Author Archives: dinafried

A Sense of Place

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I’m always surprised that no matter how much I might originally intend otherwise, the bulk of my fiction (including nearly half of the stories in Immigrants) is set in New York City–with a large percentage in the immediate neighborhood where I grew up. While I’ve often joked, You can take me out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of me, this is really more of a truism than a joke. Each time I visit, I can feel the city’s resonance and vibrancy, even as I recoil at the noise of the subway chugging on the elevated tracks, or the food wrappers and soda cans tossed into people’s yards and the flyers disintegrating into muck in the puddles along the curb.

As a child, I never noticed these kinds of details. Tuning out was my superpower. I kind of had to in order to stay sane. As someone who had a rich fantasy life with imaginary friends since I was very young, it always felt way more easy and pleasant to pay more attention to the world in my head rather than the world around me. So all the ugliness of New York, or anywhere, never seemed like a problem. But tuning out is a problem when you’re trying to establish detail in your writing and develop a strong sense of place.

In the book I’m working on now (in fits and starts), the two teenagers who center the story both live near where I grew up in Queens. One lives in the rows of brick apartments in Jackson Heights, and the other lives a couple of miles closer to Manhattan in a row house on a rundown block in Woodside. So, on my most recent trip to New York to visit my mom earlier this week, I spent some time exploring both neighborhoods for street details I could use, trying to pay attention to who was on the street in both locales, what public places (stores, schools, parks) were nearby, and some precise specifics on what the houses looked like in detail: Peeling paint? Colors of the houses?  The arrangement of numbered addresses on the doorframes? What kind of door frames? Types of gates framing the steps? How many trees and other plantings were on the block and what kind of shape were they in? The list of questions you can ask about the concrete (pun intended) nature of a place can go on and on.

True Confession: I can think of very little that is more boring that developing lists of these kinds of details–even though I know that some people thrive on this. There are writers out there who are marvelous stylists, known for their ability to describe meticulously. And these are people who will happily lose themselves in place research and/or other types of historical research, taking days or weeks to investigate all the nuances and possibilities before committing words to paper. I admire them!

Call me lazy (though I’ll argue than in most aspects of my life I am anything but lazy!) but I just don’t do this. My descriptions aim for just a few salient but highly sensory details, which, when I feel I need to, I flesh out with metaphors, rather than more particulars.

Neither way of describing is better–or worse–they’re just different.

Diversity Plaza, Jackson Heights, NY (I took this pic on a previous trip.)

And another true confession–though not necessarily what I’d recommend: I didn’t take notes on my walks through these neighborhoods. I didn’t even take pictures (though I might be able to rely on some pics my partner, Shel, took.) Instead, I plan to rely on what I remember, perhaps a bit blurred or distorted from what I really sensed, but, hey, I’m writing fiction, not documentary.

And like a watercolor wash over whatever details I try to bring to life will be my long history with the city where I grew up and came of age–a melding of what’s actually there and my inner response to it. Because even as I grooved in my fantasy world in the countless hours where I walked the streets of New York as a younger person, it seeped inside me and will be there forever. As I said, you can’t take New York out of me. 

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Putting Your Work Away and Bringing It Back

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My daughter’s piano teacher used to tell her that when you put a piece away for a while and then bring it back, it comes back better.

I think this is also true for writing–at least it’s true for me.

Most recently, I “put away” my piano memoir, Imperfect Pitch, for several months. I had been shopping it around unsuccessfully for a couple of years, and then I was offered a consultation with an agent who told me she thought it would be more marketable if I turned it into a “self-help memoir.” So, last summer I added a bunch of short sections reflecting on the themes I’d raised and offering prompts and prescriptions people could use to tackle perfectionism and self-judgment while amplifying joy and forgiveness. I was excited to give that version to a few readers, but then disappointed when they uniformly said that the self-help voice was intrusive and detracted from the thread of the story.

I put the book away for a couple of months so I could read it fresh. But other than realizing that they were right, I couldn’t figure out what to do.

Then winter hit, along with the new administration and my father’s illness and death, and I was too depressed to do any substantive writing for a while. But the book was there at the back of my mind, niggling me. The project was too important to me to abandon. In fact, of all the things I’ve written, this is the book I most want people to read, because I believe its messages about creativity and mattering are essential to healing ourselves–both individually and as a culture. That was why I was going for an agent and the big publishing houses, rather than the small ones–and why I was willing to take this agent’s advice about so-called “marketability.”

