Dear Angeli,

I admit that when I think about Palestine, Venezuela, and most recently, Iran, my immediate feeling is one of avoidance and dissociation. It is a measure of coping, as you said, that shouldn’t be necessary but is.

I’m reminded by a Palestinian refugee I met online, B, who I’ve been sending financial aid to. He has escaped to Egypt, but he is still not completely safe, struggling to afford rent and food without a job and without knowing anyone in his new home. I felt most anguished talking to him; it is unspeakably difficult to have no family, to ache for a homeland you might never see again.

I suppose my answer to your question is this: I place one foot in front of the other by engaging with a few people at a time, people who I know I can help. I invest my care in them. I asked B about his family, and he asked me where I’m from; this human exchange is healing, I imagine for both of us, in a way that sending money over PayPal doesn’t quite achieve.

To engage in the practice that asks of us what we owe to each other is maybe the highest form of spirituality. I admire that in you, that you do this even when you’re struggling. But Angeli, I hope you know that you don’t owe anyone your life. Your life is yours alone. To feel that life is out of one’s control leads to thinking about not living. To feel this lack of control persistently over years is a unique form of trauma, a phenomenologically heavy burden.

Relating this to your yearning for a creative life, writing is a form of regaining control over our lives through narrative. With each word, we rebuild our numerous pains into a kind of sanctuary for ourselves and others.

I’ve been devoting my time to further self-study around trauma psychology. In reading books about fragmentation of the self and how to piece these fragments together into a whole, I’ve come to a greater appreciation of this truth that I’ve felt intuitively before: Narrative, making sense of a traumatic experience through words, moves that pain from the emotional center of our brains to the cognitive center and gives us permission to release the pain trapped in our bodies. We can become aware of our pain in a way that’s not abstract but felt. We realize we have the freedom to let it go.

Writing is crucial medicine. It’s certainly not a straightforward or painless process, but it’s why we devote ourselves to the craft: we find deeper truths through narrative that free us from deeper pains each time. So, I hope through the busyness of your Master’s degree that you find the time and space to write. It’s one of your medicines, and it’s medicine for others too (just as your book Unbecoming was for me).

About books—I’ve sent my poetry manuscript to another publisher this month, and I feel sort of like how a mountaineer feels after reaching the summit and admiring the vista but feeling the immense need to take a shit. I’ve created something I’m proud of—something that should be sent galloping into the world—but I need to wait months, maybe even a year, before it can be published. And I don’t even know if it will be read. I find this part of the writing process tedious, underwhelming, insufferable. I am trying to be patient with it, but the longer I wait, the more I wonder if it’s even good.

I have a lot to learn and untangle about my need to feel seen in my writing. Did you struggle with this in the process of publishing your book? How have you come to be satisfied with your work as a kind of living thing that’s no longer in your control? I can’t wait to hear from you again.

Love always,

Maria

written March 7th, 2026.

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Dear Maria,

I understand what you mean when you say you place one foot in front of another by investing your care in people you can help. In the past few months, I’ve also been talking to A, a Palestinian still living among the devastation in Gaza. She runs a small and mobile primary school in Gaza, seeking to teach children the basics of literary and numeracy and in doing so prepare them for a better future than the present deprivation they live in. I wish, always, that I could do more for them. I hope, with my entire being, that your friend B is alright, that he will find a life of safety and dignity in Egypt. These past two years of genocide, I have wished for nothing else but the safety and liberation of our fellow sisters and brothers in Palestine, in Sudan, in Venezuela, in Iran. I wish we ourselves could bend the moral arc of this universe towards justice, but I take comfort in the fact that we are not alone in our anger and grief; we are not alone in this protracted struggle for a better world.

Regarding what you said, I do feel quite keenly that I owe my life to things and people outside of myself. I think, on one hand, that to contemplate what we owe each other is a necessary practice in a world absorbed by delusions of independence and isolation. On the other, you are quite right that to feel as if your life is outside of your control is a slippery slope to not wanting to live at all. I suppose there must be some middle ground to this, some kind of balance where we can acknowledge the ties that bind us to each other while allowing ourselves to steer our own ship, but I can’t quite find it. I feel a keen sense of indebtedness to others. Sometimes, I feel like my life is not my own to live.

I find your foray into trauma psychology and the power of narrative to be quite a fascinating journey. From past experience, I find that what you say is true, that the process of articulating an experience moves us from the emotional realm to the cognitive one, and in doing so allows us to release what is tangled in and fraught with emotion. Writing is a kind of therapy, and I must admit I prefer framing it as a process of transforming the self, of allowing ourselves to be changed through articulating that which grieves us. We can let it go, as you say. We can let go of the pain.

I hope you too never stop writing, Maria. Your writing is a gift to me, as it is to others. I am incredibly proud of you for completing and sending your poetry manuscript to publishers, and I have to agree that this is one of the more underwhelming parts of writing: that long, protracted stretch between submission and acceptance, between completing a manuscript and looking for its place in the world. I hope for patience for you, as I always believe that what is meant for us will find us, and I hope you know I believe fully in your manuscript, in its sense of wonder and curiosity, and I have no doubt it will find its place in the world. I believe this enough for the both of us.

I admit that when it came to publishing my book, I was not so nervous about its reception, or how people would view me afterwards. I don’t mean this to say I was confident it would be received positively. I keenly remember the simple, joyous excitement of writing—of wrestling with words and narrative—and that childlike wonder sustained me throughout the entire journey of writing and editing. At the precipice of publication, I found I had no choice but to make my peace with it; I had to let it go, as one would let go of a child that is grown, and in many ways the book doesn’t feel like my own anymore. I mean that in the best way: the book simply exists as it exists. It is read how it is read. Whatever journey it is on is its own, and I am happy to simply see it exist in the world as it is. A process of detachment, almost; a process of letting go of what we care about, trusting the world will meet it with care.

As I write this, I am almost certain that I failed my final exam. What I am learning most from this program is how to meet failure with grace, how to treat myself kindly and to understand that, no matter how many times I meet the steep learning curve with failure, I can simply try again.

Perhaps, in school as in life, that is all we can do: attempt again and again, knowing we do not traverse this path alone.

I miss you always, dear friend.

With love,

Angeli

Written April 5th, 2026.

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What is the opposite of dominion, of empire? I ask, quite unusually, after watching the new Netflix Dinosaurs documentary with Ethan. Last night, both of us thinking of the 1988 animated movie The Land Before Time, we were giddy as kids. But by the second episode, we couldn’t take it seriously.

Immersion into one of Earth’s ancient epochs, the Triassic-Jurassic period, was ruined by imposed human storytelling, or what humans imagined was going on with the dinosaurs, which followed a pedantic formula. Introduce a defenseless species who must overcome a rivalry with another species. Follow its evolution into an apex predator that dominates the Earth. Then, extinction event. The formula restarts with a new dinosaur.

To be clear, I didn’t expect artistic sophistication from this documentary. I think I expected something more like Our Planet. I know that science storytelling needs an emotional narrative to engage people, but it’s dismaying that it seems the popular notion of life on Earth still revolves around violent competition: Dog-eat-dog, or large-being-eating-medium-being-eating-small being and all of them lost eventually to Earth’s oscillation between Ice Age and Global Warming. A string of violence punctuated with pointlessness. It’s a tired narrative that, in my opinion, has no place in the 21st century.

While it’s true that planet Earth herself is the greatest equalizer, I refuse to believe that domination is the natural desire of all species on Earth—because the extension of that belief is that human domination through imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and so on, is natural and therefore inevitable.

As Peter Kropotkin wrote, life on Earth has flourished not due to competition but through mutual aid; domination is a choice, and a very unlikely one if we look at more-than-human history.

Currently, drones are flying from Iran into the Gulf Coast countries and escalating the war that the U.S. and Israel began. Some historians are predicting the U.S. to lose this war, and that their loss will begin the fall of the American empire. It may be too soon to ask, but I ask out of necessity: What happens after empire? Do we dare, as the species responsible for bringing about the 6th mass extinction, to imagine something different to dominion? We are not all equally accountable, but we are all, in one way or another, responsible for the future of our planet.

What is the opposite of dominion and empire? Submission is not a sufficient answer if we’re looking for new ways of being. Yielding is more correct and happens to also be poetic. What Donna Haraway calls “becoming-with” (or making kin with) wider webs of life involves yielding our anthropocentric sensibilities. Like lichen, fungi, and bacteria that is so often in symbiosis with another living thing, we need to adapt to our planetary crises by allying ourselves to what would outlive us.

I plan to write more about this in the coming weeks, thinking through Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble and Ursula K. Le Guin’s imagined realities of animal communication, utopias, and more (thank you for your wisdom, Madam Le Guin!)

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Stern mouths protected by riot shields greet us. All of these men in blue could’ve been my older brother, barely thirty according to the skin around their wary eyes. Hard to believe they’re our enemies, capable of cruelty disguised by obedience.

