Betsy Robinson

Forty-four minutes past midnight on February 7, 1951, I came into the world at the now-nonexistent Woman's Hospital, 39 blocks north of where I live in Manhattan.

When I was very young, my mother told me I was a mistake, quickly followed by the explanation that they'd have had me eventually, just not when I made my appearance. Even then I knew that "at another time" would not have been me. But oddly, I was not hurt by this. It was information that is even more important to me now than it was then.

Abortion, which I firmly support, was not an option and even though my sudden presence caused problems ("Good Trouble?"), I'm glad I made it through. And I'm absolutely positive that by the end of her life, my mother, who became my best friend for her last 10 years, felt the same.

Today I am 74. Way older than my father when he exited; six years older than my mother when she lifted off; and way way older than I thought I'd ever be.* And I'm grateful to be here, doing this life, trying my best to finish what I started so many lifetimes ago.

I may fail. As I said, my timing has never been great. But I'll go down acting and meditating … for the well-being and transformation of me, my ancestors, and for all who populate this precious world we all share.

__________________

* Because it is my birthday, I'm giving you a present if you are a person (like I was and sometimes still am) who is afraid of your own thoughts because of the edict that "Thoughts create reality."

If my thoughts created reality, I would be dead.

Thoughts create your experience of reality, but it is thoughts married to actions + fate/luck/karma that create what happens in this land of karma and matter.**

If you merely think and never act, you will have a passive existence. You can be born into wealth and experience life as drudgery. You can meditate your behind off, but not affect the karmic chaos in which we are all, by default, participants.

If you think you are hopeless and unworthy of life, and you eat/drink/drug/etc. yourself to death, you have acted on your thoughts and it is your actions that have proven the validity of your thoughts. This is called "confirmation bias."

If you have lousy thoughts like I had growing up and still do, but you DO NOT ACT on them—e.g., you don't kill yourself but instead live as healthily as you can; you do not seek revenge due to spiraling hurt and rage after somebody does you wrong, but instead you just feel and process those feelings; and if, no matter how ineffective you believe you are, when you see a destructive raging fire, you attempt to extinguish it—you essentially starve into transformation the beliefs behind the thoughts.

What's key is discernment which requires knowing WHAT you think and then choosing to act or not act on it. In fact, the whole business of condemning and being ashamed of our own thoughts lies wholly in the ego.

Lift up! Expand! Send your roots deep down to the core of Mother Earth. BE here. Discernment is only possible from a whole and therefore higher Self. And when the Self identifies an ego problem, then the ego gets embarrassed, and transformation happens. And as you transform, you have the potential for great joy and, eventually, amusement at your own lousy thoughts. So quit being afraid of your thoughts!

_______________

**Many of us have heard stories about enlightened beings manifesting stuff—food for the hungry, etc. By definition, enlightened beings live at One with everything (as opposed to split and in their ego), which means their steady vibration is quite different from that of most people. Their vibration is One with the Creator/the act of Creation/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Hence, their actions are those of the Creator. Hence, manifestation.

Unless you are an enlightened being, to worry about manifesting stuff by merely thinking about it, or to believe you can magically heal the world by doing nothing is, to put it bluntly, the magical thinking of a young ego.

Whatever your tradition is, think of a Great Being whose counsel you believe in. All Great Beings encouraged action.

A central practice of meditation is repetition of a mantra—in my case, the Sanskrit phrase "Om Namah Shivaya" which means "I bow to my higher Self."

A central practice of Trump and his supporters is repetition of lies.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in a live Facebook talk, strongly suggested that those of us who are interested in truth relentlessly repeat that the pardoning of the Jan. 6th criminals (notice, I call them "criminals" rather than the sanitized "insurrectionists") is wrong. She referenced the success of the election result deniers through constant public repetition of the lie that it was not a fair result (notice how I do not repeat their lie, but use the words "fair result"). She said we can learn from them by using the same tactic to relentlessly refute any justification for pardoning criminals who broke into the Capitol, beat, bloodied, and tased police officers, called for the murder of the Vice President and Speaker of the House, and smeared their shit (notice "shit") all over the Capitol rotunda.

She encouraged us to write to lawmakers, write editorials, and do it repeatedly.*

The words we choose to repeat matter!

Why?

Because constant repetition, whether in meditation or in spreading beliefs, causes erosion. In meditation, if I can repeat my mantra for 35 minutes every morning, no matter how many times I go off the rails into mind chatter, there is a gradual erosion of that chatter.

