People talk about defying and opposing injustice but that merely only appears to be resistance to injustice. To transform our systems, what would it mean to not call out who and what is so angering us but to call in those participating within injustice and to have compassion for their ignorance? For their not knowing, their forgetting, of what is wise and so meaningful to them when caught up in our ways of eclipsing reality?

As what Kazu's Fierce Vulnerability is the how there is a privilege in calling people out yet also a familiarity: targetting someone and blaming some is a trauma of White, colonial modernity that sows its seeds in the marrow of our blood and the circulation of our love. And how this internal targetting: how we pathologize our own actions and behaviors rather than understanding them and how they meet our needs, however tragically, and then blame ourselves in this self-pity. Kazu recognizes that this extends into the world around us, and that self-healing is necessary yet it is not enough.

To address the violence happening the world without contributing to more forms of it, as Kazu recognized how communities based upon the values of love and nonviolence often fought and acted out forms of hate toward one another, we need to not combat things (i.e. climate change). But to see its true face. How we are helpless to the systems in place simply because we do not see them as systems as we take them for granted. Our business-as-usual has been so concretized that we cannot imagine the future we would enjoy stewarding. And we live out the symptoms of illness not remembering that the roots and wounds are not scarring over and that most activism picks at the wound and deepens our wounds.

So Kazu brings this challenge:

In the novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin writes of learning “the utter uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.” So, these days I’m asking myself a different set of questions, to which I don’t know the answers.

What if instead of chanting, we cry?
What if instead of holding signs with demands, we tell stories?
What if instead of yelling, we sing songs?
What if instead of anger, we lead with heartbreak?
What if we stop trying to win and start trying to heal?
What if we build a movement where nobody, even those on the “other” side, ever think to question their sense of belonging?
What if we view nonviolent action as collective trauma healing?
What if instead of our goal being to “shut it down,” we try to “open it up?” Open up our hearts and our opportunities for healing?
What if we mobilize the power needed to stop harm while cultivating the love necessary to heal it?
What would it take?
What if?