23S week 3: Nurturing Your Spiritual Self

 

Focus: Ival Stratford Kovner

Click here to hear Ival's focus talk.

 Spirituality, Skekhinah Reflection

When I consider WomenExplore, I always recall with such a memorable sensation of a clear communal experience the day I spoke to this group in the Democracy Center.

Today I would dare to call this the presence of the “Shekhinah” within our group consciousness.   

 What would allow description when words tend to mute the actual experience? 

 I shared my Torah portion from my adult Bat Mitzvah wrapped in my tallit. 

For me, chanting Hebraic verses among others gathered  summons the Shekhinah.

I might further describe the Shekhinah’s presence as preventing panic and high tension in  near death situation.   Why was the shared glance towards one another so supportive and calming as a 7.1 earthquake struck Anchorage Alaska and we were ten stories above the street? 

Neither of us uttered any words.  I believe this was the Shekhinah in action.  

A sense  security filled the room in those moments.  

It was not an “ungodly” hour – it was our hour to find verify belief.  

Can the Shekhinah be experienced not within a communal experience?  

May Shekhinah intervene at other times? 

I burrowed down through exactly fifty years of time passing and  discovered another example. 

The Shekhinah was revealed in one split second as I was uninjured in a potentially horrific accident. 

The eight bicyclists who were struck and killed in New York City reminded me of the force of vehicles encountering bikes.  The terrorist was in court for sentencing recently.

We watched in Manhattan on Halloween, and cancelled trick or treating with our granddaughter – this had been her birthday. We hid the news from her and her younger brother – deciding to simply enjoy cake together.  

Had divine Shekhinah intervened, ever present, as a force pushing me away from certain injury and death?

Hearing Brandon Tsay recount his memory of an encounter with an armed gunman – had he felt the same push? 

I wish we’d gather all the “Go Brandon” shirts – whatever hideous message is conveyed in its reach – and add “TSAY” – on the bottom of the shirt. 

Shekhinah

Ival Stratford Kovner, MS, MFA

Group consciousness may be felt

Encountered one by one

Within expressive, knowing eyes

Words shift, now we are nonverbal 

A rare otherness sensed

Name such moments,  Shekhinah ?

Consider Women Explore gatherings

Recall a memorable sensation

A clear communal experience

A shared communal wave

Dare to call this presence

The Shekhinah? 

How may words in each Focus

Convey a muted, transcended

Experience encased in memory.

Once I stood wrapped up in my tallit 

Chanting the tropes of antiquity

Shekhinah summoned in such actions.

Can we find the same presence

Locked within a couple’s eyes

As an earthquake rocked earth

One long moment they glance eternity

Husband, wife sharing mutual gaze,   

Securely safe,  wrapped in Shekhinah.

We know other scriptures describe

Miraculous visions of burning

Tongues descending down,

Upon disciples conveying knowledge

As eyes gaze in unison upward

Holy Ghost, Spirit, Shekhinah?

Evening mists descended a decade

Ago, December fourteenth, reporters

Whispered behind nearby sound trucks,   

A gurgling brook beneath foot bridge

Echoed loss here in Sandy Hook, 

Witnessing this palpable wail, Shekhinah.   

Small stuffed animals stood guard

As sentinels for the souls of children  

Echoes of communal loss, disbelief 

Hovered within darkness of night 

Damp night air hung thick with sorrow, 

Shrouded, Shekhinah wept.

Naming the mysterious warrants

Set limits, since sages caution

Study not mystery until decades

Of life pass, then bear witness

Search and recognize the mystery

Is this presence, Shekhinah?

Half century earlier in Central Square

A fast moving car careened towards

Me, straddling a half crossed street

On my bike. A miraculous nudge felt,   

I fell distant, avoiding being crushed 

Beneath the mangled bike, Shekhinah?

Can instant transcendence be noted 

As Brandon Tsay saw his last moments

On earth, then he sensed a tug and

Enabled, he tackled the gunman

Had Shekhinah intervened?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Let me share far more eloquent words written by

Rabbi Jill Hammer

 

The feminine image in Kabbalah

where Jewish mystics explored and extolled 

Feminine Aspects of the Divine:

Stepping through moments of creation

Shekhinah deepens her relationship  earth.