The practice itself—of meditation or phrase repetition—causes erosion of whatever exists already. Practice is repetition.

Therefore, I repeat: WORDS MATTER.

WHAT WE REPEAT MATTERS.

We have to start noticing what we are publicly repeating. If we desire truth, we must choose to phrase things using truth.

___________

* The day after Heather Cox Richardson's talk, because I have no Republican representatives to plague, I sent the following to our newly minted, unanimously confirmed, Secretary of State. Feel free to copy. The address is: https://register.state.gov/contactus/contactusform

Or even better, write an original message to a Republican who represents you.

Dear Secretary Rubio:

Congratulations on your appointment as Secretary of State. I've read your remarks about this and you sound rational. Therefore, I would like to plead to your better angels to:

1. Remember how you got here and mitigate the brutal plans to eliminate immigrants. Yes, they should come here legally, but the point is we are a country of laws and your boss's promises to ignore everything from the Constitutional right of citizenship for people born here to draconian deportations are inhumane and go against everything this country was founded on.

2. Your boss's pardon of January 6th insurrectionists is untenable. Speak up! How can you possibly represent this country diplomatically when criminals are freed and encouraged by the government?

I wish you the best in your new job. Please act as a bulwark against the oligarchy that is threatening to end democracy in our beautiful nation.

Sincerely,

Betsy Robinson

1. Today, Jan. 7th, is the relaunch of a second edition of my funny novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, revised and republished when it went out of print.

The Humorous Story of a One-Woman Train Wreck—Winner of Black Lawrence Press's Big Moose Prize

Meet Zelda McFigg. She is 4-feet 11-inches tall, 237 pounds, and convinced that she could be somebody, if only someone would recognize her inner beauty and star quality. Cousin to Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces) and Homer Simpson, Zelda runs away from home at age 14, and at age 49 ¼ writes this furiously funny memoir to "set the record straight" about her lifetime of indiscretions. (Video: https://youtu.be/baVdveWdtao)

paperback

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQS8DXJ8

and

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-last-will-testament-of-zelda-mcfigg-betsy-robinson/12166654?ean=9798989689248

e-book at Bookshop (readable on phones, iPad, computer--they have an app)

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-last-will-testament-of-zelda-mcfigg-betsy-robinson/e1019eca30ba6166

kindle

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Will-Testament-Zelda-McFigg-ebook/dp/B0DQHR13B8/

kobo

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-last-will-testament-of-zelda-mcfigg-1

Nook

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-will-testament-of-zelda-mcfigg-betsy-robinson/1117038781?ean=9798989689255

2. I am thrilled to have my essay "Whole-Body Reading" in the winter issue #018 of Oh Reader magazine. It's about my visceral experience reading and why it's visceral—why some books work on a body level and some don't. It's a piece I've wanted to write for a long time, including an explanation of what I qualify as a story that "had to be written"—the books that send my body into movement and noise.

You can get the winter issue, #018 at Barnes & Noble stores magazine sections. And hopefully it will be available soon on www.OhReader.com.

Happy New Year!

Maira Kalman is brilliant!

This book reads like stand-up comedy for philosophical masses. The stories are snippets: commentary sometimes, sometimes personal stories. And they're delivered with a stand-up's or a performance artist's timing and pithiness, paired with paintings that demand to be looked at alone in a second paging through.

The still lifes are both paintings and moments within stories that manage, in so few words, to make you feel the insanity-causing dichotomies of love and remorse, love and rage, generosity and greediness, and every other opposite that we all contain. All this crazy turmoil of emotions is life. Or as Kalman writes: "the seething savagery / of our mundane lives." (81, slash  connotes line breaks, as in poetry)

Maira Kalman is part gleeful sprite and part ancient wise woman. A true original who's found her niche—despite my comments about stand-up comedy and performance artists, this work is exactly what it should be: a book of writing and art. Long may Maira Kalman live, write, and paint.

SALE: NOVEMBER 25 – DECEMBER 2ND

This Cyber Week, my books are on sale.

CATS ON A POLE

A novel (with humor and an edge) about curmudgeon Harmony Rogers and healing teacher Joshua Gardner, and their duel of psychic wills.

Reg. $16; Discount ($9+shipping) link:

IngramSpark

THE SPECTATORS

Part love letter to NYC's Upper West Side, part an ode to friendship between a writer and her creations (reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to Paul Simon to terrorists), The Spectators' cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.