My arm is tucked in C’s arm who I just met that day but feel an intimate protectiveness for. I search the line behind me for A’s colorful bandana, for my other friends whose names I won’t share, not here. I’m unnervingly close to the barricade of policemen flanking us on the left. Behind my sunglasses, I avoid their eyes.

I look to the front instead, waiting for something to stir on our side or theirs; something that might tip the deadlock. It happens when an SUV from our side pulls up to square against the police barricade. Like water through a tight hose, our collective body rushes past the corner of the barricade. We bolt. But then someone in front is shoved to the ground, causing multiple bodies to fall. The force of the march behind us is overwhelming as we were suspended. Back up! C says. A few of us pull the fallen back to their feet, and we rush past the remaining policemen.

A few hundred meters and we make it to the shrine where the program was to occur. I almost hear a collective sigh of relief breathe out—the threat of violence has passed. Before Mary Queen of Peace, under the MRT tracks, a shaft of light spills onto our faces.

Grace is short-lived as I become aware of the uniquely middle-class familiarity with Megamall and its giant digital billboards, one of them featuring Kathryn Bernardo for some eyeglass company. I find it so strange, this blend of neoliberal privatization and traditional Catholicism. I suppose it’s one of the ways I know the city, this city that’s gone through democratic struggle after struggle flattened by history, stratified and labeled after the fact. Just like the pieces of scrap metal melded into the street.

Just like the pieces of scrap metal, we are invisible unless you look closely and you see that we glimmer under the sun.

I write today in anticipation of multiple anniversaries tomorrow, the commemoration of EDSA People Power and Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice for Palestine. If you couldn’t tell, I’m preoccupied with how to move forward in history carrying the dignity of people who have sacrificed themselves for political change.

I’ve been thinking about the other side of this moment and what might carry us there. I’m certain it involves a diversity of revolutionary strategies, a plurality of resistance. When I say plurality, I mean everyone acting from their local needs and most specific skills and interests to create a kaleidoscope of solutions to the present moment. A plurality of thinking about how we can help each other’s real needs and how we can divest from the hegemonic system that divides and enslaves us.

Where is the site of our resistance? Is it in the streets, online, at home—or somewhere else entirely? For many of us in the ahem business of change-making, our politics suffers from an internal war. Middle class against the poor. Leftists against centrists and leftists against conservatives.

Listen, wherever the struggle is shared with the most people—that’s where we should be. That’s where we have the most potential for change because of the strength of our solidarity.

I don’t believe we are so divided that we don’t share any struggles, but we do need a robust empathy to bridge our differences, especially since these differences are encouraged and emphasized by the ruling class to prevent us from working together.

According to Wataru Kusaka’s Moral Politics in the Philippines, modern-day politics seeks to pit a morally “good” group against a morally “evil” out-group, which furthers the division inherent in movement spaces.

I don’t remember a time when politics wasn’t about morality, but I am envious of a politics that doesn’t condemn citizens to political purgatory based on how well we can perform change-making. If politics is the pursuit of shared goals, then pursuing change can be as simple as going to our neighbors and talking about how we might help each other. Yes, sometimes it sounds absurd—let’s just ask each other what we need and share resources based on trust!—like a child drawing two stick figures and a house and calling that family—but shouldn’t it be more simple? Shouldn’t we uncomplicate changemaking and go back to the basics of being good humans?

I think we should, and I think it makes the impossible weight of carrying historic political wins like EDSA much easier to carry.

Aaron Bushnell, if you’re reading this from the spiritual realm, I hope you know how much your words mean to me. Please grant us protection in tomorrow’s march as I bring your words: We will not be complicit in genocide!

Thanks for reading! Support my work with a small donation or drop a like and comment~ I appreciate any and all of it.

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In popular stories of good and evil, the villain is packaged in metaphor. Evil wears a black cloak. Evil sees from one large fiery eye. Sometimes, evil has no nose.

In light of the demons whose names have been redacted from the Epstein files, the most accurate metaphor to understand the psychopathy of evil is that evil people are not human. They only wear human skin. They abuse children and young women systematically, and they talk about unspeakable things using barely concealed language over e-mail. They are horrible, and they deserve the worst punishment we can give them.

Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of American empire? I would like to say yes, but I don’t see this as just an American evil. This is a global empire run by old white men, a political configuration we’ve unwillingly arrived at after centuries of colonization and decades of neoliberalization that privatized and financed and surveilled everything.

The crucial thing to understand in the release of the Epstein files is that everyone in the elite knows each other, and they control the world together.

Why have they released the files now, you might ask, if they have all the power? Because most of the names of the perpetrators have been redacted, the release of the files actually serves them through three main reasons:

1. By shocking the public into submission. The unthinkable acts committed by the elite are so gruesome, so heinous, that it puts citizens into a state of psychological freeze or “submission,” in which people who are overwhelmed by the horror let everything—including, crucially, political engagement—roll over them.

2. By distracting from a different evil, which is the genocide of Palestine and expanded Israeli-U.S. war in the Middle East. The war crimes against Palestinian people have been ongoing since 2023. Just yesterday, Israel attacked six countries, with Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon among them—this is despite the ceasefire agreement Israel made with Lebanon in November. If the world is looking at the heavily-redacted Epstein files, trying to uncover just a few of those protected elite, then they won’t be looking at Palestine or Lebanon.

3. By priming the American public for the next electoral candidate, who will appear to be opposed to Trump and his policies. This is the purpose of polarized political parties, after all; they give us the illusion of change. The more extreme the ideological switch between candidates, the better to cut off our political imagination. When the realm of politics is defined by them as progressive or conservative, left or right, we can only watch as the pendulum swings endlessly. The next candidate will curse Trump as a pedophile and rapist, touting themselves as a progressive “socialist” but effectively doing nothing against the policies of Trump’s administration. Democrat or Republican, it doesn’t matter because the elite only have one goal: consolidate more power.

Despite the bleakness of this analysis, what steels my courage is witnessing countless everyday citizens mobilizing, lending their expertise to bring clarity and justice to this moral crisis. Morticians are analyzing photographic evidence of Jeffrey Epstein, graphic designers are uncovering the names of redacted co-conspirators, and not to mention the decades-long legal battle victims have been waging to bring justice to abusers. Citizens—not legacy journalists, not puppet politicians—are doing the work of justice. This is something to celebrate. We the people are not helpless, and justice belongs to us.

Let’s keep up the work of healing violence and injustice. Here are three things I personally practice that might be useful for you:

1. Find one thing you can do for your community that you’re good at, and do it consistently. Giving food, education, art, or other skills and services on the basis of mutual exchange (i.e. trusting that you will be repaid in means that don’t have to be financial) is the most dependable way to build a strong resistance. We don’t have enough trust in people who are just like us, struggling and feeling alone in this political climate—but we need to remember we have more in common with each other than with the 1%.

2. Keep calling for a free Palestine, for climate justice, for the freedom of political prisoners, and more, but don’t get stuck in one form of messaging. In trying to get more people on our side to work with us, we need to meet them where they are, which involves using more approachable language, extending compassion when there are inevitable mistakes, and never holding perfection as the standard for activism. Expanding our circles of care and solidarity is meant to be uncomfortable, but it’s also meant to be exciting—we are co-creating something together. We don’t know how we’ll change in the process, but we will develop skills and values that make us better people.

3. Remember that the scale of Empire is not the same scale we need to operate in. The logic of Empire and its systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, demand full subjugation of all populations of the world. The same logic penetrates our values when we mistakenly believe our solutions must apply to the whole world, when we insist on scaling locally grown projects to the national or international level, frantic about solving everything now. Under this paradigm, small-scale solutions are subversive. Causing a crack in the empire, no matter how small, is life saving. It grows justice by providing a blueprint for others to emulate.Don’t mistake virality for effectiveness.

The Epstein files are truly traumatizing, especially for women and sexual abuse survivors. We need to be mindful in how we process, act, and resist in the coming months. Please take care of yourself and check in on the people you love. Take your time in processing the shock and trauma of recent events. The work is still important and necessary. We are in for a long fight, but we don’t fight alone.

Was this piece useful to you? Let me know by leaving a comment! If you like my work, please consider supporting me through the links below. Thank you.

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1. You ask yourself why the fuck you signed up for therapy. You think of the cost of one hour. You hate yourself for wasting money being so depressed you sunk into a dimension without time.

2. You yell at your mother at least once before sessions to have something to talk about. You mistake big emotions for productivity. You make sure to cry at least once a month.

3. Having made no progress, you resent yourself and your therapist. You are still messed up. You are needy, so needy, for something no one can give you.

4. The unspeakable forces you to sign up for therapy again.

5. Your new therapist says progress comes in waves. It’s more like looping circles than a straight line. You believe her because perfection is no longer the goal—surviving day to day is.

6. In Grade 6 when you started feeling an ache in your chest, your class went on a trip to the beach where there loomed a ten-meter dive deck. Each session feels like jumping off this deck. Careful to avoid the barnacles on the beams.

