Here we are, in the tender and precarious liminal space of a paradigm shift centuries in the making. We feel the seismic waves of a grand restructuring. Peering down into the dark chasm of uncertainty utterly saturating this moment, so much needs our care and attention. In the panicked chaos, our desperate pleas grow louder. And yet, our bodies are cell-level weary from fighting for survival for too long.

There is an unignorable call to go deep and slow, to get quiet and listen. Bayo Akomolafe, says “the times are urgent, let us slow down”.

We honor the grief we feel for ourselves, our loved ones, and all who have suffered violence and abuse. We listen to our intergenerational, personal, and collective traumas and wounds and we mourn. We look out on the horizon of rebirth, we see it within our grasp.

When we transform all that we reject, when we withdraw consent from what harms, when we release lingering ties of all that no longer serves, when we dismantle and decompose old skins, old shackles – we see regenerative processes are possible. We allow all that needs to die to become the compost that nourishes fertile ground for our seeds to unfurl in new ways, to stretch toward softer and truer versions of ourselves, to nurture right relationship with others and this planet.

We hold that multiple contradictory truths can coexist simultaneously. We believe our liberation is interwoven with the ability to expand our thinking beyond the reduction and contraction of systems of oppression. We maintain eternal optimism because we know that the sheer act of holding possibility for liberated futures is an essential part of of dreaming them into being,

Dear darkening ground, you’ve endured so patiently the walls we’ve built, perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour

and grant the churches and cloisters two.And those that labor—let their work grip them another five hours, or seven,

before you become forest again, and water, and widening wilderness in that hour of inconceivable terror when you take back your name from all things.

Just give me a little more time! I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them, until they’re worthy of you and real.

Ranier Maria Rilke | Book of Hours, I 61