One new word opens a window where there was a wall. One old word is a sturdy boat, carrying me across a river I didn’t know I needed to cross.

When I’m stalled by not knowing my place in creating the change I seek, returning to practice lifts my spirits. Then - a small miracle - I often find I can do more.

Retreat to consensus and even its fierce defense is understandable. Still, I can’t see a way out of the requirement of careful thought in response to every new understanding, every turn of the moment, every gift of insight from an emerging future. . . . Thought is a threat to certainty, yes, but thoughtlessness is the enemy of liberation.

The long arc of justice requires love. It requires appreciating each other, and saying that. It requires persistence

The word “us” in a simple sentence speaks volumes about choices to extend care or to withhold it. Choosing to extend or withhold care is arguably a political decision

For many who I know, read and listen to, the past year especially has been a time of critical transition, an opportunity to reckon and change in ways long overdue. With that awareness comes a hunger for information and understanding. It’s an urgent hunger, with often anxious questions, because the stakes are so high and there is so much to learn.

Thinking can mitigate the risks of action, and action the risks of thinking. Besides, mistaking limitations for uselessness is never a good idea.Despite their limitations, change requires action and thinking. Thinking discerns a way forward, action puts feet on the path.

Hope has far more gravitas than mere optimism. Hope is a necessary strategy in the slow work of carving out equity and driving down violence, precious enough in the work of change as to warrant our protection.

When we limit our vision to moments in lives out of context, we risk seeing individuals as exceptional. “Exceptional” seems like a compliment until one considers the question, exceptional relative to what?

When we limit our vision to moments in lives out of context, we risk seeing individuals as exceptional. “Exceptional” seems like a compliment until one considers the question, exceptional relative to what?

What matters is that we do not let moments like this pass without thinking. Hard. What matters is that we question what happened and notice what didn’t, make connections to histories, between movements. If we’re surprised, we can ask if there was anything we missed, and why. If we’re not surprised, we must, I think, brush away cynicism, which is the enemy of action. In moments like this we need to figure out what we need to figure out, then act on it any way we can.

The turn of the year is a few days away. This year, “good riddance” is everywhere. I think that may be a mistake.

Punishment is not working. It is not keeping black and brown people safe from police shootings. It is not keeping first responders safe from violence. It is not supporting loving families, housing and food for children. It is not keeping disabled and trans people safe from beatings and worse. It has not made the lives of victims of violence more whole.

…there is another kind of witness to consider, the kind of witness that works against forgetting, that requires us to scrutinize our lives for their impact in the world. This other kind of witness is defined by its staying power and its consequence. This kind of witness is weighted by strong imagery, so it shows up in stories and poems, in dance, music and visual art.

Attacking the fearful strengthens fear. Strengthening fear easily hardens into hate, hate too often extends to violence, and reinforces systemic injustice. So it stands to reason that attacking fearful people is antithetical to liberatory change. As a friend of mine, a long-time labor organizer, said to me once, it’s just bad strategy.

Too often in history people in power, no matter their politics, have demanded allegiance to answers built on ideas they believe in as much as I believed in those stones. They might be right, and their answers may deliver what they promise, but they are just as likely wrong, or they were right at the time but like the ground under my woodshed, things changed. Still, many have died simply for questioning somebody’s idea of a solid stone.

We ignore others’ complexity at our peril because complexity reflects our full humanity, and no one who claims the cause of liberatory change can with integrity diminish that light in anyone.

Race is not real in any biological sense. Racism is very real, dangerously so. In order to be in loving family with each other, multi-racial families must live in that complexity, seeing each other as fully human, transcending race, while at the same time acknowledging racism and our very different experiences of it.

Welcome to the ILI community. With this first newsletter, we're "going public" with our work and our mission to create opportunities for change-makers to meet at the intersections of thinking, action, and connection to experiment and learn together and generate strategies for a more just future. We're glad you're here to think with us.

Resistance to the changes called for in these weeks is already fierce, on the street, on social media, in the highest levels of national leadership. If this is simply a panic brought on by a killing that was finally unspeakable enough for white people who had remained on the sidelines before, will it stand up to a well-organized, determined and powerful resistance?