Reg. $16; Discount ($9+shipping) link:

IngramSpark

Perhaps my biggest ego quality is arrogance. I know it and it is hard to incinerate. I approached this morning's meditation feeling some despair. I asked for help—from a Siddha guru in spirit and the one who is presently alive.

It felt good to ask for help from what for me is a "higher power." (Side note: I just finished a thrilling thriller called Assassinations Anonymous by Rob Hart about a killer who is attending a 12-step program to stop killing. It is an ingenious way of dramatizing what it takes to change, and in 12-step programs, that requires requesting help from a higher power which can be anything you feel is bigger than you are. For me, that is my gurus.)

I felt their presence, but it wasn't helping much. Still my arrogance was spinning. Then Gordon Parks, the late photojournalist who I wrote about last February, came in in the form of a great light that pierced my heart so deeply I cried.

I felt small and contracted after that. When I tried to straighten, I felt nausea in my stomach. I guess I have to fully experience my arrogance as a process of letting it go.

Arrogance is a very different thing from determination. Gordon Parks lived his life with enormous determination but zero arrogance.

What a wonderful journal of thoughts and observations by Amy Tan, who also is a fabulous illustrator. The Backyard Bird Chronicles is beautifully written and published (thick paper, suitable for color plates) and $35, which is cheap for a book with this kind of art. (I read a library copy.)

Finally I get this birder thing. Amy Tan chronicles not only the "bird community" in her lush backyard, but her own mind chatter—and she is self-revealing in that way that I'm guessing most people will relate to: all of our judgments and worries, etc. The entries range from informative to funny to sad and even heart-breaking (it is a rough world in the wild, even in the well-tended world of backyard birdfeeders) to inventive (a wonderful "live commentary" of "The Windowsill Wars" for bird food). And I so admire her care for all living creatures—from the birds to the live mealworms she feeds them. She roots for life but has the ability or tolerance to watch death.

I live in NYC, right off Central Park, and for most of my decades here I had dogs (my last girl died a couple of years ago), so I was well acquainted with the human "bird community" in Central Park's woodland area, The Ramble. [If this sounds familiar, it is because the well-publicized horrific racist incident with one of the long-time birders, Christian Cooper, was in the north end of the area.] Historically, the birders are not fond of the dog people who chronically break the leash laws in the Ramble. And the dog people, who are there year round no matter the weather, are not that fond of the birders who tend to travel in massive aggressive herds, moving like a seasonal invasive species oblivious to anything or anyone on the ground who is not a bird. There are obnoxious birder guides who show off by blasting their bird calls through the serenity to impress the people who've paid to go on their tours. In short, there is obnoxious behavior on both sides of this birder/dog people history. But after reading Amy Tan's book, I finally get it: the birds are just like us—complicated, scrappy, territorial, with bullies and submissives, predators and prey. Maybe I'll even take my binoculars there myself now that I'm solo. (N.B. The solo birders are no problem—some became my friends over the years. Christian Cooper was not a herd-group birder, and the woman who falsely accused him was a newbie dog person—Ramble etiquette is, when caught off leash, to say "Sorry" and leash up—no big deal.)

At the beginning of the book, Amy Tan writes about how she was taught to "become the bird" by her drawing instructor, and she does—struggling to understand how they recognize individuals and why they do what they do and if they can change their habits . . . which brings me to:

Some thoughts on energetic and telepathic communication that Amy Tan never mentions:

In my years of watching birders in the Ramble so obsessed with peering through binoculars and camera lenses, I often had a fantasy. Or an idea for a cartoon: what if somehow what they saw were birds staring back at them through tiny binoculars?

The thought amused me and still does, and, often while reading this book, I found myself envisioning this.

Amy Tan is mostly focused on common human senses of sight and sound in her musing about why birds react the way they do—even wondering why they are fine when she's looking at them naked-eyed through her glass doors, but the instant she picks up her binoculars, they take off. She posits that it is because she looks scary.

This brings me to a New York City anecdote:

 Read More 

I recently had a deep conversation with a friend I've known since the first grade. He is one of the nicest humans I've ever known. To me, he radiates goodness. But he would dispute that because he isn't made with the same energetic antennae that make me ME. He'd just read my novel Cats on a Pole and he was deeply shaken by not only the turns of plot but by the protagonist's sensibilities: she smells things he doesn't smell and feels energetic sensations he doesn't think exist, so in his mind, she was possibly mentally ill.