7. You meet past versions of yourself in each session: seven years old, twelve, sixteen.

8. You observe them. This lingering agony was theirs first before it became yours.

9. You hold them close.

10. You don’t want to waste any more time. You finally feel alive. The circles spiral towards the sun.

Thank you for reading and may you be blessed with therapy that doesn’t take ten years. Here are a few of my links if you’d like to check out more of my work:

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Dear Angeli,

Recently you told me that there’s no future you can imagine yourself in, even wildly distant futures where the revolution has won and we are living exactly how we dreamt it. As your friend, I thought about this a lot. It’s the reason why I’m writing this letter. As you know, I’ve felt the same way before. My depression is not so bad now—I’d describe it as a small kitten that sometimes scratches when it’s hungry—but I know what it’s like to have birds of prey peck the future out of your eyes. Sometimes, you feel as if it’s all you can do to stay alive.

Maybe you feel that you’re in a prison no one else can see, with no jailer except your own mind. I hope you’ll allow me this useless tautology: Depression is all-encompassing until it isn’t. I find tautologies comforting in the way that a coin is comforting. Heads or tails, true or false. One can’t exist without the other. Depression makes us look at the world with a black and white filter, and it helps to remember that no dark can exist without light. If we feel trapped, we have the potential to feel free as well. And, like a coin, there is no good or bad to either of these states of being; it just is.

I want to ask you if it annoys you to think about possibilities. Are you in a state of mind where considering an alternative makes you hate your own mind more? I can understand. It’s a wonder we’re still here, and I mean that sincerely. I’m breathing, just like the trees around me are breathing, and that is a wonder. Here in Rizal, I’m eye-level with branches of rainforest trees and planted papayas—this is a wonder.

In reflecting on what you said, I want to share that the revolution feels distant almost always. It feels like it’s not ours, though I know this couldn’t be more wrong. The rhetoric used by militant Marxists and exclusionary leftists makes it feel as if we’re meant to serve the revolution but not enjoy it. You and I are exploited in the global economic sense as Filipinos, but we are also very privileged in occupying a space in the world that allows us our basic needs and many luxuries on top of this. There is at times the creeping shame that change is not for us because in comparison, there are so many people who are suffering more.

What I’ve come to learn is that if I can’t feel the revolution in my body, then it’s not a revolution. It’s propaganda. I want hope on a cellular level. I want joy on my skin so visceral it raises my hair. In every radical action, I want to follow what makes me feel alive because that is what makes me free. I want this for you, too.

You said you can’t imagine a future that you want to be alive for. In the infinititude of possibility, I trust there is at least one future you can find yourself in. What futures are you imagining? If you’re thinking of land to the farmers, forests restored by indigenous peoples, and presidents rotting in their graves—these are stirring images, but they don’t automatically have you in them. What’s the revolutionary future where you’re at the center? What’s the future where every sensation is lighting up for you?

I watched a video essay recently that said this: Propaganda doesn’t turn you into a fanatic. It turns you into someone who just wants to get through the day without being emotionally destroyed by things they can’t change. It’s not simple brainwashing. Propaganda doesn’t shout at you until you believe. It talks at you until you’re too tired to care.

To keep ourselves in the reality where we can change things, we need to revive our sense of care—through friends, and through a future we can see ourselves in.

If you examine any future I want to live in, you’ll find yourself.

With all my love,

Maria

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Dear Maria,

Thank you for writing to me, and I hope, as always, that you’ve been well. I don’t mean that lightly. The news coming out of Venezuela, Palestine, and Sudan has me terrified for our fellow comrades across the world, and if there’s anything I pray for it is for their continued survival, for their well-being, and for their collective liberation and self-determination. The ramping up of US imperialist aggression has me feeling despair and fierce anger, and sometimes I can’t see a way out it; sometimes I feel the hopelessness so acutely that I can’t imagine facing another day. Do you, too, feel the despair and anguish that comes with these endless wars and obscene imperial violence? How do we, if not cope (for coping entails some measure of acceptance of the state of things), but rather place one foot forward towards another day, another possibility, another world?

I’ve been thinking about what you said, about the revolutionary future that I can dream of that includes me. Sometimes, it isn’t only that I can’t imagine a future I want to be alive for; it’s that I don’t want to. I’m ashamed of it because that’s the easier option, really: to refuse imagination rather than engage in a practice that asks of us what we owe to each other, how we are tethered to each other. Sometimes my deepest fantasy is that I don’t owe anything to anyone, and that would free me to choose death freely, without reservations. On bad days, I imagine this is true, and it is an image so tempting and unforgiving that I feel it like a second set of teeth. On better days, I hope for a future where none of this overwhelms me. I hope for present moment after present moment where I can resist the temptation to die.

Recently, I’ve been thinking of hope as a practice of commitment to another, more benign world, rather than optimism per se. This reframing of hope has helped me rewire certain thought patterns in my brain: I don’t have to be an optimistic person (which I am not) to have hope; I don’t have to twist myself into reciting positive affirmations to say I am a hopeful person. And I want to be a hopeful person. Framing hope as a practice of commitment helps me tether myself to this one precious life of ours, as it forces me to think of futures beyond my wildest dreams, beyond the limits of my imagination: a future where the revolution has liberated us all, and in doing so, reinforced the bonds that tie me to this world. I speak of bonds not as obligations but as interdependence, one like the network of roots that connect all trees, which is to say that in a world wherein the revolution wins, then life wins too.

I’m starting graduate school soon, in a field which I know absolutely nothing about, and to be honest with you, I’m terrified. These long, lonely days of the past year and a half, unmoored in a foreign country: I have found myself contemplating solitude as a measure of eternity, as Rilke would call it, and in this solitude I have found myself faced with the most silent part of myself, and in this self I find myself yearning most of all for a small, quiet, creative life. I’m scared that the path I’m choosing would erase that possibility; that through the slow crawl of busyness and the safe but numbing choice of convention I might one day find myself having not written, having forgotten to write at all. It would be a kind of death, insignificant in the larger scheme of things, but a kind of death nonetheless. In choosing to stay alive, I hope to refuse this silent death too.

I miss you always. Whenever I look to the clear, open sky I’ll remember you, my friend.

With all my love,
Angeli

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I wrote the first draft of this poem a few years ago after marching in the People’s State of the Nation (SONA), which protested the corrupt administration of President Marcos Jr.

It feels right to share it here, to a growing number of you reading my words, especially given the recent string of unjust arrests against community organizers, journalists and activists: Chantal Anicoche1, Frenchie Mae Cumpo2, and environmental defenders Florentino Daynos, Krislyn Pocday, Adela Modi, Analiza Balliao, Amelia Rabino, Janey Macari, and Sonnette Bullecer from Nueva Vizcaya3.

What I hate most about impunity is how smug the people in power have to be. Impunity has to die.

I know that at times, protest can feel performative and draining—too many cameras, not enough change. I revised this poem today as a reminder of the animal grace of protest, what can happen when our feelings and desires and pent up anger align so that we move uninhibited, driven only by instinct. In those rare experiences, when you realize why they call it a movement, it matters less what happens after because you’ve just tasted collective power.

Sparrow flies over Commonwealth

And just like the bird as small as my palm

I march with the people as one animal.

And just like the dragonfly thinking the road

is a river, we are a light-dappled force.

And just like the bats shadowing the sky

we climb the air and claim rotten fruit.

And just like the rain that prowled

through the night, we leave traces

of a better world for you to find.

It was the 1970s. The indigenous peoples of the Cordillera had been battling the government to protect their home against what would be a devastating dam in Chico River. One tribe, the Kalinga people, were at the forefront of this battle. If Chico dam were to be built, it would have displaced their tribe and submerged their ancestral land. So they boycotted and protested, and when soldiers came to disperse them, they called every Kalinga woman to go to the river, link arms, and stand their ground in a barricade.

Not one man was present. Only Kalinga women stood by Chico River while the soldiers warned them to leave. Unarmed women, mothers and grandmothers stood guard by the river. The soldiers stepped closer to the barricade, trying to intimidate them, but they all stood their ground. Then, something unplanned happened. Each woman stripped their shirts and bared their chests. Brown and sagging breasts.

“You would hurt us women? You came from a woman,” they said. “Come closer and I’ll crush your balls!”

The soldiers who considered themselves men of God found the sight of wrinkly breasts horrifying. “Jusko po!” They looked away and found all haughty anger drained from them. They became ashamed.

The soldiers left. Peacefully, without any Kalinga people harmed. The same story happened in Bontoc, a different part of the Cordillera, where indigenous women stood once more against a mining project.

This famous story was retold around a table of women activists recently. Carol, who had been a dedicated force in the movement for decades, said this: “The Kalinga people knew if they sent men, the soldiers would see them as threats. Violence would be inevitable. They wanted to protest peacefully, so they sent women.”

Macli’ing Dulag may be remembered as the hero and martyr of the Kalinga, but it was Kalinga women who put their bodies on the line for Chico River that day, a crucial victory in the lifelong triumph of protecting their land and home.

