fractal is. It's this pattern that requires a different scales of the universe.
• 12:15
  I once read an essay that said that the way that our neural pathways like the map of it literally maps onto maps of the galaxy.
• 12:25
  So there's all these is like Fibonacci sequence and sacred geometry things and the idea that these patterns exist at every single scale at the pattern of your fingerprint mirrors bigger patterns and the galaxies and in the universe.
• 12:38
  So what she's saying is if we want to change the big we have to start with the small changing ourselves to change the world essentially and changing how we relate to each other into our reality and to what's possible.
• 12:48
  So that is this third idea that like hope is sort of not an option not to say that we I don't love that language because it feels like casserole it's not an option.
• 12:56
  It sounds punitive. It's not giving nourishing and loving and also allowing room for disagreement or rupture.
• 13:03
  So I'm going to say that hope is vital. I like those words. Let's call it that.
• 13:07
  So let's get into these little three lessons. Okay, I did that so that those of you who you know attention and all those things you may not stay with us.
• 13:17
  I don't understand why but no, I totally understand.
• 13:20
  So I wanted to give you that overview so that you know where we're going and if you are not able to stay you at least got a little bit of a nibble.
• 13:27
  A little bit of a nibble from each of these deeply important, deeply massive ideas that I'm certain I won't do full justice to but I'm doing my best to come to the flea market of life with this little bite of amplification of someone's work who I think can really help us think past and beyond these systems and do both the deconstructive work of dismantling
• 13:49
  and the reconstructive work of reimagining. On that point there is a quote that lives rent-free in my brain which evidently there are many.
• 13:57
  It would seem and I think that is really sexy but essentially it's a quote from Dr. Ruha Benjamin who is the author of Viral Justice.
• 14:04
  I do have a podcast episode with her if you'd like to go back and listen to that but her book Viral Justice is excellent and also she has an amazing book called Imagination.
• 14:13
  Imagination a manifesto which is all about how our imaginations have been colonized and monopolized and she has this amazing quote in that book where she says those who monopolize resources also monopolize imagination.
• 14:28
  There is a lot more to that book but I think that's a little snack again of the idea but the quote that lives rent-free in my mind I don't know where she says this but she says remember to imagine and craft the world you cannot live without just as you dismantle the world you cannot live within.
• 14:53
  I literally have tingles running all over my body because what a profound and also there is something happening on the level of those two parallels and threads woven together in that sentence that does something for me both on an emotional level and also on a functional syntax what a perfectly constructed sentence level.
• 15:13
  And so the just artist in me is pulled in the idea from Tony Kate Bambara the artist's role is to make the revolution irresistible.
• 15:23
  I think there's so much happening in that sentence that I love so much that it's so important that we do both of these processes my mind is just wondering.
• 15:32
  So let's get back to these three incredible points let's go number one I'm going to be reading to you a lot okay and so the first point we are going to get into today is the dehumanization of Palestinian men.
• 15:44
  So I'm going to be reading very long quotes from these essays you of course can go and read them okay let love speak through me and let me speak through love okay let's get into it.
• 15:55
  So the media selectively highlights women and children as helpless docile passive victims of an obscure quote unquote humanitarian crisis or nameless tragedy.
• 16:13
  The boys and men however are demonized as terrorists while their deaths stories and suffering are strategically erased to manufacture consent for genocide.
• 16:31
  They continue the lives of all black and brown men are sacred.
• 16:57
  But endless propaganda goes into convincing you that they are not.
• 17:21
  I literally have tingles because so much of this we do.
• 17:33
  I remember growing up and just hearing this language women and children women and children and then also a Palestine knowing that 50% of the people in Gaza or the Palestinians are children and how devastating for the children and no child should have to.
• 17:46
  And as I say this I don't mean to trivialize this whatsoever I do think that there are specific dignities forms of safety forms of security that word is now so charged with American propaganda forms of being made to feel safe and held by your community by your society.
• 18:04
  I do think there are specific forms of that that we owe children as beings who cannot protect themselves and also I think we pretend that those forms of nourishment and support and safety that children deserve are so much different than the ones adults deserve.
• 18:22
  And actually at root that our basic needs are very much the same and so we don't need to minimize the stories of Palestinian men in order to honor the stories of Palestinian children.
• 18:34
  In fact actually there's a sense in which they're so intertwined and connected the parents can't be well if the children are not well and vice versa.
• 18:44
  And of course there's people who completely queer these gender identities in general.
• 18:49
  I'm going to keep reading from this that just came up for me and I know when I'm editing this I'm going to be like that wasn't good enough.
• 18:56
  You said this you sound like you think this is funny and it's like no I am actually I'm going to take that out if I leave that in I'm brave I'm brave so I'm brave okay I'm going to continue.
