Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
After the babies were bored, everything just hurt even more
because I 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.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
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 Corps, 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
(00:37):
right after this first break. Before we get started, one
quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional relational
territory in our time here together, this show is not
a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health
provider or for professional supervision related to your work. Hey, Fred's,
(01:02):
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? Valeriicor
(01:22):
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
(01:45):
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 care, community, I mean, on and on. We
also cover why fighting for love and pleasure is always
(02:06):
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
(02:30):
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
(02:51):
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
(03:12):
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. You wrote, Wonder is where
love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning
(03:34):
of violence. Can we start there?
Speaker 1 (03:39):
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
(03:59):
have to remember what we once knew. You know, we
walked to the beach every Friday morning. And once I
understood this, this says 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 where we need
to go. And so I started to make up the
song for her, It's become our song now, and saw
(04:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
No, Oh, I love it.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
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 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
(04:59):
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 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
(05:20):
the world, this aching, noisy, complicated, bleeding world, I'm realizing
how much love comes from that willingness 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
(05:43):
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 moved around revolutionary love, is
really returning people to their inner capacity to wonder, like
(06:08):
my daughter does.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
And so much of life is sort of designed to
grind that wonder out of us.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
It is it's like this flame that just the hot
winds of the world want to extinguish it, whant 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 this world or be powerful. No, this
capacity to wonder, to be vulnerable, to let yourself orient
(06:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, I was just gonna as you're describing that, I'm like,
this is really the root and the foundation. And you
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.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
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
(07:23):
he was in the face of death many times in
his life. And it's the shobd 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 tivana Lagi bad Dramshanai
djogud Madam God, the klubgayna bay, and it goes on
and on, and it's the hot winds cannot touch you.
(07:47):
You are shielded by love. I'm wondering what would happen
if each of us could place our hand 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,
(08:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
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
(08:47):
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 in necess necessarily a place without pain.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
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 talking about her a lot right now because
(09:23):
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,
(09:45):
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,
(10:07):
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
(10:27):
to a meadow. I was in this gorgeous meadow with
flowers blooming, and she was there next to me, wiggling
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,
(10:48):
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.
(11:10):
And the next moment it's raining. There's an umbrella and
we're walking through 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
(11:30):
the only way that I could get back to the
meadow is 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
(11:52):
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
(12:15):
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, that 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.
(12:36):
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
(12:59):
was described transitioned on that burning 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
(13:22):
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 discover 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
(13:43):
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 and close over mine, and I realized that this
grieving process was just one long way of making him
(14:06):
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 what
(14:30):
this moment in 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 resilite, more courageous, more imaginative, more loving
than we've ever imagined. That we could be.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
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've 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
(15:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Sometimes it's so hard to be here and to be awake,
you know. I often, especially after my baby's reward, 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 bored, everything just hurt even more because I, you know,
(15:51):
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.
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
(16:12):
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, and I can so hopeful We're going
to change the world. And other times it's like a
(16:34):
new mood or a slimmery. 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
(16:55):
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,
(17:16):
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
(17:37):
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
(17:58):
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 experience pleasure in my body, like sensual pleasure,
like holding the tea with the we were talking about
(18:20):
the fire before we gain, like the cozy fire and
the warm tea. And I'm always my children 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 brings me so much pleasure. And I don't
choose the outlet. I put it on my tongue and
I let it melt, you know, and I experience the
(18:42):
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 letting, 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
(19:02):
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
(19:23):
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
(19:44):
become the meaning of my life.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
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
(20:11):
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
embodied world, that you can't do both at the same time,
(20:33):
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
(20:55):
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 with Jonathan Field's on the Good
Life Project where you said, you know, I I'm in
a 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
(21:17):
around love. And that's what I think of you when
you make this description, is that the pain of the
world is the pain of the world regardless. Yes, And
what is our rest point that allows us to show
up for it?
Speaker 1 (21:31):
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, this is yeah, breathe, my love, and then
push and then breathe again. You know, there's.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Know, building a movement for just so 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 in the breed, 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
(22:20):
in the street, I would roll my eyes anytime someone
said love was the answer on a stage. And yeah,
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
(22:44):
wasn't actually that useful to me that often, because I
could sit in 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,
(23:06):
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 RUSSI of feeling. Love
is sweet, labor, fierce, bloody, imperfect life, giving a choice
(23:30):
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
(23:50):
we think we've reached our limit. 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
(24:11):
to transform the world around us. And once I came
to that definition, Megan, I said, Okay, we're going to
need people who continued 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
(24:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
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. Yes, right, Like it is so rude
to make it this like fluffy pastel thing that can't
(25:11):
like do anything for you except to 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
(25:31):
put it in.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
And we've heard this called I'm saying, like revolutionary love
is the call of our times.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
And we heard this call for a thousand so many.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, right, you know, to Abraham, to Mohammad, to put
that to hervagurunanik, you know, see no stranger, knockle 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 femine so imagining that
the love ethic could be the foundation of every arena
(26:03):
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 teach humanity how to live sustainably with
(26:25):
the earth for the first time ever? Like our very
future as a nation and as a species depends on
whether 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
(26:48):
that world, and that each and every one of us
has a role in the labor.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
This is true personally and collectively. I think one of
the things that we all also sometimes do is like
is we jump to the movement 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
(27:17):
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 grief and I think
that sometimes we forget that because it's so big and
so painful, and that ferocity and that braveness, Like you
(27:40):
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,
(28:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yes. Any time 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
(28:41):
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've never seen before. We saw
(29:01):
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
(29:22):
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
(29:44):
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
so solidarity with black people, Indigenous people, and other people
(30:06):
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
(30:29):
an arrow where we 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?