But as the months passed and my writing fog started to clear, I realized it was ok for me to loosen my expectations on the marketability angle. I’ve always personally been an outlier when it comes to popular culture. So why should my book be any different? Yet, there was something in the added sections I liked–a wiser voice that could look back on the memoir incidents I wrote about and make sense of them. It was the poplike “you-too” voice that felt insincere and inauthentic to my newly attuned ears.

So, I took out that voice and shortened the reflections, making sure they all sounded like me–a wiser, calmer me than the me in the throes of wrestling all my musical baggage, but still me, without artifice. I hope they now feel like a cool wave momentarily breaking the heat. We’ll see. I’ve given the book to at least one more reader. And then, after what will likely be another round of revisions, it’s off to market one more time–perhaps no longer exclusively on the big press circuit. While I’ll continue to attempt to build my platform, I’m no longer interested in being anything less (or more) than who I am, whether or not my messaging ever gets popular enough to build a huge following.

Photo by Shel Horowitz

Incidentally, I also put away the Brahms Intermezzo I fell in love with and worked diligently on for two months. I got it down pretty well, but far from perfect. Which is ok, now that I’m no longer mentally beating myself up for piano imperfections. Still, I hope I’ll be able to make it way better when I pull it out again.

Have a listen here from pianist Jean Marc Luisada.

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Empathy

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My 2.9 year old grandson, Manu, loves the playground, especially when there are no other children and he has the whole place to himself. A few days ago when we arrived, we saw another kid in the sandbox who waved to him enthusiastically. “That kid wants to play with you,” I said.

He hesitated before answering, then said, “I don’t play.”

Photo by Shel Horowitz

This surprised me because I have clear memories of being 2 and wanting nothing more than for other kids to play with me. I remember Linda, who lived a few houses down in the apartment complex we lived in and how I liked nothing better than running down the hill with her at top speed in our shared yard. And in kindergarten, I remember Mary Ann, with her perfect blond braids, how I cried because the teacher wouldn’t let me sit next to her.

While I don’t remember the specific incident, I also remember the day I came home from kindergarten crying  because some kids had said or done something mean to me. My mother simply shrugged and said, “Children are cruel.”

I was shocked! Children? My tribe? (I was already aware of divisions: that I was a child in a land of adults and a girl in a culture where boys ruled.) But how could children as an entity be labeled as cruel? I was a child and I wasn’t cruel. And why was being cruel something to be shrugged about and accepted as a fact of life?

Unfortunately, cruelty is not something confined to children. Our human history of wars, torture, and the oppression of one group by another is all the proof we need. And if we want to fast forward to the present and our own country, all we need to do is look at the initial reports from “Alligator Alcatraz” (aka “Alligator Auschwitz”) where inmates are reporting no bathing facilities, one maggot-infested meal per day, elephant-sized mosquitoes, 24-hour lights, and alternating periods of sweltering heat and chilling cold.

What should we do? Shrug, and say, “People are cruel?”

In both my most hopeful and most devastated days, I find myself pondering why we humans as a species are the way we are. How can we possibly have the capacity to harm each other in the ways we do? The “hopeful me” looks at this question as a puzzle that, once solved, can change the entire trajectory of how humans can live together on the planet, while the “devastated me” wants to curl up somewhere and cry–with many more tears than I ever shed because I couldn’t sit next to Mary Ann.

Elon Musk recently said, “the fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” But that’s the voice of the dark side. Empathy is the only thing that might be able to save us from ourselves. It’s empathy for others that can catalyze those of us who have the privilege and the capacity to speak out. And we must speak out–despite empathy’s ability to also render us paralyzed because we feel the pain of others so deeply.

On a recent day at the playground, Manu wanted to climb on a rock where another little boy was standing. He stayed at the bottom of the rock for minutes looking up at the boy, who stared down at him from the top, neither of them saying anything, just staring each other down and holding their position. Finally the boy on the rock made a fist and released his index finger, as if he were shooting a fake gun. It was subtle gesture, and I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting it correctly, but I think I was, because he did it several more times.

Where did he learn that? I wondered, with horrified distaste. Who taught him?

Then I tried to use my empathy, and reason from the kid’s perspective. He was enjoying being on the rock and didn’t want anyone encroaching on his space. We humans have an innate tendency to protect what is ours, and when we’re young we often have to learn not to grab or be aggressive towards others to get what we want.

Even though neither of the little boys thought so, there was enough room on the rock for both of them. Just as there’s enough room in our country for all of us who are here to live peacefully with each other.

