Holding Love at the Center: Building a World for Everyone
Reflections on empathy, activism, and the collective work of creating a just society
I am a white presenting, cis-het woman. And I have been exhausted over this last week. I’m sensitive. I’m empathic. I’m intuitive. So, the feelings are big this week.
If you don’t know why, let me share my perspective.
I have many friends who are trans. I have many friends who were born in other countries and have made this land their home. And, to keep you up to date, the current administration is very much against immigration or anything that suggests a gender spectrum.
Many have written about the actual biology of why two genders have never existed, so please take a look and make sure it’s a reputable source (like it has an editorial board). I’ll bring back my tips for being a critical reader later. For now, I just wanted to write.
I haven’t really written something since September. I had a moment where I plugged in scheduled posts, and I got them to you, dear reader, and then the election.
I am working as a community organizer. I love my job. Bringing community together is the only way to build the world we want. We must do the hard work of having conversations together, learning to sit in tension with our neighbors, holding love and kindness at the forefront of our guiding principles, and discussing what we have in common and where we want to dream. Then, we will have a fighting chance of creating the world we want.
And we have years and years and years of divisiveness, trauma, and biases that have been baked into our DNA. (Remember, trauma lives in the body and is passed down from generation to generation.) We need to unwind all of that while we are having conversations with our neighbors. We must critically examine our own thoughts and question our own motives. And I invite us all to center back to love and kindness.
I committed to friends that I would pull together some local (Portland, Oregon) resources for this moment. Stay tuned for a more thorough list. But here are some resources (mostly) nationally.
Know Your Rights: https://act.communitychangeaction.org/a/kyr
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Latino Network (Portland, Oregon): https://www.latnet.org/immigration-resources-2025
Do you need an abortion? https://www.abortionfinder.org
Support Transgender People: https://transequality.org/trans-101/supporting-transgender-people
I have always wanted a world where any person could grow into the person they wanted to be, as long as that growth doesn’t infringe upon another’s. I was “born this way,” as some say. Sometimes, it takes a severe event for people to wake up to the idea that everyone deserves to live in a just and free society. I hope, as a collective, we are waking up now.
We might be in this fight for a lot longer than I want. (The astrology suggests our new society/world will settle in around 2400. So, we may have another 300 years of… shaping.) I hope that we can make a radical change now, to radically define the foundations we want, so within the next three hundred years, the cruelty that exists in our social contract will diminish so dramatically it will look like it doesn’t exist.
If you want to explore creating that foundation, continue to read my words. Take action when you can. And, if nothing else, talk about what matters to you to those that matter to you.
Happy New Year. Let’s make this a great New Year for all of our neighbors.