(30:51):
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 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
(31:11):
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 a new
we birth new solidarities, new possibilities, new movements that might
(31:36):
expand the circle of 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 birth that future.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
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
(32:28):
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 megandefine dot co. If individual
(32:49):
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 megand fine 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.
(33:10):
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, it's too much, too.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
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,
(33:54):
you will have what's called empathy fatigue, and you will
shut down, right, So empathy will 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?
(34:16):
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 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. That's the cadence again, right. I think so
many people feel like I'm either all in or not
(34:39):
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 visuals 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.
(35:00):
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
behind 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,
(35:21):
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 at 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.
(35:44):
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,
(36:05):
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 warriored, 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,
(36:26):
then that I think between the warrioring and the birthing,
we have the other wars we need to.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
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
has lost, somebody else's story, we start to feel things.
(36:56):
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
(37:16):
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
(37:38):
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, yeah, because
we don't have the tools to deal with all.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
That's so good. It's so good. I mean the school
shooting are you know? I talked about becoming a radner
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 Valde, Texas was
particularly hard for me because my children are the ages
(38:17):
of these children, and it was so graphic and so
monstrous and so massive, and I felt like a primal
scream in me that just wouldn't go off, you know,
And I had to notice that my body was activated,
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 was like, oh,
(38:40):
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. 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
(39:01):
don't talk about, bru no No, no.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Time, which they cannot dance to.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
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
enter my body when I dance with my children, and
it's like it's like a kind of sparkling energy that
(39:28):
goes from the earth up into my heart. You know.
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
(39:52):
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 or turning up that song with my children,
I am 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's sparkling energy,
(40:14):
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,
(40:37):
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 up.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
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
(41:26):
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 day is
just this morning, my time. I get to be alive today.
I get to be alive today with you. Each day
a surprise, a gratitude, gift, and then we end our
(41:50):
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.
(42:13):
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
(42:35):
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, an 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?
(42:56):
A 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,
(43:17):
dying every night and then waking up like this lifetime
is a complete surprise, you know, it's the 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,
(43:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
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 described there as like how do
we keep ourselves porous and open to all of it? Yeah,
(44:15):
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 of the world.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Like, it is so heavy.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
And in the book you introduce the concept of squad care.
Can you tell us what that means? Squad care?
Speaker 1 (44:42):
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 moo cannot happen on our backs
or over our dead bodies. We need to be caring
(45:04):
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
(45:25):
that is allowing that grief to be held. I need
to be part of a workplace, in a community, in
a city, in a 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
(45:46):
someone else's midwives. So Melissa's idea of squad care was
that there's always 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've
(46:07):
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 as 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 soiree and we sat around a table and had
(46:28):
this gorgeous brunch together. We hadn't gathered together, 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
(46:49):
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
(47:11):
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 may we imagine that
there were networks all across the country of those of
(47:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
Earlier in the season I had Action it was last season,
had a conversation with Sara 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 she said something like,
you know, the the closest, most powerful, most supportive relationships
and friendships in my life. I got those because we
(48:22):
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
(48:43):
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
(49:04):
to be at this party and acceptable.
Speaker 1 (49:07):
Yes, oh su so beautifully said. I've been on the
road the last few months, you know, after coming out
of several years of locked down and known 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 qata, and
then it transforms into this container where people are standing
(49:33):
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 there 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
(49:56):
catharsis and knowing that you're not alone in our culture. Sure,
doesn't you know, we tend 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
(50:20):
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 solidarity.
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.
(50:43):
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
(51:06):
that space where all the rest flows.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (51:23):
It's true. Lynn and 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 next to year. 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
(51:44):
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 any think away from this conversation, know
that we can transform the world from the inside out.
(52:06):
We can transform the world from the inside out, and
it can begin with the 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
(52:26):
happens next, Notice what you see, Notice what you want
to do when that starting point placed inside of you
is one of love.
Speaker 2 (52:35):
There's lots of love in this ouse.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Now.
Speaker 2 (52:39):
You've brought up a 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?
Speaker 1 (52:57):
That my daughters 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
(53:17):
me as her ancestor and that which she will inherit
from this time of violence and transition is not my trauma,
but my bravery and my joy.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
Thank you for that.
Speaker 1 (53:33):
Oh, I love you. Thank you for feeling that with me.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
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
(54:00):
last parting words.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
Basically, there's one more thing that gives me hope. And
it's a very practical thing.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
Hmm. I love practically.
Speaker 1 (54:10):
There's a researcher, chena With and 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
(54:31):
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
(54:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (55:15):
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,
(55:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (55:53):
Now.
Speaker 2 (55:53):
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.
(56:13):
She said, I hope that she will inherit from this
time of violence and transition, not my trauma, but my
bravery and my joy.
Speaker 1 (56:23):
I just.
Speaker 2 (56:25):
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
have 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
(56:46):
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 found something to hold on to. 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
(57:06):
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
(57:32):
in good company. That's it for this week. Remember to
subscribe to the show and leave a review. Your reviews
helped 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
(57:53):
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
(58:15):
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 Co. It's Okay that You're Not Okay. The
podcast is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive
(58:37):
producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio. 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.