Bioneer,
Love is a powerful tool for fighting injustice — and it's essential to honor the role of healing and loving in the process of shaping our new future.
This week, we explore the force of love and how it fuels the fire behind the world's most revolutionary movements.
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3 Ways to Practice Revolutionary Love with Valarie Kaur
Activist and lawyer Valarie Kaur advocates revolutionary love as the call of our time. It is the foundation of our movement toward a better world, as it emphasizes the very truth of humanity: that we are all interconnected. As founder and leader of the Revolutionary Love Project, Valarie encourages us all to practice the labor of revolutionary love for ourselves, as well as love for our opponents in response to the increasingly hateful and divisive nature of political dialogue. In the following piece, she shares three ways you can join community leaders and peace builders in fostering a mindset of revolutionary love today.
I want to invite you to imagine my grandfather standing behind me, a tall man who wore a turban as part of his Sikh faith. He taught me how to be brave.
More than 100 years ago, he arrived from India to America sailing by steamship in the year 1913. He arrived in a port in San Francisco, not just a few miles away from here. His generation fought for the right to become citizens, to earn equal protection under the law. It was my grandfather’s spirit, his ancestry behind me when I was growing up on the land that he farmed. And so I invite you to imagine him behind me now as I tell you my story, and share with you why I believe Revolutionary Love is the call of our times.
My story begins in the aftermath of September 11th, in the wake of the horror of those attacks, when hate violence erupted on city streets across the country. Members of my community were killed. The first person killed in a hate crime after 9/11 was Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh father who was killed in front of his store in Mesa, Arizona, by a man who called himself a patriot. He was a family friend I called “uncle.”
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Support Native Youth Leadership
Don't forget about our fundraiser for the Bioneers Native Youth Leadership Program (NYLP). This amazing program creates opportunities for Native youth to participate in, network at, and be empowered by attending the annual Bioneers Conference and Indigenous Forum.
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Terry Tempest Williams, Eve Ensler, Valarie Kaur & Nina Simons: Grief, Sacred Rage, Reckoning, and Revolutionary Love
For too long women in general and women of color even more pointedly have been told to suppress their grief and rage in the name of love and forgiveness. No more. How do we reclaim our emotions in the labor of loving others? What might authentic reckoning, apology, and transformation look like, personally and politically, and where would they ultimately lead us?
Read a transcript of a conversation between four extraordinary writers, activists and thought leaders of our era: Terry Tempest Williams, Eve Ensler, Valarie Kaur and Nina Simons.
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Video of the Week: john a. powell – Beloved Community
As humanity faces global environmental and social collapse, our fear of the “Other” can be magnified by unstable contracting economies, radically shifting demographics, and new social norms. Can humanity overcome these divisions and come together to protect our common home? john a. powell, a nationally respected voice on race and ethnicity, leads the Othering and Belonging Institute, holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion, serves on the UC Berkeley School of Law faculty, and is author of Racing to Justice.
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This Week on Bioneers Radio & Podcast
Shailja Patel's unique artistry is a provocative global mash-up of genres. She's a slam poetry champion and star of her award-winning, one-woman play Migritude about the intricate webs of global migration and cultural identity. As an acclaimed poet of South Asian and Kenyan ancestry, through her fearless art she embodies the authentic voices of women, South Asians and Africans who are otherwise seldom heard. For her, the ultimate destination of poetry is justice — too heart-breakingly beautiful to be denied.
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Take Action: Revolutionary Love Project
The Revolutionary Love Project is a national initiative founded by Valarie Kaur that produces stories, tools, curricula, conferences, films, TV moments, and mass mobilizations that equip and inspire people to practice the ethic of love.
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The Latest from Bioneers.org:
In this speech, playwright Eve Ensler explains how writing an apology to herself from the perspective of her late, abusive father, helped to cultivate self-healing and forgiveness. Read more here.- Lyla June, a Diné artist and activist, shares her personal journey with food and agriculture, and what inspired her to focus the next stage of her life on traditional food systems and language. Read more here.
In this excerpt from her new book, Fibershed, weaver and natural dyer Rebecca Burgess explores the impact of our clothing on the environment and its whole supply chain. Read more here.
Dr. Daphne Miller is an author, physician and professor whose work explores the relationship between human and soil health. In this article, she answers questions from Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director Arty Mangan . Read more here.
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