Spiraling through time, born within earth

She encounters change with each of us

We are shown the work of return

Repairing the world, through our actions.

Shekhinah also shelters within

Sacred places on the earth

Find protection within her wings.

Birthing the light, she kindles 

The fires of faith in the Divine

Offers strength in mortals.

She is the constancy of seasons 

And the world combined

She teaches her creatures not to fear

And shows them paths to move

Forward as she attends each moment

As laughter emerges in harmony. a

Suffering is given redemption

Powerless are freed from resignation.

Belief is instilled that all deserve a place.

The timeless is connected with world of time

Eternal,  sacred conversation endless.

It remains the lasting covenant.

She descends the mountain as a bride

Frailty and tragedy within her partner

For her spouse is the world, yet still

She shines in the shadows

And offers blessings for humans’ dark 

And uncertain journey.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

JANET COOPER NELSON

Click here for lecture by Janet Cooper Nelson

References:

"You Can't Have It All" from Bite Every Sorrow by Barbara Ras

Carrots and Other Poems by David Fedo

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Age of Anxiety  by Katherine May

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

WomenExplore Resource List, Spring 2023

 —collected by Paula Chandoha

Marcia's decluttering  course: Andrew Mellen  offered a five day challenge to clean up clutter.  From Robert Weber: Arthur Frank, At The Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness John Yungblut, On Hallowing One’s Diminishments, Pendle Hill Pamphlet 292 Connie Goldman, Who Am I . . . Now That I’m Not Who I Was: Conversations with women in mid-life and the years beyond  Rick Hanson. Just One Thing. Check this week -- https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGrcrxzDslJHRlPHjqgSQHLGPtB?compose=GTvVlcRwRrhVJmtPGMpCZxHWFnLlrRQwKfPVWVbbqrMdCjlBXwkdzQwmHtJbdPSFRKmBbbWMdMdNx Olivia Hobliztelle has a good list of resources on wisdom and aging on her website. Click on “Resources”to see Selected Bibliography: https://www.oliviahoblitzelle.com/ Jill Tarter on extraterrestrial, TED talk: https://www.ted.com/participate/ted-prize/prize-winning-wishes/setilive Film and panel discussion via zoom: Film screening of Home of the Brave — When Southbury said NO to the Nazis,  March 17-20  plus March 19, panel discussion on the film.  Register here for link to view film and to hear panel discussion https://sousamendesfoundation.org/event/southbury/ Women forging a special space together: A Schlesinger Library historian gathered 10 women historians  during the 2020 pandemic lockdown to decipher an 1891 diary of four women on a special expedition together.  Amateur sleuths unveil the women behind 132-year-old Boston Harbor adventure journal (wgbh.org)

Article, The Marginalian, Robin Wall Kimmerer

https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/moss?e=8d49b76b80 

The Marginalian is a source of articles on well being and culture with strong emphasis on art and literature.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/05/13/gathering-moss-robin-wall-kimmerer/?mc_cid=8b42268e4c&mc_eid=749c58947a 

 On the the birth of ecology:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/02/04/universe-in-verse-bloom/

 Climate Change: Interesting piece  

https://www.farmaid.org/issues/soil-water-climate/farmers-and-climate-change-myths-vs-facts/

Abortion rights in the USA:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/destruction-us-abortion-laws-human-rights-violation-un?

Spiritual wellbeing: The OnBeing Project: The Pause Newsletter (Sent once a week on Saturday) 

You can subscribe. 

https://onbeing.org/newsletter/ 

The Slowdown: Readings and interviews on culture, spirit, politics, literature, media:

New book by Dacher Kelner on AWE, Why we all need a daily doses of awe

 https://mailchi.mp/slowdownmedia/dacher-keltner-on-why-we-all-need-daily-doses-of-awe?e=750a8ee95a

Bill McKibben on heat waves: 

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-hotter-planet-takes-another-toll-on-human-health?

Podcast: Terra Firma (Colorado Public Radio) podcast is about the natural world and its sounds. 5 to 10 minute segments. 

 https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1147840005/terra-firma

Article, A discussion of time, modernity, being in sync with nature:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/saving-time-book-review-jenny-odell

Poem for spring:

                    [There is a section about a poet, Dorianne Laux, here!!!  

