I call myself a story listener. I love to listen for a story's essence as it reveals itself in people’s words.
I love to gather the essence of words and reflect their meaning back.
I love to watch people discover more depth, power, insight, and beauty in their words, and in themselves, than they alone could see.
I love listening for space that white supremacy has not yet invaded, for echoes of communities that lived, and live on, with love and mutuality at their heart.
I love to hear vision in the present moment, to see that what we’re looking for is right here if we choose.
I love magnetizing stories together into constellations, clusters of stars that immerse us in warmth and invite us to navigate toward possibility.
“You’re a story doula,” someone once told me, describing how I helped her birth meaning onto a page. When COVID fatalities began in the US one year ago, I felt called to that role in another way.
From my kitchen table I listened to stories of vision expanding in pandemic. I collaborated with folx willing to share their words, producing video stories (in collaboration with Jason Walker) about community-based mask making in Oakland, deepened understanding of indigenous farming in New Mexico, BIPOC-led community birth centers coming together around the country, and even human beings learning to prepare, with love, for death.
In these COVID stories I witnessed the practice of love nurtured in community, forged in global crisis, rising up through a world of violence, domination, and extraction.
Poet activist June Jordan writes that to discover "the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always, where is the love?" Love is, quite simply, our best narrative compass.
Last week I returned to these COVID stories as pandemic grief and loss stretch on.
Today, still, and always, it is love that I listen for.
New Moon is proud to introduce our 2021 advisors, Ariel Jacobson, Maria Ibarra-Frayre, Supriya Lopez Pillai, & Yodit Mesfin Johnson. Click here to find out more about them!