Because he's such a good friend, I willingly went into the weeds of this with him. I explained about hyperosmia (a smell sensitivity; I just recently learned the name for it from a NY Times article that describes it as a gift—which it is—rather than the "disorder" categorized by medical sites) and I told him I feel energetic sensations everywhere. I told him how this is commonplace and in fact valued in indigenous cultures where people who are particularly gifted are named as shamans or medicine people. (Unlike in our Western culture, this is not something one declares about themselves.) I told him this stuff is ancient and there is tons of literature about it.

All he really wanted was assurance that neither I nor my protagonist is insane. He seemed satisfied at the end of our book-length series of emails.

And I learned from him that what I've written may scare some people and I hope I understand better why and how to respond in a helpful way.

Today, September 1st, is a day I glory in being hyperosmic. I smell fall: a heavenly mix of both growth and decay in Central Park, one block away. My apartment is filled with godly perfume, and I wish my friend could experience this.

I wish we all would be curious, rather than judgmental, about one another's differences. Altogether, we are the most incredible garden we could never imagine.

Yesterday a friend told me that people feel pressured to "take a side" in war. Maybe in life too. The side I pick is FREEDOM and EQUALITY.

I pick that in this country. I pick that in the world. It's not that complicated.

If freedom and equality are my side, then everybody's pain matters. I can wish for wars to end and everybody to have equal rights. I can acknowledge the pain of people who have been attacked, killed, butchered, raped, burned, and abducted while enjoying a music festival, and I can acknowledge the pain of innocents who are being slaughtered by an army directed by a tyrant who cares only about maintaining power. I can call for the release of innocents on both sides from horrific actions.

If freedom and equality are my side, I can acknowledge the history of my own country and also live here, knowing that I have a right to my home, even though others were butchered in a genocide that gave me the land on which my home stands. I can choose personal actions to see that everybody's pain is acknowledged and everybody matters and that past wrongs are not perpetuated or repeated.

If freedom and equality are my side, I can hold painful contradictions and refuse to give in to catch phrases that condemn everybody of one race or ethnicity.

It's not that hard.

Yippeeee! On sale today: Cats on a Pole, a novel (with humor and an edge) about curmudgeon Harmony Rogers and healing teacher Joshua Gardner, and their duel of psychic wills. It's available wherever you like to buy books and e-books. But here is a link to buy it at a discount directly from Ingram, the distributor. (Cheaper for you, more royalty for me, no Amazonians chewing up the majority of the price, and only one shipment—smallest possible carbon footprint): $10+shipping for paperback for sale to addresses in U.S.A. only:

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?KD7AtCWE6EmYWL6RGzaLBcFDddACvPC4RxwU9SPSj5O

To see more--videos, etc.--go to the Cats page on this website.

Our bodies are maps—not of regions but of history. And not only of our own history, but of the history of our ancestors. So when I learn history, I'm learning and feeling it in my body.

I'm reading The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, the personal research and story of author Rebecca Clarren about her Jewish ancestors and how they came to settle in South Dakota—specifically land that had been stolen from the Lakota, and to this day, still legally belongs to them (the Black Hills), because they refused a monetary settlement from the U.S. government. This is a region where Trump held a rally, and his supporters yelled at the Lakota protestors to "go back to where they came from"—ignorant to the truth that they were standing on Lakota land.

To me, this is beyond the pale.

Did you ever wonder where the expression "beyond the pale" comes from?

The Pale was a region—or more accurately, a reservation or ghetto that Jews were relegated to by the Russian empire.

In the bad old days of a dysfunctional relationship with my late mother, she often yelled at me, "This is beyond the pale!"—her judgment about everything from the way I thought and the things I didn't care about to the way I was in the world. This changed after I banned her from calling me and refused to see her, except when I initiated it. The ban lasted for a year, during which she got some behavioral therapy that taught her not to criticize me; she didn't need to understand why. So she practiced it, and we became best friends.

But just now, reading about the history carried in her and my own DNA—a history relegating us and life itself to a narrow body of land called the Pale, a region outside of which you would be killed, and even within it, you were subject to chronic terrorist attacks, called Pogroms, from the Cossacks when they would butcher, rape, and burn everybody in a town, I understand the fear that must have constricted my mother and that was behind judgments whose deepest wish was to keep me alive.

No wonder that as I read this book, my body feels battered and exhausted.

