what is the shape of our nation's current moment?
big table press, grief garlic, spring break and the engaged dharma book club
This month’s SLOWLY, SLOWLY newsletter is abundant in length, meaning: the message will likely be clipped in your inbox! Click “View entire message” at the bottom of this e-mail to open the newsletter in a new window and read it in its entirety.
I recorded the audio of this month’s SLOWLY, SLOWLY. The audio includes some fun outtakes and sidenotes. 🤓 You can listen below.
This month, I am sharing writing for Big Table Press This Year: 2025 project, which documents a day in the life of one participant throughout the year. In December, I was assigned March 15 as my day to document, and then somewhat fortuitously, this ended up being the BIPOC Day of Mindfulness hosted by Brooklyn Zen Center.
You can read about my day below and at Big Table Press. You can subscribe to the This Year: 2025 newsletter here.
xo Jessica
March 15, 2025
At the Brooklyn Zen Center,
is leading a session of interplay during the BIPOC Day of Mindfulness. We are skipping, walking, and stomping ourselves across the sage green wood floors of the Boundless Mind Temple. We are shouting, whooping, and whispering. Humming and attuning. This is interplay, a somatic practice of speaking with the body. Their website describes interplay as unlocking the wisdom of the body. During sessions, facilitators provide prompts, inviting participants to use their bodies to swing, hang, thrust, or be still. From there, the facilitator might open up the group to more expressive forms of using the body to communicate a feeling or idea. Integral to the experience is releasing the act of rehearsal and trying to let the body respond in the moment. As the name suggests, it is play - evoking the latent creativity and silliness that exists within us.What is the shape of our nation's current moment?
About mid-way through the interplay session, this is the prompt Kaira Jewel offered us. I got close to the floor, positioning my body with my knees on the ground, my upper thighs pushed back flat against my shins, my upper body curved forward, arms extended out before me, palms flat on the floor. My position resembles child’s pose, though my forehead is not on the floor. Instead, I keep my head parallel to the ground, my gaze cast a couple of inches in front of me.
In these final days of Winter 2025, this is where I find myself. I am braced and protective. Planted and alert. I could just as easily spring forward into action as I could lie my head down and release. This bodily shape reminds me of Kuan Yin Bodhisattva, who is depicted with one leg touching the floor, the other leg propped up, with her arm lying lackadaisically on her knee. She is listening to the cries of the world, alert and at ease, ready to respond.
What is the shape of our nation's current moment?
I can’t quite say that I am at ease. I woke up right at sunrise, needing to leave my house at 7:42 am to get to the temple in time to help with set-up and prepare to serve as Ino1 for the day. Getting out of the shower and lathering my skin with lotion, I listened to On The Media, where Brooke Gladstone was speaking with Corey Robins, a Brooklyn College political science professor, on the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student who helped lead Columbia University Student encampment protests against the war in Gaza last spring. The government has yet to provide information as to why Mahmoud Khalil has been detained*.
Robins draws parallels between what is happening now and the Red Scare of the forties and fifties, when Senator Joe McCarthy launched a campaign to root out communism in the U.S. He describes the large scope of the Red Scare: from suppressing a range of thinking (communist, left-wing, and liberal), to the weaponization of immigration proceedings (deportations and denaturalization of people who had become American citizens, for reasons of expressing or associating with certain political beliefs or movements), and the far reach of Hollywood (Humphrey Bogart recanting the messages in Casablanca).
The tactics of the Red Scare were a part of a broader strategy of destabilization. If those things we thought were fixed, like our citizenship or our freedom of speech, are in fact not, we begin to question what views are safe to express. Robins also argues that the cruelty of right-wing policy is not the point, as has been stated by Adam Serwer. Robins says:
“Let's take the case of support for Israel. The Trump administration has no interest in being cruel about that issue. They're trying to produce a certain kind of belief system by silencing those who would disagree with them. This was very true during the McCarthy era. McCarthy did seem like a cruel individual, but that's not why the federal government, the state's governments, the whole society sought to eliminate all of these different beliefs about civil rights, democracy and so forth. They wanted to produce a country that was much, much more conservative and didn't subscribe to those beliefs. Cruelty is not the point. The goal is to silence anybody who has a different thought. That's the point.”
We are being taught to fear using our words. Doubt reverberates through the body, and the voice trembles. Maybe we speak in a whimper, but perhaps, our voices waver into silence.
What is the shape of our nation's current moment?
In the last months, I’ve oscillated between numbness and fear, numbness and outrage, numbness and constriction, my body letting in emotion as it is able to, I suppose. Numbness is a type of silence. But this Saturday early morning, listening to Trump conflate being pro-Palestinian with being a terrorist, I can feel the flicker of a white, hot rage pushing against my numbness. It pushes against the constriction, the part of me that keeps things on lock in order to get through the day without becoming unmoored or falling into collapse.
Another prompt during interplay: Kaira Jewel asks us to thrust our energy against a metaphorical wall and to emit whatever sound we need to as we do this motion. She gives us 5 seconds. I’m not looking around the room as I do this but I can speak to what I did: letting out as rageful of a scream as I could, I pound my fists and upper body against the air. I, and we, keep at this for five seconds, and then ten seconds, and then 15 seconds. Kaira Jewel says: “It seems like we needed more than 5 seconds with that one.”