                     Is that your pen name, Dorianne?] 

Coming  by Philip Larkin  Listen Online     On longer evenings, Light, chill and yellow, Bathes the serene Foreheads of houses. A thrush sings, Laurel-surrounded In the deep bare garden, Its fresh-peeled voice Astonishing the brickwork. It will be spring soon, It will be spring soon — And I, whose childhood Is a forgotten boredom, Feel like a child Who comes on a scene Of adult reconciling, And can understand nothing But the unusual laughter, And starts to be happy. "Coming" by Philip Larkin from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

23S Week 1: Aging with Wisdom: Opportunities and Challenges

Click here for Introduction, including a Brief History of TOP/WomenExplore,

and the Poetry Reading with all three contributors.

Ival Stratford Kovner

Ival and Ron sitting at Trail Train Stop NY State with Cole

 

AppalachiANNA on the 75th birthday of the Appalachian Trail

The trail will be 86 on 8/12/12. 
Youngest female recently finished -age 15.
A 76 year old  female had 300 miles to go!

Karen Sheahan was a flight attendant for 35 years and brings a global view.

Lindsa Vallee's poetry told the story of a self-sown sunflower seed that grew to 

the height of her second floor porch and remained strong even after its leaves 

had dried up and its drooping head was bursting with seeds that fed the birds.

Two corellas share a sunflower head

Click here for lecture by Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle

Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle, a writer and teacher, was formerly the Associate Director of the Mind/Body Clinic and a Teaching Fellow of the Mind/Body Medical Institute, where she pioneered how to bring meditation, yoga, and cognitive behavioral therapy into the medical domain to treat stress-related and chronic illness. She and her team developed one of the first training programs in Mind/Body medicine in the country and trained health professionals under the auspices of Harvard Medical School.

Formerly a therapist in private practice and a Co-Director of Greenhouse, an alternative mental health collective, Olivia worked with individuals, couples, and groups. She also spent years serving as a Hospice volunteer.

Olivia's teaching and writing are inspired by over forty years of practice in psychology, Buddhist meditation, and other wisdom traditions. In addition to her roots in Christianity, she has practiced primarily Vipassana (Insight Meditation) and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as in a devotional tradition from India. 

Having taught contemplative practices in a wide variety of settings such as government agencies, hospitals, churches, businesses, school systems, and meditation centers, she is currently focusing on conscious aging, elder issues, and living the contemplative life.

Her award winning book, Ten Thousand Joys & Ten Thousand Sorrows: A Couple's Journey Through Alzheimer's, is a narrative memoir of how she and her husband handled his illness, drawing inspiration from their background in Buddhist practice. Her book was translated into Chinese, Korean, Dutch, and Japanese, and recorded for the National Library Service for the Blind. Now an elder with two grown children and four grandsons, she lives in Massachusetts and loves to spend time in Vermont where she grows vegetables, welcomes family and friends, and steeps herself in the glories of nature.

References:

Prayer for the Grace to Age Well  By Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu

When the signs of age begin to mark my body, and still more when they touch my mind, 

When the illness that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me;

When the painful moment comes to which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am growing ill or growing old; and

Above all at the last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me,

In all these dark moments, 0 God,

Grant that I may understand that it is you—provided only my faith is strong enough—

who is painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.

Henri Nouwen, Dutch priest and author 

Winter Grace: Spirituality and Aging by Kathleen R Fischer

Jon Kabat-Zinn's website

The Guest House by Jalaluddin Rumi

23S Week2: The Power of Radically Inclusive Women-Centered Spaces

A brief history of WomenExplore:

In 1973 Brita Stendahl started the Theological Opportunities Program as a way of giving the wives (and other interested women) a taste of what their husbands were experiencing at HDS.  She was assisted by a small advisory committee of women.  Many of the women who attended TOP went on to divinity school, not necessarily at Harvard, in their own right.

In 1978 Elizabeth Dodson Gray took over as "Coordinator" (her title) and radically transformed the program. At first she opened up the Advisory Committee to any woman who had attended TOP.  Liz developed a feminist method of taking the issues that were on the minds of the women in the Advisory Committee and developing a series of ten topics under a common theme.  Naturally the range of topics continued to broaden.  TOP was fortunate in having access to expert speakers from a wide range of fields in the Boston area.

