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Gemma Copeland

Tag “Varshini Prakash”

A couple of super nice interviews and essays by women I admire:

Alice Grandoit-Sutka, co-founder of DEEM Journal, on how to generate new possibilities:

I want a practice that is both critical and generative. Sometimes we can invest a lot of energy critiquing what was, which can block or limit the potential to cultivate possibilities of what could be.

Sunrise Movement’s Varshini Prakash on how she deals with climate grief:

I find that the key to staying optimistic or having hope is – well, not spending too much time on Twitter – but also really allowing yourself and honoring the feeling grief, pain and fury and whatever is moving through you. In the climate movement, people can lose themselves in the gloom and doom or pretend everything is OK and not process the grief. So, a big thing for me is creating strategies to feel the full scope of the emotional intensity of work — journaling, meditation. We have a strong storytelling culture in our organization and ensuring that I am not letting myself numb or get subsumed by the emotional intensity of what I’m feeling. And having a strong spiritual practice of gratitude. There is something about being really intimate with the potential demise of the world that makes you almost ironically really intimate with the beauty of it and the immense gratitude we should feel to be here. Being able to hold both of those things at once is key to my ability to persevere.

Food writer Alicia Kennedy on abundance:

The flexibility provided by a specific kind of abundance—extra pumpkin, banana blossoms blooming, an excess of food, period, growing in the garden to give away—rather than the idea of abundance we’ve been sold, quite literally, being access to anything at any time to buy is what fuels creativity, excitement, a feeling of safety in the midst of an uncertain future. Abundance doesn’t have to be gifted to us; it can be cultivated. It can be a choice we make, in order to take care of each other and the earth. The world is abundant, I remind myself again in a dark time. I pray it. We just have to be sure to see it that way, to share it that way.