Eventually, the boy’s mother finally came over and picked him up, enabling Manu to climb on the rock unimpeded. Eventually, Manu, too, will need to learn how to share his space. Hopefully he’ll get to a point where he thinks it’s much more fun when other kids are also at the playground. Hopefully, we’ll also get to that point. Somehow. Some way.

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Out of the Cage

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Last night, I had the special treat of seeing Ocean Vuong talk about his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness. I haven’t read the book yet, but I was wowed by his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous–and struck by the sensitivity, depth and humor in the brief excerpt he read from this one. Most of all, I was moved by his thoughts on what it means to be a writer–what it means to be a human, actually–in these troubling times.

Vuong talked about “the cage” that all of us are trapped in, meaning the large set of sociocultural stereotypes and mores that hinder the definitions of who we are and the possibilities of who we can be. In his first novel, the main character, Little Dog, says: To be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.

As I thought about this idea of cages, I realized that my lifelong pursuit of writing is absolutely an attempt to break out of the cages of expectation, to come as close as I possibly can to exploring absolute truth and authenticity. And perhaps that’s what makes Ocean Vuong’s work so great. He may be writing fiction, but he’s doing it without artifice. Vuong insists that his novels are not autobiographical, nor are they specifically about anyone in his actual life and claimed that he would never appropriate anyone’s life story to feed his art. Yet, there’s a truth that seeps through whatever he’s invented that pulls back the veils under which we hide.

And I do believe it’s not only the revelation, but the acceptance of our own and each other’s authenticity–provided we can even find it in ourselves–that may be our only hope of changing the world.

Alligator Alcatraz: From Heute.at (cropped)

Of course, I couldn’t think about cages without the intrusive images of “Alligator Alcatraz” the newest prison being build in Florida and the memories of children in cages during this administration’s first term, a practice that ended after huge public outcry.

Also, yesterday, earlier in the day, I joined eight other people dressed in black, carrying signs with names and information about people who have been disappeared in Massachusetts and sent to caged prisons near and far. We walked in silence through the streets of Northampton, banging a drum, and bearing witness, creating a stunning visual effect that made people stop what they were doing and notice.

Said Vuong in a recent interview, Maybe in another 15 years, I will write about trying to be an artist while our civil liberties are being eroded and our country is run by oligarchs who are bordering on fascism. If we make it to 15 years later, hopefully I can write a book about that. 

Hopefully, he can. And in the meantime, hopefully we’ll all continue to access whatever creative sparks we all can make to raise awareness, claw out our own truth, and make it through.

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I Carry… I Hope

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Last weekend I attended an excellent workshop on writing protest poetry. Among the poems we talked about was this gem, I am Dark I am Forest by Jenn Givhan. I love the repetition of the phrase “I carry…” and how the poet threads us (trigger warning) through a maze of generational and societal trauma  with specific sensual imagery overlaid in a veil of surrealism.

I was struck most by the “heaviness” of what so many of us may be carrying these days. Whether we’re mired in personal issues related to health, loss, or economic instability; or whether we’re sweating anxiety, sadness and fear after the escalation of war in the Middle East and seeing reels like this one of ICE officers beating people as they take them into custody, it’s a very heavy time.

The poem inspired me to attempt my own version of a prose poem using the refrain of “I carry …” Here’s a short blip from the draft I wrote…

I carry

obedience / even as my horse body strains at the bit / the bridle trying to break the chains of normal to get to an unbroken place. / I carry

all the broken places / my little girl self in the back seat of the station wagon staring at the wall of my parents’ heads / obey / or you’ll embarrass us. /

So I’m asking all of you… what do you carry?

And an extremely relevant follow-up question: How can we put down what we’re carrying?

Not with disgust or abandon, but lovingly.

When I think of carrying, my first association is some heavy object I’ve lugged, like the old air conditioner from the 90s that my partner and I managed to drag out of the closet last weekend and shuffle it onto the hand-truck so we could wheel it to the corner of our road for someone driving by who might need it for the upcoming heat wave. Or the table on our deck we have to shlep back and forth from the garage for the winter, which involves walking backwards on uneven ground and maneuvering corners and stairs. I’ve never been adept at carrying heavy objects, and as I age, I’ve had to stop even more often to rest or find ways to balance the weight on my hips, which can take it more easily than my arms.