A second innovation that Liz introduced was to ground each topic by starting the session with an "existential focus" in which a member of the Advisory Committee speaks about how the day's topic comes from her life.  This enhances and gives more meaning to the main speaker's lecture.

Elizabeth Dodson Gray remained at the helm as Coordinator for 32 years with the invaluable assistance of her devoted husband David. (Harvard certainly got their money's worth!)  A number of smaller sharing groups associated with TOP came and went -- today we have "Reflections".  Liz and David faced a number of upheavals over the years, the greatest being separating from Harvard and becoming an independent non-profit in 2003.  This meant that Liz became "Executive Director" and required the creation of a Board which had the responsibility of overseeing the Executive Director and ensuring that all financial dealings were above board. From the point of view of most of the TOP participants an even bigger upheaval came when TOP needed to find alternative accommodation, which it did at the University Lutheran Church in Winthrop St.  No longer located in the HDS Liz set in motion a process for finding a new more descriptive name for the organization. Finally Liz and David retired from TOP in 2010, but continued to attend the lectures for some time.  (At their retirement "garden party" Liz and David were presented the Donella Meadows Award by the Club of Rome (USA). This coveted award is given to highly outstanding individuals who created actions in a global framework toward the sustainability goals Donella Meadows, lead author of the influential book The Limits to Growth, expressed in her writings.)  All of these changes took the work of many committees to come to fruition.  Doing everything by consensus is not necessarily the most efficient!  

Since 2010 WomenExplore has had three executive directors, each brought her own talents to modernizing the organization and all brought more volunteers into the running of WE.  We also moved our base to the Democracy Center in Mt Auburn St.

The latest upheaval WE faced was the covid-19 pandemic.  We postponed the Spring 2020 series, which was about to begin, while we found our footing in an on-line environment.  Being on-line is a mixed blessing.  We can afford to offer the lectures cost-free since we no longer pay rent and it is easier and less time-consuming for us to be present at a meeting.  The downside is that we have lost the personal interactions which inevitably take place at in-person events.  At the end of a lecture instead of fifteen different conversations taking place simultaneously we can only have one, one where people need to raise their hands to speak.  We have sought to mitigate this somewhat by incorporating some in-person events into the series and in the times between the series.

Where next?  Only time will tell.

Focus: Muna Killingback, Tracey Hurd and Maria Behnke, prev exec dirs WomenExplore

Tracey Hurd (3rd ED) was unable to attend due to an unexpected work situation:

I come here after years in primarily academic settings—as a former Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Center, program director at the Unitarian Universalist Association, and faculty member at Boston College. The dual commitment to learning broadly about issues in the world today, and deep thinking about how those issues touch our own lives, drew me in. I attended a session with a friend, and came back again and again. I am honored to be part of a program that is so full of possibility and transformation.
I served for a very short time at WomenExplore but always hold the collective and Elizabeth Dodson Gray dearly in my memory. Elizabeth’s deep trust in women, her commitment to expansive feminist thought, and her lovely grittiness were inspirational. I am grateful to have known her, for being welcomed at WomenExplore, and for the truly incredible individuals who have carried on the vision of Theological Opportunities/ WomenExplore forward with the same thirst for knowledge, truth and justice that Elizabeth held. I am very glad to have met you all.

Maria Behnke (4th ED) is working now as a Montessori teacher and both her director and co-teacher have called in ill.

She says:

Please send my regrets and love to the group.  I owe so much of my success to WE and being ED changed my life in the most profound ways imaginable.

Focus talk by Muna Killingback, WE's second executive director

Lecture: Timothy Patrick McCarthy is an award-winning scholar, teacher, and activist who has taught at Harvard University for more than two decades. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, Dr. McCarthy holds a joint faculty appointments in Harvard’s undergraduate honors program in History and Literature, at the Graduate School of Education, where he is core faculty in both the Equity and Opportunity Foundations Curriculum and the new online Master’s Program in Education Leadership, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government (HKS), where he is Core Faculty and Director of Culture Change & Social Justice Initiatives at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. At the HKS he was the first openly gay faculty member and still teaches the school’s only course on LGBTQ matters, he is faculty affiliate at the Center for Public Leadership. A historian of politics and social movements, he teaches courses on equity and justice, brave communication and leadership, and race, gender, and sexuality.