• 19:08
  This is another quote I just pulled quotes that spoke to me spoke to me and I literally there's some of these essays I literally highlighted the whole thing.
• 19:16
  So when you read them if you read them you might find a complete different excerpt to be the one that you choose to take away from the essay.
• 19:24
  Okay second quote the essay by the way is called our boys and men deserve to live not just our women and children.
• 19:32
  The demonization of black and brown men is an age old tactic that has been used to manufacture consent for genocide and to garner public support for the massacres of our communities.
• 19:50
  This is very important so I quickly want to dig a little bit deeper on this point so black and brown men demonized painted as inherently terrorists violent abusers savages quote unquote when you make a certain public think that about black and brown men.
• 20:14
  You in turn manufacture as in you artificially create produce that public implicit consent in what you then do to harm those people.
• 20:27
  Because if someone believes oh no you're a savage you're brutal you're a brute you are violent they're going to think oh well then the state is justified in being brutal towards you because if it weren't them doing that to you you would do that to us essentially is the logic.
• 20:45
  So that's how they have always painted indigenous peoples black peoples brown peoples and especially men in a certain way now this is not to say they haven't also done specific things again we're talking about and we're not saying higher than lower than we're saying this piece is under scene so we're shining a light on that it doesn't mean the other piece is not deeply important as well.
• 21:08
  So by painting out a group of people as savage this is the whole process of dehumanization and inherently violent you then manufacture implicit consent to enact violence on that people so that's a very important point that I think is very profound I hadn't thought about it in the sense of like manufacturing consent even in implicit ways.
• 21:30
  Okay let's continue the quote it is quote unquote normal for governments media and prominent figures to refer to Palestinians as human animals children of darkness wild beasts
• 21:50
  and frame their ethnic cleansing as a righteous war to rid the world of pure evil.
• 22:03
  We just listen to that language human animals more the law and children of darkness wild beasts savages and frame their ethnic cleansing as a righteous war we are on the right side we are on the moral side the enlightened side to rid the world of pure evil we're doing you all a favor.
• 22:22
  It's so deeply sadistic and dehumanizing continuing this quote young Palestinian boys are seen as soon to grow into violent fundamentalists and killing them is spun as a proactive way to neutralize future threats.
• 22:40
  And I know we see so many parallels since all these struggles are linked with the dehumanization of black men in the United States of America with the coastal state being tried as an adult what even when you're a child and being rubbed of the status of the child which also happens to black women and girls where black girls are punitively treated within schools and other systems.
• 23:04
  Okay and not allowed to have childhoods and so this mirrors I mean it's the same system so it's not even a mirror it's an extension it's the same tree we're seeing different offshoots of the same tree I usually love the trees but this tree we do not love.
• 23:21
  Continuing the quote Palestinian boys as young as 13 are categorized and mistreated as men by the occupation forces.
• 23:35
  As young as 13 the goal is to make the world doubt if any Palestinian man I'm continuing the quote by the way and by extension if any Palestinian at all could ever truly be considered an innocent civilian undeserving of genocide.
• 23:58
  So if you make people doubt that Palestinian men can be considered innocent it extends to Palestinians in general that they are somehow worthy of deserving of genocide that is their natural conclusion which is deeply painful deeply dehumanizing.
• 24:22
  The next quote from this essay is at the same time of portraying Palestinian men and boys this way as terrorists as quote unquote human animals as beasts as savages at the same time the media chooses not to show footage that captures the deep emotional complex stories of black and brown men.
• 24:52
  Deep emotional complex stories videos that capture their joy sadness grief justified rage and anger their compassion their generosity and their care.
• 25:16
  You don't see videos of black and brown men sharing their raw and heartbreaking experiences of being submerged in brutal colonial violence morning the murders of countless loved ones passionately sharing their dreams and hopes of liberation.
• 25:42
  Holding feeding soothing showering caring for their loved ones with care or relishing in communal joy.
• 25:59
  And given that kind of saying that our consent for violence against Palestinians has been manufactured by this dehumanizing depiction of Palestinian men and boys only as terrorists only as brutal savage suspect.
• 26:18
  How many of you have seen images videos stories of Palestinian men and boys depicted in the way described depicted with depth with complex stories to be told and have seen black men being portrayed this way at a mass level in the media whether they be from Congo from Haiti from Sudan from the United States of America from South Africa.
• 26:46
  Videos that capture their joy their sadness their grief their justified rage and anger their compassion their generosity and care.
• 27:03
  You don't see videos of black and brown men sharing their raw and heartbreaking experiences of being submerged in brutal colonial violence morning the murders of countless loved ones passionately sharing their dreams and hopes for liberation.
• 27:26
  Doing the physical work of care holding feeding soothing showering tending to saving protecting whatever it may be their loved ones with care or relishing creating experiencing communal joy.