Indeed.
Later, we have tea and cookies. On the walk to the train, I spot snowdrops in bloom. Spring’s awakening promises the return of an aliveness that has lain dormant for some months. May it find us with a renewed energy to use our words, to resist even the smallest of silences, and, like Kuan Yin, to be ready to respond to the cries of the world.
*Mahmoud Khalil has issued his first public statement since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abducted him from his home on March 8, 2025. You can read it here.
Thank you to Big Table Press for the invitation to contribute this reflection!
GRIEF GARLIC + STARTING SEEDS
Last fall at the garden, when everything felt like it was falling apart and Audrey was swiftly dying, my friend Abby handed me a bag of garlic bulbs and said “I feel like you need to plant these.” She was right. At the time, I felt in shock. Having just returned from an unscheduled visit to Kenya for my aunt’s funeral, working in Democratic politics for the past four years and having that work Very Decisively Rejected with Trump’s reelection, and taking Audrey in for what I thought would be a simple vet visit and learning she was dying - it was all * how do you say * too much, too fast, too soon.
So, as activity buzzed around me (if memory serves, we were hosting a volunteer appreciation day), I concentrated on placing individual garlic cloves into the soil of this garden bed, hoping to transmute some of the pain I was feeling into the act of planting.
Planting is an act of hope that, given the right conditions, the seeds we place into the soil will be wholesome, germinate, and sprout, nurturing us in the cycle of dependent origination.2
A couple of weeks ago, I was taking a solo stroll through the garden and noticed the garlic was starting to sprout. At this, I marvel. That I can offer my suffering to the Earth and that it can hold and receive it, and offer new growth, is no small thing. Gardens really are the site for radical transformation.
With this fresh reminder of planting wholesome seeds, I am trying to get around to starting seeds for the next season in the garden. It is very easy to get bogged down in the administrative aspects of stewarding our little plot of land and I am trying to remember to balance that service with actually putting my hands in soil. I’m particularly excited about starting yarrow, with the hope to be able to make a tincture this summer.3
SPRING BREAK
Earlier this month I took a week off of Work Work, which I (ironically) filled with Personal Work (like submitting a fellowship application, getting my trench coat tailored, etc). But I also did pleasure activities like printing at the RisoLAB, getting lunch with Dom in Ridgewood, spotting crocuses in Fulton Park, grabbing fabric swatches, eating cake, starting milkweed seeds4, attending the BIPOC Day of Mindfulness at Brooklyn Zen Center, hanging at game night with garden friends, hosting the Brooklyn BIPOC Sangha at my home, and my #1 Pleasure Activity, visiting bookstores (including what I think is now one of my favorite NYC bookstores: High Valley!).
ENGAGED DHARMA BOOK CLUB
Last Saturday, we held our first volunteer orientation of the season at the garden. Seeing so many people show up with eager energy to help support this little parcel of land was an important reminder to me that community green spaces help to grow our souls.
“Growing the soul” is kind of the thesis of The Next American Revolution by Grace Lee Boggs, a book written in the context of the War on Iraq and the post-Bush administration, early optimism of the Obama administration. In the book Grace Lee Boggs analyzes the illusion of unceasing technological innovations and economic growth, the difference between political theory and political praxis (Grace Lee Boggs got a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1940 and was a contemporary of C.L.R. James but rejected the academic life for movement activism), and the spiritual impact of hyper-individualism. It is painfully relevant to our present day. Grace Lee Boggs writes:
“These are the times that try our souls. Each of us needs to undergo a tremendous philosophical and spiritual transformation. Each of us needs to be awakened to a personal and compassionate recognition of the inseparable interconnection between our minds, hearts, and bodies: between our physical and psychical well-being: and between our selves and all the other selves in our country and in the world.”
The Next American Revolution by Grace Lee Boggs
If you’re unfamiliar with Grace Lee Boggs and her organizing work in Detroit, or if you’re down with GLB and want to geek out on her work, I invite you to join me and for the Engaged Dharma Book this Sunday, March 30 from 3 - 5 pm ET on Zoom.
*You don’t need to have read the book to roll up!* I’ll be sending out a Zoom link to all of my paid subscribers. If you’d like to join this program, consider becoming a paid subscriber! However, no one will be turned away for lack of funds, so hit me up if a subscription is cost-prohibitive but you’d still like to join.
FITS AND BITS
I put on this outfit and my inner child felt good. I ordered this bonnet in January and it finally arrived from Latvia earlier this month! Trying to get a lot of wear from it before it gets too warm.
My seasonal playlist is rarely ready at the start of the season, but Surprise! Here it is!5 Happy Spring! 🌱
Work with me.
You can find me five days a week at Arena and often at 462 Halsey Community Farm.
🌞
In Zen, this is the zendo (meditation hall) manager.
I’ve been saying I am going to make a tincture for two garden seasons now and this year, I will do it (🤞🏾). Yarrow and Lemon Balm!
Cold-Stratification BB!
There is a transition in here that I am particularly proud of. If you listen, please let me know which one you think it is.
This is one epic post, Jessica! I’m up in the middle of the night, peeking at my phone, and knowing I have to save this one to dive into later on on my laptop. So much goodness in here, thank you.
I know that place!