Women have always been at the forefront of resistance work. For indigenous women, resistance is their heritage. Overlooked and erased by history, but there all the same—women animate the resistance.

Around that table, exchanging stories and weaving our collective wisdom, I learned a lot from Carol and her life partner, Cye. I asked them if I could write about our visit.

On a recent trip with friends to La Union, where I was practicing saying yes to the ocean and to life, Carol and Cye invited us to visit their permaculture farm. Nestled in the hills a few dozen kilometers from San Juan beach was the small food forest they’ve tended for thirteen years, the Pitak Project. The farm was named for the Ilocano word for mud, pitak—the combination of soil and water which gives life.

Before Pitak farm, Carol and Cye were what’s called “full-time” (FT) activists, dedicating their lives to advocating for farmers’ and indigenous people’s rights. In the Philippines, FTs live closely with the communities they serve, receiving little pay for their work of fighting for justice. It’s a job that demands physical, mental, and spiritual sacrifice—especially when activists in the Philippines are painted as terrorists by the government. Full-time activists are at higher risk of being murdered or disappeared by the state.

Carol and Cye knew the sacrifices of activism too well. They’ve lost some of their close friends to the violence and impunity of the state years ago. I’m sure it was a difficult decision when Cye and Carol left full-time activism to resist in a different way. A better world was possible—they still believed in this—so in 2013 they pivoted to the Pitak Project.

It’s not easy to change the way you resist. Going from a paradigm of fighting the system to creating within the system can be frightening. Am I abandoning the cause, or will my friends feel abandoned? What if I can’t create something worth it? What if, in the end, it’s still destroyed? One of my close friends is a full-time activist, and I had considered going full-time years ago when I was volunteering with a national climate organization, so I know the dilemma personally.

In our conversation under the fruit trees at Pitak, Cye and Carol talked about the necessity of working within the system. “We have to befriend local government officials,” they said. “Our old friends tease us for it, but we work both in and out of the system.” As educators, they teach permaculture practices to farmers and organizations; as activists, they promote sustainable and regenerative living. They work in between the new world and the old.

In the spectrum of resistance that exists within any progressive movement, there are advocates and then there are stewards of a new world—a better world. One tries to change public opinion by disrupting the status quo, using logic to beat the rhetoric of oppressors, while the other focuses on creating spaces of justice where people can physically experience what is usually only hypothetical. Stewards take the question what if and they grow it.

From what I can see, women are still leading the resistance, but ways of resistance can look vastly different from each other. The struggle is a barricade and the struggle is a food forest nestled in the hills.

More than anything, Cye and Carol’s story reminds me of the importance of beginnings. There are times when we need to embrace uncertainty and lean into the creative, expansive possibilities of our desire for a just world. Cye and Carol created a haven in Pitak that feeds not just themselves but their neighbors, too. With their knowledge in permaculture, they’ve taught countless people about living in harmony with the land. I saw a future for myself there in their farm. Despite climate crisis and the relentless privatization of land for corporate profit, I could see myself living a fulfilling life because of Cye and Carol’s work.

The steel spine for resistance that Kalinga women taught us remains. Just yesterday on January 24th, indigenous people and community elders stood in a barricade against the Dupax del Norte mining project headed by Woggle Mining Corp in Nueva Vizcaya. We must wield both strategies at the same time: we need to fight for our land, and we need to grow something worth fighting for.

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If you’ve been feeling similarly, if looking outside is too painful so you stay indoors, let’s imagine leaping into a different timeline—one where utopia is just a few steps away. I think of Lulu Houdini writing to her fourth great-granddaughter about regeneration:

“All the land and sea animals have come back now, hey bub. The ones in the ocean near to where you live have colours so vibrant we can see them from the clouds on a still day. By nighttime, we sit up here and watch the bioluminescence sway them in glitter-storm tides. They light up like dancing water trees under the glassy surface, and I sit up here with my cuppa.”1

Houdini imagines a healed earth and celebrates the return of Indigenous community that comes with right relationship with the land. She isn’t saying these things have or are certain to happen, but she names what they are: we saved the mangrove seeds, we revived birthing practices, we took down all the satellites.

Even if reality is healing only in our minds, couldn’t we sit and conjure that vision for as long as we can? The word Utopia comes from the Greek roots not and place, a place that exists nowhere. But Eutopia, its homonym, comes from the words good place.2 Both can be true at the same time, and in the course of human history, it’s entirely possible that one meaning becomes favored over another.

In my utopic vision, there’s a house with many rooms backed by the mountains and facing the sun. The house stands on fertile soil that we tend to as one great garden. In the garden, there are countless fruit trees of mango, guava, rambutan, jackfruit, as well as atis, guyabano, caimito, suha. We grow leafy vegetables and root crops in colorful patches—my favorite crop is calabasa for its sweet color and flavor.

All of my brilliant friends and wise elders live in this house. We work together to ensure life is as good as it can be for us and for others. For now, the house is just a house, but in time, it’ll grow to a large community of hundreds of people stewarding the land together.

For now, I take comfort in the dignity of small-scale changes. Things like shared libraries, gift economies, traded zines. My friends reading my poetry manuscript for free because they are my friends, and in return I read their work just as eagerly. In the last reading group I hosted, we read The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. One of the passages that stood out to us emphasized it is alright, good even, to let solutions be small. It doesn’t have to apply to everyone to be healing:

“Anthropologists who study gift economies note that they function well in small, tightly knit communities. You might rightly observe that we no longer live in small, close-knit societies, where generosity and mutual esteem structure our relations. But we could. It is within our power to create such webs of interdependence, quite outside the market economy. Maybe that is how we extract ourselves from a cannibal economy.”3

What is keeping you tethered to this world, dear friend? What visions do you hold dear?

Until next time.

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As one of the facilitators of the gathering, I asked everyone to consider Adrienne Rich’s famous poem, “Natural Resources”1 and what it offers us today, both in our personal lives and in our political engagements.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those

who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,

reconstitute the world.

“It’s nice to be able to acknowledge the first two lines,” one of us said. “Other times, it feels defeatist to say something like this.”

Another one of us confessed that the poem reminds them of the cyclical nature of our work: “It’s kind of depressing. Age after age, we do this. Does that mean nothing has changed?”

Perhaps in answer, one of us highlighted the poem’s sentiment that we “perversely reconstitute the world.” “It’s strange,” they said, “we have no tremendous power, but we still recreate the world, for better or for worse.” For better or for worse, and of course, it is up to us to collectively choose what’s better.

When I brought up the middle two lines of the poem to ask the circle who they cast their lot with—who do you ally yourself with, and why—one of us answered, “I came here with my friends from Bacolod, Negros Occidental. They are who I ally myself with. We’ve been working together for years.” There was a deep sense of trust among us who came from Negros together. They were part of youth-led protests years ago that successfully campaigned for a coal moratorium in the province2.

This kind of deep camaraderie among activists can be explained, I think in large part, by a shared sense of home, which Arne Naess wrote is an “ecological self, rich in internal relations.”3 When we have a vibrant sense of home with multiple webs of kinship, connecting our selves to the birds and the insects and the mother trees of that place, to all that is alive, we are much more likely to fight for the life of that place. On the other hand, when we’re living detached in cities where every interaction has a price tag, we survive and die on our own. In the language of Adrienne Rich, in these cases, we have no one meaningful to cast our lot with.

In the past, Adrienne Rich’s poem has meant to me a persistent faith in collective action despite the losses suffered. Now, after years of advocating for collective action, the poem is a reminder for me to build relationships that last, allies for the movement of caring for the Earth. They don’t have to be many, but they do have to be meaningful, relationships that share something greater than a utilitarian objective.

The second part of the gathering invited everyone to write a reflection (and later, a short poem) about their experience as an environmental organizer. These questions were offered as guides:

• How did you get involved in climate advocacy? What roles have you played in the movement?

• How do you deal with uncertainty in your work?

• How do you process feelings of anxiety for the future and feelings of grief for what has been lost?

I’m a little evil for springing the task of writing a poem, even if it’s a short one, on the group. I sensed everyone’s anxiety around creating something that they felt must be a piece of art, but I reminded them that our goals for the gathering was to express ourselves and connect with each other. Writing a poem is one way to do that. And I’m so glad that everyone warmed up to the idea.

One by one, we shared our poem. I asked them to format it in this way: Read the first two lines of “Natural Resources,” read your poem, then close with the last four lines of “Natural Resources.” Each poem read something like this (this is the poem I wrote):

My heart is moved by all I cannot save

so much has been destroyed

In the few years I’ve been here

little progress has succeeded.

I’m holding back what seems like inevitable destruction

while I try to count all the delights left:

every mango tree that greets me on the bus

or the motorcycle, on the forever freeway into my country.

Everywhere I go, the color of home follows.

I have to cast my lot with those

who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,

reconstitute the world.