But while putting down the deck table for a few minutes can give me enough strength to pick it up again, it’s harder to put down the onslaught of news, or whatever dire reality any of us might be faced with.

There’s been a lot of writing out there on happiness and gratitude. However, a recent study targeted hope as the biggest key to being able to shoulder the burdens we carry. One reason for this: gratitude focuses on events in the past, happiness is usually related to the present, but hope is aimed at the future. When I’m carrying the table, it’s hope that enables me to measure the progress and see how much closer I’ve gotten to the garage each time I stop to rest. The study suggests that people notice the small wins and seek all opportunities, even the tiny ones, to move forward and then celebrate them whenever possible. This can help us strengthen our hope muscle and cultivate a hope mindset, the belief that nothing is static and change is always possible.

This is why I eagerly look forward to Jess Craven’s Sunday posts from her Chop Wood Carry Water newsletter, which are filled with all the good news of the week, which people worked for to make happen

Feel free to use the refrain, I carry… as a writing prompt…
Or perhaps, instead, (or in addition to) the refrain, I hope…

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The owl I saw flying and then landing in a tree on Mt. Toby (Sunderland, MA) gave me an enormous boost of awe and hope.

The Stories You Tell Yourself

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Since my father died in early March, my writing has gone from a fairly steady stream to mostly drought with an an occasional faucet drip. I’ve told myself this is okay. It’s hard to write when your mind is fogged in by grief–hard to focus on anything. And when my attention wasn’t focused on my own personal loss, the onslaught of news–particularly the kidnapping and forced disappearance of people off our city streets and reports of humanitarian aid being blocked for the sick and starving in Gaza–has generated a lot of tears, but not too many new words.

Still, like the trouper I am, I’ve kept at it, sitting down at the prescribed moments in my schedule to write, but mostly using the time to send things to journals, which did involve some occasional tweaking, but mostly felt like dropping in on my work for a brief visit, rather than living with it.

However, yesterday I received a gift that might have shifted things.

If you subscribe to Lori Snyder’s Substack, Splendid Mola, you, too, can receive a 5-minute Writers Happiness Exercise delivered to your inbox every Tuesday. This one invited people to “Set the Thermostat for your Heart” by reframing negative stories into positive ones. We were asked to take 30 seconds to focus on one thing that was important in our lives–which could be writing, or could be something else, whatever resonated most at the moment. The next step was to take 3 minutes to brainstorm success stories about what was working well, or–in my case, and perhaps many other people’s cases–what had worked well in the past, even if it wasn’t working well now.

So I chose writing, and this is what I wrote for my brainstorm:

  • Regular times with my words
  • Lots of publications
  • Having the drive to finish and keep going
  • Belief that it mattered
  • Spiritual uplift and “oomph”
  • Wow moments

The final step in the process (1.5 minutes) was to whittle these moments into a one-sentence success story that you can keep telling yourself. Mine was: People care about my message. Lori suggested setting reminders to tell yourself this success story at least once a day, if not more.

But before I even needed to do that, I immediately got the inspiration to pick up with a YA manuscript I’d abandoned after 10,000 words about a neurodiverse middle school girl whose only friend, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, suddenly disappears. Interestingly enough, about an hour after the euphoric high of squeezing out two more pages and the thrill of congratulating myself for inserting new life into what I felt had been a dead project, I started to feel like crap–teary, angry, unfocused. I knew that part of the reason I hadn’t gone back to the book was that I hadn’t yet formulated exactly what had happened to the disappeared girl and her family, and consistently reading real accounts on what happened to similar people for research had become too paralyzing to dive into. But even though I wasn’t writing that part of the book in the smidgeon I drafted yesterday, I realized that being that deep into my words again had brought me to the spiky edge of feelings I might prefer to sidestep. No wonder I’d been playing the avoidance game.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

What I hope will keep me going this time is that little success story sentence–People care about my message–instead of the story I’ve told myself for the last three months, which is, I’m not writing because I’m grieving. Of course I’m still grieving, but the major fog has cleared. And while I still want to honor the truth of the “not writing/grieving story,” it can’t be the final chapter in the book of my life. There’s never been a more important time to believe in happy endings.

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Bravery

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As I sit on my porch under the maple tree, on a sunny late spring day looking out at my idyllic view of the farm and the mountain behind it, I realize I have no idea what it means to be brave.

Sure, I’ve taken the plunge into social situations I might have preferred avoiding, and occasionally attempted some speedy or free-fall athletic feat that instigated a split second of terror and an adrenaline rush. But really, I always knew I’d be fine.

