Season 2, Episode 2: Maggie and Danielle, Critical Conversations, Engaging Community and Politics

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In this episode, Maggie and Danielle connect over having a new imagination for what it’s like to live in these COVID days. Having once thought, “perhaps this will all blow over,” we are now knee deep in changing family dynamics, changing what it looks like for kids to “go to school” with distance learning, and adults shifting to a more long-term working from home situation. Normal is being redefined. 

Even still, nearly six months in to COVID-19, things feel raw and exposed.

With the end of summer and the beginning of the school year, there is a sense that “I’m not ready.” Maggie named that she is feeling ill-equipped to teach children and also help to them deal with social isolation… Simply put: We are not able to meet all the needs for all the kids.

Danielle names there is a hard balance: how do we manage screen time and engage with our kids and work (from home)? We are having to trust our kids lot more and these family dynamics are continuing to develop as we find ways to deal with losses and managing emotions.

In the midst of  a continued need for social distancing, how do re-form, or form from for the first time, community? Just how well were we connected before COVID?

As we enter into the political season it feels more divided than ever across our nation—people seem to be  lining up to pick sides!

We can ask ourselves: How much capacity do I have in this season, in a global pandemic, being maxed out with personal and/or work life, do I have to engage people who aren’t like me… or who disagree with me, when I still want to connect and be seen and heard?

Danielle says the reality is we just don’t want to  know people who are like us and yet we do just want people to know people like us. We want to agree because it feels good. And when we disagree, we aren’t just having disagreements [about politics], people believe that these things are connected to the core of who they are.

Danielle challenges us as we engage in debate and discourse this political seasons to ask ourselves: Am I in my body? Am I present with what I'm thinking? When you’re in your body you have a harder time accusing and dehumanizing another person. Honor humanity by being a human: be in your body.

What if I am in my body and my neighbor isn’t in their body? Start by asking questions, “You don't seem to be with me right now, where are you?” Start with curiosity. Acknowledge what you see them, it disarms them.

If we can have a conversation with someone without being seen and heard, what was the point of the conversation?

If someone hears what you said, they're going to remember what you say. They remember it in their bodies, for good or bad.

Danielle’s tips for engaging with others in this political season who may disagree with you:

• Practice hospitality to the other person.
• Offer yourself kindness. — If you’re not ready to engage or in a place to engage, then don’t.
• Have self-awareness—what am I feeling? And where am I feeling it in my body?
• Stay with it: Danielle believes that our culture wants to disconnect from the conversation around race, racism and white supremacy because there is a sense of SHAME. But we need stay with it: take breaks, do work on your own, but then reengage in this important conversation.
• Don’t engage over social media because you remove the human part of being human—our bodies. Our bodies regulate with other bodies. When one person’s body is dis-regulated it disrupts other bodies present. Therefore engaging over social media takes away our ability to regulate our bodies.

Anger can be arousing and exciting over social media. And yet anger can cause damage that will require repair that you may not be able to over social media.

When we enter into a place that requires repair there can be this sense of despair, hopelessness, "this isn’t going to get better.”  We need sit in that for moment and mourn. We need to feel the weight of our grief for there can be no movement out of grief without engagement. We must allow space for our anger to transform into grief so that our grief turns to lament and morning which leads to repair and reconciliation and healing.

There’s been much debate around Abortion / Pro-Life this political cycle and it is not as black and white  as much as we’d like it to be, it’s so much m