The result was a meditative reading, a sort of psalm, call and response, using Rich’s words from 1977. In the 70s, the world looked very different from now. The climate crisis was only beginning to be researched and integrated into the environmental movement, but the values of the movement was the same. That we can draw inspiration from what someone wrote fifty years ago is a helpful reminder of the longevity of our own words and actions.

Through each poem read, a weight was lifted from each of us. We were reminded that we never carry our feelings alone, and that we are part of a decades-long movement of people who see the planet not as a resource but as a home.

To close the circle, we each picked one line from our crafted poems to weave together a collective poem. After a few minutes of rearranging lines and crossing out unnecessary words, we agreed on an arrangement that we were happy with.

My Heart is Moved By All I Cannot Save

after Adrienne Rich

by Seedlings of the Earth Collective, Oct 25, 2025.

Our small steps carry the greatest cost.

Though one person is not enough,

a seedling perseveres and grows despite

flood waters, even higher.

Will I ascend or sink below

the answer hides. I do not know

Every day the world ends, and every day

something survives.

Binhi na tinanim sa lupang sinilangan

Now, knowing that we are capable,

that things can change, the spark

of shared sorrows and intertwined hands.

Everywhere I go, the color of home follows.

Meanwhile, movement is primal

There is much to do

for a world to be inherited by those

who are not yet there.

If I were to hold a creature

For you, I will.

Thank you to Manawari SEA and CANVAS for inviting me to facilitate the Seedlings of the Earth gathering. Learn more about the work of Manawari and CANVAS here on their websites.

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The world gets more complicated each day, as you certainly know, and if we are honest with ourselves, no inherited religion or ideology can survive the griefs and frictions of a human life in the 21st century. At some point, our belief systems break. What we once clung to as universal truth transforms, dissipates, or dissolves under the torrent of external influence. Or, if we are patient enough to let it burn and skilled enough to shape it, the belief can become a sword—your own philosophy against injustice, and what one must do with their limited time in this world.

To become skilled in shaping our belief, we face the world honestly. We confront all of its frightening truths and take time, likely years, to process them. In other words, we must read and write.

Adania Shibli, the award-winning Palestinian-American author of A Minor Detail, wrote that ethics “is a field that is constantly being nourished, revisited, and revised with every act of reading and every act of writing.” She goes on to say that “literature has never exercised or threatened violence as governmental or religious authorities have. Considering literature as an ethics would allow us more possibilities[…] might assist us in realizing or even imagining who we are in relation to one another, and in allowing others a place within ourselves.”1

Shibli writes from the experience of being silenced. In 2024, she was awarded the LiBeraturpreis for her novel but was then disinvited from the awarding ceremony and its book fair in Frankfurt.2 Shibli was born in Palestine. I think you know what I’m going to say next, but I will spell it out. A Minor Detail reckons with the Palestinian story of dispossession and erasure. The state responsible for that dispossession and erasure also seeks to erase stories, like Shibli’s, that reveal the extent of their own evil. The Frankfurt Book Fair, and the German literary organization LitProm, blindly obeyed. Because of their allegiance to the ideology of Zionism, they participated in the erasure of Palestinian voices.

This is a tragedy that reveals for us readers and writers what we must do. I think of what Stephen King wrote when asked to comment about his books being banned from public high schools in 1992. “Read it carefully,” he advised. “Discover what they didn’t want you to know.”3 I’ve just downloaded an ebook of Adania Shibli’s A Minor Detail, and I hope you’ll find a copy for yourself too.

It’s not as if we can destroy authoritarianism and all its iterations after reading a book, but as a writer and as an anarchist, I do believe in the power of changing ourselves in order to change our surroundings—eventually, yes, our world. While readers and writers are often solitary people who are not the first to speak in any room, imaginary worlds can offer the space to practice courage and solidarity, if we set an intention to do so.

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Dear friend, I’ve been thinking about what I want to say for the last three weeks. After the protests on the 21st, so much was urgent to attend to and advocate for that I needed to press pause on all plans. I didn’t want to, of course — I’m a recovering perfectionist — but for the sake of my mental health, I surrendered.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you might know that it’s not easy for me to be an activist. I lack the anger. I’m all grief. I wasn’t born into poverty, nor did I grow up in the Philippines. Most of my life has been comfortable, with my challenges being personal rather than systemic. In all that I’m learning through volunteering with, studying, and making art about justice movements, I’m also unlearning old ideals of individualism and security.

As scary as it is to be a self-employed artist and activist, I have to keep moving forward, keeping my eyes on the horizon, not looking down at how far I could fall. At the same time, I know I can’t wait for far-reaching change to sweep the world before I allow myself to feel peace. The impossible challenge is balancing the weight of both the desire for change and the desire for ease.

We wish revolution could arrive like the seasons do, naturally and without asking. How lovely this image is!—the thousands of us marching on Luneta and Mendiola like samaras off the Apitong tree.

From the perspective of Earth-time, change is easy and a natural part of life. But from our human lifetimes, change is never easy.

While there is a rhythm to societal rupture, I have to remember that systemic change requires leverage. I’m always asking myself how revolution will arrive. It might be better to ask where is the next revolution? As in, where is the site of my riskiest solidarity, the place to add my force now in order to move the system closer to where we collectively need it to be?

If you’re asking the same question, let me know your tentative and joyful answers below.

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Today I am moving through my doubts and fears like trudging through Manila’s recent floods. This rainy season brings so much pain and release, as it typically does. The collective is letting go of old and fresh wounds, of dreams that have soured.

This country is one that still dreams of freedom despite itself. We are making way for new strategies and ways of relating to one another.

Ethan started playing Michael Bublé last week, which means we are well and truly Filipino now, if there was every any doubt—the impatience for the Christmas holidays a symptom of our deep desire for ease and joy. Maybe we’re drawn to the mythology of a saint giving us presents for no other reason than because we asked.

Imagine if our own autonomy was achieved as easily as this, if we could wish for our freedom in a letter. We might say autonomy is a fundamental quality of freedom, which means we need to own our cities, our grocery stores, and our flood control projects. At the top of our list would be democratic governance. But then, many of us have tried this method through requesting for reform and lobbying politicians, with little success.

I was speaking to a close friend recently, wondering about how we can move from processing collective colonial trauma to changing our cities with our hands. Some of us are still reckoning with our entanglements to Empire and unlearning oppression in our bodies. This unlearning is necessary, but we also need to seize the present moment and build towards our freedom—in small but sure steps.

I’m talking about prefiguration, building the new in the shell of the old.1 If radical imagination is familiar to you, prefiguration is essentially that concept extended to action. It’s “organizing and embodying the modes of existing and understanding that you long for, in the present.”2

Old systems are truly dying. Multiple countries in the Global South have ruptured with long-simmering frustration against the elite. You can see it in the protests in Indonesia and in Nepal, and of course, in the Philippines, where two massive protests against corruption and inequality are being staged on the anniversary of Martial Law this 21st of September.3 People all over the world are demanding change.

But protests are only the beginning. What comes after is even more important than the show of force that a protest brings. If, let’s say, we succeed, and the current powers step down after a long and gruelling mass movement, how will we feed each other? How will we make decisions together? What institutions will we build to embody the antithesis of our current institutions?

The Occupy Wall Street movement answers some, if not all, of these questions. The movement was a huge success because of its prefigurative qualities. Although it lasted only fifty-nine days, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is mentioned in much of libertarian, socialist, and anarchist discourse for the lessons it teaches to future movements.

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Solidarity — We are the 99%

OWS was organized around solidarity against the elite. The slogan that rallied 50,000-100,0004 people on the initial march was “We are the 99%.” Day laborers, students, prison workers, and all kinds of people worked together to stand for better jobs, income equality, and restrictions on the powers of banks.5 It was important to the organization of OWS that marginalized voices be heard first, and this was practiced in their general assemblies. Women and people of color were encouraged to come forward at the start while white men were encouraged to listen (here I think of improv class, of all things, and the games we played learning to speak one at a time with our eyes closed—a game that taught us how to listen without talking over each other).

I’ve been wondering what’s at the heart of genuine, long-lasting solidarity. I suppose, as one friend and author of Gentle Subversions put it, we spend time with each other. Even if we disagree. Under a system that tells us we are individuals alone, we must insist on knowing each other.

Convergent spaces

Why was OWS so long? You might ask—fifty-nine days! It’s an inconceivable number for other cities, other populations. It’s because OWS consisted of more than just marches. Yes, there were marches, but there were also convergent spaces for food, medical care, legal aid, art-making, action planning, and a people’s library—because OWS folks had all the intention of staying and claiming that space. They were in it for the long-run.

The People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street was a library without due dates, co-governed by a rotating cast of volunteers: “full-time activists, artists, retirees, college professors, poets, students, parents, punks, wandering Canadians, and professional librarians.”6 The public library is a key feature of any truly democratic society, as a space to learn, unlearn, dream, and organize. Wherever there’s books and zines and poetry, there are thinkers. In a library, people are encouraged to ask questions and seek dialogue rather than build taller and taller polarized walls.