 

Film on abortion talks:

https://whatisessential.org/the-abortion-talks

Timothy McCarthy:

https://www.malindalo.com/blog/2021/6/15/daughters-of-bilitis

Timothy McCarthy:

https://www.pangyrus.com/politics/may-our-hope-persist-a-love-letter-for-my-niece/

This is a love letter I wrote to and for my niece Malia.

I published it in 2015 but am giving it to her at her 8th grade graduation this spring.

America, June 2018

Dear Malia,

Let me begin with what matters most: I love you.

I don’t know how many times I have written this letter in my mind, and I have no idea when you will read it. It started as soon as you were born. I was the fifth person in our family to hold you. I’d never before met a human that new to the world. You were very small, but you weighed everything. I can’t forget the look on the nurse’s face when she came into that hospital room in Boston and saw you in my arms as you settled into your first night’s sleep. Not everyone can see what is so obvious to us: we are family.

You look very much like your folks. You have your father’s eyes and your mother’s smile, both of which are excellent things, because Mommy and Daddy are Black and beautiful and brilliant, like you. You also have their spirit, their essence, which is at least as important, because the truth is that you were born into a  world that too often measures human value by the surface of things rather than the depths—the skin, not the soul. This is terrible, of course, but it is also treacherous for a child like you, born at the intersection of so many things this country seeks to covet and control, and deny and destroy. We will teach you all this history someday—soon—before this reality becomes too obtrusive and the nation’s relationship to you becomes too abusive. And it most certainly will, given its long criminal record. I hope you will always know that we have tried to love and protect you—fiercely, ferociously—since before you even knew us.

I have known your father since he was even younger than you are now. We met when I taught at his elementary school, when he asked me to be his brother, when Auntie and Nana welcomed me in, when we all first fell in love. Ours is an uncommon story, a really beautiful one: we are a chosen family. There are other family stories that are not mine to tell. Yours is a complex inheritance, but one thing is constant: we are not fancy people. We have had to make our way in this world, too often with undeserved difficulty, against overwhelming odds, but we persist, on our strongest days, like the superheroes you love to read about in books. Let me say this about your father, my brother: he is a very good man, tough and sensitive in equal measure. He is named for his father, a man broken by an unjust war and his own very bad demons; because of these things, you will never know him. But Daddy is still a dreamer, a man of peace who loves hard and refuses to break, as much as this nation conspires to guarantee it. Many thousands before him have gone another way, including some of our childhood friends—mine as well as his—but he has taken a different road, with no guarantees but the ragged, resilient hope that offers a fixed, flickering beacon in the tougher times.

You, on the other hand—you were named for the eldest daughter of Barack Hussein Obama. Yours was a very popular name back then, that historic year when he became the First Black President. That was a really big deal, though it feels like a lifetime ago. When I think of how young you still are, I have difficulty apprehending how much has changed in such a short time. I’m an historian, which means that I tell stories about people from the past as a way to make sense of whether things change over time; put another way, I track this nation’s progress so we can hold it to account. I am afraid that when the stories are told of that time—the moment of your precious birth into this nation—it will be seen not as an acceleration point for justice, as many of us hoped and expected, but as a breaking point when the arc of history got bent backwards, again. I want to be wrong, for the sake of your entire generation, but I feel it in my bones that we’ve been here before. After all, your Mommy and Daddy and Uncles and Aunties—we are all from a different time; and your ancestors—well, they were born into harsher circumstances than most of us have had to endure. We all wish for progress, some of us have felt it and many of us work hard for it, but we must never expect it. I had fallen in love with the fantasy that you would be much older before you figured out that a mediocre white man— much less a madman who hates families like ours—could run the country. But history has a peculiar, stubborn way of being repetitive, which is why I was so relieved, and inspired, when you said to me recently: “He is everything you teach me not to be.” How I wish you could vote.

