Feeling is revolutionary, a disruption of the status quo. Though it feels personal and happens in our bodies, it doesn’t need to be a solitary action. Feeling and connection bring us into the world and into relationship with one another. Some things seem too big to be felt alone because they are. They require the collective to hold the space for big feeling, for it to move through, and to remind us that we’re not alone. It’s not practical to imagine that we can feel the weight of historical trauma as one person. This is why we meet in the streets. As much as mass protests and direct action are about putting strategic pressure on opposition, they are often a gathering space for grief and pain because they are too big to feel alone. Protests don’t get reported on this way, as an eruption of collective grief; on the news they are riots, and we begin the cycle of minimizing the feelings that bring people to the streets, and ultimately miss the message. We need those spaces and others, too, where our grief can swell, where feeling for feeling’s sake can reconstitute us, where our empathy for one another can build. A community, a society, becomes one, remains one, I think, through shared feeling. –Prentis Hemphill https://prentishemphill.com/

No matter the outcome of this election, there will be some big feelings for us to move through. We can feel them together. We can be a community that processes them together so that our actions align with our values. How will we move forward with our friends and family members that we are in conflict with? How will we help this country move forward towards unity and still celebrate our diversity? How will we be able to live joyfully, and without fear, in our own lives?

Over the past several years, we have built a supportive and loving community at UUCL. It’s always an incredible joy to see what we can do together when we all participate–we make great things happen! Let us continue to pick up momentum, work together and with our community partners, so that our ability to build a life-saving kind of empathy leads us down a path to unity.

Take care of yourselves this week and please reach out if you need anything–a listening ear, a place to vent, a shoulder to cry on.

Much love to you all–

Heather