In summer 2023, Anderson Cooper devoted a whole hour on his show The Whole Story to The Gilgo Beach Killer, about an accused serial killer, an architect who was a family man employed in New York City and living on Long Island, where he allegedly deposited his victims on a beach. In the process of reporting this story, CNN reporters mentioned that other serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy also were family men. A few weeks later, authorities arrested a violent serial kidnapper and sex assaulter who lived an apparently ordinary life with his wife and two kids.

And yet, this "dangerous loner" trope survives.

In my essay "Walking Alone: Dangerous or Heroic" in Prairie Fire magazine, I point out that it is just as likely to be a well-adjusted, non-homicidal loner as it is to be a happy anybody else.

And yet, as a culture, we cling to our sweeping stereotypes—notions that take the place of discerning thought and the subsequent processing of information that may be different from what we believe, and therefore may elicit an inner struggle and change.

Although I'm an introvert, I have lots of extrovert friends. They are in constant social interaction and thrive in the company of others. Occasionally one will confide that they feel as if they are neglecting "who they really are"—ignoring their inner lives. That's funny because it's obvious "who they really are" is people who love people—according to song lyrics, the luckiest people. Likewise, I think people like me—contemplatives who are excited by the inner journey while examining the outer one; people who thrive by having insights, connecting metaphor to meaning, and creating something that has not existed before—live who we really are with a different emphasis.

Author Amina Cain has brilliantly turned this quiet journey, as well as a woman's need for it—a need as strong as any mammal's for oxygen—into a novella called Indelicacy (‎Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Reading it made my brain pop with identification, associations, appreciation, and flat-out glee. In the novel, a woman who works as a museum cleaner, craving freedom to deeply enter and write about the world of the paintings that surround her, finally achieves this. She makes mistakes along the way, gets involved with a man she doesn't want to marry but marries him anyway, and does some hilarious things—hilarious because they're honest and yet incongruent to people who live primarily in the "outer world"—and eventually she is happy. In fact she sometimes experiences being one with everything when she writes about paintings. In a quick search through the book for the word "open," there are many salient quotes about the power of looking within. One example:

All the windows in the restaurant were open, and as I wrote, the waves were crashing right outside them. It began to help me. I began to feel I was in a trance of writing. All around me were plump insects. They too were very alive, beating their wings, landing.

You can read this 158-page entertainment in one sitting and I did (twice)—in a state of near-ecstasy. Then I knocked out a Goodreads review, posted it, and proceeded to get really sad reading other readers' reviews calling the book "insubstantial," "cold," or, even more distressing, this comment by one who loved it: "I mourn for her [the protagonist] to break out of her self-imposed limitations, but she doesn't want to." All of this exposed a social bias I don't understand: Why do people who love connection assume that this is the only real life, the only proper way to be, and that "self-imposed limitations" in favor of time and freedom to travel one's unique inner journey is something to mourn? What limitation is there in feeling one with all that is? Were the great visionaries and mystics who changed our understanding of life and love tragic figures? Or is it that one must declare oneself by some avocation to justify this excitement of discovery? One reader who identified herself as a writer (an introvert?) commented, "This book scared me, honestly. I didn't want to be her, even if I liked her for the most part." I posit that this woman's fear is not of Cain's protagonist but of a part of herself she wants to avoid. Why? Read More 

James is the 22nd book I read by Percival Everett. When I was at book #18, I met the man when he spoke on a panel here in NYC where I live. I'd brought my copy of Erasure for him to sign. I'd chosen carefully—the newest looking of his books on my shelf. I wanted to present him with something pristine.

After the panel discussion, I crept out of the audience, around the circle of panelists' chairs, and, like a teenager with crush, smelling my own sweat, I said, "Mr. Everett, would you sign my book?" He couldn't have been more affable. And as he wrote, I blurted, "I've read 18 of your books." "Oh, so you're the one!" he joked, a line I sensed he used a lot to those of us in what was then a small cult of fans. Undeterred, I further blurted, "When I first discovered your work, I felt like my head exploded."

He smiled kindly and handed me my paperback, fully aware that I was as in love with him as a reader can be from only an author's books, and I didn't know what to do with the feelings.

Every one of Everett's books is different, but having read so many, I feel like all of them have led to James. James is far more accessible than a lot of his other books, and it is perfectly timed to convey his essence to the huge audience he has "suddenly" evoked due to a movie based on Erasure that he had virtually nothing to do with. (I have not seen it because I like the edge in his books, his anger, his uncompromising intellect—even when it is over my head—and his refusal to mitigate any of it with anything that would make his work more accessible, and I've heard that the movie softens all that.)

What is Percival Everett's essence?