So I’m thinking now, as the jaws of the looming authoritarian police state are snapping loudly, about what it means to be truly brave.

When I went to the border in 2020 I heard many stories of bravery, all of them spiced with horrific moments that made me flinch, or cry, or both: kidnappings, gang break-ins, death threats to their children, rapes…One man told me about being forced into a car with his 8-year-old daughter by kidnappers after spending weeks in the hielera (Spanish word for ice box where they keep detainees). With his permission, I chronicled his story into a poem (pasted at the end of this blog) which was first published in my book, Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, and which I’ve shared at many community talk-backs about our trip.

Holding this man’s story and the stories of others was devastating. I came back from that trip feeling smothered under the weight of such sadness, confused about how I could continue going blithely about my days feeling grateful for the trees, and my friends, and the small sweet details of my privileged life.

It’s pretty much the same as how I’m feeling now.

Except that the necessity for bravery, personal bravery of a sort that’s far greater than whatever “risks” I might have taken to enter the potentially dangerous city of Matamoros, Mexico, has reached a crucial point. As the events in Los Angeles unfold, and thousands of brave people prepare to demonstrate nationally on Saturday against the rising tide of authoritarianism, and the administration counters by launching threats against protesters, I have to ask myself: am I ready to face masked men in military gear who may be throwing tear gas and shooting rubber bullets? It’s unlikely things will escalate to that point in our relatively small and mostly rural area, but if I lived in L.A., I hope I’d be brave enough to be on the streets, protesting *non-violently* against what is happening to immigrants across the nation.

Because the point is not about the few burning cars that are being shown over and over again as justification to quell our First Amendment right to peacefully protest. The point is that ICE is breaking the law! Over and over again! They are arresting people without warrants, abandoning due process, tricking people in court by moving to close their asylum cases and then arresting them. They are bashing car windows, leaving children abandoned as they take their parents away, and sending many to prisons that are miles away from their families. They are disappearing people off the street! Nearly 44% of those arrested have no criminal history and many of those with a so-called “criminal record” have only minor infractions–traffic stops and what-not!  Some of those who have been arrested are green card holders! Some are U.S. citizens! 

I do not condone violence, but the violence inflicted by ICE on our local communities is evil, ruthless, and deliberately inhumane. It is an order of magnitude more violent than the actions of the protesters, of whom the huge majority are demonstrating peacefully. Much of the violence is being instigated by law enforcement, who are choosing to escalate by throwing tear gas. A so-called “unlawful assembly” is a form of non-violent civil disobedience, but it is not a riot!
Here is the poem, I wrote about one of the stories I heard from immigrants in Matamoros. When I asked this man if I could tell his story, he said, Sure. There are a thousand stories just like it.
MY FRIEND TELLS ME THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF STORIES JUST LIKE THIS ONE

Man who takes us to the Matamoros mercado
to buy food for refugiados to cook by their tents,
tosses frosted flakes in the cart with the rice,
tells us he’ll pay, man whose money
we wave away. It’s a gift, un regalo.
Man whose glow is a regalo, scrolling
through phone to show us mamá y papá.
He left without time to say goodbye;
his abuelita, who now has died.
Man who says, you must understand,

I love my country, amo mi país.
I had a good job, never wanted to leave.
El año pasado, last year, on Valentine’s Day
I called mi esposa said, Amor, let’s go out.
We took the kids and came back late,
fell happy, full of love, into our beds.
In the middle of dreams, a noise in the night,
man with a mask, black hat with holes for eyes.
When I tussled with the guy, the mask
came off; I saw a boy I knew,
then the others surging with the guns.
I told them to take whatever they wanted.
The next day, I went to la policía. All they wanted
was my phone number. I’d barely gone a kilometer
when the phone rang with amenazas de muerte, threats of death.

Man on planks of wood lashed
to an inner tube crosses the river to Mexico
in the dead of night when the guards are gone,
each daughter held in a muscled arm.
Man riding on bus after bus, north
to la frontera, bad hombres lurking in the shadows.
The guards block the way, the only opción
to pay the coyote to take his wife
and younger daughter. (He didn’t have enough
for all to go together.) On the opposite
shore, man’s wife presents herself to ICE.
She’s put in the “hielera,” where the detainees shiver,
then sent to the midwest to live with her brother.
She is one of the lucky ones.