• 27:45
  Palestinian men and boys have been deprived of stories that depict their humanity and I think black and brown men as he says of the world have been deprived of stories that depict their humanity.
• 28:02
  And the impact of this on the one hand is this manufactured consent but I think on the other hand since the mirror reflects back on itself when you grow up only seeing those kinds of images and stories how do you think that must affect their sense of self and in turn how much that then causes becoming what the society told you you already were.
• 28:26
  So there are so many angles where this is deeply painful and something to grieve and try to change and as artists as creators as storytellers as feelers and streamers being part of that narrative shift of where is the humanity in this.
• 28:45
  And then I love this question because what kind is saying is it's also not fair to say oh I support Palestinian men and boys but just not the ones who are militant not the ones who are fighting against these colonial forms of violence what she says next is this why are these Palestinian men dehumanized and punished for being the children that happened to survive genocide long enough to die.
• 29:15
  How can you not have compassion for their struggle punished for being the children that happened to survive genocide long enough to do something about it.
• 29:40
  And then I want to read you a concluding paragraph from this essay where Khan says I don't want you to sympathize with just our women and children.
• 29:53
  I want you to sympathize with those young men taking up arms to fight for their community.
• 30:01
  I need you to understand their complexities hopes suffering and the violent oppressive context that necessitated their resistance.
• 30:15
  If you care about Palestinians about any black or brown community then your compassion should extend to all of us and the only thing you should be condemning is the colonialism that is the root cause of all suffering.
• 30:42
  Today I'm asking you to extend your compassion to all of us not just some of us.
• 30:54
  Palestinian boys and men deserve the right to live all Palestinians deserve your compassion not just some.
• 31:09
  My love I think that is so deeply powerful and urgently needed in our world at this moment as we hold the despair knowing whose despair we are attending to and that it is so deeply soul destroying the multiple forms of death that are being imposed on Palestinians.
• 31:32
  The physical death imposed by the state of Israel but then also the psychic the emotional the spiritual death this is a moment where I think a lot about looking towards versus looking away and I think each of us feels there's been moments where we wish we look towards more and then moments where we felt an inability to hold what we were seeing.
• 31:59
  And we know the theory we know it's not about us and it's a privilege to be able to bear witness and that that is the least we can do right.
• 32:17
  I don't have a resolution on that I only have questions I come to you with questions.
• 32:24
  I thought I would do all three key points from this essay in this episode but I'm getting to 40 minutes and I'm thinking that I'm going to split this into multiple episodes because I won't be able to give my all to the words that ensue.
• 32:40
  I can feel physically that I need to in order to give this work and these words the vitality the energy the love compassion the presence.
• 32:51
  Yes that I want to I need to stop here knowing I gave my full presence to this work and that I'll continue to do that.
• 32:58
  And so this will be a mini series I don't know if it's going to be three sole sessions or two but I do hope that there's something that we can all take from this work and carry into how we then live and exist and support all forms of liberation movement and all forms of resistance against colonial and capitalist and white supremacist et cetera violence.
• 33:27
  In the show notes I'm going to include several links including number one please do follow and support Aisha Khan's work and subscribe.
• 33:38
  Most of their work is free and then there are sections at our only for paid subscribers the lowest paid tier is five dollars per month.
• 33:47
  If you do have the means that's a beautiful way to keep this work going and also if you don't have the means subscribe there's incredible resources for free I mean most of it is free.
• 33:57
  I'm including 14 trusted organizations that are helping civilians in Palestine which is a list compiled by human rights career organization so that will be in the show notes.
• 34:11
  I'm also including the decolonized Palestine reading list by now I'm sure you know your sources and your creators and voices that you're turning to as well or maybe you don't know sometimes I'm like why are you sure you shouldn't be sure of anything okay maybe you don't know.
• 34:29
  But the other thing I want to say oh my goodness wow something that one of Khan's essay says that I think is so powerful we're going to get to this in the next episode is that part of the reason we feel so much despair is we're carrying this emotion on our own often many of us are sitting on our phones scrolling through the most deeply traumatic.
• 34:50
  Deeply sadistic and awful and cruel and painful and treacherous and like I can't even language can't even describe.
• 34:58
  We're consuming these images and videos on our own and then we feel despair and then we feel completely hopeless and what Khan says is we were not meant to number one receive such news in an individualistic space all on your own.
• 35:14
  So we're meant to carry this together and the strongest sources of resistance are coming from the same places where community is strong.
• 35:21
  So students live together they have mutual and shared rituals they have mutual and shared spaces now this is not to say it's easy for them they are putting their lives at deep risk and I'm so in awe of the students of this time.