Learning in action: “praktis lang”

What strikes me more than the words “We are the 99%” is one of the common chants at OWS: “This is just practice.” The Taglish translation: praktis lang. Perhaps the most exciting thing about revolution is that we cannot predict what the outcome will be because we have to practice it every day.

As organizer and filmmaker Marissa Holmes writes in her book Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice,7 “Wherever there are people who insist on acting as if they’re already free, the spirit of Occupy is present.”

I’m hoping that protesters will continue the action even after the 21st to build solidarity across class and identity divisions against the Filipino elite, to organize convergent spaces, and to occupy public spaces everywhere in Manila.

See you on the streets. See you in your practice.

What if I told you that you’re already an activist? Yes, you, with your full-time job at a soulless company (your words, not mine). Okay, maybe you don’t work at a soulless company. Instead, you’re pretty happy with your job. You enjoy it, and you’re good at it, and it pays well. That last one’s the important part anyway.

You know what activists are, and you wouldn’t really call yourself that. You see people on the news being praised for how much they’ve sacrificed to draw attention to a cause. You’ve read smart people dissect the ills of society in articles, books, poetry. You’re not smart enough or self-sacrificial enough to do those things, so you don’t call yourself an activist.

And yet you know—the world is run by capitalism and we need to get to where it’s not. At this point in 2025, there’s already enough information explaining the problems. There’s a whole church choir singing the problems in Gregorian chant (very ominous, very boring). The meta-problem is we’re not addressing the issues as much as we are documenting them. Why? We’re tired and anxious and possibly depressed, and because we’ve been trained to think that only certain kinds of actions will be meaningful.

We fail to realize that we are already participating in changemaking every day. All of our actions reconstitute the world. Every day, we recreate countless complex social and structural systems, from something as large as the economy to as small as our immediate families.

Here, I echo Adrienne Rich’s famous poem “Natural Resources” published in 1977.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those

who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,

reconstitute the world.

Rich’s bittersweet kicker of a poem reminds us of two things: “so much has been destroyed” on our planet, our only home, and yet those of us who are still here have power—although it is not extraordinary—to recreate the world.

If activism is the work of renewing the world, you’re already an activist because you influence the world with every single choice. Whether you are conscious of that choice or not is irrelevant. You are already making a difference.

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You don’t have to make incredibly difficult choices right away. If you want to organize, start at the low-hanging fruit. This is different for everyone, but two of the easiest actions with no barriers to participation are talking to people and sharing your resources.

Talk to your neighbors about how you see the world. Talk to them about your shared problems. Almost always, you’ll touch upon a systemic issue that needs to be addressed. Maybe, just maybe, you go and address it together. (pretty please?)

If your social battery is fried, try sharing resources with your neighbors. Recently, I’ve been surprised by how easy it is to create a mutual aid fund. Here’s how you do this very radical, very cool practice: Gather a group of people, give a certain amount of money to the fund, and agree together when individuals can take from the fund to support their needs. Then, keep refilling the fund based on how much you can give.

Taking a recent example from the Philippines where billions of taxpayer money have been stolen by one family, Filipinos are half-joking to stop paying taxes. Well. Um. What if we weren’t joking? What if we used what would be our taxes, pooled them together, and did something useful with them? Made actual flood control efforts, for one, or built homes for urban poor communities. Maybe we can use those billions of pesos to grow free and healthy food in the city. Around the world, the collective is waking up to their free will. What are we going to do with the dizzying realization?

The dizziness of freedom, as Kierkegaard said, is only dizzying if you keep looking down. If you keep moving forward, however, you’ll adjust and find balance. Make a choice, then stand ten toes down on it.

This is the basics of organizing where you stand. You don’t have to travel to a far-off community to do volunteer work. You don’t have to read dozens of books on decolonization. To be an activist, you just have to understand that each choice you make contributes to or hinders the project of co-creating a better world. “Not a batter world, not a butter world, a better world,” writes poet Bob Hicok in his hilarious poem “Having had a little bit of enough.”

We have to try something

don't we, to make this a better world?

Not a batter world, not a bitter world,

not a butter world, although I can see merits

in all of those. A better world. And no,

not a world where you can bet

whenever you want on whatever you want,

though we seem to be going down that road.

Vegas will let you slap dough down

on anything, even the when and how

of the apocalypse, though not the why.

There's no mystery to the why: because.

And what would a better world look like?

That's easy: different.

After two rituals with two live chickens, Babaylan Grace gazed at me for a moment before speaking in Hiligaynon. She said, “You’re looking for something to belong to. I can tell just from your face—I don’t even need to consult with your ancestors.”

Her words were kindly translated for me into Tagalog and English by her husband. I had trouble responding in either language. Was I that transparent? What else was my soul telling through my pores?

It’s clear to me now, reflecting on that moment years later, that Babaylan Grace didn’t just mean I was searching for belonging in the present moment. She meant that the belonging was my past and future. It was the theme of my life. In the hallways of my high school, in the cold harbor of a foreign country, in the isolated bedroom of pandemic lockdown, I had been searching for something to belong to, something that made me feel like I’m home.

As a child of migrants, I know this is my story. It’s a cliché at this point. I’m one of (hundreds of?) thousands of children who’ve been separated from their motherland. The so-called brain drain, otherwise known as my country “exporting” our people—the language alone is dehumanizing and isolating.

I’m often asked by Filipinos why I moved back. Was I not living better overseas?

I recall one conversation with my coworker back when I was living in Singapore. He was an immigrant from India under a short-term working visa. When I told him that I was planning to move back to the Philippines instead of finish my studies in Australia, he said, “If I had the visa you have, I would leave today—I wouldn’t bring anything but the clothes I’m wearing right now.”

I know, it’s an unconventional choice to move back to your home country if you’re from the Global South. Postcolonial countries have that in common. Most migrants would take on any foreign challenge — racism, shoddy jobs, homesickness — a hundred times over before the thought of returning home can cross their minds. For Global South migrants, borrowing language from Aimee Nezhukumatathil, home is that place we are forever running away from and running towards. Always a different country, always another ‘elsewhere.’

For most of my life, I assumed that position as well. I expected to stay in Australia, where I likely would’ve become a geography researcher fighting for grad school scholarships. The pandemic in 2020 radically transformed my priorities, however, and towards the tail-end of the lockdown, I moved back to Manila.

What I know is that when Babaylan Grace shared my sumpâ, meaning both curse and promise, she was telling me that belonging was both my curse and my gift. I am privileged and burdened by my ability to choose—whether to stay or move elsewhere. I chose the unconventional choice, she seemed to challenge, so what was I going to do with that gift?

Reciprocate Gift

My ability to choose means I have time and resources to give—to build on existing social movements and lend my skills. (A note on privilege: I find that the word carries centuries of inherited shame and guilt, feelings that aren’t helpful in moving me, or anyone, to action. Rather than seeing my privilege as an obligation, I choose to reframe it as simple circumstance. More on this in other essays, I suppose)

So many people have been doing the work of community building much longer than I have. Good Food Community has done an excellent job of weaving together multiple sectors with a shared solution to our intersecting planetary crises: food.

I give my time and energy to Good Food for a reason. For me, community satisfies the instinctive need for belonging. It’s a place where you can be met as yourself, with all of your imperfections and capacity for change.

Going a step further, community should share the burden of creating just, alternative futures. Without our effort to create more equitable ways of being, there is no community.

Building alternative futures is a key practice of being in relationship with each other. It’s what transforms a relationship of practicality into one of purpose. When we acknowledge the world is unjust and we find ways to address that injustice together, our friendships and partnerships go beyond convenience—they become full of meaning. Life becomes more than just what we can survive. We discover what we can create together—and isn’t creating one of the most romantic things we can do?

In thinking about the importance of community in justice-oriented grassroots movements, I think about lessons I’ve learned in my romantic partnership with Ethan. We’ve been together for seven years (a surreal amount of time). He’s loved me since I was depressed and barely myself. We’ve supported each other through the many awkward and painful phases of becoming, including a defining feature of our relationship: three years of long distance.

With hope that these resonate with you and your budding communities, here are my lessons of community from the eyes of a lover. Inspired, of course, always, by Ethan.

1. Regularly do fun things together. Recently, Ethan and I have been playing old versions of Pokémon on a DS emulator. For the past two weeks, we’ve been trading strategies and tricks for training Pokémon faster. (If you’re wondering, the game is Pokémon Soul Silver, and I chose Cyndaquil as my starter pokémon while he chose Totodile) It’s not silly, and it’s not a waste of time—play with your friends like you’re children again!

   

2. Remember that even though you want to see a radically more just world, you’re still here in this one, so be present. Being present is about staying curious. It’s the opposite of having your mind made up. Ask questions about the details of their life. What have they been up to? What’s their current obsession? A new world isn’t falling from the sky tomorrow—it’s emerging through our everyday choices. Ironically, it’s when we demand the arrival of a new world that it most swiftly escapes from us. I think of this concept by African theologian Mbiti—that time is not linear, and people call the abstract ‘future’ forth through our present-day actions.