America intended for you and me to be enemies. You can’t yet fully comprehend this, thank God, but this country was built, in large part, to keep people like us apart. The colors of our skin— yours black, mine white—are falsified fragments of evidence that have long been used as fictional alibis to justify and pardon some of the worst crimes against humanity. You may not remember this, but several Christmases ago you asked Daddy: “why isn’t Uncle Black?” We all made a joke of it at the time—you know how we like to laugh about these things at home—but the deeper meaning was clear: why am I not like you? It’s a good question, impossible for me to answer. But when that older white boy called you that racist slur on that school bus in elementary school, I wanted so badly to change the color of my skin, to be as Black as you and Daddy and Mommy and most everyone else in our family, or to have none of this matter any more. But these, too, are fictional fantasies, because race and racism have always been the realest things about America—the wretched foundation of its original sins, the rotten core of our ongoing inheritances. After all these years, I don’t know which is my bigger fear: that you will someday see me as an adversary, or merely an exception. But my biggest fear is that the people who look an awful lot like me will someday break your spirit—force you to doubt yourself, or worse, convince you to participate in your own undoing—because this would finally break my heart. To prevent that, you must discover your own truth, never let anyone unmoor it, and cling to it as if your life depends on it. Because it does. Please keep this wisdom from the great ancestor James Baldwin close to you: “Take no one’s word for anything, including mine, but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear.” You seem to already know this, somehow, because you asked us this about that white boy: why is he so angry? That really is the essential question.

Whenever I worry about you, and we do, I try to remember all the times you have shown us what it means to be free. When you didn’t bat an eye the first time you realized that CJ and me—your Black Uncle and your white Uncle—have been married to each other almost as long as you’ve been alive. When you came to your birthday party one weekend in camouflage and cornrows and my birthday party another weekend in twists and a pink superhero tee. When you warned me, with a serious smile, that I would need to learn how to twist and braid before you’d ever let me do your hair. When you announced that you want to be a boxer and an astronaut and the President of the United States, and saw nothing unreasonable with any of this. Because there isn’t. When you told the little boys on your basketball team to pass you the ball because the team has a better chance of winning if they do. When you began your training in martial arts because you want to protect yourself and never hurt others. When you changed from the bright colors we suggested to a black blazer of your own choosing before you introduced yourself to the real life superhero John Lewis. When you pay no mind any time someone insists that you “eat like a girl,” or shrug your shoulders any time someone complains that you “act like a boy,” and just carry on whenever someone says you’re either “too sensitive” or “too tough.” When you tell us how much you love Janelle Monae, and we aren’t the least bit surprised. Perhaps all of this stems from the fact that you were born into a family that is Black and interracial and Queer and feminist and so many other perfectly wonderful things. Perhaps it’s because you’re being raised by a vast village of tough women and sensitive men. Perhaps you are just who you are—strong and happy, a new normal beyond the old boundaries—and that, my dear, is just fine. You write your own rules, play your own game, and live (and love) on your own terms, because this, at last, is what it means to be free.

I would be a fool to promise you freedom. Ours is not a world where such promises are usually kept. And in any case, no one can give another person freedom. We must find it for ourselves, and too many people never do. That doesn’t mean you have to search for it alone; history teaches us, many times over, that there’s strength in numbers. And there is. There will be struggles ahead, for sure. This nation will impose its unfair burdens upon you, and disappoint you more times than you will be able to count, but you can’t let any of this break you. Our promise to you, all kids like you, is this: as you find your own freedom and live your own truth, we will continue to love and protect you—fiercely, ferociously, fabulously. We will get up each day, for as long as we are able, and tear down, as best we can, the obstacles in your way so that you can light and lead the way to a different world.

You recently gave me a birthday present: a small bracelet with shiny round beads, a purple tassel, and four black and white dice that spell H-O-P-E. You told me you were giving me hope because I give you hope. The world will always need hope, Malia, because hope is the root and the wellspring of freedom. May we always find it to give. I love you.

Your uncle,

Tim

   

Documentary film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Rp4L4XyUs

Women’s Political Council Flyer for Montgomery Bus Boycott:https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mbbleaf.pdf

Socialist Origins of International Women’s Day: https://daily.jstor.org/the-socialist-origins-of-international-womens-day/

Timothy McCarthy:

https://soundcloud.com/memorial-church/timothy-patrick-mccarthy-oct-31-2022-morning-prayers?in=memorial-church/sets/morning-prayers-at-harvard-4

No Trailer Anymore - Tralier:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGrcsBJQCpPPCPTPzCNxhDwXRXt?projector=1