Man raises money to cross with coyote,|
asks for asylum and taken with daughter,
put in the hielera, three days. Couldn’t bathe.
They blast sirens in the night to prevent you from sleeping.
His beary arms couldn’t stop his daughter’s shivering.
He thought they’d send him to his familia,
but they took him to Tijuana, so he could wait in Mexico.
Man who refused to go. Said,
I won’t sign these papeles. They marked him
troublemaker and sent him there anyway.
Man whose daughter tenía hambre, so hungry.
When he tells us this part, he starts to cry.
Man whose arm I touch chasms away in his dolor privado,
los memorias that could shackle a thousand hearts.

Man who clung to his daughter when the gangs grabbed her
and shoved them both in a car, demanding ransom,
which his wife had to borrow to pay. They dumped him
far away in the desert, across the border,
where for hours they wandered in the dark, coyotes howling,
until they found a woman, an angel, he thought,
who fed them and led them to the city, where she stuck
out her palm for money, and they were forced in another car.
He should have known the world, like the wall
at the border is lined with spikes. Man held

for money, then more money until all sucked dry.
If his wife didn’t pay, they said they’d kill him.
In a last gasp he retrieves the hidden,
maybe broken, phone in his daughter’s teddy bear,
with only a battery sliver, texts the location
to su esposa, who calls the cops,
who come and find seven more people
captured there, all put back
in the hielera, all sent back to Mexico
where they all wait, all hope. Esperar.
In Spanish, it’s the same word.

 

 

 

 

 

Holding Onto the Heavy

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Every spring, as soon as I start gardening, my shoulder begins to ache, a dull pain that often spreads all the way down my arm. It’s not debilitating; it’s just annoying, but it’s pretty constant and I have to keep reminding myself not to overdo–set the timer and tackle the ubiquitous onion grass for no more than half an hour. Lately I’ve been feeling it most when I’m lifting heavy rocks to weigh down seed covers and cardboard mulch. And in the wee corners of my mind, I hear the niggling question of how much longer I’ll have the physical ability to keep on with this yearly seasonal ritual that brings me so much joy. Hopefully for a long time, I tell myself, deflecting with my usual optimism/denial reflex on any issue that relates to my own aging.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

This morning I felt torn between gardening and writing group, since it’s going to get hot in the afternoon and I have a bunch of things to do then, but I chose the lure of writing group community, where someone made a random comment, “It has been a time and it’s not over.”

My friend was referring to events in her personal life, while also acknowledging that many people our age (50s and 60s with aging parents) are going through something similar. But I believe this heaviness is currently permeating among all ages as we read story after story of children starving and being indiscriminately killed in war zones, humans taken off the streets by masked men in military gear, and the myriad other ways our rights to shelter, health care, and food security are being dismantled.

I’ve encouraged people in our immigration justice advocacy network to join me in sharing some of the personal stories of immigrants who’ve been arrested, kidnapped or disappeared, knowing that reading about actual humans with lives and back story can get people in the gut in a way that vague policy statements or piles of statistics don’t. (Though one stat I will emphasize: very few of the people taken have a criminal history, unless you count trying to enter this country for a more economically secure life free from gang violence and death threats a crime. All this talk about murderers, drug dealers and rapists is a lie fabricated by the administration that’s also intended to get people right in the gut.)

However, my resolve to share these stories has gotten to the point where I can’t keep up with the flood of incidents coming into my inbox like weeds each day–high school students, families with young children, neighbors, friends…And to tell the truth, I don’t even want to read these upsetting stories any more. And if I, despite spending most of the last decade as an immigration justice activist, don’t want to read them, how can I expect others to?

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

Back at a demonstration on the border in 2020, we projected a sign. Don’t Look Away! Yet, there are some days that all I want to do is look away–curl up with the blessing of my meditation app that encourages me to simply cultivate a lens of neutrality and observation and be present in the moment.

How do we balance this appropriately mindful adage for self-care without forsaking our responsibility to our fellow humans? I keep thinking about Nazi Germany. Not the people who actively collaborated with Hitler, and not the people who risked their lives by hiding Jews in their barns and attics, but the people who may have quietly disapproved of what was going on, but did nothing and went about their lives as best they could.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

I don’t want to be one of these people, and yet, I fear that’s what we’re all becoming. Not because we’re bad people. We’re just numb. Paralyzed by the heaviness of it all.

How do we hold onto the heavy and continue to take steps forward to address injustice, perhaps with the clarity and gentleness that mindfulness might bring? Somehow despite the pain, we need to keep lifting those heavy rocks.

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