3. If you’re going to measure someone, do so against their own capabilities, not against your own. This is really about political anxiety, the worry that someone you care about does not align with your progressive politics. Of course we want the people we love to share our values, but this constant measuring of someone’s political disposition gets in the way of real connection.

   This lesson is mine. I claim it. While the desire for my partner to care about politics is important, it’s not fair to expect my configuration of political actions from another person with entirely different resources and interests. When I measure all the ways my partner falls short of progressive politics, I’m acting from a deeper anxiety: the belief that only perfect actors will bring about systemic change. This is just not true. A diverse multitude of actors is what we need. We need solidarity over division.

4. Learn to enjoy the process of rupture and repair. I know, it seems impossible. How can we learn to enjoy conflict? The thing is, disagreements are frightening when all our moments of vulnerability have been met by punishment or abandonment. It’s an unfortunate circumstance we find ourselves in, but it can be different. Friction with another person can lead to smoother edges for both of you, perfectly matching puzzle pieces. It requires consistent effort to understand yourself and another person, but one day, you’ll be surprised. The time will come when you’re no longer scared of disagreement, or anger, or someone else’s pain because you’ve met yourself deeply enough, and you know that their pain is not a threat to who you are.

5. You don’t have to do everything. One of the hardest things to do is to admit that you can’t do it. You can’t finish the writeup, can’t host the event, can’t make it to that integration. The natural thing to feel in these situations is disappointed, frustrated about your own capacity which seems incredibly weaker than others’. Maybe you’re thinking, how am I meant to contribute to the movement like this? Take this opportunity to lean on your friends, who are your co-organizers—and I mean that in the metaphoric and literal sense, because everything is political, even our seemingly mundane relationships. Ask your friends to go with you on those impossible errands. Ask for online meetings instead of meet-ups. Find compromises that honor your body’s needs. In doing so, you’re not just being kind to yourself—you’re growing the collective’s capacity to care for each other.

And should those days arrive when none of you have any capacity to support each other, repair conflict, or be fully present, go back to number 1. Dance in the living room, or on the street. Play boardgames, video games. Read a book together. Designate someone to read aloud, playing the characters and inserting funny voices! God, I know community is hard to practice, but if, let’s say, nothing matters in the end, wouldn’t you rather do life with your friends?

Dear friend, thank you for reading. Your support means a lot to me. If you have the means to reciprocate my time and energy in making essays like this, please consider giving me a gift through my coffee page:

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I’m embarrassed to say it. “Revolutionary.” When someone describes themselves as a revolutionary, they are, whether they mean to or not, comparing themselves to the likes of Audre Lorde or Gabriela Silang, Bobby Seale or Huey P. Newton. When someone says “revolutionary,” they claim self-sacrificial values in an age of self-gratification. I just can’t help it. Really? Are you really doing the thing or are you just putting on the aesthetic?

I say all this as one of the least inspiring revolutionaries. I find myself depressed half of the time. I admit to ghosting a few organizations. Mostly, I no longer seek to destroy myself for supposed justice.

“Revolutionary suicide” is the term Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, used to describe his central philosophy. It was the title of his autobiography, the book that in many ways radicalized my politics. In his own words, “It is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them.”2 When everyday life is a struggle, you may as well turn that struggle against the Empire. This fiery commitment to the revolution, however, is what would consume him in the end, a dangerous cocktail of paranoia and self-hatred.

It is easy to understand why the concept of revolutionary suicide is problematic. It suggests that you can only find fulfillment through self-sacrifice, whether that’s emotional, spiritual, or material sacrifice. Any other way to live is seen as a waste and even betrayal to the movement. It is the binary of hero or traitor that permeates much of class discourse. This revolutionary work is joyless and impractical—what happens to the world when we have all been martyred? Nothing at all, unless we learn how to live differently.

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In their book Joyful Militancy, carla bergman and Nick Montgomery write that “undoing Empire also means undoing oneself.”3 We need to become capable of being other than what Empire has taught us. Instead of learning oppression, punishment, and marginalization, we need to learn restoration, care and cooperation, and foster them in turn. In the Panthers, this spirit of care was most alive in their Free Breakfast Programs which fed thousands of children across the country so that kids could properly focus and learn from school. It was a positive strategy of direct action. Instead of, let’s say, lobbying the district for free school breakfasts, the Panthers took matters into their own hands.

The Panthers understood that to get anything done, you have to do it within your community. Do not rely on the state. Capitalism and authoritarianism will not reform itself. It will never prioritize equality over domination. It will continue to promote individualism and competition among us because that is what recreates the system. Focusing on what we can actively create rather than what we need to tear down allows us to take root in Empire’s fissures and grow alternative spaces. As Purvi Shah writes, “We resist collapse by holding space for possibility.”4

This brings me to my understanding of revolutionary work as an experimental, creative and caring practice. In fact, let’s do away with the word revolutionary altogether. This work is for the visionaries, healers, disruptors, worldbuilders, troublers, arcanists and liminal ancestors—those who see the future with the wisdom of the past—space-time baddies. We need everyone. The revolution is not enlisting; the fucking galaxy is.

Theory of Practice (or the Creation Paradox)

What came first: the fascist or the fascist system? I don’t know, but the fascist is surely the chicken in this situation. In seeking to make change, we need an understanding of how change occurs/stirs/comes to be.

Forgive me for using the A word here: According to the anarchist theory of practice, it is our actions which transform both ourselves and the world around us. Actions create change within ourselves as well as change within others and the world. They can either expand or shrink our capacity for care and cooperation, either encourage or discourage practices of care in others.

Reading transforms our beliefs and opinions. Feeding the homeless makes us feel expansive and hopeful. Working in a soul-sucking 9-to-5 trains us to be a laborer.

This theory of practice, that our actions transform ourselves and the world around us, is also the theory of emergence: our small-scale actions, when practiced intentionally, will grow in scale just as fractal patterns emerge from a fern’s leaves.5 If we read regularly, we begin to talk about what we are reading with others. We might lend our books to friends. We might start a book club or a small library. Alternatively, feeding the homeless consistently will over time create organization around that action, bringing more and more people.

When addressing our community needs, we don’t have to make an organization in the sense that it’s recognized by the government, complete with tax-free donations. The organizations that empower people the best are the ones that are suited to our needs, flexible, and based mostly on our resources. There must be no donations from companies or otherwise outsiders looking to improve their social responsibility rating because sooner or later, we would be forced to cater to their needs instead of ours. The more we can build up our resources and invest it in our communities, the stronger our safety nets will be.

The inner work of changing ourselves runs parallel to the work of building community. The two things feed into each other as a positive feedback loop that is in direct opposition to fascist systems based on individualism and domination. As Kropotkin wrote, humans have both the capacity for mutual aid and domination. These can be nurtured; it is up to us which one we choose.

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Poetry is not a luxury, Audre Lorde’s spirit reminds us. Lorde wrote that poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into tangible action.”1

But what happens when we write in English, which is so easily co-opted by the Establishment?

English has no teeth. It is the language of imperialism. It subsumes all other languages. It takes words from distant places and cultures and makes them legible under its banner. Writing in English against empire creates a sad paradox. As Ella Shohat wrote in her essay “The Alphabet of Dispossession,” who among the displaced can write the word return in English, and will they “be allowed to inscribe it on a document of civilization?”2 Speaking in English does not guarantee us the right to be heard. For Palestinian refugees, English allows them to speak about their dispossession but does not permit an end to that cycle of dispossession.

I’m faced with this paradox particularly as a writer. As a diasporic Filipino, English is the only language I can express my deepest emotions and thoughts with. American colonization systematically erased what would have been my mother tongue and thrust English upon thousands of children like me. For me, it is either English or silence.

Etel Adnan wrote years ago: in the exhalations of Americans there is a crumbling empire.3 I take this to mean that even without words, empire is naturally crumbling every day.

Poetry, at least, gives diasporic writers a voice that is not so easily co-opted. Poetry is itself another language that subverts expectations and transforms meaning beyond typical English. Through metaphor, poets are able to create portals for the reader to embody multiple places and perspectives at once. Poetry forces us to see things we’ve been conditioned not to see. Poetry grounds us, plants us, roots us, brings us that much closer to the politics English attempts to co-opt and therefore neutralize.

And it’s important to note: poetry doesn’t always have to be understood. Whenever I write good poetry, I’m in a state of mind like dreaming. Whenever I read good poetry, I’m put in a trance. If someone doesn’t understand a poem, the poem wasn’t meant for them. Simple as that.

As I wrote this letter throughout the week, Israel’s war advanced in the Middle East to destroy parts of Tehran, Iran. U.S. President Trump had a lot of things to say about it, some stupid, some appalling.4 This itself was not news, but it was still concerning, to say the least. I took Trump’s words about Iran and made an erasure poem from it, shifting the focus to an Iranian hiding amidst the destruction caused by U.S.-Israel.