For me, it is the thing that made my head explode on first contact: he is absolutely himself. He refuses to fit into any box, under any label designed by someone else. There is loneliness to this kind of a life. A loneliness that can become a choice because at some point you know that nobody—or very few people—will see you as you know yourself to be. (He writes about this in not only Erasure, but in I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Dr. No, God's Country, and many of his short stories.)

In James, he has parsed this out for the masses, using Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn as a launch pad.

Why this book now?

Because it's legal—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written in 1884, is now in the public domain. But more importantly, perhaps because the masses are now open to hearing that Black people are and always have been individual people with individual thoughts, ideas, and peculiarities just like all human beings.

This sounds obvious, but in our country it is anything but—proved by the stereotypes that make Black men "dangerous" and all the other notions that weave through our culture.

As in many of Everett's books, James disarms us with humor. There are the fools, the clowns whose cruelty is matched only by their idiocy. As in one of my favorite of Everett's short stories, "The Appropriation of Cultures" (in his anthology Damned If I Do), there are ingenious absurd yet logically-obvious-except-nobody-has-thought- of-them plot twists. There is the unpredictable picaresque journey (I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Dr. No). And there is also an undertow of "yearning to be seen and known." (I wrote about how subversive this is in the book-within-the-book of Erasure; I have no idea if Everett would agree with my take, but it's what I felt.) This is what gives Everett's books a subliminal heartbeat . . . and it hurts—in a good way.

New in this book, although there are aspects of it in other books, is the utter exhaustion of the code-switching Black people have learned by necessity by the time they have social interactions. And, here, that is married to the exhaustion of living in a slave culture of "duplicity, dishonesty or perfidy (195)" where you can't tell who is telling the truth or who might act like an ally but turn out to be the worst kind of enemy. But because of Everett's genius, reading James is never exhausting and always entertaining.

And for me, the newest aspect of this book is a full pulsing catharsis—set up by the ending of his remarkable God's Country in 1994, delivered in an almost mythical form in 2021 in Trees, and finally, in James, experienced through the heart of a man who loves his wife and young daughter, who loves the son who didn't know him as a father, and loves life enough to fight for it.

Oh, my heart!

Last night was the second time in my life that I've gone to a synagogue. I'm an Ashkenazi Jew ethnically, but was not raised in any religion. I liked the music and the welcoming atmosphere, but the language was foreign and any references to "God saving us" don't resonate with me.

Nevertheless!

I'm really glad I went because following the service, there was an enlightening discussion with two representatives of an organization called Standing Together: an Israeli Jew named Alon-Lee Green and an Israeli Christian Palestinian named Sally Abed. For me, the most compelling stuff was this:

After a long discussion of the actions of Israel's right-wing government that has not only indiscriminately bombed Gaza and had a dual system of rights—civil law for Jews; military law with no due process for Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, Sally eschewed "the middle way."

When there is an oppressive authority, one must call it out and reject its binary message: "us or them." The middle way is not an option.

Suddenly lightbulbs popped on in my head.

Imagine it like any container. A jar without a top, for instance: The opening to freedom and joining the atmosphere is right there, but a very tiny portion of life who is dedicated only to holding power, blocks the opening. Because they are proportionally so small compared to who is being contained, they have to use pressure to cover the space, and they press down.

As with any contained matter, eventually the pressure makes it explode, fracture. The more this happens, the more the small group exerting the pressure must press to try to contain us.

When we fracture into binary groups, "us and thems," the oppressive force has an easier time staying on top because it has created chaos among us and there is no cohesiveness pushing back.

The oppressive force does not care about any of the groups. Their sole interest is their position, and the fractured "us and them" groups feed them.

The only way to change this whole dynamic is to wake up to the fact that it is happening. Then refuse to take part in it. Even if you are looking into the eyes of somebody who is rejecting you because you do not agree with them—the eyes of somebody who believes you are their enemy—look with soft eyes, insisting on the truth of our oneness, and at least then there is the chance that they will see and wake up to their own humanity and desire for peace and freedom.

The morning following the October 7th Hamas attack on Jews, Standing Together organized a meeting at the only space that would accept them—a mosque. Sally was supposed to make a speech. Instead, she got up on the stage and broke into tears. As she wept, so did everybody else. Everybody in the mosque cried and cried, feeling their common grief: Jews and Palestinians. And for a brief time, there was oneness.

Let's feel our grief together. And our joy. We all have it. That is the only way to dethrone the bogus "leaders" who choose killing and bullying.

Wake up!