• 35:34
  And what she says is the reason they're organizing is so powerful the reason they're able to have this resilience among them and have this strength and this commitment to this cause is also because they were first a community.
• 35:51
  They first had all the underpinnings all the ingredients of what it means to live community to make sense of things together instead of sitting on your room on your own getting into a town hall situation and being like what are we going to do how are we feeling how can we hold this and how can we act.
• 36:07
  So what I love love love this point because it brings so much clarity of like okay so part of the despair is coming from the very same isolating systems that we're trying to oppose because you were not meant to process mass genocide on your own I mean you were not no one was meant to be experiencing genocide at all.
• 36:27
  But I think that's such an important distinction it just hit me in like a light bulb with my heart right now like a spark I don't want to use these machine like metaphors but trust me I will because it's so in great I feel like it hit me like a strike of lightning like I had to share it with you.
• 36:40
  But essentially that I think that's just so important and it gives this sort of comforting feeling of like so that's why it feels so impossible to keep going at this time because of that sonliness because you're living this reality that feels very isolating rather than sharing.
• 36:55
  It's not that it wouldn't be difficult not that the students are not suffering no not at all but that workers students all of the people were strongest when we're together and we can actually hold so much when we're together and cotton has an essay on this as well.
• 37:11
  Difficult emotions are meant to be held in community which I didn't include as the full going into this but I'll link to it in the show notes because it's so true.
• 37:20
  Last thing I'm going to leave you with is just the idea that our lives and this is what sparked this for me.
• 37:25
  We are embodied creatures and so we were not actually designed to only process or be part of these activist causes online.
• 37:34
  I know that online space is exceptionally important especially in terms of disability rights and accessibility and also that many of us are so isolated in the physical spaces we are in that online provides a kind of emotional and
• 37:48
  spiritual nourishment and community that is important and is life giving and also if there's anything you can do to get involved in a physical action with other people around this cause whether that be attending a protest.
• 38:02
  I remember when I was in London I went to a free Palestine protest and it moved me literally to the depths of the depths of the depths of my core and it felt so much less fraught with danger and violence as in the US protest that I've attended.
• 38:17
  I went from feeling like oh I'm so alone why is it that everyone else is just able to move on with their life and process these images and videos and I can't and then I was in this sea of people and I was like I'm not alone at all.
• 38:31
  I was just made to feel alone by the way I was the way I was processing this information what the society made available scrolling on my own you know watching things on my own consuming things on my own.
• 38:42
  And suddenly I was in the sea of people of all ages little children old people it was amazing so many brown people so many black people white people everyone was there okay I almost started crying several times I don't actually know why I didn't cry.
• 38:55
  Oh because it was so life giving to know that no I'm not alone look at all these people who have the same or similar values who are showing up and I know there's so many people who wanted to be here who couldn't show up because protest are also not accessible for many disabled folks and so on so I just felt like wow okay here we are and so that reminds me so much of what kind of saying these extremely painful experiences are extremely painful and the way that we sit with them is to do it together.
• 39:23
  So the takeaway there is if there's anything whether that be attending a protest a local event a local project that you could join or start to whatever it is I do think that that embodied connection is what we are here for and that's also a way we put our bodies where our values are I know that there's so much around this so of course do what is safe for you and best for you I'm not telling you what to do I'm just offering something that I wanted to not just like in this episode and be like okay bye like let's keep this as theoretical and try to be able to do this.
• 39:52
  And try to bring it into okay the theory is very important but also the how can we act in alignment and if you have any suggestions that I haven't named I know that there are many more and more may be more effective
• 40:04
  also supporting uplifting the student protests also continuing to share the stories of Palestinians I think that's an ask that keeps coming from Palestinians is don't forget about us don't stop sharing our stories
• 40:17
  and actually with that I think I'm going to end with a poem that just came to me that I read from cons work because it speaks to this point of amplifying the voices of Palestinians.
• 40:29
  The poem is by Rafat Alarir who was a Palestinian writer, mentor, professor and organizer who was targeted by Israeli intelligence and assassinated along with his brother, sister and her four children on December 9, 2023.
• 40:49
  Wow.
• 40:50
  He's also the editor of a book a collection of short stories called Gaza writes back that I'm going to link to in the show notes.
• 41:09
  If I must die you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings make it white with a long tail so that a child somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a plane.
• 41:37
  In a blaze and bid no farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself.
• 41:49
  So that this child sees the kite my kite you made flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love.
• 42:03
  If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale.
• 42:19
  If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale.
• 42:49
  I'm sending you so much love my darling.
• 43:01
  And I invite us all to take a collective inhale and exhale you are here you are loved and you are love.
• 43:22
  Love you so much my love and thank you so much to Dr. Isha Khan for this amazing crucial vital beautiful work.
• 43:33
  I'll see you on the next session love you bye.