I figured that the poem fits well in this letter about poetry against co-optation and empire. Erasure poetry is its own brand of subversion. What I enjoy most about writing erasure poems is finding words out of an imperfect or problematic text. It is just like being forced to use English—we have to find the precise words from a problematic language to convey our colonized and dispossessed rage, sorrow, and hope.

Being perfect is not the goal, but even the lack of right language, and the silence we let sit from that lack, is a powerful way to communicate.

Skies Over Iran

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Last week, I started my counseling practice intended to make mental health care more accessible for everyone, but especially for social workers, activists, and young folk. Those identities are who I was when I needed the most care, and I believe it’s particularly hard to find a therapist or counselor when you are any of these things. Young people because they are easily invalidated by older therapists, and social workers and activists because of their unique emotional landscape.

Social workers and activists are different from most people in that they’ve made it a significant part of their life’s work to help others, often at great sacrifice to themselves. Their emotional landscapes involve anxiety, guilt, and depression. Activists need mental health care that validates the sacrifices they make to help others while offering them ways to balance their profession with their health.

I saw a few clients this past week, holding conversations that expanded my understanding of how activism affects our mental health and vice versa. Here’s a few things that I understand and am able to articulate better.

1. People gravitate to activism subconsciously seeking to address their own trauma or wounding. With great empathy and analysis, they relate their pain to a systemic injustice, understanding that it is not only them who experiences some kind of insecurity or marginalization, but all people, to varying degrees. This is a source of strength as well as a continuing source of pain. Activism of this kind essentially raises the stakes of every outcome. If the movement is succeeding, the activist will feel temporarily healed. If the movement is stagnant or failing, they will feel stuck or depressed. They’ve tied the deepest part of their sense of self to their activist work, the part which has been hurt before and needs to be taken care of. This heightened emotional attachment to the precarious work of changemaking easily leads to burnout.

2. When the stakes are this high and movement spaces are made up of hurt people trying to heal themselves through external conditions that are not quite in their control, it’s very easy for abuse to occur. This abuse will range from petty uses of hierarchy (I’m in a position of authority, you’re not) to emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. One of the beliefs that underpin such abuse is the purported priority of the movement, their work that cannot be compromised in any way. When the arbitrary success of the movement is prioritized over everything else, it is easy for people to be overworked, undervalued, or abused. This is what leads many activists to leave movement spaces and never look back.

3. Leaving movement spaces, even temporarily, causes immense guilt in activists. And of course it does. Organizing within a movement gives their life purpose and meaning, and many activists believe that it is their duty to help bring about change. Not doing anything is seen as giving in to oppressive forces, or worse, being complicit in oppression. Underpinning this fear of complicity is the unsaid belief of certain kinds of movements: if you’re not with us, you’re against us.

In order to address the ways that activist culture harms the very people involved in movement spaces, a few things need to happen.

1. Activists need mental health care that understands their context. It’s important that every activist understands why they’re doing the work, not just the surface-level reason but the personal, core reason that brings them to action when most other people would rather not risk it. Because there’s always a risk involved with organizing against oppressive forces and attempting to create spaces of justice, activists should reflect on what makes the work worth it for them. If the reason is somehow tied to a trauma wound, their motivation will come from an insecure place, and this will cause more pain than healing for them. These insecure motivations include wanting to be recognized or praised, wanting to belong to something, or wanting their life to have meaning. This last one may seem dubious—how can a desire for a more fulfilling life come from a trauma wound? It’s great to want to make life fuller by serving others and being connected to a larger purpose, but expecting activist work to fully complete one’s life is a sign that someone is generally unhappy with their life or with themselves. In these cases, the wound needs to be addressed first. When did this unhappiness start? Where is the self-hatred coming from?

When I see activists, I’m listening for their motivation, their personal philosophy. When did they start volunteering for organizations or advocating for a cause and why? What do they feel is lost if they stop doing so? Understanding this is one of the keys to understanding their mental health and helping them heal any past or present psychological wounds.

2. The culture of activism needs to radically change. Abusers need to be held accountable, ‘called in’ so they can address the impact of their actions with the help of their community and make proper amends for the people they’ve harmed. We need to balance collective goals with individual health, not compromising one for the other but understanding that there is a give and take, and this balance will look different for everyone. Importantly, we need to practice being there for each other in unconditional ways, not just because we want our comrades to work together for an outcome. If we stopped viewing our fellow activists and volunteers as tools to be used to achieve revolution and instead treated them as relationships that we are responsible for, we could be healthier and more effective in our work.

Here, the anarchist principle of the unity of means and ends is useful. What we practice in our relationships is what we create for broader society. Undoing injustice requires the most radical care, love, and healing that sees everyone as a part of our alternative future.

What else would you suggest needs to change in the culture of activism? Comment below.

If you’d like to try counseling sessions with me, you can learn more here. And if you enjoyed this letter, please consider sustaining my work by giving me a coffee’s worth of support.

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What makes this tragedy so difficult to move through is that it was completely avoidable. The SUV that drove through the Lapu Lapu Day crowd should never have been able to enter the roads if the Vancouver police had followed protocol. Of course, we won’t see this reported in the news. We’ll see the police statements expressing grief, but we won’t see journalists question systemic accountability in elite-owned media.

Nevertheless, we have to find a way to move through the grief and rage. I know we are tired of demanding the minimum from the governments that are meant to serve us. We are used to providing for each other in mutual aid (you can see this in how quickly the donations for the families of the deceased poured in from around the world), and we need to continue doing so with courage and compassion.

The vigil was a beautiful and sacred space shared by 16, a mix of migrant Filipinos, local activists, and their loved ones. We honored each person who passed and each person who was injured at the festival, then we offered songs and poems and shared food with one another.

I shared two poems that night, “Forsythia” by Ada Limón and “A Portable Paradise” by Roger Robinson, as well as a few words on community and hope:

Forsythia by Ada Limón

At the cabin in Snug Hollow near McSwain Branch creek, just spring, all the animals are out, and my beloved and I are lying in bed in a soft silence. We are talking about how we carry so many people with us wherever we go, how even simple living, these unearned moments, are a tribute to the dead. We are both expecting to hear an owl as the night deepens. All afternoon, from the porch, we watched an Eastern towhee furiously build her nest in the untamed forsythia with its yellow spilling out into the horizon. I told him that the way I remember the name forsythia is that when my stepmother, Cynthia, was dying, that last week, she said lucidly, but mysteriously, More yellow. And I thought yes, more yellow and nodded because I agreed. Of course, more yellow. And so now in my head, when I see that yellow tangle, I say, For Cynthia, for Cynthia, forsythia, forsythia, more yellow. It is night now. And the owl never comes, only more of night and what repeats in the night.

We don’t have forsythias here in Manila, but now is the season of Narra flowers, of bright yellow buds decorating the sky and the ground with the color of joy. It’s a reminder that those who have passed are never truly lost to us. Although it is night and dark, although the ‘owl’ may never come, the day will break and we’ll see that splash of color again, that one thing that says our beloved’s name back to us.

This next poem was written in the wake of a tragedy as well. In 2017, what would have been a household fire in Grenfell, London, caused the whole building to go up due to building material that did not comply with regulations. Seventy-two people were killed by this completely avoidable accident, essentially government neglect. The residents were people of color and working class folk, who had raised the alarm about the dangers of the building, to no avail. The poem addresses us, the marginalized and neglected, and reminds us of our secret paradises.

A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson

And if I speak of Paradise,

then I’m speaking of my grandmother,

who told me to carry it always

on my person, concealed, so

no one else would know but me.

That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.

And if life puts you under pressure,

trace its ridges in your pocket,

smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,

hum its anthem under your breath.

And if your stresses are sustained and daily,

get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel,

hostel, or hovel – find a lamp

and empty your paradise onto a desk:

your white sands, green hills, and fresh fish.

Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope

of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.

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In times of distress and trauma, especially as we question why tragedies happen, – who and what allowed such senseless loss of lives – we have to sustain ourselves on something no less than paradise. We have to imagine that special warm place and make sure we carry it around with us. Like the author Roger Robinson writes, “carry it always” on your person, “concealed” so no one else can steal it from you.

Like Adrienne Rich wrote in 1977, “My heart is moved by all I cannot save / So much has been destroyed / I have to cast my lot with those, who, age after age, / Perversely, with no extraordinary / Power, reconstitute the world.”

What paradise must we protect in the wake of such tragedy? Hold onto it, nourish it, and I know that one day, it won’t be a small hidden thing in our pockets anymore—because we will hold and share it together.

I hope these words reach you with nourishment wherever you are in your life. We are all going through something secret that no one else may know about, but I hope you are reminded that you are not alone, and that there is so much beauty to be had in being there for your community. If you don’t have the capacity, let others hold you. And if you do have the capacity, allow yourself to hold whoever needs it: your friend, your sister, your neighbor.

I hope you feel the strength of community within the vision of a more just future as you move through this coming week.

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